mcantor

I have always been amazed by knife-throwers' ability to calculate the amount of revolutions between their hand and their target when throwing. It just seems like one of those things that the human brain couldn't possibly calculate correctly on a consistent basis. Does it take a very long time to get comfortable with it when training?

If we were only allowed to post stuff that was universally true with no exceptions, HN would just be an "iPhone news" outlet. ;-)

It reminds me of the "alpha male/beta male" thing that leaks out of 4chan occasionally. Sometimes it's just not as easy as one or the other!

Am I the only person who just can't figure out whether I'm an "introvert" or an "extrovert" no matter how hard I try? I hate small talk (and love Smalltalk), but love meeting people. I value unfiltered honesty, but prefer effective communication. I love to be alone with my thoughts, but sometimes I just need to go out and make an idiot of myself at a party. Am I really the only person in the universe with a mutant 'vert-agnostic brain, or maybe, perhaps, are we creating some unnecessary binary distinctions here?

As a Vim user, I lol'd (and upvoted you).

I like how the juxtaposition of these links makes it look like the Firefox addon is called "Vimperator" while the Chrome addon is called "dbepggeogbaibhgnhh".

It finally happened.

HN cut out the middle man. Instead of linking to something on Reddit about 4chan, we finally just linked straight to 4chan.

It's about time.

I am an adept computer user who is also a moron. It stands to reason that there are also very intelligent people who are not very good with computers. I believe this is what the author was getting at.

I've lost count of how many times I have tried to do something in Rails which was trivial in every other framework I have ever worked with; struggled; gone to #rubyonrails or a mailing list and asked for advice; and had people tell me that I was "fighting the framework". I understand the benefit of not having to make every single decision from the ground up when you're getting started on a project, but sometimes I worry that working with rails is actually warping my thought patterns to fit its myopic vision of how web apps "should" work.

To phrase it differently: I feel comfortable with a framework or community forcing me to change how I achieve some higher-level goal. But when that convention prevents me from doing something, period, I start to worry.

For his next project, he will store a chest inside a chest!

They'd been sitting on the floor until now.

Perhaps you could enlighten us with an article about how to live a flawless life, as you appear to have it figured out.

I disagree so hard. Computer programs should be written primarily for humans to read, and only incidentally to be executed by computers. The connection between writing and programming is vital: they are both the practice of expressing structured ideas. It has nothing to do with the computer. It has nothing to do with the English language, or Vim, or Word. It's about starting with an idea and hacking away at it, removing ambiguities and possibilities, until only something unique remains.

It seems like this would be a total stopping point for mobile users, too.

Travel and worldliness are both interesting subjects to many hackers. I'm sure that a less notable hacker moving to Singapore wouldn't attract quite so much attention, but you should notice that most of this thread isn't about Mr. Sivers: it's about Singapore.

Anything less would not qualify as due diligence!

Your self-effacing "PHP programmer" comment surprised me and made me chuckle. Thank you for that!

"I'm not sure if that's due to a misunderstanding on your part or a lack of clarity on my part."

These are merely two perspectives from which we can view the same phenomenon.

This is an interesting approach. It seemed to me that the OP would agree with what you are saying, up to the point where the police said they couldn't help. He certainly doesn't explicitly say anything about why he is posting the photos... that said, I feel like there are two possibilities:

1.) He doesn't care whether the guy is the thief. He is publishing the photos in an act of non-vengeful vigilantism, with the hopes that someone will see or recognize the guy and contact the OP.

2.) He is assuming the guy is the thief. And, he is publishing the photos to harass/humiliate that person.

Personally I am comfortable with #1 but certainly not #2, for the reasons you cited. In #1, the guy's innocence (or lack thereof) is irrelevant to the OP's motivations.

Another good book to read along this vein is The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. He talks a lot about designing things which afford being used correctly; that is, you can't help but use them the right way, just based on the way they work. His favorite anti-pattern is the "Push" door with a "Pull"-handle on it, or a "Pull" door with a "Push"-plate on it. The door, like the programmer's interface, exposes more options than are relevant to the actual use case.

