mortice

please don't comment for another 10000 hours

no there isnt

But if he intervenes at this point it will spoil the emergent complexity of the community, and hence the beauty he has created per his revolutionary treatise "Hackers and Painters"

This is just a natural consequence of Hacker News not being a free market. The state controls of the karma system practically guarantee inefficiency in the free exchange of ideas. We need to stop subsidizing mediocrity.

The fact that the author was able to manipulate values 2 pages after the form he modified pretty strongly implies that those values were used on the backend, however.

hello i am a natural born programmer i am a creature of pure logic birthed from the essence of paul graham's reckons, may i join your society

You are so wrong that you are dangerous.

Easily the funniest link on this site this year.

You don't hope for vehicles delivering reusable lunch? I can't imagine anything better.

Which still leaves mouse pointer images all over the document. Horrendous.

So, in summary:

"A hammer can be used for the following things:

1. To drive nails into another material

2. To 'hammer out' dents in sufficiently soft materials

3. As a weapon

4. As a doorstop

5. etc.

Because some people only use it to do (1) and (3), it isn't a tool for (2)."

P.S. I know the author acknowledges this in his own comment on the article.

The content of the presentation is much the same, albeit pitched at a different audience. To get straight to the discussion at the end (which is impossible effectively to summarise for you and well worth the time) skip to about 26:00 in the video.

I once worked on a project where 'REST' was synonymous with 'putting query data into the URL before the query string', and this was done so that the webserver could cache the response.

I died a little inside every time I wrote a 'Restful' servlet there.

The article and your comment share the same deficiency: they don't deal with concrete problems (or at least when the article does it's about edge cases, as you point out). It's all very well for you to have decided that svn > git for your purposes, and I applaud you for having evaluated the two and chosen one based on relative merits. But in order to extrapolate from that to a general counter-argument to "git is better than subversion," you need to a) provide the details of the problems you had with git and b) explain how they are specimens of a general problem which SVN doesn't have.

I don't say this as a git fanboy, just as a techie who hears "I had problems" and instantly wants to hear details so that I can evaluate the argument properly.

Exactly the same story currently exists in reverse for the album 'Kaputt' by Destroyer.

It (used to be!) available to stream in full at http://hypem.com/#%21/artist/Destroyer. It's available to download at Amazon's US MP3 store for $5.99. It's not available to download from the UK MP3 store, and Amazon UK are charging £22 for a CD copy. That's 6 times the price!

I think I'll just torrent it and get it in lossless format, thanks very much.

Fair enough - I clearly missed the point. :)

The point of the piece doesn't seem to be to add anything of value to a debate, rather than to grab some easy traffic and make a joke. Whether it succeeds at the latter is up for debate, of course, but given the aims, who cares about the grammar?

Maybe there is some innate difference, but with a wide variety of societal factors in play I think we're probably on safer ground eliminating them from the equation before we declare that women are somehow less likely to have technical aptitude by nature.

I think you pick up on an interesting point - the focus on Computer Science qualifications above GCSE level. The drop-offs the article points to are between A-Levels and degrees and, to a lesser extent, between GCSEs and A-Levels. But those drop-offs can only be said to explain the gender disparity among professional developers if you accept that the vast majority of software developers working professionally today studied Computer Science at degree level. I'm not sure that's true, and I'm equally unsure that it should be true.

Given that there's a software developer shortage overall and that software development jobs don't tend to require CS degrees, wouldn't it be more prudent to make the professional end more attractive rather than concentrating on outreach for degree programmes?

I'd be upset, but T-Mobile failed to get an upgrade smartphone to me within 2 months of my order and so I switched to Vodafone and got it within 3 days.

Full story, for the interested:

I had recently moved home and tried to use T-Mobile's website to update my address. Unfortunately, it had one of those forms which require you to enter a postal code and select the correct address from the results of a postal code lookup, with no way to manually correct it. Since the postal code lookup didn't give my address, I chose to call T-Mobile's customer service number to get the address changed at the same time as asking for an upgrade.

I spoke to one customer service representative to update the address, confirming very clearly that they had the correct address, and then asked to be put through to the upgrades department. After negotiating the upgrade, I asked whether it would be dispatched to the new address I had just given them and was assured that it would, within the next week.

A week and a half later, the phone had not arrived and I hadn't heard anything, so I called again to find out the status of the order, and was told that the phone had been dispatched to a non-existent address as that was what T-Mobile had on file for me. In fact, it was the incorrect address suggested by the postal code lookup service which I had specifically called to have corrected. Note also that T-Mobile had on record that the phone could not be delivered and neglected to contact me.

After updating my records (finally) to the correct address, T-Mobile told me they couldn't send out another phone as stock was limited and that they couldn't simply send the erroneously sent handset to the correct address once it returned to them because that "wasn't how their system worked".

Another month of going round in circles with inept customer support reps and I was gone. Next time I won't be so patient.

Article invalidates self early on by claiming that this is a value object:

class Person { var $id, $first_name, $last_name, $email; }

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ValueObject

I'm objecting to the article rather than the research, and I agree that the 'double-bind' described does ring true. What I'm objecting to is the conclusion that women should conform to a stereotype in order to be accepted in the workplace.

I'm not saying that the situation is the same for every underrepresented group; I'm saying that if the article were to advise any other underrepresented group in a similar way it would be denounced as discriminatory.

EDIT: I have no idea why parent is being downvoted. He/she raises valid questions.

I'm not too impressed with this article. If we replaced women in this article with any other underrepresented group in the software business and asked that group to conform to a stereotype to get ahead, it would be considered offensive and rightly so.

Dave Thomas's keynote from Rubyconf comes to mind. http://confreaks.net/videos/368-rubyconf2010-keynote

There's an assumption implicit in the announcement (and in a lot of anti-Cukes stuff I've seen) that the primary benefit in writing your feature specifications in pseudo-English is that clients get to read/write the features.

That's not the point, at least as far as I'm concerned. The point is to make me, as a developer, think like a user and write the specification of a feature from a user's perspective.

So instead of writing 'page.should have_css(...),' I write "Then I should see ...", and specify the details of that somewhere else. Yes, I could just write a method 'def i_should_see,' but I'm a developer, and hence lazy and also comfortable with the detail. That means I'm more than likely not to do that, but then I've got a spec which doesn't express the feature from the user's point of view.

I'm prepared to accept that there are developers who are disciplined enough to write specs with Steak which do express things from the user's point of view, but I'm certainly not one of them.