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This could be useful to know! I still used to do this on XP, where there was at least an icon there but it seemed to be deprecated. I don't think I'd even tried it in 7+.

Although I am wondering if it has ever bitten anyone by accident, especially given that double-clicking elsewhere on the top bar will maximise a window (and I do this frequently). Could be unfortunate.

Other not really documented leftovers of previous UI standards: I still sometimes use Ctrl-insert and shift-insert for copy and paste, which still work in a surprising number of apps, but not everywhere. I picked up the habit in the DOS 5 era with QBasic/Edit, but it seems to have been an IBM standard from 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Especially useful in terminal apps/ssh clients, where you really don't want to be pressing Ctrl-C by accident.

There's a Udacity mini-course with a fun section on Python turtle graphics, too.

https://www.udacity.com/course/viewer#!/c-ud036/l-1004409226... (UD-036 Programming Foundations with Python, lesson 2A)

Thanks! Was it this one? http://web.archive.org/web/20160304012151/http://tech.beatpo...

(no longer on the beatport site; tech.beatport doesn't seem to exist any more and the current beatport blog starts at 2015)

This looks very cool. I'd love to see something similar for other languages.

How do you envisage the fluency colour coding being used?

Total shot in the dark but I don't suppose it was reading a 44.1kHz file at 48kHz or the other way round?

I don't know how often the data is present, let alone correct, but iirc the SoundCloud API lists bpm as a field in the track data. Might be worth a look if you haven't already.

Are you allowed to complain about food poisoning on Yelp?

My town, which coincidentally happens to be Oxford like in the article, has its own local site "Daily info" which includes user-submitted restaurant reviews, and the review form asks you not to make allegations of food poisoning (presumably for legal reasons) and to submit possible food poisoning reports to the local authorities for investigation instead.

I note the Chinese takeaway I got food from last week shows up on this map as a bright red blob...

"Welcome to the real world" - I know, right! Though I should point out that this is my first post on this thread, so I'm not the people you were talking to earlier. Perhaps they have reasons you'd like better.

And I still think it's a crying shame to flush science, research and education in this country down the toilet just for the sake of waving two fingers at some unknown bureaucrats and uncaring politicians, whether I get paid or not.

There probably should have been some more options on the paper, seeing as how people voted Leave for many disparate reasons and with many disparate ideas (or no idea at all) of what to do instead, and there is no way to keep all of them happy.

In fact there may be no way to keep any of them happy, since apparently many of them voted Leave for impossible/EU-unrelated reasons: to keep non-EU immigration down; to spend money we won't even have on the NHS; because they don't like what the UK government has been doing and will keep doing outside the EU with even greater impunity, etc.

"Pathetic" 1. Arousing sadness, compassion, or sympathy, esp. through vulnerability or sadness; pitiable.

Seems fair enough. "Name-calling"?

"Rich people": I work for a university as support staff. I earn under the median UK wage and surely well under the median HN wage. We've had deeper and deeper cuts year on year for the past several years and post-Brexit an even bigger chunk of our budget looks like disappearing along with our best academics and researchers, not to mention other support staff, foreign language teachers/cataloguers/negotiators, etc. Education and research careers have been a route into the middle class for many and it's a shame to see that threatened - even more of a shame when the people who voted for it, the press, politicians have hardly even acknowledged it's a problem.

But have fun assuming that only rich people are interested in science or can get any benefit from cooperating with colleagues elsewhere in Europe...

As a semi-regular reader, I would say that the site author is absolutely reliable and writes pretty good columns both there and for other sites, but there have definitely been troll/joke letters in the past which have been gone up (a couple of borderline believable letters revealed by over-the-top follow-ups, etc).

I'm not 100% sure that this is one, though - there are some red flags but I've definitely had managers I could imagine doing this. And I can see the point in printing the letter even if you think it's not real but that someone out there might do the same thing for real.

I've run into this bug too and it was mystifying and (iirc) not overridden by manually loading the file using the Text Import wizard. But this...

