I've been really digging AppEngine and Python lately. You're right that most of the work is done on the front-end, but I enjoy many things about the AppEngine ecosystem and in this case the ease in integrating user auth was one of the reasons I decided to go with it.
The classic way of learning has evolved with history. Before having books, everything was memorized with a few exceptions. The Google era is just another step in this evolution. Why would we waste time memorizing stuff if we can just look it up? Might be argued that Googling takes time. Of course it does, but there will come the next era where our thought could prompt a query and get an answer without physically doing it. That will be the next step in human learning.
Sounds like sci-fi? So did the idea of having all the information available on the tip of your hands 30 years ago.
> Why would we waste time memorizing stuff if we can just look it up
Because from memorized knowledge comes inspiration. If you are thinking about something, and actually know many things you can put all those things together subconsciously and have a flash of insight.
Without all that memorized knowledge you have to laboriously look everything up and you may never make the connections.
If there's one thing I remember well it's relationships and behaviours(probably the same for most engineers). This is distinct from what I would call knowledge (i.e. when something happened). For me inspiration always seems to come from comparing relationships and behaviours, memorizing information rotely doesn't contribute to this at all.
The problem I've found is I've become so used to no "waste time memorizing stuff" I've forgotten how to memorize things.
Which is a problem when I need to learn things that can't just be looked up online when you need them, like a new language. When I try to learn new vocabulary or something my brain just refuses to leave its default lazy "aww, just look it up on Google" mode. It's annoying.
I agree with you, it is quite annoying. I found an interesting quote from a PG's essay "Great Hackers" [1]:
"Several friends mentioned hackers' ability to concentrate-- their ability, as one put it, to "tune out everything outside their own heads.'' I've certainly noticed this. And I've heard several hackers say that after drinking even half a beer they can't program at all. So maybe hacking does require some special ability to focus. Perhaps great hackers can load a large amount of context into their head, so that when they look at a line of code, they see not just that line but the whole program around it. John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor. Maybe great hackers have some similar inborn ability. (I cheat by using a very dense language, which shrinks the court.)"
I can see something like this hitting the IDEs shelves in a few years. Need to use an unknown API for this very specific part of your project? Don't worry about the documentation, suggestions are going to tell you what you'll want to write.
Agree with pseut. I would need a Siri smart enough to aggregate and manage news for me. We need someone to build that great aggregator, and then we'll talk about Siri integrating that.
Sure, but your original point seemed to be that any small degree of progress on a Siri variant would be more important than any large degree of progress on a news aggregator. My only point is that the magnitude of the progress matters, and a big change in the "smaller" problem of news aggregation would free up a lot more of my time than a small change in the "bigger" problem. As much as I'd like to be able to dictate research papers and code up a bunch of data analysis over my phone via Siri++ while I'm on a long run on the beach, at some point you have to trust that people choose to work where they think they can make the most progress.
This is being built under the same principles that we build software on. I think that it is huge that many industries are using what I would call DRY development on their manufacturing.
I think that you should consider white labeling. Or perhaps not necessarily white labeling, but releasing SDKs to allow to use the platform from third-party apps. Obviously many app developers and companies could benefit from having it available from their own apps.
I can also see value for it in the academic world. Academia is starting to dip their toes in the crowd research and this could be very valuable. But again, I don't see a benefit to actual users to download the human.io app, it seems as an unnecessary hassle. Having it available from other apps allows third-parties to offer their own benefits.
