bitdiffusion

It seems to me that facebook has all their eggs in one basket whereas google is extremely diverse (even though many of googles' ventures inevitability feed back into search).

I think facebook haven't used their huge cash reserves wisely which is why faltering in a single area (aka. advertising) puts them in a very precarious position.

What has google done (just off the top of my head)?

android, gmail, google maps, search, self-driving cars, glass, hardware (I know the nexus/q are manu. by asus but google do have their name on it)

What has facebook done?

facebook.com, facebook app for mobile? thrift?

Just had a browse through and although these particular patent examiners are obviously smart, software is not their area.

If you are looking for answers as to how some of the ridiculous patents manage to get through the patent office (including patents for software concepts that engineers are likely to consider "obvious" or for which there is likely "prior art"), you are unlikely to find the answers here.

I'm curious as to whether this general trend is a new one or if I'm just getting old:

1) user creates semi-controversial post (see: PHP sucks, nosql sucks, node sucks, semi-colons suck, time-is-money, ideas are worth nothing etc)

2) debated ad-nauseum with good points on both sides

3) within 24 hours, blog posts turn up which say almost the opposite of whatever was said in a) PHP works for me, time is worth nothing, nodejs/mysql is webscale, ideas are everything.

I can't help but feel that - much like this comment - it doesn't add much that hasn't already been said better elsewhere and is purely for linkbait purposes.

It started a bit slow but I ended up watching the whole thing.

Not sure I agree with the comparison at the end to asp.net mvc and "waiting for a database to complete the request" - with mvc4 async controllers, .net 4.0 tasks and the new mvc 4.5 await keyword, async processing of web requests is pretty much a solved problem in the ms stack.

Not that node doesn't look like fun-as-hell to code-in - for that alone I would be willing to give it a go.

I always find it a bit insulting when a company tries to offer me a discount to stay; like I wasn't good enough to qualify for a discount when I was a loyal customer.

This seems a lot like the situation where an employee threatens to leave and the company offers more money to keep them for which I almost always give the advice: "just say no".

I guess if price is really the only thing making someone leave, then lowering the price might make a difference but price and value are intrinsically linked: if they thought the price was too high, then they considered the value to be too low and it's probably just a matter of time before they decide to leave anyway.

Ouch - this hits a little too close to home being from the architect camp myself (hell - I even spent the last week dicking around with rabbitmq! - talk about coincidence!)

Anyway - as I'm sure other comments will allude to, one of our jobs is to take the time-out from frantically delivering features to investigate new technologies/techniques and distil them in a 5-minutes-or-less style format to the rest of the team. Ideally, organisations should allow all members of the software team to participate in this activity, but it seems that when push comes to shove and clients are waiting for stuff to "get done" this kind of activity is one of the first to fall by the wayside.

If you read the whole article, Taubes isn't saying that there is not a link between calorie intake and weight-gain - what he is saying is that it's not "causal" in any useful sense. Why exactly overweight people consume more calories is still a mystery and it's a gross oversimplification to discuss the law of thermodynamics when considering "why someone is overweight".

Adding to some of the anti-orm sentiment above: I always find that orm's are trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. The proportion of time (and therefore cost) spent on a project writing SQL is orders of magnitude less than time spent on things like performance, scalability, user-experience, testing etc. You might have something that only maps data from your results into your language of choice but, again, if small, slightly repetitive tasks like this are affecting your ability to deliver your software, you have bigger problems.

Sure - database design is important - but that you have to do that regardless.

I've used a few and ultimately ended up at HSBC for my business and personal account. Haven't had any problems so far (touch wood) and been pretty impressed so far with the service.

If I remember correctly, they were one of the few banks to come out the back of the banking crisis largely unscathed. Convinced a few friends to move too and have had good feedback so far (but ymmv as usual).

Not sure where this one fits in (passion? commitment?) but having a candidate mention that they "don't do overtime... ever" half-way through an interview when nothing has been mentioned about over-time is a serious turn-off.

Sure - people have families and not everyone is geared up for 18-hour work days - but sometimes the sky is falling and companies need an employee that isn't going to disappear out the door at 5:01 PM when the place is burning with a "well that's me for today! good luck guys!"

