So if a group of people wants to change the fundamental focus of this site from technology to animal evolution we're not allowed to say anything about it? Flagging doesn't do anything because too many people take your approach of just ignoring it (or worse down voting any concern as complaining).
There definitely seems to be a growing group of users who are looking to greatly expand the scope of this site and to me that dilutes the quality of the site.
Why are there so many random NY Times articles ending up on the front page lately? Back 6 months ago I never remember seeing these articles and now there seems to be one hitting the front page every day. I could understand if they were relevant technical articles but one about giraffes?
The worst part is they create very poor discussions where most of the comments get down voted because what can one really say about a story about giraffe evolution?
From what I hear, the roles are quickly collapsing at Microsoft. In the service orgs especially, the role that was previous done by a Test team is now handled by the Dev team. They are also increasing the ratio between PM and Dev (less PMs and more Devs) and many PMs are being asked to code in some fashion (prototypes and tooling). Be interesting to see how long the unique role of PM remains at Microsoft.
When I say engineering is about making it work, I mean it mostly in the sense that nobody gets to see how the sausage is made. No customer is ever going to critique your code or double check your cement pour. As long as it works, that's all that matters.
On the other hand, the work that a visual designer does is front and center, it is literally the only thing that a client will interact with. For example, when Microsoft introduced Metro that's all anybody talked about (good or bad). Nobody ever talked about what the code looked like that went into producing it. Customers only connect with what they can see.
You call it pigeonhole but a lot of people call it specialization. Some trades require it, others don't. I don't think you can generalize it and call it a problem. It's almost like expecting an expert plumber to wire up your 20 story condo building. Sure you can find a handyman that can do plumbing and electrical, but for your 20 story condo building you are going to call in people that specialize in electrical. And that's okay.
I think you're confusing visual design and UX design. I agree that UX design is mostly about making things work. Visual design (fonts, color palettes, use of white space, emphasis, etc) is mostly arbitrary, touchy-feely stuff. Some people just intuitively know what 'looks good' and what will create that emotional connection with users. This is much different then somebody doing a wire frame with a title and a text box.
While there might not be anything stopping somebody from being both a great developer and great designer, I've never come across somebody that is (though I've come across people that think they are...). I've seen exceptional developers who are terrible designers, decent developers who are decent designers, and exception designers who are terrible developers. I'm sure you could find some counter example but I've never come across them.
I think it is simply that there are only so many hours in a day. Somebody that spends 40+ hours a week over the course of years honing a particular craft will become more skilled than somebody that splits their time between multiple crafts (especially if they have existing talent in the area).
I also disagree that visual design and engineering share many of the same principles. Engineering is about making things work, visual design is about creating an emotional connection. There are no formulas or rules that can be systematically applied to make a product feel right. People that think they are similar probably have never had the pleasure of working with a top visual designer.
I would save yourself the trouble and create a separate domain now for customer subdomains. The problem with your current path is that it is impossible to tell the difference between a 7sheep.net subdomain that is owned and operated by 7sheep and a subdomain that is owned and operated by a 3rd party.
For example, training.7sheep.net is an official subdomain, but I could create docs.7sheep.net and make it look like an official subdomain and request peoples account information or do other bad things. GitHub ran into the same problem when they started supporting GitHub pages. Originally these were subdomains off of github.com, but after all the spoofing and other issues they moved them all to github.io. This way you never need to create a list of 'reserved' names and don't need to worry about confusion down the road.
This project is a mess. The boring has stopped until 2015 due to damage done to the drill and the cost has been steadily increasing. You can read more at http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2024187017_berthadela.... Turns out that boring large tunnels under cities is never straightforward.
Most developers already have a build system to concatenate and minify javascript and css files, plugging in the html minifier is straight-forward and doesn't add any additional complexity really. And since the minification is done at build time on a build machine (not request time on a production server), there is no impact on server side load.
I've never understood why people put Scientology in a different bucket than other religions such as Christianity. I wonder why you didn't comment 'The 79 Christians are trolls, right? ...right?'
This was my exact impression whenever I heard him speak at internal Microsoft meetings. He always says so much without ever actually saying anything. We would leave the meetings realizing that nothing he said had any impact on us. He's obviously an incredibly smart person, but always seemed afraid to take even a somewhat controversial opinion on anything.
Every time I come across one of these color generators it just reminds how much a good designer is worth. Putting together a pleasing color palette with the appropriate amount of contrast, interest, and color quality is really hard to do. I always laugh when our designer updates color values to ones that may look identical to me, but as soon as they are implemented and play off the other colors in the design (including the white space) everything just instantly feels more polished.
Whenever I hear about these I always wonder what the people that found them are thinking. I mean, what type of person would you have to be to decide to try and screw over the restaurant industry (which already has historically low margins) just to make a buck? I can't even imagine how many fake reservations they would need to create to make that idea worthwhile for them. And what investors would give them money to do so?
This video is pretty disingenuous in my opinion - it appears this woman remains in the home when people rent out a room (such that she share experiences with them according to the video). Looking through listings in NYC, this is not the common case at all - it's actually expected that a unit rented through Airbnb will be empty during your stay.
It's also getting more common that people are purchasing real estate for the sole purpose of renting it out through Airbnb. When I stayed in NYC via Airbnb, I never even met the owner of the unit (keys were dropped off at a coffee shop across the street) and it was very obvious that nobody ever lived in the unit.
I also have a problem with the tone of the video - "_I_ should be able to do this because it is a good thing for _me_." What about everyone else that lives in the building? They never signed up to live in a hotel. As a condo owner myself, I don't want random people that haven't been screened getting access to my otherwise secure building. I don't want to have to pay for any damage that they cause and I don't want to deal with any of the association rules that they break (noise regulations, pet regulations, parking, etc). While Airbnb might be great for the people renting out their home, it's a sum negative for everyone else legally living in the building.
If somebody told you to mail them $13.50 and they will mail you back $10, you would think they were crazy. But in today's world this is a valid idea for a startup?
It doesn't seem like they really did resurrect it. Typing in any zip code results in "Sorry - Prim is not accepting any new customers. Thanks for visiting"
Of course there is. They have to draw the line somewhere and there is always going to be an applicant that fell just below the line. I doubt Quora will take up as much bandwidth as other startups, but I'm sure it still figured into their calculations of how many teams they could accept.
This was a comment I made a while back. YC is only looking for companies that have already shown growth or meet some diversification goal. There are so many applicants with traction there is no need for them to invest in completely unproven ideas since they can just take a wait and see approach which turns out to be more profitable.
Even then - Airbnb is a souped up Craigslist that is breaking laws everywhere and Pinterest is yet another photo sharing board. They just happen to be very successful at the moment. Is that work really more interesting and engaging than creating operating systems, compilers, or working with the biggest of big data?
But if he works at Microsoft, then the VCs won't be able to extract value from him and make their money (especially painful when they lose a 20 something willing to work 90 hours weeks). Sure he might be happier, but think about the VCs! This is why it was a terrible decision.
Wow, first time I've seen Virtual Machine Manager mentioned in the wild. I was on the original team that built that product at Microsoft. How long I fought for a real, native API :( Worst part was that there was a decent one hiding beneath the PowerShell layer that was not exposed.
One of the nice things about green sock is that it doesn't have any dependencies. That is more important to me than a little bit more performance (since green sock is already pretty fast).
Yes, the return statement was what I was referring to. You can't use a type switch to do some sort of an implicit conversion that exists outside of the switch statement.