imroot

Luxottica ran the CostCo Optical centers for a little bit. I believe they got out of it because they were not making any money on it.

To make matters more interesting, EssilorLuxottica is going to stop separating everything, and start "bundle pricing" things -- so, whatever clarity you might have had on a receipt or something else is going to go out the window.

EssilorLuxottica is probably about 70% Sunglass Hut, 30% Vision when it comes to retail sales (I'm not factoring in Oakley). They also sell their frames on the wholesale market for independent DO's to purchase; pre-merger Luxottica did have some "house" lenses, but, they were just as expensive as Essilor lenses.

Ironically enough, Luxottica did attempt to be Costco's Vision provider for a few years back in the early 2000's, but, they did back out of it after only two years.

I have two solutions for this:

The first one is easy: The Police agencies encrypt their Tactical channels and leave their dispatch and car-to-car stuff unencrypted. Police still have the ability to mask sensitive operations, the public keeps their "Open" access.

The second answer is a bit more complex -- give the media outlets a radio that is transmit inhibited that has the dispatch channel only on it. I believe that one city (Cincinnati) did that when they moved to P25 a few years ago.

With that said, There's only a trivial space that most radio systems use for encryption these days. In Kenwood radios, it's only 4 numerical digits. While I haven't tried decrypting someone else's NexEdge stuff, a motivated person who wants to hear what's going on, will hear what's going on.

I live in Miami, and the tech scene here is...small, and there's not really a lot of potential for moving up/around.

There are some good employers with a startup mindset like Ultimate Software (payroll/HR software) who pay well, but, the pay is marginal for everyone else. ADT and Office Depot are in the Boca Raton area (great if you've got Hadoop skills or retail experience), but, I haven't heard that people are paid above the average around here.

I live in Downtown Miami (and work from home), so, I can't comment on commute:

I've went through Stripe Atlas as well -- and didn't have any issues whatsoever; When we decided that we didn't want to be a C-Corp in DE, we made it before the actual setup, however, when we ran into issues with our process, their support folks were very very helpful and it was zero hassle switching banks.

What's interesting is that normally, USAA (and other banks that tend to cater to government employees) will offer 0% APR loans to those who are impacted by this.

There have been quite a few reports of USAA not offering loans to those who are affected by this -- and other credit unions (NFCU) only offering $1000 as a quick loan...

If the banks don't want to deal with the risk of this until the shutdown is over, this makes me believe that the shutdown will last a while.

Interestingly enough, Congresspeople's staff are not getting paid during this break as well -- but the congressfolks are.

Instacart and Shipt (who was recently acquired by Target) make money from the price slew between what they're paying (which, might not even be the cost that's on the grocery shelf -- it may be lower), and the price that they're charging you.

Yes, they have to pay the Shoppers a per-item fee, but, for the most part, the price that Insta is paying isn't the price that's listed on the shelf.

Marriott did outsource their development of the migrated SPG+MI marriott.com.

As much as I want to hate this, I was part of this marriott.com fiasco -- Marriott switched from a monolithic, huge, J2EE stack and moved to openshift for container management. The problem? the development teams didn't really and fully understand the concepts behind containers...and internal Marriott staff had limited knowledge of Openshift or how it ran.

They brought in RedHat ProServ to manage the Openshift stuff, my former employer to lead the DevOps group in assisting the dev teams to containerize, and then when I left that team to go somewhere else, tried bringing in a devops shop in Bethesda (and then tried to hire everyone in the company to come work for them).

I've just dealt with it (K4IMW), but, I use my PO Box for my FCC ULS information. If the FCC or anyone else wants to get in touch with me, it's probably quicker to email me, but, I understand that there are times where a paper letter is more "formal," (also, QSL cards).

Kentucky is one of those states -- if it's in your vehicle -- but, it's a "Secondary offense," and I've been told that they haven't cited anyone for that for 10+ years.

Ginny has drained the life out of IBM -- and not in a good way.

Not really -- I have used SuperMicro servers in the past, and we had our own Super Micro part numbers based on the company -- so, they know who is ordering each piece of equipment and they know where each piece of equipment is being built and sent to.

If you're just ordering boards through a reseller, I wouldn't expect those to be infected, but, when you're ordering 10,000+ servers at a time, you'll get your own Part Numbers, your own specs, and your own build times/specs.

Morning Consult | Senior Software Engineer | Washington, DC | ONSITE, Full- Time | https://morningconsult.com

Morning Consult is a leading technology company revolutionizing ways to collect, organize, and share survey research data to transform how leaders in business and government make key decisions. With offices in New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago, Morning Consult provides rapid and rigorously tested research, news, and brand-tracking technology for over 150 of the world’s biggest companies and industry associations. Morning Consult conducts regular surveys for major media organizations including POLITICO, Bloomberg, The New York Times, AdAge, and Vox.