"If the file's suffix is .csv, then maybe you should just treat it as a CSV file"

doesn't make me any happier, because there are a lot of slight variations on CSV files or a lot of different ways you might want to load a CSV file (perhaps you'd like to specify the character set, or set columns to be text or date format, or not have leading zeroes stripped or numbers in brackets turned into negative values), and if I absentmindedly name them .csv then again I can't use the full loader, because Excel knows best.

And if you want to read a CSV file with a VB macro it's even worse, because you can specify all the parameters but it just silently overrides them all with the CSV defaults just because the file extension is CSV. Hours of debugging spent on that...

I typed "Translate how much does that cost to French", which was one of the examples it showed me on the front page (under "Intent Parser", exactly as shown, no quotes), and it still gave me tv_onoff.

And "Turn on the TV please" is interpreted as "Turn the TV on to channel 'please'".

And don't invite any physicists round, because "Set the temperature to 293 K in my bedroom" results in a "temperature" value of 293000.

Still, the docs do indeed say you can train it (for sentiment and yes/no queries, at least, and hopefully other things too).

It's frustrating. The site is now full of bullet lists about things like when you need to fill in which forms and what documentation you need to provide, and half the time it's not made clear whether you need to meet ALL of bullet points or just one of them.

Also the team redoing the website, GDS, seem to be closely affiliated with the firm Govknow, which keeps spamming every email address at my non-profit including non-personal/automated addresses and refusing to unsubscribe anyone, in contravention of the rules about email marketing on the government's own website.

(I'm not sure if there's an official link but certainly most or all of the speakers at most of the conferences I get spammed about are from the GDS.)

Sorry I can't offer much advice but I hope you find a way out of this rut.

How long have you been with this company? If you've been there for over a year (and/or have a good portfolio, github profile, etc) I'd say that would help your chances to be hired without a CS degree.

However, if you're not close to that and the job is really bringing you down that much, don't stay just to get to a milestone like that. Sadly overlong days do seem (in my opinion) to be quite prevalent in IT, though, so try to get a good feel for the work/life balance at any new job before moving on.

I'm afraid since I don't do hiring and am probably in a different country (I assume you're in the US) I don't know what the market will be like otherwise, but hopefully someone else will reply soon...

It didn't convert it for me. Oops.

Well, they know who I am anyway. Hi again!

(Edit: If you click on it from the repo file list at the top it converts it; don't do what I did and click on the link to download at the bottom of the readme)

The column order thing is pretty annoying but IMO the worst thing about vlookup is that you have to remember to set the last parameter to FALSE for pretty much every single vlookup you ever do.

(the default of TRUE is some backwards-to-the-80s-compatible behaviour where it expects the lookup column to be sorted and will return the wrong answers if it isn't, plus will return matches even if the data you're looking up isn't there - the closest match if your data is sorted, but it probably isn't, and "closest" may not even mean anything...)

It's not immediately clear to me whether "it's a game" or "it's a test of reading ability" makes it sound more competitive.

"I want to win at the game" vs "tests = boring" / "I'd better do well on the test as it sounds important and people might think I'm stupid" vs "it's only a silly game"

Perhaps one leans towards being competitive about what your peers think of you, and one towards being competitive about what teachers/adults think? Not sure.

15 years in IT-related roles, mostly a mix of programming, data monkeying and IT support, mostly for non-profits.

1. Find mentorship. Don't be shy of pair programming and code reviews. If you're not getting either (or not getting productive comments that you can learn from) at your job, find a way to get them somewhere else, outside work or at a new job.

I was bad at CS at university and dropped out just as the bubble burst. With a lousy CV in a lousy job market, I took the only jobs I could get. I worked as the lone programmer, or in teams where the only other programmer was way too busy to talk to me, or worked on something completely separate, or was just a grumpy sod.

Even at university the demonstrators didn't generally talk you through how to improve your code; they would read it silently, hand it the corner case you hadn't handled, then walk away without a word. There's a place for that, but there's a place for "hey, have you thought about..." or comments about style or design patterns too.

