kurtle · HackerTrans

4 lata temudiscuss

Was this site you were thinking of (linking to avc post since it's been shuttered for a while)? https://avc.com/2015/06/pegg/

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one.

Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.

I don't have a strong opinion in Google doing their moonshots but it's happened before.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

This article articulates well that it's important to have good board members and it's disasterous to have bad ones, but then doesn't really explain what to look for in a board member besides experience.

I'd love to see some input here about what makes a good vs bad board member and how to identify one when making a board.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

I'll expound on the doorman situation because it was something I thought a lot about during my time in Dubai. I knew I was being watched by CCTV all the time (and to some extent that's probably the case while I'm walking around in NYC), but I wasn't constantly reminded of it.

The fact that the door man would watch the feed and press the elevator button remotely was an unwanted and often reminder that I was constantly under surveillance even at my residence. It wasn't that I walked by the door man and he hit the button for me just as I walked up. It wasn't that he had a control for the elevator (which I get is common). It was that I was several floors above or below him and he was monitoring me and pressed the button for me. He even said once, when I asked him if he was the one doing, that "Yessir, I see you all the time."

It was creepy.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

Source: lived in Dubai for 2.5 years.

This is a combination of Dubai's two greatest past times: spectacle and surveillance, so naturally they will implement this as quickly as possible, paying top dollar to contractors to make it work.

I'm sorry if this sounds jaded, but I lived this for 2.5 years, running projects whose sole purpose was pomp and circumstance for various Emiratis who have virtually unlimited (debt funded) budgets.

To all those saying it won't work because {{technical reason}} you're probably right, but it won't stop them from overpaying to do so.

Some more examples of this:

* They have a road toll system called Salik, which is like EZ Pass gone amuck. There are numerous tolls and each give the police the ability to track any car to a small area. So ther is very little auto crime.

* There are speed cameras about every 10km, which residents speed up and speed down to "obey" the speed limit. So to whomever was talking about high speed chases: they don't happen. They just wait for the criminal to stop, know exactly where he is, and then apprehend him.

* Most projects I worked on had a whole component about being "the best", "the biggest", "the tallest" where we would have to show why {{costly technology}} is the best in the world. There was no definition of "the best" beyond just claiming something.

* In my apartment building, there were cameras from outside my door to the carpark in the basement. And they were regularly watched. I know this because the door man would make it a habit of hitting the elevator button for me when I was about a meter away from the elevator, having seen me from CC cameras far below

* To those talking about how burqas and hijabs will make this technology impossible: most folks there don't wear traditional, national dress. 87% of the country are westerners who stay there for an average of 2 years and leave. Westerners and low-wage workers are who they want to track anyway.

* All internet is filtered by "du" and "Etisalat" (think ATT and Verizon) - by order of the state. But they don't maintain a common block list, so some websites work on du, some on Etisalat.

* There are large articles on this, but basically the UAE compelled Blackberry to allow them to install backdoors so that the government could circumvent secure communication (this was back when Blackberry was dominant).

And there are many more.

I'm not saying other countries don't have these problems. I'm more just listing these things out to show that this is exactly the kind of project that Dubai would love - high technology, spectacle, and above all controlling.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

I think this is a really good answer to the question of "What do you do when [Google | Facebook | Microsoft] enter this space?"

Just because they're big and have scale of users doesn't mean that a) they can create a product that people want to use, b) failing that are able to force them to use this product.

Though it was a defeat against Facebook, this is a good sign for smaller companies: the behemoths aren't invincible.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

SEEKING WORK (iOS / Android) - NYC or remote

I'm a full-stack developer that specializes in mobile - both iOS and Android. I've got a few apps in both stores, check them out at http://kurt.so

Fluent in Objective-C, Java, HTML+CSS. Experienced with .NET, python, and ruby on the backend. I have a few open source projects at https://github.com/kurtguenther

If you need an Android or iOS app, I'm your guy.

kurtguenther on gmail

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

This article disappoints me because it seems to boil down to:

  BAD: making money by selling software
  GOOD: making money by selling ads

So how do you make money selling ads? By getting a bunch of users and auctioning off their private information.

