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.
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.
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."
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.