john_flintstone

Only, that's not how it would be bought. People would buy their porn phone online, just like they buy they porn, and their hookers, and their erotica from Amazon. Nobody (almost) walks into a Walmart to buy porn or hookers - they do so online, where it's all nicely anonymous.

Questions for people with nothing to hide:

1. Have you ever had an abortion?

2. Have you ever cheated on your husband / wife?

3. Are you currently looking for a new job?

4. Have you ever being diagnosed with a mental illness?

5. Are you currently on anti-depressants?

6. Were you ever sexually abused as a child?

7. Have you ever fancied someone of the same sex?

8. Have you ever had sex with someone of the same sex?

9. Have you ever criticised your current employer or boss to anyone else?

10. Do you love all of your children equally?

11. Have you ever fantasized about...

12. Are you planning to get pregnant in the next two years?

13. Have you ever lied on a cv/resume?

14. Are you mean to your wife / husband on a regular or semi-regular basis?

15. Do you have trouble acquiring or maintaining an erection?

16. Are you one of those women who’ve never had an orgasm?

17. What prescription drugs are you currently taking?

18. Have you ever cut yourself?

19. Have you ever attempted suicide?

20. Have you contemplated suicide in the past 2 weeks?

21. Would you be happy with your answers to these questions being made public? Or being read by your employer, local 23 year old policeman, or nosey neighbour?

I could go on and on. None of the actions mentioned in these questions are illegal, but for many/most people, the answers would be intensely private.

>One other thing to take note of is depending on your relationship with the client, it may take a while to get paid...

That's a freelancer, not a contractor. Different ball game entirely.

Sorry, but I don't agree with that at all. You're propagating the myth that contracters are supposed to be shit hot developers, the 1%, and that's simply not true. While it might be true to a degree in the US, it certainly isn't in the UK. Most contracting positions in the UK are for bog standard .net / Java developers doing grunt work, not hit-the-ground-running/take-over-the-project developers. An average/reasonably-ok developer with 5 years experience is fully qualified to contract in the UK, and shouldn't expect any serious downtime.

No offense, but you seem to be answering the question as an American worker, not a UK worker. Contracting is VERY different in both countries. If the OP is asking about contracting in the UK, I don't believe your lengthy post has any relevance to him. Almost nothing you say about networking, meetups, paperwork+tax, linkedin, etc. applies to the contracting market in the UK.

>and not being able to find next gig for a couple of month

In London? Sure, you could be laid off anytime, but if you can't land a new contract in two weeks then there's something wrong with you. Contract market in London is buzzing.

What would figures for another European city tell us about London? Rates for programmers in Dublin are about 20% higher than London, but that says nothing about the London figures quoted here.

Contract wages are considerably higher, especially in London. In some cases, twice as high. If you have a little fire in your belly, and don't mind living with some uncertainty and a lot of change in your life, contracting in London can be great -- financially and otherwise.

Ex: City (finance) contract rates of £500-£700 per day are far from uncommon, if you have finance experience. Non finance, £400+ per day is not hard to find.

Sorry, but no.

I've been in discussions recently with a French company whose development team is based in Dublin (Ireland for the geo-illiterate). Most of the tech staff in Dublin were East European, and the company's HR department was in Romania - a non-EU country.

This EU centric perception is a media perception, and bears no relationship to the reality on the ground in Europe.

Company in question was owned by a a UK multi-national, and builds software for banks all over the world. The 'Western EU' leaning is pure fantasy. I understand why Americans like it - it's simple and straight forward, and appeals to people from what is basically a simply and straight forward country - but it's just not the reality on the ground.

!+": Romania: !+": Wasn't even aware of its EU status. Why? Because when you think EU, it simply doesn't pop up. Which points vividly to the diversity of the EU. Romania, even now, is no one's idea of a Western country. It simply ain't. It ain't western; it ain't even that European. Tarring all of Europe with some kind of EU white wash is simply foolish.

It's only clearly Bootstrap to people who have heard of Bootstrap. 99.999% of your visitors will never have heard of Bootstrap, will never have heard the word 'framework.'

It's not tax avoidance either. It would only be tax avoidance if they moved from one EU country to another one that had a lower corporate tax rate. This is their first European office - it makes perfect sense to choose the location that brings the greatest benefits to the company.

>You can ship all the code you want, but even if it's lots of mediocre code, it's still mediocre.

The code might be mediocre, but that doesn't mean that the product is mediocre. Pristine, beautiful code, that forms part of a bad product, is like a soprano singing the most god-awful piece of bilge anyone has ever heard. Doesn't matter how good her voice is if the song is rubbish and makes everyone cringe.

>There are traits of a good programmer that are immediately evident to any experienced programmer.

Replace the word 'programmer' with 'coder' and you might have a point. Whenever I hear the word 'coder', all I can think of is shelf-stacker. A coder writes lines of code, a programmer builds products or 'things'. All the rules and standards regarding code belong to coders - they have nothing to do with finished, shipped, or successful products.

