I took on 6 figure debt to go to school. I'm happily employed and grateful for the life I have.
The way I see it: every option available to me coming out of high school had risk. Taking on debt to go to college is a risk. Not going to college is a risk. For some, these risks are low, due to a fortunate upbringing with financially stable parents. That wasn't the case for me — but I can appreciate having the choice at all, which many people don't.
I achieved the goals that were important to me given the risk I took: to get a job doing something that challenges me, makes me happy, and allows me to live comfortably. The debt is the cost I chose to pay in order to achieve this goal — one of many I could have taken, but there was always going to be a cost.
The article meanders a bit but I think the story is a pretty common one for those of us in a lot of debt: it's a long term partnership. The "amount of debt you're in" is abstract and barely fathomable. It manifests monthly as a force that pushes against you and your bank account, and how you choose to respond to that reflects your priorities at that moment.
This is a bit pedantic, but I believe what you mean is that she understands that the problem is a few bad apples. The full phrase is "A few bad apples spoil the bunch" — it only takes some minority threshold of underperformers to threaten the entire culture.
Well, that's the thing: I don't find that interesting, I find it lazy. It's already lazy to write about Facebook, especially in a negative or fearful tone. (How much of that mongering do you see in a day? One article on the frontpage a day on average, yes?) When a writer chooses Facebook's ethos as a topic I'm looking very critically for true insight, but most end up punting on this -- this author included.
Poetic and engaging writing, but ultimately dishonest. It relies on the symbol of the hoodie to carry the speech through pathos, and that does take it quite far, but no argument is given. Are we expected to fear Zuckerberg, or the consumer website Facebook? The author stirs drama but does not direct it, and the resulting flatness feels disingenuous -- yet another Facebook piece that feels important with no insight. The author has identified that there is something significant to culture in Facebook's work that is also frightening, but can't quite articulate it, because that is actually difficult to do given how bleeding edge these issues are; instead, lazily, the author appears to give up. Disappointing. I'd love something with more teeth.
Or, that whether or not you happen to like skeuomorphism is a necessary condition for being "the next Steve Jobs".
If the most important part of being Steve Jobs is making sure your app has leather in it, then you can witness the work of a few hundred-thousand "next Steve Jobs's" just by browsing the App Store.
I'm not a huge fan of the current Markdown mark. I'd encourage the creator (dcurtis) to push it, because currently it feels like a first-stage idea — or perhaps, an execution without an idea at all.
There are many questions — "What is Markdown?", for starters — that feel unaddressed by the mark. Instead, we get the brute force approach: splitting up the word into smaller word parts, which is what you do with a word if you don't know what it means, or you have to gesture it in Charades.
Rather uninspiring for an idea so beautiful that Jeff and others can get so excited just thinking about it, but what else can you expect from such a mark whose approach is so stubbornly literal? I take that back — only one word part actually gets to be represented literally... the other only managed to become a letter, in a moment I can only imagine involved the creator muttering "good enough". He must have found this mark uninspiring as well, given that he sought to put a box around it.
At least consider that the down arrow on its own is an overloaded concept, particularly on the web. Without context — and a mark should not need context — M↓ could read like a hotkey or command of some kind. This kind of ambiguity is utterly unnecessary — you're making a mark; it can be whatever you want it to be. Push!
"Flat design" is, yes. It's just a horrible label for a much broader concept, which is "form follows function", "clarity", "honesty".
Skeuomorphism is an easy target because it is dishonest by definition. Things that appear "cutting edge" or "high quality" today will, in a few years, seem dated, clunky, and pointless.
By contrast, pick up a copy of Die Neue Typography and see how well not just Tschichold's designs, but his ideas, hold up today. Skeuomorphism is a symbol of the Old UI. What we need is the New UI.
You heard it here folks, an engineering bug that didn't actually happen is tantamount to rape. Perhaps we should stop referring to them alleged bugs and start calling them rapes. I'm sure the rape victims in the audience would love this idea.
"Fantasy"? That's absurd. Copperplate is a letterpress type. Papyrus, meanwhile, is a joke, but it's meant to look like bush strokes; it's hardly fantastic.
I would like to see the information about the support visible, rather than hidden under a mouseover. Maybe 2 thin horizontal bars where length = %, 1 for Mac, 1 for PC?
First of all, whether or not something offends people is rarely the best reason to do something.
Secondly, "choice" is a generous way to describe it. It's more that sizes are happening of basically their own will, whether the user likes it or not. At least if inch measurements were respected, the designer could be deliberate about a decision. This would not invalidate user stylesheets or zooming; I can't fathom a single disadvantage here.
> this all goes into a FB database somewhere, which who knows has access to it, or backups to it. Enjoy being harvested voluntarily.
Are you being ironic with a statement like this, or are you serious?
The second there's even so much as a bug that affects some obscure privacy setting, the TechCrunch pitchforks are out, and the brand is on the line. Do you really think that FB is just gonna let anyone rummage through their user's private data, just, you know, for fun? Can you even imagine how damaging that would be? Why do you think FB blows millions of dollars on engineer salaries to work on privacy features — which you just dismiss in a sentence like they're nothing?
The way I see it, you're already in a database somewhere, many of them, but the difference is you don't have access to that data — you don't even know what data exists, where. Facebook comes along and says "OK, fine, we'll play along, except we'll let the users decide what data they provide, and we'll try to help them benefit from it as much as possible" — and suddenly, Facebook's the bad guy. All the government, banking, insurance, direct mail databases out there and people have to go after FB, where every click has an associated privacy setting. It boggles the mind.
> On another hand, it makes your backend to have exactly one function – to be a simple REST provider. That leads to easier development support and improves the scalability greatly.