jasontsui

Given the timelines this is happening along, it would not be surprising if we end up with a middle of the road solution that involves some kind of road marker/beacon standard to provide points of reference for these systems. It only took a decade or so to retrofit LED streetlights.

I think there is a broader food education issue in the US beyond nutrition- folks simply dont know what to buy, cook and eat, over the course of a life time. The quick fix is a fad diet which comes with instructions and recipes, but these ultimately dont build long term habits. So much of how we write about food here is focused on anti- anti junk, anti fat, anti carb. I think this hints towards the root of the problem where most people dont know what a good foundation is. What are the top 5 American dishes that arent a just disaster for your body?

The author is trying to get on the outrage train when there is no compelling reason for it. The college kids he cites? A project with 2 likes. Splitting a Papa Johns pizza? Killer use case. OP seems to be grasping at straws to find concrete reasons for the API to exist.

"Drivers, dog walkers, handymen" are mentioned but author doesnt include an actual example - those were all examples supplied by Venmo itself...3 years ago. Who are the developers hes talking about when he says "community that stuck with Venmo"?

And finally, unlike Twitter, which has an plethora number of ways to be consumed, searched and experienced that would be better as different apps - Venmo does not. Its just a P2P payment system.

The way I see it, Venmo has accomplished the following -

1. Deprecated old features (save resources, reduce complexity)

2. Found new way of building profitable and sustainable relationships w other businesses, rather than just a wild west API.

Terrible read, file this under- "How TO Run a Platform"

Hm - a lot of comments here seem to suggest that your prank ethics are sound- but I think a lot has changed in recent years. With the proliferation of Nathan for You, #goating, College Humor prank wars, youtube shows, etc - when weird things begin to happen, my reflexive response is almost immediately "This must be a prank." and to start accusing possible culprits in a spray and pray attempt to "figure out" the situation. If the pranker fessed up immediately, then there wouldnt be much of a prank.

With prankees increasingly guarded, maybe there should be some leeway in this rule.

Other than chalking it up to Elon being an absurdly talented superhuman, I'd venture a guess that these industries move at a slower pace. The ground shifts every day on the web, which means day to day leadership is crucial. I'd imagine during the longer development cycles of these companies that he can tune out for extended periods of time without development going astray - especially in areas where his input isn't crucial.

Just some conjecture..

Isn't this more of the very same smarmy navel gazing bullshit OP has taken up arms against? There are plenty of designers doing meaningful work in various fields. The big red flag in this article is the implicit bullshit! Who said design is for social change? Political disruption? What if design is just making these buttons look good so 10 year olds can Snapchat more better? Whos to decide whats a real world problem and whats not?

Jeez, its gotten to the point where I balk when introducing myself as a designer.

Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.

Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.

The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.

Fun pattern, but is it more useful? I think its hyperbolic to call losing 160px of reading space on top of a desktop browser a "nightmare". Something a user can see all the time has greater affordances than something that is hidden. Especially if that something is as essential as navigation. Honestly, I think this is more style than usability.

To some of the older folks on HN - is this a new problem?

The last few years have brought on a whole different type of newsmedia hybrid (the buzzfeeds, huffpos and gawkers) organization that is driven primarily by clicks and do not hold themselves to the standards of traditional print news. While there were dubious options on paper before (Daily Posts, National Enquirers), the internet is far greater venue for propagating bullshit with clickbait headlines. Some of the newer sites I'm seeing people post on Facebook have skipped the truth part altogether, they go straight to fabricating stories. TV has gone the same direction with news-entertainment.

I'm pretty concerned. When its too hard to find signal in all the noise, I'm afraid folks will give up altogether. With Buzzfeed putting out longform articles and NYT putting up quizzes, its already hard to discern who cares about delivering real news and who will do anything for clicks.

But maybe I'm just young (25), and people have always found echo chambers, and yellow journalism is always something we've had to wade through to find the facts. What do you guys think? Has anything actually changed?

One of the points they touch on is a "world where many things wont work and nobody will know how to fix them". As I understand it, we already live in this world. Some new cars dont come with dipsticks, and I cant look inside my iPhone.

In the case of the car and the phone, they've added complexity (a service layer) and I think its worked out well. The user gets to do what users should do and businesses grow doing what they do best. When it comes to IoT, my first thoughts always drifts towards "will this make things better, or could we muck up what once "just worked"?

We're entering a time where we have the technology, capital and reach to create and distribute new products and services at massive scale. Now that ideas are less constrained by "how", and compete on the "what", do we need to stop and ask ourselves not "Can we do it?", but "Should we do it?"

We can see this in many disrupted industries now, where new ideas, innovation and competition have shook up traditional business models. Whats left in their wake is not always better than what preceded it.

Ill use the social media ad driven business epoch as an example, was that a net positive for us as people? Or did we add a layer of complexity to the web that is now dedicated to delivering Upworthy blog posts, selling our personal information and a constant stream of Coca Cola ads? Is that a good trade off for pictures of Grandma, news from friends and Likes from everyone?

Do we already evaluate technology on these terms, or has our current state driven us to cobble together any business model that works?

