plug

It's not silly at all. I'm 38, a friend of mine died almost six months ago (he was 37). I still haven't really parsed the permanence of it, or the fact that half a year has passed already; even as I stood beside his grave last weekend. It does feel very strange - indeed I don't have the words to describe it any other way.

I applaud for doing that, and your request.

Reading that article was horrifying. One one side, the banality of it all. On the other... I can't even imagine what it was like to experience that, and I think I am happier that I can't.

The statement 'war is a game' has never been more true.

Indeed. I got in there just before the stampede. A short, entertaining read about the dying art of book theft, and a summary of some of the 'characters' of the trade.

Google cache here:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:thedabb...

Thanks! Fascinating. Good to know I am not alone :)

Galway is a great spot alright, although I have to admit I do prefer living in Cork ;)

I don't know anything substantial about data centres so I wasn't basing my assumptions on their real-world requirements.

That said however, isn't Athenry a bit inland itself? You'd imagine far west Galway would be better again, with the added potential - I assume - to create infrastructure their own offshore wind energy.

Slightly off-topic, but the use of 'an' as the indefinite article in the phrase 'an HTTP' always seems really weird to my brain.

In Ireland we seem to learn a less "rounded" version of the letter H when we learn the alphabet - I assume this comes from Irish language pronunciation. It sounds much more like "hay-ch" than "aych", really emphasising that initial 'h'.

So, thinking about it, I guess 'a HTTP' probably sounds pretty weird to every other native English speaker in the world :)

Anyone else out there prefer 'a HTTP' over 'an HTTP'?

Back on topic: I really enjoyed the last two hacking sessions, it's really edifying to see the process. More please!

Aye, I'd concur with that. Pretty unusual/interesting that they chose Athenry Co. Galway though - I guess specific location is pretty irrelevant in a tiny country like Ireland but I would have imagined that Cork would be the default choice, since the EMEIA HQ is there too. Good news for Athenry in any case!

nikic is an incredible asset to the PHP community. I feel slightly less bad about my own programming abilities now that he is no longer a teenager ;)

Everyone likes to rag on PHP's chain, which is fair enough in some regards, but it has become a far better language recently, with more useful features, faster development cycles etc. People like nikic seem to be at the forefront of this.

Since PHP is a major part of my day job this all makes me very happy!

Amazing guitarist. A friend (J's greatest fan incidentally) managed to convince him to do a guest solo on one of his albums a few years ago. Pretty amazing thing to strike off your bucket list!

I've never heard of anyone calling a jazzmaster shitty before though ;) Amazing, beautiful machines.

I can appreciate this also. Your `sort` question reminds me of an interview where I asked the candidate to give me an example of where he used his general coding knowledge to solve a problem. He told me how he had two long lists of email addresses with duplicates that he needed to sort and merge into one unique list.

He explained his solution in which he spent considerable time writing a C++ program to do this - iirc it even wrote the unique entries to a db. He seemed stunned when I explained that he could have achieved this easily with something like `sort -u a.txt b.txt > sorted.txt`. Sorted! To be fair he was inexperienced, but there is a lot of power in the command line that some developers don't seem to be aware of at all.

In other cases, some developers who do know will still grab to the new and shiny solution every time. The simplest solution is usually good enough, and the most maintainable (if that's a concern).

Ted Dziuba's 'Taco Bell Programming' nails this perspective pretty well. I'm sure it has been posted on HN many times already:

http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...

It is a lot of fun, it tastes amazing and it gets quicker and less messy the more you do it.

Recently I decided I would start getting a lot more use out of an Imperia I bought years ago, with the specific goal of getting good/fast enough to not make a huge mess and be able to (literally) crank out a few helpings quick enough for dunner. Practice makes perfect...

The most time consuming part is mixing the flour and egg, and if you don't do it well enough you're going to have a hard time rolling and particularly cutting.

It turns out that it's a perfectly acceptable 'cheat' to just use a food processor... I tried it the last time and I ended up with a decent dough in a fraction of the time it takes to hand mix. That was an encouraging development :)

Also known as the World Wide. You can surf out there too apparently.

Indeed, and if that wasn't enough of a disincentive they'd lose out on the favourable taxation they get from basing themselves in Europe - specifically, Ireland.

http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/google-pays-17m-in-...

Although I understand that the European Commission will soon be focusing their attention on the tax arrangements of some of the Irish-based tech giants (Apple, Google etc.)