dieterrams

This isn't about which CEO is the better human being. It's about which management style is more effective.

This is true, and I think it accounts for a lot of the difference in quality between their products. But in this case, it sounds like there just weren't clear, enforced rules about integration, interoperability, and usability. Not once in the email does Gates reference an existing, company-wide set of standards. Even a company like Microsoft is capable of having and enforcing such a thing, and it would actually boost productivity over the long run. If all the different teams are doing their own thing and subject to an off-the-cuff usability review only after they've shipped, they will ultimately spend more time making revisions than they would have spent targeting standards from the start.

I've no idea what Microsoft was like at the time, so maybe they did have such a thing, but if there was, I can't imagine it had much priority in the corporate culture.

I keep getting downvoted. I'm not sure why. My guess is that criticizing criticism of an article that a bunch of people find sketchy has made me a target for their low opinion of the article or site itself. This seems especially likely given that the only response to my original comment, which has been increasingly upvoted while mine have been downvoted, chooses to see the lack of top-aligned labels for the comments form as likely evidence that the article was authored for base motivations, or that the author doesn't really believe his own advice. This despite the fact that I offered several very plausible reasons why it would not count as such evidence. Here's another one, just for the hell of it: laziness.

I have no idea if the site is as sketchy as people claim, because I've never even heard of it before. But even if it is, I still wouldn't think the comment form comes anywhere close to giving unambiguous information about the author's motives. There are so many highly plausible reasons for this that you'd have to be thoroughly unreasonable to assume that it's strong evidence for any particular reason.

> It really makes you wonder whether the post was written to increase a counter in a database or out of conviction that this is the way to go.

Again, this just has no relevance to the claims on offer. You can evaluate them for yourself without wondering what the author's motives are.

> Interestingly, they don't follow their own advice. The comment form after the article uses right-aligned labels.

Apologies, but these sorts of observations/criticisms are fairly common on HN (I remember someone saying "they don't follow their own advice" about the Stanford web credibility guidelines), and I have to say I consider them pointless. Observing hypocrisy and pseudo-hypocrisy is necessary if you're making a decision that depends heavily on someone's character, like electing a president, but it's almost always irrelevant when assessing the merit of what someone says.

People often have good reasons for not implementing their own advice, too. Maybe it was a higher priority for them to get the word out rather than make sure everything public they do complies with it first. Sometimes it's a cost-benefit problem: improving blog comment forms probably won't make much of a difference to their bottom line, but improving a new user sign-up form very well could. Comment forms are also fairly standard in what information they expect and in what order, so again, probably not a huge payoff. In Stanford's case, they already have the credibility that comes with being Stanford. Etc.

> The answer may be related to the early age at which mathematicians seem to peak.

I may have been searching badly, but I couldn't really find anything to support this idea, at least in terms of a cognitive deficit. The following was the best discussion about mathematicians and age that I found:

http://sps.nus.edu.sg/~limchuwe/articles/youth.html

Bullet points:

- Mean age of best contribution by mathematicians is 38.8 (based on counting references to research by historians and biographers). This is roughly the same for other SET researchers.

- The Fields Medal cannot be awarded to mathematicians over the age of 40, which skews the mean age of mathematicians receiving their field's most prestigious award.

- As mathematicians get older, they take on more administrative work, have families, etc., which reduces the time and energy they have to devote to research. (I'm reminded of how Andrew Wiles basically shut out the world while proving Fermat's Last Theorem.)

- Rapid expansion of the field meant an increasing proportion of mathematicians were young, thus more discoveries were by young people.

- Math is a field where someone can make a great contribution without having acquired a large body of knowledge.

- Young math prodigies get a disproportionate share of attention.

At this moment, the following article is sitting right next to this one on the front page, which is great:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1644200

The abundance of such trivial apps is more than adequately explained by (1) their trivialness to implement, and (2) their established reputation for actually making money.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I don't believe the kind of people who want to make significant, high-quality apps like the one Rob made are the kind of people who would so easily stoop to making a fart app.

Which is fine, of course. He's more than justified in defending himself. This article just isn't interesting from a "too few women in tech" angle, and you can't really generalize from what's going on here. It's fine that he wrote it, I just don't see that it warrants much attention from HN.

