mattdodge

We've been able to return most Amazon Prime items to Kohls here in SoCal for a while. When you drop off the return they hand you a 25% off coupon for anything in the store. There has been several times that I've browsed the store and bought something because of that coupon.

So basically, Kohl's gets foot traffic and some purchases that they wouldn't have seen otherwise. Seems like a very smart and adaptive move on their part.

There was actually a podcast by Radiolab recently that discusses how and why this is not the case. It's counterintuitive for sure, but pretty interesting.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/asking-friend

Care to share what types of tools do this? I'm genuinely interested. I haven't come across a log management tool that uses AI to detect abnormal conditions based on the log message contents like the OP describes. I stick to Papertrail for the most part though so I'm likely out of the loop.

Agreed - this really only benefits product creators who want actual emails so they can send (spam) them with newsletters, product updates, etc. Requiring a valid email is rarely something a product needs to do. I get so frustrated when a mailinator email address is rejected during sign up.

Not all PII is inherently "sensitive" though. Meaning not everything that can be used to actually identify you needs to be encrypted and protected. I don't know for sure but I don't think names or addresses qualify as that.

None of the data that was available sounds like sensitive PII so I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised by this. I would probably think that rider/driver feedback isn't PII at all.

I suppose it might be a bit questionable if Lyft was creating and providing tools to make it easy to look this stuff up and promoting it within the company but that doesn't sound like the case either.

You are literally describing Chariot. Everything except for the sleek black color.

https://www.chariot.com/

It's really a convenience thing for me. Yeah I could go to the store on my own. But by the time I come up with new/interesting recipes for the week, plan out all of the ingredients I need to buy, then actually go buy them, I've spent a ton of time and really not saved that much money.

The waste thing is definitely legit though.

Haha, but that doesn't matter! You just have to beat more other people than I do.

This was a fun problem. I wish I spent a little more time on it. My solution and approach was pretty similar to the OP, code and write up here: https://github.com/mattdodge/538-riddler-nation

The biggest takeaway I think is that you don't even need to beat the "winning solution", you need to beat more of the general population than that solution does.

It's certainly good for beginners who are looking to get into competitive programming. The problems can be somewhat challenging to someone not familiar with algorithms or computer science fundamentals I think. The code for solutions often isn't complex at all, but they typically involve applying some sort of algorithm to a made-up (often funny) real world problem. You're not building a to-do list app, you're writing algorithms.

It's sort of like a word problem in high school math. The math itself is often just addition and multiplication, the hard part is figuring out which math to use and which numbers to apply it to.

All of the old problems are on the CodeJam website though so you can go check them out and give them a go!

Great timing considering Google Code Jam Round 1 starts tonight too

This is the shortest one of the solutions so far. Wonder if it's the shortest possible? (Other than empty = empty)