You are so right. Seriosly, I would never, NEVER code on my Android phone. And why should I? It is a small device with a small display and small keys - I would not like to search for a specific line of code in a 2000 LOC document.. seriously.
I am a CS guy, so I have my laptop around me most of the time when I feel like I need to code something. That's far enough I think.
When I was a kid, I sometimes went to toy shops during school lunch hour and coded BASIC on a toy computer with one LCD row of text (couldn't afford a home computer).
Why would one want to code on an Android device? Not everyone uses laptops all the time. Laptops need to be lugged around (even though mine's a Toshiba Portege, and is lighter than most at ~1.2kg, I seldom bring it anywhere), opened up, resumed (takes a second or two), balanced on a knee (so you need to be sitting), etc. Hard to do when you're e.g. waiting in a queue, walking in the countryside, lying in bed (without rearranging pillows, sitting up, lighting up the room from the screen, fans and light disturbing your significant other, etc.)
And then there's the idea that you're writing programs for your device without the need for a deployment stage. You're running them right there on the device. No need to faff about with cables, or build / deploy steps.
As to lines of code, in a structure-oriented editor, I think that would not be relevant. I would imagine program navigation to be spatial with drill-down, up and out; all identifiers are hotlinks to their definitions; MRU lists and the same Patricia trie technique, or incremental search, for more random access, etc.
You think so? Well okay, it's not a topic for everybody, but with increasing data loads, it's about time people think more about machine learning technologies to use to get to know more about their data.
I do both Operations Research and Machine Learning and see many possibilities to improve a company's knowledge about the data they have - even if they don't know it (yet).
Especially as with unsupervised ML you can definitely find patterns in your data, groups of similar data and trends, you can do forecasts, imply relationships, and much more.
It's a hard topic, and you definitely need a lot of time to get into the really bloody details, but it is definitely worth it. And it makes a lot of fun if you like maths and statistics.
I agree it's a fascinating field. I've been doing nothing for the past few months but intensive study of the fundamentals. I've had to review a lot of math but I've really been enjoying it. It also seems reasonable to me to expect that demand for those skills will grow.
My impression of the current job market, however, is that it's tough for somebody without formal academic qualifications to crack.
Okay, just tried the search function and it does not give me any results whatsoever... but I just flipped a few options.
oceanician, are you the founder/creator of this project? When did you start it? Could not find any information regarding that but it would be interesting to read.
... ZPL, so the Z POSIX Layer, is the really awesome thing. Virtual block device access is neat, though. I wonder when the first one starts building a high performance data base project based on virtual blocks in zfs for linux. Could be interesting.
Nice topic. Just talked to my co-founder about that. We are developing both web service and mobile app, so there are to different views on the problem.
We didn't really thought about the whole problem of calling the user "you" or "me" yet, so here is where we are today:
In the web service we use "you" everywhere. So far so good.
But for the mobile app (we just finished the first prototype - without beutification and such) we used "my" in almost every case... and we investigated why: For us it feels convenient that if I hold my cell in my hand, it is MY phone.. and such is the mobile apps that I use. They are MY apps, and as MY apps, they are a part of me (I take them with me everywhere I go - just like my keys). In the keys-example you would also say "my keys" and not just "the keys".. and you say "my phone" and not "the phone". I think it is just intuitive that it is "my app" and (inside of the app) "my posts" and "my messages"...
The last part: Absolutely. They got it the wrong way. I mean - okay - they have the right to establish the paywall.
But they are scare off the wrong people: the readers. Why use a service to pay for reading something that the publishers WANT to give me for free? Not enough: Many publishers would pay for it, as it is convenient and absolutely user friendly.
This won't work. Well no, actually it will work - but not as a service that proclaims "show your work to the world for free".