We're looking for a strong backend Engineer to join our team. Ideally, you'll be comfortable mentoring junior developers as our team grows (we're a team of 8 right now, primarily front-end focused, with a backend engineers, four front-end engineers, a DevOps/Systems Engineering guy, a VP of Engineering, and a CTO).

The good: Small startup. Great culture. Decent office. Nice to commute from Metro, and close to the 'political hotspots' downtown (if that's your thing). Never taken a dollar of VC funding and cashflow positive.

The bad: Typical "Growing startup" pains.

I'm on the engineering team (Devops/Systems Engineering role), and am not the hiring manager, but, will work with you directly and can answer any questions you might have.

Our open positions are here: https://morningconsult.com/careers/

If you'd like to ask me questions: iwilson at (domain), please put "HN: Careers" in the email.

I have a friend who is an OB/GYN Oncologist in Indianapolis. Her hospital had IBM Watson Health on campus last year, and she mentioned to me in passing last month that they finally had kicked IBM off of their (learning) university's campus. When I asked her why, she said:

"Often times, Watson would recommend courses of treatment that would be completely incorrect, if not detrimental, to the patient. It became more of a hassle than a learning tool, and since the Residents are operating under my license, it's 'my way or the highway.'"

Hell, I went to an urgent care over the weekend, and they were still using a old IBM e-series application built with COBOL -- and when the doctor was inputting the drugs to prescribe, it warned him about potential interactions between the different drugs -- not something I had seen the EPIC system that my normal doctor uses do.

I still feel that there's a lot of good growth to be had for data scientists in the Health Care field...but, Watson itself is probably not the answer, and IBM should probably get rid of Ginni Rometty and find a new CEO, unless they want to continue cutting IBM down to a skeleton of what it used to be.

Ohio didn't care that I moved out of Ohio in March, and Kentucky didn't care that I already paid Ohio.

I was honestly just happy to pay it and get it over with.

I had this problem between Ohio and Kentucky about 10 years ago: I moved from Ohio to Kentucky, and they both considered me living in their state for the entire year.

I gave up trying to fight it after about 5 years (!!) and just paid the $15K to the Commonwealth of Kentucky and moved on with my life.

I now live in Florida -- legally and physically -- and don't have to deal with the headache of this crazy state income tax drama.

Ever time this gets brought up, everyone agrees with this, but, yet, no matter what, damn near every -- and I mean EVERY -- employer I've worked at, and even interviewed for since -- probably 2002 has gone to open plan offices.

I can look at the engineering area at any given day and see every member of the engineering team with headphones/earbuds on. Slack/IRC/Skype for Business gets ignored...why? It allows us to focus on the task at hand, without the noise of the office around us.

One of the best startups that I've worked at -- culture wise -- had a policy of two days a week, there would be no meetings, chatter around the office, or loud noises in the afternoon, and they'd play something that was rather chill/relaxing that everyone would agree on...and it really helped with productivity: the number of commits went up on Tuesdays and Thursdays because we were able to get things done without the hassle of anyone bothering us but the tasks at hand.

If open plan offices were designed with sound masking/dampening, the correct number of bathrooms per person (because, they were originally designed for cubes, not open seating, there are never enough bathrooms, it seems), the correct network planning (limiting your DevOps guys to one network drop always sucks when we're the ones pushing around gb+ images), and parking (because open plan seating usually implies that they're trying to stuff more people into a smaller space, so, there's never usually enough parking for the area) I would not really have an issue with open plan offices. I have a great pair of noise cancelling headphones and they work well for me.

I had an issue where I accidentally sent an eBay shipment to an old address. It's something that I immediately recognized after clicking "Buy now," and immediately sent a message to the senders; all but one of them corrected the issue and sent the package to the right address, but, one didn't...and it wasn't a big deal -- a $15 package -- but, it was more about the principle...

I followed eBay's "Buyer protection" to the letter...and guess what? I wasn't covered...even after escalating -- and saying, "They have my money and I still don't have my product, I'm trying to understand which part of 'Buyer Protection' I am missing here."

I called my credit card company, explained what was going on, and had my money back in 3 minutes.

Chargebacks are great, whenever they are used effectively...and ebay/paypal is the devil.

I'm going to have to disagree -- and this is based on first hand knowledge (albeit from a few years ago), and from second-hand knowledge from friends that I trust who are working in/around Kroger now.

Kroger is in a difficult position -- Grocery is a low-margin space: it is the true "race to the bottom," and now, with Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, and Target's acquisition of shipt (Kroger has looked at other delivery services, but, can't find one for the same price point), they're struggling to find the same portfolio matrix to keep them competitive to other startups.

