michael_miller

Minor nit: it's a little annoying that the the site takes over horizontal panning. It effectively makes the swipe forward/backward gestures useless in Chrome. The information could have been presented in an equally effective manner with a simple vertical page layout.

I find it a little disingenuous that students who are subject to "forced withdrawal" are allowed to re-enter after 2-4 semesters. This sends a horrible message to students - that you can cheat, and the worst case scenario is taking a couple semesters off. No mar on their transcript of starting a degree at Harvard, and suddenly transferring to another, probably academically inferior, school. No explaining to employers why they suddenly decided to pack up and leave during a large cheating scandal. Just a forced vacation.

I'm also pretty appalled that students supplied the same answer down to typological errors. When the scandal first broke out, it sounded much more mundane - that there was little guidance, and that students asked their TAs for help. At least then, it's possible to rationalize the situation by saying that students genuinely did not believe they were doing something wrong. I don't think there's any way to justify multiple students submitting the same typos. This indicates blatant cheating, which any Harvard student should readily recognize as being morally wrong, and clearly violating any reasonable academic honesty standard.

It's always good to keep things in perspective. Many of my friends in the liberal arts are doing PhDs with the same (or less) 7% tenure track position rate. The difference is that they don't have the choice to go into industry afterward. Our "worst case scenario" of going to work for Google for $150k-$200k is a dream for most PhD candidates.

I disagree with the premise of the post. In a year or two, most apps will only support iOS 6. How bad would it be to search for an app you expect, like Facebook or Yelp, only to not find it, not having any indication of error? At least this way, people realize that they have to buy a new iProduct to use an app. Having an empty app store and not knowing why is way worse than being teased by apps you can't get.

"Big Name Publications" do not get a free pass for speculation, in print or in blog. They gain credibility, so they can say things like "From talking to senior Boeing engineers, we uncovered..." but making up hypotheses out of thin air is shoddy journalism that should be criticized, regardless of the source.

I really wish people would stop speculating about the 787s problems. Yes, it has had serious issues. But why is the author qualified to talk about them? From his bio, it's not clear that he has any aviation experience, and he doesn't appear to have any inside sources.

The article is littered with phrases like "My hypothesis is that McDonnell's mindset from its defense work — minimizing the amount of capital put at risk during R&D — was applied to the 787" and "But, in this instance, it wasn't so much the outsourcing, as it was the decision to modularize a complicated problem too soon". How can the author make such brazen claims without having talked to a Boeing engineer or visited the factory? I assume if he had done either, he would have noted it in the article.

Only one type of person is qualified to comment on the problems: a person working at Boeing, or someone talking to him/her. Otherwise, we're just playing the Apple rumor game, piecing together tidbits of supply chain data to come up with the conclusion we want to hear.

I was not being sarcastic. If you buy ranking metrics, UT Austin has a top 10 CS program [1]. We have some of the best Systems researchers in the country [2], a professor from our dept won the Turing Award in 2007 [3], and Bill Gates + Michael Dell just donated a new CS building for our campus [4].

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/

[3] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/emerson_1671460.cfm

[4] http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/goto_gdc/

I don't believe there's any intuition I got from my algorithms class that couldn't be gained on the job. However, the class does provide intuition in an accelerated manner, and it proves to employers that I have the intuition. Some examples off the top of my head:

- Memoization / DP

- Divide and conquer

- Using a bounded approximate algorithm in place of an exponential one for NP complete problems

I feel like it would have taken me a lot of time to internalize those types of algorithms on the job, but seeing them presented in my algorithms class made it easy.

> "[Top schools] don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer."

I've found this statement to be false, at least at my alma mater(UT Austin). My Honors OS class unquestionably made me a better programmer, teaching me about how programs I wrote interacted with the OS to a very deep level. My algorithms class gave me an extremely deep understanding of how algorithms+data structures worked, giving me a better intuition as to what tools to use when confronted with a problem. My HCI class made me acutely aware of how users interact with software.

I'll agree that the purpose of universities is not vocational. Without a doubt, a lot of classes I've taken will have absolutely no impact on my career (unless Buddhist Art becomes an in-demand field!). But a good school gives students the opportunity to gain applicable skills that are needed in the world.

If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer. You can't do well in the class unless you truly understand code. Using a coarse grained filter of "Harvard University" is bad, but using a "Passed CS50 with an 'A'" filter is a very good metric to use.

For most purposes, it is de-anonymizing. There might be several famous people who share your name, but is there more than one person with your name who is currently an undergrad at Caltech studying CS? In most cases, a name combined with a little bit of context will identify an individual.

