megrimlock

According to Wikipedia, the Ship of Theseus problem questions whether an object that has had all of its components replaced is still fundamentally the same object.

<pedantry> If each part is replaced in series, and the identity of the object remains the same after each step, then clearly the object remains the same. For humans identity is thus based on recognizing what you have seen before; it acknowledges mutable state. In this case, if you consider the brand as a mutable property of the object, then yes, the identity of PLT-Scheme and Racket are the same. </pedantry>

You should ping them again once some time has passed, just to inquire as to how things are going. It will only take you a moment, and there's a non-zero chance they may have grappled with the problem enough to have changed their mind and be eager to speak with you.

Even putting the IDL over the sparsely populated Pacific is inconvenient enough that it was drawn to zig-zag across 40 degrees of longitude, or 2.5 hours of timezones, to be less annoying!

You know... we should optimize the IDL with a graph partitioning algorithm. We can measure inconvenience by the number of times any human's life trajectory passes the IDL. That's impossible to measure, so let's use recorded passenger airline / boat transportation numbers as a proxy. That also quantizes our graph into distinct origin and destination nodes. We penalize any graph edge that transits the IDL. Then we just find the min-cut of that graph, and draw the new IDL across the cut. That still leaves us lee-way about where to cross each edge in the cut, so we can apply aesthetic heuristics to try to draw a maximally straight line, or one most aligned with meridians. Then this will no longer be arbitrary.

Media is most appealing when it seduces the reader into a sense of insight.

Obvious errors in reporting on familiar areas pierces this illusion, and makes one wonder how accurate coverage is of other areas.

> If I want to apply for a position over the internet, I ABSOLUTELY must do things to stand out from the piles of emails

Agreed! Regardless of your background, taking the time to write a specific cover letter and tweak your resume to highlight experience you think a particular place would appreciate is well worth it.

Consider it this way: your application is one entry into a huge priority queue heap. You want it to be picked up by the comparison operator in every significant way you can. Don't be afraid to leave out work you did if it doesn't seem relevant; it will just dilute the signal.

> open, democratic, decentralized social enterprise management

6 words and you've already lost me.

This is followed by a complicated screenshot with arrows pointing in various directions, then a manifesto in typefaces that jangle like a political donation chain letter. Then a quote from Albert Einstein. Then a bunch of diffuse conceptual words in different sizes and orientations. Seeing floaty words like "Distributed" and "Emergent" only solidifies the feeling that this product is hot air -- even if it isn't.

You're making it extra hard to understand what it does or why I'd want it. Smart HN readers will pore through and analyze what it does, because they are looking for product ideas of their own, but the rest of the world is damn busy and unlikely to spend that much time.

Perhaps try to cut your initial presentation down by 10x. If I have to scroll at all to figure out what you are talking about, you've probably lost me until I hear from someone I know that it's awesome. Do you already have users raving to everyone they know about how awesome it is?

Not trying to be harsh, just honest! I completely respect the challenge of what you're trying to take on, and I doubt I could do any better.

Edit: Having spent a bit more time on your site to try to find more constructive advice to offer, I have to say I am impressed with your ideas and development of them. I feel myself rooting for you to succeed. But the initial impression you offer is more opaque than it should be. And it seems like your system offers an entire architecture for project management that you'd have to buy into, making that a steep first step. Do you guys use this product internally? Is there anywhere you expose how you're using it?

What's really needed here is not more distance between hotkeys, but instead universal lightweight undo for user interactions.

The most precious resource is the user's time. There should be no interaction that irreversibly discards the user's work. We have fairly universal undo for editing operations; there should be just as much undo support for closing windows, tabs, or apps -- carefully constructed artifacts of the user's workflow.

Mostly agreed... but Dominion seems like it doesn't have much real human interaction. It's more like playing simultaneous games of solitaire with your buddies in a race to the victory conditions. I haven't used all the cards yet so I could be mistaken, but it seems the only real time you can affect other players directly is with the militia, which you can't target and just slows down everyone else. Tthat's not to say there isn't fun to be had, like in chaining together multiple Markets in a round.

You should also check out Bohnanza; similar ideas, fewer rules to parse, plus inter-player trading.

> Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?

We do that, in addition to an interview process biased towards false negatives. We still find it expensive to make hiring mistakes, enough that we are still circumspect about candidates.

Not only does it take a lot to build up someone new, it's emotionally costly to tell them at the end of the evaluation period that they didn't make the grade -- and still give them full support and a real chance the whole way, in case they can turn it around. It does happen; sometimes it just takes time for ambient culture values and priorities to sink in before people "get" what's important to succeed.

It's much harder to do this trial period with option to buy, than for interns who are going back to school, where the expectations and time frame are clear. It also seems that the most capable candidates aren't as interested in being hired on a trial basis, since they have other options willing to commit more fully to them.

These are a few reasons it doesn't work as well as you might hope.

(* note, not talking about google here)

> not the biggest fan of the transparent movement

Completely agreed: the fact that OSX UI (and iTunes) change in arbitrarily small ways with each release seems like evidence that they are orbiting a local maximum rather than making absolute progress. But Linux distros and Windows are just as bad. And much more interesting advances are happening with multitouch on iOS, so I give Apple a pass.

At least there's a pref for the menu: System Preferences > Desktop > Translucent Menu Bar.

There's a school of API design that believes you can guide users to reflect on what they are doing by deliberately excluding certain things, without explaining why they are absent.

This springs from a prescriptive viewpoint that presumes the reader will inevitably arrive at the same conclusions as the author about the right way to do things.

Since no one is always right, and API's are too often designed without considering what actual application usage would be like, this can be extremely frustrating.

The best API's that somehow hit the sweet spot of minimal, efficient, and obvious are always extremely impressive.