I also haven't seen auto-playing ads on my android phone. Nevertheless, the ads on slashdot are what finally made me get around to setting up an adblocker for it.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1999-03-29

I like the editing features of vim. Yes, there are plugins, but why settle for a subset when you can have the full editor?

Agreed. I use both actually. Android Studio is kept on one monitor. I use it for syntax checking, auto imports, refactoring, etc. I do the real coding in vim on the other monitor (with portrait orientation). It took some effort to get vim to auto-load changes made by android studio, but it works very well now. In the Before Time when Eclipse was the standard for Android dev, I used eclim which eased the pain of Eclipse significantly. Thank goodness those days are over.

I hate ambiguity more than most people.

Stop rhyming, and I mean it!

Exactly. If you can already type at 60+ WPM, the miniscule benefit that a th key would provide is laughable.

Can we please stop describing games as being "addictive"?

care to elaborate?

Happy birthday
Happy birthday
Misery is in the air
People dying everywhere
Happy birthday
Happy birthday

I started programming about 7 years ago with visual basic 6, now I'm finishing my sophomore year of college (CS major). When learning new languages, I would start out with beginner tutorials and then move on to writing my own projects as quickly as possible. I would then do all my learning from experimentation and online resources (google, stack overflow, etc). Now I have enough experience that when I learn something new I can jump right in and start making stuff. But I've never learned from books. I tried a few times, but they just seemed boring/slow paced. I learn so much quicker from google anyway. I don't think I'm really missing out on any in-depth knowledge from not reading books--I try to research things I don't understand quite heavily, and works quite well as far as I can tell. I often hear other programmers talk about how they learned/learn from books, but I figure I just learn differently. I never read the text books for my c++/java classes either. I find that half-paying attention in class and then researching anything I don't understand on my own time is much more efficient.

Care to explain? I couldn't find any info on who/what APK is.

It actually doesn't matter that the sample is such a small percentage of the population. It's size that matters, not percent.* A sample of 162 will be just as statistically relevant whether the population size is 9.5 million or only 10,000 (assuming the sample is taken properly). There may be other issues with the study, but this isn't one of them.

(At least that's what I learned last quarter in intro statistics. Feel free to correct me if I missed anything)

*Though if the sample is drawn without replacement (i.e. putting each subject back in the pool before choosing the next), the sample should be under 10% of the population.

This really bugs me. I'll be listening to Pandora and they'll cycle between just 2 or 3 ads. Do they think that repeating ads is going to make them more effective? Maybe to a degree, but it starts to get really annoying to listen to the same crap over and over again (same goes for the music, but that's a different rant).

If you're on chrome, you can get the Personal Blocklist extension (made by Google). I don't know if there's an extension for firefox though.