jacabado

When something is not working properly I put a breapoint on the suspect area (you can do this in the script viewer or by code writing <i>debugger;</i>) then I will use the console script to inspect some variables or test the outcomes of certain bits of the code. It's a must.

My small contribution to the discussion: Spain has one of the biggest problems with the youth drug use, I read somewhere that more 20-year people were consuming cocaine than 21-25 combined. I share that generation and I see the same problem here in Portugal.

My experience tells me that things were worst some years ago, I remember lots of people were on hard drugs on my home town, sadly most of them died. Also the big drug ghettos in Lisbon almost disappeared. The thing is Portugal as a peripheric country is in a very peculiar situation and the regulation problem should be seen in that context. It is normal for Portugal to lead drug aprehensions every other year because it's one of the main drug gateways from Africa (Marrocos) and from South America and it's close relationship with Brasil.

But the spirit of the law doesn't convince me at all, there are lots of people living from selling drugs and from the stats like 50% arrested were in the 16-20 years range, mostly everybody consumes marijuana. The problem may not be the law, but the environment around the schools doesn't benefit from this law, this should be somehow compensated.

Nice to meet Portuguese people here! Would you bother to fill your details? Or contact me: jracabadoemgmail.com would be wonderfull to talk to you guys!

Could you at least verbally disagree? It's the reasoning wrong?

The style is provocative but just to get some attention to the idea.

Wondering about what will be Apple's next big product ...

Internet TV?? OMG!

iPad will rule the world because of the Internet TV!! iPad will be the perfect interface for controlling a TFT on steroids, and the target markets fits so well it makes a lot of sense. Does anybody agree to me?

I see the iPad as an enabling device, it's ease of use and hipness will create a big market on the less technology savy.

But the ignorance anedoctes he tells all follow some ignorance patterns. Metaignorance should be described by these ignorance patterns: the context, the problems and how their solution will be missed, the ignorant rational. These ignorance patterns are distinguished from anti-patterns as they describe the process by which the solution is missed instead of the erroneous solution.

If it was all about brainpower I would put all my money on the distributed system guys.

Or if he is your boss, you better adjust (would that mean the trans-gendered would have to change again? Or is that a double violation?)

That's true and probably the reason why interfaces improved so much. Whitespaces are a design element and what you call junk is somebody business need.

The fact that the blank canvas got bigger on the web allowed to much better interface patterns, or maybe it was just a question of maturity.

But I guess the most interesting discussion is not the visual part but the utilization scenarios of the Ipad. I'm not sold on it as a mobile device, but how many people use a laptop as a mobile device? Mobile phones are the first truly mobile devices. I'm just starting to notice Iphone owners on the middle of a crowd trying to text somebody, you have to hold it closer to the horizontal plane to have better accuracy making it less natural.

I'm not sold on the Ipad as a mobile device, in the mobile phones sense, but I also don't think its success depends on it.

I am not sure, and nobody can be, but isn't the web an example? When the most common resolution was 800x600 the graphical interface patterns were really bleh.

Be carefull with what you wish. Ill motivated attempts of refactoring more often than not disrupt an entire team rythm. I come to appreciate the simplicity of lazy spirits.

Obviously broken? Aren't you demanding too much of it?

Also your math doesn't demonstrate that much: the incentive for trying to be the first is big (25x an insightfull comment) but there aren't that many opportunities, and it establishes competition for a good thing, having fresh news on HN.

You also tell that the referred mechanism would be gamed by people who would post old pg essays. Then again your scenario is wrong. The mechanism can be implemented to work so that the PG essays as not enough for the demand of points. And if you tell me that people would post other things just for points, isn't that the whole point of the voting/karma system?

There are problems, but I think the karma system is not obviously broken. It's true it's hard to create the right incentives to fight those problems. But HN has done it so better than everyone that I'm confident it will get better soon.

