shpiel

One of the most annoying things about translation is that the length of the string may change which can mess up designs and layouts. For example German strings tend to be longer than their English equivalents. Or dealing with languages which orientation is right to left (eg. Hebrew).

What type of database did they use? What type of caching would be desirable? Most modern RDBSes, like Postgre, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL server, have internal LRU caching already implemented. InnoDB tries to store everything in memory.

I wonder if they meant that the default caching was turned off, or that all the queries had "no cache" clauses, or that an additional caching layer (Redis, Memcached) was not implemented?

The back end is swappable. I think right now you can use Mongo or MySQL. If you want to use something else you have to write your own DDL. They hope that more people will do that in the future. Or presumably, they will do it themselves, once they think it's a priority.

I assume it meant zoning that limits the number of hotels that can be built in a particular municipality. I also assume he meant to suggest that established players attempt to limit the growth of competition by being in favor of regulation (permits, zoning restrictions, business licenses) that makes it difficult to enter their market.

If more programmers did volunteer (or their employers encouraged volunteering), even for a little bit, by being exposed to the problem and having an opportunity to interact with the homeless, some new solutions might arise.

I work in the Downtown Crossing section of Boston, which has the one of the highest visible homeless populations in the Boston area. I was also consistently troubled by the number of homeless people I encountered to and from work.

It really helped to volunteer at a nearby homeless shelter (Pine Street Inn). I was comforted to see some of worst cases (including people I encountered daily) have access to meals, a clinic, a shelter, and treated with courtesy.

I was also struck by how many people seemed normal - not someone who was mentally ill or spent time on the street.

In general America fulfills a lot of need with private charity - which can occasionally be really impressive. When I worked at a large financial institution there were lots of opportunities for matched giving and volunteering opportunities. I wish tech companies would do this more.

You are actually arguing that the developers should have made an effort to have their game appeal to those who take a copy of it without permission?

This is a false equivalency. Musicians can opt out of having their music played on the radio. If they do choose to have their music played on the radio, there is a genuine attempt made by radio stations to track how often their music is played and make a commensurate royalty payment to the artist. (source I worked on college radio).

Businesses take cash to local bank branches, which then take the cash to closest Federal Reserve branch. Most large cities have Federal Reserve branches even if they are not heads of the regions.

What motivates to spend so much effort on a job posting for an Office Manager position?

Is this someone who needed a creative outlet or is there a specific goal?

Isnt't Apple a hardware company that writes its own software ?

I could see myself adapting this strategy, except that my employer requires me to use a VPN client that runs only on Windows and OS X. As of right now this solution makes economic sense if you already use cloud storage. Assuming storage costs will continue to decrease and the network accessibility will continue to increase, then I can definitely see myself using it for personal projects.

Both. If hacker who discovered bug in a system should have reported it, instead of exploiting it.

However, the analogy is flawed because if you find a loophole in the law and it is discovered you are usually not liable. If, however, you find a "bug" in an inadequately secured system you are still likely to be liable for exploiting it. Similarly, if you find physical security exploit in a building (a broken window, unlocked) you can still liable for taking advantage of it (trespassing, etc).

However, you point was about "admiration" vs. "contempt." This is obviously a matter of opinion, but I don't share admiration for hackers who take advantage "exploits" without at least attempting to report or taking some other "good faith" action. Neither writing software nor governing a society is easy. Finding and reporting "bugs" is a helpful and productive activity, exploiting "bugs" is not.

The portrayal of the dwarves is consistent with their characterization in the book.

I don't think anyone (with the possible exception of the Spotify marketing department) thinks that Spotify will be the savior of the music industry. Most popular artists know this. Popular artists like Radiohead, Taylor Swift, or Arcade Fire either distribute only a portion of their work on Spotify, or distribute it with a delay.

And Spotify is better than piracy for record labels. (i) Spotify provides useful data for labels (at least those that have an ownership stake in Spotify), (ii) the revenue, in aggregate, is not insignificant and certainly better than revenue from piracy (again this benefits the labels with ownership stakes), and (iii) gives them a measure of messaging control.

Essentially, Spotify is marketing channel for major labels.

Just because something is easy to do does not mean it should be legal. A person could walk into a business and find documents with private information that have been carelessly left in the open. That does not make it ok to take and publish them.

There are plenty of physical crimes that are easy to commit. For example, opening up someone's unlocked mailbox is technically a federal crime in the US (even if you don't take any thing and just put a leaflet there). Pointing out that a 'bad guy' could easily steal someone's mail by opening their mail box does not constitute security research.

This is great. The path to peace is education, high skill jobs and prosperous businesses.

Both fraternities and synagogues are examples of non-profit organizations.

Or buy things

Selenium can handle a lot of gui issues with different browsers. There are also tools to compare images (could be used with screenshots).

Yes ultimately you need human eyes and on the product. It also helps to have someone with a QA mentality, who has a developed intuition for breaking things and finding edge cases. But rigorous use of automated testing, code review, and dogfooding greatly reduces the need for dedicated QA.

Yes. Not all bugs are the same in terms of end-user impact and how they affect the overall performance of the system. You can expend a lot of resources trying to track down every single last glitch in many cases you should. However, if you have the luxury to be able to push updates and fixes at any time and you a free non-critical service, its better to just have a culture of fixing things quickly and allocating resources to more high-priority things like adding new features.

More eloquently stated: http://www.quora.com/Quality-Assurance-QA/When-is-not-having...

Ideally, most of the testing should be automated and engineers should be writing test cases as they build features.

In my, albeit short, experience I have found that the "do you have testers?" and "do you fix bugs before writing new code?" to be overkill for most consumer-facing web applications.

They are very important if the software is mission-critical or if there is some sort of physical cost to shipping patches. But if you can continuously update the live site its not that big of a deal if a bug gets out. It will be noticed soon, often by your users, and then you fix it and that is it.

This works if the developers and other stakeholders at the company are testing the product themselves and are responsive and can triage bug reports quickly.

Having an up-to-date schedule can often be unrealistic as there can be shifting priorities and developers should be flexible to move around and respond as necessary.

This was in Boston. But the company is national. My understanding is that they did try to build relationships with employers and would do a site visit with the employer before taking them on. (I had to go the receiiters office for a mock interview.) They have also been around for a long time.

Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.

I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects.

In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position.

Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.

While I agree with the overall message of the article, one facet that is not mentioned is that spec work offers an opportunity for less-experienced people to showcase their talent and compensate for a less extensive portfolio.