HN user

5teev

312 karma

No comments aloud.

Posts4
Comments146
View on HN
Dear Instagram 12 years ago

"Bolts Framework" is rather different from, and clearly not competing with, "Bolt."

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple someday has a Windows (or whatever) version of Xcode. That is, in a kind of parallel to the OP's essay, Xcode as we know it isn't necessarily "Mac-only" but simply built for Mac first.

But what if it's an awesome shiny new hammer based on the latest impulse-delivery fads? Plus, screwdrivers are boring.

"Fact" because I can't tell if it's true. (I'll confess I have great doubt.) "Preposterous" because it doesn't seem possible a web site would cost that much. Relevant to HN because it's about a web site, and the readers here are well positioned to evaluate how such a thing might actually be true.

I was worried it might appear so, but I was not trying to rabble-rouse. Sorry if you mistook my intentions.

Historical note about the logo illustration at the top of the essay (which predates the well-known red logo): it was internally referred to as "Uncle Stinky".

Objective-C's tendency to long names (variables, selectors, classes) makes it more "self-documenting" than any language I've worked with. Besides, it's not that bad with autocomplete.

It's an interesting intellectual exercise to build THE email validation regex, but it's shortsighted to inflict your experiment on the public.

While I definitely enjoyed how Friedl's book (http://regex.info/book.html) builds over several chapters to an ever more complex solution, maybe a page long, my takeaway was: don't bother. A friendly UI will help users avoid an obvious mistake, but as other posters have pointed out, the only real validation is, does an email get there?

If your app directly accesses the camera with AVFoundation, saving photos is a lot less automatic than you might expect. It's easy to save the raw image data but you have to generate and add just about any interesting metadata (EXIF, GPS, TIFF, etc.) explicitly. It's hard to do right--as the rather many discussions on StackOverflow suggest--and definitely a steep price to pay for a customized camera interface.

This article reminded me of a Flash game I played with several years ago:

http://www.redistrictinggame.org/

If you work through the levels, you'll see that voting districts sometimes must have highly irregular shapes to ensure maximum representation of the various groups of constituents. You'll definitely see cases where "objective" boundaries leave some groups completely unrepresented.

Gerrymandering definitely happens, and it's a big problem, but it's not a simple one.

I like that Perl tends to do what you wanted it to do, rather than what you told it to do. Bugs in other languages are often because of vice-versa.

That does seem high, but if you factor in the (non-trivial) installation process, and the fact that you won't be voiding your warranty with a DIY installation, it may be an acceptable tradeoff. Apple is probably counting on your reaching this conclusion as well.

It's hard to imagine nowadays, but in the late 1990's, Nokia made cell phones Americans craved. Their blunder in the US market was to think they didn't have to get in bed with specific carriers and make phones exclusive to one or another. A titan the world over, Nokia was surely surprised at how effectively they could be diminished by the business model the US carriers settled on. They never recovered in the US, and I don't think they ever will.

At least you get a few quiet hours between 6 and 9 to actually get things done. I've noticed much less resentment of people who come in after 10 and leave after 6. Same hours, different perception.

Because somehow, no one sees you come in, but everyone sees you go home.

If you think of "I could care less" as sarcasm, it makes more sense, i.e., the speaker couldn't really care less. (If I recall, this was the typical usage when I first started hearing this phrase decades ago.)

In their desire to shed themselves of Google, Apple has opened a window of opportunity for 3rd parties to enhance their own maps' utility. History suggests, however, that this window will be small, and I expect in the long term, the best bet for the 3rd party apps is to be acquired by Apple.

Nokia is a company with over 100 years of success behind it, and it approaches new products with the concomitant confidence: they really believe the engineers will be able to pull off whatever the marketers come up with. (Even after, as the video shows, the top of the line N97 fell far short of the hype.)

> Are you saying that Apple is succeeding because their customers are their users?

Yes, and they have different priorities than the CTO or IT manager, who may select enterprise software by feature checklist (or other priorities) rather than end-user experience.