This craze for the most modern stuff -- and believing people can't pick it up -- drives me crazy.

I'm the hiring manager for a small (5 people) software engineering group. We use Scala. Nobody in my team used Scala before they joined the company -- they learned (hell, we use Scala because THEY decided they wanted to use Scala). One of these developers didn't even know Java before he joined the company -- he was a Perl guy, through and through. He's one of my best.

We're looking at a candidate now who actually retired from the workforce after being an architect for a while; her last time writing code was 15 years ago. We like her because she has a fantastic fundamental grasp on computer science principles and the passion to learn quickly -- we think. So we showed her the code base for one of our open source projects, asked her to implement a feature that had been requested, and let her loose. She came back with the first version Friday; we'll see how it goes.

Concurrency isn't Olympic Gymnastics where if you haven't been doing it from the time you were six years old and if you're older than 20 years old you have no chance. It's just something to learn. Smart people can learn pretty much anything you put in front of them.

Hire smart people.

I'm a hiring manager for a software development team; one of the front-runner candidates we have right now is a woman who did software development for donkey's years, then went into architecture for 15 years, then retired, then realized she really wanted to get back into coding.

She was rusty in our first round interviews when it came to actual coding, sure. We expected that. But we also expected her to think about design and architecture the right way, and to ask the questions we would want a great candidate to ask -- and she did all of that.

So we asked her to resolve one of the issues logged against a product we open-sourced; we get to see how quickly she can spin up knowledge of github and our code base, she gets to do some code she'll be able to point to as part of her portfolio (since it's an open-source product, her code will be open-source and visibly hers as well). Everyone wins.

Check out http://techblog.netflix.com/ if you want to know more. We're cloud-hosted, BTW, except for the actual streaming bits which are on a combination of our own CDN and public CDNs.

(And we're hiring).

Signed,
A Netflix Employee

The other cool thing about the format is that there's no "last week, on House of Cards ... " wastes of time, because you're not presumed to have waited a week since you saw the last episode. Nor "next week, on House of Cards" teasers ...

My grandparents had faded blue serial numbers tattooed on their forearms.

Your use of the word "nazi'" to describe Adria Richards and her ilk tells me everything I need to know about you.

At least part of the reason I go to Pycon is for recruiting; that means that I wear a company-branded t-shirt, and -- obviously -- my name tag has my company's name on it. I expect that I should always behave in a way that is consistent with representing my company well, and part of that means keeping my conduct strictly professional.

I don't see anything here that makes Pycon less useful, or interesting, or relevant to me, nor do I see any action on the part of the Pycon folks that I disagree with. And, having just talked with my management last night about Donglegate, I know they feel the same.

Now, Pycon being in Montreal is a different matter -- I don't really want to cross borders for Pycon.

I'm sorry, can you name one Microsoft executive on the Netflix board? Because I looked at http://ir.netflix.com/management.cfm#3562 and couldn't find any.

ISPs don't have to build a computer. The OpenConnect appliances are owned by Netflix, built by Netflix, and paid for by Netflix.

If you're honestly thinking that the ISP is supposed to build the computer, you misunderstood how the OpenConnect system works. Go back and ask some questions.

Not necessarily. Multiple accounts can be logged into the PS3 simultaneously -- it would be trivial, once a game disc is associated with an account, to check not whether that's the currently active account, but whether it's an account defined on the particular PS3 at all.

(Not that this isn't a terribly obnoxious idea, of course)

Crossbows are a form of bows -- a weapon which is based on the bending -- not stretching -- of a semi-flexible rigid material.

This is a slingshot -- a weapon which uses an elastic strap which releases energy by stretching, and then releasing.

If you're comparing the cost of GAFYD (Google Apps For Your Domain) to the cost of running Word, Excel, and Powerpoint on your desktop, then either you're doing it wrong, or you wouldn't be well served to switch.

Where GAFYD kicks Microsoft's ass is in online collaboration (because it's better) and unified messaging (because it's less expensive). So it's not about Word -- it's about Google Talk being better than Microsoft Lync, and about Google Mail and Google Drive being being more cost-effective than Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint.

Because it turns out it costs a little more than $50/person to run a really great-running Exchange environment. That's not an oxymoron, BTW - I currently work at a company that has a fantastic Exchange environment, best I've ever seen run. And I'm really going to miss it in the upcoming quarter when IT shoves our migration to GAFYD down my throat. And I'm not even a Windows user ...

"Tape out" is a term of art of the processor industry. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape-out where the first sentence will tell you "In electronics design, tape-out or tapeout is the final result of the design cycle for integrated circuits or printed circuit boards, the point at which the artwork for the photomask of a circuit is sent for manufacture."

"Fabless ecosystem" is another term of art of the processor industry. Wikipedia is similarly helpful here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabless_manufacturing -- where the first sentence will read "Fabless manufacturing is the design and sale of hardware devices and semiconductor chips while outsourcing the fabrication or "fab" of the devices to a specialized manufacturer called a semiconductor foundry."

STFW FTW.

"The death toll in Germany and Austria due to Allied strategic bombing was estimated at 500,000 by the West German government." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_casualties_in_World_War_II

It depends on your definition of "someone else's". It uses your AWS credentials to kill an instance, so in the worst case, the PHB of group A in company Z could kill instances of group B in company Z; company Y would still be safe.