Viewing profile — jhermsmeyer

Labrador OmniMedia | Rails Developer/Devops Engineer | Sonoma County, California | Remote Labrador creates software for the hospitality industry. Our flagship product, Slate, is an…

Agreed. The sample is very likely tainted by factors that made success much more likely than average if we believe that NFL coaches are both conservative (they forgo punts only whe…

I'd say the answer provided is so simplistic that it has very little explanatory power. Commenters have already mentioned Uber and Groupon, but I'd go further and add YC love child…

My favorite slide from Greenwald's article was the justification field from the Search Email Addresses Query [1]. It's a one line field. With an addition one line field for "Additi…

To paraphrase (or is it a direct quote?) Jacob Applebaum, "Quiet, please. Adults are talking." This is staggering, and to chide others for being staggered is the worst kind of truc…

This is a huge deal for folks stuck in Salesforce. I've already had our team of 6 regional sales managers begin using the app.

Right to anonymity? Convicted felons lose their right to own a gun. Some might never use one to commit a crime, but they still lose that right. This is no different. It is not reas…

"It will include a plethora of innovations to come that will further make it clear that big things are on the road ahead." All Things D's writing, and hence credibility, is one but…

> I've got to say, I don't understand why people keep mentioning drop shadows, though. Drop shadows seem fairly uncommon. Even Google only uses them for mouseover. Put your cursor …

I think we are splitting hairs here, but I agree that what we are talking about is affordance. The reason why I use the term skeuomorphic in this context is because there are those…

The two most prominent buttons on the home page have subtle drop shadows and gradients. Google is actually a great example of restrained skeuomorphic design. If I had to advocate f…

You are in good company: "According to various reports, when someone suggested to include a touch-typing tutorial in this intro as well, since many people did not know how to use a…

If your audience is developers and designers, a pure flat design is great and will likely work well. But normal people need their hand held as to what a button is. Subtle drop shad…

Agreed. There are low tech ways to achieve a similar result. But operators, servers and managers absolutely loathe anything that changes their steps of service. The winning solutio…

If this attempt at price discrimination does indeed become popular it will be via digital menus that update their pricing automatically, not via fiddly coupons. We are quite aways …

The wine, beer and spirits industry is one of the most highly regulated and opaque in America. Innovation in this area takes more than good technology - it takes an incredible amou…

Honestly one of the more impenetrable articles I've read lately. Just not very clear or well written. I'm not even entirely sure there is anything news worthy here. Just some dire …

You kinda did gloss over, well, everything that makes this letter good. The letter is powerful because of how it said what it wanted to say. The examples and imagery are vivid; the…

I have talked to directors of Bay Area charities that tell me that Jobs was a generous donator personally. In fact this just happened 2 weeks ago, and the person defended him vehem…

I use Assistly for one of our CS portals and due to sporadic downtime was interested to see what Groove had to offer after reading this post. In terms of marketing, this is exactly…

My goodness. This type of thinking is going to shackle you from ever doing something new and untried. That's the most important lesson you don't learn in college: how to do somethi…

So poorly written, I find it hard to take seriously. tl;dr Make fun games, not pretty ones. The problem is that it is never obvious when mechanics make a game great, and when art d…

Those that are driven to make things will be inspired by what the post-pc landscape has to offer, not dissuaded. I don't want to completely discount this short post, but the FUD he…

I agree. If you feel what you have to say is important enough for other people to read, put some time into shining it up, and making it readable. Otherwise you leave yourself open …

Interference can be a problem, to be sure. But you can't create a successful business without feedback of all kinds, including technical. It's just that it has to be done thoughtfu…