elmuchoprez

As a Midwestern suburbanite, I don't think I understand this service. When it comes to trash removal, the city already comes around once per week and collects whatever I put out there. The cost of this is baked into my city taxes and can't be opted out of so far as I know. There may be some technical limit as to how much they'll take at once, but I've never hit it. They even come around and take big stuff, like couches and mattresses, a few times per year. Is this type of service not common throughout the US?

This is an interesting idea for donatable goods like clothes, but I lose the write off and I'm not sure waiting around for a pick-up is really more convenient than just driving the stuff to a drop off location myself.

The only real advantage I see here is getting rid of stuff that's hard to dispose of: car batteries (you know, cause I'm always throwing those away), poisonous or flammable liquids, medical waste (which I don't think I've ever had), etc... but I can't believe that is profitable cargo for them to haul away at $5/bag.

What am I missing here? Am I just the wrong demographic for this?

Similar announcements from Gates, Buffet, and Zuckerberg have gotten significant press over the past few years. Is this kind of philanthropy new, or is it traditional to see some of the world's top earners donating (or pledging to donate) their fortunes? I realize that these people are but a small fraction of the true top earners in the world, but they have to be among the most notable.

After reading it, I actually went looking for a date hoping it was written before the Echo announcement and was a wonderful coincidence.

On a side note, having to hover over the title to expose the date is a silly UX.

Backblaze is $5/month (per machine) and let's you grab single files (or directories) from your backup if you want.

I found the use of slightly different shades of the same color to differentiate data bars to be incredibly frustrating, which made me assume this was written by a marketer and not someone with a technical background. Fair or not, that instantly made the message less interesting to me.

Anyways, just an interesting take on another type of factor that can impact recruiting messaging.

    The one thing they're not making any more of in this world is land.

    $3.2M isn't much money for a very large number of people in this world.

As a small team (1 - 10), I would be willing to pay in the neighborhood of $5/user/month. Once we get up to $50/month, I'd like to see volume discounts.

I can't imagine I'd ever pay more than a $100/month for a team of any size, because at that price, I should probably just have an in-house dev develop a similar system.

This is purely anecdotal as I don't have real numbers to back it up, but it seems to me like every airline has been on the edge of going out of business for as long as I can remember. I don't think it's greed so much as there is virtually no margin in airlines to begin with.

Because reclining the chair is using it in a predictable way and as it was intended to be used. It's a bit like laying your laptop in the middle of the freeway and then claiming people can't run it over.

Liability would almost certainly be yours alone. The passenger who reclined their seat was using the seat as it was intended, so there is no offense there. The airline would likely argue that they never made any guarantees as to the protective nature of that pocket, nor did they tell you to put your laptop in there.

I saw his one-man show when it came to town about a year ago. After watching him alone on stage for 90 minutes, I have no doubt that he is still "with it" enough to not only comprehend modern tech (if that's what we're calling Facebook), but to provide this level of insight and understanding.

Chalkfly.com - Detroit, MI

Detroit-based start-up (funded, stable, paying competitive salaries), is looking for experienced Magento developers.

Chalkfly.com is looking for amazing, experienced, OO PHP developers with deep Magento experience to join our fast-growing, first-rate development team. As a software developer, you would responsible for end-to-end product development, from architecture, to development, to rollout. You must be comfortable participating in design and code reviews, as well as delivering accurate estimates, providing regular development progress feedback and consistently meeting project deadlines. Our developers are effective at explaining complex ideas and concepts to non-technical team members.

This is a full time position that would work out of our downtown Detroit office. Occasional telecommuting (like one day a week) is on the table, but we really need people who can be in the office most of the time.

Here's our stats:

    Company size: 21
    Current dev team size: 4 
    Stack: LAMP
    Version Control: Git
    Bug Tracking: Github Issues
    Project Management: Basecamp
    Mac or PC: Dealer's choice. We currently have 3 devs on mac and 1 on PC.
    Office style: Open floor plan, collaborative working environment, very casual. We're in The M@dison Building, which is home to about 20 other start-ups.
    Dev methodologies: We borrow elements of various frameworks, but in general we work in monthly sprint cycles, daily stand-ups, weekly overview meetings.

