anthonyrubin

Do you honestly believe that people keep their browsers up to date? Do you know how old IE 6 is?

Do you honestly believe that their intent is to somehow deprive you of information? How exactly is this shady?

What if Incompetent + Nice never becomes Competent + Nice and they hold the same position that you do?

I just finished listening to the Design View podcast yesterday. Andy covers this topic in a few of the shows. Unfortunately he only did 8 shows in 2007, but they are all quite good.

http://show.andyrutledge.com/

There are no silver bullets.

Nice straw man. I advocate better software, not more software.

find, locate, dir /s and the horrendous file search in Windows XP (I haven't used Vista) are not solutions for most users. Under what circumstances are Spotlight, Google Desktop Search and Windows Desktop Search context aware? If I'm in MS Word will any of these tools show Word documents before other types of documents? If I'm using a browser will they perform a web search?

More than likely they don't understand how to manage someone at all.

When will programmers stop blaming users for the deficiencies of software?

Many users do not understand hierarchical filesystems. Few users care that "Computers work best with structured data." Why in the world would one argue against making a computer do work by searching for information?

Use Google to search for your home address. Try a UPS tracking number. Enter the first few characters of a word and wait a moment. Enter your zipcode followed by the word weather. These are the types of solutions that we should be working on.

Don't fret, neither does anyone else.

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn

His talk at Google:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nwwKbM_vJc

As far as I'm aware Gmail is far behind even the other webmail providers.

Here are a few that I don't think have been mentioned yet:

The Cooper Journal http://www.cooper.com/journal/

Google Testing Blog http://googletesting.blogspot.com/

Knowing and Doing http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/

To impress potential investors and acquirers.

What a bunch of senseless drama.

This phenomenon is extremely common. Most users seem to either call everything by the product name or by the company name. For example users will refer to Office or Windows as MS or refer to MS as Windows. At my current employer some of our users refer to our product and company by the name of the product and some refer to the product by the name of the company.

What would you propose they change the name of their company to?

I think the problem with a domain like charge.37signals.com is that many users don't understand how to type it in the address box (e.g. some will add www before it). If you've watched users try to enter URLs with subdomains in the address box you've likely experienced this.

Being able to add a PO number to the description would probably help at many companies.

Why do people feel the need to continue voting down a comment like this that is below 0? Clearly mikeyur made a mistake (HN could very easily prevent these types of mistakes). Voting it down to 0 seems sufficient.

You forgot to add that the US government heavily subsidizes corn (and a few other crops) as well.

Radiolab:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/

Limit the number of submissions per day per user in order to encourage high quality submissions.

People bike in the winter here in Chicago. I can't imagine breathing in the car fumes every day though.

Can we leave these inane issues to reddit?

There doesn't seem to be anything here that wasn't covered in his blog a week ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429231

What area do you live in? There are many more special interest groups in large cities. For instance there is talk of starting a Scala group here (Chicago) and there is already a Lisp group and a Polyglot Programmers group.

You need to break these problems down further.

Let's take Citibank.

The government is involved in changing behavior right from the inception of a corporation. It is called limited liability. We as a society accept this as we believe it encourages people to take more risks. It used to be that a corporate charter could be revoked if it were decided that the company was somehow harmful to the public. I am unaware of the last time this has actually occurred.

The government also encouraged risky behavior through GSEs (Freddie and Fannie). There was an implication that the government would take care of things when they went bad.

I personally believe that all of these problems are exacerbated by large public companies. Other than the possibility of having to find another job there is generally little risk in performing poorly or even maliciously at an individual level. Those at the top likely make enough money to survive a lifetime if they were fired tomorrow.

Now let's shift to the issue of energy.

Every drop of fuel you put in your vehicle is subsidized by the government. We spend trillions of dollars to fight wars in order to secure energy resources. These costs are externalized through taxes and it is thus feasible to drive vehicles which are not fuel efficient.

I have only scratched the surface on these two issues. I'm not advocating abolishing all regulation and government institutions. I do wish for more discussion which considers the effects that the government has on society. As the original poster alluded to, good intentions are not enough.

Why is it that everyone bitched when the iPhone offered a Javascript widget API and now Palm is being praised for it?