jaimzob

Honest question: how does that article contradict that statement? Everyone is bouncing off the walls about this but I honestly can't see where the story is. Microsoft + others enable NSA to access customer data when presented with court order. You can agree or not agree but is it really a shock?

"I’m your typical “balls to the wall” founder that will sacrifice all for the sake of the startup" ... "I founded and ran GooseChase, which makes running scavenger hunts incredibly easy via iPhone & Android apps".

Some of this stuff is beyond parody...

Partially, the problem is that "designer" is such an elastic word. You could argue that an interaction designer should be able to code, at least enough to make a realistic prototype - if a design isn't interactive then how can it be an "interaction" design?

Coding is less critical for visual designers though. It's better if the visual designer can render his design in html/css (or whatever), but you probably don't want to turn down an otherwise brilliant visual designer if they can't.

The "should designers code" question seems to come up again and again because interaction and visual design gets rolled into one discipline (and often one person).

But affordances (such as bevelled buttons) are not the same as skeuomorphic design. Bevelling an area of the screen implies that something is pressable and hence aids the user. Covering iCal in a fake leather bitmap does not help the user. WP7/Metro seems to have taken a lot of tried and tested affordances away, but hasn't really replaced them with anything.

They all have something to do with software development in specific situations. But the assertion is that this set of "exam papers" represent the canonical body of development knowledge and if you don't know the majority of answers off the top of your head you shouldn't be a developer, or at least should be grateful your ignorance has gone unnoticed. I find that assertion ... questionable.

:) This is surely just degenerating into parody now. I can't wait for part 4: "Build a Turing Machine from scratch using paper-clips and sticky tape and send it to me for grading. Remember to show your working and no looking it up on Google."

Indeed, presenting this more 'guide to interesting things you should know' rather than 'here's an exam I've condescended to set for everyone dumber than me' would have worked out much better.

Maybe B-player is harsh but in my career I've worked with some very good programmers and some real stars. When I talk to the very good programmers I always feel dumber, but whenever I talk to the real stars I always feel smarter myself (though heaven knows that's not actually true). This seems to fall firmly in the "very good programmer" category.

No. They can be interesting things to read about, and knowing a little about the themes each question comes from (i.e. how does a processor cache work) will make you a better programmer, but don't worry about cramming your head with trivia such as "what does MESI stand for?"

Hear, hear. Obsession with trivia and a supercilious tone are sure signals of a B-player in my experience. "Name and describe the four states in MESI cache coherence"? Sorry, memorising an algorithm for determining if a graph is bipartite pushed that knowledge clean out of my head...no doubt I'm very stupid.

I'm a big fan of The Verge but this seems melodramatic and a little hollow. The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale. Way more than any Samsung phone did w.r.t iPhone. Not mentioning this in the article was weird.

And Joshua is being "bullied"? Really? Sensitive types, these bloggers.

Oh god, an OSNews article from Thom Holwerda about how "obvious" the iPhone was is now top of Hacker News? How long do I need to switch the internet off for to restore sanity?

Hitler? That's where you want to go in a thread about web browsers? Maybe it's time to switch to decaff.

I'm not a big fan of agile either but "over 40" == "the smell of death"? Seriously? Not a convincing, or classy, opening line. And this was posted by the CEO of Assembla.

Chrome 19.0.1084.56 on OSX 10.7.4...

I hit this too - what does "doesn't cover" mean above? If two people have already hit this you might be having problems with more than 0.7%...

Wow. What a disgraceful exchange. The 'apology' that not-so-subtly implies Shanley has an agenda because they didn't employ her doesn't exactly exude contrition, or class.

Meh. I'm sure his comment was well-intentioned: If you spend most of your time communicating with computers then your communication with humans can sometimes tend toward the 'abrupt', after this long in the industry I'm pretty used to it.

Thanks, I'll patch this up when I have more time - though I'm not sure there's enough time in the world to fix my sloppy C code... ;)

This is often how text buffers are implemented in editors. Since most text edits are contiguous, the gap means you don't keep shuffling memory around with each insertion and therefore it's extremely fast. I think it dates back to a pretty early version of emacs, maybe even before.

For anyone interested in a C version, I wrote this a while ago, YMMV: https://github.com/jaimz/core_ds/blob/master/MxStringBuffer....

Thoroughly depressed by the responses here - especially on a site that prides itself (or used to) on being more nuanced and intelligent than average. If you don't like the message then fine, it's a little saccharine for my taste, but it doesn't make Apple a 'soulless' company, it doesn't make Apple customers empty-headed morons suffering from "stockholm syndrome", and snarking at it does not elevate you above those people who do believe in the message. Quite the opposite.

"I will instantly disregard any CV that doesn't have reference to a GitHub account"

Well bravo you. The problem with recruitment in our industry is not the candidates with no GitHub account, its the egomaniacal interviewers who waste no opportunity to turn any interview, in this case any application, into a passive-aggressive pissing contest.

Perhaps its acceptable for an interview to be adversarial, but I don't think any other industry matches the tech industry for the utter hostility of the interview process.

Nice! Like everyone else, I had a stab at the same problem. Not nearly as slick but might be interesting: http://www.thebitflow.com/journal.php#photo_upload (github: https://github.com/jaimz/file_upload)

Augmentative dicks always think they are A-players. That's very rarely the case, but they'll never rise far enough to find that out.

Agreed. I've looked at Go quite a bit and I can't figure out what new problems it solves, or how it solves existing problems better than previous procedural/OOP languages. How is better than 'D' for example. How is it better than Java?

If you want a fresh look at systems programming then leaning Ocaml or Haskell would be a much better option because you will learn to solve problems in a new way, not just with slightly different syntax.

Also, someone on this thread doesn't understand how downvoting works. If you disagree with something then make a response, save downvotes for deliberately trollish or off-topic comments.

You may want to check out Opacity (http://likethought.com/opacity/) which can export to ObjC, HTML5 Canvas, SVG and PNG/Jpeg etc.

Seems very cool, but as far as I can tell there's no trial version? $80 seems a bit much to lay out before you even find out if the thing works.

Standardized toolkits were a boon when the Mac came out - they were confining enough that the average programmer couldn't produce a really bad interface. Today however, and after quite a struggle, the idea is finally taking hold that software should have an _actual_ design phase conducted by _actual_ designers that understand how people _actually_ interact with software.

The disquiet some people feel is that frameworks like bootstrap make it very tempting to drop this design phase in favour of snapping widgets together and assuming the end result must be a good UI because users are "used" to the individual widgets. This would definitely not be step forward in software construction - web or otherwise.

Whenever I see "user's want standardized UIs" what I hear is "it's easier for me to _program_ standardized UIs". Users want UIs that are in-tune with their goals and mental models and if you deliver that, it won't matter what size and shape your buttons are.

Snapping widgets together like lego bricks and declaring the result to be a "good" interface because it adheres to "standards" is sometimes true, but not nearly as often as you would think, and in my experience leads to interfaces that map closely to the underlying system, but not at all to what the user actually wants to do.

It's good that a non-designer can use bootstrap to create a decent looking site, heaven knows the world is not over-burdened with good-looking websites, but neither we nor the "users" want every web page, or every web app, to look the same.

Agreed. These "assault course" style programmer interviews are getting more ridiculous - and seem nine-parts interviewer ego stroking to one-part ascertaining candidate quality.

I'm getting lots of "Unknown property attribute 'strong'" type errors (which I suspect would go away if I upgraded to XCode 4.2?)