caseorganic

There are also Esri maps: https://developers.arcgis.com/en/features/mapping/

Love this! It's very intuitive and fun to draw gears of different sizes and hook them together.

I'd love to be able to make more complex gears. I immediately tried to make a compound gear set with three gears and two different bands.

That got me thinking about "Incredible-Machine" puzzle features and how fun it would be to actually try to build working things like clocks, bikes and machines with this.

While Esri HQ is in Redlands, there are an increasing number of R&D Centers around the world. Portland, OR, DC, Scotland, Zurich and China all hire front end and back end devs, UX and visual designers. While it was uncommon to work outside of Redlands only a few years ago, there are more possibilities for that now. This is a pretty recent development, though.

While I follow your logic, there are a lot of companies out there like this. They're called "hidden champions" and modern industry has plenty of hidden stories like these. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

The main point here is that companies like this might not be as sexy as the short term vc-funded explosive growth companies that are always in the news, but like small stars, they burn for a much longer time and are much more stable than the massive stars that quickly run out of fuel and turn into dwarfs and black holes later on.

Source: our company was bought by Esri last year, and before then I didn't really know the company existed. I was looking for a way to grow our technology in the long term, not evaporate like so many other companies had before.

Glad to see that Yahoo isn't shutting down Pipes yet. I still run a lot of data through that system.

Thank you. Initially I sent this to people I knew, and the responses were to be included in a book to be distributed to people interested in hearing stories from programmers. Some of this is mentioned on the survey itself.

I'll make a new survey with less questions that address your concerns and takes less time to fill out.

Thank you for your feedback! Made the full name optional and added an anonymous checkbox. All responses will be made anonymous by default.

The problem with categories like 'millennials' is that it generalizes an entire generation of people and makes it easy for people not within that group to say rude and untruthful things about an entire set of people. Instead of trying to understand where a group is coming from, it makes it easy for people to simply brush off any differences as inappropriate instead of understanding where a group might come from.

I've hired plenty of what you might call 'millenials', many via text, and they have been some of the hardest working, most professional people I've ever worked with. I've also been courted for an exceptional job via text, Twitter and Facebook. The hiring manager was in her 40s, and she understood those interfaces better than I did.

Hiring should be very personal, not cold and professional. Hiring is about getting to know someone that is the right fit for the team so that the hire brings passion and cleverness to the table. Even at a larger company this should be the case.

Hiring is changing, and has changed for many people. I don't think it's fair to force people into what someone somewhere considered a proper 'hiring process' if you end up hiring someone from a piece of paper and not for who they are. This kind of process can cause companies to lose talent, flexibility, and ultimately money.

I'm not suggesting that everyone hire in the way I do, but in the way that's most suited to the person you're trying to hire. Having empathy and attempting to understand and respect people on a case by case basis is important, especially when you'll be working closely with them.

I'm not a 'millennial' or whatever generalization buzzword some individuals use to make themselves feel more comfortable with the uncertainty of different people in a workplace, but I work with people of all ages and understand each of them as an individual, not as a generation. I communicate in the format they are most comfortable with. I text my boss, who is two generations above me, and email some of the more formal, younger members of our team. The college student in this post is not in the wrong in his communication methods. I understand that the author may be trying to teach him a lesson, but it's not that cut and dry across all industries, especially tech.

We ran a 4-5 person startup from our apartment (and had the servers running in the closet) for a year before we got free office space. I had a different experience where we worked longer and faster when we were all in the same room (my roommate and I slept in the back, which was our area and no one could touch). Once we got a little larger and had reasonable funding, we moved out and got a really nice office with the money we'd saved for a year.

I thought the same thing until I watched the video. It looks like she categorizes the business as "consulting", which both justifies the prices and irregular schedule of visits and charges.

Those who pay for her services see a record of purchasing a consulting service on their credit card. Though this seems clever, she will technically have PII data on all of her customers if she is somehow caught in the future, but the chances of someone like her being caught may be smaller than most.

There are plenty out there, but the overwhelming majority of them are doing their job instead of talking about it.

Thank you. I'm much more interested in 'people' in tech and interesting founders. What about the most interesting founders in the class? The most interesting 'people' in the class? So many people are excited about one kind of person in tech that they draw attention in the wrong way.

This is a truly wonderful writeup. I especially appreciated the insight that "Marketplaces need a big disconnect between buyers and sellers".

I try to tell this to startups that try to add indoor location-based technology to businesses like Men's Warehouse. What they fail to understand is that those places run better because they are staffed by people who understand their customers. When someone drives into the parking lot of a Men's Warehouse, they are already there to buy a suit. They don't need discounts or information about the products from an app on their smartphone, they need real customer service.

A skilled salesperson can upgrade anyone on warranties and other items. Having a piece of software do it, especially one built by a group of programmers and marketers that know nothing about suits, is ridiculous, and so is the idea of training skilled salespeople to also be system administrators for software that's not needed.

My co-founder and I were sitting in Coupa cafe two years ago with a couple of VCs who told us that the Youtube co-founders had pitched them right from the same booth we were were sitting at. "Did you invest in Youtube?", I asked, to which they said, "no - the idea seemed preposterous at the time".

"Well", I said, smiling, "you'll probably think our idea is just as preposterous, and saying you didn't take the jump like it's a badge of honor probably means your firm won't work for us".

Excellent! So you mean to say that my schoolyard days of being hated for liking computers are going to come back to me as an adult?

I have a problem with phrases like "eat your own dog food" because I worked for a company whose founder formerly founded a very large Pet supply company.

He told story about actually having to eat his own actual dog food, then adjusting, branching out new lines of dog food and eating it again. He eventually took the company through IPO before creating a software startup. We were not allowed to use that phrase when I worked there.

Somewhere Street is awesome and a bit like playing a utopian FPS http://www.bestofnhk.tv/?show=Somewhere%20Street%20-%202012-...

I always start in my head with the goal of the speech, then I sit down and make a quick outline.

I use the outline as a skeletal structure for my slide deck, otherwise I spend hours tweaking font size on the slides instead of understanding the overall goal of the talk. Once the outline is done, I add in a bit of muscle to the talk - one to two sentences per point to the outline. Then I go to the slides and add full-pages images for each slide, with short topic headlines for each part of the talk. Then I memorize the gist of the outline sentences and embed those mentally into the slides (making the slide deck a memory palace). When I get up on stage, the slides remind me of the storyline or topic I'm on, and I simply tell the story.

I have written out some talks before, but I only use that method to practice the talk as if I were speaking it out loud. I write with the same tone of voice that I speak in, and write it to get it out of my system. I don't look back to the write-up afterwards.

Not sure whether to consider this a mental exercise or if this author is serious in his assumptions.

If he is serious, the author seems to have forgotten about all of the jobs that cannot be automated. Book writing, art, entertainment, inspirational speaking, posting funny cat pictures and original memes to the internet, innovation and clever software development, music and musicians, and more. Prostitution, legal services, etc.

Even if all of these were to somehow be automated people would still need each other. Service industries are also important.

Could you imagine living in a reality where every job is done by a machine but because there is only one person running the show there is no one around to support or improve on the code? None of society would move forward. We'd be running on legacy architecture and legacy ideas. And then what would the point of living be? Likely we'd see a whole lot of anomie and disassociation. What would be the point of learning if there were no purpose in applying it?

The "logic" fails when the author assumes that society in the future will be an "either/or" instead of the spectrum of human experience and automation that it always has been and always will be. We are nothing without machines, and they are nothing without us. They need us to reproduce them and improve them, and we need them to help us to maintain homeostasis with our environment. It is a symbiotic situation, not one of bleak and utopian/dsytopian absolutism.

I'd like to, but only if I can export my data later. I like the interface, but don't want another 3rd party keeping my data and evaporating eventually (and unexpectedly). Email invite to case at caseorganic dot com.

Well deserved, and way overdue!

In response to: Dropbox Bug Can Permanently Lose Your Files http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4703943

When done well, a skeuomorph helps a user to feel comfortable with an interface. Slight textures in digital interfaces help them to feel tactile. Good skeuomorphs take cues from an analog world to help a user navigate a digital one. when done poorly, the skeuomorph forces the user to deal with an interface in an outdated way by blatantly ignoring the fact that the interaction is being done on a platform that is capable of handling new and improved interactions.

This "page turn" skeuomorph really bothers me. If there is to be any animation at all, it should be to cover up load time, and the user should not have to click and drag with an extremely RSI-incuding stroke to get the page to turn. It feels like the page weighs 50 pounds. Digital interfaces are not material. They are supposed to be frictionless. They are supposed to take the work out of interaction.

I want to click on the right side of the page and have the animation quickly play so that I can get to my content. Focusing on the entire page flip takes me right out of the content.

I know that a book in real life takes some effort to hold, and some effort to flip a page, but designers should really reconsider designs that "look pretty" but keep that same effort around when they translate a book into a digital format.

I cringed when I first saw this kind of behavior in Flash. One or two people figured out how to program a page turner, released a tutorial and everyone was off to the races to create their own. Excellent programming exercise - extremely bothersome UX. Now we can see the entire thing play out again, in high def CSS!

Another example of a lie an acquiring company gives when they acquire a great product. I use Skitch 10-15 times a day and won't update.

Why do great websites always feel compelled to redesign? Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook etc. It is very unsettling. The equivalent of someone coming into you home when you're not there and changing the entire floorplan, then expecting you to be elated when you come back at night, instead of confused and disoriented when all of the cupboards seem larger than they appear.

I'm the opposite of offended. :)

Was excited to read the article for the history on Centipede, then had to filter through a tired rant on gender in order to get to it.

In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers at Work is absolutely fantastic. http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...

Agreed. It was an extremely useful service. Helped to keep everything nicely organized and the reminders were helpful too!

I wish they would keep the service going and just migrate it over to Salesforce. I would have paid more for it as a Salesforce addon in addition to my existing Salesforce account.

Agreed, and it was significantly more difficult to put together 7 years ago. This one is very, very similar.

Branding guidelines fail.