kd1220

How useful is the API for speech on iOS? Do you have a link to the docs for it? I did a quick search for "speech recognition API for iOS" but I didn't see anything official from Apple on the results. (Is there an official one?)

Then you have to define "continually." It's probably better to say it's unreasonable when it eventually fails, but you can only make that determination after the fact. The truth is that any managerial behavior, when applied continually, will become an anti-pattern. So choosing particular behaviors, organizing and labeling them is just an autistic exercise.

I've seen, in my decade of experience in tech, that a well-worded and keyword-packed marketing ploy is as irresistible as gravity to many. As the seductive promises and successful toy examples accrete around the neutron soup of buzzwords, a marketing mass finally reaches an influential Schwarzschild radius. Businesses that come within this radius are pulled in and obliterated, but they have no knowledge of their destruction. They've passed the event horizon and are now in a place where causality and reason have been up-ended. Their demise would only be detectable outside in the faint Hawking radiation that is drowned out by the background noise of self-congratulatory back-patting.

These pie-in-the-sky companies are necessary in the tech galaxy. Their primary purpose is to weed out those businesses who don't have the wisdom or tenacity to take on the challenges themselves. Their secondary purpose is to teach future tech leaders a hard lesson: there is no silver bullet.

I don't think any of these are anti-patterns. They are behaviors that may be completely reasonable to use in a given circumstance. The author is misapplying software engineering terminology to software engineering management.

I've solved some coding challenges I come across, but mostly because I wanted a little diversion. Generally those problems give me an excuse to practice lesser used languages or languages I want to learn. I've been contacted by companies after solving these, but I always decline.

In regard to the change in hiring practices, "social presence resumes" are just a passing trend. It may result in better candidates in the short term, but people will learn to pad these new resumes and it won't be much more effective than paper resumes.

The best hiring practice will still be tapping your employees' social network and hunting down talented people who aren't happy in their current positions. Anything else is usually a shot in the dark.

This is the case in the U.S. as well. Apple products are considered chic, and people merely buy them for the fad value. Apple marketing has been very good lately - a stark change from "Think different." Their product release cycle and pricing are magnificent as well. While other computer makers are reeling from the crisis and subsequent changes in the market, Apple has created a small ecosystem that is very well designed to pull you in. Once you buy the peanut butter, you also need the jelly, the bread and the butter knife.

Neko.io looks like it's trying to solve the access control list issues that Facebook has been plagued with since... forever. But it gets no further. It only exports these issues to all social networks.

Watch Zed Shaw's "The ACL is dead" presentation and you'll understand why.

Also it requires yet another non-standard authorization utility (Mepin?) or a separate login. I'm phatigued by phishing.

He's making a consumer/producer dichotomy. If you can't produce software, then you are relegated to only consume it. This is true of all technologies and advances though. Lofty arguments aside the article is mostly a subtly placed ad for Codeacademy.

If you're currently living, you will be able to make it to your grave without any knowledge of programming. There's no reason to learn to code if you don't want to. Sure, you won't be able to take advantage of many things that technology offers, but that won't seriously degrade your standard of living to the point of hopelessness.

A better bit of advice would be "Learn to understand systems, get a job".

Being the pragmatist that I am: Why bother with public social media if you want to say something in private? Also, from a social behavioral view, this is very rude. It's the online equivalent of 2 or more people in a group switching to speaking another language so someone else in the group can't understand the topic.

And we will likely never get there. A good place to start reasoning about programming languages is the philosophy of language. Frege, Hume, Wittgenstein, Searle are some interesting figures in this space. Many language philosophers believe there are some basics of language that everyone grasps, and the particulars of a language evolve from necessity. Fortunately there is little agreement on what these basic elements are. This is what makes it interesting.

"Evidence-based programming languages" won't solve anything by finding natural-language equivalents for difficult syntax. What natural language will these equivalents be created in? English, Japanese, Arabic? All languages? Will Japanese programmers share their code with English programmers by means of a Babel fish?

The idea of a poorly designed language is nonsense. All languages that exist or have existed were designed precisely for what and when they were needed.

At its core programming is about appropriate abstraction. To be widely useful the programming language's wheels should tread lightly, just touching the road. If there's too much abstraction, there's no friction and you go nowhere. With too little abstraction you're pegged to the ground and expend enormous amounts of energy to go anywhere.

The article would make more sense if it were titled: "Why AT&T should acquire Twilio."

My experience with gung-ho githubbers is the same. It's great to try out new technologies, but gitguys take it to an extreme. They'll shoehorn any new technology into their stack without a second thought about product stability.

Gitguy: "I used EC2, Blazboo and Chingbang to create an HA job queue that will never fail! It uses counting Bloom filters and I wrote it in Brainfuck."

Me: "What do you use it for?"

Gitguy: "Sending password reset emails."

