michaelpinto

a ux designer would tell you to not trust your own experience, but to measure the experience of others.

the danger of climate change

You have to define what "ruin" really is. Ruin could mean no longer being a viable brand, in which case you may be right. However ruin can also mean a creative decline in terms of creating new series, and if they're shifting to an ad supported model and try to appeal to the widest audience that may really be the case.

Idea: Can you volunteer for a local non-profit to build up a resume?

The problem is that when you have a hammer (a software startup), everything looks like a nail:

1. There may be a shortage of Doctors to provide a 2nd opinion. The cost of a medical education is quite high, and the pay has been going down these past few years. This can't be solved by a software startup.

2. Hospitals have less funding than ever, and are trying to do more with less. So there may already be software out there, but they can't afford it (or the staff to to maintain it, never mind the staff to distribute it). This can't be solved by a software startup.

3. This is really a political problem, and again that can't be solved by a software startup.

4. A medical opinion may not be a binary option, and it could be a moving target where data changes by the day, and it could be a suggestion to collect more data, or even to talk to someone else. Opinions by definition are arbitrary, as where something like IBM Watson may just give you options based on probability (but that probability is only as good as the data you collect, which may not be all inclusive, and may be a moving target). So a startup might even make things worse as people base their options on incomplete data or dated options.

The depressing reality is that there is a great deal of economic inequality in our society, and that's reflected in the quality of healthcare that many people receive. It should also be noted that poverty can prevent access to preventative healthcare strategies which include everything from diet to access to basic medication.

my friend did this at a well known tech company, and they screwed her over in a very bad way

sadly your boss usually isn't your friend, and your boss will talk to other co-workers, and then they may want to get rid of you

i'm sure there are exceptions to this, but you sadly can't bank on that

I hate to tell you this but you're looking in the mirror at your future self (and your peers) as coding isn't usually in most cases a healthy lifestyle choice.

Something to keep in mind is that Asimov was very much a product of the age of pulp magazines, so early on in his career he was paid by the word for his work.

A side geek note: If you were active in NYC fandom from say the 50s on chances were very good that you would actually get to see Isaac in person at many local science fiction conventions. For some reason he disliked air travel, and would show up at almost any local convention that he was invited to.

If you want to read a really good book on being a geek from the depression era to about the 50s I would highly recommend reading The Way the Future Was by rederik Pohl.

This blew me away:

"Venture capitalist Michael Cardamone, the tournament’s co-organizer, approves of young companies buying tables with venture funds. “You absolutely should,” he says. “It’s part of building culture.”"

This: "Better design does not mean more design. Often, the most obvious designs are invisible." This also reminds me of the Steve Jobs approach of being proud of all the times that they said "no".

That depends on the nature of the startup: There is a ton of hyphen-tech here, so for example a fin-tech startup in my building that focuses on insurance just closed a Round B. Boston has a finance industry, but not on the level of NYC. And it's the same with media and other fields as well. Also something to keep in mind is that NYC has always been a magnet for Boston school grads and tech is no exception.

Y Combinator should come to Brooklyn!

While it wasn't hardware I wish they had mentioned GEOS: If you had enough money for a disk drive this would give you a Mac OS feel to your C64: http://toastytech.com/guis/c64g.html

There already was a crash of ad banner rates in 2008, in fact that killed many small publishers. You'd have a real bubble if there was a ton of moneys still being pumped into AdTech, but that hasn't been the case for a year now. And you're now seeing mergers and acquisitions take place. A good example of this on a bigger level would be Verizon buying up AOL for their ad business.

Although something to realize is that there are winners in that business. Most people don't think of Facebook as an ad company, but they really do get mobile advertising and from the looks of things they'll keep growing. And that's not just Facebook but other properties like Instagram which will snag more and more ad dollars.

Something to keep in mind is that Japan is very impacted by the economy of China: Not just direct exports and tourism, but as the rest of Asia suffers from the slow down in China that also impacts Japanese exports as well. And on the tech side many Japanese brands from Sharp to Sony haven't been doing too well.

It's not a bubble, the advertising industry has always followed this cycle:

The post war television boom in America begat many new Madison Avenue ad agencies in the 50s who reached a high point in the 60s and the 70s, but then by the 80s and 90s were consolidated via mergers and acquisitions.

Even the great Ogilvy & Mather was swallowed by up WPP in 1989. In fact one of the David Ogilvy's greatest regrets was taking the company public which allowed the take over years later.

