lian

I think the truth of this article depends on the size of your team.

If you're hiring only one to a few developers, it's likely that you need your employees to self manage. They need to strategize, have realistic expectations, and fulfill them to the best of their abilities. "Dianne," the good developer, demonstrates these skills. So, judgment is important from this kind of developer.

However, I think that "Dianne" would be best suited to a more managerial position, focusing on her strategy skills and ability to relay needs to other developers. Handing off the implementation details to a team of rockstars, with deep and varied proficiencies, would make for a spectacularly complementary team.

And in the latter case, your best developers are - and should be - rock stars. You need to consider not only how you want your code to scale, but how your company will.

It's always disappointing when people think that a fashion company is mutually exclusive with a company that makes well-designed products.

Things that make me feel like I'm taking crazy pills: how surprised people are that there's a future beyond screen interfaces.

Aren't things posted to Hacker News supposed to be by people who understand the utility of disruption? And the value of leading/controlling it?

Oh, but I should add that it is cool to see something headlining as "user testing" making its way up the HN ranks.

I agree with what I think Boriss' point is – that our interfaces are not natural. They require us to build a new system of patterns to match with encountered interfaces of a similar kind, in order to know what we're doing. Same is easily said of learning any new language, visual, written, or spoken.

But to suggest that iconography and buttons in general are unique to digital interfaces is inaccurate, and recounting one man's first interaction with a computer as "user testing of browsers" comes across as a sensational misrepresentation of what user testing is, and what education-by-interface should be.

Let's not show an entrenched English speaker Japanese and claim that it is the language's responsibility to immediately map to his mental model of English. Learning falls on a motivated student (which Joe, with self-proclaimed "no excuse[s]" for never using a computer, was not) matched with an expert evangelist like Jennifer Boriss, in the event of a total failure of comprehension.

I will never use an application that makes me tell it my salary on the first page.

Regardless of the Thiel Fellowship, this is the guy that I would want on the inside taking academic ideas from research to revolution. Ito represents a kind of energy and enthusiasm that higher education direly needs.

More creative, free-thinking skeptics of academia should definitely be empowered to lead it. I see Ito as one of them, and I think this is an inspired choice.