smartkids

7 ms·

1.
by smartkids 14y ago
Making your Mom deal with permissions? Yikes. I think reasoning, in addition to basic instructions, is important even though some people might not care about it. By leaving it out you deny those who do care an opportunity to learn. And t
2.
by smartkids 14y ago
and you're not answering my questions. what are we debating? i'm happy to debate. here's my guess: we're debating whether mdonahue's statement "people like you are not a large market, unfortunately" is true. however as i pointed out, we h
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by smartkids 14y ago
Thank you. I knew there must be a reasonable explanation.
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by smartkids 14y ago
Intelligence insulted. Next. I have a MicroSDCard inside a SDCard adpater sitting flush in my smaller-than-iPad netbook. I got it for "free" with purchase of a cell phone, before the iPhone existed. I guess I need to get a MacBook to rep
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by smartkids 14y ago
This HN title reminds me of the type of headline The Onion used to be famous for.
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by smartkids 14y ago
This is a fascinating story. The most interesting stories never seem to reach the HN frontpage.
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by smartkids 14y ago
Solution: Let these interface gimmicks be the stuff of tech conventions and demos, and never part of any mass-produced product. But maybe some marketing folks, seeing the success of Apple, have reasoned that these gimmicks can sell products
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by smartkids 14y ago
re: his appeal to "interested corporations" Does he need money? One would think he probably has a pretty good day job already. But if he really needed it in order to continue writing software, I would bet many people would be willing to c
9.
by smartkids 14y ago
This is nothing compared to the number of py spent writing crapware. Think of how much effort has been spent writing lousy software. It is enormous. (But then most consumers of software don't know any better, so from a sales perspective,
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by smartkids 14y ago
If Bluetooth isn't working for some reason, then cables would not work either, so it makes sense to remove the option to use them. Bluetooth always works flawlessly, unlike cables. It's also proprietary and far more secure than cables. It's
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by smartkids 14y ago
"this claim" what claim? can you be specific? the original comment referred to a market for "people like [me]" being "not large". my response was that i have not seen any evidence to support that sort of claim. but i'm not even sure i kn
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by smartkids 14y ago
It's possible that innovation, specifically scientific progress that leads to innovation, actually relies on scientists sharing stuff with collaborators that patent lawyers would not want them to share. The patent lawyers might often be "t
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by smartkids 14y ago
no empirical evidence to support the original statement he made: "the market for people like [me] is not very large" for one, what does "people like me" mean? people who can make use of non-apple hardware? what sort of uses? i don't know
14.
by smartkids 14y ago
anecdotal evidence indeed. that's precisely the point. there is no empirical evidence behind the vast majority of comments like these. conclusions without evidence or any indication of the methods used to arrive at them. linux? are you
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by smartkids 14y ago
They owned the network. And they wanted to control devices that could be used on it. (There may have once been legitimate reasons for this.) Apple wants to control your devices. How you use them after your purchase. The network you use
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by smartkids 14y ago
I understand the comment. Of course the thought has crossed my mind. But I'm not so sure there's any evidence to support it. I actually test some of my ideas with people like your mother, and surprisingly (why should I be surprised?) they
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by smartkids 14y ago
The iPaq was/is a fantastic device. You could attach peripherals. Try doing that with an iPad. I could put an entire OS on a CF Card and assuming I could boot from the card, the expanded functionality is limited only by the hardware spec
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by smartkids 14y ago
Yes, but perhaps _making things easy to use_ and _sexy hardware design_ might have something to do with their success? The problem with the research labs at those example companies you cited is that those businesses have little incentive to
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by smartkids 14y ago
"Wow, this just what we've been looking for! Where have you guys been all these years?" The sad thing is it's not what we think that matters. If clients fall for the buzzspeak, it's irrelevant if that what they're paying for, believing it
20.
by smartkids 14y ago
Just based on the Linus quotes, I think he's right. The kernel did what it was supposed to do back in 1991. What is the "desktop" supposed to do? There will never be unanimous agreement on that - every user will have different needs and pre
21.
by smartkids 14y ago
Toughbook is hardware not software. Get an old Thinkpad. It's durable. I take the opposite view. I like durable software. And that's how I build my systems. If they get trashed, they can be restored in minutes. I'd rather spend my eff
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by smartkids 14y ago
Yes. This is why I defined "incompetence" quite carefully. Finding bugs in Knuth's or NASA's code might be beyond "a reasonably skilled hacker". To find bugs in that code you would likely have to be "highly skilled", above average. Everyo
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by smartkids 14y ago
I hate writing what I just wrote because I know it might offend some people. I'm OK with the "incompetence" (I'm sure I qualify myself), but it's the fact that many of these programmers think they know what they're doing that bugs me. And
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by smartkids 14y ago
It's interesting if you think about how easy is is to get food. The drives that cause us to eat probably evolved in the long period of human evolution where we had to work really hard, like every other animal, to find food. Hunger might c
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by smartkids 14y ago
13. Most programmers think they know what they're doing but actually are "incompetent". (There are Usenet posts going back to 80's documenting this fact.) How am I defining "incompetent"? In my definition it means writing software that a
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by smartkids 14y ago
Sounds more like energy depletion that "ego depletion". The more stress the person is undergoing the more energy is drained. Isn't this obvious? I thought Ariely was known for brilliant insights on human behaviour. Maybe he's become a di
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by smartkids 14y ago
Are domain names overrated? If I understand the reasoning correctly, someone who really wanted to access whatever is at "dajaz1.com" would not be willing to type 108.162.192.76. It is a non-starter. For example, if an announcement was post
28.
by smartkids 14y ago
Teach her to turn off Javascript. Voila. No more ads. (Or at least a drastically reduced number of them.) Just as Google is entitled to show ads, the user is entitled to disable Javascript. It's a fair trade. And as for inserting the ads