jumblesale

It's a really great read and did a lot to inform my approach to writing all kinds of software. It's a shame that I cringe to recommend in now due to the politics of its author.

Brum did not have a song.

This must be amazing to have inspired so many people to sign up about the same time this got posted and share their brief opinions on how cool it looks.

Are you still in London?

It's ok because it's legal. It's legal because we've made laws allowing it. I hope they find time soon to get round to addressing if it's ethical, or if the people want it.

  July 13, 2012

I don't remember but did the BBC run the story on TV? I don't remember it being discussed but I might not have seen the news that day. My point was that none of the other papers picked this up. There's been a lot of talk online but I don't think that's where the majority of people get their news from.

It's staggering that there's no discussion on this. I remember seeing the newspapers on the day Snowden broke the stuff about GCHQ. The Grauniad was indignant; nobody else even touched the story. Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing? Cameron's promising an enquiry over the Lawson investigation but his government is still pushing ever broader collection of digital communications.

It makes me feel angry and powerless.

This is a little condescending. I live frugally but have spent the money I've saved on a house for my family to live in. I've contracted the last year to be able to afford to travel around the world next month.

"You can enjoy your life right now. You just need to spend less money on shit that you don’t need."

True, I don't need a house or to go travelling but my life would be poorer had I not invested in that shit.

Snowden said some unwise things in his past? Well that definitely makes it ok for the government to spy on me!

Seriously Ars? You don't feel it's a little ironic to be raking through his communications like this?

Mehran Karimi Nasseri's story is often misreported - he was free to leave the airport for a long time but was prevented from doing so by suspected mental illness. His eventual hospitalization finally removed him from the terminal building during which time his makeshift home was dismantled. I don't think those circumstances really apply to Snowden's case.

Really depends on the type of phone interview I think. If it's really basic HR, do-you-fit, core competency stuff then no, I don't think it makes sense to replace the phone interview. If it's a technical assessment then maybe, since it makes more sense for them to accept a work sample.

Work samples are a way better indication of candidate quality than phone interviews. If the interviewer is sensible and has the flexibility to deal with it then they would definitely prefer you to show them your coding chops than ask you a bunch of technical questions. Many employers won't have the luxury of being able to spend someone's time reviewing your code though, or if they're big enough, will likely have a bunch of HR hoops to jump through.

If they're small and smart though, it's definitely worth a shot. Phone interviews are horrible for both ends. Beyond the real basics I think it's better to avoid them.

This is really great, Wendy's a total hero, it's inspiring to see democracy producing some good results right now. But surely filibusters generally are a really terrible system. Had it been the other way round and another politician had tried to filibuster a bill to protect womens rights, that would have been terrible.

I'm not from the US so I'm not really sure about what the situation is with filibusters but it seems to me to be a loophole that needs fixing, or a symptom of some underlying system which needs fixing. Is anyone pushing for reform right now? It's great that this time it was used to a positive end but couldn't it just as easily be abused to cut in the other direction?

"To protect our liberty, it is essential that we root out these threats by any means necessary; and if the Constitution gets in the way, let’s ignore it — just for a bit — until we can get the problem squared away. Then things can get back to normal."

The Roman republic had some ideas about dealing with this with dictators appointed to "get the matter done". They were usually called upon when they were at war or facing rebellion. The dictator was vested with absolute power. He could pass any law or make any change to the Roman constitution. Once the matter had been done, he was immune to prosecution for anything done as dictator. It was an effective way for Rome to be free during peacetime and powerful during wars.

The thing is that when there's constantly a matter to be done that the power creep is never repealed.

This is the main topic of Graham Greene's excellent Our Man in Havana. I doubt much has changed in the competency stakes between then and now.

Merkel isn't exactly a proponent of digital privacy[1][2]. It's unbelievable that the government of a country where the Stasi were operating in living memory aren't incensed by this. If anyone's interested in a film showing what life was like under the regime, The Lives of Others is a haunting exploration of that period, particularly relevant to what's happening right now.

[1]http://infowars.net/articles/september2007/050907Merkel.htm

[2]http://www.dw.de/german-chancellor-merkel-rebuffed-on-terror...

It's disappointing that the reaction to PRISM outside the US has not been one of fury. Non-US citizens have been hit worse by this but nobody in the mainstream European political landscape is making any noise about it. Is it because they don't have the temerity to risk relations with the US by publicly criticising them? I suspect it has more to do with not wanting to draw scrutiny to their own programs for mass surveillance.

