sedev

"The rule of thumb is that if someone says that's their name, that's what you call them."

Yes! Insofar as it can be made simple, that's how simple it is. I can't fucking believe how hard it is for some people (and databases) to accept that part.

I wonder whether the recommendation at the very end, about starving patent trolls of lawyer resources, is more or less viable now than it was five years ago. Although there are certainly plenty of megafirms, I'm not sure that the legal world is coherent enough for that to be a great strategy. Plus you need maybe two full-time lawyers and twice that many paralegals to operate on the Lodsys level of suing smaller developers and working your way up.

Patent trolls, like terrorists, take advantage of asymmetric resource usage. So trying to attack their supply of lawyer resources might not work.

That's the whole point of the article: the SCOTUS members don't have to be re-elected and are not going to be lobbyists after leaving the bench - they actually can do such a thing on principle, that's their whole role. Please read the article.

While "keeps a close eye on" is certainly an accurate description of what he does, "makes accurate and/or well-founded predictions" is not, and that's more important. Someone who wanted to be well-informed about mobile would do far better by reading Horace Dediu, for example.

Those are important amplifications and qualifications to what I said - thanks. :)

I can't decide if that shows whether these guys would be good or bad entrepreneurs. This kind of insane persistence in pursuit of what you believe in is sometimes a good sign for starting a business. On the other hand, they have made some very poor choices in that pursuit, and they've demonstrated that money is far more important to them than it is to the entrepreneurs that I admire.

Independent of that, they're exercising a non-trivial chilling effect on startups at the earliest stages, so I hate 'em for that, and I am deeply suspicious of the class angle - these guys are sons of wealth, I can't imagine they've ever known serious privation in their lives, and they're trying to squeeze still more money from someone who, much as I dislike him, earned it by working his ass off.

If I were a Randian, I'd be the kind of Randian who believes that the wealthy are the real parasites, for exactly reasons like this.

The policy that they are enforcing is that you must use your legal name, leading many people to the obvious conclusion that the policy is bullshit.

The flip side of that metaphor, though, is that most of us go to lots of parties without necessarily taking the same identity with us to each party. Further, using people's legal names (if this fiasco demonstrates anything, it's that the concept of a "real" name is kind of a crock) doesn't guarantee better interactions - at the Facebook party I run into objectionable relatives all the time, but it's not really my party and I can't kick them out.

"Apple’s OS update clearly has not removed and replaced the system’s UNIX foundation with something sane..."

And that was where I stopped taking him seriously. This author sounds to me as though he is complaining that his free pony is dappled, not purebred. His arguments all sound, ironically, correct - in a skin-deep way. He discounts, with wincing ease, the evolutionary steps that are the necessary prerequisites to getting to where we are now. Reading this is like listening to Stephen Wolfram talking about cellular automata - it is a shining, glittering, many-tined work of an absolute crank.

Okay, thank you for clarifying and expanding on that.

This is definitely resonating with me. Could I get you to say more about "If you are building anything consumer-focused, definitely don't quit your day job"? What do you see as the biggest obstacles in building a consumer-market product?

That's what it's starting to look like, yeah. Which is reassuring, in a way - the upside of a lifestyle business is that you're not particularly beholden to investors.

"the vested interests of a particular large corporation are sometimes very different from mine."

Couldn't agree more! Especially when it comes to large corporations where you are a product being sold to advertisers, they're even worse than large corporations that accept money from you in return for goods and services.

It's kind of hilarious and sad that, judging by their home page, it's possible to build a business on selling "In Case Google Stabs You In The Face" insurance.

Even if the headline was accurate instead of hyperbolic, my response would be something along the lines of "because no one's a fairer and more impartial judge of Apple software than Adobe." That list of incompatibilities is something I think Adobe should be ashamed of: it is essentially a "List Of Areas Where We Don't Have Our Shit Together." Apple's cut-off dates for legacy versions are pretty aggressive, true, but with the notable exception of the XServe (and how many people do you know running Creative Studio on an XServe?) they're also aggressive about announcing them ahead of time.

This is basically another data point in the pattern of Adobe not being a very good development house, along with all the points about "please exhibit good design taste in your design applications."

Then there's this: "Adobe also notes that one of Lion's marquee features, the System Preference that allows you to have Lion restore an app's windows just as they were when you quit that app, doesn't work at all in Adobe products. "This feature requires new code in order to work properly," they note. "Adobe will research adding this functionality for inclusion in future versions of our products.""

That's not a "woe," that's "repeating Apple's documentation of the feature."

"and now he works in investment banking."

That's one hell of a punchline. Is that serious, or is that just a grim joke? Because sadly it's right smack in the middle of Poe's Law territory.

I definitely hadn't thought of the Ford vs. Lambo angle - thank you for pointing that out. I think one could also phrase that as the Apple vs. Dell angle. Revenue-per-customer is definitely important.

I think that I could offer an investor a positive return - the revenue model is subscription-based with strong network effects - but not an explosively positive return. So if I were developing a pitch, I think I'd want to include something about the opportunity cost there, and like any founder, would want to explicitly say "here's why I'm less risky than other things you might fund."

I hope that we can more widely spread the news: power makes you stupid. I wouldn't say 'for some reason' - I would say 'because of cognitive biases that would afflict any other ordinary human being in his situation'.

Power makes you stupid, a summary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11... - the article in question cites work by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and Dacher Keltner of Berkeley.

"Keltner and others have shown that power exacerbates many cognitive biases. People who lack power turn out to be more accurate in guessing the opinions of those around them, whereas those in power tend to be inaccurate. Because subordinates are also hesitant to tell superiors things they do not want to hear, the problem gets worse, with powerful people having even less input and perspective about how others think and feel."

