Kidnapping: a small photographic project I did with a friend of mine a while ago.
This is the story of a young man minding his own business. Until he found himself in the middle of something he’d never expected.
Not to that point, not in that way.
To make great software, you neither need to be a rockstar programmer or study CS. What you need is to understand human beings thoroughly.
— Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) January 2, 2012
“There is a colossal opportunity for companies to break this logjam and organize around customer satisfaction instead of around software, around personas instead of around technology, around profit instead of around programmers.” —
From the Foreword of Alan Cooper — The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.
I can’t believe this book is not a required reading in all Computer Science and Business Administration curricula.
Photo taken in Gouda, NL using an Apple iPod Touch.
TheSkeptic, over at Hacker News:
YC S11 Company Seeks Uber Python Dev
We’re a young company that’s so hot, we melt ice in our sleep. Some of our investors even believe we’re responsible for global warming. Out hotness is to be expected: our 5 founders hail from top engineering schools, and one even won $5,000 in a single night playing online poker when he was 13 (for reals).
Our users? Cooler than a polar bear’s toe nails. Think Tom from MySpace, but even cooler. They’re young, they love technology and they all have fat bank accounts. Oh, they’re all beautiful people too.
Our trajectory is clear: extreme penetration of a lucrative niche market in Year 1, and world domination in Year 2. We’ve already grown 500% in our first 2 weeks after launch. See http://yfrog.com/kfu2tcj
We’re looking for an awesome Python developer with a big ego and low self-esteem. Someone who knows he’s the sheeeeet but doesn’t want to prove it at a big company that does lame stuff like QA. Someone who can down a can of Coke and a box of Mentos and then go on to devour a four-course meal of web-scale challenges the likes of which no other startup has ever faced. Seriously.
What do we offer? Put simply, The Life. As an early employee, you’ll receive a salary that will enable you to rent a condo in Palo Alto with 3 other startup dude roommates, a huge equity stake that will be massively diluted as we raise new rounds of funding from some of the most respected angels and VCs in the Valley, and the ginormous confidence that comes with knowing you’re changing the world one unique visitor at a time.
If you’re ready to take your awesomeness to the next level and think you have what it takes to hang, send us an email at socially.awkward.hipster.startup@gmail.com and tell us why we shouldn’t laugh at your Github account.
Brilliant.
But it’s a bit sad that, like tibbon in the comments, it took me a while to figure out it wasn’t a real job description.
I hate cluttering my Mac, and cringe every time I see a desktop full of stuff. So, you can probably tell how much I dislike when applications put their stuff in my candid Documents folder. 1
Fortunately though, Mac OS X features a way to hide them from the Finder. If you ever tried to list the root of your hard drive from the terminal, you probably noticed that it is quite different from what the Finder displays:
$ ls /
Applications/ Developer/
Library/ Network/
System/ Users/
Volumes/ bin/
cores/ dev/
home/ net/
private/ sbin/
usr/ etc@
mach_kernel tmp@
var@
Mac OS X’s filesystem stores a series of attributes along with every file and folder. Other parts of the system, like the Finder, are cued by these attributes to display and handle the file correctly. The complete list of attributes is available here. The one we are interested in, Invisible (also represented by a V), determines the visibility of a folder in the Finder, contributing to the overall simplicity of the operating system. If you have Xcode installed on your machine it’s easy to check it and set it thanks to two command line tools, GetFileInfo and SetFile.
GetFileInfo will return the string of all possible attributes, with uppercase letters representing on, and lowercase representing off. For example, the following means that `/private“ is an Invisible folder, because the V attribute is set.
$ GetFileInfo /private
directory: "/private"
attributes: aVbstclinmedz
created: 01/26/2010 10:27:05
modified: 01/26/2010 10:42:18
Thanks to SetFile we can apply this attribute to every folder we please.2 This is quite handy to cleanup ~/Documents from those nasty folders created by games and badly ported programs, without losing our crucial savegames or preference files. The syntax is simple:
SetFile -a "V" <directories>
For example (do not copy and paste it), yesterday I did this:
$ cd ~/Documents
$ SetFile -a "V" Aspyr "BIT.TRIP BEAT" "Civilization IV" "Civilization IV Beyond the Sword" "Civilization IV Warlords"
That applied the Invisible attribute to all the listed directories. I then restarted the Dock to update the Documents’ stack:
$ killall Dock
Bye bye, ugly folders!
Just in case you will want to make the hidden folders visible again, use SetFile as before, replacing "V" with a lowercase "v", like this:
SetFile -a "v" <directories>
Update: Turns out that Mac OS X provides a slightly simpler solution since 10.5:
chflags hidden <directories>
to hide the <directories> and
chflags nohidden <directories>
to unhide them.
not every program that uses the Documents folder is inherently bad. Papers, iChat, and Colloquy are great examples of exactly the opposite: they use Documents to save only informations relevant to humans. ↩
remember to be careful applying attributes to files and folders. While Invisible is handy in some context, other attributes can be quite dangerous. ↩
Meet me at the bar…
Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg’s animated GIFs are truly an art form. Their cinemagraphs let you savor a passing moment.
“We wanted to tell more of a story than a single still frame photograph but didn’t want the high maintenance aspect of a video,” they told Co.Design via email.
Check out more of these gorgeous pics.
“I am building a prototype VM where performance is largely irrelevant. Yet still I repeatedly found myself optimizing: caching, interning, fast-pathing, etc. I just can’t stop myself. There is something particularly insiduous about performance. I think it is that it is so much easier to think about performance than subjective design issues. Performance is objective — you can actually quantify it, unlike most of the issues that really matter: subjective design issues with no clear cut answer, which can be almost impossible to evaluate while you are still developing. As engineers we crave the objective and quantifiable world of performance. So we focus on that even when it isn’t important. Most of the time it isn’t important.” — Jonathan Edwards — Delusions of Programming