Hacker News Reader

Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

Not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but I had a professor who had worked as a designer under Steve Jobs and tried something similar. Steve insisted that a new mouse needed to be just a fraction of a millimetre slimmer so a person's palm was lower and closer to the work surface. They figured he was being an unreasonable "delicate genius" and returned a few days later with the identical mouse and claimed they had reworked it to be a little slimmer. He held it and immediately said they had done nothing and the size was identical to before. They took it and reworked it to actually be about half a millimetre slimmer, showed it to him, and he said it was perfect.

View on HN

There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed:

  Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to 
  Page’s open cubicle office for a review.

  As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.

  “It’s too slow,” Page said.

  Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted. 
  It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.

  “You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office, 
  he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
  for Gmail to load.

http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2...

It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.

The thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often.

You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work.

It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.

Well... I would agree that the Page story is not that impressive. Obviously, most people from the video game generation would be sensitive to a time period greater than 500 milliseconds.

But that misses the point of the Jobs story. Some people really do have sensitivity to things that the vast majority of others have trouble perceiving. Most people would have trouble perceiving a millimeter difference in spatial dimension by touch.

Having said all of that... the likelihood that the Project Manager in the original story... or even that the Project Manager in your workplace for that matter... is the maven that Steve Jobs was is remote in the extreme.

I used to play a racing game called Trackmania; there was no collision, but it was really competitive in that you'd be racing simultaneously networked w/ other players. You could definitely tell when you completed the lab in a time that was say 10ms behind a different time. 600 milliseconds, +- say 50ms, is pretty recognizable.

God I lost a bunch of hours to that game. Kinderheitstrauma.

Just out of curiosity what do you think Kinderheitstrauma is?

Well, it's one of the original stunt maps in Trackmania, but it also literally means "childhood trauma".

Oh I see. Sorry, I'm german, and the word seemed out of context to me. Thanks for clearing that up :)

Top level players will gain ~10ms or more on eachother every other turn. At a level below the very top you're going to see gaps far bigger. With experience, you'll definitely be able to tell which parts of the track you did well or poorly at, but there is no way you're going to be able to get an accurate feel for all of those tiny gains and losses over the course of a 30-60 second track to accurately judge exactly how far ahead or behind another time you are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no

I think you might be right...maybe I am remembering differences of more like 100ms?

And thinking about it, in Trackmania it was less a perception of time that you noticed, but a sense of how smoothly and perfectly you had hit every turn. You could easily race the almost the exact same time multiple times in a row, and then feel it when you hit a turn more smoothly and shaved a few fractions of a second off your time. (Or similarly feel it when you screwed up and added a few seconds.)

Man, thinking about this is making me miss trackmania :)

OK, I got curious enough I wrote a small console game to test reaction times.

It turns out I'm not nearly as good as I thought. I can nail a delay of 100,200,...,900ms exactly only about 40% of the time, and within +-100ms about 80% of the time.

If anyone else feels like trying, you can do "go get github.com/erinok/howlonghowlong". Hit space to see a flash, and then type 1-9 for how long you think the flash was.

It's surprisingly fun. (At least if you're incredibly weird like me.)

I find I'll have periods of concentration where I can just nail it, and then it'll leave me, and I'll be sloppy.

Great story, I hope that Larry loads drive.google.com sometime this week and orders that the loading time has to improve as well

Or pretty much anything in *.google.com, for that matter.

I thought you were being hyperbolic, but Drive really does take second god damn seconds to load.

Indeed, it takes multiple seconds, I have a drive tab pinned permanently to avoid it (actually two tabs, one for each google account I use)

Fine story but it has no "remove the duck" element to it.

How is this story similar? It's not even related to the topic.

That's a super old story, at least as old as this zen koan:

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html

> I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.

Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct.

I'd guess the truth is somewhere between the two.

Third plausible option for the Steve Jobs story: he knew his colleagues very well and just guessed what they did through their body-language. If I was going to pull off something like that on my boss I'm pretty sure I'd act differently than usual, and marketing/business-type people tend to be socially hyper-aware.

We could take that idea to the extreme. Perhaps Jobs knew nothing about technology; he was just highly sensitive to the body language of talented engineers. So he hired top-notch people, and then he yelled at them until he could see that the engineers knew they were doing excellent work.

Reminds me of this Koan:

Sen no Rikyu, a tea-master, wished to hang a flower basket on a column. he asked a carpenter to help him, directing the man to place it a little higher or lower, to the right or left, until he had found exactly the right spot. "That's the place," said Sen no Rikyu finally.

The carpenter, to test the master, marked the spot and then pretended he had forgotten. Was this the place? "Was this the place, perhaps?" the carpenter kept asking, pointing to various places on the column.

