benvanderbeek

Actually yeah, we set floors and ceilings. We sometimes use % up or down from competitors but always w/in the floor/ceiling.

I work at a mid sized Amazon 3rd party seller. We reprice automatically. With thousands of SKU's there's no other way to be competitive. There are many layers to consider though, you definitely can't let your whole catalog auto-reprice. Usually sellers just focus on their top X% SKU's and let the rest auto-calculate.

I wonder if we have a price ceiling setup...?

Edit: Yes we have a floor and ceiling. I have no idea what I was thinking.

In terms of being top of their industry, I would think that spending this kind of money on a domain would be accompanied by the conscious or subconscious thought that since we have such an amazing domain, we'll coast and let the traffic/money come in, vs. obscure domains/company names who have to earn traffic by proving their value.

Yeah that's what I was thinking, no way I would invest in those dudes, w/o any ninjas. Get real bro.

99 percent of single cell organisms can't be cultured in a lab, and they're starting to get some DNA sequences from this 99%.

So a researcher says "They really are the dark matter of the biological universe."

I thought the article was going to say that dark matter was related to some unknown form of life.

Psh, looks so fake. How hard is it to put little feathers on that thing?

i've had really good luck w/ all the newborns i've had code for me.

I'm a PC. :(

Chrome is so decent at modifying CSS & previewing the changes, seems like there could be a (simple?) extension that would track changes you make and give you a shareable preview link. Right? Are there other complexities I'm missing?

Added my email's to my profile. Thanks for willingness to share!

totally. i thought it was a 60% obnoxious 40% funny thing to post. i took a risk!

The punchline:

"If Cox is found to have practiced engineering without a license, Ritter said, the likely action would be a letter telling him not to do it again."

HN is missing from this triangle

Personally I like screenshots, and if they're there, I don't see them. If there was a "tour" or "screenshots" or "demo" or something, you might convert me.

The interviewer may just be playing devil's advocate, but he's doing a good job sounding like a "oh golly, dropping out of school is the worst thing that could ever happen!" kind of person. A little grating.

I hope to set my 3 year old son up for success and help him see all his options.

I was exposed to all of that, but 1) haven't used much besides Unix/OOP/Databases since, and 2) feel like I only learned 1% of what I use even in those areas during college.

A lot of it comes back to not having specific goals in college, sliding by like I always did in school.

That, and the excessive my focus on the band I played in. Not that I regret it, but pretty impractical.

Depends what you mean by "know about." I had taken a couple of programming classes. I knew you could write code, compile it, and make a thing that does a thing. I started college as a Computer Engineering major, then realized that really wasn't what I wanted. If I could go back, and if it existed at the time, I'd to informatics.

I was just talking to one of my coders about how nothing I have used in my career was learned from my computer science classes.

I guess I'm a "business programmer" - if I'm a programmer at all anymore - I'm not sure. I've definitely never delved into Scheme, Haskell, and OCaml.

I majored in CS, graduated from a California State University in 2002. I focused on getting A's, not learning or connecting w/ people or deciding what I wanted to do w/ my life. I figured I would graduate and a coding job would fall in my lap. Since graduating, I've worked at a real estate franchise, a hedge fund kind of investment place, and now ecommerce.

I don't know how a CS degree from a CSU looks vs UC or ivy league, definitely didn't think about it enough when graduating from high school. But I do know that my degree only directly served to let me pass through a filter to get my first job. And I probably could have had that with a vocational school degree.

Safari is a hoodie

Hard to get off ATG? Sounds like the perfect addition to Oracle.

How many plum livers (PL's) to replace the one that I am now planning to drink to death? And what's the max # of drinks I can have per day to make sure my current one lasts until enough PL's are available to stick in my abdomen and take its place?

I signed up for the beta and made it my home page. I tried hard to adopt. I exchanged emails w/ one of the guys there (he was super nice and replied quickly) when I had to revert to Google searches to find what I was looking for (80% of the time), but then gave up. If the basic search results quality/ranking was close to that of Google, I would have stuck with it.

The slashtags are pretty cool. But like the article says, search isn't broken, and putting a cool extra on top of so-so core functionality won't work. And if slashtags did take off, it would be super easy for Google to add that in. (Unless I'm missing some kind of patent stuff.)

We have a significant % of customers who use google checkout. Not sure the breakdown of Paypal vs Google checkout. Some people (myself included) prefer the simplicity of using their same Gmail account that they're probably already logged into vs Paypal. The more options the more better, if the integration doesn't give you too much trouble. The more ways to say "you don't have to give me your credit card info" the happier the customer.

Good point re: reviews as motivation to visit their site. Being an ecommerce guy, I was thinking "content" being product data related to products (and delivery/customer service) that Amazon itself actually sells vs. product data (and services) provided by 3rd party merchants (like me).

Question: does the other guy see you as a "direct competitor?" If he has 20M uniques per month he may not feel all that threatened (whether or not he should). I'd say he has more to lose than you. Most likely even if he understood 100% what you were trying to do, he wouldn't be agile enough to address your niche. I'm with michael_dorfman, don't see the downside.

Edit: typo.

Right. But if we're talking about content, most people go there because of Amazon's content, not other merchants. The vast majority of Amazon's revenue is from their own sales, not merchants'.

"Amazon - Leads you to other peoples goods"

I think most people go to Amazon to buy from Amazon, not "other people." As opposed to eBay and Craigslist, where the above description is accurate.

I've never used these in hiring. Assuming the candidate doesn't have the questions beforehand, seems you're mostly testing someone's ability to BS/improv and promote themselves on the spot. For coders, I don't find this skill to be closely tied to job performance. Possibly an inverse correlation.

Providing them beforehand would possibly be more useful, but in this case there's no real need to "practice" so I don't think that's what the link you provided is referring to.

yeah someone clean it up. wouldn't it be great if every bad driver had social (not just legal) accountability?

i have been loving lcd soundsystem lately.

inspirational to hear how poorly he feels he did during his early adult life. i've been doing music for years too, luckily for me not my main focus.

nicely put contrasting lazy vs. scared.

side note, i love that he turned down a job to write for seinfeld.