But what do I know? I've only been building products for 13 years. And I'm drunk.

>but people on the train are, for the overwhelming majority, uninteresting or annoying

And they're usually the same people every day, if you catch the same train.

Who cares? More to the point, who will care? Facebook will fall eventually. In the 10 or 20 years from now that you talk about, Facebook will be a distant memory.

Does anyone care about what may or may not have gone on at IBM 30 years ago? At MySpace? Facebook is not a bank and it's not a government. It's a social media site. Nobody will care.

My dishwasher was broken for months - never got around to fixing it - and the reality was, it didn't take noticeably longer to clean up after a meal or after a day's meals. Might be different if you have a big family, but from what I remember growing up, the actual washing of dishes was the least time consuming part of cleaning up.

You don't have to be 'connected'. I've got a smart phone, and I use it mainly as a phone. The part I love about it is the great big dial pad. Remove all the apps that revolve around 'connecting' you, and you'll be grand.

I run blogs on the websites of two businesses I'm associated with. In both cases the intent is not to start a conversation, but to pull in traffic and visitors from Google. Comments are not enabled. I usually base the blog topics on keyword searches that we want to target, and craft posts around that - discussing the topic and tying the business to that topic.

For static websites, even eCommerce websites, it's a great and effective way to add fresh content and pages to a site, and push up its rankings.

I'm a fast writer - easily able to produce a 600 word post in 20 minutes - and I write prose that is easy to read. The strategy works - on a robot level (Google), and on a human level (customers), but it takes time and persistence. It may take 6 months for a series of posts to cause a category page to rank in the top 3 of Google - in some cases longer.

It's also a strategy that many competitors cannot duplicate, as most are unable to write regular, meaningful blog posts. It's one of those SEO tactics that requires actual, real work, which is why so few do it well.

Wordpress, with a custom theme that fits in seamlessly with the website, is the way to go.

I rarely read comments here anymore, preferring to stick to reading the article linked to - for the same reason that I never venture into the comment section on the Guardian's once great Comment is Free section. The first batch of comments are always (without fail) in the same vein, and start with a variation of "Yes, but..." or "But what about..." Attack, criticise, find something to disagree with. It doesn't matter if the commenter agreed with 5 things in the article, the early commenters always go looking for that 1 thing they don't agree with.

One of the great myths is that you have to put up with negative people online, that you have to 'toughen up', because, well, just because... You don't. Seth Godin wrote a great piece years ago telling you to fire your customers if they're too troublesome, and I've used this strategy in 2 businesses since. It's liberating. Negativity, insults, poorly mannered and poorly behaved people - you really DO NOT have to put up with any of that. Kick them to the curb and move on, because you really do not need those sorts of people anywhere near you or your new business.

Unfortunately, a lot of 'those people' hang out on HN (and the Guardian).

You say that in a light hearted and amusing manner, but if real, honest-to-god libraries, lending books at no cost to anyone, didn't already exist, and someone tried to start one today, they'd never be allowed to get off the ground. Same applies to radio stations, playing music for free. Thank God they all got started decades ago, cause they wouldn't have a prayer today.

>The vast majority of those who experiment never become addicted. But for those who do, it is very costly, and fatal frequently enough that it is not worth the risk

Are you talking about heroin, or alcohol?

They said 'type' not 'print.' He could use a manual typewriter.

I once tried searching for my friend John Smith on Facebook, and there he was, right at the top. Good thing westerners have such distinctive names.

A forum I run in Ireland doesn't have a need for Captchas. The forum is very regional and niche - no genuine foreign visitors - so we blocked every country apart from Ireland and the UK from posting comments. Result - no spam.

This wouldn't work for many forums, but if it's local, you really don't need to open it to the world.

>This is known as the "Blockbuster Video" model for treating customers for being late. How did that model work out for them?

It worked fine until their industry (renting videos and DVDs) dwindled to nothing. Blockbuster's demise had nothing to do with late fees.

I stopped using eBay 6 years ago, and for 5 years before that I used it every week, for buying and selling. eBay is fast becoming irrelevant. And I'm not in the US either.

Not everyone who programs wants to be a competent programmer, or even a programmer at all. Some people just want to build a contact form for their website, or work out how to pull a list from a database and display it in the sidebar of the their blog.

PHP lets them do that without having to learn anything more complex. Why spend days or weeks learning something when you can work out how to do what you need to do in hours?

Who else is affected by this bug. And by who else, I don't mean this one guy's customers / users. If the answer is no one else, or if no one else has reported it, then it's probably so far down the list as to be inconsequential. Which probably means the new guy on work experience gets to deal with it.

Not all bugs are fixed. There's only so many hours in the day, and some bugs are simply not worth fixing.

So let him swear at his wife. Or at Apple. Why should we have to read it?

That's an extremely naive attitude. It's next to impossible (won't say completely) to start an online community without seeding it first. Forums in particular - you cannot get a forum going without seeding it with made up posts and comments, it simply won't happen. Nobody will comment on an empty forum or discussion board - nobody.