lyndonh

I've never had my posts downvoted so much as on HN.

I'm more or less on topic. I'm not engaging in a flame war. I'm not trolling.

Is it the "kilopounds" thing? What can I say, I heard that this kind of Greek prefix gets used with non Metric meaurements. So I said sometimes.

Interesting how the example image for a bad UI shows the good UI using "Metric" vs "English" buttons.

In the England and the rest of the UK we use "Metric" vs "Imperial".

And we use a half metric system; metres and miles, litres and pints.

I notice in the USA the system is a different half metric system. Americans are much more likely to use ounces instead of litres. I also heard they sometimes use "kilopounds" and other such weirdness.

Anyway, this example image is one big fail to me.

A "motion map" ? I think you'd better read the paper again. They compute a full 3D reconstruction. Much much more computationally expensive. You would not "be able to create a similar motion map using the gyroscope data".

> You weren't previously asking me why I disagree with her.

I think the onus was on you, the person posting a comment that you disagree with the author of the article, to make your argument/point.

You can't join a discussion with "I disagree" and not say why.

> The fact that it wasn't perceived by her as a big deal does not prove she knows better than I do.

You've already said you don't agree with her on this point and yet again you don't say why.

> Statistical outliers are not inherently more wise than others about the problems that your "average" person has.

I'm sure that formerly, she was not a CEO, she was an "average" person. So she knows more about getting to CEO as a woman than you do. I'm not arguing that she has had the same experiences as you but I think it's a given that she is not implying that it is the same for all women.

> it's difficult for a woman to step into any kind of leadership position and do the tough things without being perceived as a "bitch".

I disagree that leadership is about being a bitch or an asshole.

Yes, it's widely said that Steve Jobs was an asshole. But people "got" where he was coming from. He was a perfectionist. I'm pretty sure he didn't alienate all his friends.

In leadership you have to be able to take tough decisions; but it's not about being tough with other people all the time. You might have to be tough with someone occasionally, it's a tool you might need to use.

Take Martha Stewart for example. Tough bitch ? Successful CEO ?

She didn't emphasise it very strongly, in fact it was a very weak emphasis but she was saying that everyone has a different set of strengths and weaknesses. She might find it easier to get press attention as a woman but a guy could easily have a strength that makes up for this.

> But I don't think this kind of dismissal of the issues women have is very helpful

I think she knows better than you, unless you are a female CEO.

She made the point that sometimes when a woman is doing sales the customer can be more interested in her than the product. But historically, a lot of women in sales have tried to use sexuality to get the sale.

I very nearly stopped at this point:

"All Apple products are banned in my household to make a statement about programmer freedom."

Sorry kids, to increase freedom I'm taking away your iPhones and you have to use Samsung.

There must be a Franklin quote there, somewhere ?

It was a rhetorical question.

But it's not necessarily true that Nokia X came "way after". Nokia could have put the project on hold when they started serious negotiations with Microsoft.

The natural assumption is that the hacker has got your password, not hacked gmail or hotmail, etc.

It was developed before or after Elop's burning platform speech ?

> If someone were to hack into any mail account, all they need to do is search for ‘password’ and they have all of the user’s passwords.

Only if you're dumb enough to not delete any password emails.

Granted, preferable any site sending you your password in an email should either send a reset link or "your password is 'red*'"

I am not surprised. I tried to add some additional languages to Google (web) preferences to the "Skip translations for" but then the primary language for everything Google was changed to one of my additional languages. I had to go back and change it to default single language.

The information was on the web. Students didn't have to pay the $1 to get to the information; they would have paid it because he made a nice, convenient app. Or they could go in via the website and dig through it themselves.

Did you read the story ? He tried to talk to the school but after several school employees told him they liked his app they changed their tune and decided he was ripping them off. T hey could have worked to understand what he had done and offered him his costs to open up the app but they decided not to.

Profit = Sales - Apple's cut - Apple Developer Account annual fee - iTunes App Store annual fee.

What makes you think he will be making a profit on a $0.99 app ?

Likely he was not making any profit at all. Are you suggesting he shouldn't try to claw back some of his costs ?

And now they reject his app; he takes it down and definitely won't claw back anything. Now he is down $200 + time and effort. Yeah, screw him for trying to make money off the backs of anyone.

People are using shorteners on shortened links, this is the problem.

The most obvious one is Twitter, always using it's own service regardless.

> I don't need to worry about some app stealing my private files or similar

This is highly unlikely. But I estimate a probability of 0.7 that you don't have notable security protecting your computer and your top secret files, even though your machine is on the net.

> If it isn't good, I can leave a review that the author probably reads and cares about

Most (any decent) 3rd party software developers have some kind of feedback channel.

I think we need to see this story in its proper perspective here.

Yes, this woman received unacceptable messages via twitter. Yes, there need to be mechanisms to deal with it.

However, from her Twitter history you can clearly see she was online into the early hours stoking the trolls, fanning the flames.

She DM'd some random Twitter employee until he got fed up with her and made his tweets private.

She even @-mentioned Barack Obama, asking him to intervene. Seriously.

She claims that she successfully forced the Bank of England to change the design of a new banknote so that a woman appeared on it. Even though there has previously been a banknote featuring a woman; and every single item of UK currency has a woman on it (the Queen).

Her strategy to seek attention by using Twitter's name is win-win. If they change their policy, she was successful and claims credit. If they don't, she can keep bashing them using their high profile name to attract attention.

