davidkatz

This has been bothering me for a while, and I generally come down on the side of hugging. Hand shaking with a woman always seems to me like I'm forcing a male to male ritual on the situation. No matter how formal the meeting is, it always seems off. Now, granted, I'm not going to hug the female CEO of a company I'm doing business with at the first meeting, but even so, a handshake still feels off.

My general rule of thumb is – if I'm comfortable with the person and she's a woman, it's a hug. If I'm not comfortable, it's a handshake and a small inner sigh at the inadequacy of it. I don't consciously think about if it's work or not work, but I do of course tend to feel less comfortable with work contacts than I do with other social contacts, at least for the first few meetings.

Templates are tool. They can be used or abused. Used well, they can save you weeks of work.

There is a lot of convergence in website goals. Blogs aren't that different from each other, portfolios aren't that different from each other. Sure, you'll take on more constraints than building your own from scratch, but you also might be a lot faster, which often outweighs everything.

I've used templates to great effect many a time.

I actually like it. It takes some getting used to, but it helps me fumble less when I start a search. Now I just go direct to Omnibox everytime.

Interesting. I checked with a few people that have my version, and they don't see it. Seems like a test.

Parse is handling 10 million requests for our app per month, and I'm very uneasy about this.

Recording people without their knowledge is unethical, and letting people know they're being recorded all the time is also not feasible, so, I wouldn't use this. Good luck.

That's exactly as it should be, but not everyone has jumped on that wagon yet. I've heard a "a woman mostly taking care of her kids at home could not be truly happy" sentiment expressed often enough.

Because it's possible that the way our society behaves and judges success is modelled more after men's natural inclinations and needs than women's, and that the liberation of women was seen as women pursuing the same goals as men do, when perhaps it should have been women pursuing slightly different goals.

It's possible that feminism as a movement overshot, a mistake that's easy to forgive. Women needed to be made free, badly, and in that feminism drove incredibly important changes. However, many have come to believe that applying equal success standards for woman actually doesn't pay enough respect to women's distinct needs. It's possible that men and women, on average, just don't experience well being and meaningful lives from the exact same things.

In a way, the historical ideals of feminism may be another act of chauvinism - applying the standards of men to women (instead of say, applying the standards of women to men). Perhaps "real" feminism should acknowledge that men and women have distinct enough needs to not be judged according to the same standards of "success". Perhaps, it should be acknowledged that equality means equal rights, not equal needs or equal desirable outcomes.

I am a developer, and having the option to communicate real time with someone doesn't mean they get interrupted all the time.

Sure, I should have clarified what I mean. Responsiveness in remote environments should be like in a physical office. If you need to, you can walk up to someone and talk to them. Sometimes they're on a break, sometimes they left early, sometimes they didn't come in that day, no problem.

Generally though, you can count on being able to talk to someone when you walk up to their station. When running a remote team, I want people to generally "be around". We work very closely together though, so maybe our needs are not a good example.

I think this is an unnecessary over reaction. You're confusing an acknowledgement when someone knocks (basic human communication) and being interrupted all the time.

Acknowledging communication can also be: "I'll be with you in 20 minutes". That gives me the option to (in 95% percent of the cases) respond with "cool" and plan my own time accordingly, and in 5% of the cases to respond with "sorry, we really need to deal with this now, and here's why".

How fast you respond when someone tries to communicate with you has very little to do with remote/local. I love remote environments, they have huge upsides. Not being able to go to real time when necessary though is a major problem.

I'd disagree, just because people should respond fast when needed doesn't mean they get interrupted all the time. In a physical location, you have the option of interrupting someone when necessary, and you have the option of carrying out a real time conversation with quick response cycles when necessary.

Since these things are often necessary, you need to be able to have that happen in a remote environment.

I agree with you though on one important thing - issues of interruption have little to do with remote/local. I try to interrupt people as little as possible either way, but I don't want remote working to sacrifice on real time communication when necessary.

"A 'designer' and a 'developer' are made of the same stuff, all that separates them is the label they place upon themselves."

