tomx

This doesn't seem like a good use of your time.

I suggest installing an advert blocking program, then finding a more ambitious way to put a dent in the universe.

Is "I don’t read resumes", "I don’t care about your resume", very common? It seems a bit cold hearted and unfriendly. It says to me "I don't care enough to read a bit about you, and your achievements". But that's just me.

Are there any other countries where the education systems often reach this level of legal activity/deliberation/antagonism?

Or do they just quietly get on with teaching students?

What would the ideal policy be?

My ideas are:

- Students own their own work; even if they don't really care for it. I don't see any value in a 10 year pile of homework, but if you create a great piece of art, you should be able to take it home. Realistically, most work is valueless and binned.

- Any created teaching materials may optionally be released as open source, under some license that prevents anyone profiting from them. There's often a gap between good work, and good releasable work (final polish, consistency and so on). Anyone (e.g. some school district) wanting a particular set of work released should be prepared to fund this final polishing. So, a teacher could make a great course, subsequently receive funding to make it brilliant for others, and share it with the world. Thus any good teaching materials created benefit the most amount of people.

"This thinking is backwards. If you care about the reliability, security, and the protection of your data, then you should entrust it to those who are most capable of managing it. If you believe you can match the capabilities and rigor of Google’s Security Operations team, I wish you well."

They may be good, but naturally introduces more attack vectors into many applications.

My nicely firewalled and audited application would become exposed to an undetermined number of people I have never met. e.g. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369188,00.asp . It only takes one rogue person and you have a problem.

My application has 5 trusted people. It would be interesting to know the additional number of people you are implicitly trusting by using a cloud service. 100?

I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_week and don't see the point of this. It just seems like stressing people out due to poor coordination and time management.

Does Stripe ask for any more information than that available on the card?

Normally I'm asked for at least a Post Code, which I assume is part of reducing fraud, through making it a bit more difficult to use a stolen card.

I always feel articles such of these should be prefixed with "within my humble experience and within my application area".

"Comments are generally only needed when you failed to be clear enough in naming. Treat them as a code smell." ...but only in simpler applications, such as self-describing CRUD type web applications?

I think I agree with the quote within some web apps, however remember some code may take weeks/months to appreciate the complexities of. For example, a TCP stack is a complicated thing, born and refined through much research for several decades. Notes of various design choices and optimisations need to be documented, and long comments are sometimes the most convenient way to do so.

Would you use a doctor who had not been to college?

As you hopefully would not, therefore your argument has a flaw in it, you might like to enumerate the list of professions or activities you believe do not require college level education.

Any thoughts on whether this is:

* a long term program to mint more developers (and drive down salaries) * to mint more developers to create more websites to display advertising on faster * ??? or

* a genuine good will program * ???

?

- People may feel there is no content they wish to broadcast about themselves to the world. I don't have a desire to promote myself constantly, I'll just continue being quiet. Not everyone feels the need to tell the world their thoughts constantly.

- A single gmail/similar address can work fine.

- Not everyone has enough friends to warrant using "social media".

what is "SSO" in this context?

Is "hoster" a valid word? I do not see it listed in dictionary.com.

If you hosted a party, would you be a "party host" or a "party hoster"?

How big is this problem? A number or percentage of programmers would help to quantify things. Are all these blog posts about 10 programmers, 10% of programmers?...

As a UKer, it strikes me the US system of health insurance is just inefficient, even if only from a time management perspective.

Do 300M people really have to negotiate their own insurance, and research carefully all the terms and conditions and so on?

The best hosting experiences I've had are with Linode, AWS and Rackspace. Linode for their brilliant custom control panel - a key differentiator between them and those running stock control panels. Rackspace for the support - if I need to speak to someone, someone will pick up the phone in 2 rings or answer a ticket in 15 minutes. AWS for the fine grained pricing and ability to scale up and down at will.

All of the above are leading or close to leading in their respective niche areas. Their innovations and key differentiators appeal to different types of customer, product and price range, neither which you have stated. It is difficult to give advice on this basis, are we advising how to innovate $x/month bargain hosting or $xx,xxx/month enterprise solutions?

I think you have to identify these clearly before proceeding.

Is there an opportunity for a data driven approach to politics?