This is actually a very empowering mindset: If you push a "Pull" door, or pull a "Push" door, you are not the moron! In fact, it is the person who put a "Pull"-handle on a "Push" door! This viewpoint turns PEBKAC on its head. If a user runs a script that he thinks will configure his bootloader, but instead it erases his filesystem, who is the moron? The user, or the process which produced a script that can be run in a way that will erase your filesystem?

The worst offenders I've ever seen in this vein are Atlassian. The admin interface to their products, particularly JIRA, is basically a glorified database query GUI; there is no indication how each of the parts fit together, and 9 out of every 10 possible configurations you can create are actually broken.

The problem is that you can't design a better interface without thinking about how other people will actually use your app, and that's extremely difficult. However, it's useful to look out for signs that you are Doing It Wrong. The "programmer's interface design" from the article is one of them. Another is the phrase "Well, at some point, somebody might want to..." If you hear this phrase repeated frequently during discussions about feature or interface design, panic! It means you don't know what your use cases actually are.

This is one of the ways I think Agile development can be extremely helpful, but no one seems to practice it in a way that leverages this type of benefit. Thinking about things in terms of user stories forces you to make these kinds of decisions, and you almost can't help but design the interface better.

The "redundant favicon" complaint is somewhat mitigated by the "Pin Tab" feature. Right-click any tab and select "Pin Tab". I no longer browse with my bookmarks bar displayed because of this feature!

Are you saying that the person in the pictures may be someone other than the thief (e.g., they purchased the stolen laptop), or that the pictures shouldn't be published even if they depict the thief?

Also, are you uncomfortable with the publishing to the extent that it is a punishment? I interpreted it as an attempt to get people's attention and thus make it more likely that his property is returned, rather than a punishment.

Hmm... I guess I'll be the one who posts the Fauxgeek's Lament on this thread.

Reading stuff like this always makes me feel like a second-rate geek! I've had my fair share of soldering iron burns (for my senior project in college, I cracked open an RC car's remote and connected it to a BASIC stamp, which I controlled via RS-232 and a network socket), but the parts of this article which the author considers "easy" stuff are still a mystery to me. For example, "According to the application note I could use a simple signal diode, so I just pulled a 1N4148 diode out of my component drawer." A simple what diode? A 1N4-what diode? My component drawer? I don't even have a... help! S.O.S.! Man overboard!

I'm sure that I could come to feel more comfortable with stuff like this if I went out of my way to learn more about it, but the applicable extent of my electronics hacking day-to-day has been unplugging the rumble packs from my Xbox360 controller. Most of the things I use on a day-to-day basis are not devices that I feel comfortable screwing around with!

Is it just me, or are Google's APIs becoming more farcical with every revision? I see these words before "API" that you just wouldn't think belong in that context. Now "Prediction API". It makes me really excited for the next batch.

Bacon API?

HFT API?

Physics API?

API API?

I think perhaps you were downvoted because your posts were mainly attacking a straw man. I don't think anyone has been supporting the idea of basing policy solely on the beliefs of young people.

(FWIW I did not downvote you)

This is super-neato, but what I am really waiting for is a way to fake device capabilities in the market, so I can finally use the RememberTheMilk app on my rooted gTablet!

The Bureau Of Statistical Chicanery And Related Ballyhoo has reviewed your appeal and, based on the extenuating circumstances you described, has chosen not to revoke your blogging license...

... FOR NOW! (dramatic reverb)

You have lied with statistics! The top chart goes from 0% to 50%, and the bottom goes from 0% to 5%. Edward Tufte frowns, sir!

Maybe I'm just an optimist, but it didn't actually seem to me like he was trying to say anything nasty about you. I thought he was just joking/reflecting on the universal appeal of the article--it's well-written and accessible, so it would make most readers feel smart, and everyone likes feeling smart.