MEHColeman

Genuinely curious: which OS ought to have beaten UNIX?

Ruby Developer, Shoreditch, London. Local only.

Oscar Music are looking for a talented ruby developer.

We provide a hosted music streaming service, web site and mobile apps for our customers to white-label. We do this with a lot of ruby code (but not really rails), mysql, puppet, debian, some couchdb, sphinx and git.

We work in Shoreditch, in an office with lots of character and friendly people. We get to work on interesting new tech and keep ourselves very busy. We're a small team, and there is a lot going on, so whatever your current skills, you'll definitely be learning new things here. We've also got some interesting new work in the pipeline.

If you are interested in finding out more, check out the job spec and the company at http://mediasp.com/jobs.html and please get in touch.

Well, that's a bit depressing. :/ But half my family live in the north, and I don't think you give them enough credit :)

Also, you seem to be talking about the decision making process of assessing whether to vote for AV or FPTP, not the not the complexity of voting using an AV system.

I'm not convinced that the AV voting method is too difficult to understand, though. Ranking things in order of preference is not hard for anyone to do. The finer points of the difference in electoral outcomes given different voting statistics might be more sophisticated, but that could be applied to any of the voting systems.

Voting itself though is no more complicated saying "I'll have a pint of Stella. If they don't have Stella, I'll have Fosters."

The No campaign has made the AV system out to be more complicated than it is as a scare tactic to put people off voting for it. That seems to have worked, which is deeply unfortunate, but indicative of political campaigns across the world. Fear and doubt are excellent motivators, and seem to be far more effective than a clear, reasoned and 'intellectual' argument.

Call me an unrealistic idealist, but I would much rather people research and consider the options before making an informed choice. Making a case for FPTP because it encourages more people who are uninformed and unconsidered to vote isn't going to win me over, though :)

However, as I say, the AV voting mechanism really isn't complicated at all - my wife is an early years teacher. Voting under an AV system is so easy that - literally - a five-year-old can understand it. I don't see anyone being put off by it.

Moreover, I think more people will be enthused by i) their ability to vote for the candidate that they believe in, ii) the greater accountability of their elected MPs to engage with their constituents and more accurately reflect their views and iii) their ability to express their opinions in a more meaningful way through the ballot box, that turnouts would be greater, not smaller. Low turnout and voter apathy has a multitude of causes, but the ones that I hear most often are "lack of accountability" and "my vote doesn't count anyway."

This probably sounds terrible, but if you are too "stupid/ignorant" to write your preferences in order 1-5, are you really competent enough to be voting? I really don't expect there are many people (or any, I mean, really?) who are that stupid - that's just doesn't seem a valid reason to be against it. If you just write "1" instead of an "X", it's exactly as easy as the current system. Could you do it? Can you really think of anyone who couldn't do it? The entire tory party elected Cameron that way, it's not complicated at all. It does seem to be an effective scare tactic, though ;)

To quote Dara O Briain from twitter, "Listen, vote NO, if you're happy to trade lack of representation for a clear result. That's a perfectly fine choice to make. I respect that. But if you vote NO, because it's sounds complicated or you don't like Clegg, or the Irish are in debt, you're an idiot.

>Firefox isn't Chrome -- it doesn't force you into its workflow or mode of thought.

Yes, it does, it's just a different mode of thought. Chrome is far less configurable than Firefox, and has some features than drive me mad - like the position of a newly opened tab.

Anyhoo, this is too many steps. I want to make money in no more than 3 easy steps. Two easy steps would be even better.

Gah! Why is this relevant to hacker news? You can take this to reddit and have a willing audience.

> Plain text have no value if people writing and reading the specs are developers.

I disagree. Language shapes thinking to a certain degree, and Cucumber can help put yourself in a useful mindset for describing specs.

I think he has a point with the last comment though, most (though not all) of the benefit comes upfront. Mind you, that's the best place to have a benefit :)

The paragraph starting "There's a lot of crap out there."

To be fair, there is no magic in Rails, just a lot of 'defaults'. If you look at the code, its all very clear how those defaults are enabled, and there are clear methods for overriding them. The 'magic' thing started as a sort of marketing spiel to say "look at all these things that you don't need to worry about configuring, because they are all set to sensible defaults" but became 'mysterious' in some people's minds.

How is this on topic?

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This is kind of what happens anyway. If you let a domain expire, there is still a 'grace period' where you can renew it before it becomes available for someone else to buy. So, in those terms, the expiry date is a soft limit, and the end of the grace period marks a hard limit.