simonholroyd

Joined 15 years ago

Karma
110
Submissions
33
Member since
Sep 24
Product @ Pivotal Labs
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Recent submissions

Comment · 12 years ago
>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money

I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.

Comment · 12 years ago
This article really fails to answer the question its headline poses.
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
I also hold the phone this way.

The author's grip puts the home button halfway outside his "thumb zone" forcing an awkward claw whenever you need to multitask or return to the springboard. Our grip puts the home button in a much more natural position.

Comment · 13 years ago
2014 will be the year of the ____________ .

There's got to be some better alternatives. Ideas?

Comment · 13 years ago
Good candidates should prepare for interviews. Interviews typically require that a candidates are able to reflect on previous successes and failures and provide insights so a hiring team can review their candidacy. Failure to do show shows either:

1. lack of understanding of professional working environments (ie. interview structure)

2. lack of preparation for the interview

3. lack of ability for self-reflection

4. actual lack of any experience with which to construct even a lame story.

Comment · 13 years ago
I'm not disagreeing with your point regarding wealth, but football is the most popular men's high school sport (by participation) in the country so your experiences aren't likely the norm. Also track, tennis and gymnastics are mostly individual sports so they're less likely to be the ones driving the same level of school-wide support and pride (logos on the masthead, trophies in the hall, etc).

Also HN readers might be unlikely to have had the average American high school experience.

Comment · 13 years ago
You're right it's more difficult to pull off a soft launch on mobile if you're also aiming for a feature in the App Store (Apple seems to favor new-ness when selecting apps for features). I've heard of iOS apps launching into a subset of the regional app stores as a way to soft launch (ie. excluding the US store and thus preventing Apple from featuring there before the developer is ready).
Comment · 13 years ago
If there really is a substantial difference in the quality of two software developers then that should play out in the amount of value delivered. The article lost me at:

> Conversely, what about the guy sitting in the corner who works 9 to 5, and seems to spend a lot of time reading the internet? Is he just very proficient at writing stable reliable code, or is his job just easier than everyone else’s? To the casual observer, the first chap is working really hard, the second one isn’t. Hard work is good, laziness is bad, surely?

If the brilliant developer is spending a lot of time reading the internet, never staying late, and producing the same output (minus bugs) as the weaker team, then maybe he's not providing quite as much comparative value as he thinks he is.

Note: Some discussion on here regarding sys admins. I agree the situation is different in the maintain-working-systems roles vs. the create-new-products roles.

Comment · 13 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
Seems curious to me that (at least by visual comparison) London looks to be about 30% larger than NYC, and NYC appears to be about the same as Paris. By population, you'd expect NYC = London > Paris. Is NYC really still that far behind in its tech scene? Does Paris have that large a tech scene? Or am I just reading the chart poorly?
Comment · 13 years ago
the ads i've seen in the subway are from wag.com, which is indeed part of a generalized delivery service.
Comment · 13 years ago
This doesn't seem like a very fair comparison. Most browsers account for this (by default) by using a different cursor symbol for linked text vs. non-linked text. Some also show the linked url in the browser UI also.

A web developer can override both those conventions and when they do, their links become less recognizable and their apps become less usable. Since there's no cursor on iOS touch screens, losing the visual cues is a similar problem.

[edit] You might argue that just tapping on something serves as the way to discover if a visual element is tappable on iOS. But it doesn't, as the original article states, it just makes the user wonder if something might be broken.

Comment · 13 years ago
It's different because prior to this change, you could make an educated decision about whether to support an older version of your API based on usage of your app. When the legacy version reached some threshold percentage of your user base you could be fairly confident that you were inconveniencing a small and dwindling fraction of users and drop support.

With this change you can no longer be confident that app usage for legacy versions will always decrease. If your app suddenly becomes very popular (as most app developers are aiming for), you might have a substantial contingent of users who are on an old OS downloading an outdated version that you no longer support.

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