tmarman

California represents ~15% of GDP and 11% of the agricultural output including 33% of vegetables and 75% of fruits and nuts. Just saying.

I also despise the appeal to some false authority. The entire premise for the argument seems to be, "well, I was a nurse and had to go in even when I was at risk, so they should do the same". The fact that she was a nurse or felt a duty to work has absolutely no weight in the argument.

I have been using Feedly since Google Reader was shut down. Use it across iPhone, iPad and web. I also use it to capture other articles and bookmarks on my boards.

I have subscribed to Pro for awhile but mostly for search and a few other things. I think they do have feed limits on the free tier.

I’ve tried and used a lot of different readers over the last 20 years but for me the most important is sync of read status across my consumption devices.

I have a lot of feeds across many different categories. HN, lobsters, dotnetkicks and a bunch of other high volume aggregators make up one category. Then I have feeds for startup/VC blogs, engineering blogs, some hyper local stuff, and some other non tech categories I’m involved in (food, wine, etc)

On all sites/apps I’ve built offering SSO, we’ve gone out of our way to support linking of accounts and detecting existing accounts when claims like emails are found. Also allowing for merges after the fact.

I would consider this a best practice when iffering any “ sign in with...”

Came to say this.

Of course, having NFLX RSUs over the last 10 yrs would be worth more than the salary increase, just saying.

... except the choice is not a dollar now vs. a dollar of stock in 4 years. RSUs are calculated as part of your total annual compensation the same was as salary. A grant of $100k RSUs that vest over 4 yrs would be more the equivalent of $25k more in salary, not $100k bonus.

Yes, there's the diversification problem but it's not like you have that same money upfront to invest in anything you want.

RSUs are more akin to salary (i.e., your RSU grant / vesting period = annual salary increase) than a bonus where you get the cash upfront. So yeah, if the choice was $100k signing bonus or $100k RSU, the analysis is different - but that's not how they work.

One of the key benefits of RSUs is that they are priced and granted upfront and can appreciate (and earn dividends) before they vest.

A more concrete example: let's imagine you joined AAPL Jan 1, 2019 and were granted $100k in RSUs. You'd get 667 shares, and vest 83 shares every six months. If the stock doesn't move at all, that's the same as the additional salary (though salary is better since it's prorated evenly as opposed to bi-annual "bonuses").

Of course, the stock prices don't stay the same... and that's where the potential comes in. In the last year, AAPL has doubled. In that example, you would have vested 83 shares at $200 ($16,675) in the summer and 83 shares last week at $300 ($25k) vs. $25k salary in the first year.

In the same period, FB and GOOG have gone up 50%, AMZN has gone up 15%, NFLX (which doesn't do RSUs to my knowledge, only stock options) went up 6%. In all of those cases, you'd be better off in Y1 with the RSU grant.

Obviously, yes, there's downside risk to that too. The floor is still much higher tha stock options which can easily be worth nothing if underwater... but when you factor in that this is 20-50% of your total compensation, that upside/risk seems worth it.

Every single employment offer I've sent or received that included equity stated so in the offer letter, expressed either as a % or an absolute number of shares.

I tried it on a couple of sites I have with ~1k users using pretty heavily. I made $1.50 USD over a couple of months, and most complained that it was being blocked/giving security warnings when visiting the site.

Not that I am making much from ads either, but it just really wasn't worth it. Affiliate revenue, while small on a grand scheme, was much more effective .

It's also misleading and intellectually dishonest to discuss the amount of income tax paid in the context of rate while ignoring the underlying income.

E.g., "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)."

Ok, except this ignores the amount _earned_ by the top 1% (avg $678,359) vs. the bottom 90% (avg $35,083). [1]

And of course, higher wage earners are also likely to have disproportionately more wealth, as it's a lot easier to save, invest and otherwise maximize growth and minimize tax exposure when you have more cash available.

[1] https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-rose-for-the-bottom-90-percen...

32-64gb RAM. That alone is why I haven't upgraded my now 5+ yr old MacBook Pro.

I am not making light of the situation AT ALL - but it's sort of weirdly ironic that the link goes to a 404 page in their "Social Responsibility" section.

They're not, that's a default message.

Nice. Same here.

This makes me happy, and hopefully it's just available as a base part of Visual Studio / part of all MSDN subscriptions. I loved Xamarin in principle before, but the price tag was steep.

I inherited a Xamarin app on one project - and while there were certainly some issues here and there, the promise of native cross-platform app development and shared C# libraries is pretty compelling.

I said a few years ago that this should happen, so glad to see it actually come to pass! http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...

As a former Hamachi user and LastPass user/advocate, I had the exact same reaction when I saw this.

From my perspective, I think limiting QPM is better than limiting the number of documents that you can index. In my current case, I have millions of "documents" (in a Lucene sense of documents) but relatively low usage. Obviously, my goal long-term is to increase the usage. So being able to pay to index a lot of documents but limit the resources (i.e., VM size, but not storage size) to search would be the best way to scale.

In theory, the more users I have the more $ I have to scale the search.

The solution I'm currently using (mostly because SQL Azure doesn't support Full-Text Search) is Lucene.NET (which is still on a very old version but supposedly 4.8 is coming) and AzureDirectory (which leverages Blob storage). It's clunky, but it works... at least for the scale I use it at currently. I would love to be able to use Azure Search and scale it up again just like with all my other services.

My main problem with this is that a standard instance is $125/mo for anything beyond the free limits (10k documents, 50mB). It would be great to see pricing that followed, say, Azure Websites or SQL pricing... $20-40/mo for smaller instances (smaller by either search volume or index size).

