Shopify is a company that handles large amounts of customer data.
They've sponsored a very positively spun interview on monetizing such data by spamming people via SMS, "sweepstakes", promoting payday loans and other activities that I consider deeply unethical (even if legal).
I'd think that if Shopify was a reputable firm, they wouldn't want their name within a mile of this scumbag. Particularly when he's being portrayed in a positive light.
It's really annoying that this horseshit comment continues to get moderated up.
thechangelog jumped to an unreasonable, and uninformed conclusion, that implies pretty horrible things about me. He knew literally nothing about the existing circumstances, yet felt free to accuse me of being the sort of person who would destroy my wife's work on a whim.
It's ridiculous that any intelligent person would up-arrow his attack on my character.
Fuck Alex for jumping to the worst possible conclusion, despite having no reason to do so.
And fuck each and every one of you who upvoted his baseless defamations.
I haven't read S&W, but I have three main reasons for avoiding that word:
1) If it's really prestigious, I shouldn't have to mention that fact.
2) If I want you to think it's prestigious, I should show, not tell. It was given 3 michelin stars and won best film at cannes, or whatever the case may be.
3) It's possible that many from the target markets in Asia/Europe/etc won't know what it means anyway. As such, I try not to use complex language unless it's crucial to the message.
edit: not to mention, prestige is subjective. Some people think a glowing writeup in a particular publication is prestigious. Others think it's noise. It's hard to claim either group is wrong.
I couldn't get past the point where he's going on about doing lead-gen for payday loans.
I care about creating value far more than I care about making money. In my eyes, $500k earned by creating value is far sweeter than $5m acquired by helping loan sharks.
I'm not sure if this guy had anything interesting to say, but I'm canceling my wife's shopify account based on this interview. I'd recommended them on the basis that they were simple and not horrible... but I don't want a nickel going to this guy.
he can have his payday loans... but he can't have my dollars too.
I just went to email you, to discuss a few of the additional ideas we had in our original plan, see if there might be a way to differentiate it sufficiently from RedLaser and Google Goggles to make it work.
Unfortunately, I can't find your email address :-)
This one is bittersweet, as we had the idea, the staff, and the time and money to implement it, but chose not to, because we substantially underestimated the size of the market.
Where by 'we' I mean 'I'. It's completely my fault that RedLaser was allowed to win this market. I killed the project.
It's nice to see that we were at least somewhat correct on the general goodness of the concept, though.
I'm skeptical that it's possible for six billion people to make fast and measurable changes in atmospheric composition and land use without endangering the hydrology of the planet, and creating hard-to-predict ripples on the food and water supply.
As such, I advocate policies that attempt to reduce the rate of these changes when possible, until those changes are quite well understood.
I don't worry about "Earth" at all. I worry about food and water security, as well as the enormous waste of resources that will occur if the hydrology of a continent undergoes rapid change and leaves cities, farms and other infrastructure placed inappropriately for the changed climate.
I view this as a conservative and skeptical position.
I find it confusing, and somewhat offensive, that I'm asked by those who advocate unfettered change to prove that their change is deadly, when in most other cases, the person advocating mass change is instead asked to prove that it's safe. It seems particularly problematic, because I'm not advocating a complete halt to the change, but rather a decrease in the derivative of the rate of change.
The problem is pretty well known, with (I believe) several companies selling heaters that activate in cold weather.
I was even able to find articles that mentioned the issue dating back to Q4 2000.
As such, I'm not sure why this is all over the internet today. Somebody ignored a well-known issue and bought the wrong product. It worked as expected.
No 'about us' page. I was confused for a moment when the 'contact us' page started with 'to view our company's website, click here'. I thought I was on the company website.
Having multiple languages seems a bit odd if large swaths of content aren't translated. "Cette page est disponible seulement en anglais" being followed by an entire page of English text doesn't help credibility.
Your logo seems like it'd fail pretty hard for individuals with red-weak color blindness.
The 'deniable video operation' flowchart is more complex than what I want, for understanding how it works.
If the thing is supposed to be deniable, I might prefer a plain black plastic, or aluminum enclosure to a giant DV logo'd one.
The targeting seems very broad... and some of it seems a bit misinformed. As an example, there are substantial SEC rules when it comes to communications and the records thereof, but you have two trading-related examples in commercial.
I'd like a clear example of how it is that:
a) if my wife asks me for my password, she will get the pictures of her and I... not of the woman I met on ashleymadison. (purely hypothetical, honey.)
b) if a government asks me for my password, they will get something plausible, but not everything...
I guess it's just not clear to me what it's really good at, except that it's a camera, and a hard drive, and it uses ogg vorbis and chunks to... do something.
edit: It also conflates what appear to be the two major features (encryption, and data hiding), and it's not obvious to me what quality the resulting video will be, nor what I'd have to do if I wanted to use it in broadcast.
Also, I felt like I had to read a lot of the website to know what the product really did. I might've got the gist faster if the front page said something like: Deniable Video. * Records, Encrypts and Hides Your Video. I really didn't know what "personal video security that's loyal to you" meant.
The reality is that I'd never just use StackOverflow to find candidates, so these are people who have other ways to find out about the positions, and apply.
I'd rather see the candidate spend the money on an ACM membership (or similar professional development) than spend it simply trying to reach me.
That said, I think I now have a pretty good idea of the value proposition as it might exist for other employers, but it seems clear that the equation doesn't balance for me. Thanks for clarifying your argument, I appreciate it.
Stackoverflow Careers is based on the premise that it's worth $5,000/yr to me, plus $99/yr/candidate for the candidate, to share that information.
Do you really see that much value, versus simply asking all candidates 'Are there any publicly accessible technical forums or mailing lists that you participate on a regular basis? If so, are you willing to share your username?'
I prefer the latter, because it's a question I can ask all candidates, and it doesn't cost me $5,000 to ask. Nor does it cost you $99 to answer.
> encourage employers to view the account and see what sort of questions and answers the candidate is posting on the site
If a candidate feels that there is a very good, publicly available demonstration of their knowledge (be it a project they're involved in, some open-source software, or participation in a technical forum or mailing list), they already have the ability to simply point that out to me in their cover letter, or other communications.
> It's meant to provide another dimension to assess the candidate
This is precisely the problem. It creates an additional dimension, but one that exists only for a subset of candidates and isn't easy to evaluate fairly. That seems likely to create an imbalanced hiring process.
Why should I pay for that? (or implicitly ask the candidate to pay to give it to me?)
Looking at Stackoverflow Careers from a hiring perspective, I don't really understand the point.
If suddenly 20% of my candidates have a CV that includes some "reputation" score, and other information from a programming website, what am I to do with that?
Does it mean they spend time on stackoverflow instead of working? Does it mean they're a genius who knows all? Does it mean they simply ask and answer a lot of simple questions, but are useless on complex matters? Do I really want to try to figure that out?
In the end, I want to do apples to apples comparisons, and I'm not sure how SO Careers fits in there.
Are there suggested Best Practices for how to integrate SO Careers into a candidate search? Perhaps somebody can enlighten me if I'm missing something, but I don't get it.
The only time I really choose my words super-carefully is when I'm working on promotional copy. So that's the angle that I approached it from.