These Rube Goldberg wannabes are generally more trouble than they're worth. You end up with a system that's a technological pastiche. The drawback is apparent when you try to hire new teammates. It turns out you can't find someone who knows the 12 esoteric packages your business is running on.

I've had an interest in philosophy lately and I thought the last comment was fantastic. I'm on Heidegger at the moment and Sartre may follow. I loved 1984, so maybe I'll heed Orwell's criticism and substitute Kirkegaard for Sartre.

It's been done before, but I think the result the same. I met with a guy who was a co-owner of a luxury car rental service in South Florida. He wanted help with implementing a tracking system, but I passed up the job. He started the company back in late 2008, and it had gone under some time early in 2011.

I saw him again recently and asked why the business went bust. To paraphrase him: "High overhead and picky customers." Turns out people who rent exotic cars want the newest and latest cars, not older models (unless it's vintage/classics they're looking for, but that's another beast). So you have to keep your stable fresh. Trying to offload exotics is a pain, because there's a specific type of person who will buy a used exotic: a nouveau rich man with more pride than financial management skills.

The kicker was when he told me that if he ever decides to launder money, he'll start another luxury rental place, because it would be perfect for that.

They're what you make of it. Those problems are generally far removed from what you would actually do at most tech companies. Regardless, if they're complicated enough and you come up with a working solution, it does hone your problem solving skills. Don't do it to be top on a leader board or to get an interview.

Contributing to an open source project is also valuable, but in a different way. Open source projects require you to navigate through bug lists, socialize with other coders, read specs, analyze and repair a (mostly) functioning system. Overall, it will help you gain perspective on creating software.

The article makes me feel the same as when some guy on the street says "Hey, you want to buy a new laptop? Come over to my truck here."

Bitcoin is slipping into the dark recesses of the internet.

There is a logical explanation. Drivers are spending more time sorting through lemons at the grocery store and end up driving less, thus traffic fatalities fall.

What's the thing about article titles posing questions? The answer is always "no."

My guess is during this decade, there will be a push toward becoming inaccessible and exclusive. The internet club is a bit overcrowded and their door policy has become lax. I wouldn't be surprised to see identity management and personal automated PR agencies start springing up as a service. If you can't filter yourself, just pay someone (or something) else to do it.

Major Domo Bot: "Do you really want to send this tweet: 'im soooo wasted on teqiuza!!' to your business associates? I'd suggest editing it to 'Having a great time in SoHo!'"

If you replaced "free software/service" with "person" then a sensible title could be "Don't Have No-Strings-Attached Relationships."

I think the author is giving bad advice. If you're using a free service that doesn't appear to have any revenue stream, then just assume it won't be around when you need it. There's nothing bad about using a free service. You don't have to bug the owners to monetize. It's a technological fling. Just like with interpersonal relationships, a company isn't going to tell its users "Hey, we're not going to be around in 2 years. This is just a temporary thing."

Maybe Gowalla just wasn't that into its users.

This is probably tied to female "mathphobia" in some way, because in my experience males were the most competent math teachers. Gender biases notwithstanding, I can say there were three female teachers in my school career who influenced my math aptitude a great deal: my 1st/4th grade teacher (same woman), my sixth grade English/Computer teacher, my 10th grade Algebra 2 teacher.

What they all had in common was the ability to see my aptitude and find materials for me that I could benefit from. These teachers may not have been math whizzes, but they definitely weren't afraid to give their students material they weren't completely comfortable with themselves. They also encouraged me to do more difficult math and were very supportive in general. Their attitude carried me very far, even if they couldn't answer some of the more difficult questions I would ask. My calculus teacher was very good, but he was a gigantic asshole.

His review may be a bit hyperbolic, but this is how I predicted people would respond to Siri.

10 years ago there was a big push in commercializing automated ("intelligent") speech recognition systems. AT&T, TellMe and BeVocal were big players in this market during the last tech boom. Naturally, there was a lot of marketing behind these systems. Many claims were made that these intelligent agents would understand you and make common tasks easier.

It was all hype then, and it's all hype now. The dialog management found in Siri is likely based on research that's 10-15 years old - a slot-value style of filling in a form. VoiceXML is an example. It's the bastard spawn of speech recognition and XML, born in the late 1990s. It's woefully underpowered and simplistic, but it works reasonably well if you have good UI designers. Unfortunately, DARPA cut the cord on speech recognition grants in the early 2000s because they considered it a "solved problem." The number of speech dialog research projects fell and the subject has stagnated a bit.

Apple has great design for GUIs and hardware, but VUIs are a different beast altogether. Nuance (which provides the ASR software for Siri) has experience with creating VUIs for large corporations, but I can guarantee you they don't have the end-user ethic that Apple does. I don't think this will affect Apple much, but Siri will likely fall to the wayside like Facetime did.

