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Then there’s Dual Shot, which allows a user to superimpose his stamp-sized image taken from the front camera on a scene shot with the rear camera. S Health is another feature that stands out. It allows a user to monitor his physical activity like walking or jogging throughout the day, and also shows the actual temperature and humidity in his surroundings. However, some features don’t work as
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日P-3C反潜机发现疑似中国潜艇现身冲绳海域|中国潜艇|反潜机|P-3C_新浪军事
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【环球网报道 记者 王欢】日本防卫省19日公布消息称，日本海上自卫队P-3C反潜巡逻机19日早晨在冲绳县南大东岛以南的日本毗连区内，发现一艘潜艇在潜水航行。日本政府相关人士再次猜测称，该潜艇疑为中国海军潜艇。
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行并不违反国际法，13日也有“疑为中国海军的”不明国籍潜艇在冲绳县久米岛以南潜水航行，日防卫省正对相
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Hghhgghhgt
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因为我们的大脑中同时存在着远古的自我，和现代的自我，并且两者并没有完美协调，所以才会出现“如著作等身的教授，聪明的数学家，艺术家同样有可能成为性引诱的牺牲品，同样可能犯七宗罪，同样可能成为焦虑和忧郁症的患者”（《Synaptic Self》）（不禁让人想起前阵子著名的泰格伍兹事件）。
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书写是与自己的对话：在书写的时候，你不断地观察自笔端流出的信息，一行文字被你写下来之后，你就不用再将其费力地保持在大脑的临时记忆中，因为这行黑底白字会不断主动地通过视觉刺激来提醒你它的存在，于是你就可以将空出来的思维精力用于反思你自己的观点。不信你可以自己观察一下，如果不用纸笔，仅用大脑，是否很难在思考一个问题的同时对自己的思考进行反思呢？
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每个人的思维都有一些盲点，盲点之所以为盲点就是自己很难觉察得到，虽然我用了很长的时间来训练思维的客观和清晰，但总是不断发现自己的思维仍然还是时不时不自觉地陷入某个盲区，当我对人类思维的特点了解的越多，我就越是从心底里谦卑地认识到与人讨论是多么重要的一件事情，每个人的盲点不一样，你的盲点可以在别人那里得到补充，别人的盲点也可以被你纠正。三个臭皮匠顶一个诸葛亮的含义便在
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My daily readings 05/21/2013
May 21, 2013My daily readings 05/20/2013
May 20, 2013-
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《Phantoms in the Brain》提到这么一个有趣的例子：我们看到老朋友时会自然微笑，然而站在摄影师面前我们却经常“挤”出难看而别扭的微笑。我们常常说第一种微笑是发自内心的，第二种笑则是有意做出来的。事实上这两种微笑的确涉及到两种不同的机制，只不过不是心脏和面部肌肉，而是两个不同的大脑模块。自然、下意识的微笑来自于大脑中位于进化年代较古老的丘脑和进化年代较新近的大脑皮层之间的一个叫做“基底核”（basal ganglia）的结构，而有意识的笑则是由大脑中的动作皮层控制的。而这两者只有前者具有正版的微笑神经回路，当我们看到朋友的时候，朋友的脸庞的视觉映像通过视觉神经传导到我们的情绪模块（边缘系统），并进而被转发到基底核，后者的微笑回路负责调动面部肌肉生成一个真正自然的微笑，整个过程在不到一秒内完成，在这个时间里你的高级认知模块根本还没来得及活动呢。
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我们在选择职业的时候“听从内心的召唤”，因为我们对事物的热情来自于我们的情感系统，没有这个系统的支持，我们很难在一件事情上持之以恒的专注投入，emotion（情绪）和motion（动力）本就是同根生，说明人们很早就了解到情绪和动力的关系。对此有这么一个真实事件（记不得在哪本心理学书上看到的了，记得的朋友请留言。），一个事业顺利的中年男人，原本过着典型的美国中产阶级的生活，但有一天不幸遭遇了车祸，车祸损伤了他的头部，他的情绪大脑遭到了损坏，后来虽然他健康方面痊愈了，然而却从此对任何事情都无动于衷，再没有动力去发展他的事业，照顾他的家庭，对他来说发生什么都是无所谓的。事实上，我们所谓的生活的意义便来源于情感系统。
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情感最能影响人，所以真正的热爱是最重要的。一方面，要理解自己喜欢的，比较困难，另外一方面，要把意识中的好的规则，弄进潜意识，形成习惯，也是很难。
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我们对于未来的惩罚和收益都估计不足，倾向于就眼下的损益进行决策。这就导致我们天性在决策方面目光短浅，一个典型的例子是我们会在大学阶段花费大量的时间去进行学习之外的娱乐，这些娱乐都有一个典型的特点，就是能够立即获得愉悦，并且并不会导致立即的损失。毕业看似遥遥无期，我们很难提前几年就设想几年后的危机，毕竟，未来的事情谁说得清呢？也许我们的远古生活告诉我们的真理就是，几年后的潜在收益跟眼下唾手可得的好处无法相比。