They want to use GCE, but, they're truly struggling to use it. They refuse to use AWS for competitive reasons. They don't want to pay for talent (they were offering an Enterprise Architect $25/hour on a contract in the Cincinnati area , they don't want to pay for commercial tooling). Admittedly, in order for them to make money, they have to run truly Lean IT...but, they also make really foolish decisions. They were considering building their own cloud until it was pointed out just the sheer amount of capex needed for that project....and then the VMWare Licensing costs. They spend a crazy amount of money on SurePOS, but, then don't pay for any of the Verifone branding/customization/contactless enablement for their terminals. Technologies like LaneHawk help their cashiers catch shrink, but, their cashiers comment that it's ineffective and do not work 95% of the time.

If it was my job to move Kroger's technology forward, I'd probably do the following:

* Look at ways to help the cashiers do their job better and more effectively. Finding ways to shave transaction time will add up, enabling more customers per hour to flow through the transaction lines.

* Microservices in the store level for things that need to have store level availability, but, push things to cloud services where it's feasible. Yes -- let's buy bigger pipes to the cloud, but, keep a smaller server at the store in case things fail. We can manage that farm in the cloud more efficiently at scale, and then deploy out to the stores nightly or weekly versus continuous delivery in the cloud.

* Vendor Selection: Use the right vendors for the right things. Look at how you're spending your money with your vendors, and do a double check to make sure you're not being foolish with your spending (ala, vendors like Pomeory -- 99.99% of the time, you can do it better in house)

I'm really not surprised by this at all. I know that Kroger was exploring a service like this last year, based on conversations that I had with someone from their legal team; they've had this in the Cincinnati area stores that I've been in recently (when I've been in that area) -- including their "flagship" Oakley store -- for at least the last six to eight months.

As for the POS devices looking identical:

I've worked for a large retailer who has purchased a sizable number of verifone devices (hundreds of thousands). The devices do have NFC-enabled readers in them to support Apple Pay, however, the contract that the retailer has with Verifone specifically says that Apple Pay is disabled: The retailer does not want to pay for the development cost for enabling Apple Pay in their Point of Sales stack.

It's a great add-on for Verifone: A couple of bits get flipped in fipay and in their backend and boom: Apple Pay (as long as the payment processors support it).

I had a really negative issue with Simple: a garnishment (wasn't my garnishment -- there's someone with my same first and last name with the same birth date who has a different middle name) that was incorrectly applied to my account. When I presented Simple (and their controlling bank) notification from the garnishing agency that they had garnished the wrong account (and deposited the check from the garnishing state's treasury back into my account), Simple's response was...to garnish my account.

Suffice to say, I went back to my neighborhood bank.

To Simple's credit: Their customer support was beyond fantastic -- they were at the mercy of their controlling bank...who was receiving the garnishment request.

When Simple switched banks last year, I received a check in the mail for $3 and change for the amount that I had left in my account after moving my direct deposits and such over. Just...a massive headache.

I had Instacart express for a year (it was $99/year).

I cancelled it after a year. If I want nothing but dry goods, I'll get them on Prime Now: the Instacart shoppers couldn't buy the produce at the quality that I would expect it to be for that price...so, I just go to Whole Foods and buy my own groceries now.

My biggest issue with an iPad Pro+Apple Keyboard as the main terminal client:

- Where the "Control" key should be, is the "International Keyboard" key -- and there's no option to remap it. Control-something brings up the "Emoji" keyboard...or the Spanish keyboard (for me)

Everything else? I can live with.

Like most other banned communities on reddit, they just moved to other places, it seems:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SugarBaby/

In a way, I'm not really surprised.

I think that Indianapolis' job market is much stronger than Cincinnati's is, right now, at least in the DevOps/Linux Tech space.

Most companies around the Cincinnati area don't want to pay more than 80k/year for a good, mid-to-senior linux resource (15+ years). In Indianapolis, I've had a job offers come in at 130, 140, 150, and 180K, but, I'm very hesitant to relocate to Indy because of the RFRA legislation that's in town.

This feels like it's "DoubleClick For Publishers or Bust."

Admittedly, I've only been on the DevOps side of content marketing -- and even at that, only on the cloud infrastructure side of it -- but, I think that just about everyone knew that while writing your own content and then selling your own ad inventory was ideal, if you couldn't sell your own ad inventory, DFP was the second best play for the income.

To me, this screams, "Even if you have other ads, if they're not DFP-compliant, we won't show them if they are from our browser."

I may be completely wrong...but, who knows.

Selfcheck is a high-shrink area. Not everyone is as honest as you are. You'd be surprised the number of people who "forget" to put the "9's" in front of their organic produce when they are checking out.

In Gaithersburg, MD, you're just prompted to enter in the number of bags you've used. You're then charged the $.05 per bag on your tab.