Sketch is better than anything else on the market simply because it's actually made for user interface design. Everything else that's existed for years was made for image processing.
I just spent the last year of my life doing a 'proof of concept' and 'looking out for investors'. You'll spend your life always with a sense of insecurity drawn on by the fact that you don't have a real product.
Now, if your favorite Uncle is an investor and absolutely loves you, that's a whole different story. But realistically, make a product, find users who love it, then campaign for them by finding people to invest.
Otherwise you'll lose sight of why you're doing this.
Yay! Everyone start their own company! I mean why not? Who needs salaried work? It's just so easy and risk-free if you already know how to program!
Come on now, start a company when you've identified a problem that really needs a fix, and that has a huge potential of profit. A great way to find that problem is in a paid position. Starting a company for the sake of starting a company won't get you anywhere.
I'd started my own company at one point, and utterly failed at it... didn't enjoy it at all, and it wasn't at all freeing.. in fact I never felt more constrained.
I also spent 8 months in a Director level position, managing several teams and several projects. Also much more constrained. Though, I did learn that there is far more mediocrity in the majority of programmers than greatness at that time.
Now, I'm much more about putting in my time, making the projects I work on better when I leave than when I start. I enjoy contract work as I get to learn new things constantly (___domain knowledge in diverse cultures), which to me is a lot of fun. Right now, I'm working for an internal development operations group, which means creating services for other development groups... It's interesting for the moment, though I'm enjoying the slower pace so far.
I spent the last year and a half before where I am working on changing the environment of a set of very stale projects that had become maintenance nightmares, and bringing them into more current structures. Enhancing the UI as well as simplifying other systems. It really depends.
I see people posting horrendous stuff with their real names all the time on youtube. I don't think anonymity is what causes these horrible comments: it's more the fact that the internet creates a "barrier" between two people. It's easier to say something with conviction in text than it is in person, even if you're typing it under your real name.
I heard road rage explained in the same way. We would never act to each other face to face as we would in a car. The car feels like an extension of your own home and you feel more violated when someone invades what you perceive to be your space and we view what we are lashing out at as an object and not as person with feelings. I can see it being the same mentality when you are sitting at home nerdraging at your computer.
Ya. A friend of mine was driving one time and some asshat got all bent out of shape over something he did and started doing all sorts of douchbaggy things while driving. So my friend decided to discreetly follow this guy. When the guy had stopped and parked and was getting out of his car, my friend confronted him and inquired about his problem. The guy nearly crapped himself as he never expected to actually have to deal with someone he had just been a dick to on the road. Classic.
Edit: I guess I need to clarify that my friend was a perfect gentleman to the guy. Very non threatening. Not in the same road-rage way the other guy had been on the road. The situation ended very peacefully and the other guy apologized. This was not one of those "I'll throw your dog into traffic" situations. I can't imagine why confronting a bully like that would be looked down upon but I guess HN is fickle that way.
I imagine they were down-voting you because you chose to explain the story that, as far as many could tell, was a bit off-topic; and was spoken in a more 'street' way, that might be perceived as trolling.
huh... a road rage story in response to a post that talked a bit about road rage compared to cyber-bullying and safety in anonymity, etc. It sounded on topic in my head.
Lots of pseudonymous forums are reasonably civil. I suspect the problem with Youtube's comments is more an absence of signal than the presence of noise. Videos are far more accessible to the barely literate, "People who watch videos on YouTube" has no community identity, and there's no external purpose to the commenting to overcome the weakness of text as a medium to discuss cat videos.
I'm not sure why Youtube even bothered allowing text comments in the first place, let alone why they didn't go to video-response only years ago.
There also seems to be an impermanence to commenting on a video, especially one that's popular, because responses (unless sufficiently up-voted) don't stick around, and there's no way to easily search through them.
So a YT comment stream takes on a party line vibe and (IMO) there's not much point taking the time to write something thoughtful.
Mainly when I have commented is on videos on niche subjects when I'm reasonably sure the video poster/artist/producer will see it.
There was a period when I was able to Have A Conversation in YouTube comments but I was never able to do it more than a few times. On the other hand, I see people having legitimate conversations on random occasions quite frequently.
I think the barrier you describe has helped lead to the phenomenon of claiming 'I was just trolling' or some variation of that comment when people are called out on inappropriate behaviour on the internet.
It really depends on the video. I still see people spouting stuff straight out of Stormfront and calling people fat and blah blah but for the people with channels with following? I do see a change. I think the bigger deal is that YT finally brought up a system to deal with the troll commments by downvoting. You only really see them when you click "show anyway" now.
