gt384u

ITT: People who don't React well to critical feedback from new users

I feel like completely specifying the problem does everyone in an actual engineering interview a disservice and isn't a good analogue to actual engineering problem-solving. That said, it might be acceptable or even encouraged for the purposes of this site.

In the case that you mention, if someone asked me "Can I short sell?" I'd be happy that they considered the order of events there and were trying to explore the problem. I'd certainly remember it in my interview feedback. My response as an interviewer would be more or less "That's an interesting thought. To simplify the problem, let's say we're risk averse and prefer a finite loss potential. Go ahead and just consider purchase before sale."

One of the biggest criteria I looked for from junior engineering candidates was that they didn't just jump into implementation and asked clarifying questions. That's hard to do with the sort of site this is so maybe in this case more complete specification is useful, but any way that a bit of ambiguity can be introduced means that you can have a meaningful conversation with an engineer about representation, the shape of the problem, the inputs, what the criteria for success are, what is truly necessary to solve a problem. I want working code in the end, but hearing the things a person does or does not consider about a problem is interesting and valuable to understand a potential teammate and how they think.

  > For a time, Target used Amazon's website code.

I remember getting the email saying that we no longer had to special case Target stuff in the retail platform. 'Twas a joyous day all around.

I attended this conference and spoke with the presenter about his talk both before and after. My takeaway was that the presenter was trying to accomplish one thing: educate front-end developers who (rightly or not) have been characterized as unfamiliar or ignorant of cryptographic techniques with a survey of those techniques. I believe this was the sense "Bringing Crypto To The Masses" was meant.

I appreciated the energy and enthusiasm the speaker had for the subject matter and would be delighted if any of that transferred into his audience, but I don't feel it was effectively communicated. In the time constraints presented, even something as simple as, say, discussing what cryptographic hashing (or symmetric crypto or public key crypto or digital signing, take your pick) was and doing a deep dive only in this domain would have been a valuable experience and opened a lot of eyes. I'm fairly familiar with all the topics discussed during this talk and I had a difficult time following along with it. I can't imagine what the experience of the intended audience was or what they managed to glean from it.

I would imagine this has something to do with having an existing package dependency management system company-wide and it causing friction trying to get the two to coexist.

I have similar issues where I work with trying to integrate an internal build system and rubygems. Our answer is to essentially mirror the gem version internally into our own repo. It's not the best answer I could hope for.

Another identifier which would seem to help accomplish the task is identifierForVendor. As a bonus, it isn't something that can be opted out of like the advertisingIdentifier.

Maybe it's just being on a team that's more focused on nontechnical users, but I still see plenty of PowerPoint. Product, sales, and business process people seem to swim in the stuff.

This is how I first learned about CSS circa 2001. More importantly, you could provide your browser user-defined CSS.

My first entry? Making any link from goatse.cx struck-out and brown.

Neither. If you look at the S3 URL, they are URLs with expiry times after which they stop serving the content. The cryptographic signature makes it... let's call it "infeasible" to manipulate the URL to change the expiry time.

I had a conversation with a senior engineer on SourceForge where he pointed out that most people forget that developers are actually a minority of their business: most of their users are nontechnical people that come to them to download binaries of things like zip utilities.

I think I understand the motivation behind your comment and I'd agree to some extent, but designers still have the mantra that users need to be involved in the process of design. For some design practitioners, it's maybe ensuring that designers write personas and scenarios for different types of users or engage in narrative-based design exercises, or even (if you're the right sort of weirdo) participatory design.

I honestly have no idea what stage this project is in. Are they in a phase that's more ideation? Are they refining in their design funnel? I think it's a bit curious to point at an example of a product by one company and say essentially 'They did it this way and were successful, clearly this is how all things should be designed'.

I'm not sure this is an issue of them asking a question analagous to "What do you want the iPhone to do?" so much as it's maybe "How annoying are people who aren't researchers and designers going to find wearing HUD glasses for 3 hours a day?" or "Will people feel uncomfortable using them in pedestrian or cycling settings given that they're voice-activated and pervasive?" Granted, there are maybe analogous products on the market that will maybe inform how people will interact with this new medium, but I have a few years experience interacting with someone using this sort of one-eyed projective displays (my former research advisor wore one) and there are some funny things involved with face to face interaction with someone using them that you might not anticipate. In fact, he felt that the eyepiece was often enough of a social interaction barrier that he'd take his off and tuck it into his shirt pocket when he was having a conversation.

You're not necessarily going to figure these things out in the product design lab. Maybe it's stupid of Google, but I suspect they're trying to better do design for the wild. Alternately, they're just people who don't know how to make products.

I think you give your own creation too little credit. I would have never found Peanuts by Bukowski without you, and that was worth all my internets. I never saw it on reddit, never saw it on slashdot, never saw it on digg.

Anyway, thank you for running memepool as long as you did and keeping it up for others to enjoy. I used to love Lowbrow around when you were actively posting and I'd be curious to re-read through their archives archives, but they're gone from what I can tell.