benvanderbeek

Plane trips and long car rides are screen free with my 4 young kids (3-9) but that’s more about gluttony for punishment than principle.

nuCourse (http://nuCourse.com/careers) Garden Grove (Orange County), CA

Wholesale distributor of mobile accessories.

Hiring developers and non-technical positions.

#152 on most recent Inc 500 (fastest growing private companies in US).

Great place to work. Warm, friendly, exciting, growth potential, good work/life balance.

Long Beach, Calif.: 2 (meprobamate and phenytoin). [1]

I'm drinking an anti-epileptic and an anti-anxiety. That sucks.

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-03-10-drugs-...

The problem isn't the lack of workarounds. The problem is that we have all departments - Purchasing, Marketing, Operations/Warehouse, Sales, Finance, IT - working with sku's in spreadsheets. Every single time, every single person needs to know the workaround(s), and as other people are mentioning, you then have to hope it's not somehow saved as something else. And also as mentioned, if someone else has worked with the data before you get it, good luck restoring it to what it was before.

But yes we'll probably stick a letter in there.

My company's part numbers are in the form 00-0000. After enough conversations about how to convert back to this format from the date Excel changes it to, we've finally just decided to change our sku format. A rolling change though, so we'll still be dealing with it till the current 5k sku's are all EOL.

I also hate the scientific notation default, in addition to the leading zero. Guess what, UPC's exist and no one wants them in scientific notation.

Postini setup process and support are a joke. You can call someone who tells you to look at a help file, and the help files point to help files, which have no screenshots, and reference menu and navigation options that don't exist. Also asking them how to get Postini to work with Google Apps was like speaking a foreign language to them, as if we were the first person to need this. Despite the fact that it was up-sold to us as an add-on to Google Apps.

Other than Postini, though, I do like Google Apps.

Bing Liu is one of the researchers working on this. I've discussed Amazon review fraud detection with him. http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/

I have an iPad 3 and a Chromebook. I like and use the Chromebook much more, because of the built in keyboard. I know plenty of people who would hate using a Chromebook and much prefer their iPad for everything. To each his own.

"you can choose the left or the right lane of the conveyor belt to the butcher house."

I am going to use this phrase, thanks.

Regarding the unhelpfulness of online reviews, my company has problems with manufacturers/sellers writing 5-star reviews of their own product listings (ASIN's) on Amazon. We've begun (manually) data mining 5-star reviews to identify whether each 5-star-reviewer has any other reviews (or wish list, to indicate the possibility of a real user account), then calculating the % of reviews written by no-history user accounts. Of the ASIN's we've assessed, the gut-level-doesn't-seem-like-heavy-review-fraud listings can be in the 6% range, whereas the looks-like-review-fraud ASIN's are above 20%. We're working with Amazon to identify and penalize these manufacturers/sellers, but internally at Amazon the Seller Performance team is separate from their Community (user review) team, so it presents a challenge. Also hard for them to separate valid complaints from sour grapes complaints.

My friend works for ALEKS. I agree it's a very solid approach.

Amazon review fraud is rampant, and with enough effort, they'll do something about it. I've worked w/teams there who, over time, develop very complex queries on the back end, and use these to remove sellers who violate policy. There are all kinds of additional tricks sellers or manufacturers use to make their reviews look legit, such as using Amazon gift cards to prevent tracing back to a specific credit card holder, and to ensure the "Verified Amazon Purchase" indicator shows on the review. Helpful votes are crucial and there seem to be very complex rules behind which votes get counted and which don't. Some combination of accounts being related via credit card on file, IP address, possibly length of user account history, etc. One difficulty for Amazon is that their community review policing department is disconnected from their seller performance team. My company's work with them has improved the communication, as well as the realization that user accounts that leave fraudulent reviews cannot be treated as merely rogue buyer community members, but rather have to be tied back to sellers and manufacturers who are the real benefactors of these fraudulent (positive or negative) reviews.

We've come a long way from manufacturers blatantly paying people for positive reviews. http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belki...

Last paragraph:

As for what the app will do moving forward: "We will no longer send data from the meeting notes section of your calendar event. There will be a new 'learn more' link to provide more information about how your calendar data is being used." LinkedIn says these updates are already live on the Android app and will be coming to the iOS app shortly.

Error when trying to delete: We're sorry, but something went wrong. We've been notified about this issue and we'll take a look at it shortly.

I love that it was "too many times" - how many is too many? After the 3rd time seeing Asshat on a large screen you decided to go clean? ;)

Makes sense, thanks for connecting the dots while my imagination was not working.

I apologize for my lack of imagination, but what does this mean? "We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal."

This part of the final paragraph summarizes it well.

"[St] Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says "How dare you terrorize the seas"? The pirate captain replies, "How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I'm called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you're called an emperor." The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only."

Are there layman-friendly tutorials on these OS-level steps to ensure full control of encryption? If it remains a matter of editing and recompiling an operating system, the masses have no hope of reestablishing that control.

"A stud finder or old man that knows how to knock on the wall and tell where the studs are."

Would you just search Craigslist for the old man? Sounds tricky.

"corporate leaders (e.g. You)"

I'm honored, and confused, that you would consider me a corporate leader.

Like I said, I see your point. And if you look at my comment, it was in the form of a question, not an imperative.

Don't worry, the meds give me a thick skin ;)

I'd probably need it less if I actually did exercise! :/

I'm going through a very difficult time in my personal life and meds have been a crucial supplement to other forms of therapy. They would be much less impactful if the underlying issues weren't being addressed though.

So the civil answer to my question "why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone?"

is: "I keep naked girlfriend pics on my iPhone. I don't think that's weird, but I don't want someone to see them."

I see your point. I apologize for using the word "weird." I assume that's what the downvotes were for.

Great idea. I'll mention that. He was coming at it from a somewhat arbitrary expanding-skillset approach, wanting to get his feet wet on the web side of things. I was explaining to him the difference between a creation that "looks" a certain way vs a creation that that "does" something.

Privacy is important. But why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone? Keep it somewhere else. Or say, "hold on let me log out of my bank app" or something.

"According to Cornell scientists, it’d take a machine 18,600 miles long to produce a time mask that lasts a single second."

That Hideous Strength is a fantastic bizarre ending to the space trilogy, completely different genre (satire?) from the others (sci fi?).

I was talking to a (print) design friend the other day who's trying to learn to code. It's interesting to explain to a non-programmer what kind of person will/can become a programmer. If you don't love solving problems by digging and automating, then you will never be a programmer. As you say, not because of intelligence but rather desire and enjoyment.