I did 4-hour nights of sleep for a year, mainly because I didn't like my job, so was trying to maximise my time outside of work. It's possible, but you lose the ability to think properly without realising it, and in my case, every few months I got intense headaches that only stopped when I was in darkness - presumably a migraine? Anyway, I really don't recommend it.
The article assumes that people are happy to click on a link within an email from an unrecognised source, in order to cancel a fake member account. This rings all sorts of alarm bells, I would never do that.
If I got an email like that, I would click the spam button and the server would probably face regular spam blacklist issues from big providers.
This. Silence is not consent, and if you start mailing me regularly because I did not browse to some URL telling you not to, you are a spammer and I will treat you as such.
I doubt the BBC's legal team would have allowed it to broadcast if they didn't think it would end up in their favour. The losers in this are the British public, who are presumably paying to defend the broadcaster from some car manufacturer who didn't like a review.
At least we have Loser Pays, so it feels unlikely that the license fee payer will actually lose out.
As Top Gear is a big winner for BBC Worldwide (commercial, not-license fee funded), it's been frequently the case in the past that they will fund any legal action should that become necessary.
True, but if Worldwide end up paying/losing, that means less money paid back to the corporation, therefore a lower budget for other productions (effectively the same thing).
I'm a fan of electric cars, but I am disappointed by Tesla on this... using the legal system like this leaves a bad taste.
This is a form of blood sport (i.e. killing for personal entertainment). Animals that are destined for human consumption aren't generally killed for entertainment.
I think websites like Stack Overflow, GitHub and HackerNews attract a certain type of programmer, which might not always be the sort of person a business is looking for. Or, at least, it will exclude a lot of people who aren't interested in being involved with online development communities. That is, they are too hardcore.
Yes, but there are tons of other data sources out there, right? For example, how many developers are members of mailing lists for a given API, service, language, tool, etc.? How many contribute? Plus, that doesn't even include the world of personal blogs, twitter accounts, etc.
I think we're entering an age for software engineers where expressing yourself externally is going to be even more important than your resume. For example, a really intelligent, well-thought-out post like the one linked above can really move you forward in your career.
I'm focusing on making a startup that captures all this stuff and uses it for both display and matching candidates. I'm still in the very early stages and would love some feedback! http://proovn.com
Indeed. There are also lots of scanning services that go through websites to commercially exploit them. That's why you get these blunt T&C, which basically point out that you are accessing private property and need to ask permission.
An example might be a service that scans Eurostar's website for cheap tickets (i.e. loss leaders) and then consistently send (deep link) visitors who purchase the loss making tickets. While existing customers who are looking for the deal, can't find the cheap tickets, so become disillusioned.
It's weird, I only meet intense hostility/hatred/dislike for PHP on websites like this. Is it some sort of geeky way of appearing cool, or do people genuinely dislike it?
I can't say I dislike any language that I have used.
I have a pretty broad experience with a lot of languages, and while I wouldn't say I hate any of them to the point of wanting to murder their creators with my bare hands in a dark alley behind OSCON, I'd say that there are languages (like PHP) that have annoyed me to the point of never wanting to use them unless I absolutely have to on threat of death or incapacitation. I can get the same thing done in Rails with more sanity and less or equal amounts of code and far less frustration. Or I'd much prefer to never, ever use Java again beyond certain very specific tasks; that's largely because I can use a large number of languages for the same task these days. If I need performance, there's always C or C# is cross platform, as is Scheme, Objective-C, etc.; if I need to work with some Java library, there are languages like Scala and JRuby that are much more pleasant.
So, for me at least, my "hatred" of languages comes from finding better alternatives that "knock the shine off" the previously used language, if you will. Progress showing the failings of the past perhaps?
There are things I dislike about PHP as such; it picked up Perl's sigils, but inconsistently; is $x a scalar, a list, or or a dictionary? Its support for first class functions just isn't there (in 5 anyway), and using "map' is a pain. None of these are anything like showstoppers.
What sets my teeth on edge is some code I have inherited, which takes all the possibilities available to the new & undisciplined programmer, and runs with them. 2000-line scripts with mixed HTML and code, global variables used indiscriminately, dead code here and there. None of this is PHP's fault, but reflexively and unfairly I associate it with PHP as a language. I suspect that this is where most of the dislike of PHP comes from.
It's probably because most people have never made something elegant with PHP. The language is always a means to an end. It, in and of itself, will not make you a better developer. It can do a lot of work for you (frameworks) and make esoteric design patterns easier, but it always comes down to your ability to write structured, maintainable code. PHP makes it easier to hack together scripts. A majority of developers never take the next step in their life and learn the ways to properly structure a website. Chances are, if they do, it's because they've joined another language with the promise of an easier world (Rails, Python) and fail to realize you can do the exact same things in any other language - although it might required a little more understanding of its nuances (PHP).
Could this be an "old boys' network" type of deal? Investing in it because one of their other established investments is in line to purchase it? Is something like that allowed? If it is, presumably it happens regularly.
Rather than thinking organic/inorganic, why not try different varieties of carrots? If you can't find a retailer that sells named varieties, try growing your own because seeds are always sold with the name. There's all sorts of types and colours:
