pwaring

I've found their recruiters to be polite, but they don't seem to do their research before contacting you. Explaining the "no, I do not want to live in London" angle to a US recruiter is also a bit tricky. :)

You can't claim copyright on a list of facts anyway, at best you might have a database right.

How many people actually do that though? GoDaddy's model seems to be like the banks over in UK - offer a great introductory rate (with a 'bonus' that expires after a year) and then allow customer inertia to set in.

The fact that you can switch and that it makes financial sense to do so does not mean that people will.

I'm not a C expert by any means, but is there a need for another new version? Last time I checked, some compilers hadn't even got round to implementing C99 (e.g. Visual C++ doesn't support variable length arrays). Even gcc hasn't got everything:

http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

It's how Facebook refer to their 'coders', and in many ways it's a better word because it suggests something more than just hacking [insert language] all day. For example, an engineer might be concerned about how their code fits into the bigger picture, whether there is a better way of doing things etc., rather than thrashing out code for a daily rate.

I don't know where you're getting this "massively increased hardware and hosting costs" from - we run our trading platform on bog standard x86_64 hardware, as has every other PHP site I've worked on (some even run in VMs with 500MB of memory).

Because you can get a web application up and running quickly in PHP, then tune it later if and when your application needs to scale to 500 million users (which it probably won't, because only a handful of sites reach that size).

There's also a far bigger pool of talent to draw from if you want developers. I don't think there are many people who know how to write web applications in Common Lisp or Haskell.

There seems to be an assumption within the tech industry that startup == total dedication to the company, including 60 hour weeks and a lack of family time (which might put some people - male and female - off). I don't understand why this has to be the case.

I work for a startup in another industry (wholesale insurance) and 90% of our staff are female. People work 8:30-5 Mon-Fri and rarely do any overtime. If there's a programming/development project which needs to be done, I estimate how it will take and we decide if it's worth the cost, including the opportunity cost of what we could have worked on instead.

If tech startups were run properly, with sensible deadlines, fixed hours and no 'crunch sessions' (if you need these on a regular basis, your project management is broken) they would probably attract a far wider range of people.

The comparison with CPAN was more to do with the abandoned modules - if you go onto CPAN you'll find lots of modules which were created years ago and then never updated, but they still show up in search results.

I think it's a bit unfair to suggest that all jQuery plugins have problems (I use the validation plugin and it is excellent for catching mistakes before a user submits a form and starts the backend processing). I see them as being in the same boat as WordPress plugins - there are some which are well maintained and up to date, and then a huge pile of others which were quickly hacked together and then never looked at again.

It's the same with CPAN, PEAR and anything else where you allow users to contribute additional separate components which aren't maintained by the core developers.

Some charities do employ their own staff, because they want greater control over the process and staff who know about the charity, rather than agency staff who might be 'selling' a different charity each week.

Even if they're an agency, the ones I know of are paid hourly, not per sign-up.

Do you have any figures to back that up? Most charities here in the UK publish their expense ratios (i.e. how much is spent on admin, fundraising, on the actual good cause etc.) and they tend to be fairly efficient.

Said I hadn't visited any of the sites, except HN (which is easy to guess since news.ycombinator.com will be in the HTTP_REFERER field...).

If I re-run the test it still gets some sites wrong (says I haven't visited them when in fact I have). It even claims I haven't visited Amazon both times when in fact it's open in another tab.

Looks pretty smart, I really hope this project succeeds because as an ex-academic I find it almost impossible to get hold of information about research, and particularly papers.

One thing which could be improved though is the lack of canonical departmental names. For example, if you look at the University of Manchester there are entries for 'Classics & Ancient History' and 'Classics and Ancient History', so you have to look at both to see all the members.

Localisation would also be good - in the UK we don't tend to refer to people as 'Faculty' or 'Graduate Student' (lecturers see themselves as being tied to a department or school rather than the mostly administrative faculty).

The headline is technically accurate, but I suspect most people don't know the difference between x-ray scanners and millimeter-wave scanners and assume if a scanner shows underneath your clothes then it is an x-ray.

Not only are you being forced onto his schedule, but unless you've read his blog post you won't even know what his schedule is.

If I go away on holiday, I reserve a few hours of my first work day when I get back to scanning through email and working out when I'm going to reply. It seems to work reasonably well - occasionally I'll get someone who didn't know I was away grumbling about a late reply but a quick apology usually satisfies them.

As a sysadmin who ends up getting a lot of autoresponder messages (e.g. in response to emails sent from a website, or from mailing lists) they are an unbelievably irritating 'feature' which I wish had never been invented - although most of the annoyance is down to the fact that the vast majority of autoresponders don't seem to remember whether you've already sent them a message, so they reply every time.

"They just disappeared sometimes. Cause unknown."

If the cause is unknown, how can you blame it on a given piece of software?

Herb Sutter, whose blog post is the subject of this thread, has written a few books. I enjoyed C++ Coding Standards in particular.

I've used it in the past to learn how a distribution is built from, well, scratch. :)

Nowadays distributions like Ubuntu allow you to install a full system with just a few mouse clicks, which is great for usability but not much use if you want to learn how everything works.

Perhaps they use Automated Linux from Scratch?

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/alfs/

Although there's little documentation to speak of, so I can't tell whether it helps with upgrades.

If you want to build from source and tinker with compile flags but also be able to upgrade seamlessly, Gentoo or Arch Linux is probably more appropriate.

I think the difficulty most people have is that Stallman is, or at least comes across as, an uncompromising idealist. Whilst there's nothing wrong with that (we need some people to stick to their guns), most of us are pragmatists who have to compromise regularly in order to get things done, so someone who appears to refuse to change his position and shoots down anyone who disagrees with him can be very annoying.

Compare Stallman with Torvalds, who seems to be much more pragmatic and willing to listen to people who may have different views, and seems to be much more popular as a result.

Both are listed as valid pronunciations according to the Oxford English Dictionary:

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/251510

Well, it scales within projects (see Linux kernel for a good example of a distributed project run by a mixture of volunteers and people paid to work on it), it doesn't seem to scale as well to projects working together.

"community development simply doesn't scale"

I think that depends on what you apply it to. Community development seems to work well enough for individual projects, but not in-between projects (see amount of duplication caused by LibreOffice/OpenOffice.org).

Bit late, I've already done that. :) Although I don't remember hearing any horror stories, other than an amusing anecdote about how his ultra-free netbook wouldn't connect to the wireless, whereas the proprietary Macbook worked perfectly...

http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/17.2/#repor_paul_

I don't think it was posted to the mySociety list in order to criticise RMS, more a notification of what's in store for anyone who is thinking of organising an event where he is a speaker. You certainly wouldn't want to go ahead without having seen the rider, given the number of conditions attached.

I don't know why, but it's a new one since 2008 (I hosted a RMS talk then and still have the rider).

Google will let you filter searches by date, it's there under the More Search Tools -> Custom Range option. If I choose Last Year, I don't see most of the Perl 4 stuff.

The problem is that people looking for a basic Perl tutorial may not know about all the filtering options.

There's a HTML version available (the build scripts are available on GitHub), so it could be readable on the web.

It's not a tutorial as such, but the Modern Perl book is up to date:

http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/

Unfortunately you can't create your own set of tutorials from it, and it doesn't rank highly in Google.