jdvolz

I use the 4000 and have for the last 8-9 years. They break or otherwise fail to wear or spillage but I've had 4 of them and my hands and wrists don't hurt. If Microsoft ever stops making them I fear for my wrists. Every time I get a new job I bring in my own keyboard or have them get me a 4000 for work and leave mine at home. Best keyboard I've used.

I'm starting to wonder if all this developer time we're saving by using Ruby is leaking out in other places (chiefly, deployment and performance optimization). I'm new to Go, but it seems to me that deployment and optimization are considerably less of a problem while also not costing me much on the development side of things.

I'm not sure, I just think it's worth discussing.

San Francisco SOMA area: Shop It To Me http://shopittome.com/jobs

Seeking: Full time employees

About Us: Do you like pleasing over a million people every single day? We use Rails and a magic dust sprinkling of JRuby to ensure all our subscribers get the very best deals on apparel from around the internet.

Perks:

- Work with awesome programmers. Not a day goes by that I don't learn something new.

- Interesting problems: usually in the form of high email volume challenges.

- A predisposition to A/B testing and using ideas that come from anywhere. My offhanded remarks sometimes make it into production A/B tests!

- We're profitable and we have been since 2007.

- A diverse team: want to work with smart non-programmers? We have them in spades.

Requirements:

- Predisposition towards action

- Eagerness to learn

- Experience with our stack: Ruby on Rails, JRuby, MySQL, Javascript et al.

- Strong object orientated knowledge

- Fluid communication skills (both written and spoken)

Get started:

Email Josh at jvolz@shopittome.com. Include a Github link (or other code examples) and your standard resume. In the email tell me two things: [1] why you are interested in Shop It To Me and [2] Why you think you're a good fit with us.

Millions of our customers are waiting for your good ideas.

Don't forget about the true rent-seeking, taxpayer gouging insurance companies. I find that by the time I've paid my $950 a month in insurance, paying another $40 copay to the doctor just makes me angry. When the cost to have semi-decent insurance is the same cost as leasing a BMW it's no wonder that people don't go to the doctor's.

[Note: I realize it might just be that my insurance is ridiculous. I'm looking into alternatives.]

Shop It To Me, Inc. (http://shopittome.com/) -- FULLTIME ENGINEERING POSITIONS

Location:

San Francisco. We're in the same building as Yammer and Tech Crunch

Who we are:

Shop It To Me is the #1 online personal shopping service. We recommend 2+ billion products to 3+ million active subscribers every month. We are profitable and growing FAST.

Who we need:

- Rails / Ruby developers. Experience and technical excellence in another stack also considered.

- Tinkerers: We A/B test everything because those little tweaks add up.

- Motivated and self directed people who enjoy making something new.

- For more detail check out our jobs page: http://www.shopittome.com/jobs

What we offer:

- Competitive salary & options, medical, dental, vision, a nice selection of free food & drink.

- Sweet rig of your choosing, big monitors, Aeron chairs, big windows, high ceilings, brick walls and a quiet work environment.

- We even let you choose your operating system (Ubuntu, Windows and Mac represented) and IDE (Vim, Textmate and Sublime represented)

- Millions of adoring (mostly female) fans.

- Great company social events

How to apply:

Send a cover letter and resume to Josh (jvolz@shopittome.com) Please include code and english writing samples.

I would like to echo this sentiment. Further, having read the author's book 3 weeks ago, I'm confident even he wouldn't say the uneducated are going to save America. His book is about the alternative education that you can give yourself if you choose to seek it out, particularly around topics that are business centric (sales, marketing, personal branding, networking, etc.).

The point of the book is that he found common themes in the people who didn't have college degrees but who did attain business success.

As the father of a near 3 year old the educational questions weigh heavily on my mind. While this is a great thought experiment ("How could we make it better?") it's scary when given a concrete example that is near and dear to your heart.

I believe:

[1] Each general subject has a core competency that you have to achieve at a minimum.

It's broken into skills and subjects.

