brackenbury

Does it make sense to have special laws to protect endangered species? Why not protect all species? Does it make sense to have more severe punishment for cop killers? Why not have severe punishment for all killers? Does it make sense to have extra fines for drivers who break rules in construction zones? Does it make sense to have a special coaching for girls who code ( https://girlswhocode.com/ ?) Why not provide that extra coaching to all kids? Because we live in the real world, not some utopia.

I can't comment about the framework since I don't speak Lua, but I want to congratulate the author for her work. Less than 1% of opensource contributors are women. Women are already under-represented in tech, but in opensource women are even more under-represented, so this is good to see.

Regarding angular, please see this previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8651641 There appears to be lots of things the 1000 contributors didn't get. They are after all abandoning Angular 1 and working on Angular 2 which is a completely new framework which just happens to share the same name as the older framework.

I agree designers shouldn't touch code (i.e., javascript). But designers should be able to directly edit the visual aspects (i.e., templates). This was one of the goals of XAML.

And what is it that you think is good in XAML? Two-way data binding? Angular and Ember tried that and are now moving away from it. XAML is poorly designed, especially those over-complicated data bindings. I prefer the jQuery way where the template just contains an id or class, then you set data from code, as opposed to the template trying to pull data. The template needs to be simple (since designers also have to edit it), and the intelligence should be in code.

Am I the only one who thinks Jony Ive is a fraud? Let's examine the evidence, shall we?

Let's consider Jony's performance on software design first. This is what some prominent people have said about iOS 7: The Verge wrote in their review: "iOS 7 isn't harder to use, just less obvious. That's a momentous change: iOS used to be so obvious." In iOS 7 basic usability features such as making buttons look like buttons are now stuffed under Accessibility options. About this, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment wrote: "If iOS 8 can’t remove any of these options, it's a design failure." (And iOS 8 hasn't.) Michael Heilemann, Interface Director at Squarespace wrote, "when I look at [iOS 7 beta] I see anti-patterns and basic mistakes that should have been caught on the whiteboard before anyone even began thinking about coding it." And famed blogger John Gruber said this about iOS 7: "my guess is that [Steve Jobs] would not have supported this direction."

And what about Jony's other responsibility, industrial design? The iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook Air and other Apple products are all amazingly well designed and breathtakingly beautiful. But these products weren't designed by Jony Ive all by himself. He designed them under Steve Jobs's guidance and direction. Steve was the tastemaker. Apple's post-Steve products are nowhere near as well-designed.

Consider iPhone 5c, for example. The colors are horrid, and when you add those Crocs-like cases it looks more like a Fisher-Price toy than like a device an executive would want to be seen holding. Then they released some ads for the 5c, and I kid you not, one of the ads had sounds of bleating farm animals. (It was titled "Every color has a story", published on tumblr. That the 5c hasn't done well in the market shouldn't surprise anyone.

Of late Apple has done phenomenally well, financially. But this isn't because of Jony Ive's design. It is because of the ecosystem created by Steve Jobs. The larger phone size met an important demand, and is not an innovation, and this is not repeatable innovation.

References: http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4741724/ios-7-review http://www.marco.org/2013/12/15/button-shapes http://fireballed.org/linked/2013/06/18/heilemann-ios-7/ http://daringfireball.net/2013/10/this_weeks_ipad_event

One solution is for Japan to start encouraging immigration. Maybe setup an H1-B program. This will increase the number of tax payers, while also increasing exports.

No.

I moved to another group immediately and doing well in the new group. The manager got demoted during a reorg several months later, likely because there was a lot of negative feedback from his direct reports. That's one thing I like about Microsoft. Microsoft collects anonymous feedback about managers from their direct reports during an annual survey, and if there is a lot of negative feedback about a manager that manager is not going to do well. Other companies should adopt this.

"Microsoft uses bad performance reviews (“The How”) as a tool to eliminate the elder (40+) and senior ranked employees."

Current Microsoft employee here. A few years ago my manager at that time did exactly the above. The review process in use at that time rated employees on "What" you accomplished and "How" you accomplished it. I had done really well on the "What" and the manager still gave me a low rating because supposedly I did poorly on "The How". The "How" gave managers tremendous flexibility to rate employees however they want regardless of actual performance. So why did my manager do it? I believe he discriminated against me for age reasons. There is evidence to support this: This manager rewrote ("reinterpreted" according to him) the HR-supplied expectations for SDEs (Software Development Engineers) at each level, and he raised expectations for those at higher level, while leaving expectations for lower level employees the same.

While I believe this manager discriminated against me for age reasons, I don't believe there is Microsoft-wide, corporate-sanctioned, age discrimination going on. It might be happening at the level of individual managers, however.

Trust is not a binary value. When large sums of money are involved you don't want to rely solely on trust.

I agree with you when you say ideas are actually worth something. When investors say ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything that's very self-serving. The idea wasn't theirs, so of course they want you to believe the idea is worth nothing. Also, the suggestion that all co-founders should start with equal shares, regardless of how much work they put in and whose idea it was, this is also very self-serving. This just makes it easier for the investors to boot one of the founders if needed, and does not serve any other purpose. This video should be taken with a grain of salt.

This lecture is from YCombinator and may be a bit self serving. I would take it with a grain of salt. I have noticed that YCombinator prefers multiple cofounders, and in this video they are now saying the cofounders all need to have the same amount of stock regardless of how much work you have put in in the past. That's very surprising advice. You may have slogged for a couple of years before taking on a cofounder, and you should both have the same amount of shares? This is not in your interest, but may be in YCombinator's: if they need to separate you from your company it is easier this way.