Yes, I have worked for Apple. Anecdotally, almost everyone I met was a fanboy.

The reason Apple is stingy is not because of this antitrust case. Apple pays (relatively) poorly because they don't want people to work there for the money. As I'm sure you know, Apple employees are fanatics about the company's products. Apple wants those people, not the "WTF? You're only giving me $100K and no free food? What is this shit?" people, even it it means losing a couple good engineers. Many other Silicon Valley companies are content giving their employees ridiculous salaries and perks, and don't really care whether engineers are evangelical about their products. For mostly cultural reasons, Apple hires people who wouldn't turn around for a slight raise. In fact, back when Palm was still a company developing WebOS, the standing offer for iOS engineers was to DOUBLE Apple's salary. Think about that - not enough employees were leaving for anything less than a 100% raise. Even at Apple's low salary levels, I think that says something about employee loyalty.

I don't regret getting a CS degree one bit, since it exposed me to people I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. I wouldn't have taken ballroom dancing, buddhist art, or learned how to fly had it not been for getting my degree.

My intuition is that school marginally helped by day-to-day coding, but gave me the tools I needed to dig deeper. It was invaluable to take operating systems, and learn about the nitty gritty internals of how a modern OS worked, along with the details of CPU caching. I probably could have learned the information outside of school, but it would have been a much longer process, and I might have large gaps in my knowledge.

I think what the OP is trying to point out is that this would be seen as an "oh shit we don't know what went wrong" consulting job rather than a "we knew we weren't good at this from the start, so we contracted out to another company who was" job. They've already implicitly asserted that they knew what they were doing by putting the batteries into a certified plane, so this would likely be construed as an emergency cry for help.

Also, most of the time the use of consultants isn't publicized - taking help from Elon Musk would no doubt be broadcast heavily by the media, and most likely not in a positive light.

This is a very cool app, simply because it eliminates most of the browser chrome. Taking out browser chrome is a very important step for making web apps first class citizens. It might be a minor visual difference, but it's a huge psychological one.

On another note, it sounds like Opera was forced to use UIWebViews due to Apple's restrictions. I'm curious to know if anyone has ever hacked up another rendering engine (even WebKit) to run on iOS. Obviously it wouldn't be able to make it on the app store, but it would be cool to play around with on a development device!

In the Swartz case, I have to say that JSTOR acted professionally and did the right thing. They saw someone stealing their data. They reached out to the authorities to help stop the theft. Swartz returned the data, and JSTOR agreed not to pursue (civil) legal action against him. It's unfortunate that the US government couldn't match JSTOR's level of reasonableness. Yes, Swartz did something illegal, but the time (~35 year prison term and $1m fine) did not fit the crime.

I can't help but be reminded of the MPAA/RIAA vs. John Doe lawsuits that were commonplace just a couple years ago. It's sad that our legal system lacks a sense of proportionality for crimes. 35 years is what someone would get for murder, rape, or dealing drugs - not for stealing property, and then giving it back. I hope that the US government takes time to reflect on how they mishandled the case. At least then something good will come of his death.

Most of the US has terrible public transit. The reason is simple: America is not densely populated. NYC is one of the few cities where public transit works, because it is so dense. Manhattan has ~70k people / sq mile. Compare this to SF: a measly ~17k people / sq mile [1] [2]. That's more than 4x as dense! The Valley is even worse, with sprawling suburbia.

Honestly, Caltrain is not that terrible. It compares fairly well to Metro-North in NYC when you consider the population density. There's a train every hour to take you up to the city (or back) in an hour. Most cities don't have a direct train you can feasibly take in from the suburbs to the city. Yeah, it sucks that it stops at midnight, but public transit generally doesn't run late anywhere. Even in NYC, transit out to the suburbs stops at ~2:30a.

It's a little annoying to see people commenting here that this is entirely due to politicians and bureaucracy. It isn't. It's just not economically feasible to offer public transit comparable to NYC to the bay area.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

Don, a great blog post! It's really fascinating to hear about what goes on between the inception of a project and its release at an Apple keynote.

I would be interested in hearing more about the technical side of WebKit. How does it work at a high level? How are touch events handled? What fancy things are done (within your NDA restrictions) to make scrolling so fast on the iPhone? It would be really awesome if you wrote a series of blog posts talking about the structure of WebKit!

If this is the case, then maybe PHP's role is a rapid prototyping language which is replaced when the codebase gets to a certain size.