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如你所见，很多时候我们只是生活在信息社会的远古人，如果上帝要为我们目前生出的时代设计人类，我们将会是身体上适合长期久坐不见阳光，眼睛尤其适合长久盯着30厘米以内的物体看，我们情绪上会偏好有节制而健康的饮食，我们的身体发育将不会在肌肉上浪费太多不必要的能量，青少年也不会在青春期强烈渴望冒险和建立小部落内的声望并为之做出各种危险或可怕的事情，而在执行力上我们则会偏好于执行能够积累知识和技能的长远计划，正如geeks们所崇尚的一句话所言：smart is the new sexy。
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然而人类进入工业文明才短短数百年，英特网的历史则更是短的几十年，和漫长的进化长河相比仿佛一瞬，我们匆匆忙忙把自己推入了一个完全不一样的世界，而进化的齿轮转动得却慢了很多拍，于是我们都成了进化时滞的牺牲品，我们用远古的双眼打量着这个世界，关在笼子里的老虎完全不必害怕，但我们还是会汗毛倒竖，汽车酿成的交通事故每天无数，而我们过马路却置若罔闻。一句话：我们的情绪大脑仍然停留在20万年前，而20万年前是没有汽车这种物种的。
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我们的大脑喜欢事情往积极方向发展，有这样一个实验：研究者让被试将手放在冰水中一段时间，有两个选项可供选择，一是将手放在非常冷的冰水中60秒并取出，另一是将手放在非常冷的冰水中60秒，然后再在逐渐变得不那么冰的冷水中放30秒再取出。绝大多数人认为第二种选择更为不那么痛苦。然而从经历的“客观”痛苦上讲，很明显第二种情况下人要受更多的罪。但是那种“情形正在变得越来越好”可以带来明显的正面情绪，于是第二种情况下的主观痛苦要小于第一种情况。而GTD的原理正是如此：通过提供不断的进展，让执行者意识到事情正在朝向完成不断迈进，这种正面趋势所带来的积极情感能够进一步激励个体把事情执行到底。
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最后，经常动用理性思考也能够锻炼理性大脑的“实力”，在更多的决策场合获得压倒性优势。神经科学显示，大脑的模块的确遵循用进废退的原则（《The Brain That Changes Itself》），一个经典的证据是钢琴家的大脑中对应手指的神经回路占用面积要比正常人大很多。另一个有意思的证据是，如果一个人失明了，那么负责接受视觉信号的神经回路往往会被听觉所侵占（人们常说瞎子的听觉格外灵敏难道便是这个原因？）
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My daily readings 05/08/2013
May 8, 2013My daily readings 05/07/2013
May 7, 2013-
HN supports SPDY | Hacker News
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Great! Now if only they would implement allowing HEAD requests and support for any of the various headers that would allow me to get a 304.
The reason I ask is because every time my Safari crashes, if I have 50 HN tabs open (as I often do on by Friday [1]) I’ll get IP banned from HN because Safari will do a GET request on each page, but it can’t pass any of the headers necessary to get back a 304, because HN doesn’t support it.
[1] The way I consume HN is I load up HN once or twice a day, open up all the interesting links and their comment pages in new tabs, and then go back to work. Then when I have some downtime (most of which is on the weekend) I read through all the open tabs.
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My daily readings 05/03/2013
May 3, 2013My daily readings 05/02/2013
May 2, 2013-
How to retire in 10 years | Hacker News
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Looks like we’re having the same discussion as we had a few days ago [1], with all the same irrational dismissals. I might as well go ahead and grab the top comment again…
It’s unfortunate that the author uses the term “retire” in this context, since that seems to be the thing people pick up on when deciding that this is all totally impossible and made up and won’t work anymore and so forth.
