tomfakes

I was part of the small team that added Exchange Offline mode very, very late in the product cycle specifically to counter the Notes Local Replication story.

We were asked for something quick and easy, but decided to put the effort in to make it the correct way for the Exchange architecture.

The bulk of that code is still there 30 years later.

I’m a big fan of her current podcast - The Rest Is Science. Informative and entertaining as well as being easy to listen to (I’m not a fan of many audio-only shows, so listenability is a big factor for me)

The original Costco HQ building overlooks this new intersection, so this is almost a relevant comment

I too live nearby

The lanes are quite narrow, and the outer curb is deceptive - there’s a 1” edge with a curved curb behind it making it look wider than it actually is. Scraping along that edge will push cars into the center of the road. There will be a lot of minor accidents here due to the road design.

One other second order effect - people are getting used to roundabouts here now, but nearby are ‘traffic circles’ that are roundabouts with stop signs on some entrances. People are now ignoring those stop signs (because it’s a roundabout!). I almost hit 3 cars in 2 intersections as people ignored their stop sign.

If you were building Rails apps in 2005/6, more than likely you were reading Ezra's blog post on how deploy to your VPS. It was tricky to get right, but Ezra made it so that it was no longer impossible. He was always there to help people with their own tricky configurations too.

If it does work this way, this is a breach of the Facebook developer terms of service. Data may be cached for specific amounts of time, but long term storage is not allowed. When this app gets big enough to notice, Facebook will shut it down

Hi - can you email me - tom at craz8 dot com? I'd like to know technical details and a price you'd sell this at.

Thanks

The $12000 out of pocket is only if you use it because you need medical help. You don't actually spend the whole $22K unless you have a lot of medical issues, and then you'll be happy that you only pay $22K per year!

When I left my last employer, I had the same company plan under COBRA. It started at ~$1000, and then went to ~$1300 at the next new year. It had lower out of pocket expenses, but those came at the cost of more monthly payment.

My current Gold medical plan (2 years later) is $820, plus dental at $120 or so. ~$950 for Gold plan, vs $1300 for my COBRA plan (in between, I had a really crappy personal plan that covered almost nothing for ~$600)

People who have employer payed medical have no idea how expensive their plans actually are

In addition to what others have mentioned, your old plan had a lifetime maximum payout - maybe $1M, maybe $2M. That is removed by the ACA, and that costs extra too.

Also, there is extra cost because insurers now need to cover existing conditions - allowing you to change providers if you are already sick.

All of these extra things make it more expensive for some, but a better overall coverage - if you have catastrophic illness, you may have not been covered at the top end for all of these costs on your old plan.

Younger people tend not to think about catastrophic issues like 3+ years of cancer treatment, because new treatments are a) expensive and b) may extend your life significantly, so you may actually hit your $2M lifetime maximum, and then you are on your own, until you're bankrupt, and then the state (i.e. taxpayers) would help you out.

So, taken over 50+ years (not just this year's numbers) these new plans actually provide much better coverage, and may even take pressure off the Taxpayers for those that are under covered for their medical issues.

Each country has it's import fees for commercial use. These are often quite large, and, as an import company, you will have to pay them to operate legally.

The reason some of these fees is large is due to governments trying to control the import process, not due to any inherent costs associated with the items, so where these fees apply can not be guessed without having knowledge of the specific laws and treaties involved. As an individual, you've never needed to know these laws and fees

Also, your legal costs to import random things over random borders is going to be quite large. Most importer companies start with one set of items into a single country to defray the legal costs for that one set of items over many items sold. i.e. It's as much legal effort to commerically import 10 cases of wine into the US from France as it is to import 10,000 cases. But importing Cheese from France to the US is a completely different set of laws, and could cost the same as the legal costs for the wine.

Duty Free shops, I believe, are for personal use only. Gifts to family and friends are overlooked, but the limits are small enough anyway that you can't possibly give too much away - i.e. 1L of booze, a few bottles of wine.

Any time you cross a border with goods, there's a question that is asked about if this is for personal use or not. Sometimes this is on a form, sometimes in person, but the answer to this question changes what is allowed and what fees need to be paid.

Since you are operating a business service, you need to ensure that a) it is legal to take that item across that border, and b) The relevant fees are paid for an import business (not for personal use)

It doesn't take a lawyer to see that you'd be in trouble for not following the laws of the land your couriers are traveling to. But you do need to run this past a lawyer (and probably a set of lawyers, one for each jurisdiction) before you get one of your couriers thrown in jail.

It is possible to run this legally, but then the process won't be as cheap as I think you're expecting it to be.

It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they open it to public viewing.

Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!