nullflux

However, Salmon's incentives aren't aligned the same and regardless of his desire to show a lack of bias to be a "good journalist", there is a point that he stands a lot to gain if his critique of Andreessen becomes popular.

Sure, he makes good points, but I'd take this type of critique a lot more seriously if a successful VC said it. Journalists are good at writing and doing a job of disseminating information. Given their role, they will never be completely accurate when it comes to making predictions of an industry in which they are often on the periphery of "the trenches".

The solution is to learn color and how it works. Start with something like color theory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_theory

Have these types of things happened on Kickstarter before (or has anyone attempted to just completely game the system?) What types of recourse do investors have? Any?

I wonder if this has something to do with environment or just personal insecurity.

Not really. In that situation you're telling people you know how to do something you don't. In this situation you're telling people you have no idea but can probably figure it out.

Sure. On the flip side of my argument there is also something to say: quite a few startup designers could learn a lot from following such a process at some point. There's a lot of "copy this guy's design, it converted well for his product!" that ends up leading people down roads that aren't exceptional for that product.

But can we say there's really a "devolution"? Is there not progress in not following Morville and Garrett to the letter? I find a lot of dogma in "UX" practices that make designers feel comfortable, and I just as often find many UX designers to overstate their impact on things because it is not as easily quantifiable as an engineer's impact.

Not quite sure this applies too much in startupland. There does appear to be a shift away from traditional IA practices with most startup designers, but largely because it takes too damn long and really isn't that necessary.

Proper IA/wireframing/signing-off-on-steps is good for companies where a clueless management is going to make myriad changes to information hierarchy or UI bits along the way, because you have a "we talked about this already and you agreed" defense when some clueless marketing guy comes over and says things need to be bigger, this link needs to be here because it's his friend's company, etc.

A lot of what this article is proposing is missing (organizational hierarchy, an understanding of the order of information) is something that I don't really think is missing in a good tech-company designer's head. He or she is often one of few in control of that domain, and the product roadmap is often known quite a bit in advance. A lot of the polar bear book's 1000+ pages ends up getting turned into heuristics, when quick decisions and fast iteration under multivariate testing is often better off for a young company than sitting back and doing some type of holistic, IDEO-class set of mental exercises.

We are still missing each other somewhere here.

I'm not saying that this article doesn't help, but I'm saying it's the equivalent of pouring water on a fire, and we're ignoring the systemic cultural stuff that started the fire in the first place. What I'm arguing is we need to stop thinking "Pour water on this until it goes out" and also make sure that we take away the fuel for such behavior by trying to solve many of these problems earlier.

Is there such thing as a "do not mail" list? If it is possible to opt-out of private (tele)marketing and block spam, then logically it should be possible to opt out of this service too.

That's not what I'm getting at at all. This might be the most misunderstood thing I've written. If this keeps up I'll likely rewrite again.

Read my last paragraph in my post again, please. What I'm trying to get at is that if you want to really squash an issue let's do more than the easy thing of "awareness". Why don't we actually get involved somewhere else? Help out in the places where this type of crap actually originated and keep it from happening in the end. Try to prevent the problem, don't just suppress it when it arises in certain cases. It seems the better long-term solution; IMO it's easier to correct less-formed opinions and put people on the right track then. "How to correct sexism in Silicon Valley" isn't just "hey, get mad at people when they say something out of line", it's also "hey, let's try to get people to understand why this hurts us in the first place".

People are misunderstanding; it's time for an edit.

What I'm trying to get at is that awareness alone is not going to solve this issue, and we are very narrowly focused on this "Be aware!" thing. You're not going to self-correct big things like this; in a lot of cases you might truly correct it but you will just as much bury the sentiment in others who truly believe these types of things.

EDIT: Also, I don't understand how the quote you referenced is evidence otherwise, but perhaps we're miscommunicating. Rewrote my post in hopes of being a little clearer.

Younger generations are often more malleable than older ones. There is a reason why many cultures have a proverb similar to the "old dog, new tricks".

I'm not saying that there's nothing we can do now, but the kind of change you're looking for isn't likely to just happen overnight because you don't feel like waiting for it. These things have lots of momentum and emotion behind them.

Why are we are focusing consistently on a short-term solution to what seems like a larger issue? I personally don't see a quick fix to all of this, and it seems to me that the real solution is more holistic than we seem to be pushing for.

In every one of these that gets to a couple hundred comments, we end up with two big groups that appear: "bros" that are "just having fun" and y'all need to "lighten up", or some stereotype of a misogynistic engineer that hates women because women consistently slighted the character throughout his life. In the first case, you have to fight a subculture that commoditizes women; in the second, you have to fight years of maladaptive behavior, and negative feedback from a cycle of sexual and social ostracization, where their defense became vilification.

Both of those cases are going to be really tough to change in the short-term. In the best case scenario we'll get a few to see the light, but when there are emotional ties to this type of behavior there is a lot of cognitive dissonance that has to be cut through before any change is truly realized. In the tougher cases all we will actually do for the present generation is bury sexist sentiment into a back channel somewhere, which doesn't help the end cause.

Yes, let's lead by example, but let's also try to start at the origin and get things sorted out before such discriminatory practices can get deeply rooted. Go talk to some college engineering teams. Let's get more women involved in the things that these guys are doing, and give them equal opportunity to show their abilities; the culture is often more meritocratic than not. Take it one step further if you have kids, and teach them that gender roles are just as bad as racism. The bros will realize that their actions are slowly being obsolesced, and the shunned will be proportionally less so. It takes work from both ends and we are really only ever pushing one angle hard.