I think you're describing a sales guy versus a programmer. In my experience, "businesses guys" are actually professional bullshit detectors. It's one of the reasons you want them in on the actual contract negotiations. A skilled business guy has an amazing way of boiling things down, spotting inconsistencies, and seeing where relationships are likely to fall apart.

Sales guys on the other hand are professional bullshit machines. They heavily rely on being able to read your tone and state of mind so that they can tailor the message to whatever they think will resound with you the most. And that's way easier to do on the phone.

Detroit-based start-up (funded, stable, paying competitive salaries) looking for experienced Magento developers.

Chalkfly.com is looking for an amazing, experienced, OO PHP developer with deep Magento experience to join our fast-growing, first-rate development team. As a software developer, you would responsible for end-to-end product development, from architecture, to development, to rollout. You must be comfortable participating in design and code reviews, as well as delivering accurate estimates, providing regular development progress feedback and consistently meeting project deadlines. Our developers are effective at explaining complex ideas and concepts to non-technical team members.

This is a full time position that would work out of our downtown Detroit office. Occasional telecommuting (like one day a week) is on the table, but we really need people who can be in the office most of the time.

Here's our stats:

    Company size: 19

    Current dev team size: 5 (and hiring as fast as we can find good people)

    Stack: LAMP

    Version Control: Git

    Bug Tracking: Github Issues

    Project Management: Basecamp

    Mac or PC: Dealer's choice. We currently have 2 devs on mac and 1 on PC.

    Office style: Open floor plan, collaborative working environment, very casual.

    Dev methodologies: We borrow elements of various frameworks, but in general we work in monthly sprint cycles, daily stand-ups, weekly overview meetings.

    Hours: The dev team likes to have people here by 10am most days.

If you're interested in finding out more, shoot me an email at evan@chalkfly.com.

"...just 'cause the owner was still staying there."

Honestly, my favorite part of a hotel is not having to share a living space with a stranger.

Detroit-based start-up (funded, stable, paying competitive salaries) looking for experienced Magento developers.

We are looking for an amazing, experienced, OO PHP developer with deep Magento experience to join our fast-growing, first-rate development team. As a software developer, you would responsible for end-to-end product development, from architecture, to development, to rollout. You must be comfortable participating in design and code reviews, as well as delivering accurate estimates, providing regular development progress feedback and consistently meeting project deadlines. Our developers are effective at explaining complex ideas and concepts to non-technical team members.

This is a full time position that would work out of our downtown Detroit office. Occasional telecommuting (like one day a week) is on the table, but we really need people who can be in the office most of the time.

Here's our stats:

    Company size: 17

    Current dev team size: 3 with a 4th starting soon

    Stack: LAMP

    Version Control: Git

    Bug Tracking: Github Issues

    Mac or PC: Dealer's choice. We currently have 2 devs on mac and 1 on PC.

    Office style: Open floor plan, collaborative working environment, very casual.

    Dev methodologies: We borrow elements of various frameworks, but in general we work in monthly sprint cycles, daily stand-ups, weekly overview meetings.

How many days of vacation did you personally take in the past year?

For-pay services have an incentive not to do something with my data that upsets me enough to leave. Let's say an advertising company offers eTrade 50-cents for info on every trade I make. That's free money for eTrade right up until I, as the client, decide that's intrusive and take my business elsewhere. Now eTrade is out my $10/trade, let alone the 50-cents.

But you don't have that leverage with a free service. To them, (in the long run) making some money at the cost of pissing off their customers is better than making no money at all.

This looks really cool but I couldn't shake that feeling of, "If you're not paying for it, you're the product."

I didn't feel any better about that when I saw that Google was one of their major investors.

Still hoping for the best though.

"And abhor even more the money spent on college football (e.g., the budget for our university library was being slashed so much that frequently used journals were having their subscriptions cut, while at the same time the football team got a new stadium and dorm)."

The irony is that at almost every university, the football team is a profit center, not a cost center. It' entirely likely that your library would have had deeper budget cuts without that football team.