Skills includes: programming, reading, writing, functional mathematics (+-*/ and solving word problems), learning (figuring out how the pupil best learns for themselves, or if you want "meta-learning"). I may be missing some skills here.

Subjects include: english, history, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics (both higher level functional math and theory / proofs). I may be missing some subjects here.

[2] on top of #1 you have focused subjects of interest which you should support the pupil learning to whatever depth they are interested in learning. Most people I know upon finding something they are truly interested in become a borderline expert. Are they world class? Maybe or maybe not, but they are certainly journeymen. These range everywhere from finance to car repair to engineering to language learning to musical instruments to basically anything people take an interest in.

If your student can reach functional usage in all parts of #1 earlier that gives them more time to learn different things from #2. Note that the skills and background knowledge learned in #1 are reusable to various subjects in #2.

Circling back to the article: It's a stupid idea to even attempt to prevent a student from mastering anything in #1 above faster. It might help if the peer group instead of being defined by age could be defined by what your interests in #2 are. Then you get cross pollination of students by more advanced students in those same interesting subjects.

Maybe they only do the genotyping and other people can handle other aspects of disease prediction and prevention. Knowing something doesn't predict something else is just as good as knowing it does. In either case you need more information, but you've learned something.

Horrible headline.

I'm now more inclined to buy from 23andMe than I was before because I know they are doing legitimate science and reporting the results without prejudice.

Questions:

[1] Wouldn't it be worth funding this company just to find this out about Parkinson's disease?

[2] Is this a reason for them to pivot or adjust their marketing to talk about what their service does do well?

"tasty, weaponized ice cream treats" - I didn't need more convincing.

That was exactly my point. Just because the Terms of Service of some place says something doesn't make doing that action illegal. The cops won't come to enforce someone's terms of service.

Yeah, I was laughing about how an Acer laptop took down their service and did damage to their network. If I was JSTOR, I wouldn't prosecute just because it makes our company look ridiculous.

Am I the only one who is bothered by the comparison here of "I could be sued for" and "it's illegal for me to"? Just because someone can sue you for it doesn't mean it's illegal. In fact, if someone is suing you, it's likely that it's entirely legal for you to be doing it, otherwise, they would have just called the cops and saved on lawyers.

I second MVPs. The customer acquisition strategy is usually harder than the actual application. I am guessing, and patio11 can back me up if he agrees, that it is much harder to get a teacher to your site in a cost effective manner and then get them to pay than it is to write an application that randomizes a set of words and prints them out.

By concentrating on the hard part you don't waste time doing the usually easier straight forward part you're already skilled at doing, only to find the part (marketing) you know nothing about doesn't work at all.

I don't mean to sound preachy; it's just that I've made this mistake and I don't want anyone else to if they can avoid it.

I think the idea is to get them to the point where you would take their credit card number, and instead say that you're developing the product and ask them if they want to leave their email address. That's how I've read these experiments in the past. Taking someone's credit card number without the intention of selling them something feels fraud-like.

First, subvert the law. Second, make it public (blog post is a good start). Third, start contacting your congressmen. Fourth, attempt to contact Google and indicate that you're getting ready to talk to reporters. Past that, I'm unsure. Can I ensure that any of this will change the law, no. But that's always true.

I'm mostly okay with the law covering this specific situation, but the law could reasonably be amended to allow for an easy way for parents to give consent - instead of companies just denying access based on an arbitrary age.

If they can require my bank to double up on the login confirmations, they can require services to provide a reasonable way to let parents give their consent.

I agree with you that you not only have to break the law but publicly flaunt it. I think the blog post is a good first step in an overall plan, which may include the production of letters to members of congress, or other political persons (Judges?).

My point was that if you see something that is obviously wrong and it's caused by a well intended law you have a responsibility to do something. I admit I'm something of a freedom zealot so my view on what corporations and especially the government can restrict you from doing is broad in general, but clearly this is a good learning opportunity about what to do if you're faced with a "buggy program" (aka a law).