It's amusing to see this back and forth of tech community where one side thinks it's the next big thing, the other thinks that because these "nerdy" tech journalists like Google Glass it won't be popular, and then the rebuttal that the critics are either jealous or just naysayers.
Honestly, it's all fun and games till the average consumer has the ability to buy it. The rest is just speculation.
The goal isn't to write pleasant code; it's to explore what's possible with the language, even if you should be slapped for using the techniques in a real project. Reducing LOC is akin to code golf; the shortening is an ends to itself, and sites like codegolf.com are essentially competitive problem solving with a very strange goal.
Tangentially: In a different subject, there was an ad hoc competition to write the shortest science fiction story.
One example is Knock, by Fredric Brown: "The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door..."
Another is Cosmic Report Card: Earth, by Forrest J. Ackerman. The entirety of the story is "F".
Whenever I see "Tutorial: X" on the internet I immediately think "What if a beginner read this".
Therefore whenever I see an article without a "Do not do this in real-life / production because..." warning I immediately take a negative view.
In this case I evaluated the site with that in mind, all the techniques are useful but the examples are pretty badly shoe-horned. There are much cleared ways to give examples of multiple assignments than the examples there.
Other things like writing methods on one line, probably useful in situations like defining error classes
"class MySpecialError < StandardError; end" but apart from that I frown upon it.
There is also the "Hey, this is a nested ternary operator" example which is... well, demo'ing nested ternary operators without a big fat "Do this in real life and people will hurt you" warning is a no-no in my book.
A bit rambling but I suppose to sum up my main problem with this was "Here are some things you can do" without actual discussion about when they are suitable, when they are not, and why this is so.
If you have to do stupid tricks such as concatenate statements with ; and create long lines, it's not a useful trick.
In general, reading even the original code, the author doesn't understand Ruby or OO in general. A number of the items would be one-liners with an improved application of theory rather than syntactic rewriting. If the goal is just golfing, then #map and possibly rockets would be better choices.
If I wanted less maintainable code in a shorter line count, I would use a mechanical obfuscator.
This is exaggerated but more or less correct. Depends on the country. You can live in an expat bubble but the downside is that people leave all the time. And you will never be national local but after long enough you can be city local if that makes sense to you. Requires actually acclimating, learning the language and implicit norms etc. I'm not even remotely there yet but living in Shanghai beats living in Ireland.
It was in a sense a generalization to shed light on a larger point in that acclimating to cultures isn't about you, it's about the people who are a part of the culture accepting you.
I also don't want to discourage anyone from leaving their culture to try something new. It's an amazing truly eye opening experience.
I truly don't get the hype about that movie. They definitely got the visuals right, but a lot of it felt "off". Quite a few of the cultural stereotypes were awkwardly over-played too.
Also, Japan is really a different bird when it comes to integration. Not all countries have the same jarring and visceral division between foreigners and local society.
It feels "off" because it's strange for Americans, who grow up in a culture that is made up of immigrants to understand that cultures with centuries of history aren't very accepting of people who are different.
Don't get me wrong, the international community is very accepting, even loving. But when you get to actual nationals, other than a few exceptions, you'll never be truly accepted.
> It feels "off" because it's strange for Americans, who grow up in a culture that is made up of immigrants to understand that cultures with centuries of history aren't very accepting of people who are different.
I lived there for a few years as a teenager, and didn't really have an experience that jived with the general atmosphere depicted in the movie. YMMV, I suppose.
Come now, Japan is by some distance the most xenophobic first world country. If you look Asian, learn to speak Japanese very well, adopt a Japanese name and citizenship you can integrate but those are all necessary conditions.
On the overplaying the foreignness people on their first sojourn in a really foreign country do the tourist goggling all the time. One needs a lot of foreign travel experience to start treating it as just some more different shit.
That's not always true, or maybe I'm just weird. I admit, there's a lot of feeling out of the loop with friends in a different country, speaking a different language, but it's not forever. (And no, I'm not living in one of those American colonies that always seem to form either ;)
One thing this shows is just how powerful Facebook could become/already is.
When they connect the dots online and offline of billion user's buying information and habits they essentially can electronically understand who you are better than you do, and can predict what you'll do even better.
Just food for thought.
When Facebook connects the dots online and offline of billion users' buying information and habits, they essentially can electronically understand who you are better than you do, and can predict what you'll do even better.
Simply put, because the corner stones of democratic societies are built on the assumption that peoples lives are private.
Take voting without privacy. Can voting work if everyone is fully known by the state? If the people in office known where the oppositions voters are, new actions become available. If you can redirect road work, sporting events, sales, and so on, how much work would it really be to get the oppositions voters to spend the day doing something other then voting on the election day? Knowing who votes for who allows those already in power an unfair and destructive advantage over those not yet elected.
