HN user
http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...
It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.
Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.
Other blogging services don't have Posterous' remarkable ease of use. The prior lack of themes has been a turnoff for potential users--now that they're here, it's a no-brainer for those folks.
It's a lot more efficient for the journalist to maintain integrity in the authoring of information than it is to have every reader scrutinize that information for a lack of it.
It does carry a higher risk of transmitting an STD from one person to another, yes. So I'm wrong to say that it has "nothing" to do with it. But in terms of epidemiology, the higher risk of transmission associated with a given form of sex is insignificant compared to having many partners. Spread, not risk of transmission, is by far the dominant factor here, even if they're not entirely separable. Sort of like the difference between scalability and performance.
Having lots of sexual partners creates epidemics of, wait for it...sexually transmitted disease.
The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.
The problem is that you're conflating incompetence with a lack of capacity for competence. In other words, the mere fact of not knowing something implies that one can never know it. If that were true, nobody would know anything.
What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.
I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.
> She seemed kind of flaky but I assumed it was because she was a lot smarter than I was. I pressed on, and an hour later I discovered that she didn't know what a typical size for a C pointer was.
That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.
She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.
I haven't bothered checking Politico since the 2008 U.S. election. They were horrifyingly fixated on covering the horse race, with a big spot on the front page dedicated to who "won" the day. Iirc, they also build the partisan split directly into their information architecture and staff, another big no-no as far as I'm concerned. This sort of thing is what's ruining our politics.
In theory, I would be interested in a site with a tight focus on low-level politics, but Politico ain't it.
Voted you back up. Fwiw, I was trying to respond to the general sentiment that this was a free speech issue, and the quote made for a good place to do so. Thanks for clarifying your stance. In retrospect, I should have used less strong language--"utterly absurd" wasn't necessary, as I can see how one might regard it a free speech issue.
To my knowledge, the Thatcher quote has nothing to do with their health care system, and it would appear she was an advocate of the NHS, not an opponent.
From http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp...
Our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for nearly 50 years. It has enabled us to repay debt and cut taxes. The resulting success of the private sector has generated the wealth and revenues which pay for better social services—to double the amount being spent to help the disabled, to give extra help to war widows, and vastly to increase spending on the national health service. More than 1 million more patients are being treated each year and there are 8,000 more doctors and 53,000 more nurses to treat them.
That is the record of eleven and a half years of Conservative Government and Conservative principles. All these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Leader of the Opposition, who has no alternative policies.
I'm sorry, but the idea that the boycott is somehow threatening freedom of speech is utterly absurd.
> A boycott is a ban and bans on other people’s opinions are stupid and childish.
I don't know if this was a massive logical slip-up on Berkun's part or what, but: nobody's banning Mackey's opinion. As far as I'm aware, copies of the Wall Street Journal containing that article are not being burned, nor is the website being hacked to prevent anyone from reading it.
Freedom of speech has nothing to do with guaranteeing that people should keep patronizing your business if you say something that rankles them.
That has far less to do with TC being principled than it does TC being on good terms with YC.
Please don't include a personal rating in your submission's title.
Pressing a button is an action that a gestural UI can communicate visually, but there are a number of other actions that have no visual cue. Direct manipulation gestures such as tap (on something other than a button), double-tap, tap-and-hold, swipe, and pinch/zoom are far more difficult to communicate. These rely on user experimentation and memory.
Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.
I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.
It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement at all is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.
They both make operating systems, browsers, and web apps.
Look up "climate" and "weather" before you make silly arguments about what can be claimed about them.
> BTW, they don't call it Global Warming anymore. It's now called Climate Change. You see, since the climate is a dynamical system that is continuously changing, the name "Climate Change" per se has absolutely zero information.
It only has zero information if you give it a massively uncharitable and ignorant reading. A climate per se describes a long term pattern of weather in a region. If that pattern changes, by definition, the climate has changed. Hence, "climate change".
Systems, or "dynamical systems" (whatever that means), are privy to two levels of change: one occurs within the system, the other defines the system. In other words, a system's state may change to another state, or the system may change into another system. Got it?
Not a whole lot of discussion here, is there?
There are Apple fans here, yes. There is much to discuss about Apple and its products that's relevant to Hacker News. But getting notified about a firmware update that affects a tiny portion of readers isn't. I do not come to Hacker News to get stories about extremely niche hardware issues and fixes. I do not want to see the front page littered with stories of this type.
That "a portion" of HN readers found something relevant means nothing with respect to its appropriateness for HN. All of us have many interests and concerns which are not relevant to HN. When we start loading this site with anything and everything of tangential interest to any reader, the primary value of this site as a source for news about hacking and startups diminishes.
The firmware update only applies to the latest model MacBook Pros, not all of them. And this information is easily obtained on the many Apple-centric websites out there. Presumably, most HN readers with a brand new MacBook Pro follow at least one of them. It's practically useless information as far as the larger HN readership is concerned, and exists here only as Apple fan-service.
(I'm a fan, and an MBP owner, but I sure as hell don't want news of minor Apple updates polluting HN.)
A firmware update? Seriously? Can we not dilute HN with stuff like this and the inane gamer chatter at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=668692 ?