Your logic focuses on the product; mine the market. By your logic men's make-up should generate as much revenue as women's make-up. It doesn't though, and make-up exists for both men and women.

Existing game companies aren't directly comparable to Zynga precisely because they don't market to women. However, a social gaming environment like Dave & Buster's is comparable, because they target adults in their late 20s/early 30s and families, whose social agenda is driven by women.

Zynga's success comes from the fact that they tapped an underserved market: women who like to socialize through playing games.

I don't think a comparison to EA and Blizzard is appropriate. You'd likely find a better indicator of value by comparing to something like Dave & Buster's, which sold for ~$600M last year. D&B is aimed at wholesome entertainment for adults. Zynga is targeting much of the same market with a focus on women. EA and Blizzard mostly produce games for males 16-35.

The main difference between D&B and Zynga is that Zynga is available to any one with a computer or smartphone, while D&B franchises are only built in cities of 500k+ people. That difference might create a multiplier on the order of 10. $600M * 10 = $6B. So $7B in valuation doesn't seem that ridiculous to me.

I experienced this mindset in my graduate studies. Many graduate advisors spend so much time writing grant proposals and hobnobbing with government project managers that they didn't care what result their experiments got, as long as it was positive. I lost interest in being a researcher primarily because it's no different than working at a company - except you get paid less.

I never saw any researchers or students falsify or make up data, but often I saw experiments performed without defining a hypothesis first. The hypothesis was created a posteriori to match any interesting correlations that could be combed from the data. I felt like I was a marketer trying to find a reason to promote a product. This particular approach might be standard when dealing with in-vivo experiments (on human subjects). It's a time-intensive process and you can't just rerun the experiment like you can on an artificial system. However, I didn't feel like it was the correct way to do research.

There's been renewed interest in recent years of creating a journal of failed experiments for various research areas, but it never seems to catch on. It would be invaluable, but there are too many egotistical people in academia who don't want to be associated with failure in any way.

To add to the constants list: rsync, some sort of firewall (iptables, apf-firewall, etc.), netstat, sed, awk, logrotate, lsof.

Hanging out with other sysadmins is better than a book. I find that information in books becomes outdated pretty quickly. Try new stuff in a development environment, and then pray they work the same when you go to production (often they won't - so follow the golden rule - back up everything).

There is no point to a .xxx TLD. Its sole purpose is to extract wealth from an existing pool rather than create value. This is the textbook definition of rent-seeking.

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theor...

Generational theory is interesting on the surface, but often I take these meta-analyses with a grain of salt. They seem to be grandiose astrological interpretations that would be applicable to any generation.

I'm part of the "Nomad" generation type. Nomadic definitely describes my life fairly well for the past 10 years. I've lived in 2 countries and 5 states. The post office should just start OCRing my mail and sending it via email.

Zach really doesn't push the envelope with his posts. He's enthusiastic and outspoken, but at the same time very green. I can't hold it against him. Time will temper his views. (Disclosure: He's an alum.)

However, I think someone like Sachin Agarwal would benefit from reading this and taking it to heart. Sachin's recent post, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218607, came off as douchey. What I took from that post is that Sachin used his self-proclaimed fanboy relationship with Apple for gain. The tone of the post was slightly cocky and speciously reverent.

Branding is important and it's increasingly difficult to avoid it as our lives become more public through technology. Consciously putting effort into presenting yourself in a good light isn't something that's automatic; it requires practice. If you put too much effort into it, then you might come off as a sleazy used car salesman. Focus on what you do and how you do it and the branding will emerge effortlessly and naturally. You won't be a product that way; you'll be a process (or a platform, as Jason puts it).

It's typically not my style to call out specific individuals and make examples of them. Sachin's post didn't make an explicit reference to his persona, but I thought it was useful for the discussion. Both Zach and Sachin have appeared on the front page several times. I think they can handle the criticism - positive or negative.

Dropbox also has the ability to take the path of becoming a platform more easily than something like AirBnB. I'm bringing this up because Steve Yegge's recent post on Amazon vs. Google struck a chord in me.

I could see Dropbox becoming a large file sharing network with great access controls. The amount of data that's produced every day needs a place to be stored and accessed, even if only a fraction of it is worth sharing. It's definitely a problem that many organizations and groups have, and there are few good solutions out there.

When the tech industry is booming the silicon epithet is wantonly attached to any geographical feature. I remember back in 2000 when New York was becoming "Silicon Alley", South Florida (Ft. Lauderdale - Boca Raton - West Palm Beach) was "Silicon Beach", and Israel was forming a "Silicon Wadi." New York is still mostly alleys, Florida mostly beaches and Israel mostly deserts; not many glimmers of silicon remain. I bet this time around there will be "Silicon Fjords" in Scandinavia and "Silicon Rainforests" in South America.

The tech industry will make beachheads in various places and eventually be swallowed up and integrated into the industries that already dominate the area.