concerto
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11 years ago
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on: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
Conversely, I have had a lot of work from companies switching from Java to Ruby due to the high costs and relative slow speeds of such developments. As someone who started out mainly working in Java, but now works mainly in ruby/rails I think the whole "rails == amateurs" argument you are making is oversimplistic. All languages are tools and there are always situations where one is more appropriate than another.
concerto
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11 years ago
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on: The UK Ruby Contract Drought Is Real
Obviously the author has more of a historical overview, but, anecdotally, I am getting the same quantity of contact concerning roles as I have ever done, but there seem to be more and more recruitment companies moving into the ruby space. I would say it is also possible that what the author is seeing is less of a slowdown in the ruby market and more of increased competition in the recruitment market.
Having dealt with the author previously (though never having taken a role through him) I hope his approach of specialising in a technology stack and pursuing that as a specialist, gaining knowledge of both the hirers and potential contractors, wins out over the LinkedIn profile fishers.
concerto
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11 years ago
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on: Show HN: Advertising-Free Search-Engine
I think relevance is the thing to work on. I did a search in a space I know a lot about and the majority of first page results were domains for sale. The company I have an interest in, which is the first result for certain keywords on Google and Bing, wasn't to be found anywhere in the first 4 pages on here. It would be interesting to hear a bit more about your plans for moving this forward.
I have a few questions it would be great to hear about either here or in a follow-up blog post:
* Is your reimplementation in JS a translation of your current from Pascal or a redevelopment?
* Why have you decided to move from Pascal to JS rather than spending the effort improving the current implementation?
* What lessons have you learned from your current implementation that you are attempting to overcome with your new version in JS?
concerto
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11 years ago
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on: The History of the Handshake
concerto
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11 years ago
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on: Prison Bankers Who Profit from the Inmates
Two stories next to each other on the home page with someone called Ryan Shapiro in them, in both cases he is 37. One where he is an foia activist [1], and this one where he runs a company profiting from prisoner's families. Are they the same people or is this just a strange coincidence?
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390642
concerto
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12 years ago
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on: Confessions of a Drug Dealer's Delivery Service Guy
If the majority of users take the small bag, which seems logical, then I can't imagine you would be able to upsell them easily to a product that was 5x the price (indeed the author acknowledges that), the upsell opportunity there would be to a medium bag, but as there is no difference to him financially in the sale of a small or medium bag, what is his incentive?
concerto
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12 years ago
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on: Confessions of a Drug Dealer's Delivery Service Guy
The sales incentives make no sense. He made 1/3rd commission on the smallest bags, 1/5th on the medium and 1/6 on the largest bags. It is better for him to sell lots of small bags than 1 big one. In addition, assuming most customers buy the small bag, then upselling to a medium bag would bring no extra financial reward. Putting aside the idea that buying the biggest bag might lead to faster consumption, and assuming that the customers were tied in to the supplier, he would have been better off downselling as the customers would still buy the same amount, just in more transactions, leading to higher returns for him (especially as his transport costs were paid).
concerto
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12 years ago
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on: How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard
You say fortunate, I say foresighted. In any event. I imagine that he started building it to meet his own needs and the growth of revenue now is a happy side-effect.
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Xeround discontinuing cloud DB service
I am considering switching to Amazon RDS, but would welcome hearing other suggestions too
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Xeround discontinuing cloud DB service
Mine are paid for, so I will need to pay for another provider to take them over - not to mention the migration/testing time. They are still listed as a provider on Heroku too.
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Telegraph erects Paywall
I always wonder with paywalls if they would be better leaving the news for free and charging for the opinion and unique content, as there are always going to be free places to get access to the news.
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Telegraph erects Paywall
The email they sent out said:
Today, we are introducing subscriptions to the Telegraph website.
As a registered user of the Telegraph website, you can continue to enjoy free access up to a limit of 20 articles per month without subscribing. Once you have reached this limit, you will now be invited to choose one of our subscription packages, which have been designed to suit your reading preferences.
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Programming Is Not for Everybody
I would say that programming is for everybody who is interested in how stuff works. While a career as a programmer might not be for everyone, it can be useful for someone who needs to create presentations or word documents to be able to write basic macros in vb, or for people who have websites to understand what is going on in the html/javascript. I think that is the thrust of the argument of the "everyone should code" brigade. Not that we should all be full time java/ruby/c# programmers.
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: The Coolest Experience I Had as an Apple Store Employee
My first thought too. What kind of budget did the kids have on this day out? How do I get my kids into that school?
concerto
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13 years ago
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on: Better Dictators than Elected Islamists
I don't think you can argue for democracy and then complain when the countries elect people you disaprove of.