Suggestion to non-design founders:

If you really want to learn about color you should start with a serious study of color theory. If you don't have the bandwidth to take a full course you should read the book "Interaction of Color" by Josef Albers.

If you want to see their amazing film work (and they made quite a few cool films on computing thanks to IBM) take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/user/EamesOffice

If you want to be inspired by an amazing product roll out take a look at their video for the SX 70 (this is one of the amazing products that Steve Jobs admired Edwin H. Land for):

https://youtu.be/GXPYera597U

If you're a fan of data visualization you MUST see The Powers of Ten if you've never seen it before:

https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0

Looking back I have to conclude that Adobe didn't know what they were doing, so you can't really blame Apple. The proof? If you look at the success of Unity which does cross platform game dev very well you have to conclude that Adobe messed up with the future of Flash when mobile took off.

Every form of energy generation has positive and negative points, to claim that one is the best is oversimplification. In fact when I met people who worked for that industry their argument to me was that no single source of energy generation could meet full demand. To me the real prize in the energy game is efficiency, and there's quite a bit of wasted energy if you look around.

Q. What direction do you want to go in with your career?

I think you really need to think through where you'd like to be when you get out of school. Do you want to work at a big company or a startup? Is there a problem space that you have a passion for (this can be anything from finding a cure to cancer to videogames)? Are you into a certain language or a certain platform?

The people who stand out are the people who have a passion for something. If your obsession is stock picking then you want to bring that passion to an investment bank. If your obsession is self driving cars then you want to work for a tesla or uber.

There's the old Woody Allen phrase "half of life is showing up". In a humorous way you can envision a slacker who shows up for school and manages to pass, but in reality it's showing up and hooking up with the people or projects that you want to work on.

By the way I trick I use is this: If I gave you several million dollars and no conditions, what would you do with it? Would you buy a house or start a startup? By the way don't buy the hype and be honest with yourself on that answer. Many people are selling startups, but there's a world of people doing other things out there.

I don't know if everyone can go to this extreme, but when you think about the fact that plastic can take up to 450 years to decay one wishes that there was less waste in most packaging. What I've really noticed in fact is just how many plastic items aren't even designed to be recycled. So an example every time you buy a dress shirt those collar stiffeners will be here in the 25th Century.

I don't agree with this article:

I think that when it comes to usability (and maybe even empathy) that some engineers are more talented than others. And even then there are some engineers who may not have that talent, but have an understanding that user interface design is important part of a product design.

The same also applies to other team members involved in software (from beta testers to those who do marketing): Some understand engineering better than others.

Genetics plays a role in obesity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetics_of_obesity

You can also be thin and have a bad diet, and while you may not be obese your internal systems can still be suffering from damage over the long run.

Something that should be noted: Many folks who are poor don't have access to high quality foods. So they can buy soda but not a salad. And what determines what makes those foods cheap or expensive are often driven by industry lobbying. So much so that when there was attempt to tax soda in NYC there was a great deal of money spent to stop that from going into effect.

That's easy to answer: Dementia.

http://www.dementiaguide.com/symptomlibrary/thinkingjudgemen...

Dementia can grow slowly over time and can impact your judgement. And said person can be highly functional at the time, so the relatives don't know until something goes wrong.

How much you kern may be subjective, but kerning itself (and other aspects of typography) are very related to legibility which is less subjective. Of course on a one word logo that really won't make a measurable difference.

Related reading:

http://fontfeed.com/archives/nyu-researchers-discover-defini...

Old dude advice here:

Have you gone to to each company and city in person?

If so which one really speaks to your heart?

Which company has people that you'd like to meet who you might learn from?

Which city would you want to look for the job after this one if this company falls apart overnight?

Forget logic young Jedi Tomy and use the Force!

By the way it sounds like you're young, so realize that you can do something in life, realize that it's a mistake and then move on. Once you're married with kids and/or have elderly parents your choices become narrowed down a bit...

Of course Angela's kerning is 100% better, but in terms of branding Google has always been "anti-design" so maybe the bad kerning was planned?

Maybe that's it for the freemium model? We tend to forget that before the web most software had to be paid for unless it was pirated or unpaid shareware. The advertising model has given us everything from the original Star Trek television series to Google, but maybe this is the downturn of that model.

Things I dream of: Something like a HyperCard interface so non-coders can create apps (and of course like HyperCard there should be a language like HyperTalk under the surface that users can use):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

http://hypercard.org

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-t...