Instead, how about we come up with a better word for “hitting a point where you never ever have to save even a single dollar ever again”. That is, after you’ve socked away a certain amount, you can stop actively saving and the market will take care of your retirement planning from there on out.
So sure, you can stop working at that point and scrimp along. But you can also take a silly bartending job on the beach and spend every last penny you bring in. Or you can go do a crazy startup and know that nobody will take away your house if you blow it. That’s a pretty nice place to be.
So yes, we’re agreed that it doesn’t mean you get to buy a tropical island and pay your servants for the next sixty years. It just means that you’re now officially free to coast.
I’d highly recommend getting yourself to that spot. Life’s pretty nice thereafter.
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Avoiding Burnout | Hacker News
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I remember reading this published insight[1] from Marissa Mayer a few months ago:
Burnout is caused by resentment
Which sounded amazing, until this guy who dated a neuroscientist commented[2]:
No. Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It’s the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it’s worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are “groomed” by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
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During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don’t burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little “pops” of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don’t think it addresses the main issue.
Then I finally realized how many times I’ve burnt out in my life, and I became much better into avoiding it. Which is really hard to do.
And it seems to me that this is one of the many points that Ben Horowitz talks about on his What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology[3]
[1] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment…
[2] http://iamnotaprogrammer.com/Burnout-is-caused-by-resentment…
[3] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-diff…
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How we failed our YC interview | Hacker News
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Explicit demand and no competition (cancer treatment) — demonstrate feasibility
Explicit demand and existing competition (fashion ecommerce) — differentiate and show competitive advantages
Implicit demand (farmville-like games) — demonstrate early traction and prove that your product is delivering high-order values (entertainment, happiness, inspiration, meaning…)
No demand — delusion
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My daily readings 04/29/2013
April 29, 2013-
Log-structured file systems: There’s one in every SSD [LWN.net]
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Over the last decade CPU speeds have increased dramatically while disk access times have only improved slowly. This trend is likely to continue in the future and it will cause more and more applications to become disk-bound. [...] Log-structured file systems are based on the assumption that files are cached in main memory and that increasing memory sizes will make the caches more and more effective at satisfying read requests. As a result, disk traffic will become dominated by writes.
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Surprisingly, log-structured file systems are more relevant than ever when it comes to SSDs. The founding assumption of log-structured file systems – that reads are cheap and writes are expensive – is emphatically true for the bare-metal building blocks of SSDs, NAND-based flash. (For the rest of this article, “flash” refers to NAND-based flash and SSD refers to a NAND-based flash device with a wear-leveling, write-gathering flash translation layer.) When it comes to flash, reads may be done at small granularities – a few hundreds of bytes – but writes must be done in large contiguous blocks – on the order of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of bytes. A write to flash takes two steps: First the entire block is cleared, setting all the bits to the same value (usually 1, counter-intuitively). Second, individual bits in the block are flipped back to 0 until you get the block you wanted.
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New High I/O EC2 Instance Type – hi1.4xlarge – 2 TB of SSD-Backed Storage | Hacker News
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Don’t reserve for 3 years.
AWS cuts their costs at a relatively reliable rate. We’ve done the match an found that the 1 year reservations are absolutely worth while, but that the 3 year reservations are not. Granted that was for our specific workload / use case.
Money has a time value, and this stuff is getting cheaper fast.
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My daily readings 04/28/2013
April 28, 2013-
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The students who obtain top grades in classes have an ability to focus like no other.
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Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that they are ready.
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It was an insult for me to think that I was ever anything like them. In my drive to show them up, I have broken myself with grief and anxiety comparing my marks to theirs, and I have alienated them through irrational, envious hate. With my final two exams of university next week, I understand now that I was a fool for having confidence in myself and my abilities without reason. I should have put the effort in first and should have only allowed myself to gain confidence through the results that followed.
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Read the masters | Hacker News
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Fair warning, however: once you start consuming works from the masters it makes mediocre works hard to stomach. Oddly enough, bad material is fine. I still love me some pulp fiction and trashy pop music. It’s the stuff that tries to be highbrow but you know is going to be gone with the wind in ten years that’s impossible to take.
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I actually believe the mindset this author has (along with many university professors) makes learning far more difficult for students and discourages them from staying in STEM (math and science) degrees.