I mean, after all, if SQL Azure supported Full Text Indexes, this wouldn't be critical either.

This is a truly bizarre post. I especially don't understand how they create myths that at least most people wouldn't think.

Like do people really think Square is not PCI compliant? Maybe they're just trying to do some SEO magic so someone searching for "is Square unreliable" will land there, but it's still odd. Why establish this negative relationship when it maybe/probably doesn't exist?

This doesn't surprise me at all.

My account was banned for "invalid activity" in the timeframe mentioned. The automated emails said they wouldn't even tell me what I supposedly did wrong. I tried appealing and only got an automated email telling me my appeal was denied. I was never able to talk to anyone or get any actual details on wrongdoing. A quick search and you'll quickly realize this happened to a lot of people.

I had something like $200 sitting in my account, which was obviously forfeited. Before this even happened, I removed ads from my blog (which is where the revenue was earned) because it wasn't performing well enough to justify having ads there anyway.

In the end, I didn't really care so much about my forfeited balance - hell, I even volunteered to forfeit it during the appeal if it was in any way associated with invalid activity among other things. The big issue is that this seems to be a lifetime/universal ban. BEFORE WE EVER RAN ADS, an AdSense account with an unrelated corporate tax ID was also banned for "Invalid Activity". The only reason I can conceivably come up with on the ban is that this was also associated with a Google Apps account that I have.

I'm a longtime Google shareholder and supporter, but it's times like this when you realize you can't trust "Don't Be Evil" any more. Ironically, I've spent way more in Google Apps + AdWords than I ever earned with AdSense.

Sigh. Happy "Turn off the Internet" Day everyone!

I was really hoping the "developers" portion would announce a Xamarin acquisition. Maybe at BUILD, but curiously as this talk was going on I got an email from Xamarin telling me to visit them at BUILD.

I think the shift towards cloud services is key here - just like today's OneNote announcement. But more than extending their tooling to competitor's platforms, I think this is a sneaky way to actually make their platform more viable.

Microsoft has tried to pay individual developers to get them to develop for WP, but this is short-sighted and ultimately doesn't address the opportunity cost involved. There are a number of cross-platform mobile tools out there (PhoneGap/Cordova, Telerik Icenium, Xamarin, etc). For a small team, it's damn near impossible to maintain both Android and iOS, let alone Windows Phone.

The fact that Xamarin is compiled to native code and built around Mono makes it a particularly interesting play, since it's probably better suited for games as compared to the HTML 5-based solutions.

I evaluated, and liked, Xamarin a lot. As a .NET developer and part of a very small team, it made a ton of sense for me. The main issue was price - it's very expensive which kind of becomes cost prohibitive for the small team that it is a great fit for.

If Microsoft buys Xamarin and builds it into Visual Studio (or gives it away as part of MSDN/BizSpark), all of a sudden you have a lot of people building mobile apps in C#/.NET - and targeting Windows Phone becomes much, much easier.

Microsoft can't compete straight up with Android or iOS because it doesn't have the same audience that either of those platforms have. But providing tooling that makes our lives easier doing cross platform development is an ingenious trojan horse to getting people to be able to target Windows Phone as well.... or even Windows 8 for that matter since it's just the CLR at the end of the day.

[1] http://tmarman.com/Blog/Post/ba9a711f-dcdb-40b5-bca9-ad6eb5b...

Curation of video is a fine idea, but I wanted to comment on the actual messaging of the site so far.

Something the tone of the copy bothers me. "Let's meet Joe. Joe is an everyday internet user". "Joe is confused!". I don't think most users, even every day users, would describe themselves as "confused" about what to watch. Pandora certainly doesn't position itself as helping music listeners be "less confused".

I think it would be more useful to focus on the benefits, and how/why someone needs this. And while we're on benefits, focusing on real features/benefits has to be more impactful than saying "it takes only a few seconds to login". Having that in there almost detracts from the real point you're trying to get across, which is that you make video recommendations based on your viewing history.

CloudFlare also caused huge performance issues on a side project which I didn't notice until recently. I was consistently getting 1.2s+ responses on a couple of pages, and 600ms on a completely static page.

So, not only did CloudFlare not help on the pages that were truly static, it was actually making everything worse across the board. Hitting the same site with my direct.* DNS cut from 1.2s+ to under 500ms.

CopperEgg and others also kept reporting that my site was down or otherwise super slow when on CloudFlare. I'm not sure if this is because of throttling or something else that might have been in place with the CF service, but either way I was often unable to reproduce the "down"/"more than 6s" that CopperEgg kept reporting.

In short, I think CloudFlare's services sound good in theory, but I'm not sure they have figure out all the issues with scaling and performance yet. So, I cut them out... and certainly not going to be paying any time soon.

SOPA Was the biggest misstep for me, and was the breaking point for me to migrate all my domains elsewhere. I ended up at Namecheap because I liked the way they addressed the situation.

The key to any defamation claim is that it is a false statement. Truth is an affirmative defense.

We just moved from NYC and bought a house out here... it's not NYC, but it's a pretty nice place to live :)

Absolutely. Before I started listening to him on TWiT, I used to just think he was incredibly dumb. He's not - and he knows EXACTRLY what he's doing. He's a MASTER at creating controversy and posting "maybe true, but definitely inflammatory" stuff that will generate more clicks - and he's openly admitted doing this before on TWiT (and apparently this YouTube video too).

Damn, i would have loved to make it but I'm still recovering from surgery. Maybe next time...

Do any of you guys go to the NY Tech Meetup? Or other good local meetups?