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Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by sxp on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @12:04PM (#9138814)
There is a similar story about Larry Page when Gmail was being developed:

  Before Google launched Gmail in 2004, its creator, Paul Buchheit, brought it to 
  Page’s open cubicle office for a review.

  As Buchheit called the program up on Page’s computer, the boss made a face.

  “It’s too slow,” Page said.

  Buchheit disagreed. It was loading just fine, he said. No, Page insisted. 
  It had taken a full 600 milliseconds for the page to load.

  “You can’t know that,” Buchheit said. But when he got back to his office, 
  he looked up the server logs. It had taken exactly 600 milliseconds
  for Gmail to load.
http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-page-the-untold-story-2...

It is quite plausible for people who being to obsess over a certain aspect to become overly sensitive to it. In my case, a lifetime of playing high speed video games makes it possible to notice things that others miss when it comes to things like framerates and microstutter in computer graphics. I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by sytse on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @01:09PM (#9139371)
Great story, I hope that Larry loads drive.google.com sometime this week and orders that the loading time has to improve as well
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by yellowapple on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @08:02PM (#9142040)
Or pretty much anything in *.google.com, for that matter.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by NegativeK on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @11:32PM (#9142675)
I thought you were being hyperbolic, but Drive really does take second god damn seconds to load.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by sytse on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @11:52PM (#9142736)
Indeed, it takes multiple seconds, I have a drive tab pinned permanently to avoid it (actually two tabs, one for each google account I use)
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by ggchappell on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @07:54PM (#9142009)
> I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.

Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct.

I'd guess the truth is somewhere between the two.

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by leppr on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @12:22AM (#9142833)
Third plausible option for the Steve Jobs story: he knew his colleagues very well and just guessed what they did through their body-language. If I was going to pull off something like that on my boss I'm pretty sure I'd act differently than usual, and marketing/business-type people tend to be socially hyper-aware.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by ggchappell on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @09:54AM (#9144518)
We could take that idea to the extreme. Perhaps Jobs knew nothing about technology; he was just highly sensitive to the body language of talented engineers. So he hired top-notch people, and then he yelled at them until he could see that the engineers knew they were doing excellent work.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by Karawebnetwork on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @12:48PM (#9139197)
The thing is, 600 milliseconds is a number that comes up often.

You don't have to be precise to the milliseconds, you only have to be able to recognize 100 milliseconds, 500 milliseconds and 1000 milliseconds. The rest is guessing work.

It's the same thing with the width of elements on the web. Know what 10px is, and you will be able to guess anything.

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by dilap on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @01:10PM (#9139384)
I used to play a racing game called Trackmania; there was no collision, but it was really competitive in that you'd be racing simultaneously networked w/ other players. You could definitely tell when you completed the lab in a time that was say 10ms behind a different time. 600 milliseconds, +- say 50ms, is pretty recognizable.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by raziel2p on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @02:51PM (#9140184)
Top level players will gain ~10ms or more on eachother every other turn. At a level below the very top you're going to see gaps far bigger. With experience, you'll definitely be able to tell which parts of the track you did well or poorly at, but there is no way you're going to be able to get an accurate feel for all of those tiny gains and losses over the course of a 30-60 second track to accurately judge exactly how far ahead or behind another time you are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6Ri6XUq6no

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by dilap on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @12:14AM (#9142808)
OK, I got curious enough I wrote a small console game to test reaction times.

It turns out I'm not nearly as good as I thought. I can nail a delay of 100,200,...,900ms exactly only about 40% of the time, and within +-100ms about 80% of the time.

If anyone else feels like trying, you can do "go get github.com/erinok/howlonghowlong". Hit space to see a flash, and then type 1-9 for how long you think the flash was.

It's surprisingly fun. (At least if you're incredibly weird like me.)

I find I'll have periods of concentration where I can just nail it, and then it'll leave me, and I'll be sloppy.

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by dilap on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @07:27PM (#9141888)
I think you might be right...maybe I am remembering differences of more like 100ms?

And thinking about it, in Trackmania it was less a perception of time that you noticed, but a sense of how smoothly and perfectly you had hit every turn. You could easily race the almost the exact same time multiple times in a row, and then feel it when you hit a turn more smoothly and shaved a few fractions of a second off your time. (Or similarly feel it when you screwed up and added a few seconds.)

Man, thinking about this is making me miss trackmania :)

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by bashinator on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @01:52PM (#9139734)
God I lost a bunch of hours to that game. Kinderheitstrauma.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by samjc on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @12:24AM (#9142841)
Just out of curiosity what do you think Kinderheitstrauma is?
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by bashinator on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @01:56PM (#9146446)
Well, it's one of the original stunt maps in Trackmania, but it also literally means "childhood trauma".
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by samjc on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @09:32PM (#9148895)
Oh I see. Sorry, I'm german, and the word seemed out of context to me. Thanks for clearing that up :)
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by bilbo0s on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @12:59PM (#9139290)
Well... I would agree that the Page story is not that impressive. Obviously, most people from the video game generation would be sensitive to a time period greater than 500 milliseconds.

But that misses the point of the Jobs story. Some people really do have sensitivity to things that the vast majority of others have trouble perceiving. Most people would have trouble perceiving a millimeter difference in spatial dimension by touch.

Having said all of that... the likelihood that the Project Manager in the original story... or even that the Project Manager in your workplace for that matter... is the maven that Steve Jobs was is remote in the extreme.

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by zipfle on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @04:19PM (#9140838)
That's a super old story, at least as old as this zen koan:

http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/48accurateproportion.html

Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by guelo on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @01:33PM (#9139583)
Fine story but it has no "remove the duck" element to it.
Re:“Just remove the duck” (2013) by aros on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @02:50PM (#9140180)
How is this story similar? It's not even related to the topic.