This is just Michael Arrington defending TechCrunch against one person's assumption that they're not aware of the issue. There's nothing really relevant to the issue itself here, aside from the obvious point that the reason why there are "too few" women in tech is because there aren't enough women who want to be in tech.

That's true. There really isn't a good way to communicate with your userbase. You're basically limited to updating the app description and hoping your existing users bother to click the "More" link to read it (assuming you didn't put the update at the top, because that's prime real estate for attracting new customers).

It really astounds me hearing about how long new apps and updates can get stuck in limbo, with no feedback from Apple or path to action. So far I've managed to avoid any nightmare scenarios, but every new anecdote I read makes me increasingly anxious that one day, that time will come.

Barring the possibility of Apple ever laying down clear, comprehensive, stable and reliable guidelines for avoiding rejection (with many real, anonymized examples), it sounds like the MVP approach is the best way to go.

Rob's case is special, though, because his app was never actually rejected. I suppose if he'd been willing to submit a MVP and wait the same amount of time in limbo before putting any more effort into it, he could have saved himself all that hard work. But the aggravation of not getting an answer would have still sucked.

> You could argue that these are somehow related, that the young and hip would be attracted by the Think Different ad. I don't dispute that. But the later ads of kids jamming with their iPod ear buds communicate a message that is much closer to the general perception of Apple as a brand today.

The Think Different ad was about Apple, the company. Kids jamming with their iPod earbuds was about the iPod. The Think Different ad was about revitalizing the Apple brand, and Jobs points out how the Nike ads aren't even about the product to explain the logic behind that ad, not to suggest that Apple was going to take that approach forever like Nike does. It makes sense that after they'd established the values they wanted associated with Apple, they'd return to product-centric advertising.

In 2008, ten years after the Think Different campaign debuted, six years after the slogan was mostly retired, and well after the earbud ads hit their peak, there was a study on whether flashing Apple or IBM logos faster than could be percieved could prime people to be more creative. The results suggest it's not really necessary for them to keep playing up that angle.

http://www.physorg.com/news125073871.html

I won't say the restrictive policies governing iOS hasn't dampened the message somewhat for people like us, but you have to remember that a lot of it is about empowering people who aren't super great with computers and don't feel they have the freedom to use them the way anybody here does, because of their complexity and vulnerability. Remember that thread a little while back, where HNers were sharing stories about how some family member would write long lists of instructions just to do something like check their email?

> But that same post waxed on to almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism. And that's the type hystrionics I'm talking about.

"almost absurd levels of pseudo philosophical anthropomorphism"? Are you reading that post correctly? When I said "Truly personal computers," I'm not saying the computers are like persons. I'm saying that they fit people to a far greater degree than any other PC I've ever seen.

> There isn't even a single post here in this thread (and there are 171 right now) that says something to effect of "This LED thing is cool, but Apple drops the ball on <insert xyz widely known problem>".

Uh, yes there is. My post, which is currently right below yours (edit: well, it was), explicitly acknowledges that fact. I also wrote another comment about a Mac OS menu behavior that I dislike, which has been voted up, not down. mkramlich also mentioned his problems with iOS 4 on an iPhone 3G here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1635018.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that Apple fans "religiously ignore" problems with their products. Do you actually spend time on the support forums, or various Apple-centric sites? I've never met an Apple fan that thought Apple was 100% perfect. Does every single thread appreciative of something a company is good at need to prominently feature criticisms of everything that company is bad at as well? Of course not. Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment.

> Instead we get north of 170 posts, all breathlessly agreeing that they wish Apple could have their child.

You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here.

That's brilliant. I'd never noticed that about Mac OS submenus (although I definitely noticed how arduous it was to navigate Windows submenus).

I do have one outstanding gripe about Mac OS menus, though, which is that if you misclick on some non-reactive part of the menu (a greyed-out option or divider line), it simply closes the menu. I can't think of any reason why this would be better behavior than leaving the menu open, since at least 90% of the time my intent was to actually click on something that would respond.

> Personally, I think we should not personify our computing hardware. It's a tool, not your friend.

I think the breathing LED is great precisely because it's a subtle form of personification that manages to be "friendly" without actually going far enough to be "your friend". (Remember: technophobes.)

Also, it's relaxing. Sometimes this is exactly the cue you want after a stressful session at the computer.

The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers. This is the kind of stuff that gets people lining up for new Apple products, not some silly brand whoring or desire to be hip and fashionable.

