vickytnz

As they note, the traffic from HN has meant that their main page isn't a full list. There's dozens when you look at the UK category http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

Reading this, this is perhaps comparable to getting university education: you are losing money, but you get some interesting experiences to set you up for later. That said, in an age of free internships and similar, I hope this isn't done too often so as to give employers ideas….

He does say "until my startup takes off". I don't think this is really that much different from the kid who kept sneaking into a big corp's office (was it YCombinator?) and sleeping under a table in a sleeping bag until he got caught. He's also wisely doing this during a Swedish summer, where the daylight hours are so extreme that everyone's behaviour changes anyway (well, that's what we get here in England anyhow….)

I mean in general, there are about 500 responses there. You can get permalinks for all of them. (After doing a lot of page refreshes—and seeing a lot of amazing stories from interning at the Swedish Defence centre to being inspired by Gloria Steinem—I found mine http://ilearnedtoprogram.com/?id=4db7598635a76c8952000000 )

I had a discussion with someone about learning Dutch, as I know many foreigners there who learn to understand it but never speak it as they get spoken back to in English. One suggestion put up was that the Dutch never get people speaking their language badly the way that English speakers do, and so revert to English rather than hear their native language mangled!

You know about this site, right? http://ilearnedtoprogram.com/

My favourite example of what seems like talent actually being a damn lot of work: Derek Silver's 15 years of vocal training that took him from a mediocre singer to a the type of one that people would say 'had a gift' http://sivers.org/15-years

:) Where were you originally from (rough area if you don't want to be too specific)? As much as I'd like to move back home I fear I've been spoilt by living in the UK to expect cheap and plentiful internet, great public transport, and loads of interesting opportunities!

Yeah, savvy companies are getting away from the annoying "RT every nice thing people say about my company" with 'fave it and then point the faves at people if they want testimonials". Hostgator does this well: http://twitter.com/hostgator/favorites

I moved to Chrome just to be able to see PDFs in browser. Lots of websites have info that way (restaurants are the worst) and I don't want to get it saved on my computer just to have to delete it!

Slightly OT: but I've always loved how Finns are so direct in their writing and speech (yet also able to be really funny at the same time). I suspect that it might have something to do with their famously small alphabet, but it always comes across pretty cool in English :) [EDIT: just realised that the writer of the article is here in the forum. Hi, Bemmu!]

Yes, my former work were very clear with our clients about this (usually Drupal as this was a couple of years ago): "we use open source because it means that if you decide you don't want to work with us any more, you're not locked in and can do whatever you want. It's also common enough that you can get your own in-house developer if you really want to add functionality to it."

Our strategy was that by informing the client, they a) knew we weren't backing them into a corner and b) were informed enough to have options in the future. (Most stayed with us anyway, but it was nice to say that they had a choice)

Conversely, the difference is that women are incentivised just as much as men to apply and be accepted as (in the UK at least) it's tied to research outcomes.

At least one other article has made the point that conference organisers should aim at getting more females to submit by a) finding female networks and making them aware of the CfP and b) even putting a quota on the submissions. That way, unless something is very wrong with the pool of people, some women's talks should just get through by sheer probability.

And, of course, you're contributing to a greater good (particularly with new references). And learn how to reference. [Proud Wikimedian]

The whole open source eco-system has similar things e.g. Drupal books and so-so online documentation (I can attest to this one), Joomla, WP …. Books are much like doing workshops, they're a shortcut for those who are prepared to pay rather than have to do a lot of online searching.

I hate to be that person, but I'd have liked some of those testimonials to include music students and teachers.

Yep, the death was unfortunate (photographer goes back for his gear and doesn't come back). Still, a lot of us Kiwis are still angry at what happened afterwards (France plays hard ball and gets the agents on a French Atoll and then back to France, where they wrote books and moved up the ranks).

Hmm, this is basically pointing out that power users take the time to learn the craft and make shortcuts. I learned all this stuff not because of Starcraft but because mousing around a 21" screen (which was amazing back in 2007) started giving me RSI.

