>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money
I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.
I think Bostonians would take issue with your assumption:
- Boston has one of the best public transportation systems in the country (ranked #4 by Us news) [1]
- Boston and the surrounding area is very densely populated making things generally not far away. In fact, Boston is about 4x as dense as Atlanta and the surrounding cites of Cambridge and Somerville are more dense still. [2,3,4,5]
- Boston is pretty much covered in college campuses. They're in the middle of the city, edges of the city, and outskirts of the city.
The author's grip puts the home button halfway outside his "thumb zone" forcing an awkward claw whenever you need to multitask or return to the springboard. Our grip puts the home button in a much more natural position.
Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:
1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)
2. lack of preparation for the interview
3. lack of ability for self-reflection
4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.
I'm not disagreeing with your point regarding wealth, but football is the most popular men's high school sport (by participation) in the country so your experiences aren't likely the norm. Also track, tennis and gymnastics are mostly individual sports so they're less likely to be the ones driving the same level of school-wide support and pride (logos on the masthead, trophies in the hall, etc).
Also HN readers might be unlikely to have had the average American high school experience.
You're right it's more difficult to pull off a soft launch on mobile if you're also aiming for a feature in the App Store (Apple seems to favor new-ness when selecting apps for features). I've heard of iOS apps launching into a subset of the regional app stores as a way to soft launch (ie. excluding the US store and thus preventing Apple from featuring there before the developer is ready).
If there really is a substantial difference in the quality of two software developers then that should play out in the amount of value delivered. The article lost me at:
> Conversely, what about the guy sitting in the corner who works 9 to 5, and seems to spend a lot of time reading the internet? Is he just very proficient at writing stable reliable code, or is his job just easier than everyone else’s? To the casual observer, the first chap is working really hard, the second one isn’t. Hard work is good, laziness is bad, surely?
If the brilliant developer is spending a lot of time reading the internet, never staying late, and producing the same output (minus bugs) as the weaker team, then maybe he's not providing quite as much comparative value as he thinks he is.
Note: Some discussion on here regarding sys admins. I agree the situation is different in the maintain-working-systems roles vs. the create-new-products roles.
Not sure if this is what you meant, but I don't think it's fair to call The Economist "right wingers" in the American sense, and probably not in the general sense either.
Seems curious to me that (at least by visual comparison) London looks to be about 30% larger than NYC, and NYC appears to be about the same as Paris. By population, you'd expect NYC = London > Paris. Is NYC really still that far behind in its tech scene? Does Paris have that large a tech scene? Or am I just reading the chart poorly?
This doesn't seem like a very fair comparison. Most browsers account for this (by default) by using a different cursor symbol for linked text vs. non-linked text. Some also show the linked url in the browser UI also.
A web developer can override both those conventions and when they do, their links become less recognizable and their apps become less usable. Since there's no cursor on iOS touch screens, losing the visual cues is a similar problem.
[edit] You might argue that just tapping on something serves as the way to discover if a visual element is tappable on iOS. But it doesn't, as the original article states, it just makes the user wonder if something might be broken.
It's different because prior to this change, you could make an educated decision about whether to support an older version of your API based on usage of your app. When the legacy version reached some threshold percentage of your user base you could be fairly confident that you were inconveniencing a small and dwindling fraction of users and drop support.
With this change you can no longer be confident that app usage for legacy versions will always decrease. If your app suddenly becomes very popular (as most app developers are aiming for), you might have a substantial contingent of users who are on an old OS downloading an outdated version that you no longer support.
What does that even mean? You wear gloves in public all the time? You wipe down everything you touch?
Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?
I agree with you I don't think the income gap is the cause of lower crime. Also these crime rates are dropping absolutely not per capita, right? Is there any data to show that the actual population of lower income (or even middle income) residents has dropped? All the news focuses on the variance in income distribution. NYC could be getting richer while still taking in more low income residents.
On one of the Apollo missions (11), a medal commemorating Yuri's first flight was placed on the moon by the NASA astronauts. The medal was commissioned by the British government and contained inscriptions in both English and Russian languages. It was among other items commemorating fallen astronauts/cosmonauts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin#Tributes)
I'm aware of this because my grandfather hand engraved the medal.
My team has done similar user testing in Starbucks quite a few times. Here's my $0.02: If you're willing to be bold, walk right up to people and ask, you don't need to offer free coffee or gift cards. We've found this is a better strategy for a few reasons: 1. It's cheaper. 2. It does not dramatically change the number of test users you can get in a given afternoon. And 3. You're more likely to get critical negative feedback if you dont put the users in the position of owing you for the coffee.
Why not add a link as the 3rd step in addition to the invite code? Once the app's installed on a user's device you can pass through the code via a custom url scheme and avoid the possible drop off of having a user mis-enter their code. (you'd probably still want the code there in addition for users reading the email on a non iOS device)
I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.