tomkarlo

61 ms·

511.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
Does anyone really think Photoshop is a good UX for mass consumption (which is obviously the target for Gmail)? I've been using it since version 2, and I think it's a great product, but for new users it's a miserably difficult product to le
512.
by tomkarlo 13y ago
"People have this idea that you can reduce a program to a precise set of specifications that can be formulated by non-programmers and shipped off to China to be coded up." Yup... If this was actually possible, we could just write software t
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Building "business-scale" software is almost always a team effort. It doesn't matter how brilliant someone is if they can't work well with their team; in fact it's generally a recipe for disaster. 2 and 4 here are deal breakers for any dece
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
If only. Aside from very, very standard patterns, software development is like building a totally different house each time, and builders tend to have a bear of a time when things deviate from accepted patterns. There is an immense range of
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
I did.
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Yes, but you're also hanging around on HN. :) I'm thinking more of the other guy, who was just as smart as you but perhaps not in love with tech, and had to decide if he wants to give up 50K to be an engineer. (I think you're referring to c
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Because there’s a longstanding view that since programmers love what they do, they shouldn’t be compensated as highly as other fields with demanding requirements. Employees at large tech firms are as profitable as bankers, yet they get paid
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Yes, but the site has significant flaws when it comes to handling old content regurgitated on other sites. Which is why it's relevant to point out how old a post is - because the site itself doesn't. In this case, this is essentially a repo
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
On a site with "News" in its name, you'd expect articles to be at least somewhat timely. Otherwise, we could all just start posting random wikipedia articles or other things we happen to have just discovered ourselves, regardless of whether
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
This is 3 years old...
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
No, it used to be just search. Now it's a whole integrated service of helpful information on a local/personalized basis (RTFA).
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Mobile devices have much better context information than desktops. And they're more likely to be present during offline spending decisions.
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
Pointcast was basically a feed reader / screensaver. It didn't have any of the predictive elements of Now (as I recall... I had it installed back in the day.) Basically, it turned your idle monitor into a poor-man's version of a TV tuned to
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by tomkarlo 13y ago
I suspect that using the very simplified iOS notifications would probably get irritating quickly. Sample size of 1 but my iOS notifications tray is always a disaster compared to my Android, I think because it doesn't coalesce notifications
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Creating a service shouldn't be a lifetime commitment to running it. There needs to be a way for Marco to continue inventing new products without dedicating an increasing percentage of his time to supporting existing ones, and this seems li
526.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Seems like it makes a lot of sense to do this. They don't want to become a de-facto mirror for the content, they want to provide it only to people who are actually their users. I'd rather have that, along with a bias towards sharing the ori
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
I don't need to strain: what you're saying - that you can look a bunch of people, and based on their faces and clothing, decide they're not American - is racist. In fact, it's pretty close to the canonical example of racist. What I'm trying
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
I misspoke. The slop was in the interpretation of the definition, not the definition itself.
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Arguably, but there are social bounds to what's considered acceptable, as well as bounds enforced by Twitter to prevent abuse of the medium. Any phone conversation B2C is similar, but in general, we don't like businesses calling us on a fal
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
No, not "or ads on Gmail". Gmail doesn't create ads that pretend to be email messages. The whole point here is that it's a mis-use of a messaging channel - they are leveraging the fact that users _don't_ expect favoriting to be a form of ad
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
It's an abuse of a messaging channel that degrades it for everyone to benefit a small number of parties. Similar to spam or telemarketing or chain mail. (Or, say, pollution. There's a mismatch between who the benefits accrue to, and who pay
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Exactly. Reminds me of a startup that complained to me they couldn't find any good engineers in Silicon Valley - when they were offering 25% below market comp.
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
"Essentially every student in a well known US college or university is "heavily subsidized" in that they pay roughly only 1/3rd of the real cost with the rest from US citizens via gifts or taxes. Even paying full tuition of $50,000 a year o
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Yes, but not in the way you think it does. It mostly tells me you haven't been around a wide variety of people. Live in any major US city and you'll meet thousands of citizens with heavy accents and atypical fashion sense (ever been to Broo
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
How could someone "see" the citizenships of the non-white students? And that's not racist?
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
You're guessing that these students are somehow federally subsidized, but if you're going to make that assumption, you need to actually substantiate it before composing an elaborate fiction of government malfeasance to explain it. For many
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
It's hard enough to find qualified devs out of the pool of folks with CS degrees, which often fail to prepare students for the workplace. CE is possibly at a disadvantage because in covering two disciplines, it doesn't serve either particul
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Is that because the job market is so tight, or because they're not paying enough for the level of talent they want, relative to alternatives like Wall Street and other major tech companies? Microsoft used to be able to pay market (for tech)
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
It guessed 8 years too young for me. Looking at that result and the ones below, it doesn't seem like it's doing a whole lot better than randomly picking an age in the 30 +/- 5 range. I'd like to see how it does with folks further out on the
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
The problem here is that the most reliable delivery channel (email) is not sufficiently secure enough for a lot of situations. Worse, some users share email accounts, so you can't even depend on the auth of the account. If an app or service

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