Funnily enough, a lot of designers tend not to bother with the shortcut stuff, arguably as they don't tend to be doing it day-in day-out.

On the other hand, an illustrator colleague knows all the shortcuts as well as I do (related: the one peeve I had with the near-future tech of Charlie Brooker's 'Be Right Back' ep of Black Mirror was this exact scenario, where an illustrator is using a highly gestural interface to do work. Her whole arms would be aching after just a few hours!)

Funnily enough, today there was a piece on Jezebel (I know, it's my guilty pleasure) "We’ve Seen the Future, and You’re Freelancing" http://jezebel.com/5993227/weve-seen-the-future-and-youre-fr...

I think that this has to come from both directions:

1. Remember those silly class codes of conduct we had to do at the beginning of each school year? Bring something like that back at the beginning of each conference. OK, not quite that cheesy, but a reminder at the start about the code of conduct. Offer refunds at that point if people don't agree with them. Hell, we have to sit through the Health and Safety stuff anyway so it's a good time to add them in. (Speaking of which, I think it's too late to do anything int regards to the guy this year).

2. At a grass roots level. I know it's a horrible analogy, but I remember when I was taking my dog through dog obedience (OK, puppy kindy) that if you don't punish a dog within four seconds for something they've done wrong, you might as well forget it as they will have. In that respect, I think any social reactions have to be swift and to the point. Walk away from a group if something is unacceptable, or very quickly say something along the lines of 'that crossed the line and isn't cool'.

That is interesting. Or in particular, when you get to the pages that actually spell out how it works http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Tips_and... (that landing page is somewhat nebulous, it takes a little digging to find the actual content!)

As someone who's being involved with wikedit days (e.g. for Women in Science) and also in academia, I think this was a typical 'good idea, terrible execution'. The washup from 2011 noted that not many people did it, and those that did weren't very useful. And probably should be later on in university curricula (sad but true): letting first year undergrads at it is asking for trouble.

Yeah, the official title on Wikipedia (or at present is) "Class of 1700 students fill Wikipedia with plagiarism. Response from prof is accusation of illegal behaviour by editors" link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_not...

If you read through the information, the story appears to be : prof assigned wiki edits to class, wiki find the class do more harm than good and ask prof to stop, prof does it again the next year anyway.

Basically this is a 'friends don't let friends assign their students wikipedia editing'!

You need to think of the context of that logo, which was, what, 30 years ago? The arrow meant speed in a time when post (hell, pretty much everything) was slow. And visual jokes such as this were still pretty new. It's like saying The Beatles' 'She Loves You' is simple and obvious, yeah, it might seem like that now, but it sure as hell wasn't the case back then!

Yes, the real rule here is 'breaking the rules for a landing page. The author hasn't noted that his site is a one page site. I suspect that when he adds any extra pages the logo will appear back at the top again. Actually, I'd argue that a number of designers know that landing pages are not standard site pages. I certainly always design a content page to figure out the general structure and expect landing pages—particularly the home page—to potentially break these rules as their goals are different (by the time you end up on a content page, you are usually looking for specific information).

I did Code Year and was pretty critical of it (I've blogged about it but won't spam here!), particularly as it got less and less immediately practical over the course of the year and spent the last 3 months doing Python (which was bad enough for me who has experience with PHP, HTML/CSS, and JS) I hate to think what it'd have been like for people still getting their heads around coding!

Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM https://gist.github.com/dhh/1285068

I was not impressed with Codeyear last year for this exact reason (and I did it with coding skills; I just did it for interest to fill in any gaps as I'm self taught). What started as JS then moved to HTML/CSS (fair enough, they do relate to each other) … and then in the last four months switched entirely to Python! At the end I didn't know whether I was coming or going.

Am I the only person somewhat confused by the site at present? It feels as if they're trying to muscle in on TC/Wired/Netmag … yet I don't know what exactly I'm reading as of yet.

Oh, and to add to my own comment, I'd also say you could swap out "depression" to "ongoing medical condition".

Similar thing, it's fine if you manage it, if you don't things could get a whole lot worse (and other people will end up hating you for either carrying your load or being let down)