Singletoned

I agree that advertising at the moment is an anti-feature, but it is at least theoretically possible that an advert could be of benefit to a user.

If advertising were to reach the quality and targettedness that they were telling you about things you genuinely wanted, it would be a useful service. Kind of like advertising as a recommendation engine. That would be quite people centric.

I don't think we will get there though.

I can't imagine a circumstance where I would be entering a country like the UK or US, and when asked what my visit was for, I would say anything except for "I'm on holiday". Being out of the ordinary is very dangerous.

That said people shouldn't be subjected to such unnecessary unpleastantness.

> what is the w-word?

> I really don't get this obsession over hiding the existence of these words.

You've kind of answered your own question there. If you hide the words, then people who don't know them (eg children), don't learn a new offensive term.

I'm not saying I support the policy; I'm just saying that I understand why people do it.

And again, you don't need to have any understanding of asbestos in order for the gloves to work. You can believe that they are magic gloves from God, and they will work just as well.

> We don't need people with craftman skills

> I still code in (mainframe) assembler sometimes. It's a craft

You seem to be contradicting yourself. Unless you are saying that you use assembler even though you don't need to.

No, this is called learning from experience.

If you put your hand in a fire 5 times and it burns you 5 times, you don't have to understand anything about fire to know that you should probably stop putting your hand in. And if you saw other people about to put their hand in, you would mention to them that everytime you put your hand in, you end up regretting it.

Yeah, this makes internally hosted GitLab VERY attractive for us now. Even the Enterprise edition is going to be significantly cheaper than GitHub.

You kind of have to love living in London just for the sake of it. I'd want to live and work here, no matter what job I was doing.

That said the average salary isn't worth it at all, but the top end is. You can't really get 6-figures outside of London, but there's plenty of banks that pay that in London.

> These idioms have a complete disregard towards performance.

As they should. "Premature optimization is the root of all evil".

What if you deploy to Linux and Windows? Do you have to develop on both OS's?

Monocultures where you develop and deploy on the same OS are more efficient in the short term, but cause massive problems in the long term when you have to start supporting a different OS and you suddenly realise that you have finely tuned things for one environment at the expense of robustness.

It's just like in nature. Monocultures are better in the short term, until the environment changes. Then they struggle to adapt. (I suspect that most mass extinction events have been a failure to adapt to changing environments when overly adapted to a specific environment).

> Likewise, using turing complete PHP to generate HTML was never as clean as using a less powerful templating language (like jinja2) to generate the HTML.

I strongly agree with your point, but Jinja2 is Turing Complete as well (it's still preferable to PHP though).

> this stuff is hard enough to get write in your native tongue

Was that deliberate?

I'm quite suspicious about your statement that your side is supported by "such a huge body of evidence", whereas "the other side base their arguments on [...] a gut feeling".

I think from that we can safely assume that you (at best) massively overstate your position and massively understate your opponents.

I own a company where everyone is a software engineer. I'm currently the only employee, and I don't imagine I could scale to much more than one or two other people before I had to hire non-software engineers.

I also think that a marketing department full of software engineers would be a bit of disaster.

My worry about this would be that in order to prevent mass fraud of the system, we would have to have a national ID card system, which is something I've always instinctively opposed.

More and more, I'm starting to think that free speech and privacy are opposed to each other.

I agree that there is potentially a distinction. Speech that is restricted in public (eg through a public libel trial) is different to speech that is restricted by preventing the person from ever speaking.

In the former, you get to state your opinions publicly but then have to defend them, but no secrets are kept.

I guess he's using a different meaning of 'dinky' to the one I'm used to. The dictionary says that there's a US meaning of dinky meaning 'inconsequential' which seems to make sense.

From the title I had assumed it was going to be about the UK meaning of 'small but particularly well formed', which I guess would also make a good article.

> if we ever for some reason have to close down shop, we will release the Bubble source code under an open-source license so that you can set up your own Bubble server and keep your app running

That's quite a nice thing to read. I hope more people start committing to this.

Surely if America was founded on the rule of law and respect for authority, they wouldn't have committed treason and overthrown the King?

It would seem to me that America was very much founded on the opposite. A lot of the constitution seems to be focussed on limiting the power of law, not limiting the power of the people (the right to bear arms being the clearest example).

I agree with the first bit, but I use a JS blocker and had no problems reading it as none of those things happened. You should definitely try one if that really bothers you.

I'll second this. I recently switched from permanent to contract work, and I love it. Walking out the door at 17:30 on the dot and completely forgetting about work until the next day is very liberating.

Also, you aren't involved in office politics and you can upwardly delegate any decisions that you don't want to make ("I'm afraid I'm just a contractor, you'll have to ask my manager about that).

As a developer, I really get to get my head down and work hard, which is what I most enjoy about this job.

My father once described Malcolm Gladwell as "that man who writes books that should be essays". I think that also sums up my feelings about this.

A particular bugbear of mine is when a non-fiction article starts by describing the weather or somesuch. If the opening line is "It was a warm summer's day when Joshua first..." then I just give up then and there.

There's no glory in padding.

tldr;

> [Table Top] garnishes several hundred thousand views per video.

It should be 'garners'. Garnish means to put something ornamental on.

I adore the nonsense poems of Edward Lear. He's most famous for The Owl and The Pussycat, but The Nutcracker and The Sugartongs is one of my favourites to read aloud: http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/nutcrackers.html

When read aloud, the rhythm is impeccable and almost addictive.

Another shout out has to go to A A Milne, particularly for Disobedience, which again is a delight to read aloud: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~ridge/local/disobedience.html

Finally I have an excuse for all my farting.

I have done quite a bit of recruiting and interviewing for Python in the past, and I'd say that if I saw it on your CV, I'd automatically invite you in for an interview.

If you fluffed the interview on Python stuff, I'd give you the benefit of the doubt and give you another go.

And if you happened to have answered one of my questions for me, I'd have a whole lot of good will towards you.

I think you'll probably end up with a lot of very small karmic rewards, rather than any one big one.

The benefit is not (necessarily) that these ways of doing things are inherently better; it's that they are commonly used.

If you do things in this manner, everyone who has to deal with your API will have a good understanding of how it works. Even people who've never studied REST will have a good idea of how it works, as long as they are familiar with the web in general.

It immediately made me think of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines