rorymarinich

> Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be right).

Ah, but there's the rub: Dustin doesn't have a great product and he isn't right. At best he's a good marketer: the only things he ever stands out for are his gimmicks. His best posts were gimmick posts ("watch me redesign airport passes!", "let me show you how stupid commercial graphic designers are!"); his only creations are good marketing creations ("you should follow me on Twitter here", "kudos!"). Occasionally I've seen him get halfway towards having a decent thought, but I've never seen him follow through.

Compare that to John Gruber, who's talked before about how he painstakingly selected the Daring Fireball color before he launched his blog (which has displayed his thoughts, gimmickless and unchanged, for a decade now). Greatness is a matter of finding big ideas and sticking to them; the only thing Dustin's stuck to in the few years he's been promoting himself is that people ought to remember him. But he's forgotten to create something worth remembering.

Curtis writes:

> One of my main goals for this new writing interface was to encourage myself to spend more time writing and less time presenting.

Which is admirable, and I've noticed that his writing in this new iteration is somewhat less surface-irritating. But he contradicts this in this very thread, when he says of his jackass slogan: "It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it." He cares about being remembered; it never seems to occur to him that there's more to writing good things than making them memorable.

I mostly read Hacker News without posting. I like the change. Something about the feeling of reading comment chains changes when you can't see what the faceless community has thought about every comment. Now you can read the arguments without such an immediate bias.

It also makes me more aware of the clipped, cold feel of the dialogues we have here. Most (though not all) exchanges here read to me as humorless and either blunt or overpolite. I don't know if I entirely like it, but I wouldn't immediately say it's a bad thing either. It works better, I think, in the tech discussions, but elsewhere it keeps me feeling distant from the conversation.

Now, the question I'd have for people who post more than I do is: How do you feel about comment threads where you see your score but nobody else's? How's that change your perception of threads when your score's high, versus when you have a comment or series of comments in the greys?

You're right! I am ashamed; I have no right to call myself a Mike Oldfield fan now.

> It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.

I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.

Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.

> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.

I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.

Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.

It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?

> Every single review would say "it's cute and all, but without the apps its a nonstarter".

I think we're getting to the point where we can't discuss this alternative reality meaningfully (but don't get me wrong, this was a very nice discussion!), but I'm curious. What makes you think that without Android nobody else would launch an App Store, or that nobody else would have the clout to get the sorts of apps that users are interested in?

Sans Android, the iPhone would still have the limitations inherent to a closed system that it has today. Anybody else could have added the background multitasking, or the free GPS, or any of the features that made Android popular, to their own OS, and attracted the same audience that made Android big. I mean, Microsoft is by no means a company that can't afford to compete with Apple financially, and RIM's no slouch either.

> While I do believe anyone can learn programing, thats not really the issue at hand. The question is how fast do most people take to it? I think programming is one of those things that only a certain type of person will take to it reasonably fast. This is important because there's a cost/benefit analysis people do when it comes to what's worth studying.

I can agree with that statement, to some extent. The composer Brian Eno once said of prodigies: "The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities." Programming fits the "discontinuous possibilities" mold very well.

The question is whether or not you want to keep teaching programming in a way that only clicks with those more prodigious people, or if you want to come up with approaches that let in people who may not have the same instant intuition. And, just as in classical music, if you encourage only the people who have a certain sort of aptitude, you're also encouraging people who will only ever approach programming in one certain way, and the result is that the medium as a whole suffers from lack of diversity.

> They teach programming by asking you to program. Unfortunately this is impossible for some 60% of the people who take a programming course. We have yet to come up with a better way.

It's not that they ask people to program that's problematic. (I'd like to see a citation for that 60%, as well; it sounds fishy.) I've taken several programming classes at several levels and I don't think anybody who gets what they're doing finds programming difficult.

The challenge, rather, and this is not only a challenge that comes up in programming courses, is figuring out how to make people get it. You need to develop a manner of teaching that makes all these actions somehow intuitive; why is it that we program in this particular way? What does each word mean? Why's each language constructed in its particular pattern, and how does that affect coding?

Teaching programming without putting serious thought into creating a comfortable abstraction for students is not really teaching programming at all. It's like teaching a creative writing class without simultaneously teaching literature (and, sadly, many creative writing classes are guilty of this). You can pretend that writing is an obscure, difficult art that only a select few minds can master. But I'm a skilled poet and I teach poetry to middle schoolers and I think it's safe to say that the reason most people can't write a good poem is that they don't understand the reason why they're writing a poem in the first place.

I had a teacher, in a high school Java class, who was actually very good at teaching this; I didn't recognize how good he was at the time. He took a class composed mostly of people who knew literally nothing about anything code-related, and in a year turned them without fail into programmers capable of making competent programs. No student dropped out or switched the class; he worked with what he had and didn't fail a single one of us.

The guy-to-girl ratio was pretty close to 1:1, for what it's worth. We had a surprisingly diverse class. And it was really surprising who ended up really showing a knack for coding and who didn't. Frequently the really good coders struggled for longer than the rest of us did, but when they hit upon how to get something done their approach was a lot better than the rest of the class's.

(And by the way, I'd like to mention that this is the best discussion of gender equality that I've ever read on Hacker News, and that I'm in a way really proud that we're having this conversation right here. Cheers to everybody on both sides for keeping this a relatively civil conversation; this is not an easy subject to discuss politely.)

