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skibrah's comments

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Tell HN: Let's Be Civil

Thank you for writing about this. Bickering about biases that an article or commenter might have is the least productive thing imaginable. We all have biases, we all have one product that we prefer over another. If you have a well developed reason for that preference, I want to hear it and hope that you'll share it. But, when I come across a post/comment that is clearly of no substance, my first reaction is to ignore it and move on with my day. Life is too short to waste time and typing on attacking someone for sharing something of little value.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Things I've quit doing at my desk

I couldn't agree more regarding using a standing desk. The ability to stretch and move around makes working for long periods of time much more productive.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Jiro's Dream

I agree with the OP, but the most important part of Jiro's philosophy is his believe that one must choose a craft and dedicate one's life to perfecting it.

If this is the mindset that you take towards your work, you will naturally seek out the best in your field and learn what they do best to incorporate it into your own approach.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: 80-20 software

Designing for the 80% case is especially important in mobile, where cluttering the user experience with small, seemingly nice to have "features" ends up turning a smart, functional application in to a confusing piece of software.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Art’s Sale Value? Zero. The Tax Bill? $29 Million.

The last thing the government wants to be involved with is selling real estate, art and other illiquid assets. There is a very real possibility that the government would lose money if it is unable to sell the asset at the original valuation.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Codecademy closes $10M round

Learning about algorithms is far more difficult and far more important than the mechanics of writing code, which is the focus of sites like Codecademy. I believe that there are certain people whom have minds that can naturally pick up algorithms and break down problems into the different steps needed to solve them. Codecademy will give these individuals most of what they need in order to develop proficiency in writing code.

However, these people are not the majority. When I TA'd for an introduction to Computer Science course, most of student's difficulty, especially on more difficult assignments, was not syntactic and getting a program to compile or run but rather conceptualizing and implementing the intermediate tasks that the program needed to accomplish in order to produce the final result. In my opinion, this is the most difficult part of writing anything beyond the most basic piece of software and the area which online programming courses are the least helpful.

That being said, I think that Codecademy and similar sites are very helpful of learning the syntax of a particular language which, of course, is the first step to being able to write code.

skibrah | 13 years ago | on: Apple Maps

over under on the time that it takes for this to be changed?

skibrah | 14 years ago | on: Steve Jobs on the File System

I agree that there are definitely cases, attaching multiple files being one, where the lack of file system access makes the process more difficult or impossible. However, I think that there isn't really a "happy medium" in terms of whether direct access to the file system is provided or not, there is either access or there isn't. Rather, one possible solution is to put the onus on the app developer and allow apps to present files that can be "public" within the phone and accessible to other applications. Obviously this opens a worms in terms of security, which I think is one of the main reasons that Apple has not done this.
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