phantomb

I want to say that hacker groups haven’t declined, it’s just that now they don’t call themselves hacker groups, they call themselves startup companies.

This. In its 35+ years Apple created - or at least codified - the personal computer, the mp3 player, and the modern smartphone. I think it's closer to a big new product category every 5-10 years, really.

Historically it has been easy to claim that programming is merely incidentally complex but hard to actually produce working techniques that can dispel the complexity.

The truth is that programming is one of the most complex human undertakings by nature, and many of the difficulties faced by programmers - such as the invisible and unvisualizable nature of software - are intractable.

There are still no silver bullets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelat...

I understand that's what the Kickstarter team is most interested in. But what would that accomplish besides causing all the companies to simply move to the next crowd-sourcing site?

If Kickstarter doesn't want a cut of that money I'm sure Indiegogo will be happy to take it

According to the article a majority of the backers and a significant majority of the money was at or above the $300 mark

"a $2.4 million early-stage investment in what would become a $2 billion business in a year and a half, in return for 0.0% equity" No. Those backers weren't investing in a company, they were purchasing a prototype device and software package. In practice, that's how Kickstarter works. Sure, there will be a lot of backers who are happy that their deferred purchase is helping a project actually get off the ground, but I guarantee every person who handed over the $300 read over the rewards carefully.

"Excellent communication skills and the ability to work well with others"

The author added this in the rewrite, but I think this is exactly the kind of filler that needs to be avoided. These things are mandatory for basically all jobs, and people who can't communicate and work with others don't think they lack these skills anyway.

Education is a business and college administrators want to spend as little as possible. Radically changing things and incorporating new technologies costs money.

There are plenty of students willing to fork over cash for the product as it is now, and there is no competition to drive innovation. Prestige requirements, accreditation requirements, etc. lock small schools and newcomers out of the education market. It's also pretty obvious that the top universities and their administrators are connected to each other and act together to hold a monopoly on the business.

I'm skeptical that an insight can be both simple enough to spontaneously occur during a social outing AND complicated enough to require multiple pages of notes just to capture enough to remind you of the idea.

Yeah. Party guy isn't busy, he's disorganized.

Agreed. It's generally a good idea to write readable code. There's a reason why explicitness and redundancy are common in natural language.

We actually have studies on this. Amateur photographers have worse awareness of a scenic environment than people who just look around. And people who just look around have worse awareness than professional photographers and painters. Donald Norman talks about this in one of his books, Emotional Design IIRC. Makes sense.

"The tech community has made a mistake in rushing to judge one of its most influential members based on an article behind a $399 paywall."

Did the tech community do that? I thought it was that one other community. You know, the one that starts with an 's' and ends with "ocial justice warriors".

I understand Enron tried the same thing. These people are idiots.

http://postbiota.org/pipermail/tt/2007-June/000884.html

In interaction design we say that you can't design an experience, but you can design for an experience. We know quite a bit about humans, the psychology they approach an interface with, their physical abilities to use an interface. With this information and a target experience you want to design for, the design choices follow.

We can objectively measure things like whether a user approaching an interface can easily understand what options are available to them, whether the user can intuitively tell what actions to take to activate those options, whether at every point the user can tell what state the system is in through its interface.

It is absolutely true that if you are developing for, say, ascii-loving adult S.U.D. gamers your design requirements will be different than if you are developing for casual gaming tweens. But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.

I'm not sure what this is trying to be. If it's supposed to get people who know nothing about web to create pages, it should really have some handrails and tutorials (or at least links to tutorials). As far as I can tell the new user creating their first page basically just gets a huge wall of xml in their face. If it's really just trying to be hosting for people who know what they're doing and that's it, well, I'm a cheap bastard and I host my static page on Dropbox for thousands of times the free storage. I guess here the ugly url would be slightly shorter?

Pretty sure he does that too through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Quick look at the wiki page says that among many global health issues, the Foundation hands out hundreds of millions in grants for AIDS research on condition that findings be public. It's notably also involved in the development of Malaria vaccines like RTS,S, the first anti-parasitic vaccine in history, I believe.

Why in the hell would navigating a bunch of sequential screens full of huge icons be less of a pain than an applications folder? Thank god for application launchers in any case.

And they did screw with the old ui stuff in Lion. For example, they completely fucked up Spaces when they merged everything into Mission Control. It now takes twice as long to move between spaces; you're treated to a stupid iOS-style "fade in" animation, wasting even more of your time; the steps to move a window between spaces is now more complicated; and they removed rows. Why? I assume they wanted to make it look exactly the way it does on iOS, where you just have a horizontal series of windows. This is simple and intuitive. It's also stupid as hell.