This comment is perfect, in that it simultaneously gets my goat and pulls the wool over my eyes.
736 karma · joined September 7, 2013
It's very simple, but it's only obvious after you've seen it happen too many times.
Is it a skill? No, it's a tool. Being able to use it involves some skill with HTML, CSS, and possibly Javascript.
Does it belong on a resume? Why not? At worst it may not be relevant to everything you might apply for; at best it shows a familiarity with available utilities that, required for a given project or not, might come in handy or at least show you're open to and have worked with current alternatives to the everything-from-scratch approach that's sometimes but not always necessary or helpful when developing for the web.
[edit] After going looking for an author citation, I see this is on the official blog of a digital agency, written by one of the partners, who refers to himself as a "titan of industry."
That's just embarrassing. The ego is stifling, and the tone screams "nightmarish to work for." [/edit]
This is incorrect. Facts do not have bias by definition; only the presentation of a fact can show bias.
If you're showing all of the data you have objectively, you're at least limiting the bias you introduce to what was present in the collection method. It's difficult if not impossible to completely remove bias from the entire process from experiment design to execution to reporting, but that does not mean that bias is somehow intrinsic in data.
Having a point of view is also not the same as making a biased presentation. Stating your point of view (if you have one on the data you're working with, which also is not absolutely guaranteed) is a great way to establish credibility, but the presence of an opinion does not guarantee the presence of bias in presented results.
Telling people you don't have an opinion when you do? Yes, that's lying. So obviously it's not a good thing, particularly in this context. But you're making assumptions here that don't really fly.
Maybe some people view the Oculus acquisition through that myopic lens, but many do not, and your generalizations do your point of view no justice while simultaneously misrepresenting many of theirs.
It sounds like either you've never been in a situation like this or you should back up a bit and take it in at a higher level; you're missing the forest for the trees. You're assuming the client contact you have even knows "the process that brought [them] here," which they often don't, and that they are going to be interested in discussing it with you, which they often aren't, among other things.
This conversation is also more often, in my experience, one step removed: Rarely have I seen this actually happen with a technical implementation person in the room. More typically it's a salesperson and a project manager, and you just get marching orders after the fact, which may or may not make sense depending on the PM's ability and willingness to make sense of the client's requirements.
Sales and engineering have fundamentally different objectives: Sales needs to generate revenue, engineering needs to create a project that satisfies a specification (ideally). There is very obviously overlap and hopefully interplay there, but I don't agree that people who are good at those largely disparate things necessarily think in any particular way, and certainly not the same way.
You also don't need to be undervaluing someone's skill set to see their lack of understanding of a project's limitations and requirements as a detriment and impediment to your progress; it is, and acknowledging it as such does not require being a jerk, nor does it necessarily make you a jerk.
If you're saying "man, what an idiot you are" to people who suggest things that aren't possible, feasible, or sensible, then yeah, you probably have some growing up to do (of course, most of us do anyway). But that's not the same as addressing someone else's very real problem before it makes your responsibilities intractable.
Of course an idea isn't useful without execution, but without the idea, you have nothing to execute.
If you run analytics on bad or incomplete information or information that doesn't realistically relate to something important to your bottom line, or if you try to interpret useful data without knowing what you should actually be looking at in the context of the service you're providing, it'll obviously be meaningless.
As stated, it's either ambiguous or false. If it actually means penetration will never again double from the peak percentage it reached which was >=50%, it's trivial and uninteresting... if it doesn't imply that, then yeah, it's just incorrect.
It's ridiculous to suggest that YC is a universally positive experience, just like it's ridiculous to suggest it's completely without value (based on the significant praise you refer to).
Or at least not in that neighborhood. You have an anecdote... that's all. I'm sure there are others that match it, but being a dick to your neighbors and having neighbors that are dicks to you is not a necessary pre- or post-condition of financial wealth.
You can end up in that situation regardless of how much money you make. What you should probably take away from that experience is that you value community and wish to have positive interactions with your neighbors; perhaps financial wealth shouldn't be a priority for you, but I don't believe this situation could really inform you on that point.
