jbondeson

Imagine if you will that I release a phone that everyone in the world unanimously decided had a more responsive and beautiful UI than iOS, but only a battery life of 20 minutes. Would MG and every other person "whom the little details like UI responsiveness are supremely important" stand in line for weeks to get? Of course not.

Decisions as simple as "What phone will I buy" are an insanely complicated calculus of thousands of micro-decisions and trade offs.

People like MG like to pretend that they have themselves all figured out, and THE reason that the iPhone is superior for him is "the little things," or they buy Android because "its an open platform."

Its all bunk, they bought it because, hey the phone does what they need it to, and for some damn reason that particular configuration of options happened to strike a chord with them.

"The world is divided into two groups, those that think little details like freedom are supremely important and those who don't notice or don't care so much"

"The world is divided into two groups, those that think little details like enterprise integration are supremely import and those who don't notice or don't care so much"

The argument holds no water. I can draw a line in the sand however I'd like to make any product seem better, and anyone who disagrees is just in that other group.

This whole "argument" is inane. People have preferences, and the rational ones will act in accordance to those preferences if they have the means. Getting huffy because someone dares to disagree with your preferences is asinine.

There are tons of industries that should require it. The issue is that we focus in on the software that can directly kill us, rather than all the software that can indirectly do it. We instantly reason that all software we use to control things like cars or airplanes should be highly controlled, but what about financial software, phone systems, medical records software?

One of the sloppiest and haphazard programmers I ever worked with is now writing software for non-critical medical monitoring devices (external monitors like O2 sensors, and blood pressure monitors) and it scares the living daylights out of me. When I'm in a hospital room I look around to see if his company's hardware is in use. It might not kill me, but it could contribute to that end.

I'll come full circle around to my initial assertion that I don't know if we can even get to the point of a true Professional Software Engineer. Many of the tasks we deal with are highly abstract. How do we define an acceptable failure rate for a TCP stack? And even if we do, how do we take that into account for a monitoring application? There are many hard questions we have to tackle prior to our industry being taken seriously as a true engineering discipline.

What troubles me is that very few of the leaders in the software community even care about these questions.

I'm sorry, I wasn't very precise in my language, I meant the industries working together to generate a more generic process that isn't tied to a specific industry. This would be done with the intention of building a Professional Software Engineer program.

Anything relying on the physical world obviously cannot be mathematically verified, however the mathematical rigor is still there in the modelling and testing.

The aerospace and medical fields have done quite a bit to increase the rigor in building software, however there doesn't seem to be any push from them to codify their processes and establish some sort of push for the industry as a whole. The establishment of a true Software Engineering discipline would require some consensus on the use of formal methods in specification design, and then program verification.

The other hurdle is that you need the same rigor from your hardware designers. Just as structural engineers must rely on the rigor of steel manufacturers, we are held hostage by hardware manufacturers. Frankly the entire industry needs a wake up call.

As for formal verification, it is the mathematical proof (in the pure sense) that a program behaves exactly as speced -- the specification must also be formally verified for consistency. Currently this is only possible on relatively small programs, with the largest being several compiler back-ends being verified.

Here's a paper on what it took to formally verify the seL4 micro-kernel: http://www.sigops.org/sosp/sosp09/papers/klein-sosp09.pdf

You're an Engineer who writes software, nothing wrong with that. Lots of Chemical and Electrical Engineers write software, I'm still not going to call them Software Engineers.

This isn't about discrediting anyone's life work. The fact is if you're developing software that gets deployed on anything but purpose-built hardware you're already not engaging in proper engineering practices. It would be like building a bridge with materials whose properties you didn't know.

Frankly, I dispute the existence of a "Software Engineer."

The UK and parts of Canada may recognize and regulate people with this title, but I don't believe that the same rigor _can_ be applied to building software.

You would have to work with formally verified (and I mean that in the mathematical sense) hardware and software all the way up and down the stack (that would include the language and compiler you utilize). You would then have to formally verify your own software on the stack you are deploying to. Only then would you be approaching the rigor that other Engineering professions are held to.

#4 - Cloud9 seems to fit the bill http://c9.io

Tab Groups. For those of us who do lots of research and like to keep it organized it's a godsend.

Right now I have 159 tabs open -- I was curious so I decided to count. If I tried that in Chrome I'm pretty sure it would crash and burn hard, not to mention there would be no ability to keep it organized.

I know there are some research workflows that would allow me to do that as well, but I haven't really taken the time to dive into them after I found tab groups.

It almost seems impossible to imagine men like Ritchie leaving us. His efforts helped usher in the modern computing age.

While he is no longer with us in person, may his legacy never be forgotten by those of use who have had the honor to stand on his titanic shoulders.

Truly he will be missed.