"Football/basketball players are paid obscene amounts of money, while what they do does not have any real value."

Serious question: Do you consider entertainment to have a real value for society?

"Never trust anyone over 30" is a bit of a rallying cry among musicians. It's often attributed Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Jerry Rubin and a few others during the 1960's, but I'm not sure anyone really knows who said it first. I would guess that people are actually referencing that whole movement when they put it in the Craigslist ads rather than setting a hard and fast restriction.

Or maybe it's a bunch of 22-year-olds who just want to hang out with people their own age.

"A college kid would never have come up with what I'm building, because they wouldn't realize the problem I'm trying to solve actually exists."

This is such a key point. Sometimes it takes years, if not decades, of experience to even know that the problem exists. Put another way, if the problem can be solved by a 22-year-old with no experience in the field, there's a good chance they've misunderstood the problem.

The most recent episode of In Beta with Gina Trapani and Kevin Purdy (http://5by5.tv/inbeta/70) discusses the current state of WP and specifically addresses Ghost. While they make a sound argument that WP has become a bloated mess compared to its humble origins, they point out that Ghost isn't terribly accessible to the general public because it's node.js based and can be complex to configure. Probably not a huge deal if you know what you're doing, but even as a full time web dev, I don't have a node.js server of my own to screw around with.

These days I bill like a lawyer: Up to two hours free of charge as a consultation and then the clock starts at my full rate. If you're not OK with that, you don't value my time enough for this relationship to work out.

And that's a much more generous strategy than say a plumber where you have to pay just to get him to listen to what the problem is.

But it's all supply and demand. Lawyers and plumbers who bill like that typically have more work than they can handle. I didn't when I started out as a developer, so I worked long hours for little pay for bad clients. Those were rough times, but looking back, those experiences are really what led me to being successful later on.

One of the things I'm not sure the general public is aware of is that there's a very high stakes war going on behind the scenes between Amazon and much the e-commerce ecosystem. As the author points out, Amazon is good at what they do; maybe too good.

If you're a small e-com retailer, selling your goods on Amazon can seem like the magic bullet you've been looking for. They can provide you a huge audience overnight. And if you have a good product at the right price, you're probably going to do well on Amazon. The danger is when you do well enough that Amazon takes notice, because if you're little slice of the industry starts to look too profitable, Amazon will come in and start selling in your category direct. And they're bigger than you and can do it on a smaller margin. Entire verticals can be consumed in a matter of weeks if Amazon decides to set up shop next to you. Amazon is really good at destroying the retailers that they helped in the beginning.

But it doesn't stop there. Once Amazon squeezes out the small players, they start acting like Walmart with the manufacturers. They start dictating margins and pushing down prices. And they can do it because they've monopolized the distribution channel. Amazon isn't making a lot of friends with manufacturers lately.

My point is that while this may be a clear win for consumers, it's a very sticky situation for manufacturers, distributors and retailers. If you go to most of the major e-commerce trade shows, you'll find that people are actually quite fearful of Amazon. They're looking for ways to widen the gap, not close it. Heck, in the past year I've actually started to get contractual obligations from some major manufacturers that I CAN'T sell on Amazon. They're mandating that all of their retailers keep their product off of there because they're scared shitless that it's just a matter of time before Bezos starts dictating their margins.

For better or worse, I do think Amazon will be successful to some degree with this project, but there's going to be a lot of behind the scenes fighting to get there.

Some sort of verified caching protocol. Like mixing together the Wayback Machine and a notary.

This is specifically what services like Kickstarter were designed to address. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that crowd-funding services are viable funding models, especially for low budget projects like this.

This feels like deception for the sake of deception and I would have been among those who were pissed had I signed up.

"We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension."

Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. If you solve our natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who look and act like us, you'll probably have solved racism, sexism, ageism and just about every other -ism. I' not saying we shouldn't challenge this instinct, but I also don't think we should be surprised that white, 25-year-old, male founders have a tendency to hire other white males in their mid-twenties.

While I can appreciate your situation, those last two paragraphs read with the same kind of anecdotal logic that lead people to the conclusion that vaccinations do more harm than good.