Hm, I've always assumed that Kickstarter funds should be exactly what they're called - kickstart funds that allow you to bring a project/product to market. In more recent times, it seems that the majority use of Kickstarter has skewed towards a preorder style in which the creator of the project is basically already selling the product and looking to make a profit on that first run. It is much harder to bring the project to market AND deliver it with the same funds, as opposed to spending most of it towards the former and sending out t-shirts for the support. Of course, way less people would back projects if they only got t-shirts. Thus, the current state of Kickstarter, where creators promise a lot from the beginning just so they can be successfully funded.

I'm not implying that this was a bad shift, just that if you plan to use Kickstarter rewards in a preorder style, its much more important to get the numbers pinned down so the project doesnt fail altogether.

“We believe in the long term, but the long term also has to come,” says Bezos, explaining that periodically Amazon wants to “check in” with its ability to make money. Thus, in 2007, Amazon more than doubled its profit, to $476 million, on a 38% increase in sales to almost $15 billion.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/11/16/jeff-bezos-amaz...

1. Users notoriously have no idea what they want. Surveys may not be the best method to determine the effectiveness of an icon because youre asking the user to predict their future behavior (which most are happy to do, confidently). The only way to test an icons effectiveness, is to test icons in a real world environment.

2. We hear this story every time Apple releases a product, when Google updates Gmail, when Facebook gave us Newsfeed. An instant gut reaction to change is not indicative of long term success or failure. People "hating" the icons is meaningless - they havent even been released yet. Change is good, its what drives our ambitions forward. Don't survey people and let the results scare you into stagnating.

3. http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/graphic-design...

Full disclosure - I helped with the project but I'm also one of those people who on some days CANT get out of bed.

You can put the panel pretty far. If your bathroom is a hallway away, this might make the difference. You cant put a regular alarm that far, you wouldnt hear it. For me, physically getting up isn't enough because you can do that half asleep. Thats where having to punch in the date helps, I think this part fires a few more synapses and gets the engine running. It certainly solved it for me.

If anything, I think the special brand of "tumblr porn" has differentiated it from other blogging platforms.

Ive done the same myself. To me, the real issue was how time consuming it was to "cover my tracks", so to speak. After taking a look at it, I decided there wasnt much to hide. Sure, you may not want everyone to know you were at the movies last night, or that youre a regular at dubstep shows, but what are the possible negative outcomes? Having people know more about me hasnt been as dangerous some make it out to be. On the other hand, its given me plenty of opportunities to connect with similar people. Also, the idea of activities in your personal life interfering with your work image is outdated. Everyones got a personal life, why should we back away from that? Its who you are.

Its going to be interesting to see if the Starz deal is going to affect this at all. Anecdotal, but I cancelled my subscription a few months ago after being disappointed with the availability of streaming titles as it was, I cant imagine what itll be like with a further diminished streaming library.

Its a shame that content owners and distributors havent been able to work out a deal. There is money to be made every time someone pirates a movie because there is literally no way for them to pay for it. I wonder if it would be possible for Netflix or Hulu to sustain libraries like that without moving the price past traditional cable services.

Unfortunately with the acquisition of Autonomy, their pockets arent so deep anymore. They spent about 80% of their cash on the deal, leaving them with not much money to push devices like the Touchpad at a loss.

To make a significant dent in the market, enough to attract developers in droves (good ones at that) would require a significant user base. Im not sure they can afford to lose $200-300 every time they sell one and expect to recoup it in the lifetime of the product. The life cycle of the PS3 and Xbox 360 have been extended for that very reason. How many iterations of discounted tablet devices would HP have to sell before they could demand profitable prices right off the bat? They certainly wouldnt make it back by selling $2 apps.

Ive been using it for about a week now. The home page will start to get cluttered as more people begin to use it. Itll be interesting to see if/how they address the issue, I would guess with some kind of following system where you add people to your main page feed. Another part of reading.am I find interesting is how interesting stories make big blocks on the feed because a bunch of people are reading them, thus attracting more attention and presumably, more readers. You could argue thats just a less efficient upvote system though.

"Fulfilling an existing need" seems somewhat misguided. In many cases the need is not always so obvious, especially at the conception stage. Its hard to imagine whether or not people will adopt something, at which point a need (previously unknown) is fulfilled. The iPad comes to mind off the bat as something many initially dismissed as not fulfilling any needs, only to meet runaway success when people figured out how to integrate it into their lives. What that means to me is that we should not always look to fulfilling existing needs, but to imagine new needs as things evolve. Its that kind of forward thinking that creates great products!

The USPTO has not always been so eager to issue software patents. Up until the early 90s they were reluctant as they saw code as a language which could be copyrighted, but not invented. From what I understand, most software patents came flooding in after the Court of Appeals ruled in favor in the case in re Alappat, 1994. OP could have spent some more time doing research on software patent history before writing this, I feel.

Edit for source http://patentsusa.blogspot.com/2007/02/in-re-alappat-1994.ht...

I agree. The author seems to be caught up in the semantics here. The way I read it, the criticism stems from its use as a buzzword instead of its implementation as a concept. The word itself just allows us to have a conversation about it without detailing it in full each time. Gamification is no more bullshit than SEO or UX. Its simply utilizing things weve learned from other fields to create better experiences for users.