> Adding memory is the cheap option

Only in the sense of having a broken system, putting in place some procedural constraints and then praying that everyone follows the rules.

As you say, it's a software bug. Until it's been 100% characterised and tested this leaves a huge question mark hanging over the system. Adding memory is a band aid solution.

But surely they don't use the mean to find the average score ?

Even a basic trimmed statistic would find a much more accurate average. Lazy people leaving 10s and 1s would be removed or given a lower weighting.

If RSS "died" (and I don't think it did), then it was when the main browsers stopped showing the RSS icon next to the URL and started hiding RSS feeds and links.

From a user perspective, the thing about RSS is that most readers/clients were designed as if they were email clients, where you mark articles as read/unread. Who wants thousands of extra "emails" in their inbox to check every day ?

From a site perspective, most sites were stuffing the whole web page in each RSS article such that RSS was not a summary. Then they realised that people reading RSS weren't reading ads so they either killed RSS or made each article one line.

From a programmer perspective, writing an RSS client became a hello world of applications programming such that there were millions of very bad clients.

RSS is very much alive and very useful; but maybe RSS as we used to think of it is dead. It's a background thing that browsers and applications should make use of

I think the big challenge for RSS and the web in general is link rot.

  Me: I'm trying to do X, I know I need to do Y first but it doesn't work. Can someone
      please go through the basic principles I need to do this thing.
  Comment: Post some code
  Me: (posts summary code but it's a difficult problem and you can't make a trivial example)
  Comment: No idea
  0 answers

  Me: I have this problem with X and Y, but it's not working.
  Answer (2 upvotes): You should (onerous and time consuming alternative approach
    suggestion with absolutely no evidence that it would solve the problem)
  My comment: How do I know this is going to solve my problem ?
  Comment: Try it first and come back.

  Someone: (difficult and useful question) ?
  0 answers, 5 upvotes
  #1 result in Google; top 10 hits for every search on this and related subjects leads to
  this question on SO or mirror sites

Another scenario -

  Me: (challenging question) ?
  0 answers, 0 upvotes

  Another person: Why does j++(++)++++++++++ not give me the answer I expect ?
  110 answers, accepted answer receives 200+ upvotes, question has 1000 upvotes and is
  locked because of too many frivolous answers/comments

Oh good, another blog post on text coding. We don't have enough of those.

This.

This is what causes at least 50% of queues. Everyone can take 1 small bag. Nothing on wheels. If you can't lift it above your head it's too heavy. No exceptions. Overhead bins will be sufficient, no hunting around for a space, easier to get your bag at the end of a journey.

On the other hand; I have taken a 35 liter backpack on many trips. No waiting at the carousel to get my suitcase; just walk straight out of the airport.

a. They get money for each patent examined. If they spend more time scrutinizing it, their profit is reduced.

At their annual review, one measure of how hard an examiner worked is probably based on how many patents they dealt with.

b. As an examiner you can send a patent back for a clarification or ask for more details. That's why as an applicant you pack in as many obfuscated details as possible, without giving the game away.

Also, this: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/02/214237/inventor-has-w...

c. The money goes to the lawyers. It's not an incentive for the examiners.

> Almost every organization in the world, no matter if it is profit or non-profit, gets more rigorous the more applications come in.

They get more money from processing more patents. They don't get more money by making sure the patents are better quality.

The author thinks he is "helping" the USPTO - to stop bad patents. But he is doing nothing of the sort. The USPTO are part of the problem.

Do you really think that you can strike down a bad patent by simply sending some links for prior art to the USPTO ? Someone who applies for a patent must pay a fee to have it examined by an expert. I'm pretty sure that they're going to have to spend some time re-examining the patent and the new material to decide if it's relevant or not. I don't think that's going to be free.

The author doesn't understand the patent system.

The government, via the patent office, is selling a monopoly on technology. If someone writes a frivolous application the patent office usually takes the money and grants it.

Does the author think the patent office gives refunds ? There is no incentive for them to stop granting bad patents. While this situation persists, it makes financial sense to apply for a patent if you think you can get it.

It's a self perpetuating cycle; it's easy to get a patent -> many people apply -> there are too many applications to examine thoroughly -> more people apply -> etc.

Killing patents, as the author suggests, is a waste of time. The USPTO is not going to be more rigorous when checking patent applications. The proper solution is to make it very easy to strike down bad patents and stop accepting them in the first place.

"Men's friendships aren't the same as women's friendships"

or

"People who you were once friends with aren't necessarily good friends for life"

Skype as software has a lot of issues. Before they were bought by Microsoft the software worked quite well; on my Mac I'm still running an ancient version. Why ? - it got replaced by a version that takes up half your screen, I think they were trying to make a single version for desktop and iPad. After a public outcry they reduced the size somewhat. The latest version has about 3 extra options about the amount of data you will be sharing with Microsoft/associate companies. What ? I want a phone service, I don't want my personal info datamined. OK, they give you the option to disable this but it doesn't fill me with confidence.

If you want to use Windows 8 Metro version you must "link" to a Microsoft account and change your login to use that method. It's the first thing that it does, but the UI is very subtle about it. IIRC, it even wants to change your desktop login settings. Phone software should not be changing system settings. Also the latest version removes the option to hide the fact that you have a webcam. With Skype you absolutely must read all the fine print and dialogues.