fizzbar

The technology should enable better outcomes. But the "good" in question here is your personal health -- its "worth" is infinite.

Re: negotiating your bill: It blows my mind that in America you would approach paying for healthcare the same way you would purchase an expensive car. I don't consider my health to be a luxury good... But in the USA it is priced as such?!

YES. The adjective-overload is too much.

Nice list, thanks for putting it together & sharing.

Slightly OT, for people with email sending experience: I've noticed that some of these lists require you to confirm an email subscription ("double opt-in"), which afaik is standard operating practice for any email list these days.

Yet a couple (Bootstrappist, Web Design Weekly to name a couple at random) don't, they just send a welcome email. Are those two able to avoid the double opt-in requirement by virtue of being larger/older/more established lists, or are they assuming their open rates will keep their deliverability % high, w/o needing the extra confirmation step?

Has the double opt-in requirement become a relic?

No, but what matters to the photographer (our stand-in for software developer) is that there are many people willing to pay them several thousand dollars for those kinds of photos :)

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, while maybe not the "best" book ever written, is highly entertaining...

I'd suspect that in more "mature" working environments the probation period is used more as a fail-safe mechanism, as opposed to being integral to the actual hiring process (which is what it sounds like at FB).

Chris Dixon (and I'm sure many others) talked about it: http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...

Wow. Leverage all those reams of data about us to freeze out fraudsters... Impressive/scary if they pull it off. Hopefully they don't make too many false-positives that result in innocent bystanders being banished from the Kingdom of the Google.

Indeed. I think Youtube's "Hey, you should use your real name!" nag to be a very unsettling sign of things to come. My friends @ the Googleplex also note that there was a large schism internally wrt the whole "real name" push, but that's all heresay anyway.

I found the article I mentioned: http://www.fastcompany.com/3004448/plus-one-proof-google-plu...

The author thinks G+ will be huge by the end of 2013, which is much too short a timeline... but otherwise I think his analysis is spot-on. Some highlights:

"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."

("awesome user experience" is obviously highly subjective and debatable)

"What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead."

and the conclusion:

"I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:

Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”

You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”

Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”"

Interesting that Ilya doesn't seem to apprehend why so many people are uneasy about this.

Way, way too soon to declare G+ a miserable failure. It's the lynchpin to their long term strategy for maintaining their dominance and relevance in Search, which in turn is how their Golden Goose of ad revenue lays its eggs.

Whether us schmuck users like or dislike it is irrelevant. At some point, G+ will be mandatory, as someone in Slate (i think, or maybe on quora somewhere) recently wrote...

Hates it with the fire of a thousand suns. All those ad impressions, all skipping right over the Google-supplied (and now invisible) OS...

Now spending every moment they have with their device basically entirely in Facebook.

Wild speculation: if you're at the "ballpark" stage, you probably have a very vague feature list / overall plan... I suspect if you tighten up the description and scope you'll have more luck (although given how many offers for quotes you just got, perhaps a better method is to just post on YC ;)

Slightly OT, but what do you find so bad about the G+ photo experience?

Chromebooks are just a means to an end: ever more ad impressions.