npsomaratna

I was hoping for the Warhammer 40k type of chaos. Oh well, one can dream ...

We use PHP for our backend stuff. We've been using our own custom framework for years, but are in the process of migrating to Laravel now (something we really should have done much earlier).

I can understand the hate for PHP. As it is easy to pick up and because it doesn't enforce good coding practices, PHP has become a magnet for poorly capable programmers. In fact, one of our great challenges is that the majority of candidates who apply for PHP Software Engineer (SE) positions are barely capable of programming in the first place.

At the end of the day, what matters is the skill of the tech team. A team of SEs with strong coding skills and well thought out engineering/architectural practices can create systems that are well-built, scalable and maintainable, regardless of language. Conversely, no programming language or framework can compensate for a lack of skill or poor knowledge of good engineering practices.

I'm curious - could you explain what you mean by the "Scratch UI"? I did some searching on Google, but there appear to be several products which use this term.

Is this what you meant? https://scratch.mit.edu/developers

Thanks for bringing up Allegro - I have many fond memories of playing around with it in my teens. I'm amazed to see that it's still under active development!

People see the royal family as both a living link to their past and a unifying force for the nation that is above mere politics.

Add to this the fact that the Japanese royal line is by far the oldest in the world and that the Emperor is also the head of the Shinto religion.

Update: social media isn't blocked anymore. Six days in total - reasonable enough, I think.

Sri Lankan here.

Historically, the people here have engaged in "knee-jerk" violence following an initial inflammatory incident; see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_July

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_anti-Muslim_riots_in_Sri_...

In the second incident listed above, social media was used both as a vector to spread hate speech and misinformation, and also to help mobs organize.

Regarding the current social media block: at the start, I felt this to be reasonable, as it made sense to slow the spread of misinformation/hate speech for a couple of days, until people's emotions cool down. However, the blocks still continue - and I see no clear justification for continuing them for so long.

Law student (non-USA) here.

The general contract law principle is: if both parties have signed a contract, it is legally valid. Whether copies are possessed by only one party or both is inconsequential.

Exceptions are if the contract contains language mandating that both parties should receive a copy, or if there are specific laws regulating the form of such contracts.

From what I've read, the Citizenship Act of India specifies that any citizen of India who obtains citizenship of any other country immediately ceases to be a citizen of India. At that point, it is his or her duty to surrender their passport to the nearest Indian mission abroad.

I guess that one could ignore this and keep on using their Indian passport - but doing so would be fraud and criminal misrepresentation.

Legal student here. To answer your question - current international human rights treaties / laws prevent revocation of citizenship (even naturalized citizenship) if that would leave the person stateless.

Edit: and yes, India, only allows single-citizenship. Accepting U.S. citizenship automatically results in the loss of Indian citizenship.

That's a good question, and a tricky one to answer.

Criminal law is based on the concept of crime and punishment. Depending on the crime, the punishments can be very severe (e.g. loss of liberty or life).

Permitting ex post facto criminal laws would allow legislatures to arbitrarily criminalize actions that were perfectly legal at the time they were committed.

Given the potential severity of criminal punishments, this just lends itself to abuses of power. Because of this, most countries explicitly disallow retroactive criminal legislation in their constitutions.

Civil law pertains to rights and duties. In this context, there are legitimate occasions where retroactivity may be useful.

Sure, retroactive civil laws can still be used to target specific entities or persons. However, the potential negative outcomes are milder (at most, the loss of movable or immovable assets).

Because of this, there is no universal consensus on retroactive civil laws. Most countries allow them; many other countries frown on them; a few ban them outright.

Law student here. We use the term "ex post facto" for laws that have a retroactive effect.

Article 1 of the US. constitution prohibits ex post facto laws, but the supreme court has traditionally interpreted this to only apply to criminal law.

Civil laws can and have been applied retroactively.

Out of curiosity, how would you suggesting monetizing this?

^ Exactly.

Also, his statement implies that digital assets have no real-world financial value. In practice, even if the investment fails, the codebase of the company, body of active users, and any user data gathered will have some value.

3rd year law student (among other things!) here. As you've mentioned, the doctrine of promissory estoppel should make this enforceable in law.

Did someone change the link? This originally pointed to: https://www.facebook.com/Dell/posts/10206079690990070, but it now points to the change.org petition referred to at the end of the aforementioned FB post.

I agree. Also, publishing this stuff online might weaken his legal hand.

You do have a point there - but this is an app which appeals to almost all medical professionals.

If you look at the top 10 apps in the medical section (or the top 25 for that matter), you'll see that they have been there for months (or years) on end.

My feeling is that the medical section of the app store is fairly different from the games section (where apps have a very limited shelf life).

Unfortunately Flurry's new SDK does not collect iOS version info, so we're as much in the dark as you are.

However, 90.9% of our users are listed as having iOS4 devices - I am not sure whether this indicates the iPhone 4, or whether iOS 4 prevents flurry from detecting the device type (in which case this would be an accurate estimate of the number of devices running iOS 4)

I guess that the percentage of users with iOS 3 devices should therefore be at most 9.1% - probably less than that.

Another statistic is that 7.43% of the users had jailbroken devices - I suppose that a significant portion of them would be using iOS 3, as it is so painful to upgrade to iOS 4.

You do have a good point about adding advertisements later on.

We thought that having advertisements at the very start might turn off some users - but there is also the possibility of a backlash if we add them later.

Note that we were not planning on adding a generic ad network, but rather partnering with a pharma company and deploying ads customized for the iPhone.

The other possibility is to have 'sponsored cases', similar to what they have on Medscape - there would just a be a single line of text, i.e 'Sponsored by XYZ"

>> So, first thing to note is the difference between Top 10 in the free Medical category vs. Top 10 of all free apps.

Fixed on blog. Can't edit post.

Our app is free. We do have plans to add advertising later on - but not for several months at least.

All costs are out of my pocket (and Sandaruwan's and Parinda's)

Note that $50 is a LOT when bootstrapping from Sri Lanka - my salary as a Doctor (which is much higher than that of the general population) was only $400 / month - with most of that getting burnt up in living costs.

I know - we made the mistake of the setting the target platform to iOS 3.1 but only ended up testing it under iOs 4.0 devices - simply because no-one seemed to use iOS 3.1.

Wrong !

Although 93.6% of our users use iOs4, the other 6% were pissed off when they found out that the app crashed on iOS 3.1

The icing on the cake ? After the app crashed, the users deleted it - and were prompted to rate it. I'm sure that you can imagine the rest.

Thank god that the 'rate on delete' feature was removed from iOS4 - although that is scant consolation.

Just got a message saying that the server is booting up .... 3 hours :(

Yeah .... our iPhone app downloads content from our server - so far we've got 3 1-star reviews saying 'Your app sucks - it can't download any content'

Damn .........

Nope. Ours has been down for over 2 hours now - and it's nearly an hour since the 'linodes are on their way up' message :(

Thanks for the feedback - a lot of useful points there :) Would you like to beta test the app ?

Well, there are different App stores for different countries ?

Users with US app store accounts will not be able to see apps in other countries app stores (of course, they can just create a new account set to a different country, but your average user is unlikely to do that)

That is very true.

However, the problem is that the FDA rules would probably block those apps from being deployed in the US App store.

And all said and done, the US App store is key to gaining traction and users.

Thanks for the article. Luckily, the app is (currently) just a fun educational tool and should escape their scrutiny !

I guess that this news will put a dampening on innovation in the mobile medical field though ....