character

There is a QR code drawn in Elliot's journal that leads to www.conficturaindustries.com (one of the URLs linked to the same SSL cert) - the same company name that is on the front of the journal. And the meticulous zoom-in on the apple skin left on the floor looks very similar to the logo of the company. Looks like they had fun making this :)

I think it depends on the primary use case (for accounting vs banking) - I know a lot of people who are earning barely livable wages as 1099 employees and they are often tempted to spend everything they earn (need to make rent and feed themselves) but then come April they haven't saved enough for their taxes and get screwed. Having a separate bank account that withholds the taxes for them first and then deposits 100% spendable money (just like a W-2 employee) would be really helpful for people in this position. If you're coming at the problem with this use case in mind primarily, the approach they took makes sense. I think those people can benefit from this service the most too.

strict password requirements are usually a requirement for regulated businesses (such as those creating back accounts). Having a secure password for an account that manages your money is a good thing!

A CS degree obviously is not meant to give people 100% of the skills they need to work in the real world. It builds a foundation of core knowledge about the field that does not usually come from a hacker bootcamp or independent web dev study.

Having a few friends from the school of "who needs college?! I taught myself everything I need to know about coding and I'm on the cutting edge of the field and I have a great job!", I sometimes see a lack of understanding of general principles. Sure, people who really love computing often dive deep enough to learn this stuff themselves, but there are a lot of people who love development that just don't even know what they don't know about it. Most development jobs don't require this knowledge, but you'll sure miss it if you're in a position that does.

looks like Blank Slate can also do that (notes start as private but you can "publish" them, giving you a public URL). Other cool things about this one are that it is open source (https://github.com/tomasienrbc/notes) and that there are extensions, for instance to turn your note into a Google Doc. It also works with markdown so you can make bulleted lists and such.

Seems to me like the layout is basically as minimal as possible, so that would lend itself to looking similar to others that don't have the normal bells and whistles.

I think the point is that this is a site where you can just click the link and start typing. Optimized for loading fast and getting your idea written down as quickly as possible. You don't have to create a user if you don't want to, and you can save as a temp user. Draftin.com (and most other notes sites) take too long to set up for this use case.

The keys used by KMS are stored in an AWS-managed hardware security module (HSM) on-site and never go outside that data center. This means that even if the person had physical access to the data center, they should not be able to extract the decryption keys because HSMs are specifically designed to prevent that. If it was an Amazon employee that had super-user privileges over that HSM for management purposes...who knows.

(from regular Microsoft employee perspective): this article does make them seem like that. Usually, in my interactions with Legal Compliance, they make sure everything we do is 100% legal, and prevent us from even coming close to the border of legality. They assume that we programmers don't think about complicated legal matters, so they go over a lot of the projects we work on and make us adhere to very strict privacy compliance that most of our competitors breeze over.

as do Yahoo and Siri

"we’re all pretty sure that the Android royalties are larger in that division than the Windows Phone revenues." -Forbes

Please don't incorrectly paraphrase a speculative comment.

Daniel Willingham knows a lot about this subject (I took into to cognition with him a couple of years ago). Of course in the linked article he is just paraphrasing other people's work, but he does a lot of similar stuff himself especially on developmental neuroscience in learning and reasoning. It is very interesting to be taught by someone who knows a ton about learning and how to learn from the neurological point of view.

Seems like a similar situation to the student info system at my school, which supposedly cost $8 million of our tuition money despite its terrible UI (scrollbars inside scollbars inside scollbars) and inability to store three-digit course numbers (making the entire university have to switch to four-digit course numbers).

free advertising! We have a lot of people who look at the site, and it is incredibly difficult to find drink deals online in one place (at least in Virginia), so people go to the places that are listed on our website that have the best deals. If you're not on the website, our users might overlook your bar. Seems like a good enough incentive to me. We will also market the ability to directly contact the bar's core crowd via push notifications and SMS when that is ready by the end of the summer.

I'm a just a dev on the site, but here's my point of view. The news has overblown the actual laws concerning the marketing of drink specials. We have actually been in touch with the Virginia ABC since the start to make sure nobody gets in trouble as a result of this site. The laws are in place because Virginia is afraid of underage drinking, and they believe that drink specials encourage underage kids to drink (of course, they wouldn't be able to get into the bars, but that doesn't seem to concern the legislature). As long as the drink specials are advertised in a responsible manner, the state doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Luckily, being developed in VA means that if it works with the laws here, it will likely work with the laws pretty much everywhere else.

We're not about trying to replace the experience of word-of-mouth drink specials. We just want to make that happen even easier. In larger cities it is difficult to keep track of drink specials for all of the bars (especially when they change so often), and many times I find specials on the site that I didn't know existed or have changed from what I thought they were. When you go out with friends, you usually go with a small group because it is hard to plan otherwise, why not make it easier? Also, your use case doesn't apply to grocery store or liquor specials...that I know of.

I agree. Sitting in a 90-degree apartment without power while working on our mobile platform is not the most code-friendly environment. On a different note, establishments will soon (possibly this week) be able to edit their establishment listing from mobile. We're also trying to get user feedback on specials so we'll know which prices are out of date in case the bars forget to update them.

From the dev team here: all the establishments have a back-end editing page that they can access after we verify that they are the owners of that establishment. They can then update their establishment's specials. Some bars have jumped on this opportunity for free promotion, but we would love to see wider adoption! Until then, many of our grocery prices and unclaimed bars must be updated manually. Luckily, prices are usually changed on a regular schedule. Liquor prices in VA are publicly available, so that is easy.