I would argue that the frequency of SMS usage has very little to do with the type of phone you have, and much more to do with the demographic. There are plenty of iPhone users (such as my mother) who don't use SMS at all, and plenty of 14 year olds without smart phones (like my cousin) who text dozens of times a day.

Either way, I've never seen a breakdown of SMS usage by either category.

The iPhone has 4-5% market share of worldwide mobile phones. Even if you could get every smart phone manufacturer to convert that still would only get you to a ~20% market share.

SMS isn't going anywhere soon.

It sounds like you think I'm belittling the iPad. I really don't know what's bad about being a really big iPhone. A different form factor of an excellent product can still be excellent. Apple made a great piece of hardware with some pretty crazy hardware wizardry, but non-techies don't care about that because they expect it from Apple.

I'm merely trying to describe what I've heard my non-techie friends praise about the iPad. They like that the user experience is almost wholly translated to the iPad. They like that they can get all the apps they have on their phone on their iPad. They like that it's bigger.

I've never heard a non-techie say "I really like this new dual-core processor," or "I really like the 4:3 aspect ratio as opposed to the 1.5:1 on the iPhone!" We (royal HN we) may love to obsess about all the little nuances that make the iPad different from the iPhone, but the fact of the matter is that most people just don't care.

I think the problem is that people are looking at this backwards.

The vast majority of people buy the iPad not because they want a tablet, they buy it because they want a really big iPhone. HP, RIM and most of the others seemed to not understand this and attempted to build a really big iPhone... without the iPhone ecosystem. Surprise, surprise they failed miserably.

Apple did a very smart thing, they took a product that was selling like hotcakes, and they introduced a product that was identical save for the form factor. Every iPhone user (which is a whole lot of people) was suddenly an expert iPad user! They felt at home, they felt safe, they got what they wanted: a really big iPhone.

No one has figured out a way to objectively measure eyestrain so it's a completely personal decision.

As a developer I too spend all day reading and writing text on a screen and I can can tell you that there are so many things that go into what causes me eyestrain personally that I'm sure making any of it objective would be tough.

I have tons of problems with eyestrain when reading black-on-white text for long periods of time, so the kindle works great for me. I'm sure with a sufficiently configurable reading app I could tweak it until I could stand it, but I don't know too many PDF readers that allow you to start messing with background colors and the like.

As a Kindle DX owner, it's all about the form factor and readability.

Back lit screens cause eyestrain for those of us who read quite a bit. With my DX I can read for hours on end in any environment I could read a dead tree version in. And with the battery life measured in page turns, even when reading at a crazy clip I can go more than a week without charging.

Form factor was the other huge sell. If I want the ability to read my collection of technical PDFs without a microscope (or awkward panning) the large size is needed. Even with non-PDFs I like the hardback size font and character count on lines.

The DX is the only game in town to get both of those right.

I think you're missing the fundamental limitation of this: the SSN identification.

Even if I give you the ability to go from picture to real name (which to many is still fairly jarring) given only "open" databases at 100% accuracy you still can't come near your 50% mark. The leap from real name and place of birth to SSN is the limiting factor, and the reason for this is the randomness inherent in the assignment of the last 4 digits of one's social security number. Given the ability to guess > 10% of that range (they have access to all SSNs who are deceased as well), the researchers could still get only 8% nationwide accuracy on recent SSNs.

You would need a fundamental change in that algorithm to get close to the numbers you want. This isn't a technological limitation, it's a algorithmic limitation, and you can't really put time frames on these kinds of breakthroughs.

No that really isn't plausible. Read their original SSN prediction paper [1] and you will see that the highest they got their SSN prediction (with < 1000 attempts, which is quite a few) was 8.5% for SSN's assigned after 1988. For 1979-1988 that number was 0.8%. Only in the smallest states with issuance after 1996 do they get their best numbers of +60% matches.

That's only the SSN portion. When you add in the facial recognition, the requirement of a facebook account with pictures and a correlation to place of birth, you're going to see those numbers plummet.

At best this is a clever hack that highlights the risks inherent with publicizing your life on places like facebook.

[1] - http://www.pnas.org/content/106/27/10975.full.pdf

I think the key is that there are crappy puzzles (and coding a blog system is not a "puzzle") and there are decent puzzles. I've been giving applicants a simple word search puzzle for over five years and it has been great at differentiating candidates.

The biggest plus for me as the hiring manager is that it allows me to be much more confident in taking flyers on people without that picture perfect resume.

The fact that it takes her calling you out in front of what amounts to the entire tech community to get you to act is appalling and speaks very poorly about how you value your customers.

You've known about this for five weeks and the best you've come up with is to just stand by and wait?

You're arguing against yourself here - GetAround obtained insurance even while being disruptive.

