timbre

I'm rusty on C, and confused. What should I use instead of signed int?

You can deduct taxes paid to your country of residence, so it's more max-taxation than double-taxation.

I'm not surprised that employees are judged by hours worked, but I'm very surprised that an interviewer would have the awareness and honesty to say so in an interview. Was it at least rare?

I don't think it's fair to say the author missed this. He seems to be asking precisely if this is the strategy, and if so how well it's working.

> Is that Amazon’s real goal with the Kindle -- is Amazon in the device business only to sell Prime subscriptions, which the company sees as a key accelerant for sales across the rest of its site? And if that’s the case, how well is that circuitous business model working out? Is the Kindle helping to sell Prime? And are those Kindle-fueled Prime subscriptions moving more sales across the rest of the company’s inventory?

> The second secret is that most teams, frankly, are not that good.

It's so important to remember this, as well as the corollary: I'm not that good myself. The article included this line:

> If you need to follow a prescribed process in order to be in any way an effective coder then you are mediocre at best and so is your work and your project.

I'm not sure if I agree with the statement itself, although I certainly think -- and know no one who doesn't think -- that the quality of your staff is more important than your process. But I'm sure I disagree with the way this statement is used to dismiss the idea of a prescribed process. One of the main goals of such a process is to get as good work as possible out of mediocre staff. Because there aren't enough high quality staff to go around. You won't get great work out of mediocre workers, but if you can get pretty bad work instead of total garbage, in many environments that's a big win. (In the startup environment that is hn's focus, pretty bad might be just as bad as total garbage.)

If it is just a result of the credit card companies being American, JCB is a fairly widespread non-American (Japanese) alternative.

Permanent travelers, the homeless, etc. can receive mail at the post office by general delivery. (Letters addressed to

J. Doe

GENERAL DELIVERY

Anytown, Anystate 12345

are held for pickup at the post office for 30 days.) This was once common knowledge, but seems to be less so these days.

As VOIP becomes more common, I've found that some people consider it rude to use these free services. Things have shifted from a VOIP setup not being a proper phone because it can't connect with these numbers, to these numbers not being proper conferencing because VOIP users can't call them.

In fact VMG's HBS link, which generally encourages making the first offer, includes this caveat:

> There is one situation in which making the first offer is not to your advantage: when the other side has much more information than you do about the item to be negotiated or about the relevant market or industry. For example, recruiters and employers typically have more information than job candidates do...

If I can get to the point where I understand the market as well or better than the potential hirer, I'll try to make an anchoring first offer. Usually I can't.

Office.

For a language I know well, this is not appealing, but it could be very useful at the level of (non-native) language proficiency where I can write well enough to make my meaning clear, but can't avoid sounding stilted.

What's so infuriating about the options though is that they're meaningless even to geeks. Choosing a WiFi chipset at least means something to someone. Among "Everyday Computing," "Design & Performance," and "Thin & Powerful," I think the only word that gives any information about how one category is different from the others is "Thin."

Their desktops are worse. Here are the choices (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/desktops-n-workstations.as...):

OptiPlex

    Business-class performance and control

    Scalable and durable design

    Designed specifically for networked environments

Vostro

    Power for today and scalability for tomorrow

    Easy to configure

    Budget-friendly

Dell Precision

    On-the-go or in-the office graphics & analysis powerhouse

    ISV-certified reliability

    Built on a scalable IT platform

The only information-carrying word I see here is "Budget-friendly." It's hard for me to see how Dell benefits from being unclear like this, but it's equally hard to believe that they think this copy is clear.

Apple's categories are not just few, they are clear. They are specs. I choose between the 128GB model or the 256GB model, not between the "analysis powerhouse" and the model with "business-class performance."

A side issue, but there are real differences among what many people think of as interchangeable brands.

I started using Tide many years ago after, dissatisfied with my laundry results, I found a Consumer Reports article that said it was the best. I just did a quick search and they say it still is, although you can get your clothes almost as clean with some much cheaper brands (http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2010/jul...).

For Microsoft, X-box comes to mind as something they started after they were already huge, which was, eventually, a success. It took them a while to get it right though. Perhaps it's easier for big companies to do well with new hardware because it's harder for new, little companies to do hardware at all.

(I've never used an X-box; by "get it right" I mean "get popular.")

That may be optimum if your goal is to get through immigration quickly and easily. Clearly that's not the authors primary goal, as he says his behavior gets him hassled, but "that’s a small price to pay to remind these thugs that their powers are limited and restricted."

Here's a horror story from the other side (the buyer's -- or person-who-wanted-to-be-a-buyer's) of PayPal.

I'm American, but 7 or so years ago when this happened was living abroad, had no credit card, and wanted to buy things online. So I created a PayPal account and transferred $100 in from a bank account. I then tried to make a purchase, but found that as an outside-the-US user, I would not be able to make payments until I registered a credit card with them. I couldn't qualify for a credit card at the time... oh well. So I tried to move the money back to my bank account. But that transaction was covered by the same policy; I wouldn't be able to do it until I registered a credit card with them.

Looking through the ToS, I found that this rule was in there; an international user had to register a credit card in order to disburse any funds from the account. So the fool in this story is indisputably me. Still, I found it hard to believe that the system was set up to allow black hole accounts, which money could enter but never leave. Over a lengthy email exchange, I was assured that such accounts were indeed possible, and that I had created one.

Eventually I let go of the $100. But I never let go my scorn for PayPal.