zeemonkee3

I like Elixir, but the ecosystem has years of catching up to be anywhere close to Python. Not just libraries but experienced developers. There's also a danger it might end up like Ruby - basically the support system for a web framework.

Given Instacart's recent problems, maybe sometimes a bad idea is just a bad idea.[1]

[1] http://www.recode.net/2016/3/11/11586878/instacart-a-startup...

> 2. Notwithstanding #1, there have been zero successful terrorist attack on aircraft in the U.S. since 9-11.

How much is due to the TSA, as opposed to civilian and military intelligence work at home and abroad and simple measures such as having air marshals and preventing any access to the cockpit during flight?

For point of reference, a chauffered driven car for the BBC chairman costed £100,000 a year in 2011:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/michaelcrick/2011/05/ne...

I'm sure cutting a few layers of management and their associated perks would yield more than enough savings compared to vandalising publicly-funded content.

The real reason is here:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/05/osborne-accus...

> You wouldn’t want the BBC to completely crowd out national newspapers

By this, George Osbourne means friends of the Tories like Paul Dacre and Rupert Murdoch.

I might have written my last project in Python rather than Go. Go is a great language in its niche, but it's overkill for a run-of-the-mill web CRUD API on a low-traffic site. Flask or Django would have got the project done in half the time. The front end was in React, which was fun, but I was still climbing the learning curve and made a few mistakes I wouldn't have made today.

An closed office/cubicle is fine for pair programming. You need room for just 2 people, not 20.

I have no idea if "terrible developers whining on Medium" is a thing.

What I am actually worried about are arrogant developers. They tend to cause the most damage, write the most "clever" code, have the worst communications skills, and will be the first to leave the team in the lurch and panic when shit hits the fan.

There may of course be arrogant developers who can walk the talk, but I'm taking from personal experience.

The ones with "Imposter Syndrome" - i.e. those who have a fear they're not quite good enough for the job - are more likely, again based on personal experience, to double check everything, to ask questions (from the rest of the team or Google), to write tests and test manually. They write "dumb" code that works and is well-commented and is as simple as possible. They have a desire to learn.

I think you forgot the /s at the end of your post. Linkedin has brought me nothing but spam.

I was looking for the most important metric in the article - how many jobs have you filled so far?

I have limited bandwidth for free-time coding, and anything has to compete with my own side projects and "list of things I need to learn/revise to keep head above water in notoriously mercurial industry".

If I were to invest time in Starfighter, I'd need to know that, assuming I do my part and finish the game with a reasonable score, that a) it will land me an interview and b) it will do sufficient pre-vetting of my skills so that the interviewer doesn't need to throw whiteboard curveballs. If I saw some kind of metric on job placement I might think it's worth spending time on. Otherwise my time would be better invested in improving my Github profile and resume and building my network.

As someone in Europe, with 10+ years experience, I'm seeing a LOT less in the way of serious recruiter outreach (not spam) and opportunities than 5 or 10 years ago (when I had correspondingly less experience). Just one data point of course and could be personal circumstances, but it looks pretty dire here outside one or two tech hubs.

If companies aren't pragmatic now, when supposedly demand outstrips supply, why would they change when conditions are reversed? I suspect they'd just double down and network will become even more important (you'll have more unemployed friends needing a hand).

Some failed ideas from the original dotcom boom just got recycled, such as Webvan. Better technology and market conditions meant that a bad idea in 2000 made more sense in 2015. So we might see some failed ideas from today succeed in 5 or 10 years' time.

I feel quite a bit more sorry for the family of Dr. Gibbons.

The problem is that these crashes hurt both good and bad workers.

Every week you see the nth article posted here on how hiring is broken, from HR filtering to recruiters to interviewing. So how do good developers survive, if their skills and experience are essentially worthless in an opaque hiring process?

One common answer is "networking" but that's a non-developer skill- a mediocre developer could be better at networking (maybe correlated - he's in the bar handing out business cards rather than working on his latest side project). A lot of good people get hurt in a downturn and either leave the industry or end up in low-paying, mediocre jobs just to hang on.

