lusr

I don't follow this logic. "I'm certainly disappointed in the pervert's use of the open curtains here, but we need to fix open curtains as a whole." Apple are still responsible for the ethics of their actions, regardless of the legality of those actions.

I've had my .NET clients talk successfully to .NET back-ends, Java back-ends, and Cobol wrappers with no problems, with security extensions, etc. all enabled. But the key to that was having an active architecture group responsible for ensuring consistency across the organisation (libraries for each client platform host).

I'd like to know too. There are a lot of people here rubbishing SOAP without explaining why. I've consumed, simultaneously with hundreds of other developers from disparate teams, 100s of SOAP services across a number of financial institutions and any issues I ran into had nothing to do with SOAP. Generating code with SvcUtil is great and does what it's supposed to - and nothing stops you from refining it or writing your own service clients.

I don't need to run service calls from the command line - I have version controlled integration tests that I right click on and select "run", as should every major consumer of serious services.

I don't believe SOAP web services are always the way to go (I've never used any in my personal projects, preferring my own web API and/or a service bus), but that doesn't mean it's not suitable for other problems.

What's often missing from these debates is defining what environment you're operating in (legacy and dependant systems/platforms/interfaces, network architecture, how much architectural control you have, user load, number of developers, number of teams, release cycles, politics [what was the last big budget item that was purchased to solve the current problem], timelines etc.). Once you start identifying the environment details, some of the simplistic unqualified suggestions people make in these debates seem naive and ridiculous.

In my experience there isn't an issue. It all comes down to how well you design your application. Here's the interface to a service in a fun side project I'm currently working on (comments removed):

    public interface IAnalysisService
    {
        Guid CreateAnalysis(Guid ownerId, string name);
        void LoadingAnalysisInputs(Guid analysisId);
        void RequestAnalysis(Guid analysisId, string number, IEnumerable<Records> inputs);

        Guid CreateAndRequestAnalysis(Guid ownerId, string name, string number, params Records[] inputs);
        Guid CreateAndRequestAnalysis(Guid ownerId, string name, string number, IEnumerable<Records> inputs);

        Analysis FindAnalysis(Guid analysisId);
        Analysis FindAnalysisForProcessing(Guid analysisId);

        void CompletedAnalysis(Guid analysisId, AnalysisResults results);
        void FailedAnalysis(Guid analysisId, string reason, params object[] args);        
    }

These methods implement some business rules, do some database work and throw a few messages onto a service bus. Why is it so hard to believe that the database implementation for any of these methods affects the consumers? Here's a sample implementation:

        public void FailedAnalysis(Guid analysisId, string reason, params object[] args)
        {
            AnalysisRepository.Failed(analysisId, string.Format(reason, args));

            Bus.Send(new AnalysisCompleted {AnalysisId = analysisId});
        }

I don't see any obvious bugs, complexity or leaky abstractions.

I'm a big fan of relational databases. The problem with them is the high upfront cost of developing a new product: maintaining your schemas, updating data types, getting bogged down in data mapping code and worrying about what the most efficient SQL implementation is going to be, etc.

I like the fact I can whip something up quickly with MongoDB, get everything working and then once my schemas and services operating thereupon have stabilised then I can start looking at swapping my implementations out for a SQL-based back-end if I think it's worthwhile.

DB Level Locking (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-4328) is a dependency of Collection Level Locking (https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-1240). For a critical, tricky core piece of functionality like this it makes sense to tackle one major concurrency issue at a time, do a release, stabilise the code and verify there are no issues introduced by the new locking code and only then release the next step in locking enhancements. Doesn't seem like they're "pretending" about anything as far as I can tell.

It sounds like the patent owner took the case personally, made every other juror there fantasize about owning patents and being screwed over, and greed won their opinions at the end of the day.

This seemed like an interesting story so I dug into it a bit more because the notion of a for-profit charity organization was unfamiliar to me.

But detailed information seems very scarce. The article states Avon were sued for breach of contract - but mentions no damages, despite an apparently successful claim. This seems very strange - clearly the founder was passionate about his cause, so why not take whatever penalties were paid out and use them to restart the cause?

From reading the Pallotta Teamworks (PTW) site (http://www.pallottateamworks.com/about_pallotta4.php), one can infer there was apparently an arbitration (IANAL, how do you go from "suing" to "arbitration"? I thought suing can only happen after arbitration but there's no mention of a lawsuit...) but even on that site there is absolutely zero indication of PTW receiving anything despite "winning". This story just doesn't add up.

KomenWatch, which seems rather biased, but still adds another angle to the story, suggest that Avon severed ties with PTW because of growing criticism (http://komenwatch.org/history-politics/avon-3-day/).

Anybody have a reference to a more objective discussion of these events?