I was looking at jquery mobile and it didn't look too bad - would you mind giving a summary of what you didn't like about it?

If you are looking for something like this for .NET, "synoptic" can generate cli-usage help in a similar format based on your methods/classes complete with defaults, examples etc: https://github.com/bitdiff/synoptic (disclaimer: it's my companies' project)

It's no doubt that the intentions are pretty innocent (it could be a dev/designer etc.).

However the context that many developers come from is literally being allocated as a "resource" in a project plan somewhere (and being switched out for other "resources" which we all know never works). So maybe this terminology hits a little too close to home for comfort.

Consider us a bit shell-shocked and sensitive to this word (although I can't think of a better one tbh - "Enabler"?)

inane != insane

I think the other point the author makes is that it's not possible to write efficient code that is entirely abstracted from the underlying data (see his loop examples).

i.e. if you have to write your code in a specific way to make the ORM behave correctly (constantly thinking about what kind of sql your code is generating), then the abstraction becomes a lot less useful.

The notebook/note example is weak - in a nosql database you need to design your data structure appropriately to get the level of atomicity you require.

Storing an entire notebook in a single document would be the most obvious. I use postgres all the time and sql is great, but poo-pooing nosql because it wouldn't work with your relational structure is not the best idea. Also - I have found a hybrid between nosql (mongodb) and sql (postgres) is ideal - who says you need to use a single database?

The geolocation bit seems to be one of the last things that you can't really find for free (especially if you want one that works worldwide). In the same vein, good luck finding a free database or service that allows customers to look up the full address from the post code at least in the UK. The amount of constant updates required to keep it up to date is the kind of work prohibitive to most oss developers.

If there were more engineers than jobs and we were all fiercely competing for scraps, I would say ok - it's a "buyers market" and we are forced to put up with attitudes like this.

The situation is very different however. In my experience, top talent either a) have their own company or b) are well-looked after by their current employer (at least one would hope so) so they need to actively lured away; how about you tell me why I SHOULD work for you rather than give all the reasons why I can't?

Oh yes - and the author is an arrogant dick.

I was always under the impression that security trumps user-experience in the majority of cases - what happened to trying to prevent malicious users from harvesting user names by using captcha, non-specific error messages etc? Maybe I've had my head buried in the security game for too long...

It might be slightly off-topic, but I used to work in the same building as "Save the Children" at a swanky address in central London (this is the charity where the money ended up iirc). The employees dressed better than us and I could see (when the lift opened on their floor on the way up) that their offices were pretty awesome.

Anyway - how much of the donation actually ended up feeding starving children I guess is neither here-nor-there; at the end of the day giving to charity is usually about how it makes you feel.

Unless you are working on a profit-share type deal where you are going to do the work at a cut-rate price and share in the profits later, most clients in my experience want to know what something is going to cost as early as possible (even it it's just a guesstimate).

You can work as much as you like on a proposal and it can, on paper, be the greatest thing ever and promise to increase profits by whatever-percentage but if it's something that is going to be out of reach of the immediate budget of the client, then you're wasting your own (and their) time.

I have been involved in multi-million £ proposals and when it got to the end it turns out the client was expecting something for 50k. Would have been much easier to lay the cards on the table earlier in the process.

On the CoffeeScript side of things I have heard good things about https://github.com/alisey/CoffeeScript-Compiler-for-Windows which doesn't require cygwin afaik.

This could be very useful for implementing organisational-charts which, as far as I am aware, is currently only implemented in Google Viz. (flot, highcharts and their ilk don't seem to support them).

The poor guy is taking a beating in the code-project comments which is a pity since he obviously spent some time putting it together. In a comparison like this, you are always going to get people on either side of the fence claiming the results are invalid because there was some compiler switch or code construct that was missed.

The language-agnostic version of this article: you can write slow code in any language.

Extension methods can be invoked on null objects (the object gets passed to the static method and you can check for null in the extension itself).

Strange, but does enable some interesting syntactic sugar checking for empty values etc.