jagtesh

Ah. It all makes sense now. It is cheaper for them to layoff with a decent 3 month severance than it is to pay high interest on the debt that is funding their salaries (interest rate will stay high > 1 year, going by Powell’s comments).

I am glad they did it transparently, but I wish they had been more open about this fact. Shifts the entire perspective IMO.

Summary: Merchants store the token, instead of credit card details. Token is only valid for use between merchant and payment provider (requests very likely need to originate from the registered merchant URL). Conceptually, similar to OAuth. Why hasn’t this been done before?

Facebook (the social app) and Google (Ads, Play Store, etc) are no different. I’ve read countless accounts from many individuals and small/independent app developers about their accounts being suspended or terminated with little to no means of redressal.

I will go on to say that this remains a generally unsolved problem for companies working at scale that are under scrutiny and dealing with financial or social fraud. They are willing to accept false negatives instead of false positives.

I worked in an organization that prided itself with great customer service, and they did deliver. The cost of doing so (resolving each case manually, often giving benefit to the customer) is significant.

Amazon is another prime example of a company that does customer service well - though that might have some consequences on their work culture (mistakes are not easily forgiven - since the cost is so high). Not an apples to apples comparison though, Twitter is ad based (much higher volume/users needed for revenue) unlike Amazon.

More users = more challenges with the same level of staff. That’s how you end up with a cheap processes (lots of automation, outsourced reviews) designed to handle 90% cases vs. an expensive/more thorough process (manual checks by experts along the way) that can handle 99% cases.

One big reason for this is the tax law in US and Canada. Legally, contractors (esp. when incorporated) are considered employees if they work exclusively for one client over an extended period of time without interruption. Occasionally, I have seen such contractors take a few month sabbatical and return to work after that (still contracting).

Note: There are other criteria that have to be met as well for the govt to consider someone an employee: - if work happens a the employer’s premises - if the employer owns all equipment needed for work - how is the work instructed - can denote a manager/employee dynamic)

What’s wrong with removing the commands and adding shell aliases instead? That sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

eg. In bash, they can be expressed as:

alias fgrep=grep -F

alias egrep=egrep -E

This sounds like a push for purity - similar to what happened in Python 3 with the move from print “xyz” (special keyword) to print(“xyz”) (standard function).

The new function requires three additional keystrokes every time it is used.

Clever tricks in programming are an anti-pattern. When writing code in a social/collaborative setting, it is imperative to write it in an inclusive way.

Heck, I’ll coin this term here - you heard it first on HN - inclusive programming. Write code so others can easily understand it, and more importantly, contribute to it.

Social networks, news sites, online marketplaces or retail.

I would imagine the experience to not be any different from trying to use the Twitter app when you lose connectivity. The app can choose to either: 1. Degrade the experience gracefully. Still function in a limited way. 2. Display a network error message, pausing whatever action the user was about to take. Keep retrying for a bit.

PWA can get you almost there. But LiveView is server rendered (business logic lives on the server). A loss of internet would render such an app unusable.

With this technology, I believe they are bundling the Phoenix LiveView server in the binary - to alleviate that gap. It’s like packaging node + app in a binary.

I think, the appeal here is LiveView. You can develop a SPA/OPA native app without writing any JavaScript. The code is entirely Elixir + HTML + CSS. Bundle it with SQLite and you’ve got a decent stack now that can even work offline.

Disclaimer: I didn’t see many details on the project page. My assumptions may be incorrect.

Also a clear lack of empathy. I mean, sure, the person did something wrong. But have they stopped being human? Where is the humanity in squeezing every penny out of someone already broken and poor ($250/day is more than what many Americans earn in a day). Then taking away 50% of any hope/real shot at living they have. This sounds like profiteering at their expense. (Edit: this is evil).

Jail time and a permanent record is more punishment than it sounds. It severely affects future employment, even things like renting an apartment or getting a car loan (the ubiquitous background checks are done to weed such people out).

I find it quite odd that payment providers are being singled out. They aren’t going after the cloud provider, or the other services helping this company run their operations.

> if I belonged to a group of people who believe that such companies shouldn’t exist..

This seems to be the only plausible explanation. Going after them by exploiting a legal technicality (hacking the law). I don’t know if I feel any better about this approach, than I do about the original allegation.

Perhaps, it’s the part of me seeking some order in this world, holding out for a more pure form of justice. An ideal that doesn’t exist in reality.

You’re both right. Snowflake as a technical slang/jargon generally refers to “flaky” or light-weight solutions that aren’t expected to withstand the test of time/scale.

Snowflake, the data warehousing platform, on the other hand is a juggernaut - in a league of it’s own (I suppose comparable to BigQuery and RedShift).

Last thing I expected to discover on HN. This is incredibly useful for any DIYer. Thanks OP!

Edit: Usually I refrain from thank you posts on HN but I had to make an exception owing to the unique nature of this post.