But so accurate was the tea-master's sense of proportion that it was not until the carpenter reached the identical spot again that its location was approved.

from here: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans

I think this anecdote might help explain Jobs's success.

There is a tendency when one is running or developing a product to convince yourself that your efforts are producing a genuinely good product that your customers will like. Frequently that isn't true, and the product is rightly trashed by the outsiders. The thing is, the people on the inside would have trashed it too if they had not been insiders.

Jobs seems to have had the ability to resist this self-deception. He was ruthlessly honest about how good the things Apple was making actually were and not at all afraid to reject things because some aspect was poor.

He really nailed it with the mouse.

Yep, this thing was beautiful

http://cdn.mactrast.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/2012-11-2...

Apples design is hit and miss like everyone else.

My carpal tunnels ache just looking at it.

I agree with you. I could never use Apple mice. I hurt my arm muscles typing a few years back. Haven't been able to use them since.

(fixed the arm problem with physio and massage)

However, the apple trackpad on my macbook air seems to work great. I like this more than even ordinary mice, which can sometimes aggravate the issue.

I personally swear by Logitech's trackball mice (the ones where the trackball is operated with the thumb); less wrist movement involved, meaning less strain there.

In contrast, my wrist hurts just thinking about the Mighty Mouse or whatever it's called.

I was very unhappy to find they don't sell the wired version anymore, only the non-Bluetooth wireless. Glad I bought a couple.

Yes and yes. I hate it when I find a product that's perfect for my needs and then it gets discontinued. The Logitech trackball was one of them. It's one of those tools that (after you get used to it) just becomes an extension of your hand.

The wireless (which is what I'm using at the moment) is okay, but it's not the same.

I've got some dead ones in the junk pile. When I get some time I'm going to see if I can cobble together a working unit from them.

I have both, and I prefer the wireless. No cords, the battery lasts a long time, and I can program it on my Mac so that, when using Chrome, the extra buttons click on a link, open the link in a new tab, and switch to that tab.

When will Chrome offer the option of switching to a new tab when its link is clicked on? Firefox has had it forever.

> When will Chrome offer the option of switching to a new tab when its link is clicked on? Firefox has had it forever.

When will the big browsers be programmable? I'm currently running uzbl[0] because I want to set my own hotkeys in my browser. I tried 4 different 'emacs bindings' extensions for other browsers until I just figured out that none of these is gonna get it completely right.

The good thing in all of this is that I now control the behavior and features of my browser myself. I've made features that wouldn't even be possible in Firefox/Chrome. Not because it should be all that hard, but because they just don't let you actually do anything with them.

Browsers are pretty much like e-mail clients. They all suck. Some suck less than others, but it's actually striking how bad the sum total of all the browsers' usability is. Ironically I had to switch to a browser that wasn't trying to be a modern browser to get the browser experience that I wanted.

Links: [0] - http://www.uzbl.org/

If you tried pentadactyl / vimperator extensions for Firefox I'd be surprised if you found anything you couldn't program that you can acheve in uzbl.

With uzbl I can interface with literally any program on my computer capable of text input/output, so I am hard pressed to see how this claim holds up. This means, obviously, that it's mostly trivial to write bash/perl/whatever scripts/programs for useful browser features.

Like I said, I had to turn away from everything that tried to be a modern browser to realize that most modern browsers are shit, FF/Chrome with these extensions included. Browsers have not evolved well and are mostly designed to be huge monoliths with little to no transparency and programmability. Vimperator and pentadactyl don't remedy this.

I hope I'll find some second-hand, when mine dies.

Also, trackpads encourage good coding hygiene. Which is say continously using them makes a horrific sweaty mess, so you stay with the keyboard and keep coding. (Unless you really really like w3)

Also I thought "hockey puck mouse" was an old DEC mouse. Dec as in, "my Vaxstation is better than your Mac, cause it has a mouse AND it's still a VAX." (I still like saying "VAX" Side-effect: I start SHIFTING INTO ALL CAPS. )

Paul

I find that variety helps: Use one thing for a while, then use something else. Right now I love my little notebook computer with a touch screen. That, and a good trackpad, allow me to keep my hands in a neutral position, which is like a loosely closed fist with the index fingers pointing outward.

My other issue is eyestrain. I can type text without looking at the screen, so I tend to prefer text based interfaces. And keyboard shortcuts are a way to rest from overuse of pointing devices. (i.e., overuse of our bodies)

Remember the urban legend about the QWERTY keyboard, that it was designed to slow us down in order to distract us from how slow typewriters were? Sometimes I wonder if the modern GUI has turned into something like that: Simple tasks require us to control the computer's sequence of operations through extensive manual and ocular labor, rather than us just telling it what we want it to do.

Just a weird thought, offered for amusement.