I have consistently found that for me to tackle difficult concepts I need multiple points of view, specifically views that simplify the topic tremendously. My professors never encouraged me to seek multiple sources and usually pushed overly complex, decades-old textbooks on my peers and I. The “masters” typically write to a niche, university-based audience and do not tailor their original works for the masses.
I certainly agree that if one wants a complete understanding of a field or subject they should eventually study original works, however to encourage them as a starting or leverage point for understanding difficult subjects is poor advice in my opinion.
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This is similar to my experience. If I dont’ understand something, I seek some other angels from other resources.
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What It’s Really Like to Work at Google | Hacker News
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I can tell that this was written by an outsider, because it focuses on the perks and rehashes several cliches that have made their way into the popular media but aren’t all that accurate.
Most Googlers will tell you that the best thing about working there is having the ability to work on really hard problems, with really smart coworkers, and lots of resources at your disposal. I remember asking my interviewer whether I could use things like Google’s index if I had a cool 20% idea, and he was like “Sure. That’s encouraged. Oftentimes I’ll just grab 4000 or so machines and run a MapReduce to test out some hypothesis.” My phone screener, when I asked him what it was like to work there, said “It’s a place where really smart people go to be average,” which has turned out to be both true and honestly one of the best things that I’ve gained from working there.
A lot of the observations in the article fall out of this, but in ways that are less sound-bitey. Google doesn’t enforce set working hours – you can get in as late as you want (the latest I’ve been in is around 4:15 PM, but that was because I had a DMV appointment, the latest from just not waking up was about 2:00), stay as late as you want (my latest was about 1:00 AM, though I worked from home until 6:00 AM last Thursday), duck out during the day if you’re meeting a friend or have a date or need to pick a sick kid up from school, or work from home as necessary. You also don’t have a set workload: you do as much work as you think is appropriate and then go home.
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The thing is – you are surrounded by incredibly intelligent & fiercely hard-working people. Many of them were used to being top-dog at whatever institution they came from before – hell, many were top dog (we have a lot of ex-startup-founders; there’s a good chance that you’re working with someone that’s founded a company or originated a successful open-source project). And that can be a big adjustment, and the types of folks that Google typically hire usually react to not being on top by working harder. It’s up to you to set limits on the amount of time you’re willing to spend working, and most new hires at Google are used to being limited by “the amount of work my boss/professor/thesis advisor throws at me”, not by the number of hours in the day.
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Kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests | Hacker News
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Sigh. You need both. The reality is that there’s a lot of book-learning in the world. You’re never going to build a rocket to the moon by starting in your backyard with some sheet metal – your lifespan isn’t long enough if you take that approach. You have to read books written by people who have gone before, and learn from their mistakes, which you can do at a far more rapid pace than you can by making all those mistakes yourself. Only by standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before – that is, by reading their books – can you hope to push boundaries.
The writer’s complaint is daft. The purpose is to test if you can read a passage and comprehend it. Has nothing to do with microscopes. Has nothing to do with “teaching science”, as the writer asserts. Just because he doesn’t understand the purpose of the test doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Reading and comprehending text is one of life’s fundamental skills. It is, in fact, useful to know if schools are teaching that well or not.
Before I get downvoted into oblivion I should say I also think schools should do hands-on work (which, of course, they do).
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Never hire job hoppers. Never. They make terrible employees. | Hacker News
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I’m 24 years old. I’ve had 6 employers since I was 19. I’ve doubled my salary every year for the past four years. And I think this article is bullshit.
Am I wrong for choosing the path that brings me personal success at the cost of “company loyalty”? The depiction of an ideal employee painted by this author sounds a lot like the Japanese Salaryman – diligent and loyal to the company. Isn’t that model considered totally broken? Company loyalty as a top priority comes at the cost of ineffectiveness and lower morale. It just doesn’t seem right.
If your employees are being scalped away at salary+15, maybe you’re not paying them enough. If your employees are working 12 months and switching jobs, maybe you don’t offer enough internal growth. If your are rejecting applications of “job hoppers”, maybe you’re leaving major value on the table.
In Silicon Valley, it’s an employee’s market. The employer has to work to retain, support, and fairly compensate your employees. Otherwise, you shouldn’t be surprised when they up and leave.
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Today I gave the wrong answer to a customer | Hacker News
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The author seems to be missing how disruptive interruptions can be to some developers.