Meanwhile, the people with good degrees and connections took jobs with mentorship and pair programming. They started out a lot better than me already and they grew and grew, while I'm one of those "one year of experience 15 times" people, hiding in the corner hoping nobody finds out how bad I really am.

2. Be open to new technologies as much as you can: you need to stay used to learning new things as they come along, and you also never know which of the new things is the one that people will still want on your CV in 5 years' time.

And the blog also has a good post on LGoP: http://www.filfre.net/2015/03/leather-goddesses-of-phobos-or...

(and lots of other 80s adventure games and RPGs. I love this site and am very glad Jimmy Maher is out there researching this stuff)

I'm guessing (say) Ivy dropouts have SAT scores in roughly the same range as Ivy graduates but are less employable because of the whole thing of a degree showing that you can stick with something and do what's asked of you for 3-4+ years. So it isn't solely a proxy for asking IQ/SAT scores.

(I'm a dropout, though not from an Ivy, and that's definitely something I've had to do a lot of explaining of in every interview I've had. Haven't been on the market for a few years; if there really is a magical age where people stop caring about degrees, I look forward to reaching it.)

I'm elsewhere in the southeast, studied comp sci 15 years ago at a moderately well-regarded (though possibly not for CS) university, and most people I know from university or from previous jobs are on 30-45k AFAIK.

Of course, we may be too old, and earn less than those with 5 years' experience who have better knowledge of this week's single-page JS framework...

(my sample group includes some pretty dedicated, smart people as well as barely-adequate slackers like myself)

But we do all get decent holidays and sick days, which is a definite bonus.

Should start at 17:00 GMT (in about a minute from this post)

If I'm browsing a site with a top menu in lynx I press the delete key to scroll down past the menu so I don't have to press down repeatedly. Then capital V at the cookie prompt rejects it "foreVer" (for the rest of the session).

My version does, however, default to nntp for news.* subdomains unless you supply the protocol, so that's annoying.

Or you can use elinks and click on the links with the mouse...

UK is nominally 230V to standardise with the rest of Europe but actually 240V as it always was:

"Following voltage harmonisation, electricity supplies within the European Union are now nominally 230 V ±10% at 50 Hz.[6] For a transition period (1995–2008), countries that had previously used 220 V changed to a narrower asymmetric tolerance range of 230 V +6%/−10% and those (like the UK) that had previously used 240 V changed to 230 V +10%/−6%.[7] No change in voltage is required by either system as both 220 V and 240 V fall within the lower 230 V tolerance bands (230 V ±10%)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity#Standardisat...

I don't know if 240V is actually being phased out now it's post-2008 but the mains of everywhere I've lived since 2008 has definitely still been 240V.

I was hoping this would be something like the Fortran Coloring Book (link below) - although it is indeed funny to see what remains the same 40 years later.

http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colori...

I agree. Love the site though, these are brilliant. Thanks!

Would it be possible to add a sound icon to the front page thumbnail of the ones with audio? Then people who are e.g. at work or listening to music can skip them if they prefer - and people who actively want something with music can seek them out too.

I get the same in Chrome 45.0.2454.101 m on Win7 32-bit.

(I'm also running Ghostery but I disabled it - not that it found anything to block in the first place - and reloaded and got the same message.)

Is there a way to bring back the voting prompt after it auto-disappears? Personally I'd rather hear more of the song before voting good/bad.

It helps that British geeks love James Bond and Alan Turing, and at GCHQ they get to play at being both - although you'd have to hope some of them have wondered if this time round they might not be the unequivocal good guys.

Also, if you get a reputation for hiring the brightest and best, you also get people who've spent so long being told they're the brightest and best that they may have little concern for whatever lesser beings get spied on, shamed, discredited, disenfranchised during their fun intellectual challenges.

Right, I'm on a list somewhere now! Hi echelon.

I agree. Nice page though, enjoyed depressing myself with that...

(Where do you get the area names from? I realise you may not be able to change them but OX13 5 Kingston "Pagpuize" should be Bagpuize.)