StrawberryFrog

Yes but.

Imagine yourself as a user of this service. You sign up, get the "email confirmation", think everything is good. A day later you notice that it isn't working, check up, actually read the email and click the link.

Now you want to report a bug. What do you say? How do you explain that you got it to work, but it could have worked better? When there's a large helpdesk, this kind of feedback is nearly impossible to give in any meaningful way. Even if you could speak to the coders concerned, often it's hard to get them to think in a different way and see the problem.

So it's obvious but it's hard.

That sort of this is also easy to do in C# or any strongly typed language. Similar things in c# are the DBNull type which "Represents a nonexistent value" from a database (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.dbnull.aspx ) and Type.Missing which "Represents a missing value in the Type information"

C#'s type system is a bit messy over there. Besides Func<T> and Action<T>, there's also Predicate<T> , which works the same as Func<T, bool> except for being an entirely different type that's non-trivial to cast to Func<T, bool>. And the whole lot look a lot like delegates.

If they were all just Func<T> (or aliases for that, or wrappers over that when multicast is really needed), it would be a lot simpler.

So, generic type erasure is still a bad idea.

I don't think it's huge. Compare "Honey I lied about cheating on you" with "Honey, I didn't tell you that I was cheating on you". It's a fine line when it's information that you know is relevant.

> the law takes a backseat when security and anti-terror are involved

Read that statement. Again. Are you worried yet?

Are you saying that Europe is not governed by law, and citizens protections are optional there, or just that this is what happens in the USA?

If the former, I hope Europe can fix that. If the latter, why is Europe's problem?

> There's a difference between hiding something and simply not announcing it loudly to the world

But not a huge difference. It's something that would definitely be of interest.

Quite likely. That'd doesn't make it legal, necessary or even a good idea.

> There are a number of reasons why both the government and the companies would want to keep it secret:

Which are much the same reasons why someone who has stolen a TV would want to keep that secret. It doesn't make it an idea worth encouraging.

How does the "The Patriot Act seem to trump the EU law" ? In what sense?

I reject the idea that a US law is more important in Europe than an European one. If that is what has happened, then it is wrong.

If nothing was hidden, why is this policy only coming to light after the fact? There seems to be some degree of not wanting people to know.

"European Union legislation requires companies to protect the personal information of EU citizens"

It's the law. What's more, it's a good law. I am concerned that they broke it, and seem to have tried to hide this.

I have worked with coders who were lightning fast at asp.net, and those who wrote tested, maintainable, readable, extensible code that was an asset to the company years later. These are seldom the same person. Be careful. Still, for a startup, getting something working fast counts for a lot.

MVC or webforms?

I'm doing some MVC work at present, and it's a good platform (I can't compare it to RoR or others, I don't know them well enough, sorry).

For those who know .Net well, the hard/novel part is the Javascript+jquery client-side code. The rest just flows.

The current iteration of the tooling with EF4.1 and nuget is a good improvement.

Some of your questions:

> Is it the cost?

Windows servers, Visual studio licences and some SQL server licences can add up. Some small startups couldn't afford it, but MS will "make the first one free" with bizspark. Big companies won't sweat it.

> Performance issues?

Nope, asp mvc is quite performant. That's one thing that's easier in a compiled, strongly typed language.

> Frustrating development environment?

Nope. VS2010 with resharper, nuget and nunit is sweet. As long as you have enough memory.

> Lack of a Hacker community?

Not completely lacking, but may be smaller than with other environments. But there should be user groups, conferences, etc. It may depend on where you are.

There are lots of resources for you to read, official docs on msdn, stackoverflow, blogs, and .net geeks on twitter, etc.

"Plans to create new exceptions to copyright laws, including a "limited" right to copy legitimately purchased copyrighted material for private use were announced in the Government report. "

http://www.out-law.com/page-12128

So if I read this right, they are planning on legalising the act of ripping music off your Cds and listening to them on an iPod.

This isn't radical. It isn't even up-to-date.

The grid element is one of the inputs from Microsoft. This is not very surprising - it uses the basic concepts from the grid in WPF and Silverlight. It's pretty a cool way to lay things out.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

> If she hasn't had the locks changed by now,

She did. I don't see why you need to speculate on that point; in her first blog post that brought this whole mess to our attention, she said "Although I had the locks changed" ...

You should guess that; since it's what she said. I don't know why cletus didn't pick up on that.

> Maybe it's different in London compared to NY

I've seen the kind of guys described in zed's first para, in Finance in London. I don't think it's different, but YMMV.

Update: the same article can be found online here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9aac5f80-b924-11e0-bd87-00144feabd...

> There's the potential that the mainstream media could have a field day with this.

It's on the front page of the Financial Times today (Friday 29 July) in London. The article is fairly short, is based on the original blog post and the reaction to that, and it also talks about AirBnB's finances (as is appropriate for that newspaper).

It's below the fold - the headline is about US government debt. But still.

> Silverlight is still limited to Windows and Mac

And as a direct consequence of Silverlight not being all that popular, that will not change. Sadly.

they had that, it is called silverlight. People didn't want it all that much.

It's hard to see what else you can do about destroyed family heirlooms.

All right then. I'll give Tallulah von Strumpet-Hausen and Martin Soulstealer the benefit of the doubt ;)

if your point is "you don't actually know" then mine is "you don't need to even care".

> "we've made sure our customer is whole."

When it gets to personal things like "found ... grandmother's jewelry" and "I don't have the mental energy to take those last few steps into my apartment. It's too creepy in there anyway."

It's really hard to "make someone whole" with a cash payout. There's a lot of distress involved. It's not just a case of "TV was stolen, TV costs $500, here's $500". There's family heirlooms and emotional trauma involved.

Aside from that difficulty, you're perfectly right.

Your home owner / contents insurance almost certainly doesn't cover you for this, and never did.

Letting a stranger stay for a few nights in exchange for money is not novel to Airbnb, and will be excluded.

As far as I know "Fake" is the surname that she was born with.

Oops, my mistake.

> If they had built something that looked and operated like a 747 nobody would have cared

I don't entirely agree. With a space program that "looked and operated like a 747" - assuming you mean a relatively routine and reliable spaceplane where the launches are less of a spectacle - you'd get a lot of people and hardware in space, and people would have cared about that.

I guess it's harder to get people excited about results than about spectacles, but it can be done, and it lasts longer.