Take politics in general if we have no privacy. What happens to politics if every to-be political rival is known to those threatened? If we can identify which kids are going to be political active, those could be discourage. Alternative, they could be influenced, drag into the party line before reaching a independent view.
Or lets leave politics and go to justice. Can you have a working judge and jury system if everything about their life can be fully known? If one party know that a jury members spouse is cheating, they can rephrase their statements in form of betraying. If someone know about economical troubles, one can redress statements as being "down on the luck". If the judge dreams about leaving the bench and begin some childhood dream project, one could phrase statements in favor of startups. Knowing the dreams and thoughts of people, and you get boundless possibilities to influence others.
Predictions based on partial data could be problematic.
One example: I pay for fresh food and staples in cash, and buy 'grocery' items on a card. A data collection system that tracked only card purchases would give the impression of a very unhealthy diet.
This is how it is for me, too. I buy fresh vegetables, fresh meat, milk, eggs, bread at a local farm shop and pay cash. I buy other things like pizza, coffee, processed foods at a supermarket and pay with card - and also scan my loyalty card.
I regularly get offers from the supermarket for money off yet more unhealthy food - they are blissfully unaware that I eat quite well in reality!
If I'm manipulated into buying something that I genuinely want, then I'd be happier for it.
It's not as if seeing an ad for a $100 256GB SSD would make me skip looking up the reviews for it and evaluating its performance before I buy it.
It's mystifying to me why people are bothered by targeted ads. If ads become relevant to me, that'd be a wonderful thing. I'm not saying I'm right -- I'm saying I wish someone would explain why targeted advertising is evil.
1. I get no say in what information they store and use. If somebody else used my computer, that information is associated with me.
2. The more information companies have about me, the easier it is for the government to gather information without due process.
3. What is gathered about me can be stolen by somebody else.
I agree that, in theory, well targeted ads are far superior to the dating ads I get on Facebook, but with zero control, transparency or accountability, I'm very uncomfortable with the amount if info they are trying to gather from me.
I'm not bothered by targeted ads. I'm bothered by the idea that someone who has amassed all the information about me to show me well targeted ads can do other things as well.
For instance, they could sell pseudo psychological profiles or provide scoring services to potential employers, banks, insurance companies, landlords, users of dating sites or governments.
They could be subpoenaed and hence make me vulnerable to extortion by everyone with a sufficiently large legal budget or a political interest. The data could also be stolen by organized criminals.
In other words, it would give great power over my life to anyone who gets hold of that data, and therefore I do not want this kind of data to exist.
> If I'm manipulated into buying something that I genuinely want, then I'd be happier for it.
But do you genuinely want it? or were you _influinced_ into wanting it? It's the same principle that makes fast food advertisements so profitable for the food industry. The ads are already targeted (most people like to eat tasty food).
Furthermore, if you're truly indifferent with being influenced like this, to what extent will the "influencing" remain acceptable to you? where would you draw the line?
The issues with eroding privacy and with the amount of data needed to create targeted advertising are well explored, thus to expand the discussion a bit, lets talk about the subjects outside the scope of privacy.
Advertising, be that targeted or not, are problematic. In return for redirecting how people spend money, they distract people and steals time.
A child growing up is in average spending 133 hours watching TV commercials[1]. Add that with commercials on the web, games, and other media and the time spent on commercial is maybe longer for a child then what they spend learning a subject like math in school. If you then include the time lost from the distracting effect while reading email, or accessing a news site, and the cost of advertising to the individual goes up. People who's main problem at work or school is the ability to focus should strongly consider using tools such as ad-block. It could be the difference between graduating or not.
In contrast, opt-in advertising like recommendation services do not have those issues, and are in my view the only form of targeted advertising that are morally on the OK side. They use primarily legal methods in their businesses model, and do not need to use exploits and legal trickery to work.
People aren't bothered by the targeted ads. They're bothered by what else can be done with that vast, accumulated store of information and the network that's designed for surveillance, tracking and predicting behavior. For a lot of people, facebook is their identity. It's the way others see them and communicate with them, and their account holds a great deal of personal information which could be used to impersonate, blackmail or profile them.
The whole point of manipulation is to make you go against your own interests and buy things you don't need, at some point down the road. Otherwise it would just be making you aware that something exists (which I agree is fine, targeted or not), not manipulation.
And which is by the way exactly the negative incentive for governments to pass this sort of legislation, as they love to get their hands on this kind of data via legal (or pseudo-legal) means.
Get Sketch. Seriously.