Could one then attack their standing as a lawyer, i.e. pursue seeing them disbarred?

Some children are quite smart - possibly smarter than some adults will ever be. Most are not as smart as the average adult, however, and some will never be. None of this is really surprising?

Whether one is dealing with an adult or child, there's no need to make assumptions about intelligence. I mean, some kids can spell and proof read better than adults, or at least type out the word "airport" correctly :)

Are you saying you can't imagine yourself with those fears? That's fair enough. To claim, however, that no 16 year old male could behave that way seems absurd. I myself provide a counterexample; perhaps I am not real to you :) (My social anxiety - described so well by this post - extended well into adulthood and even now in my late 20s I still suffer from occasional social anxiety.)

Completely believable to me and a very astute set of observations.

I've been there. I know exactly the difference you describe between justifiable fear (the unknown physical consequences of diving off a board for the first time) vs. the far more powerful irrational fears (mind reading that everybody is looking at you and laughing at how awkward you appear, especially the cute girl over there that you are quite attracted to, and how disappointed she's going to be if you mess up the dive; maximising the importance of your dive performance in your mind because you believe she wants somebody perfect, whereas for all you know she thinks it's cute, etc.).

I especially enjoyed your conclusion - it's one I reached before, myself. Socially awkward people who eventually develop out of their behaviour have a great gift - they can recognize and empathize with other socially awkward people far better than the natural extroverts and, through their words of encouragement and empathy, share the gift of self-confidence.

1. Seems a bit strange asking that question AFTER you spend the money. Surely you should ask it before you spend the money.

2. Worst case, at the very least you sell your excess capacity as cloud computing resources so your servers aren't sitting there doing absolutely nothing.

Interesting. While I really enjoyed the post, something that stuck out for me was: what if they don't apply your philosophy as you expect? Isn't this how great companies fall down, when the founder's philosophy is lost and replaced by internal politics? Some how you should be able to review the decisions being made without having to waste even more time doing the review.

If you think he meant well, yet you think his comment could be misinterpreted, you could highlight where you think his comment could be misinterpreted and offer a more suitably qualified statement that all parties could agree upon.

Both mekoka and TazeTSchnitzel did just that, and I do it when people make stupid racist comments, too, for instance (I live in South Africa and sadly this still happens more often than I'd like).

It's a non-confrontational way of dealing with the difference in opinion, and critically, gives people an opportunity to move forward while saving face.

Some people don't think giving a diplomatic exit is appropriate in -ism scenarios, but I prefer giving people an opportunity to change their opinions - and the reality is that if you try to tell someone they are sexist or are racist you will never get through to them because their ego defences will kick in, but if you point out, with sensitivity, that their statement is unfair in some way they 'seem' to have missed, you give them an opportunity to grow because you didn't involve their ego.

Remember that most people's opinions are handed down from friends/family/social programming and seldom subject to introspection; they may be just embarrassed by what they've said as you are, but most people lack the self esteem to admit they're wrong openly. If you give them some sense of self respect despite their gaffe they often appreciate it.

In my experience most people pick up that if they don't deal fairly with reality as you propose then they'll have to admit they are sexist/racist/etc. and they quickly learn to revise their statements. Of course some people really are sexist or racist and don't care, but then at least you won't have to worry about misinterpretation once they freely acknowledge that.

I don't know him, but reading this story it doesn't sound like he learned anything. Sounds like this sort of behaviour is him. I'm jealous - it took me years just to get to the point where I realised I'd been taking "no" as an (unnecessary) absolute, never mind consciously changing that pattern of behaviour.

You know you actually did have a very good point and I even agree entirely with it. But the anger and aggression in your writing is such a huge turn-off that it was difficult to fairly consider what you said, and that was the gist of my facetious post.

Evidently some people agree with me. You can continue to be angry that your style of discourse isn't accepted, or you can do something about it and have people give your insight the time it deserves. I believe you're selling yourself short.

My profile links to my Flickr account, which has my real name. I don't currently maintain a blog or anything more meaningful to link to. I use this nickname throughout the net. You can email me at <pick anything>@lusr.org. I'm not hiding anything.

The person I responded to frequents HN (according to their own words); it seems highly likely they know quite well how non-constructive their response was and specifically chose to use a throwaway account rather than stand behind their comment under their normal account.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot of on the Internet. You hide behind an account you just made, aggressively, lengthily and rudely responding to somebody who actually desired to contribute to the discussion without contributing much of anything yourself, without seeing the irony in any of this.

Incredibly deceptive title. It's a UX review. What did you expect Samsung to do, sit around and wait for customers to complain or be proactive in ensuring a high quality UX? What exactly is wrong with using the market leader to establish how great your UX is in your competing product?