I agree with the article 100% - laws need to be freely accessible to everyone. One particular standard which I hope they publish in the future is the HIPAA standard(http://store.x12.org/store/healthcare-5010-original-guides). It's pretty outrageous that to implement any form of electronic interfacing with Medicare, a government insurer, you have to pay $2500. And it's not just a one time cost - you have to keep buying them every couple of years to keep track of new additions / errata.

That page says it's behind a developer flag, and only limited single-line support is provided. Is the page up to date, or is the feature fully implemented, and accessible to anyone, regardless of flags?

Can anyone confirm whether final flexbox support was added? http://caniuse.com/flexbox suggests that FF 18 only has support for the old version of the standard.

Many paranoid companies will often prohibit all use of GPLv3 software. The justification I've heard is that the terms of the license make it possible that anything you produce using GPLv3 software is also GPLv3. So, for example, if you use a GPLv3 licensed version of emacs, and you write some code, the code you wrote will also become GPLv3. It's a very conservative reading of the terms of the license, but understandable for companies which have most of their net worth tied up in source code.

Many paranoid companies will often prohibit all use of GPLv3 software. The justification I've heard is that the terms of the license make it possible that anything you produce using GPLv3 software is also GPLv3. So, for example, if you use a GPLv3 licensed version of emacs, and you write some code, the code you wrote will also become GPLv3. It's a very conservative reading of the terms of the license, but understandable for companies which have most of their net worth tied up in source code.

I disagree with the premise of the article. Yes, there are a lot of people dropping out of college saying "Oh Zuckerberg did it, I should do it too!" without a sane business model. Yes, there are a zillon daily deals startups which will probably all go bankrupt in 6 months. Yes, there are a ton of social media startups that allow you to take a photo and share it for 10 seconds with all your friends. And there are definitely more of these startups than usual, due to the funding environment.

However, there are also many "serious" startups. Tesla, transforming the primary mode of transport for most Americans. SpaceX, reinvigorating space exploration. Palantir, integrating the world's data to save lives. There have, and always will be, these startups doing serious world-changing innovation.

I picture Silicon Valley as a funding pyramid. The best companies are at the top, and always get funding. Then, at the bottom of the pyramid are the daily deals startups. In a less hot funding environment, these companies wouldn't get funded. But in the current climate, a ton of companies at the bottom of the pyramid are getting funding. Since there are way more of these bogus startups than serious ones in the current climate, we just hear more stories about them.

The problem with mobile HTML5 is that the frameworks aren't nearly as sophisticated as their native counterparts. There's nothing that even touches UIKit on the web. Things as simple as drawing a UINavigationBar-style gradient prove to be unbelievably challenging. On a technical level, it's completely doable, but it requires a lot of time, effort, and designer time. Multiply this out by all the little niceties like animations and embossing all of the buttons and you've got a big job ahead of you.

All the technologies are in place to have a native-quality HTML5 app -- we have canvas to draw pixels however you want. We have WebGL to do any 3D rendering. We have blazing fast JS engines. We have hooks for things like location and camera roll access. The problem is that it's really hard to justify the investment of building out a UIKit-quality framework for the web. Apple and Google can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their frameworks because it means they'll sell more devices/services. But it's really hard for someone to justify doing so for the web, where there's no ROI for your platform.

Can you elaborate on why? Is it for the same reasons as the article?

Superficial as it is, absolutely, this is something I love about iOS. It reinforces the "manipulating real objects with touch" metaphor. If I move my finger while pressing down on a piece of paper in real life, I expect the underlying paper to move as well. The highlight on Android just feels weird and clunky with no basis in real world interaction. That's not to say it isn't usable -- it just isn't as much fun without the momentum scrolling physics.

I suspect the reason for choosing KHTML over Gecko may have been more political than anything else. Since Mozilla was the dominant non-IE browser at the time, it would be hard to justify any fork to the community without meaningfully given back. For example, Apple could go off into a cave and add touch handling support with momentum scrolling and GPU acceleration, and the Mozilla community would be absolutely furious with Apple for creating effectively unusable work, assuming they did the work over several months/years in secret. The last thing Apple wants is a large group of loud people complaining about itself.

By comparison, KHTML was not really a serious project. It had a few developers, but nowhere near the scale of what Mozilla had. Thus, when they forked it to do their work in secret, only a couple people complained.

Regardless of confidentiality issues, the post was definitely in poor taste. For example, he talks about "android’s less-than-beautiful UI". If I ever hired a contractor, and he posted something to that effect about one of my products, you can bet I'd never hire him again. It's extremely unprofessional, and a breach of trust. It's one thing talking about this stuff between friends, but another to badmouth your (former) employer to the public internet.