That's because your upper-arm length is disproportionately different from Steve Jobs'. Apple doesn't design for the handicapped.

I loved that mouse. It was the most comfortable mouse I ever had and, if held correctly, you could fling it about with real accuracy.

I was sad when they replaced it.

There are some people who really love Apple's mice, even the notorious "hockey puck" one. (Which to be fair was actually pretty comfortable to use, assuming you ever got the damn thing pointing the right way.) I'm not one of them, but I'm not really a huge fan of mice, period -- and their current weirdo mouse-with-touch-surface certainly offers a lot of gesture control, and it's not that uncomfortable. (Granted, "The Apple Mouse: Hey, you've used worse" isn't a very compelling slogan.)

The hockey-puck mouse would have been a lot nicer to use had it been wireless. The small, round body didn't provide a good grip for wrestling with that stiff cable.

> even the notorious "hockey puck" one

I've always wondered why people hate on it so much -- even if someone prefers to point with their arm rather than their fingers, surely they can understand the appeal of using fingers to point at things?

Fingerpointing is touchscreen. The puck mouse was just awkward pushing with fingers.

Being able to tell the difference between the tiniest of arbitrary changes doesn't mean it's better. The anecdote could equally show how he's pointlessly stubborn.

All the praise in your comment only really works if the change is a clear improvement.

Yes it's a move which works when people demand changes in order to leave their mark or to be seen as "doing something"[0], it doesn't work in the case of people demanding changes because they actually want these changes.

[0] an attitude I find myself unthinkingly adopting when doing reviews.

i have the guilts reviewing work of non native english speakers and asking them to rename functions after review.

hard to ask for it without it seeming completely petty, particularly when everything else is perfect. it does represent a minor improvement.

It definitely requires some tact and thought first. The angle I like to focus on is whether something will actively confuse future maintainers. If it's an internal method and the name is odd but not misleading, it's probably not worth raising at a code review or maybe even privately

yeah it's definitely not one for the rooftops with a megaphone anyway.

This is also a good time for many of us to work on social skills: most people like getting help with a second language as long as it's not putting them on the spot & if you have a good relationship with someone you can bring it up at the right time more along the lines of “Isn't English so absurdly arbitrary?” than something to be defensive about.

I think this is being unnecessarily non-confrontational. As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead, I can't see how any serious programmers should take offence.

Consider it this way: natively speaking English means you have domain knowledge, sharing that domain knowledge should feel no different from pointing out mistakes in other domains. If someone gets English wrong, that's no different from getting, say, VAT calculation wrong.

Maybe I'm just assuming everyone already handles mistakes in other domains with tact and respect.

Also, it's a matter of proportion. If a function name is extremely misleading that's different from a function name just using an awkward synonym, just as a broken piece of code is different from dodgy indentation. You'll want to fix either problem eventually, but the immediate repercussions are quite different (serious bug vs minor annoyance, basically).

> As long as you explain why the term is wrong or sub-optimal and what it should be called instead

I think we're generally in agreement – I was trying to keep the focus on things which can be reasonably be considered objectively wrong and keeping the degree of wrongness in mind when deciding how to handle it. If you're on the low end of that scale, it's probably not a good use for everyone's time in a code-review session unless it happens a lot.

That's valuable work in my eyes.. a little effort helps a lot when returning to the code (or having someone else use it) later. Bad naming even causes unnecessary confusion once I'm immersed in the code base.. the fifth time or so I have to ask myself "Which one generated the view, 'processAnnotation' or 'handleAnnotation'?", I just spend the time to refactor.

Naming is incredibly important. I don't think that's petty at all.

As a non-native English speaker, I can tell you that this is not only perfectly acceptable but actually a good thing.

Naming is important. Bad function names are a bug in the API, just like any other API bug.

Non-native speakers frequently struggle naming things even more than native speakers, especially when they have to deal with a problem domain for the first time.

Just like any other mistake, bad function names usually aren't intentional -- often quite the opposite. I remember struggling with naming business domain related functions and variables in the first booking system I worked on, especially because the UI wasn't localized into English, so I had no direct reference. Should this class be called Invoice or Bill? Are the terms "netto" and "brutto" commonly used in English as they are in German? What's the proper plural of "index"? And so on.

Having tactful help from a native speaker can be a huge advantage.

This problem isn't isolated to non-native English speakers. The potential cost of poorly named methods/variables/classes, etc. is high enough on a complex product that it's almost always worth raising the issue in reviews. If your reviews are run positively it really shouldn't be an issue.

As an aside, I recently saw a job listing that included the requirement to be able to "defend your code in reviews" - I would say that's an environment where reviews probably aren't positive experiences.

On the other hand, I could see that as meaning "know what you're talking about so that you can defend the decisions you make."

As an intern, I've had many times where I'd say "I did it this way using A B and C, is that the best way? Are there any improvements you'd suggest?" after completing work. But in a more senior position, you probably don't want people second guessing / not really understanding these decisions.

I have no problem with anyone, from interns on up, constructively criticizing my code/architecture/design decisions. I work for a company with an exceptionally strong engineering culture and no one shies away from expressing an opinion when invited (and sometimes when not invited). That said, "defend" is a poor choice of words for code review. If someone asks me why I did something, I tell them. It's not a defense, it's an explanation. If they have a better way to do what needs to be done that's GOOD. If we disagree, we discuss why we disagree. Defending is what you do when someone's attacking you, not when you're collaborating.

There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off by one errors.

Why did i read that as him getting them to make a mouse that fit his hand comfortably, but wrapped it into a more generic dictate?

I think there is a more likely, albeight sadder explanation. Steve was simply able to read the faces of the team and correctly guess that they didn't comply. As a compliance professional he was very sensitive to that and immediately reacted.

Or, a more likely and less idiotically cynical explanation is that a man famous for having vision, aesthetic sense and incessant drive for excellence that enabled him to completely revolutionize multiple technology industries ACTUALLY had vision and a sense of aesthetics.

Idiotically cynical? You're getting oddly personal over this. A 'sense of aesthetics' doesn't mean you know the objectively right size to fit the very very different hand sizes of a million people down to the sub-millimeter level.

Not at all personal on my side; hell, the story is probably apocryphal.

I never said he was right or that I agreed with him, in fact I hate Apple Mice and actually find them too small. No idea where you are even getting that.

My point is that Steve Jobs was renowned for an obsessive, manic attention to exactly these kinds of detail and usually knew what he wanted and would blow up when he didn't get it; so it takes a special kind of person to dodge Occam's razor and go looking for some other explanation.

>Not at all personal on my side; hell, the story is probably apocryphal.

You called dchichkov's argument "idiotically cynical". That's a personal attack, even if you didn't mean it that way.

>I never said he was right or that I agreed with him, in fact I hate Apple Mice and actually find them too small. No idea where you are even getting that.

When you say "completely revolutionize multiple technology industries ACTUALLY had vision and a sense of aesthetics" in response to a comment that suggested he was reading expressions, that very heavily implies that Steve was correct. You need to work on wording if you have "no idea" how I got that impression.

>a special kind of person

This sounds like a personal insult again.

I don't know why you're so vehemently against the idea.

> You called dchichkov's argument "idiotically cynical". That's a personal attack, even if you didn't mean it that way.

No, I'll admit I meant it that way and I'll stand by it. What I meant is that it isn't a personal issue for me as I thought you were claiming. Those are different things.

> When you say "completely revolutionize multiple technology industries ACTUALLY had vision and a sense of aesthetics" in response to a comment that suggested he was reading expressions, that very heavily implies that Steve was correct. You need to work on wording if you have "no idea" how I got that impression.

No. I'm saying I believe (assuming the story is true) Jobs correctly detected the 1mm difference. I'm also saying I don't agree that the 1mm difference was the right call, certainly not for me. Jobs sense of aesthetics resulted in many great products but a few duds as well.

My point is that since Jobs is literally (in)famous for attention to small details and being a complete hard ass about seeing those details through to the end product, it is silly to not only question a story about his attention to small details but to offer another option as "most likely".

It does not mean I think Jobs walked on water and was always right.

This has blown up way farther than a quick throw away line.

Take into account that at least some his image was the result of a carefully planned PR. This is a known marketing tool for companies who sell luxury products.

An implausible, borderline impossible, tactical sensitivity is not vision and a sense of aesthetics. Cool your jets.

I think you're right here, he did have a sense of aesthetics.

The blog post I think was talking more about people who just have to change something to 'make their mark' and usually the mark makers are the managers, not the doers or the designers, making arbitrary changes so they feel validated, or powerful, or in control, who knows.

Steve knew what was nice though, indisputably, and in Australia we have the saying "Who's rooting this cat?", in Steve's case he was the one rooting it, whereas the PM in the blog post barely even knew the cat.

Kudos to Steve Jobs for being able to recognize the difference of what he was actually asking for.

Which is, of course, absolutely ridiculous if true. Not everyone has the same size and shape hands as Jobs did. I hate all of Apple's mice because they're far too small for me.

Didn't Steve email some iPhone project manager at 11:30pm because he noticed the shade of yellow on one of icons changed slightly?

He emailed a Google VP.

This would be a good story if apple had ever made a mouse that was even passably good.

They should've tried making it wider.

Jobs also insisted on the awful hockey puck mouse because he thought that a perfect circle was more important than ergonomics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com