What did you expect them to do? Go home and go to sleep and come back in the morning to check the logs? Come on. They'd hardly close their eyes for a second with all the excitement.

They're all there monitoring the various systems because they're all responsible for various components of an incredibly complex piece of equipment.

Assuming the landing goes well, they all still need to be there to continually monitor the operation of the systems they're responsible for and provide feedback if things don't like how they expected - it's not just about landing there.

This is normal even when releasing a tiny piece of software; it's hardly surprising NASA do the same for a multi-billion dollar project.

Well that's disappointing, CloudFront:

    ERROR

    The request could not be satisfied.


    Generated Mon, 06 Aug 2012 05:59:11 GMT by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Their mobile iOS application is absolutely the worst application I have ever used on iOS.

It just doesn't work far too often (it took 2 months for notifications to randomly start working on my new iPhone 4S, but activating them can't load the new content half the time or just sits there loading forever; I have no network issues with any other iOS applications) and irritates me too much (e.g. I keep getting stories from pages I hid on the desktop site, you can't manage photos properly like on the desktop site, etc.).

I've reverted to using the desktop site under mobile Safari but I'm dying for somebody to replace Facebook simply with something of higher quality - I don't mind the ads or tracking and I genuinely find it a useful site, it's just of such poor quality it's annoying!

My ex-girlfriend used a second Facebook profile to earn rewards in the *ville games (or something, I have no idea how those games work). Truly fake secondary accounts like that are probably quite common given the popularity of those games. All of this just demonstrates that using "monthly active users" as a metric is meaningless and Facebook need better and more well thought out metrics.

I have some utility for image processing algorithms but I am no expert in the field, nor do I have any desire to become one - I just have some ideas I want to implement.

The idea that I can write my algorithms in this language and target them at the CPU initially (to keep costs down while focusing purely on photo processing), then have it running on Amazon's EC2 GPU infrastructure later with no changes when I want to (and can afford to) expand into video processing is pretty awesome.

And all of that while having the code apparently run faster than hand tuning (which I have no interest in doing) would allow. Implementing a parallalizable hand-tuned algorithm does seem like it should be faster, but even if that were true I don't have the time or expertise for attempting that.

I left my first employer after 2.5 years because I didn't like their direction and I didn't like what they were paying me. Everybody there knew I speak my mind - loudly. And I spoke my mind at my exit interview - in a constructive way, sure, but real content.

Why? Not because I thought anything would change (it didn't - it got worse and most of my friends have now left too). I did it because I knew what I said would get out, and I knew when I ran into my past colleagues in the future (it's a small industry) that they'd have good laugh about it all and only have respect for me for sticking to my principles and never backing down.

All the best people I've worked with have been straight-shooters and I admire that and look for it in the people I interview. Every position I've ever taken on has been through word of mouth, including that position. You can use this knowledge to your advantage. I think this blog post is overly conservative.

I have no problem with the word "we". I have concerns with where people draw the line between "we" and "them".

I find nothing weasel-like with stating "Soviet engineers created the F-1 nuclear reactor in...". It's perfectly accurate. Saying "We created..." is rubbish. I mean, are you suggesting all Germans shouldn't be bothered saying "we killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust"? Is that less frightening that the alternative "Hitler's regime killed 6 million Jews in the Holocaust"?

I think your examples are contrived. The coach/trainer/owner says "We did it!" as a shortened colloquial form of "we achieved our goal of obtaining a victory!". I'm talking about people who sit on the couch watching a game, who have never attended a match or contributed anything to the team they 'support', and say "we won". I'm not saying there's anything bad with that, just I find it strange. Many of my closest friends do it and I tease them for it - just like they tease me for only being interested in the team/individual performance/strategy.

All I did was point out that people seem to (conveniently) identify with "we" when it reinforces a positive self-identity and some people choose not to identify when it reinforces a negative self-identity, which does make me wonder how healthy their identity is as a consequence, and I personally find the consequences of this unappealing.

Sure this can be mostly harmless e.g. in the case of sports, but it is identifying with a group psychologically and somewhat irrationally in my opinion and it's something I don't find natural.

Polygraphs measure your ability to clench your rectum (www.youtube.com/watch?v=bScv6kfxRyE).

You may want to read Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" and "The Minds' Eye".

It just feels odd - to me - to use the word "we". And psychologically, I'm sure it has an impact. I've noticed people will say "we won!" (when they mean the team they supported won), yet it is "they lost!" (when they mean the team they supported lost). Such psychological trickery with identity can't be healthy.

Even the whole supporting a team thing seems strange to me. When watching a sporting even I applaud individual players regardless of the team, and make comments about the team strategy and overall game, but it's not that important to me who won other than how it will affect the interestingness of future games. Supporting countries is even stranger because it just all feels so tribalistic.