> Could that be because it is in fact an extreme brain activity that only a small percentage of people is capable of doing?

Nope. The ideas behind programming are extremely basic. The rules, so to speak, that dictate how programming works are simplistic. And the actual method of creating programs — essentially, breaking down a single task into lots of little pieces — is a method of problem-solving that's existed for a long, long time.

The problem is more that the people who teach programming go at it in a very unfriendly, non-intuitive way for the majority of the population. Programmers aren't user-friendly. This isn't inherent to the nature of the task. I've handed a lot of people who literally knew nothing about how to program things like Game Maker, RMXP, and _why the lucky stiff's TryRuby, and it's impressive how quickly they both learn how programming works and begin making things with what they've learned.

"Extreme brain activity"? Hardly. I mean, let's not kid ourselves, programming's simple enough that lots of programmers get started when they're eight years old.

I know it has been. But I don't agree that just because that's the tradition means we should go on with it. I see nothing wrong with using "she" as the default sometimes, and quite a few reasons why sticking to "he" might not be the best thing.

It's interesting because I agree with you, Steve does feel a little awkward on stage, and he always has. But at the same time I think he's the best corporate showman I've ever seen.

I think there are two reasons for this. First off, he's a perfectionist when it comes to timing and arrangements. Apple execs in general are pretty good at knowing what the public cares about hearing and what they'll find boring; not so with other companies, whose executives are usually hilariously awful. But even among Apple's top presenters I think that Steve's timing is particularly terrific.

The bigger reason, however, is that Steve displays a really sincere love for almost all the things he shows off (and it's very obvious on the rare occasions he doesn't like what he has to say). It seems really clear that he genuinely thinks all the things he shows off are as terrific as he says they are. It's magnetic to see somebody talk about how much they love something. It's also rare to see it coming from a corporate event.

I disagree with your disagreement, but I figure at this point it's nitpicking on both our sides. We both stated our cases pretty thoroughly, I think.

> (btw. why are people downvoting my opinion? ok, anecdotal evidence and all that, but really?)

It's because we all like kneejerk downvoting opinions that disagree with ours! Kneejerk is fun! Sometimes we also curse each other out too. It's an awful joy.

(I wish Hacker News would stop with the downvotes. We derive enough data, I think, from masses of upvotes to sort threads by popularity. The only people who deserve downvotes are spammers, and we have the "flag" option for that.)

But you forget that the iPhone competed in many, many fields.

Consumer phone market? iPhone was up against every single cheap phone that called and placed texts. Those phones are still popular for the majority of the population.

Enterprise market? Blackberry was king. Nobody else came close.

Gaming device? The DS and PSP were and still are powerful competitors. The DS in particular, because Nintendo's one of the king game makers and they restrict all their games to their own console.

The iPhone competed very effectively in all those markets. But it never had a risk of dominating a single one. Compare that to Windows — if I wanted a consumer operating system that ran the best/most popular programs, I had to get Windows, because there was no other operating system that had anything like the programs I'd actually have to use. (Mac OS? Not even close.)

If Google didn't have their huge amounts of cash, we'd still have the Blackberry OS, which is still enormously successful (though it's taken a hit recently), and we'd have Windows Phone 7, which is actually a really damn decent operating system.

Well, that's why looking for a "rockstar programmer" probably isn't the best thing to actively seek in an employee. Not unless you're only looking to be a "cool rad" company and not an efficient company that gets things done.

No, no, you're right. iTunes does have some usability issues still. The "removing a song from playlist" is actually the first one I'd think of also; the fact that you hit the same button to delete a song and to remove it is problematic. By default iTunes pops up a warning either way asking you if you're sure you want to delete/remove, so that that way you know what you're doing, but if you tell it to stop popping up warnings there's a risk of messing things up.

The thing is that anything can become intuitive. Use Amarok long enough and I'm sure it becomes effortless. The term interface design uses to describe this is "mental model"; good designs let users form a model of how something works before they even touch it. (So on iTunes, the metaphor of seeing album covers immediately makes me think that to play an album I click on its cover, which is exactly right.) It's very difficult to create a program that forms a good mental model of every single function at once, especially if you're making a complex program like iTunes. But I'd argue that it's still vastly easier to intuit from the interface than it would be for Amarok, where, looking at that screenshot, I can't tell how I would look at other artists' music or how to form a playlist or a number of other relatively trivial tasks.

Why is it wrong that occasionally manuals use a "she" to describe somebody? Is "she" an inherently wrong default position to take as opposed to "he"? Even if 4 out of 5 times it's a guy, why not suggest that perhaps it'll be a girl sometimes?

I personally use "they", because I'm a badass linguistic prescriptivist who's fine with using a neutral plural to indicate singular. But I don't see a problem with stopping the male singular from being the default. Language describes reality, but it also defines it; languages that assume maleness as a default suggest to its users that maleness is the superior form to take. I don't think it's a particularly devastating result of language, but I also don't think it's particularly annoying for women to ask that they not be diminished by the language. If it doesn't mean anything, why not just alternate it and not raise a fuss?

(I draw the line at stuff like "womyn", though, because that's when for me it becomes noticeably silly.)