jaimzob

Honest question: how does that article contradict that statement? Everyone is bouncing off the walls about this but I honestly can't see where the story is. Microsoft + others enable NSA to access customer data when presented with court order. You can agree or not agree but is it really a shock?

"I’m your typical “balls to the wall” founder that will sacrifice all for the sake of the startup" ... "I founded and ran GooseChase, which makes running scavenger hunts incredibly easy via iPhone & Android apps".

Some of this stuff is beyond parody...

Partially, the problem is that "designer" is such an elastic word. You could argue that an interaction designer should be able to code, at least enough to make a realistic prototype - if a design isn't interactive then how can it be an "interaction" design?

Coding is less critical for visual designers though. It's better if the visual designer can render his design in html/css (or whatever), but you probably don't want to turn down an otherwise brilliant visual designer if they can't.

The "should designers code" question seems to come up again and again because interaction and visual design gets rolled into one discipline (and often one person).

But affordances (such as bevelled buttons) are not the same as skeuomorphic design. Bevelling an area of the screen implies that something is pressable and hence aids the user. Covering iCal in a fake leather bitmap does not help the user. WP7/Metro seems to have taken a lot of tried and tested affordances away, but hasn't really replaced them with anything.

They all have something to do with software development in specific situations. But the assertion is that this set of "exam papers" represent the canonical body of development knowledge and if you don't know the majority of answers off the top of your head you shouldn't be a developer, or at least should be grateful your ignorance has gone unnoticed. I find that assertion ... questionable.

:) This is surely just degenerating into parody now. I can't wait for part 4: "Build a Turing Machine from scratch using paper-clips and sticky tape and send it to me for grading. Remember to show your working and no looking it up on Google."

Indeed, presenting this more 'guide to interesting things you should know' rather than 'here's an exam I've condescended to set for everyone dumber than me' would have worked out much better.

Maybe B-player is harsh but in my career I've worked with some very good programmers and some real stars. When I talk to the very good programmers I always feel dumber, but whenever I talk to the real stars I always feel smarter myself (though heaven knows that's not actually true). This seems to fall firmly in the "very good programmer" category.

No. They can be interesting things to read about, and knowing a little about the themes each question comes from (i.e. how does a processor cache work) will make you a better programmer, but don't worry about cramming your head with trivia such as "what does MESI stand for?"

Hear, hear. Obsession with trivia and a supercilious tone are sure signals of a B-player in my experience. "Name and describe the four states in MESI cache coherence"? Sorry, memorising an algorithm for determining if a graph is bipartite pushed that knowledge clean out of my head...no doubt I'm very stupid.

I'm a big fan of The Verge but this seems melodramatic and a little hollow. The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale. Way more than any Samsung phone did w.r.t iPhone. Not mentioning this in the article was weird.

And Joshua is being "bullied"? Really? Sensitive types, these bloggers.

Oh god, an OSNews article from Thom Holwerda about how "obvious" the iPhone was is now top of Hacker News? How long do I need to switch the internet off for to restore sanity?

Hitler? That's where you want to go in a thread about web browsers? Maybe it's time to switch to decaff.

I'm not a big fan of agile either but "over 40" == "the smell of death"? Seriously? Not a convincing, or classy, opening line. And this was posted by the CEO of Assembla.

Chrome 19.0.1084.56 on OSX 10.7.4...

I hit this too - what does "doesn't cover" mean above? If two people have already hit this you might be having problems with more than 0.7%...