lian

I think the truth of this article depends on the size of your team.

If you're hiring only one to a few developers, it's likely that you need your employees to self manage. They need to strategize, have realistic expectations, and fulfill them to the best of their abilities. "Dianne," the good developer, demonstrates these skills. So, judgment is important from this kind of developer.

However, I think that "Dianne" would be best suited to a more managerial position, focusing on her strategy skills and ability to relay needs to other developers. Handing off the implementation details to a team of rockstars, with deep and varied proficiencies, would make for a spectacularly complementary team.

And in the latter case, your best developers are - and should be - rock stars. You need to consider not only how you want your code to scale, but how your company will.

It's always disappointing when people think that a fashion company is mutually exclusive with a company that makes well-designed products.

Things that make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills: how surprised people are that there's a future beyond screen interfaces.

Aren't things posted to Hacker News supposed to be by people who understand the utility of disruption? And the value of leading/controlling it?

Oh, but I should add that it is cool to see something headlining as "user testing" making its way up the HN ranks.

I agree with what I think Boriss' point is – that our interfaces are not natural. They require us to build a new system of patterns to match with encountered interfaces of a similar kind, in order to know what we're doing. Same is easily said of learning any new language, visual, written, or spoken.

But to suggest that iconography and buttons in general are unique to digital interfaces is inaccurate, and recounting one man's first interaction with a computer as "user testing of browsers" comes across as a sensational misrepresentation of what user testing is, and what education-by-interface should be.

Let's not show an entrenched English speaker Japanese and claim that it is the language's responsibility to immediately map to his mental model of English. Learning falls on a motivated student (which Joe, with self-proclaimed "no excuse[s]" for never using a computer, was not) matched with an expert evangelist like Jennifer Boriss, in the event of a total failure of comprehension.

I will never use an application that makes me tell it my salary on the first page.

Regardless of the Thiel Fellowship, this is the guy that I would want on the inside taking academic ideas from research to revolution. Ito represents a kind of energy and enthusiasm that higher education direly needs.

More creative, free-thinking skeptics of academia should definitely be empowered to lead it. I see Ito as one of them, and I think this is an inspired choice.

"The first thing you notice about Kiip CEO Brian Wong is how decidedly un-CEO he actually looks...In nerdy black glasses and a halfway zipped navy hoodie (flecked with kaleidoscope colors on closer inspection), the young man who graduated from college as a fresh faced 19 year old could've very well been, you know, anyone."

Has the author never seen a tech CEO before? Or the Social Network? Are you totally kidding me? This is no longer "un-CEO," my friend, this is de rigueur.

You don't need to own an Apple product to use MobileMe, it is device agnostic. But you do need to give Apple money for the service itself.

The Michael Jordan approach, however, is one that is as aptly applied to entrepreneurship as it is to optimizing your abilities and success in any realm. He's created a product called Michael Jordan, and that product has proved unarguably to be a game-changer, if not an entirely new game itself.

Interesting that this is out of the MIT Media Lab, since the Minority Report interfaces were based on earlier work there by another guy, who has since spun it into the spatial operating environment g-speak (oblong.com).

That said, I'm super into the fact that the extension is open source and the technology is available for others to build spatially-aware interfaces. Really, really cool work that I know I'll want to check out further.

So...we agree. My point is that where some of the other people mentioned had their masters degrees in CS, Jobs seems to have been more of a business-inclined hobbyist who really liked and could competently work with computers. I concur that his biggest strength as far as computer science went was that he happened to pal around and co-found a company with someone who was the most badass hobbyist in town.

Well, Apple could be a counterpoint if we're just talking about current CEOs. Steve Jobs has never been revered for his electronics skills, and it seems he kind of snuck in the back door in early jobs at Atari and HP. His specialty was always sales, whether selling Apple computers or selling himself.

That said, if we're talking "founders," Steve Wozniak was built right in, and he's the computer guru we're looking for. Just giving the computational credit where it's due, on this one.

I find it strange that Wired gives Grooveshark a shout out for allowing people to "sample any song you want before you buy," since the "before you buy" is totally assumed. I love Grooveshark, but it's so good at giving you what you want for free that it seems a bit like piracy in the cloud. I think the reality is that piracy and legal obtainment coexist and are a bit more ambiguous now, rather than fighting for the total extermination of the other.

You can find places in SF with short leases if you look hard enough, ranging from even 1-3 months. When moving into such a situation about a month ago, all it took was having my credit report, lease agreement and a verbal pledge that I would have no trouble paying the rent for at least the term of the lease. I agree that you should seek out an individual landlord, be up front, and have sufficient documentation to prove your commitment.

I think the best point made by the authors is that creating native apps is often avoidable, regardless of what OS you might develop for. Often a website optimized for mobile devices would more than suffice, and would also avoid the proprietary pitfalls of developing for just one OS.

When there's no concrete need to use a device's native abilities, it's foolish to waste time creating a proprietary, limited utility browser for just one device. Even if that device is running Android or iOS.

Twist ending!

In 1895 I would have been too busy being an immigrant farmer with the rest of my family to go to school at all, so I'm pretty ambivalent about what my standardized testing fate might have been.

This isn't that surprising or revolutionary, it's all just part of the inevitable movement towards ubiquitous computing. It's obvious that we won't always be reliant upon one device's built-in sensors to constantly gather and supply relevant data in real-time, and inevitably we'll have an incredibly integrated network of real-time, physically collocated devices.

For now, tablets are great. And Apple is great at supplying them. But by no means does this mean anyone will be enslaved to Apple in the long term – someone else has the opportunity to create an open platform that enables any and all technologies to communicate with each other. Someone else will have to sell this platform to businesses, governments and, most importantly, consumers. And someone else will have to create the other, new interfaces by which we access and derive meaning from this data collection. And the challenge of preventing this from being too closed, too proprietary, is what will distinguish the best approach from the most profitable approach, and where we as users can choose to avoid a "client monoculture."

The tablet approach is just a step in an ongoing direction. It's way bigger than this.

I also find it bizarre that they pay Lucasfilm Ltd. EVERY TIME they use the word "droid." That is a LOT of dollars for a few Star Wars/robot/geek-masculinity associations.