[Thread] In what is apparently a familiar story, @AskeBay @eBay permanently suspended my new account within an hour of its creation due to unspecified "activity" that could pose a risk to the eBay community. Puzzled by this, I asked, & got the response shown in the screenshot. \ Timeline:

- Jan 13: I purchased an item using a "Buy now" button, without creating an account, because I don't like to create accounts unless necessary. My bank has heavy-duty fraud protection, so I had to do the whole en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure thing to authorize payment. \

1/ I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole last night with GPG keys, just for fun, and now feel like I understand them a lot better. So here is a little mini-thread detailing some things I learned, in case it is useful to anybody. 🗝 2/ I used PGP and GPG back in the day for encrypted/signed email, but I stopped doing that years ago when I realized that basically nobody I communicated with used crypto for email at all. Since then, my usage has primarily been (a) signing Git tags and (b) encrypting files.

Don't know if I've written about this one before, but it's a classic example of a switch-to-subscription-model that went off very badly. Read the replies: a bunch of people who paid for a "Pro" version and are (understandably) miffed to find an update crammed with upsells.

https://twitter.com/scanbot/status/1134923907851591681

The thing about a scanner app is it's a bit like a screwdriver: you want it to do one thing, and once you have a tool that does that thing well you're pretty much happy with it as-is. You don't want to be locked into a a recurring payment contract just to keep screwing in screws.

Thread: [In which a programmer opines about how to interview other programmers]. I interviewed well over 400 people in the SF Bay Area over the last 8 years, and along the way got to see a lot of other interviewers work. The most common mistake I saw interviewers make was treating the interview as a search for everything the candidate *didn't* know, instead of everything they *did* know. It's an unfortunate mistake, often leading to false negatives, a poor candidate experience, and a monoculture.

So speaking of organizing my Dropbox folder... I'm facing again the whole taxonomy vs folksonomy thing. Taxonomies are seductive hierarchical classification systems that lure you with their siren song of logic, order, and sense-making. The Yahoo! directory (composed of hierarchical categories) was an early famous example of an attempt at ordering the world's knowledge (well, really just the world's Internet at that time) in a taxonomy that provided intuitive navigability, discoverability, rapid look-up.