mighty

It's not necessarily a waste, but it's not unquestionably a good thing, either. There should be something other than blind acceptance or rationalization of its impact.

Edit: I love how I'm getting downvoted for expressing a reasonable and non-mean opinion.

The manner in which people have sex, unless we're talking dry humping and such, has nothing to do with creating epidemics.

What I'm saying is, you may well be correct in your assessment that she was incompetent for the job, but that assessment doesn't qualify you to make the further implication that's she's not smart, or inherently incapable of competence.

I've noticed you added the bit about her being indignant and suggesting that such knowledge was beneath her. That does suggest she would be resistant to acquiring domain competence, which certainly doesn't bode well even if your company was open to letting the hiree acquire it on the job. On the other hand, I can understand her getting pissed off about someone using such a question as a litmus test.

That doesn't mean she's actually flaky or not smart. There's tons of info that smart programmers won't know off the top of their heads, either because they haven't worked in a given domain before, or haven't worked in it for a while.

She may well not have been qualified depending on what level of domain familiarity was expected from the get-go, but this implies nothing about her intelligence or capacity for domain competence.

In theory, I would be interested in a site with a tight focus on low-level politics, but Politico ain't it.

From http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp...

Our stewardship of the public finances has been better than that of any Government for nearly 50 years. It has enabled us to repay debt and cut taxes. The resulting success of the private sector has generated the wealth and revenues which pay for better social services—to double the amount being spent to help the disabled, to give extra help to war widows, and vastly to increase spending on the national health service. More than 1 million more patients are being treated each year and there are 8,000 more doctors and 53,000 more nurses to treat them.

That is the record of eleven and a half years of Conservative Government and Conservative principles. All these are grounds for congratulation, not censure, least of all from the Leader of the Opposition, who has no alternative policies.

> A boycott is a ban and bans on other people’s opinions are stupid and childish.

I don't know if this was a massive logical slip-up on Berkun's part or what, but: nobody's banning Mackey's opinion. As far as I'm aware, copies of the Wall Street Journal containing that article are not being burned, nor is the website being hacked to prevent anyone from reading it.

Freedom of speech has nothing to do with guaranteeing that people should keep patronizing your business if you say something that rankles them.

Even worse are the modal gestures such as shake to undo and swipe to delete. If users discover them at all it’s usually by accident. They don’t map to anything (outside of an Etch-a-Sketch) and there are no clues to indicate that they’re available. Being mentioned in a WWDC keynote does not count as a clue.

I have a lot of experience critiquing user interfaces, especially from a Norman-esque viewpoint, and would like to point out that while the above criticisms have some merit, they are practically negated by the fact that nearly every iPhone commercial puts these gestures front and center. Because the ads effectively serve as tutorials, people who've never owned or used an iPhone can nevertheless walk into an Apple store knowing how to use it. You can even just walk into a store and watch one of the videos they have running--one hardly has to consult a WWDC keynote, for crying out loud.

It is also vastly easier to show a computer illiterate person how to zoom, undo, etc. using these gestures than it is to do the same on a desktop. You can't get much better than this, frankly. That there is a literacy requirement at all is not evidence of bad design: you still have to learn how to hold a pencil, after all. It's astounding that Apple's managed to reduce the literacy requirements as much as they have.

It only has zero information if you give it a massively uncharitable and ignorant reading. A climate per se describes a long term pattern of weather in a region. If that pattern changes, by definition, the climate has changed. Hence, "climate change".

Systems, or "dynamical systems" (whatever that means), are privy to two levels of change: one occurs within the system, the other defines the system. In other words, a system's state may change to another state, or the system may change into another system. Got it?

There are Apple fans here, yes. There is much to discuss about Apple and its products that's relevant to Hacker News. But getting notified about a firmware update that affects a tiny portion of readers isn't. I do not come to Hacker News to get stories about extremely niche hardware issues and fixes. I do not want to see the front page littered with stories of this type.

That "a portion" of HN readers found something relevant means nothing with respect to its appropriateness for HN. All of us have many interests and concerns which are not relevant to HN. When we start loading this site with anything and everything of tangential interest to any reader, the primary value of this site as a source for news about hacking and startups diminishes.

(I'm a fan, and an MBP owner, but I sure as hell don't want news of minor Apple updates polluting HN.)

Consider Google News' front page: they divide stories into sections (World, Business, Health, etc.) which gives users a high level overview of the content at a glance, a domain context for headlines in a given section, and allows them to easily ignore whole sets of stories they might not be interested in. The iTunes App Store is the same way.

I'm also not sure how useful the Recently Added section is going to be in the long run. The date at which an app was added to the database is less important for users than the date at which an app launched, went out of private beta, etc.

As for the differences in sales curves, that's actually reflective of how much easier it is to find and purchase new apps on the App Store (as well as the increased competition -> price reduction that their aggregation provides), as opposed to having hundreds or thousands of different purchase sites with their own method for payment processing. Also note that most iPhone apps tend to be for entertainment, for which an early sales spike and sudden drop-off is the norm regardless of platform...or medium.

Is banning TC necessarily the best solution? Maybe not, but we don't have another solution available that's doing the job. There might also be some throwing the baby out with the bathwater here, which seriously depends on how much TC is a source of news (for HN, specifically) that can't be had anywhere else. I'm not inclined to say that they are a significant source of such news for HN.

But greed and stupidity are "natural" forces at work within the capitalist system. Asserting that crises are cyclical and "naturally emergent" doesn't rule out greed and stupidity as causes. It actually doesn't say anything about causes at all.

I'd also be wary of concluding that because certain phenomena appear to be cyclical, any similar phenomena must necessarily be an expression of that cycle.

I doubt there's a strong correlation here. When you're working on a thesis, you're still within some academic community, have a rough deadline, and have a pretty good sense of what's going to fly or not. Moreover, the progress you make on a thesis is inherently satisfying. You can stand back and look at even a page or a paragraph of work with pride.

When you're working on a startup, you spend much of your time working on things that don't work yet or will look and feel like crap for a while. A lot of the problems you solve aren't going to be intellectually interesting, as they would be for a thesis. Which means that there are precious few rewards to be had from the pre-launch development process by itself.

I tried to go solo for a while, but found myself crushed by the lack of feedback. Then I paired up with someone (remotely), and if we weren't pair programming, we were at least showing each other what we'd done several times a week and giving feedback. Not only is this immensely helpful in terms of sustaining motivation, but merely having someone else who thinks of things you don't is incredibly valuable.