The “on call” idea might have some merit because it allows the developer to adjust their coding schedule around the X hours they will lose every day for a given period of time with customer assistance.
The “all hands” idea sounds terrible. Asking a developer is asked to answer 5 customer emails daily, each one needing a variable length of time to respond to, threatens to poison the well and become a burden. My understanding is that a developer would either try to answer the emails at the very beginning or at the very end of the day to keep distractions at a minimum.
My biggest question is – what is the reason for the author to have this many questions after being with Buffer for over 8 months? This seems like sufficient time to learn all the ins and outs of most products. Moreover, I hope that Buffer dev new-hires are told that they’ll be asked to wear many hats, including the responsibility for customer support, as part of the regular duties.
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The “all hands” idea sounds terrible. Asking a developer is asked to answer 5 customer emails daily, each one needing a variable length of time to respond to, threatens to poison the well and become a burden. My understanding is that a developer would either try to answer the emails at the very beginning or at the very end of the day to keep distractions at a minimum.
I’ve seen this sort of setup work very well. It’s something I’ve done myself (while wearing a dev hat) and found it very useful. I’d happily do it again.
Yes – being interrupted at any time would be a pain – but…
1) There are normally enough natural pauses during the day where knocking off a few customer support issues is doable. It can actually be quite a nice change of pace. It uses a separate bit of your head and you come back to that problem that just stumped you fresh after the break.
2) It’s can be a mistake to worry about the productivity of individuals and neglect the productivity of the company as a whole. Slowing me down individually can make the company as a whole run faster.
3) It gets you direct contact with actual customers on a regular basis. This is pure fking gold. Lost count of the number of times this has produced insights about how the ongoing development should work. That minor annoyance that three folk mention in a row that’s sounds tricky but is a 2m fix.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about myself | Hacker News
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I wanted to focus in on the exercise aspect of this piece:
In my experience, exercise is vital to my mental well-being, just as the author of this piece found it to be for him, until he hit a slump.
We all hit slumps.
I hit a major slump when our child was born. Prior to that, I had been hitting the gym consistently (4 days per week), but my life changed and I had to re-prioritize.
However, where I failed myself is that I quit exercising entirely, because my “exercising world view”, if you will, was gym-centric; that is, I had programmed myself to need a gym to be successful in working out.
I realized that I needed to change. After some research, I found P90X [1]. This is an exercise system (presented on DVD) that utilizes body-weight techniques (e.g., pull-ups, push-ups), yoga, plyometrics [2] and resistance exercises (you can use dumbbells or resistance bands – they demonstrate both techniques).
I also found a used Nordic Track ski machine [3] online for $100. This is not part of the P90X system, but I find it to be a fantastic cardio machine, and it allows me to change things up a bit… plus, the skiing action is fun.
The advantage here is that you can do all of this without going to a gym. Also, there is minimal equipment required; here is a picture of what is used in the system [4] (note the “Description” of the image that identifies all of the required pieces).
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For anyone struggling to get into an exercise routine, I’ve ran into a potential solution because it doesn’t require lots of time and effort.
Exercise 10 minutes daily (or at least 3-5x a week) as soon as you wake up and before you hit the shower. Do intervals. Out of the 10 minutes, two have to be all out and intense. You can do a treadmill, elliptical, or as I often do at home: jumping jacks and running in place (no, seriously). Also, listen to your favorite, upbeat music.
Benefits:
* exercise is generally good for the frontal cortex, what helps you focus and get things done [1]
* exercising in the morning will put you in a more positive mood, helping to reduce stress; by reducing stress, you feel more energetic, you feel less hungry and crave less crappy food, therefore you prevent the systematic downward spiral that comes with it and you lose weight.
* because you exercise in the morning, you burn more fat [2]
* adding music is great for your dopamine levels: [3]
* intensity (anaerobic exercise) is more important than duration and frequency [4]
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Want to ace your Y Combinator interview? Be relentlessly empathetic | Hacker News
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Another alum here, good list of questions. As was stated, the key to doing well at the interview is insight. This can’t be overstated. Show them something you understand about your users, market or technology that gets them thinking.
The actual questions will vary based on the type of team you are. I.e. a couple undergrad dorm-room hackers with a prototype, a team that’s spent time in the industry they are trying to disrupt, a team that’s developed some real technology, or a team with a product that has traction.
