iridium's comments

Wouldn't a lossy JPEG (or HEIC) compression reduce the entropy?

Something I read a while ago that stuck with me - ‘When you are looking for a new opportunity, you are really just looking for a person.’

This reframing totally changed how I look for new jobs, and what suprised me more was how willing people were to refer me, even if they had never met me.

I think Tufte is great, and his ideas of reductionism should never go away. But, this is giving me MLA flashbacks all over again.

Resetting settings made a huge difference. Does not delete any data, only the settings across the phone

I have to disagree. However well intended, It sets up an unnecessary expectation, similar to your birthday.

If you’ve ever gone through a birthday where nobody wished you, I don’t think you would want a maintainer to ever feel that.

Have you read the book Traction yet? It provides a very usable growth framework. More importantly, It also allows you to start thinking of marketing as a testable iterative process, and this simple change in mindset can do wonders for the engineer/hacker.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591848369/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

Slightly OT: The biggest collective fiction today is probably this idea that as tech person, we can change the world, and as a result we should try to change the world. Anything less impactful feels like a waste of potential. The general society has bought into it - because we've been hearing this for years: Johnny - you are such a smart programmer, where is your world changing app ?

Among other things, this translates into working ridiculous hours in expensive cities and convincing a set of investors that they too can be part of this world changing process in exchange for a few shekels. Now these shekels will drive innovation, and they will push civilisation forward.

But the magic of the fiction is that poor Johnny will never feel like he did much to change the world, and so he will keep trying ad infinitum.

Selection bias is something worth avoiding in understanding health studies. It’s quite likely that you know about these folks because they had the right genetics to be healthy outliers, and by extension, famous. It’s no different than saying I know x people who didn’t die of lung cancer due to smoking, which doesn’t change the implication that y% of smokers will always get lung cancer, we just haven’t figured out what fully constitutes your risk ( genetics etc)

This comment made me realize why I never remember summaries of self help books.

Using examples makes it easier to relate and remember, whereas summaries require an additional step of mapping an ongoing situation to a stored summary in your head, and this is very hard to do in realtime.

I'll agree on the debt side. The grade issue is infinitely worse in a lot of competitive cultures.

Even if you take the money factor away, Have non-US universities really figured out higher education? Most of them tend to either be a lot more rigid in structure, or they copy from the US system.

Even though this incident sounds more personal than idealistic, it keeps bringing back up the question of the purpose of universities.

I am okay with universities being a medium of education, where one can take any courses they want, and passing and failing is irrelevant (MOOCs?)

I am okay with universities being a place to enjoy four years of camaraderie and self exploration before committing to life or career goals.

I am okay with universities being a stamp of selection, i.e you were good enough to get into harvard so you must be smart.

However, universities try to be all three and fail miserably at all of them, while leaving students in a large debt that most are unable to reconcile with what they got out of it, along with a life-long 'average gpa' that barely reflects abilities.

It doesn't hurt that Microsoft is able to hire the best engineering grads, pay them 100k, and convince them that writing documentation for .NET is a better deal than building some pseduo cool product somewhere else at half the pay.

The very small percentage of php developers who have ever had to deal with binary data probably had their hands burnt enough to figure out what binary safe was. While I'm not arguing that documentation should have vague references, its not that hard of a tradeoff between just mentioning something that should be explained over pages, as opposed to not having it there at all.

Plus, the comments section makes it very useful to have examples and clarifications. Its not as bad as you make it out to be.

Why all the hate for "Big Data"? Other than that it is a shiny MBA term that cannot, god forbid be part of hacker terminology.

Lets focus on the Enterprise tools sector, since this is a large, rich market that is yet to be tapped properly. Imagine every single piece of data from customer contact points to orders to cases to actual product usage. Imagine being able to use a tool that can take all this data and show it in pretty graphs that you can use to decide how many millions to spend where. We dont have these tools today. Oracle's BI is bloated, and there honestly are not that many tools out there that can process large amounts of data while integrating successfully with a thousand different other tools that generate this data. Every single system now tracks data..but it goes nowhere, just a large tape to be stored away into eternity while the decision makers are still struggling with massive excel sheets.

Custom solutions become obsolete as soon as one of the other systems get upgraded, so this is a great opportunity for a cloud or packaged software. And for those of you who dont want to work in backend data processing, understand that the biggest component of Big Data is the UI - The data needs to be presented in the most useful manner possible.

Three finger scrolling works on a mac (Lion). I think you can enable drag lock on snow leopard for the same effect.

EDIT: The mouse does move off the view port during drag, so its probably not that much more efficient.

I'm not sure I understand this correctly. After buying the app and then asking someone for a favor - now they need to plunk down for the app to view the favor? I'm not sure they are going to want to do the favor at that point.

I agree with MVP and your anecdotes - less bloat, all the better, but from a UI/UX perspective, let me give you a few examples of what usually gets thrown out in a mobile first design:

Dropdown menus - Mobile first almost always means multiple clicks to get to the same place, which is more annoying on a slower browser.

Commenting system - still yet to see a decent one that I would one on a mobile interface

Flash/animations - like it or not, moving images grabs attention but does not translate well to mobile.

Page width - 1440 pixels on my shiny screen, but text is stuck in a 200px box that forces me to scroll down. Flexible width usually gets thrown out when you add sidebars and ads.

Large Buttons - Great for mobile but I'd rather see context that a sign up button taking half the page

Related content links - Especially for blogs/news websites.

Inline images - My primary annoyance with this article which is ALL TEXT. Mobile design says dont take up an entire screen view with an image. Web first design says even if the current text is boring, people will scroll down if they see an interesting image.

I honestly believe that having separate approaches will allow for better UX, time and cost permitting.

Good points, but I dont agree with this:

>> 14. Design for mobile first (even if a mobile app is not in your roadmap). The constraints of a mobile context will force you to focus on what’s essential, and help you cut what’s not needed. The question “How would I design this as a mobile app?” always clears my head and helps me find the simpler, elegant solution.

Unless you are primarily designing a mobile app, this ends up shortchanging the web user. A full web interface can always do more and the challenge should be converting those features to mobile as opposed to dumbing down the design for the lowest denominator.

Estimation becomes a lot easier a few weeks into any project. Once you have the framework and an overall story down, and you start getting your hands dirty with a few classes, the estimation numbers start to have more confidence and weight.

The only thing you can really confirm though, is what is already completed, and that is what you should keep the stakeholders posted on. And a description of work left, not necessarily the time it will take.

You would surprised to see how mind numbingly similar the middle class is across all the states in India. Or for that matter similar to middle classes across the world.

Also - I dont think breaking it up will solve anything - If anything pakistan and bangladesh are excellent examples of states that were broken out of what you could call old India, and their struggles are getting worse after 60 odd years, not better.

Yup. The 3 satellites will be used for primary communication along with an X-band transmitter on the rover itself to talk to earth.

Edit: Link (communications): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity_rover#Specifications