On a side note, has anyone ever tought of dynamic partitions of the community to address the problems of exponential grow and dissolution of identity?

I was trying to put down your argument against simplicity by poiting your argument's complexity. Hence the smart-ass downmod, I accept it.

But I still disagree with you, there isn't a simple equilibrium between power and simplicity. And this is my interpretation of the Apple philosophy, I would bet I share it with many Mac users, and it's odd to me, not with you.

The simplicity in the experience greatly determines the pleasure you take from it, and this determines the context where the "power exchange" happens. Your "power", or the value you get from a product/service is all determined in this context. Albeit being a techie, and having a special interface with these machines I can no longer stand more hurdles since I discovered that it hasn't to be like that.

And it's such a nice discovery to make.

If/When Apple reaches a majority on one of these markets, mobile?, the regulators will enforce them to behave properly. Although if it's really bad to free market they should be enforcing them earlier.

Regulation is hard.

I guess nobody is counting on Excel(Office) users to be switching to the iPad, as well as businesses won't be switching their desktops to Mac. But you can bet you will look damn sexy if you present your service reporting to your clients on an iPad.

Your argument is too complex to be sound.

Google Wave as a platform is a huge step in distributed computing abstraction. If you ever try/tried to implement any app on top of distributed algo you will value the wave possibilities!

A lot of people would agree with you in 2001, or better said, before 2001, then the .COM bubble happened.

Google Wave?

Then we would have to ask which ones were not.

And then all your privacy concerns quickly disappeared!

Following yesterday's discussion on the software architecs thread.

Doesn't the lack of experience, toughness and soft skills make it really hard to 20 somethings to have success as founders?

Maybe it's my environment but from what I have seen, I live in a latin country(one of the least of the latin ones, Portugal), your skills of comunication are fundamental. And every business initiative needs backstage moves.

People here will just dismiss you for your age or step on you on the first flaw.

Oh yes you have. Basel regulations are one of the top drivers of architecture initiatives in the finance industry.

Talking about aesthetics, Information Architecture, from the data model to business objects model (or what the users call the fields in an user interface), even the the names you give to the applications are a big aesthetic exercise.

An aesthetic exercise where you your audience is the business side, and you need to appeal to their comprehension.

As opposed to engineering school? Do you think the problems real software architects are ought solve are inferior to those whose real architects solve (if they really do it any better than the software ones)?

If you answer no to the last one you should read the Chaos Report.

True, but is much more important for "20-year-old-whizzes" to learn than to senior people, at least if you want to accomplish more than those people.

As a 1-year junior with crushed dreams by a proto-startup project and now working in a technology conservative environment I can say there is so much to learn in the first years (from bad or good examples, with or without mentorship) that everyone should review his attitude. Of course always keeping the ambition and with the goal of accomplishing the most.

To have success while young and without experience you must be allowed to fail, and to fail a lot of times. Out of frustation of course, I'm starting to believe it's really hard to have success in the early times. Of course close mentoring as in Y Combinator should help a lot!

The reason is one wouldn't be able to distinguish, at least as easily as in his visualizations, single data points.

It's a clever way to automatically create visual classifications of random-sized collections of data points. The goals are not contradictory, they just constraint each other.

Just to put in context, a link that was here last week or so about the Automation Paradox:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-dea...

Will there be a compromise between traditional crash deaths and safety systems induced deaths ?

Not to dismiss the new systems, I'm an optimistic by nature.

I just saw a Top Gear episode where they tested the last Mercedes S which does just this. (talk about serendipity and having new ideas!)

Would anybody be interested in sharing the results of the Gallup's "Now Discover Your Strengths" results? Maybe a few of us also have results on that.

Really nice, I love how I stumbled in the spreadsheet case study, that's one of my use cases! Thank you so much for the link.

I would never have the ambition of creating a tool for Lisp programmers, they say communication with target users is a key thing for success. I still want to solve real world problems and I coul use a lisp <i> programmer </> or two.