jamesdhutton

Yes. I made a game for S60, in 2004. I agree the SDK and the API were poor. But I think the real mistake they made was failing to build an app store. IIRC I think they might have had some kind of rudimentary app store but it wasn't accessible to mere mortals. The only way I could figure out how to distribute my game was to post it as a freely downloadable file on the web, which I did. I have no idea whether anybody ever downloaded it. If they had just made it easy for developers to distribute their apps then I think history might have been quite different.

If you made business apps, then in some ways it was quite similar to today. You built a backend server sitting on top of a database, and and client app with a UI that made calls to the backend. You would have backend and frontend developers, just like today. The difference of course was that you built it on a totally different tech stack. If (like me) you worked with the Microsoft tech stack then you built everything as a native Windows app.

For anyone unfamiliar with DOS programming who might be trying to understand the code, you will find it helpful to know that INT 21h makes a call to the DOS API, and the value in AH indicates which API function to call, in this case the "display string" function. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_API

Looks good! I will try it with my 6-year-old later today.

Andrew Ng's machine learning course on Coursera is a good introduction to the theory. https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

Question for OP: did you attend an interview? In my experience, companies will usually provide a rejection reason if an interview has taken place, especially if you have been through multiple rounds.

What is the difference (if any) between a runbook and a process? Genuine question; I am interested to hear people's answers.

The theory that officers who are “too smart” will get bored and leave could be tested empirically. One could look at past hires, and make a graph of test scores vs length of service. This data would help inform the discussion.

It was a bug in the algorithm, resulting in wrong results. For example, I recall that to fix the linked-list insertion code, you needed to add a line of code to increment a pointer.

In a previous job of mine, we would show candidates a printout of some buggy code, and ask them to find the bugs. We would leave the room and let the candidate work through it on their own. The code in question was basic algorithms and data structure stuff in C++, such as inserting into a doubly-linked list. I always thought it was a good exercise. Suits slow-thinkers and nervous people, and it's a good test of coding ability since if you can spot a bug then you can clearly read and understand the code.

Bit of a random one but I give kudos to the winged corkscrew. That's the type that has two levers on each side, which you push down to raise the cork. Wikipedia tells me it was invented by one Domenick Rosati and patented in 1930. Why do I like it? Makes pulling a cork easy, and the design is simple and elegant.

I think “too clever” often equates to “too short.” There is real intellectual pleasure in figuring out how to express an algorithm in as few lines as possible. I personally love doing this. And, usually, shorter code is better code. But I have seen many cases where people take this too far. People reduce their code so much that it becomes incomprehensible. (No doubt I have been guilty of this.) So to your question of what is “too clever” I would say that I would prefer 10 lines of readable code to 1 line of unreadable code.

My organisation uses Aha (https://www.aha.io/) for all of our products. Personally I like it and I believe it meets both of your requirements.

Regarding 1): it has a structured framework where you define your product vision, then break it down into goals and initiatives, then break the initiatives into features. The dev team further breaks down the work into TFS tickets, and Aha integrates with TFS.

Regarding 2) It does change tracking on everything, so you can view the prior history of any ticket in the system.

Of course. That’s exactly my point. I don’t know what cut Amazon takes from sellers. But you would expect it to be higher than Apple’s cut, since it is dealing with physical goods. The comparison would be interesting. (Unlike the comparison with Stripe.)

I don’t think the article’s comparison with Stripe is valid. The App Store is not just payment infrastructure. It provides distribution and discovery as well. A more valid comparison would be with Amazon.

Question: when they list these speeds, what is is relative to? The earth? The surface of the sun? I would be interested to hear from anyone who knows.

Q. What do you call the object-oriented version of COBOL?

A. ADD 1 TO COBOL

Oldie but a goldie.

"Stack Overflow Trends" lets you search for number of questions by tag. I personally think this is a more robust indicator of language popularity than TIOBE's method. Here are the results for Objective C vs Fortran. As you can see, by this definition, Objective C is at least twice as popular as Fortran.

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=objective-c%2...

... and probably not much else. I love the way I can type in whatever combination of ingredients I happen to have in my pantry, and get a bunch of free recipes with those ingredients. I doubt that would have happened without internet advertising.

The author blames Google for the fact that recipe sites force you to wade through a long preamble before you get to the recipe. But if internet advertising didn't exist, then the recipe site would be charging him for the recipe. Recipe authors have to make a living somehow. If he doesn't want ads in his recipes, then he could always go out and buy a recipe book.

When it first came out, Delphi was streets ahead of the main Microsoft options available at the time, namely VB and Visual C++. I remember it with great affection.

The article is unfair in its descriptions of DuckDuckGo's search quality. I tried the same searches that are mentioned in the article, namely "best beach Sydney" and "Australia leader". The results were fine. The former returned a list of Sydney beaches plus some reviews, and the latter returned results for the Australian prime minister. Perfect. OK, the ads were off-topic but who cares?

Personally, I switched to DuckDuckGo from Google about 6 months ago and I have never looked back. Its quality is great IMO.

I doubt this is true.

1. "The French baggage handlers were saying some terrible things about the English." Does Spiers speak French?

2. "In an effort to find out what had happened [to his friend Spiers], McSorley alerted the media." The media? Why the media?

Interesting to read the list of companies in the announcement, and to contemplate that JavaScript has outlived most of them.

Glassdoor explicitly denies that they allow employers to pay to remove negative reviews. See this FAQ on their website: https://help.glassdoor.com/article/Can-employers-pay-Glassdo...

I am not offering an opinion on this. I am just noting what Glassdoor itself has to say about this.

Got it. Thanks.

Can anyone explain exactly how Apple "blocks" Unreal Engine? I was under the impression that it's a 3rd-party library, available directly from Epic, that anybody is free to link their game to. So I'm struggling to understand the mechanism by which Apple blocks it. Any clarity on this would be appreciated.

He murdered people to publicize his manifesto. I feel that if I were to read it, I would be encouraging others to kill to get their views known. So I won't be reading it, regardless of its merits.

I agree about using the right tool for the job. And I know UE4 Blueprints are popular so they must be doing something right. Personally I tried using them for a while and gave up. My own experience was:

1) It took me longer to create blueprints than it would have taken to write the equivalent code. I kept finding myself thinking "I could do this in 5 seconds with a couple of lines of code"

2) The blueprints quickly became unwieldy. A tangle of boxes and wires that I couldn't decipher. I find code easier to read, as a rule.

3) I didn't find it any simpler than writing code. A Blueprint is basically a parse tree. It maps pretty much 1:1 to code; it's just a visual representation of code.

Nice idea. Here is the (rough) equivalent in Python.

  from itertools import cycle
  fizz = cycle(['', '', 'Fizz'])
  buzz = cycle(['', '', '', '', 'Buzz'])
  for n in range(1, 100):
      fizzbuzz = next(fizz) + next(buzz)
      print (fizzbuzz if fizzbuzz else n)