EDIT: Drastically rewritten in hopes of being clearer.

EDIT 2: Minor bits and pieces, again.

Winer put this whole debate succinctly.

Hypocritical comments like this often seem to stem from one of two things: a desire to drum up needless press conflict or a complete lack of self-awareness. Perhaps Google has gotten the best of itself and in their all-consuming "must be, er, kill Facebook" dogma not realized that they are likely more a threat to privacy and openness as those they criticize.

Heh, that's not how most people think. It's more like:

Security! It's a total non-issue! Why would anyone want to break my app?

Most people seem to feel this way until their apps are dumped, rooted, hacked, or they just end up thinking security is cool and say "Man, I didn't realize how much of a mess I had before."

Basic scans need to be part of the CI workflow of startups these days. The same QA tier you use for Selenium and what not you should just throw Nessus/SQLMap at and have injections/vulnerabilities of the web stack fail builds as well.

Cocky, rash, and likely to be burned by YC is more likely the thing here.

If you want YC to pay attention to what you're doing, why confront it and ask for a challenge? If you're starting your own company why are you asking for a challenge at all? As an entrepreneur it is your job to challenge yourselves and the status quo.

This is like going to an NFL referee and asking them for a football game. Why not start the football game and make the referees take notice at how great you are? Being hungry gives you the ambition to improve. Being good is remembering and executing on what you've learned.

This really sounds like a game for hardcore programmers (16-bit emulation, "assembly in space" as h2s called it.) Minecraft is far more accessible: will this really gain nearly as much traction?

MX/A records can be useful for this as well.

Yes, they can, if not in staff in tenacity.

So all this time Cray has been doing it right:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cray-3_processor_brick.jpg

I have a basic understanding of how viruses work at the cellular level. The problem is that DRACO doesn't seem to kill the virus; it stops its propagation. There is a big difference in the way it works from a broad-spectrum antibiotic and seems more damaging.

Let's say you're really sick with the flu -- that means a lot of cells have that virus. The virus replicates and the cell eventually dies and releases hundreds or thousands of viruses.

From how I read this, DRACO stops the process by killing cells that are making the virus once they are infected with the virus. If I don't have an antibody for the virus or I have a bad immune system, DRACO is going to end up killing one cell for every one virus that exists in my circulatory system. DRACO is ineffective on the virus when it is spreading. Yes, it stops the spread so your immune system can catch up, I guess, but what if I'm already really sick?

The thing that worries me about DDG is their reliance on others' search engines.

If there was ever a true defection from one of the big guys' services to DDG (i.e., if DDG was actually blowing up), it seems to me they'd just replicate many of DDG's features for their userbase and DDG would wither, or even just pull DDG's access to their search engines.

If that happened, I'd just take greater advantage of online return policies if something was completely off from what was expected. A thorough reading of user reviews usually stops you from buying anything egregiously bad.

I'm missing a bit of the logic here, then. If I kill the cells infected, won't the latent viruses go and infect a different cell anyway? DRACO appears to be a medical scorched-earth policy.

Yes.

In many cases, I don't think it has anything to do with employees wanting to be there. The problem I've found is that most managers (and VCs) I've met seem to think that if you aren't devoting your life to your code monastery, you aren't productive and you aren't dedicated. Startups place an enormous amount of value on "ass in seat" time even though sometimes being in the seat isn't often the productive thing to do. There is a horribly mistaken belief that the more you sit at work, the more you get done, and if someone else is sitting there longer than you, they're a "better" employee. It's perception, not reality.

If we really want to go the fuck home, managers need to drastically change what they think "productive" is in a knowledge industry. Writing code is not like being on a factory line. The motions are not repetitive and you are required to be creative. I think I'm as productive in a 30 hour week as I am on a 60 hour one: in the latter case, I'm spending too much time spinning on overhead or burned out and playing Portal.

Let's also not forget that the whole flags/arguments debate is often not really that useful in todays *nix command line, either. I'd love to see more command-line utilities work like the Heroku gem and less like sed. (Yes, I know it breaks the whole Unix philosophy of one tool == one action, but from my experience it is far easier to get new people to learn.)

Because he does two things really well that build huge brands around specific people:

1. Acts like he knows everything and acts like a polarizing, arrogant ass

(I've never met him, so who knows if he actually is an arrogant ass. The majority of people I have met that act like that seem not to be IRL. It's often a persona.)

2. Consistently writes blog posts that cause a lot of controversy (e.g. get people fired, give more famous people you know a spotlight to write content for you, etc.)

I'm not bashing Curtis with the above, even though my tone seems pejorative. It's just true, and it's the same way most political talking heads and radio personalities work. Curtis is basically something like the Howard Stern of the YC set.

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of using such a system? It's like installing all of Windows 7 Ultimate just to run Notepad.

This is the same hardware as the XO stylus in a different case. Same OEM for both. They look great, the demos are wonderful, but user reviews say that they don't work well in the upper third of the screen and require frequent recalibration.

Yes. I own one. It is by far the best of the capacitive styli, hands down. It isn't perfect but is the closest thing you will get to perfect without dropping $100+ for something like the XO[1], which is a bit buggy from what I've seen and you are stuck with their software/SDK. I just won't pay an extra $150 for a stylus. At that point I might as well go the Wacom-equipped Android route.

Even with the Adonit, though, iPad is still no match for a Wacom. It's not even close.

Go on YouTube and just search for Adonit Jot Pro reviews. There are lots of impartial people and accurate action.

[1] http://www.by-zero.com/