I would be interested in a service that segmented people into large groups based on their political ideas. A cross between a semi-anonymous Facebook, groups and politics, none of the social networky stuff, just ideas, viewpoints, groups and votes.

For example, you might belong to a very large simple 'liberal' group, with vague and general ideas. Within this group, you'd have factions with more specific ideas and options. It may drill down to situations like: "You are a member of group liberal-software-developers (xxx,xxx members), group members strongly support ..., generally support ..., generally oppose ..., no strong opinion about about ...". Eventually you might find a group you nearly always agree with.

With enough support across the population, it would make it easy for everyone, including politicians to see how everyone felt on various topics.

To make this work, you'd need to put topics to people (in a fair way, with proper presentation of each viewpoint) and do some polling. It would then be interesting to see the correlation between groups you are in, and your viewpoint.

You could then pivot the data based on categories and any number of dimensions to see what people are thinking.

Some other usecase ideas: "I'm a member of liberal-software-developers, I generally agree with this group's viewpoint. I'll trust viewpoints from group members who are better informed on topic Z, rather than some TV commercial."

"My group doesn't have a strong opinion on some healthcare thing, I'll trust liberal-doctors instead..."

As a step for the original question, perhaps conduct a fair nationwide poll on each contested topic? You could ask 1000 people what they thought of each topic in a credible fashion. The result then gives media organisations some content to work with and read out. If public support is overwhelming for each topic, then it may become difficult to ignore the polling data.

Even better, after you consider paying tax on the original amount.

I think whether an open source project improves you, technically, depends on the scope of each project. For example, you could make 100 simple CRUD web applications in the same way, and not learn anything from it.

For the projects I tend to work on, reading 100s of pages of documentation is necessary. To create a good solution, I must understand the domain well. I spend many evenings reading books on kernel construction, networking, algorithms and so on. This is improving me technically. When I go into work, the knowledge then helps to make better software.

Sounds like creating a new filter based on open source participation levels and quality. Potentially this is a pitfall, you're excluding brilliant developers who push all their energies into their (non open-source) day job. Although perhaps this is the idea.

I wonder what percentage of say, Google engineers have public open source projects?

I like gandi.net, but struggled and failed to justify using them for domains at work.

The third word on their site is an expletive. This made it too difficult to justify in a Powerpoint presentation.

In examples like this, is the web page containing the payment form within PCI scope?

I would hope you are at least required to perform PCI level security testing on the page, to ensure it doesn't contain any dodgy Javascript and the like (<script src="some-js-I-didn't-audit-which-steals-stripejs-card-data"...).

Likewise, as there's a webserver serving the page, presumably it must have some level of testing, to ensure it is unlikely to be serving compromised web pages?

As I understand the form in the example, if the user's browser has Javascript disabled, then the form submits the credit card number to the server - putting it in PCI scope(?)

<form action="/plans/browserling_developer" method="POST" id="payment-form">...<input type="text" size="30" autocomplete="off" class="card-number"/>...</form>

It would be interesting to know the PCI process for such a setup.

"In the meantime, be sure to brush up on your coding skills. They’ll come in handy when the new application process opens in February."

Perhaps tickets will be sold or prioritised by some coding problems?

2^10 - 1 patents by coincidence, or as it's a fun number?

Nice idea.

Could you include an approximation of each components popularity or longevity?

This would allow people to know if they are picking mainstream or more obscure/specialised/enterprise/unstable/etc components.

Would you put that title on your resume?

Can you provide a breakdown of the 10 minutes, saying what you were doing for each of the 10 minutes?

Is MS's European chairman genuinely concerned about the European economy and education system? In that case, he might have more success at these goals, by becoming a politician instead.

Or... are these economic observations somehow self serving? Perhaps the lower levels of VC investment in Europe (per capita) are inconvenient for him: Implying European investors should greatly increase their investment levels. Would he be happy if VC levels did increase 10x to US levels... But funds were largely directed at companies that MS did not have involvement with?

What about introverted people, who will do good work, but prefer their own company at lunch time?

Do any other introverts feel this arrangement would affect them negatively? Subjected to this setup, it's likely I'd perform worse.

I work with some loud opinionated people all day, and look forward to my quiet walk around a park each day. Often I'm walking on complicated problems, and the last thing I need is an hour of listening to pointless arguments about movies or whatever.