Admittedly, they made the LED way too bright on the earlier MBPs, such that it would distract you if you were trying to sleep in a dark room. The newer MBPs have gotten the brightness just right, however.

Also, none of this ignores the fact that Apple routinely privileges superficial aesthetics over ergonomics, utility, etc. (Magic Mouse, hard edges on MBP, glossy displays), but that rarely stops the whole package from being the best on the market.

> In general, this is a good thing as taking the skeptical position forces a minimum degree of critical thinking, which makes that comment more useful.

One thing I've noticed is that comments which basically start off with "Bullshit" followed by a heated, not obviously wrong rebuttal tend to get a lot of upvotes.[1] And it can still accumulate upvotes even after another comment has shown that rebuttal to be wrong, and not even wrong in a good way.

Default skepticism is a good thing, but I think we're overly susceptible to assuming that anything resembling a righteous debunking from another HNer is right.

The other thing I've noticed is that if a submitted article isn't popular with some faction, but seriously damaging criticisms have not been forthcoming, then a comment demonstrating that a non-critical claim is wrong, or merely uncertain, will tend to get highly upvoted and treated as if it justified dismissing the whole article.

[1] Recent example: back in the New App Rejection Reason thread, the most downvoted top-level comment initially had 9+ karma, and had the structure I just described. Thankfully, more thoughtful people showed how it didn't make any sense, and it quickly got downvoted into oblivion. But a good number of people got fooled.

It was my last day there.

The email is confusingly worded, but I think it's simply saying that

1. you can't require account registration if the app does not provide account-specific functionality, and

2. if your app has both account-specific and non-account-specific functionality, registration can only be required to access the former.

I'm going to agree with houseabsolute and chalk this up to a mistake. That is, the app reviewer mistakenly assumed the app did not have account-specific functionality, or exclusively account-specific functionality. There are far too many (major) apps that require an account to do anything for his interpretation to make sense.

I wouldn't put this sort of craziness past Apple, but reviewer error just seems far more likely.

'Pivot' is the new 'leverage'. We're just leveraging it in different ways. You should pivot into this new verbal environment.

Like reading this forum....

> I wonder if that's representative of the economy changing, or if it's representative of the site's audience changing.

Fewer rejects. :)

Reminds me of another Steve, circa 1982:

http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/y_walker08.html

This is about where things are heading, not where they stand right now.

I'm 100% certain you've read things that are more factually incorrect. Also, you're quoting a quote from the article, whose alleged factual incorrectness doesn't make the article itself incorrect. Granted, the article's author also refers to the Google-Verizon proposal as a "deal" just above to the quote, but here's the thing:

I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.

I'm not sure why this is notable. You've long been able to post updates longer than 140 characters. They get truncated in the feed, but not when viewed individually.

Edit: icodemyownshit's explanation is likely correct. (I hadn't realized the tweet was just one big link.)

I don't think nearly enough credit is being given to the advances they made with the Mac following Jobs' return. The original iMacs were a big deal, and they've been nailing the all-in-one desktop ever since. Likewise with their laptops. Switching to Intel and supporting dual boot, also a huge deal.

iPods were definitely a huge growth driver for the Mac, but Apple without the iPod or the benefit of Vista would still be far from dead.

Ah, when I spoke of your personal desires, I wasn't talking about what you desired from your carrier. It's rather strange that you'd interpret it that way, since that obviously doesn't make any sense. However, you do have a reputation for being uncharitable and holding irrational grudges against people, which also explains your weird "whole company" assumption.

Whatever the case, you are strangely attempting to justify carrier pricing schemas through customer costs alone, as if the carriers were driven by sheer necessity rather than the desire to exploit their leverage in a deficiently competitive market. Maybe that's not what you're suggesting. If it is, my breaking even point still stands. If it isn't, and you agree that the pricing schemas are driven by leverage exploitation, then my larger point that carriers will abuse their power to the detriment of the public still stands.

I'll grant you one thing, which is that your "usage models" argument is sufficient to explain why tethering restrictions exist at all. But it's neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the specific pricing schemes, which I chalk up to leverage exploitation. And don't try to tell me carriers would never exploit their customers--they have an established and unambiguous record of doing exactly that.

I'll be leaving this conversation now, since I'm pretty sure you're in this to attack me rather than have a genuine discussion. Take care!