They state there's only one Flappy Bird clone in the top 20 on iTunes, but look at the rest of what's there. If you're going to be concerned about games that are clones/copies of what's essentially pre-existing game mechanics, you might want to think about how little comes through that's actually original in any respect.
City builders, TCG's, match 3, slot machines... and we've covered the vast majority of popular apps. Go a little further and you have hidden item games, runners, etc.
The only reason it's so obvious with games like Flappy Bird and 2048 is that the mechanic is so simple and requires so little in terms of effort and resources that anyone with even an elementary skill set on a mobile platform can throw together one of these clones and puke it onto the internet to ride the wave (or at least the foam, as most of them never even get into the surf).
I'd call that a contradiction. The principle can't possibly be that useful if, a few decades later, the result of its application is deadlock.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting they should. It just crossed my mind as something they might look at after this.
It took me a while to get a solid handle on them, but Django usually does forms very well. The best case is that your UI requirements are fairly loose, otherwise it's likely you'll end up with mostly-custom HTML, but even then you still have the potential to save a lot of Python code with things like ModelForms and/or FormViews.
Of course, we also use the web UI for consultancy time tracking and a couple types of invoice generation, so I'm fond of those features as well.
I've been involved in half a dozen projects that adopted varying sorts of that process, from small teams to massive juggernauts, and never once have I seen it not result in people tripping over each other or railing against the process.
Were those the result of poor implementation? To varying degrees, absolutely. But these and similar experiences from many people I know, coupled with the alarming degree of "if it's going poorly they're doing it wrong" from proponents, leave me with the firm conviction that this isn't just a constantly-abused practice. It's a set of tenets that apparently worked in principle for someone at some point but simply are not suited for the projects and environments I've encountered or discussed with colleagues.
People will dismiss that, which is fine (anecdotes are anecdotes, even in quantity), but I'd call such a range of practical failure pretty damning for something that's supposed to be so enabling.
If you're just using it for its own sake, or only for building things locally that either don't need to run anywhere else or only need to run where you have enough control to install your own Python, and you don't and won't need dependencies that aren't currently ported... then definitely start with 3.x. :)
More relevant to HN: The comments so far suggest that many of us are pretty far removed from not only the demographics that use malls, but also the people who run them and the shop owners and managers that are their tenants. It's important to remember, though, that this doesn't mean they don't exist or that they're somehow wrong.
Many malls are still successful, and to suggest that because some are closing the model is dead is baseless.
I don't believe the existence of services like Yelp offsets this much if at all. People who don't mind spending the extra time to use it and then to travel around to the places they find (or even wait for shipment) are not necessarily the shoppers a mall caters to, as they're obviously not so concerned with getting what they need quickly with minimal travel.
There's also the social and entertainment aspect to consider. Many malls have food courts and restaurants and/or include movie theaters (or even theme parks, which I find hilarious, but it's there).
Malls do often exist for and serves purposes other than just providing goods in a centralized location... but that purpose itself hasn't lost its utility.
I think it's clear we should be spending more time, money, and effort on truly renewable and environmentally friendly power sources. People have been turning that discussion into a "nuclear or not" debate for a long time, which has certainly hampered whatever progress we have made in that direction.
When a little boy asserts himself, he's called a “leader.” Yet when a little girl does the same, she risks being branded “bossy.” Words like bossy send a message: don't raise your hand or speak up. By middle school, girls are less interested in leading than boys—a trend that continues into adulthood. Together we can encourage girls to lead.
So yes, as others have said here, the goal is not necessarily (or only) to get rid of the usage of the word. But as is very evident from other responses, that is not immediately obvious to everyone, in no small part because of the arguably poor catch phrase being used.
I'm also not thrilled with some of the 'motivational' phrases being thrown around. "I'm not bossy; I'm the boss" (Beyonce) is not constructive. It's puerile and is more likely to encourage actual bossy behavior (the negative kind, as defined well elsewhere in this thread) than to help introduce equality in the way we encourage leadership attributes in all children.
Not, of course, that equality seems to be emphasized here. Which is a typical problem and one that's unlikely to help this campaign make a real difference, as it's immediately exclusive to some degree rather than encouraging everyone to be confident.