to you too!

126K registered users is all very well, but I want to see y-o-y MAU growth and a healthy burndown chart before I invest

blob8108 wrote:

126K registered users is all very well, but I want to see y-o-y MAU growth and a healthy burndown chart before I invest

Why, oh, why Munitions Adapter Unit?

bharvey wrote:

Why, oh, why Munitions Adapter Unit?

“monthly active users”, I think. The serious point hidden in the satire was, do you have any stats on how many users are active, as opposed to just registered? That'd be interesting.

blob8108 wrote:

do you have any stats on how many users are active, as opposed to just registered? That'd be interesting.

Good point. I'm sure we can get that. I'll look into it. We have over 100,000 projects posted this year, for what that's worth. Bear in mind that many of these new users are students in our course so a “project” can mean one day's work in the computer lab. I would guess that we have three or four thousand BJC students in the US. Other people are teaching other curricula with Snap! worldwide.

P.S. I think you missed the fact that “Why, oh, why” is a meaning of y-o-y according to some Internet dictionary.

bharvey wrote:

I think you missed the fact that “Why, oh, why” is a meaning of y-o-y

I thought you were just rhyming, it was funny I think it's “year-on-year”, if that's what you're asking.

blob8108 wrote:

I think it's “year-on-year”, if that's what you're asking.

Oh, I knew what you meant, I just wanted to give you a hard time about your use of business-droid jargon. Alas, it went over your head.

bharvey wrote:

We just got some statistics from MioSoft, our back end provider. As of Aug 12 there were 26,000 Snap! users worldwide, and since then there are 20,000 new ones.

Some of those are going to be people who forgot their password or wanted a second account for some other reason, but even if that were half of the new accounts, that would be 10,000 new actual people!

Edit: Jens thinks this is a typo and it was actually 126K in August, based on earlier reports.

I'm pretty sure this was the active users! At least that was my intereptation of the email.

Assuming this isn't revealing too much:

Since August 12, Snap Cloud has had updates to over 218,438 projects by over 26,000 users. In that same time frame, approximately 20,000 new users signed up.

That would be people who've updated a project in the last month. In May 2015 we were around ~25,000 total users, so my guess is that the current total count would be around 50,000.

So, given that Messages isn't reliably notifying these days, I know how to check the fora, but how do I know for sure if someone has replied to some years-old thread in my profile page?

bharvey wrote:

So, given that Messages isn't reliably notifying these days, I know how to check the fora, but how do I know for sure if someone has replied to some years-old thread in my profile page?

Out of curiosity's sake, did this happen to you? I haven't had any trouble with comment messages showing up – only forum notifications.

(Edit: I posted a comment on an old thread on your profile page. Did you get a notification?)

_nix wrote:

Out of curiosity's sake, did this happen to you? I haven't had any trouble with comment messages showing up – only forum notifications.

(Edit: I posted a comment on an old thread on your profile page. Did you get a notification?)

No, I haven't, and yes, I did. I just figured, since I get forum notifications intermittently, who's to know that I'm getting comment notifications intermittently too.

Moving the case insensitively discussion here…

bharvey wrote:

“Each” vs. “each”: Yes, they fill different slots in the sentence. But that's not the point. Find someone who isn't a computer person and doesn't know the context of this discussion, and ask whether they're the same word or different words. Alternatively, look them up in the dictionary! You'll only find one of them it.

Internationalization: Yes, you're right, it should work in different languages. Feel free to file a bug report. I think the right thing is to compare toLower(toUpper(char)), right? (Has to be in that order because of the ß thing.) (So your version of case-independent comparison based on case-sensitive doesn't quite work either.)

It depends on what you're using “=” to mean. In your example where “Each” and “each” are the same it's because “each” is really a pointer to “the meaning of each”. In a dictionary, you don't find two entries for “apple” and “apples”, or even “apples” and “apples!!”. (Not sure why you'd be so up in arms, but hey…).

Not really the best analogy, but I think you get my point.

What bother's me about Snap!'s approach is that it's really hard to “undo”, for a programmer's perspective. If Snap! initially disambiguated between “a” and “A”, but you (the programmer) didn't care, it's easy to write “X = ‘a’ OR X = ‘A’”, but much harder to go the other way around.

Case-Insensitive comparisons have their use, especially when accepting user input. AND in Scratch it's much more difficult to lower case an entire string, than it would be to use a custom block in Snap!. (Some of these text transformations would be right at home in the “words sentences” library.)
I understand the reasons why Scratch chose this method, but it's one of the cases that I think makes things more difficult as your programs grow in complexity.

I may full well have fallen into in the experts fallacy on this one, but I see the rules as a case-sensetive string comparison to be very straight forward. i.e. Characters that look different are different.

(And yeah, I know. Using the word “look” is wrong because the first 30 characters are stupid, but this is why I program in an editor that “shows invisibles” and they all have different glyphs!)

In this case, I think you’re all being quite insensitive…

blob8108 wrote:

In this case, I think you’re all being quite insensitive…

Groan.

Is this one readable?

I think so, yeah

I can read it, yeah!

The Nathan Report:

Nathan is alive and well and living in Brooklyn. I spent Tuesday with him.

bharvey wrote:

The Nathan Report:

Nathan is alive and well and living in Brooklyn. I spent Tuesday with him.

Yay

What's he doing, do we know?

blob8108 wrote:

What's he doing, do we know?

Programming some kind of financial software as a consultant, also thinking about going back to school.
Edit: But not in CS.