I wish more people in the position to fund software development would support a model where your users are your customers and not just eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

Congrats on making and shipping something - that is always a good thing. A lot of these are to taste, but that's what feedback is:

* I hit no when I get asked for Push Notifications on first launch. Give me a reason to enable this later and I will, but on launch it just obscures the good UI you created and I hit Don't Allow

* You need to show something before asking someone to register or sign in. People will just stop here including me

* Coachmarks are pretty nice.

* Created an album, pulled to refresh, infinite spinner (bug)

* Doing some kind of work on the main thread for the photo capture that you shouldn't (makes capture flow jaggy)

* The app seems needlessly complicated between feeds, albums, friends, etc. Most of these things should be hidden when I just want to take, view, share photos.

Overall my big question about this app isn't related to the UI but to purpose: why trust your app to share photos with all my friends. I have to get all my friends on this service to do so. And there's no guarantee it will be around for any amount of time so why store my files there.

But seriously, good job on shipping this. Keep making the things you want.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

The original and updated title are a bit misleading. I expected an article showing some valuation of Fairchild in 1950/1960's dollars to be equal to $1 trillion in 2014 dollars. That's not the case.

TC is making the argument that 92 companies today had some contact with Fairchild and if you sum these 92 companies valuations you get $2.1 trillion.

And the barrier for whether it's an offshoot of Fairchild is pretty tenuous. For example, they count Apple in the total because Steve Jobs had conversations with Robert Noyce (co-founder of Fairchild) when they were starting.

Maybe it's just me but this seems like far reaching hyperbole.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

This is an old article from 2000.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

Harvest is free for up to 2 clients. I used them for 6 months free before I upgraded to add on a third client. Definitely worth it for me.

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

"Chris and Robert Carkhuff currently own the majority of Dashcube."

That's a pretty weird thing to put on your homepage, right?

kurtle

12 lat temudiscuss

Eclipse should no longer be a valid complaint.

I started Android dev using with Eclipse. Moving to Android Studio made everything much, much smoother (except for builds, which take slightly longer now).

Android Studio is much better for showing views in multiple form factors.

Another important step, using an Atom Based image + Intel Hardware Acceleration Module (http://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/installatio...).

This reduces load time from about 2+ minutes to 15 seconds and similarly makes debugging apps much, much smoother.

Things that still bother me (as a converted iOS developer):

  * Java's lack of anonymous functions (blocks in iOS)
  * having to design for many more form factors
  * no standard core data function
  * not being able to ignore Android 2.* market share (seriously, this lacks even a simple Action Bar)
  * managing 4+ pixel densities for assets

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

I would suggest making that call to action bigger. I did not notice the enlarged key on the keyboard until it was pointed out here on HN. I just thought it was the usual keyboard stock art.

But otherwise this site looks great. Captured my email.

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

I always assume I can reach someone at [email protected]. That's the only one I assume.

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

Wow, I had never thought of this, but it seems completely obvious now. I wish music players took advantage of this (rdio in particular) so that they would better signal what's playing.

Definitely something I will think of including in my next app.

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

Good job on launching something.

Two small things you can easily fix: * Your app icon corners are wonky, probably because you aren't making them square for the large images. Apple will do the cropping for you.

* Same thing with the screenshot, I would make sure it's the right resolution so you don't get artifacts.

But these are superficial things that you can fix easily. Congrats again for launching.

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

Your first hire should be the person who fills in the missing gaps in your product.

For example, good product, code is done, bad design => hire designer.

kurtle

13 lat temudiscuss

"It relies on a relatively unusual API design – delegates..."

Nothing unusual about delegates, the entire iOS codebase is littered with them.

But kudos on doing what we all eventually think about doing, the longer we work with UITableView

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