praecipula

Let me preface this by saying I'm a developer advocate at Asana, so it's part of my job to try to construct useful stories from this sort of information. If you don't mind me asking, what do you want to see from the API? Text formatting (i.e. the strikethrough) is a huge one that I'd like to see implemented, and there are definitely some, um, ideosyncratic parts of the API (I'm trying to be nice here), but I feel it's way better than screen scraping, which is what it sounds like you're advocating.

And as for the backend, I wouldn't call it dumb, exactly, but it was implemented in a way that would help spur early growth of the company - and it succeeded in doing that, so it wasn't a poor decision from that point of view. We really, really do know that we've outgrown it now, and are hard at work replacing it with something better. That happens at just about every company as it scales. The frontend is constantly getting faster as we adopt the rewrite, and the faster backend for the API has just entered open beta, as a matter of fact; you're welcome to try it: https://asa.na/fast-api.

Asana is listening and we've been focusing a lot on performance - it's a known problem. Hopping into Asana from external links is painful and we know it (I mean, we ourselves are extremely heavy users of Asana, so we see these things too) and are working on it. Many performance changes have already landed, and more are just around the corner, so keep an eye out for things like this to keep getting better in the near future.

No, it's clear: university is not necessary. From a business perspective, universities have been a bubble for some time now: as Americans, we're expected to think and produce at the highest level of global citizens, to make our people thought workers... and yet we bitterly lament the exporting of our wealth to China to support manufacturing that we as the general public are too holy to embrace. We sent those jobs over there and inflated unemployment by expecting that everyone in the country become scholarly. It's unbalanced and degrading to our people. Have you ever eaten artisanal food? Real Parmigiano-Reggiano instead of shaky Kraft cheese? Real Boeuf Bourguignon instead of Campbell's Chunky Cow Nuggets? Then you understand the value of tradesmanship, of learning a craft. If we want to take back manufacturing, to reduce unemployment, and to keep American products the pre-eminent craft in the world, we need to get over ourselves. Americans are smart regardless of our level of education. Let's stop degrading the working man, the trade skill worker, the apprenticeship: the things that make us human are the things that require a lifetime to master, not the ones that are learned from a book. College is not always the answer. Not being haughty better-than-thous is the answer. We should appreciate American craftsmanship. Meanwhile, I'll eat the real Italian cheese while you eat the American cheez product. -From a college graduate and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. And foodie, if it's not obvious.

I think the largest hurdle for ARM to get over is the preponderance of Windows installations with kernels only complied for x86. Linux and OS X (Mach) already run on ARM, and I think that possibly the NT kernel runs on ARM (Windows phone 7 is ARM, right?) I have trouble seeing Microsoft port over Windows proper to ARM until there's a really strong market for it. That being said, perhaps low power consumption ARM devices will provide that market. Perhaps this is another reason that Apple has their own ARM chip - to be at the forefront of the ARM revolution, displacing MSFT?

I think this is a great idea - exchanging money, I'm not so sure. If everyone's trying to get funding, not a lot of cash to go around.

If, however, you worked out a shared-talent pool, that has a lot of potential. For example, often times startups don't need operations or HR staff right away, it's done by the founders. However, when it comes time to use more talented staff, what if one startup employed the person, but the pool can share their talent for an equity exchange? Seems like there are details to work out, but might be a good opportunity both for startups and for staff who would like to be in at the ground level, but there's not enough demand at any one company.

Absolutely. I find myself all the time typifying relationships - that is, classifying relationships in an object-oriented-typesystem-influenced way. Since computers tend to be very literal this leads itself to prejudices that are often funny when you take them far enough.

For instance, an Engineer "is a" Person who "has a" Job. They tend to be statically and early bound to their properties and functions, and if they need to change jobs, they have to be recompiled, which is expensive. If you ask them to do something that they don't know how to do, they will probably try, though may fail spectacularly segfault style, taking the whole program down. Engineers are written in C++.

A graphic designer is a Person who may or may not have a Job, or may intermittently have something that fulfills the function of a Job without being a Job itself. They tend to be dynamically late bound to their properties and functions (just ask my wife, who does a lot of freelance and contract work). They are written in Ruby.

An Entrepreneur is a Person who may or may not have any number of properties or functions at any one time, and may or may not delegate work to some other party. They are written in Javascript.

Engineers tend to have very well defined ideas of what is public and private, whereas designers wear their heart more on their sleeve. Entrepreneurs may have a public interface, but they tend to be so outgoing as to not have private data - they may have public knowledge that is simply inaccessible and out of scope.

It might not be the most correct train of thought, but it is amusing, so long as you don't take it too seriously.

The real problem with 3D is that all (real, not CG) cameras have a depth of field - a certain range over which the image is in focus. This is great in a 2D film to focus the audience's attention on something, but the 3D setup just begs the user to focus on what they think is important, so you end up focusing on some fuzzy object instead of the subject. In other words, depth of field replicates the fuzziness of your peripheral vision, but 3D asks you to look into and around the scene. It's a view mechanics uncanny valley - and I don't think they can fix this as long as there are flat screens.