I like it, but my biggest recommendation would be to have columns (rows, boxes, whichever) dedicated to specific categories of apps on the front page. Right now it's a random assortment of apps and it's impossible to tell what they do just by glancing at them--you're forced to do some hard parsing as the app logo/name alone typically doesn't tell you anything. If you represent categories by column, users instantly know that a whole set of apps share something in common, and will have an easier time comparing. First-time visitors will also get a more concrete sense of what's available on your site.
Consider Google News' front page: they divide stories into sections (World, Business, Health, etc.) which gives users a high level overview of the content at a glance, a domain context for headlines in a given section, and allows them to easily ignore whole sets of stories they might not be interested in. The iTunes App Store is the same way.
I'm also not sure how useful the Recently Added section is going to be in the long run. The date at which an app was added to the database is less important for users than the date at which an app launched, went out of private beta, etc.
I think there's a lot Apple needs to do to improve the IA of the App Store, and they need to make the iTunes store accessible from standard web browsers rather than just the iTunes software. But there's nothing preventing iPhone app developers from creating websites for their apps, and there are a variety of sites that review apps. That you cannot buy an iPhone app outside of the App Store does nothing to prevent developers from gaining visibility outside of it. There is nothing preventing anyone from Googling for iPhone apps (just as you can Google for non-iPhone apps), than the developers themselves.
As for the differences in sales curves, that's actually reflective of how much easier it is to find and purchase new apps on the App Store (as well as the increased competition -> price reduction that their aggregation provides), as opposed to having hundreds or thousands of different purchase sites with their own method for payment processing. Also note that most iPhone apps tend to be for entertainment, for which an early sales spike and sudden drop-off is the norm regardless of platform...or medium.
It's not so much that there is or isn't a better source of news about startups. It's that the stories from TechCrunch that make it over here and get voted up have a high probability of being linkbait ("X Will Kill Y!") or about some Arrington-induced/centric drama. That they're allowed to persist here goes against the Broken Windows strategy of preventing social decay.
Is banning TC necessarily the best solution? Maybe not, but we don't have another solution available that's doing the job. There might also be some throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, which seriously depends on how much TC is a source of news (for HN, specifically) that can't be had anywhere else. I'm not inclined to say that they are a significant source of such news for HN.
Snake oil. False advertising. Advertising that stokes and intensifies desires far beyond the point at which they would exist sans advertising. Wanting a marshmallow now vs. two marshmallows later. Pepsi doing better on one-off taste tests, Coke doing better when consuming a 12-pack. Buying into the hype for something and deceiving yourself into believing it delivered. Misinterpretation. Projection. Insufficient information.
> so I would say that the crisis was not "caused" by either greed or stupidity, but is a naturally emergent behavior of the capitalist system.
But greed and stupidity are "natural" forces at work within the capitalist system. Asserting that crises are cyclical and "naturally emergent" doesn't rule out greed and stupidity as causes. It actually doesn't say anything about causes at all.
I'd also be wary of concluding that because certain phenomena appear to be cyclical, any similar phenomena must necessarily be an expression of that cycle.
The usefulness of site-blockers as anti-procrastination tools depends on how much of a hassle they are to override. Having to use a special bookmark to visit websites doesn't do anything to make the override process more of a hassle. If I can train myself never to visit a frequented website by typing in a URL, using a regular bookmark, or Googling, then I arguably wouldn't need a site-blocker in the first place.
If someone can work quietly in a corner and churn out a thesis after a few years, does that make them more likely to be able to churn out a startup by themselves?
I doubt there's a strong correlation here. When you're working on a thesis, you're still within some academic community, have a rough deadline, and have a pretty good sense of what's going to fly or not. Moreover, the progress you make on a thesis is inherently satisfying. You can stand back and look at even a page or a paragraph of work with pride.
When you're working on a startup, you spend much of your time working on things that don't work yet or will look and feel like crap for a while. A lot of the problems you solve aren't going to be intellectually interesting, as they would be for a thesis. Which means that there are precious few rewards to be had from the pre-launch development process by itself.
I tried to go solo for a while, but found myself crushed by the lack of feedback. Then I paired up with someone (remotely), and if we weren't pair programming, we were at least showing each other what we'd done several times a week and giving feedback. Not only is this immensely helpful in terms of sustaining motivation, but merely having someone else who thinks of things you don't is incredibly valuable.
It's not what he's good at that's bad for Microsoft. Microsoft stores will need to be more than data-driven: they'll need creative inspiration if they're going to help rebuild the brand, and that's a very different task from running Wal-Mart, even the entertainment division. It's not clear that Porter would know how to pull this off. Especially since he spent 25 years with Wal-Mart. This doesn't suggest a breadth of experience with retail experiences.
Incidentally, there used to be a Microsoft store at the Metreon in San Francisco. It was fairly swanky, but it didn't make me think any more highly of the brand or their products.
It's not a pipe dream. There are some folks out there working on this kind of stuff, and I prototyped one for my master's project. However, I didn't go the route of having propositional-level granularity, because I'm aiming for Wikipedia levels of participation, and it's understood in HCI that the more structure you impose on input at the interface level, the lower the adoption.
Some stuff you may want to look up (all but the first are actually online):
MIT's Collaboratorium (should be an article in Sloan)
DebateGraph
TruthMapping
DebateWise
Debatepedia
If you're really interested in tackling this problem, let me know. I'm too busy working on a for-profit venture to keep developing my MS project, but my design doc might give you some ideas, even if you don't go the route I did.