So I believe that that's a cause of a great deal of bad management - I also believe that's part of why the 37Signals folks have done so well with a minimal-management strategy, they're consciously trying to avoid the way that information becomes tainted when it travels vertically in a hierarchy.

It is my experience that employees who hear it phrased that way, though, will from painful experience assume that they're about to be blamed for something.

I reinforce this comment. The title "When Employees Misinterpret Managers" at best very weakly implies that the managers are doing something. It plainly states, in normal English, that employees did something (they misinterpreted) to managers. Only by the most convoluted thinking could you remove that plain meaning and substitute in "managers gave instructions excessively prone to misinterpretation" or something similar. `bryanlarsen`'s point is absolute bullshit.

Now: reading the article, that does indicate that it's the managers' fault, and it's a bang-up job of doing that. But the headline - oy!

That's a lovely article with a wincingly bad headline. The author does a very good job of describing what happens when managers give instructions and then discover that they have instructed people to act counter to the managers' desires. That is not 'misinterpreting'. That is essentially a compiler error; the manager told the employees to do the wrong thing, and the employees trusted that they knew what they were talking about.

In a normal business environment, human cognitive biases about authority act very strongly. I think that a big part of what causes 'bad management' is that managers may tend to think of themselves as buddy-buddy with their subordinates, and rationalize that surely someone will tell them if they make a mistake, issue instructions that seem counterproductive, make bad tradeoffs like the ones in the article, et cetera, et cetera. That's almost always wrong. The incentive structure for normal employees means that you go along with the boss' idiot idea in almost every case, or alternatively that you take it on good faith that your wise and benevolent manager knows what they're doing, and in both cases employees do not critique managers in ways that the managers can hear (by which I mean, both covert conversations and social cues that managers miss).

Interviewers who explicitly phrase the 'how would you move Mt. Fuji' or 'here's a development task outside of your stated competencies, how would you do it?' as hypotheticals or thought exercises, could save a lot of heartbreak. I can see the rationale behind those questions, but any experienced interviewer should know how tense people get during an interview: allowing interviewees to perceive those questions as being about the literal answer, rather than about the process, is kind of a jerkface thing to do. Besides, people who can't coherently explain their thought processes are going to bomb on that question anyhow - have some courtesy and give a leg up to people who are merely nervous. I'm grateful to the interviewers I've had in the past who have come out and said "this question is about the process, not about the result".

I think it's very important to reduce the tension level, because if you're asking someone a question intended to show how they think and reason, especially with some level of creativity, you risk getting a useless answer if they're tense and antsy. Nervousness and pressure often kill creative thinking: this is well-established.

That's pretty cool - that put a coherent narrative on top of several things that bothered me about the Adobe toolchain. Thanks for putting that together.

Yeah - the first half comes easier. Too easy - I do it myself far too often.

Thank you for the explanation. That was entirely reasonable.

That reply makes you sound like you don't know how NoScript, web standards, and good UIs work.

I have access to the Good Stuff that JS enables - and there's lots of Good Stuff! But with NoScript on, I (a) get to see who's following web standards and who isn't, (b) get pages that load faster, (c) get a more secure browsing experience, and (d) by default am spared the UI/UX idiocy that some sites try to perpetrate (especially in the area of intrusive advertising).

Using NoScript and ad-blocking is pretty much like using Instapaper or the new Reader feature of Safari - it is an assertion of the user's rights. It says "no no no, fuck all your irrelevant stuff: give me CONTENT." Not advertising, not fluff, not background images, not boilerplate: CONTENT. I like how Nathan Bowers put it: "If it looks better in Instapaper than in the browser, back to the drawing board."[1] If you purposefully make it harder for visitors to your web site to get the content they care about, you're a bad programmer and a bad person. Bad JS is one of the most frequent manifestations of making it harder to get to the content - and so in my browser, JS is a privilege, not a right.

Speaking of privilege: I am privileged - I'm about 100% able-bodied. If you say 'fuck off' to and ignore users who are not - who are for example not sighted, can't use a mouse, or can't distinguish certain colors - then you're also a bad person, in a different way.

[1]: http://uxhero.com/blog/i-redesigned-avc-com/

I'd modify that a little, basically riffing on Marco Arment's proposal[1]: developers will do great things for a platform if we use it, if it's in popular use, and if there's money to be made. Twitter the service, I would say, has been fluttering between one and three of those things - the problem is that Twitter the company has been trying to choke out the "money to be made" criteria, and that, as you observe, drives developers away.

[1]: http://www.marco.org/2010/11/04/developers-dont-rush-to-new-...

That's where I'm at with this. What Jarek describes can happen, but that's a failure case, not the normal-operation case. And as portrayed in the article, the engineers at Apple have accounted for the failure case, so all's well. They simply have made the very reasonable assumption that the DHCP server will normally be operational, not in a crisis state, and that it will honor its contracts as specified in the RFC. How hard is this?

Of course we can't all be Picasso (the role was filled by some guy who was hanging out in Paris at the right time), but that is no reason not to try. Trying to raise the collective professional standard is a Good Thing. I think more people should try to emulate Zed Shaw in terms of coding competence (there are already enough people trying to emulate him in terms of 'surly fellow who gets away with being a tremendous asshole on account of being a tremendous asshole who's usually right').

Dear everyone who ever gave me shit on HN for browsing the web with JavaScript turned off by default: please see the above image. Without NoScript and ad blocking, the Internet is broken because site owners can fuck up basic UI/UX assumptions.