canremember

Honestly, chess fits your description perfectly. Easy to learn the rules, rich gameplay, and easy to play on the go.

True micropayments integrated in browser would be amazing. Imagine instead of ads or subscriptions, you could pay a few pennies for an article. It would revolutionize online content, in a good way. Nobody would be willing to pay for clickbait type stuff, but I think people would be willing to pay for quality content and journalism.

I looked at the book reviews yesterday. Tons of one star review, but if you sorted by verified purchases the vast majority of them disappeared. Honestly, to minimize gaming Amazon might just have to start restricting reviews to verified purchases, even though that has its own set of drawbacks.

As another Oracle anecdote, a family member worked for IBM (this was about 15 years ago) as a software engineer and then as (what is now called) a sales engineer/technical consultant, where he'd travel to client sites and demo IBM products, answer technical questions, etc.

He said Oracle was without a doubt the most unethical competitor they ever had. IBM had internal guidelines on acceptable limits for gifts, meals etc you could give to clients, but Oracle sales people had no such qualms and would sometimes essentially bribe VPs/whoever had the power to make the purchasing decision.

IBM was certainly no saint (this family member ended up leaving a few years later), but he was astounded by how ethically untethered Oracle as a company was.

If you're interested in free food, I recommend checking out www.freefoodguy.com. He's a blogger who's sole mission in life seems to be finding free food deals and sharing them via his email list.

How was Dropbox mean?

My family signed up for Amazon Prime fairly early on. We all knew that, given Amazon's reputation as a loss-leader, one day the price would rise. It certainly wasn't sustainable--in addition to two day shipping on almost everything, it gave you access to Amazon's Netflix clone. But for us, it worked as Amazon wanted. We ended up buying much more from Amazon than we otherwise would have because of Prime.

Do you think learning web development in its current form is a good idea? The scenario I'm concerned about is spending a few years learning web dev only to discover my skills are obsolete since the world has gone mobile.

Thanks, this is good advice. I'd consider an internship, but I'm concerned that most of the good ones wouldn't accept me since I'm still lacking in several areas. I'm willing to put in the work to learn quickly on the job, but I feel like I'd probably fail a technical interview.

I'm a CS student, but the fact that I've made so little progress with the confines of the classroom is what made me contemplate this idea in the first place. I could try for an internship during the summer, but I'm concerned about getting a good one. I'm smart, willing to work hard, and love to learn, but I feel I'm at a disadvantage since my skills are still so limited.