May I point you to the etiquette guidelines for the proper way of shooing someone away. You have hurt my feelings by the blunt way you have expressed yourself.
I have nothing against society but I do have something against the OP. Clearly he and his friends have the technical expertise to make something but instead of doing something worthwhile they have created another weapon for the spin doctors. And yes he will make millions because campaign managers these days manage more money than some hedge fund managers but the rest of us won't be better off because of it.
It's not about being passionate about politics and my background is in mathematics and cs, two of the least political subjects out there. If I was going to devote time and effort to doing anything political then it certainly wouldn't be about empowering the marketing/spin machine used by politicians. I would instead focus on tools to empower individual citizens and give them the tools to fight back the spin machine. This doesn't do anything of the sort.
I didn't say it's not a pain. I just think if you're trying to engage users then blasting them with updates on all fronts is the wrong approach and doesn't change anything about the current political setup.
In fact I think it does the opposite. This doesn't fix anything. It makes the problem worse. In our current politics there is absolutely no real dialog between the politicians and people. Blasting twitter updates and facebook status updates to your followers is the shallowest kind of follower engagement because even though everyone can retweet and comment on those status updates no one really does any real communicating in those mediums. For a guy who claims to want to fix the political landscape this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.
And how many people still use FriendFeed? It is now overrun by auto quote bots and viagra spam. Also, I don't see how facebook approving of something makes the idea any less idiotic.
I really meant it looks like a prank. So I don't see what the point of taking out the etiquette guidelines does in this case. The whole premise of managing twitter, facebook, tumbler, etc. all in one place sounds like a joke to me. What's next? Browse in IE, Firefox and Chrome all at the same time from one convenient location. Every single social app currently has the option of blasting every single thing you post on them to all the other ones and that kind of setup doesn't sound like a feature it sounds more like a bug.
That's a pretty silly list. Many formally trained programmers also lack understanding of several items on the list. How much can you really teach anyone on compilers and machine learning in two months? The easiest way to learn something is to use it. Taking tests and turning in homework assignments for 8 weeks only gets you so far. If you want to pick up the formal theory and functional aspects of programming then I highly recommend the course notes available at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis500/current/index.html. If you get to the end I guarantee you'll know more about the theoretical aspects of programming than any "formally" trained programmer at a big name university.
That would be fine if I had a server sitting somewhere constantly checking for prices. Currently I just push all the code that would be processed on the server onto the client. I'm not expecting to get millions of users but I'm also not interested in managing my own server. Making the whole process decentralized and getting the application on the phone to manage itself is a much better solution. There is no equivalent way to do that for a web app. No matter what I will need some kind of central location for people to push and pull their alerts from if I make a web app and there are plenty of services like that already.
Notifications are a bit of a problem with web apps. It's much easier to do everything client side on a mobile device and I haven't figured out how to elegantly implement a notification system on the server side. I could potentially do everything by email but that brings a whole bunch of other headaches with it if I don't want to be blacklisted as a spammer. Currently I'm looking at appcelerator and adobe air to make the app more accessible to a wider audience but that's a little ways away.
This guy sounds like an asshole. If he is so concerned about the current state of affairs he should write some tutorials and teach some real problem solving concepts. Instead he rages about something and in the end pretends to be smarter than he actually is.
I wouldn't say that's why it was shut down but facebook data gurus must be intimately aware of stalking as a huge traffic driver and this app tapped directly into that vein. I think other people have already mentioned this application siphoning traffic from their main user landing pages and that's probably why it was shut down.
I can only comment on webOS and android since I haven't yet bought a mac to experiment with iOS. Compared to android webOS is a delight because it uses Javascript/HTML/CSS and any web developer can write a webOS app after a few simple tutorials to get acquainted with the APIs. So I'd say the biggest pain point on android is Java because from an architectural standpoint everything these days is MVC and android doesn't deviate from that.
The only benefit I'm aware of is slightly faster code and even then the dynamic version is almost always more readable and easier to maintain and refactor. The ideal would be a dynamic language with optional static typing but I have yet to see a language like that.
The same can be said for any statically typed language. Any language that binds types as late as possible is infinitely more enjoyable to work with than one that fixes types at compile time. Short of developing missile guidance systems I don't think static types are warranted for anything.
Java hate has nothing to do with being cool. I can honestly say that it is a horrible language because I have programmed in several dynamic languages and the amount of grief you have to put up with in Java to get simple things done is unbearable when you have seen how much easier things are in dynamic languages. How many people are developing missile guidance systems on android? Most people write small applications to automate some aspect of their lives and forcing people to use Java for that kind of stuff is just beyond me.
I started programming in dynamic languages like Javascript and Ruby so I'm really hating it. I have no idea how people manage to get anything done in Java. I was hoping generics would help me out but when I started using them all of a sudden interfaces started to pollute everything. I really wish palm/hp had more competent management because their webOS operating system is light years ahead of android/iOS.
I am currently pulling my hair out just trying to get various activities to send stuff between each other. Doing this stuff in Javascript is so much easier with JSON and it's too bad there is no JSON equivalent for Java and the static typing doesn't help matters either so I can't wait until there is another option other than Java for writing applications.
If you know C++ I'm guessing you know object oriented programming and its terminology. The only thing new to you in Java should be the syntax so start with a template for defining a class and work your way up from there. My background is mostly in dynamic scripting languages like javascript and ruby but applying what I knew to learn Java was pretty easy. The only thing new was all the extra type declarations. Don't worry about generics and the reflection API in the beginning because once you get used to the syntax figuring out how generics fit in your code and how to make use of them will be pretty easy. If you're looking for extra motivation to keep you going you could try writing an android application, that's actually how I learned it. For extra moral support you could pick up a book but in my experience programming books get outdated pretty quickly and the online Java docs cover pretty much everything you'd need to know.