frgotmylogin

I'm a programmer at a Fortune 500 company, and it's a similar situation. I feel very lucky. I do wish I had as much knowledge of our day to day financial situation as all of the startup guys on here though, just to know where things are headed.

I noticed the same thing a while back with DoorDash when trying to order some Cracker Barrel breakfast. It was something like a 30-40% hike across the board. I emailed DoorDash to ask what was going on with the prices and got a super misleading response along the lines of "our partner restaurants set their own prices" [1]- basically deflecting the blame back at the restaurant. So I emailed Cracker Barrel, and they are not (or were not at the time) partnered with any delivery service.

[1] actual text from email: "As stated in our Terms and Conditions, the prices for menu items on DoorDash may differ from the prices on the restaurant's own menu. For example, our restaurant partners are responsible for setting the price of their menu items on DoorDash, and some restaurant partners choose to set different prices than they offer for in-store diners."

Ha, absolutely nothing. I'm sure there are people working on it, not sure if they are in the pre-employment job screening space.

I wonder how long it will be before someone competent starts doing this and including deanonymized data from places like HN, Reddit, Twitter accounts without your real name attached, phone location, etc.

Do they have them out to try in the store?

We were having the same problem with cat litter

This would be cool mixed with kind of a flipped free shipping thing, where I pay USPS $x a year and they deliver me up to y packages a week/year/whatever with no additional charge. You give the reference number to the vendor, the shipping comes up as free, they print a label and ship.

Let me know if you do it!

A nonprofit that mails to lists based on the same thing, but with a postcard listing common scams would be pretty cool. I was shocked by how much of this stuff I got when I bought a house.

My first job out of school was fixing someone's bright idea of writing a few dozen ecommerce websites with Access as a data store. They stored the CC# so it could be run later as a card not present purchase. It was nightmare fuel, this was in ~2006.

Currently nothing but Hass.io on a raspberry pi with an assortment of z-wave and zigbee sensors and a few wifi enabled light bulbs.

How do you like the D-Links? I've got two plus one of their video recorder appliances, and have found them to be completely reliable but the app is hot garbage. Any tips?

The enterprise project I have been on for quite a while now is overengineered, but the overengineering was done by some really smart people with years of overengineering experience. It works and isn't quite an unmaintainable, dangerous monster, but as someone who is very much in the short, simple, readable code camp, it drives me nuts.

I love sticking with budget phones, you can take risks on trying different manufacturers. My last two phones were a Nokia and a Xiaomi, both were good phones and I never would have tried them if they weren't ~$180.

Inland coastal Alabama, same deal. It's great to know how to catch turtles, snakes and lizards with my bare hands. Doesn't come up much while developing software but it definitely balanced out the Super Nintendo time growing up.

They did this with a sort of mixed indoor/outdoor mall in my city, it turned out well and about a third of it is still a shopping center with GameStop, Subway, clothing stores, etc. - it appears to be doing pretty well

It was a lot of stuff like

- Get a list of x in a table var

- while loop through x to build another list of y

- while loop through y and update z one row at a time

All of that rather than updating with a join.

Some of his other patterns were reusing variables for different things in a proc, using inefficient functions in a way that they executed once per row before the result set was really reduced much, nesting those functions, and using loops any chance he got.

You'd open up these slow, 500-700 line monster procs and have to figure out what they were doing and refactor them, but it was nearly illegible and there were no tests for them. Really a great reminder of what happens when code reviews aren't done.

Some of this is probably SQL server specific, but we were having some scaling issues on legacy code earlier this year and I got a lot of bang for my buck checking for these things before diving in to specific issues:

- code with a high row count table variable when a temp table would give more accurate execution plans due to better cardinality estimates.

- ultra-complex join criteria with lots of OR logic that performed better as a UNION

- lazy function calling, where a developer used a function that did more than they needed and could be replaced with a simple join to a table

- looped calls to insert procs that could be done in bulk

There was another entire category of problem that I guess would be described as "I hate sets" and was mostly attributable to one former employee. These were recognizable immediately upon opening the code and were a nightmare.

I'm also in a hurricane area - I understand, use, and really like the NHC maps as well. I'm not sure what those red cones in the slideshow were, but the definitely weren't NHC graphics.

I think that would be a pretty big cone. You might end up with the situation where nobody takes it seriously - "oh I was in the last 5 cones this year and didn't get a single drop of rain" type of attitude.

You are spot on about the weird stuff being down rabbit holes of suggestions. There is also a lot of weird/disturbing stuff you can search up in their IDE/level editor app thing. The rules I put in place for my kid were:

-grown ups do any content searching in the level editor

-ask before you try new games

-no games that haven't been voted on much

-chat filter stays on

Allowing the host to unmute participants is pretty invasive too. First time someone did that to me I was floored.

You do get a personal meeting ID, but most people already have their phone number memorized. Being able to just instantly start a meeting from anywhere comes in handy.

Agreed on the default video thing. I'm in no rush to reactivate my camera though, and "Surprise! You are on camera!" isn't something I give software a do-over on.

I've found that a good way to lower the hassle on starting a zoom is to create a permanently open meeting with your phone number as the meeting ID. Then it is as simple as pasting/typing a link into an IM conversation and clicking it, and if you aren't at your own machine, it's easy to just type it. My only complaint with zoom is the lack of a prompt before launching video. I, and most of my coworkers, have uninstalled and taped over our webcams because of it.