More to the point, neither GetAround or AirBnB are in any way deep into territory that insurance hasn't ventured before. Insuring against burglary/damage in rental properties happens all the time, just like for rental cars.

The only times when insurance is unattainable is when the risks highly outweigh the premiums (SEE: Flood insurance in the Mississippi Delta) or when there is no actuarial data available which is tough to come by at this point.

For the first point I'm going to say the parent is very correct in avoiding this type of un-insurable behavior. And as for the latter, you had better have deep, deep pockets because if you can't even convince an insurance company of the risk, are you sure you've thought it through?

I know you were being glib here and not completely serious but I'm still going to respond to the general sentiment.

Every day we do take risks by stepping out the front door, however the communities we belong to institute safeguards to help mitigate these numerous risks. We hire police officers, firemen, and construct hospitals. Living in these communities is not free, we pay taxes to support this.

AirBnB is a virtual community that also collects taxes: 3% to be exact. However, they do nothing but mitigate the risks of funds transfer, and in other cases increase the risk by handcuffing attempts at vetting.

So, yes, while I do face these horrible possibilities every day I know that the communities I belong to are attempting to minimize them -- can you honestly say that about AirBnB's community?

The only due diligence possible is an AirBnB-provided, essentially anonymous, IM conversation. Anyone who attempts to use the AirBnB service who isn't running a legitimate short-term rental property (with all the associated insurance and safeguards) is playing russian roulette with their property and possessions. And if they're home during the rental they're potentially risking life and limb.

This is a failure of the business model. If they are unwilling to get into the business of creating a safe, vetted community for short-term rentals, they need to disallow personal rental properties and stick with full-time rental companies.

I'm not vain enough to believe that my moral compass is The moral compass for all.

This is also not a community safety issue until I see the study that shows a statistically significant change toward aggressive/violent behavior in children who play violent video games.

> Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass.

No, shitty parents develop shitty moral compasses. Take your pick about shitty information sources: TV, video games, the internet, trashy magazines/newspapers. If that's where you learn about normalcy, you're going to have a shitty moral compass.

Yes, there are also cases of great parents having shitty kids, parenting is a complicated and messy business. My point is that if you can actually say one source (e.g. video games) is developing a child's moral compass, that's shitty parenting.

This is going to sound cynical, but I will not trust a company that has the ability to lock me in with my online identity. Just because "current" management respects privacy doesn't mean future management won't sell me up the river.

The setup would have to remove all power a company has over my data, and I haven't seen a system proposed that would do that other than Diaspora. However I have zero faith in them being able to actually deliver as they've shown that they just don't understand how to deliver an open source product of this nature..

This attitude is exactly why I will never have a facebook account. He sees the protests as a problem, not the degradation of privacy.

Yes, people adapt when they feel they have no choice, but that doesn't make it right.

"In the UK it is deemed that people have a right to privacy."

I believe the public outcry is more around the fact that this is only available to corporations and the rich as these super-injunctions run over £100k[1] to obtain.

[1] This number has been bandied about in many of the articles, but I haven't seen an "authoritative" source on it.

If you're repeating the exact same thing to a dozen different friends I'm going to assume that you (or they) are not engaged by the news -- which is what I call "life trivia."

Most of what I see on twitter is this trivia, "I refinished my floors," "I bought an iPad." Would you normally go out of your way to talk about this to anyone who didn't ask "What did you do this weekend?" Probably not, so why do you feel the need to broadcast it to the world via Twitter/Facebook/<Insert Lifeless Tech Here>?

Now take something you have a passion for. I personally am an avid homebrewer and love to talk about beer. I'll talk to a half dozen different friends about the latest batch of beer I made and have completely different conversations and get insights into what they like. I have friends that are huge into climbing, now I have no big interest in it myself, but their passion draws me into the conversations and over the past decade I've learned more about climbing than I ever would have if it were just some posts.

It takes an amazing writer to really evoke the emotions that most of our daily conversations have, and let's face it, the world isn't exactly filled with amazing writers.

Oddly enough I have the exact opposite take on it. My wife and I both don't have Facebook accounts, and while most of my friends also do not have accounts, many of my wife's friends do. These friends live in the same state as us, and while we don't live in the same city we still manage to get together frequently. In the last few years we have noticed quite the trend: everyone of these people on Facebook would do a double-take whenever we didn't hear about some large event in their life. They assume that because it was on their Wall, that everyone knew about it. They didn't think to _call_ all their friends to talk about the great news, they simply threw it up on their Wall without thought.

No longer do you have to think about your friends as individuals and how you're going to break news to them, or how they are going to react -- now you can simply throw up a general message and lose the individuality in a flood of responses.

The depersonalization of communication has been exacerbated by a number of different technologies (such as email), however Facebook has allowed us to perfect the art communication without soul.