duncanwilcox

Realistically 1) most people don't use a PIN code, 2) those that do use their birthday MMDD or DDMM.

If you think someone where you work/live might have to tools to lift your fingerprint from a beer bottle or spacebar, you probably have more serious problems than the contents of your iPhone.

I'm sure security nuts will put their iPhone in a shielded box with a coded lock on it, in addition to using (and painfully entering on each unlock) a high entropy passphrase that's as long as possible.

More power to them.

TouchID is a good enough to prevent my daughters from seeing the naughty texts I send to my wife (none of your business either), and that's more or less the level of security TouchID is designed for.

Do you believe chess Grand Masters exist? They're blind to invalid moves, they don't even see strategically penalizing moves.

"10x engineer" sounds like a requirement a recruiter would put in a boring corporate job summary. Meh.

A single good programmer does the job of 5, and you can pay her 2x. That's not magic, it's just a very refined skill set, focus and no communication barrier of multiple people.

So depending on the project, small team can be replaced by a single good programmer, or the project is just too large and you need many many people and communication infrastructure.

The "rockstar" connotation is just SEO.

Counterpoint (old but relevant):

http://blog.wilshipley.com/2011/04/success-and-farming-vs-mi...

The article paints non-startup guys as parasites. That's so needlessly polarizing.

The more common definition of the Passive Income Hacker is "lifestyle business", i.e. a business where you don't seek a 10-100x exit.

Personally I think if all you've done or plan on doing is an app or website, calling it a startup is kind of silly.

Clearly stackexchange is showing pro-db bias. I'm a huge fan of unstructured data in filesystems as well, that's how the service behind my prototypesapp.com is built.

I also happen to think MySQL-backed websites are the bane of the internet, further testament to the pro-db bias of the average web developer.

A properly built sql store (or, increasingly, nosql) is definitely a necessity for large service. But what is "large"?

I once heard the rule of thumb that a db is necessary when the size of the data you store in it becomes larger than the size of the db code. I kind of like it.

Dude. You won't hear that story from VCs, they want a 100x exit, and a kid with his "brilliant" ideas is their best bet at catching media attention.

Whether something like this ever becomes widespread depends on WebGL becoming popular, which in turn depends on WebGL becoming sufficiently secure.

In an interview on the Debug podcast, Don Melton describes hardening WebGL, which involves hardening the whole stack down to the hardware level, as a significant challenge.

http://donmelton.com/2013/03/25/im-on-the-debug-podcast-this...

I wouldn't hold my breath.

Very Long HN Thread Expected to discuss VSRE to death.

This is definitely not the best way to base a marketing campaign on privacy issues.

That said consumer products are traditionally ad supported, and regular consumer appear to tolerate it, mostly.

Internet advertising is quite unlike TV or print advertising though, and consumers are definitely not sufficiently informed of how much they're being tracked, particularly by products of companies like Google and Facebook, that live on advertising in one way or another.

Google Web Analytics (reportedly used on half of the websites on the net) and the "like", "tweet" and "+1" buttons are arguably much more likely to track your interests than GMail, even if you have never signed up for a single Google, Twitter or Facebook service. My guess is the creatives who build the campaign either had no idea or didn't know how to communicate it in a personified way, which has more emotional impact.

So Microsoft's campaign sucks, and I have a fundamental anti-Microsoft bias that stems from their despicable business conduct in the 80s and 90s, but Google isn't any better these days, Schmidt's comments on the "creepy line" make me shudder. Perhaps it can be a good starting point for discussing privacy issues.

Privacy shouldn't be a competitive advantage, it should be a sacred right of anybody who has children or financial/health/private issues.

Amen.

You have to think of the constraints that informed the original design. There's very little horizontal space on iPhone and iPod touch, 320 points to fit a descriptive label and the control.

So labels on the sides don't work because of space constraints, on iPhone anyway.

The windowed version is also less space efficient than the stock iOS control but I think it has merit because it shows all possible states. What I'd change is reverse the tinting, to make the active state more visible and the other states shaded.

The code is, appropriately, in the WTF directory.

To which the counterpoint is "awesome UX". You'll never get that with web tech.

Sandofsky works at Twitter BTW.

You are probably right about most of the problems, though how much of a problem they really are is related to where you place yourself on a purist-pragmatic continuum.

Sandofsky explicitly mentions development: "Today, for high level work, I am as productive using Objective-C as JavaScript." That's my experience as well.

http://sandofsky.com/blog/apps-vs-the-web.html http://sandofsky.com/blog/shell-apps.html

Cough.

I think you need to know enough of both to be excellent at one or the other. Design freedom and constraints in software come from what code allows. Code structure is all about the interaction design (and somewhat about visual design as well).

That said, if you want to do both you'll inevitably work on smaller projects, you won't have the time to do more and get to market in reasonable time. You'll also refine each skill at half speed — 10.000 hours each to become expert.

The Sandbox makes me sad.

Remove exploits of a single poorly written app spreading to the rest of my Mac and taking over make me sadder.

The "regular people" I know who own an Android phone bought it because it was cheaper, and in fact have a sub $150 thing (unlocked, retail).

They also are regularly out of pre-paid credit.

As a developer I couldn't care less about that kind of user, and I suspect few developers make a living on a fragmented and inconsistent platform like Android.

This in turn means less quality and variety of apps, which detracts even more from the experience.

If you have no money and no taste, sure lagginess, a terrible UI and advertising laden apps can be acceptable.

The problem with attracting "developers" with a limited skillset is you're asking for low quality applications.

I'm not against the idea, and if this kind of tool attracted people who care deeply about human factors, interaction and graphics design I'd in fact be totally in favor of it.

But this doesn't look like much more than Visual Basic or, as Gruber put it, Hypercard.

NoSQL might be hype. Let's get specific. Cassandra eliminates the SQL database single point of failure and hard to replace masters via a lose sync, "eventually consistent" protocol.

Is there some startup offering a web service that doesn't need that?

And have you ever tried to deploy an SQL database capable of thousands of miles apart syncing?

Eventually consistent is quite a different model than ACID. If you accept that, and accept that you can't rely on networks to always be up, you'll live comfortably and cost effectively.