I'm also made of the same stuff as heart surgeons. Want to get under my knife? Didn't think so.

I'm all for expanding one's skill set. Please say 'yes' to learning new things. That doesn't mean you get to be good at what you started last week, or even last year.

Absolutely. Working remotely and responding within 24 hours is a complete non starter. Teams need to work tightly together. I'd even go as far as saying 'acknowledge all messages within 1 minute'.

Being able to talk to people immediately is critical.

(I've been running a remote team for 5 years)

Your marketing materials clearly use phrases like "forget about servers", "easily scale to millions of users", "scale effortlessly" and so forth. You're making it very easy to misunderstand you.

I'm with you, but given that no one does this yet, if I am going to be paying $3-$6 to watch something, I'd rather do it on my Apple TV.

The aspect of Rdio which most appeals to me is their subscription model. Vdio doens't have that, so I'll stick with the Appleverse thankyouverymuch. Has better integration into my life.

My company has been building apps for startups for years, and I can confirm that Heroku is consistently perceived as a "I never have to worry about scaling" solution.

aesthetics gets in the way of usability? that sounds too wrong for anyone to believe. i mean, i'm the first to call out the current ridiculous 'design for the sake of design' trend. abuse of "pretty" interfaces abound, but clearly there can't be anything wrong with taking the same interaction design with good typography, good use of whitespace, good use of color. done right, aesthetics increases usability.

Yawn. That's a pretty non impressive redesign, especially for a company that deals in user experience. Did they forget that aesthetic factors into experience?

I like it, but I gotta say - a decent logo would take this a long way forward. Can I volunteer to make something for free that's at least better than what you have now?

Don't take money from friends, the potential problems there are countless. For one thing, your chances of success are low and your friends can't properly estimate that. They hear too many startup success stories in the news. A professional investor knows what he's getting into, your friends have no idea.

Amongst other things, this is a great lesson for how naming can affect mass market marketing.

As a product guy and general geek, I want to believe that naming doesn't matter. It's the product and the value it creates that counts. I'm increasingly learning that that's not entirely true. Having a great product is critical, but you also need to market it, and a name that evokes emotional responses helps.

Beautiful. One thing though, I believe the OP is mistaken when he implies that Steve Jobs didn't affect how computers work on the inside:

"On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things."

Ultimately, computer architectures serve real world use cases. Innovation in use cases results in innovation in architectures. There are countless new technologies that exist because of the products that Apple invented.

This makes little sense. Say only 7 people died from inhaling cyanide last year, does that make cyanide 100 less dangerous than guns? Nope, because 100% of the people who inhaled it died.

The real questions is, of the people who are within harms way of home swimming pools, how many suffer injuries, and of the people who are within harms way of fire arms, how many suffer injuries.

Both are not that easy to measure, especially firearms, but looking at absolute causes of death is clearly nonsense.

I tried that use case several times, I really dig the vision. It never sticks for me though, I don't get enough value added. Especially for my parents, Path is too complex, and a family whatsapp group serves much of the same function.

I'll keep trying Path once every few months, maybe one day it will stick.

detailed screenshots needed. can you email me at hi at davidkatz dot me?

"the biggest thing since the light bulb". Keep reading their marketing, and you get "it's a bulb that lasts longer than a normal light bulb, and consumes less energy".

So let me get this straight — the light bulb took us from expensive, unreliable, dangerous light (candles) to instant, cheap, reliable, safe light. The light bulb is one of the greatest inventions of humanity. You made it a little more efficient, and you invented the biggest thing since the light bulb? Gotcha.

Lots of real phenomena occur during an interview. For example, you could go one level deeper and describe the molecular mechanisms between adrenaline and whatever 'receives' adrenaline. That would sound something like:

"What happens in job interview is that adrenaline binds to a variety of adrenergic receptors, which triggers a number of metabolic changes" [1]

It'd be just as real, also clearly connected, but also quite clearly not what the conversation is about.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epinephrine

doesn't work for me, i get a login error. too bad.