That's really bleak. I wonder what kind of disease can kill you in 30 days but otherwise leave you well enough to write and travel? It doesn't sound like he has a history of anything. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of thing and could hazard a guess?

I live in London.

Very well written article, I always enjoy reading stuff from the intersection of writers and coders. What I found startling was how different my experience has been to that of the author's at the start of the article.

I've put up with some horrific jobs paying miserable money in some of the most uninspiring industrial parks you could imagine. I've taken work in dingy Victorian offices so cold that I've had to program through thick gloves. I've accepted commutes taking up to three hours and incorporating four different kinds of transport. More than once I've spent 18 hours on Saturday and Sunday circulating my CV to every job opening and recruiter even slightly relevant to web development.

Reverse interviews? People clamouring to have coffee with me? Beer constantly close to hand?? These are unheard of things. Conditions are definitely better for me now but my skills certainly don't mark me out as a celebrity. Maybe the financial bubble of the dot-com era has been replaced by a cultural bubble, one that I'm definitely not part of.

This is really beautiful and an effective advert for blooki.st. Doesn't look like this has appeared on HN before[1] but apparently it's been created by a couple of Slovenian entrepreneurs[2]. So far as I can tell it's all sitting on top of jQuery.

The title's really misleading though, this is more about why bold photos can be nice. I'm undecided on if it detracts from the text or if it's giving you the kind of visual impact you get from imaginative book covers. It would be really interesting to see larger collections on the site, I can see this being a really great way for people to discover authors they're unfamiliar with. A strikingly presented collection of short stories from an established author could serve as a good introduction into their work.

[1]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.or... [2]http://readwrite.com/2013/05/07/blookist-blog-book-site-all-...

Good point, thanks for the reply.

Genuinely interested: how would it be more usable if the buttons remained clickable after they'd been clicked? If you lost your connection, wouldn't you expect some kind of error? In that case how would it be more usable to be able to click the button again?

Yeah, that clock is more than just an inaccurate way of telling the time, it's an iconic image from the BBC's history.

This is really cool! The only thing that makes it a little ugly for me is that when I click on it, my browser puts an ugly grey box around the text like I'm selecting it. Could this be solved by immediately changing the focus of the input?

We shouldn't write maintainable code because the idioms might not seem fashionable at some point in the future? Never mind that code is read way more than it's written and that maintenance costs way more than development. Building up massive technical debt is fine in the short term but eventually you'll have to address it and that's going to cripple development on the product. OOP principles aren't a fad, they're fundamental to structuring code in PHP.

The analogy with the furniture is particularly misleading. Would you pay half as much for a chair that occasionally falls over? That takes a long time to get repaired because each of the legs is tightly coupled to one another? I'd rather pay double for the reliable version.

I've worked with a lot of code bases in the past where the developers have had a resentment towards new methodologies and saw people who tried to use new ideas as just trying to show off. It's a disheartening experience to want to use such fashionable concepts as 'objects' only to be told that the way things are done is procedural programming with SQL queries nested in markup like it's 2000 again. In my experience it's been because they've not wanted to invest in learning new things. That's not a good ethos for a programmer. Let's not promote it.

This is a really cool idea. I like how it plays on the idea of NT properties being boring fusty places where you go for rubbish school trips. I don't know if it's a function of age but I'm actually quite excited about visiting a National Trust property on the weekend if the weather stays nice. I encourage others to do the same and support a really worthwhile charity.

The legal situation in the UK makes it tricky to provide bad references. You have to be able to back up any claim you make with evidence[1] which is difficult if you don't have a paper trail showing bad conduct. It's far more common for an employer to just decline to provide a reference rather than risk being sued for giving a negative one.

This reluctance to provide any substantive reference often results in references just being "yes this person worked here from this date to this other date".

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3065319.stm

Seriously! Every language should support this. Not just for arrays but in argument lists too! Python does a good job here but I can't think of anything else which does.

I've started taking a notebook with me everywhere and writing down whatever comes into my head. This includes ideas for projects, articles I'd like to write about, things I'd like to research later etc. Then when I have some free time I have a long list of interesting topics / bits of inspiration to create something with. I can't imagine making it public - I think the desire to self-censor would reduce the value of it. A lot of the ideas are rubbish and most of the stuff in there is only interesting to me but it's still valuable to have a record of those things.