nomoresecrets

I saw this presentation at the London DevDays where Jon gave it.

I was quite far back, and when he walked on stage with the sock puppet on, I assumed it was one of those wrist support gloves that you use when you get RSI because you won't just stop typing all day long, even though you're harming yourself.

After all, I thought, it's Jon Skeet - he never stops typing, surely? :-)

He's going for that iTunes transfer dollar. That's a big dollar.

I've rarely met people who are excellent at everything. For the areas they have problems with, I imagine human teachers are great.

I imagine such people on HN who think they are 'brilliant' (see a recent question) are actually only adept are certain subjects, sometimes quite a narrow subset. I'm guessing they drop the other subjects asap.

That's all well and good, but who made the first horizontal rule 'rainbow' GIF, hmm?

Slight? It reminds me of the reaction to http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ - that site's so simple!

Pay developers to make apps? This doesn't happen for desktop computers/laptops, games consoles, etc., so why do you think it should be different for mobile phones?

It seems so unbelievable too, I mean, that Palm guy said it was going to rule: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/03/05/palm-pre-iphone ;-)

You'd think that someone who owned a ZX Spectrum would know that the minimum spec memory was 16Kb, not 1Kb. :-)

On the other hand, the Mint guys worked for 3 years, earned $170m, and now they can 'enjoy building things they like, their way', for a long ass time without needing to answer to anybody except people who use their product.

I'm not sure what's not to like about that. The real question is about what those 3 years were like. If they kind of enjoyed them, that's just gravy.

(Of course, I'm aware of Survivor's Bias here. Not everyone gets bought for $170m.)

And there is your comment now, right on their site :-)

One day - just one day - I'd like to see a discussion about patents where someone doesn't suggest patenting something 'amusing' that already exists and has years of prior art.

"I hate to "game" sites like StackOverflow, but there is no incentive not to."

Not being a douchebag is not an incentive?

Yes, superuser.com.

Seriously, it just opened. Go post some Linux/UNIX themed questions!

I think anyone who reads HN who needs to be told to open windows in order to keep cool should maybe hand in their hacker badge.

That's the sort of thing people say to me when I spend more than $10 on a mouse, too.

One thing I learned a while back at one interview (or rather, I just worked it out after experiencing it a few times) is that I find it much harder to think/code on a whiteboard. I don't know what it is, but it seems much easier for me to sit down with a pen and paper and work things out.

I mean, still coding without a computer - but it's something about standing up at a whiteboard. Maybe it's normally not so bad for me, but with the pressure of an interview, it's bad enough to give me problems.

Just be grateful they're not calling it MSDOS.

Re: that Credit Suisse analysis:

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090617/credit-suisse-fa...

Being from the UK, I will ignore this story until I see it reported by a source more reliable than the Sunday Express newspaper. This article from this source is akin to a clown car driving down your street and pretending to throw buckets of water over you,

So far I can't find any news articles about this on the web that aren't just a regurgitation of the Express article (along with attribution).

Here's just one of the reasons to wash your hands after touching this rag:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_Express_Dunblane_controv...

"I should note that this isn’t terribly radical, and in fact, it isn’t all that different from the direction Gnome and KDE have been heading."

Given that he just seems to be proposing the Vista-style Start menu (which I think is a good thing) is not that radical, no.

Alan Cooper covered most of this in his book, "About Face", but Cooper noticed the important things which seem to have gone missed (well, it is Cooper's job, after all).

For instance, getting rid of the menu altogether is probably a mistake. Cooper pointed out that the menu is the pedagogical interface. i.e. the way people learn how to use programs, and what programs can do, is to go through the menus and find stuff. Just by looking through menus is a good way to get a feel for what a program can and can't do (one of the reasons why you should only grey/disable menu items, and not sub-menus).

The way a lot of users actually use the program once they've learned it is with toolbars, shortcut keys, direct manipulation, etc. Some people still use menus all the time, and most people will use menus for the features they don't use often.

The Office ribbon is a smart evolution of the UI - you can still explore the ribbon to find out how to do stuff, but that stuff is generally more available than hidden away on a menu.

Presenting people with either an empty box that they have to type a search into, or a massive pane of everything the user can do (seemingly what he suggests with his Paint reworking), doesn't seem like a great idea. By this I mean that it takes away the user's ability to learn a program as easily.

You may need to have your sense of humour overhauled.

Yes, that just seemed like a PR gimmick. Given the current hardware, if I have two other iPhone users near me, and I flick at one of them, how does that work? Doesn't seem like the compass would be accurate enough.

The central plot device of the movie is that the CEO tries to hire the people developing some innovative software. One of them joins, but the other refuses. The first guy realises that the CEO is stealing his friend's code in order to make their 'own' new product.

And as for '3rd graders' - lose the attitude. This is HN, not digg.

I'm a bit disappointed that anyone who has seen a few of The Daily Show's interviews is at all surprised by any of this.

They quite clearly do it for laughs. It's not supposed to be journalism. As Jon Stewart famously put it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE#t=7m15s

No. What's the connection? Hi-tech? Someone dying?

Antitrust is about a company developing and selling a product that is stolen from somewhere else. I don't remember anyone dying because someone wanted to see a Mr Blurry-Cam shot of the new iPhone on Engadget.

I remember reading some guy's blog entry where he cuttingly remarked that he used to not watch TV, but that he spent so much time smugly telling other people that he didn't watch TV that it took less time to actually just watch the damn TV :-)

At last a purpose for those permanent markers that people use accidentally on a whiteboard now and then :-)

"He didn't back out because he thought it would be too hard. According to him, he backed out because it would be disrespectful."

Excuse my language, but this comment deserves it: I've seen horse-shit with less horse-shit in it.

"So assume that you can write all of the code for Stack Overflow in a weekend."

Only if you're a total idiot.

Indirection? Misdirection.