They're not trying to create a lifestyle, they're just running a small to medium sized regular business. "Lifestyle business" is just an idiotic Valley term.

The worst "writer's block" is when I'm actively trying to think of ideas of what to program. I get the most interesting ideas for side projects when I'm doing anything but programming.

For example, watching the Eurovision semi-finals last night I thought, "the lyrics are so cheesy and awful, I bet they could be written by a computer program", so I spent an hour or two writing a very simple Markov chain generator using input from all this years' English language entries to generate fake Eurovision songs.

The other weekend I wanted to play with React and HTML5 canvas, so I wrote a starmap/world generator for an old desktop SF RPG I used to play. I was listening to a podcast about that game so it got me thinking.

These are trivial ideas, certainly not earth-shaking or money-making, but they're good practice and fun to work on and if nothing else I can just add them to my Github portfolio.

It's about the story. An underdog - such as a very young female CEO - always makes for a good story for the press and investors (how Holmes, born into privilege, can be considered an "underdog" is beyond me, but I digress).

Don't they hire/contract experts to evaluate the technology?

The big silicon valley companies don't need to care. They have deep pockets, and queues of kids round the block willing to work and live in cubicles for a chance to work with them joining every year.

The VCs don't care either, they want to keep their startups on a tight leash from Sand Hill Road.

For a bootstrapped startup that isn't tied to a Sand Hill VC, remote working is a viable option that gives them access to talent they wouldn't otherwise have.

Referring to "scientists" that way is unfair.

Nutrition scientists and doctors are working with the human body and its surrounding environment, an exceedingly complex model. They publish their findings in journals with cautions and caveats and data.

A mainstream journalist with traffic quotas or column inches to fill on a slow news day then skims these journals for the next "X makes you fat" or "Y gives you cancer" headline without bothering to read the fine print.

> So by the third time they tried to headhunt me, I just told them upfront that their system/HR would reject me because of my grades and it was not worth our time continuing the discussion.

One wonders how a company as rich as McKinsey could have such piss-poor data management. Why not, I dunno, check that the person you're headhunting is already in your database?

Perhaps the way to go is representative democracy - vote for a committee from a pool of HN users, who then get to choose applications. The committee is re-elected every year, or whenever a member steps down.

How well paid are PHP jobs compared to Rails? I know the UK has abysmal salaries for developers (especially outside London) but the average salary for a PHP developer [1] is in a class of its own, much less than Ruby [2].

[1] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=PHP_Developer/Salary

[2] http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Ruby_Software_Develo...

I've noticed there seem to be a lot more remote Rails jobs than anything else (other than Javascript). I know some Ruby and am also thinking about Rails, despite my preference for Python- there just so few Python or Django remote jobs unfortunately I need to broaden my horizons.

The problem is that the maturity of the Rails market means that most Rails positions require X number of years experience - I can certainly pick up Rails but those years of experience have to come from somewhere.

EDIT: not entirely true, as there are a lot of PHP jobs. However these include bottom-feeder Wordpress gigs and generally pay much lower salaries than other languages, right or wrong.

Maybe a "web" designer really needs to know their medium.

A sculptor needs to know about clay and ovens, a clothes designer needs to know how to sew, the strengths and weaknesses of different fabrics and so on (even if Gaultier or Lagerfeld didn't do any sewing and stitching when they made it big, you bet they learned to when they were apprentice designers). Knowing your medium makes you aware of the limitations and possibilities and a better designer.

Why do we insist on coddling designers with tools like Photoshop? What's wrong with making them learn CSS and HTML?

It seems that some sites disappear into a black hole (such as Kuro5hin) and some become dwarf stars (like Slashdot) - they're still burning, just not giving off much heat or light.

I'm sure Twitter has great engineering talent. Whether they're allowed to do their jobs is another matter.

The context might have been "X is like comparing MySpace to Facebook" or some other historical reference.

How well would it work with, say, PostgreSQL? Would you need to use async wrappers like aiopg in your views?

> the German Communist party declared "After him, us!"

They were kind of prophetic about that.