wallywax

And $3.99/item 1-day shipping, which I find comes in handy quite often.

And Nigeria and Romania.

E-commerce that deals with physical goods does have a time delay, so I think you're really trying to say that it's not a good fit for digital goods sales rather than that it's not a good fit for e-commerce...

It's not just cheap internet access that has slow upstream. I have the second from the top tier of service from the fastest ISP in my area (a major and very affluent suburb of an extremely large US city) and my upstream is only 2mbps. Moving to the top tier, which costs over $100/mo, would only get me 4mbps. It's annoying for sure. But, that said, I do video conferences on a regular basis from my home office and it works perfectly fine. I feel like that guideline is both unrealistic in the US market, and also unnecessary.

The "LinkedIn is useless" meme that seems popular here really baffles me, to be honest. Yes, there are many LinkedIn features that I don't get value from (including the news feed and endorsements). But I've found it invaluable for the one core feature it was built on: keeping in touch with your professional contacts. I'm not going to add all my former co-workers, the interesting people I talk to at conferences and counterparts at other companies on Facebook. I don't care what their kids are doing, or where they went on vacation. But I do want to know if they move to some other interesting job, find out if they're hiring or, most importantly, reach them in the future if I would like their advice or help. With my LinkedIn network, if I ever want to reach someone at Company X, whether it be to talk about a job opportunity or to tell them their API is broken, all I have to do is search that company name. Up comes a list of people at that company, and how connected I am to them. If I don't know anyone who currently works there, I probably know someone who does, and can get an introduction.

Before LinkedIn, I'd take business cards or exchange emails with contact information. I'd try to remember to enter it into my addressbook, or file it somewhere I can find it later. Good luck searching it, and if you do find someone and they've moved to a new job, the contact info you have might be totally out of date anyway.

It isn't just a hyped up resume. A great Github profile, blog or Twitter account does little to replace LinkedIn's functionality. If you're looking at it as just a way to be found by recruiters, you're doing it wrong. It's about keeping in touch with a broad network of professional contacts. Not people I talk to every day, but people I like, respect, and know I can reach out to if I need help (and vice versa). Despite all the annoying things they do, I find it extremely useful.

For a while (not sure if they're still doing it), they were checking IDs for multi-day ticket holders at Disneyland in California (no fingerprint readers there). It slowed the lines down massively. I've been to both parks many times, and the fingerprint readers are immensely faster than checking IDs. For annual passes, they scan the pass and your picture comes up on the screen, but that's not as practical for a 3-day ticket.

They do it to curb sharing of multi-day tickets, which is prohibited by their terms & conditions. It's a relatively quick way to check that the person who first used the ticket is the same person who returned with it, rather than someone they sold/rented it to. Selling or "renting" multi-day passes for some fraction of their days is a common way to make money in the areas around theme parks (and a common way for people to try to save money getting in). I don't think this is all that sinister.

I personally would rather have thumbprint scans than have to wait as each guest's photo ID is checked every time they enter.

> This means a project written and signed off circa 2011 requires mandatory engineering costs just to continue running in a functioning and supported fashion.

Funny (?) thing is, as an engineer at Google, stuff like that happened to me ALL THE TIME. I don't even want to think about how much of my time was spent simply migrating to the "latest greatest" replacement for some critical service that was being deprecated.

Could be. My account dates from 2006, and my userid is sub 50k.

Hmm. Perhaps that explains why I got an email from them saying my account was compromised. Specifically, it said "Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We've reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account." It then went on to imply that I was phished, which is extremely unlikely (not only am I incredibly paranoid about that kind of thing, but I haven't actually entered my Twitter password on any website in a long time. I just use the mobile app on my phone.)

Totally agree. My home automation system (a pretty extensive Control4 installation) works completely fine when my internet connection is down (except remote access of course), and that would be an absolute requirement for anything I'd install in the future.

It's amazing. If that's what you want.

If you want kids, have them. That's great, I'll be genuinely happy for you, and I'll come to their birthdays, graduations, and weddings.

We don't want kids of our own, and are very satisfied and fulfilled with our lives. So please, try to understand that, and be happy for us in return.

I do this, and another "silly" thing I do is when I copy something to the clipboard, I often hit cmd-c three or four times quickly. I don't remember why or when I picked up this habit. I imagine maybe at some point I had a system or program that didn't always register the copy the first time? Or maybe it's just completely random. But I don't even notice I'm doing it until someone points it out and asks me about it.

Fast food ads do not use plastic food, at least in the US. Yes, it is carefully styled, but it is real food.

Speak for yourself. My happiness went up massively when I finally left Seattle for California. And my feeling about that hasn't changed over time.

The press room site is not their main site, and I believe is not even run by Facebook. Many companies outsource their investor relations and press websites. None of Facebook's primary site is running ASP or anything Windows-related (they use PHP). It's pretty safe to say that none of the people developing Facebook's main site, services and mobile apps are behind the press site...

I can just imagine the HN article when someone tries to delete his Facebook account because he disagrees with some new feature, and they won't do it for 48 hours. I've been on the receiving end of "DELETE MY ACCOUNT!!!1!!1" requests, and I know those people wouldn't respond well to "wait two days or pay up."

I worked at Google for a long time and never encountered anyone with the title "architect" or with a similar job role.

It seems to fluctuate. I don't track it closely, but I know that there have been times I've bought machines and the memory from Apple was close enough in price to OWC or Crucial that I just went ahead and bought it from them for the convenience. And there have been times that it was so out of whack I didn't even consider it. It's always more expensive, but not always this bad.

That screenshot is NOT from 1995. It has a reference to zShops, which didn't launch until 1999.

Vic reports to the CEO, so Larry is the only "honcho" above Vic.

During the interview process, it is not clear which bucket you're being dropped in. Or indeed even that there are two buckets. This may have an impact on whether someone would accept an offer or not.

I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home, except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD).

To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily basis.

Are things really at a state where 35k is considered an impressive salary for a journalist in the US? I know programmers are spoiled, but I was kind of shocked at the implication that that was thought of as big bucks. Sad.

Programming in your spare time is much less attractive when your employer claims to own all the code you write.