But whatever questions you get, demonstrate genuine insight, not marketing speak or cliches. And have a decent answer to every possible question. The partners have spent only minutes with your application, and you’ve spent anywhere from weeks to months to years on your idea, so this should not be that hard. If you do this, they will get themselves excited and you’re pretty much in at that point.
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Better yet: be relentlessly empathetic, create something people want (need/can’t live with it, etc), whether you are interview with YC or not.
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How would this work out in a scenario where the customers are a subset of the users. Say, a restaurant menu service that provides restaurants with enhanced menus for their clients. The customers are the restaurants and restaurant owners. But the users include the clients who actually use the menus and may have their own interests and considerations. You may revenue-share with the restaurants, but the customers are still the restaurants. Now there may be questions on this list, where the customers’ interests and pain are at odds with their clients’ interests and pain. What happens when the customer is an enterprise level business, and you can’t speak to them daily or weekly or maybe even monthly?
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The next generation of Instapaper | Hacker News
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I wonder how much this has to do with the rise of Pocket over the last year.
It’s no secret that Pocket has improved dramatically since rebranding a year ago. And I’m sure most people who are looking for their first “read-later” app are trying Pocket (free) before buying Instapaper ($5).
Personally speaking, I bought Instapaper for myself and gifted it to a few other people over the years, but I switched to Pocket a few months ago. The continuous updates and simpler interface (those thumbnail pics are surprisingly useful) won me over, despite my hesitations about their business model.
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>Pocket, although having its own benefits, is free. Any service with ongoing costs (parsing servers) that charges nothing for their app has me questioning their longevity.
Prior to the name change, Pocket offered a $3 “Pro” version.
I’m guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually.
Pulse runs a free app parsing/serving from App Engine and took in $9.8M in funding before being acquired by LinkedIn for $90M.
Pocket runs a free app parsing/serving from EC2 and has taken in $7.5M in funding.
I was able to see who would be interested in Pulse and why pretty early on. I’m not sure about the same for Pocket.
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I’m guessing that Pocket means to be acquired eventually.
And those acquisitions work out so well for the product, especially smaller, more niche products.
If they’ve taken that much money, they are going to have to provide a strategy to monetize. If they are doing it for free, it means they are selling analytics about what you are reading to somebody else.
For myself, I’ll pay for the app.
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I have no particular loyalty to Instapaper, but their major feature over Pocket, for me, is sending a compilation to kindle as an ebook (Kindle sees it as a magazine, complete with TOC.) People have been asking for this feature from Pocket for a while now (http://help.getpocket.com/customer/portal/questions/286894-k…), but without much encouragement that it will appear.
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Flat Design and Color Trends | Hacker News
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> What we are seeing more of with flat design and color though is the matching of tone and saturation.
As someone with practically no design skills, how would I accomplish this? For example, let’s say I had two or three colors in mind or already picked out. What are the steps I could take to line up their tones and saturation? Is there a formula or algorithm that applies?
I realize design skills are developed through practice, but I very often find myself with something I’ve put together that looks just OK and just sort of aimlessly tinkering around with it until I’ve inevitably made it look washed out. So obviously my feel isn’t working yet–where else can I turn?
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My daily readings 04/27/2013
April 27, 2013-
Helicopter Managers: The Helping Hand Strikes Again | LinkedIn
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To grow, people need to be challenged. Research at the Center for Creative Leadership shows that challenges—including having to work on unfamiliar tasks, lead change under uncertainty and exercise influence without authority—are important predictors of learning and development on the job. And three decades of evidence reveals that people achieve higher performance when they are given difficult goals. Difficult goals motivate people to work harder and smarter, develop their knowledge and skills, and test out different task strategies, all of which facilitate effectiveness and growth. But what’s the optimal level of difficulty?
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My daily readings 04/26/2013
April 26, 2013-
Mistakes startups make when talking to users | Hacker News
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Along those lines, I’ll share a snippet from patio11′s Microconf presentation last year (posted on HN yesterday), regarding interpreting the responses you get to a more open-ended conversation:
“If you’re solving a problem people actually have, they will say at this point, ‘Shut up and take my money.’ If someone says, ‘That’s kind of interesting, tell me when that exists,’ you have not successfully identified a problem that people actually have.”
You don’t get that kind of insight from radio buttons.
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