I read some of the comments on that video, many look similar in style talking about a 'scam', or have a negative tone. Is it possible those are planted from a competitor, or do video ads often have feedback like that?

It's the "Here is how it works" section of the ad. The wording is very close to the standard "enter your personal details on a shady website to get free stuff" scam. I think that's also the reason so many commenters seemed to believe he was offering something for free.

I'm not a marketer, but it would probably have helped to have the phrase "you pay us" or similar in there somewhere, even without mentioning the price.

The ad isn't good, and this component doesn't help. It feels far closer to a scam than it does a product. It's not personal.

This is what I originally thought referly was offering. How many others thought this?

FYI - Refer.ly is pivoting

This examples looks like it covers a large number of cases:

      extractValues('John Doe <john@example.com> (http://example.com)', '{name} <{email}> ({url})')
    >> {'name': 'John Doe', 'email': 'john@example.com', 'url': 'http://example.com' }

What kinds of problems would you run into vs using regex? My thoughts were that you lose some control of your matches.

You lose the ability to write them quickly, which considering I mainly use them for code editing or one-off uses, is quite important. The thing about regular expressions is they aren't suited to general programming in their normal form (since they are hard to read, and slow), and the quoted example is better described as a general parser, and could be implemented much better directly then abstracting through regular expressions.

  The Government believes companies have been “profiting
  unfairly at the expense of [the] consumer” by overloading 
  the national grid with electricity.

Does anyone know any more about this? It seems the companies were exploiting compensation payments made for having to reduce the output of their wind farms near Scotland.

The report says that people require life insurance, because the financial burden on their family after death is too high for them to afford.

It also says that purchasing life insurance is a cheaper alternative than building the required savings to cover the family's financial burden after losing the main breadwinner.

The report was written by Swiss Re.

Yes, sorry, it's not the right report.

  The tolerance - how far out one may be for the estimate to be accepted and the answer shown - must at all times appear reasonable ... The student should never feel that an estimate was unreasonably rejected, and on the other hand should not find an odd guess being accepted

The inventor had considered this question for 14 years while developing this calculator.

And now with linefeeds:

    The tolerance - how far out one may be for the estimate
    to be accepted and the answer shown - must at all times
    appear reasonable... The student should never feel that
    an estimate was unreasonably rejected, and on the other
    hand should not find an odd guess being accepted.

Or with automatic line breaks: The tolerance - how far out one may be for the estimate to be accepted and the answer shown - must at all times appear reasonable ... The student should never feel that an estimate was unreasonably rejected, and on the other hand should not find an odd guess being accepted.

Great primer, reading it gives a good sense for why the decorator syntax was made and the potential uses. Is this part of a wider series you are running?

Thanks! It is indeed the first in a series of Python posts that will be on the Thumbtack engineering blog.

Can you please email all future posts to me? ;p zackster@gmail.com -- I don't use RSS any more, and I'd hate to miss them.

Or just let me use Feedburner to subscribe via email.

Our niche is in electrical power systems. We're moving to Germany for a few months this European Summer to build some relationships and learn more about how things are run (compared to Australia). This is the procedure we've been following to make contacts before we leave:

- Find local (Australian) companies with a presence or relationship in Germany - Take their senior engineers or managers out for coffee (a phone call or email invitation normally does the trick) - Talk to them about their experiences with Germany and ask who they'd recommend we contact there. - Send an email to their contact, explain that we'll be in their town on X dates would they like to meet?

In your situation. You've found a job fair participant; what do you do next?

Sounds great, checked out your trackme app. Who is your targeted niche? Would I use this to track my daily jogs?

Maybe hackers all across America will see the show, be inspired, and come flocking to Silicon Valley - solving your skills shortage problem?