jumblesale

This is a favourite refrain of cheggars to guilt you into signing up. 'It's only the price of a pint a month. Won't you give that up to save starving children?' Well no, that's a false equivalence. Like the article says, this argument doesn't take into account hidden value. For instance, I know I pay over the odds for my gym membership every month and if I payed only when I used it I would save money. But I also know if I didn't have the membership I would spend exactly £0 a month on the gym because I just wouldn't go.

It's funny to see two threads on the front page contrasting 'continuing the Windows 8 vision' with 'Microsoft u-turn'. I doubt many outside of Redmond are going to conform to the former viewpoint.

So does this mean that all that money Microsoft put into getting this 'standard' through ISO was wasted? It would be a delightful slice of schadenfreude if now everyone was refusing to use it. I remember that the main reason they wanted the ISO to bless it was so that governments could use it.

I'm not totally sure where you get the idea that I get that idea based on my statement(s).

If you're ever in that situation again, try this: http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/user/XSLT_TRIP_REQUEST2?lan...

You can select what modes of transport you're interested in (so you could disable the tube if the DLR isn't running). It'll show you boats too which is cool and definitely the best way to get to Greenwich.

Most of these are mainline stations, not tube stations. Would be interesting to see a ratio of price and zone to figure out where the cheapest, central area to rent is.

I think a 10 person organisation would probably still be at the stage where they have a lot more to worry about in potential candidates and probably don't have access to enough capital / cachet to be able to attract the ideal person.

An interesting approach, and it's refreshing to see an employer wanting to be honest and open during the recruitment process, but it feels like this advice has a limited audience. It's fine if you are hiring for a large established hedge fund where you can afford attractive salaries but how many people are in this situation?

A lot of hiring happens in response to a crisis like having to replace an existing employee or having too much work for too few people. In these situations it's not feasible to invite every candidate round for pizza and a chat about ethics and then find all of them work. It's more about deciding what to compromise on. For most companies it's going to be more about things that are quickly testable: skill, experience, ability. 'Goodness' as the article describes is much more difficult to elicit in a candidate. Like any personality trait it's something that doesn't tend to manifest until much further down the line when the new hire has settled into the role.

Allen doesn't really provide any details on how you would discover the 'goodness' of a candidate prior to hiring. Other than laying down the ground rules of what he expects there's no mention of how he estimates this quality in a candidate. According to his success stories the candidates simply self select but this can't be a reliable method. What about people who use their niceness to masquerade as 'good' people?

It's good advice to be open and honest with potential employees but I don't really see what most recruiters can take away from this. Talented, experienced individuals can be difficult enough to find without having to look for some vague idea of how 'good' they are too.

That doesn't account for node's popularity. I like Javascript. That's why I use it.

I had understood that to be the total cost but you're right, the article does seem to imply that was only after it had come back in-house. The blog says 'total cost'. If the article is correct then it seems it's ignoring whatever Siemens were paid.

Really excellent points. Also it's worth considering that most of the people providing these solutions are not equipped with the expertise or experience to tackle 'third world problems' like floods or infant mortality. No amount of AngularJS or Clojure can solve these issues. However photo sharing is a domain that is approachable and there are obvious financial incentives to do so.

As someone involved in Information and Archives where this project was based, it serves as both a cautionary tale on outsourcing and a good example of when to recognise a sunk cost. This has been rumbling on for years ever since Siemens received the contract without competition due to an outstanding deal. The technology surrounding what they were trying to achieve has changed massively in that time frame but doesn't excuse them from delivering nothing of value. These projects have since come back in-house where the BBC has a history of delivering excellent technical products.

The new Director General, Tony Hall, has had to recognise this project as a failure and put it on the books. No doubt the conservative press are going to tear him apart for it but he's made a tough decision that had to be made. Continuing to pour money into the project would have left an even greater mess for somebody to take a bullet for later on.

There's a thorough analysis here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/aboutthebbc/posts/The-BBC-announc...

I can't find anything stating one way or the other but potentially it's a moral issue? The reason drones have received bad press is because they're being used for extremely dubious purposes. I can totally understand if they'd want to distance themselves from that. It would be great to see a company who could easily branch out into military applications putting ethics before profit.

It bothers me when reporting on evolution seems to attribute it to some invisible hand shaping the way populations change, or in this article making it seem like the cockroaches have made some conscious decision as a group to stop eating sweet things.

"They switched their internal chemistry around so that glucose, a form of sugar that is a sweet come-hither to countless forms of life, tastes bitter."

Either the author of this article doesn't really understand how evolution works or they are poor at explaining the mechanism behind it. I think one of the reasons people grapple with the idea of evolution is because mainstream reporting on it is poor and uses confusing language to deal with the concepts behind it.

Of course science reporting is generally quite poor but with evolution being such a battleground in some places I think it behoves people writing about it to present it clearly and precisely.

Too right, bloody limeys! Do you have any evidence for the size of the fraud scene in the UK at the moment or was that just a baseless non sequitur to round off your delightful rant about the character of those deplorable English persons?

The same functionality in Perl: https://www.inkling.com/read/programming-perl-christiansen-4...

It's a fun feature but saying it's the main reason to upgrade to Python 3 is going a bit far. I don't see how it's much different to something like # TODO: implement this method! or raise NotImplementedError if you don't want it to be invoked.