Am I the only person who thinks this is a great way to teach your son about civil disobedience? It's clear this law, while well intended, isn't meant to cover this specific situation. I would argue this type of civil disobedience is the first step in getting the law changed (in this case, to something more reasonable, or requiring that parental consent be available and expedient).

It's important for children to understand that laws aren't written in stone and that if they dislike a law they can work to change it. Feeling helpless and acting helpless isn't in the best interest of anyone's child or our children's generation as a whole.

Thanks for the info, I'll check into it. I agree there are lots of complexities here and finding the "lowest resting state" economically is difficult.

Maybe someone should write a program that does this ...

As someone who is living in Las Vegas NV (no state income tax) I am struggling with where I should move. I just checked and the CA state income tax is 10% for my earning bracket. That's a 10% premium (>$10k per year) when compared to Texas, Nevada and Washington. It's also 1% greater than Oregon. It's 5% greater than CO or NM. Add to that the high cost of living in the valley (particularly housing) and it's difficult to justify moving to California vs. getting a remote job working for a company in California at the same salary.

I see the economic value of working the valley and that the salaries are higher, but they would have to be 30% higher than what I'm earning in Nevada just to offset the increase in costs. Imagine if I actually wanted a raise.

If you tell me that not only is the CA legislature requiring these funds from me, but also requiring corporations with operations in the state to collect sales tax (putting them at a competitive disadvantage to companies that don't have operations there) I'm going to start to wonder about what other anti-business measures might get passed. Anti-business measures are going to cause businesses to move if they can. Less businesses means less chance for jobs which is obviously a negative for someone looking to move to economic opportunity.

Calufa, next time you're in Vegas, send me a message and we'll get a beer. Thank you. You just made something I'm doing vastly more awesome.

I'm eager to hear about the results of your experiment.

Is anyone else going to do something similar with a different framework or language?

Which is strange because I'm pretty sure I watched the Al Pacino version of Heat on Netflix instant in the least 6 months.

Edit: I just checked and it's not on instant, but I'm pretty sure I watched it on instant recently.

You might want to double check "Gladiator" because I'm pretty sure the one on IMDB isn't the one available on Netflix instant. :)

I told my wife this was one of the most important web pages I'd looked at in a long time.

I'm leery of building anything on top of someone else's API. I built on top of an API while also keeping in active contact with the company to let them know what I was doing, going as far as talking directly to their legal department, and they still shut me down when they couldn't handle the volume of usage. And this is in a situation where every marginal use of their API made them money. Collectively I was going to make them revenue of (projected admittedly) $1.2M. Didn't stop them from shutting me down.

Long story short: Building on someone else's API is a recipe for disaster. Are there times when you have to? Sure. But you need to know what you are getting into.

I did and I found some options that have to do with alternative keyboard layouts, usually folding the keyboard in half using a hot key. I was lucky in that I had partial use of my hand and since my injury and surgery were so high up on my arm (as opposed to a direct hand injury) I wasn't as held back as I might have been otherwise.

I also looked into hardware solutions, but those are expensive and more for a person who isn't going to recover (longer learning time, more $$). At the time I also considered seeing if I could write something for my cell phone that would make using the keyboard on it with one hand easier too.

At the time, I certainly would have purchased a software solution if it was reasonably priced (maybe 33-50% the cost of hardware solutions).

What industry do you work in?

As a programmer who tore my right distal radial biceps tendon and had surgery to repair it, I approve this message.

I have been using it myself. I'm also looking into using it for other people as a service. I'm not sure how clever the software itself is but increasing the throughput was fun across as many as 8 slicehost slices. I did discover all of the pitfalls of this type of approach, which I'll cover in my series of blog posts.

My internal process is extremely automated, as in I wasn't involved directly unless something broke.

There is some politics involved also, including Osama Bin Laden stealing my retirement.

I'm working on a new site to sell my designs directly and these blog posts will mysteriously coincide with the launch of that site.

As to CafePress reinstating me: They were letting me use it at lower upload levels and when I got things really going I was a big piece of their API traffic (like half). I'm confident that they will see the value proposition to them, particularly after the projected numbers I worked out yesterday (which I will share in the posts).