lmartel

You can make the opposite point with the same logic though: "the powerful, dangerous tobacco industry was given a loophole in the flavored cigarette ban allowing them to prey disproportionately on vulnerable Black populations."

Nonrefundable rates are not marketed as a bet against global catastrophe. They're a commitment that you won't change your mind.

This epidemic is more similar to the hotel burning down. I would expect my money back in that scenario and do whatever I could to retrieve it.

Cell service isn't for yapping anymore, it's for scrolling!

Assuming it's an entirely separate venture, sure.

But from the OP it sounds like the cofounder might be continuing in the same line of business, but wants to "pivot" and jettison the now-dead weight of the technologist.

If this is the case it seems plausible that his contributions and R&D are still relevant, even if they're throwing out his code, and so perhaps he's entitled to whatever stake he vested over those first two years.

I agree completely. My favorite podcasts are crowd-funded with no ads, but the least-bad approach to ad reads is when someone reads a script, verbatim, in a bored monotone. Especially when it's not one of the hosts reading, but a producer whose voice you don't recognize and implicitly trust. But this is really rare.

Couldn't you criticize the parent comment for exactly the same reason? Someone posted "I liked her" and someone else posted "well I didn't."

The big missing piece is roles. No service uses a root access key directly. Instead, there's a webserver role with access to a relevant secrets group but no access to data warehouse secrets, for example.

Access keys can be provisioned and downloaded straight onto the box from the service. Sure, a compromise is bad, but only exposes the secrets that would be available on the pwned box regardless.

It was more than a few months ago, but they published a best-selling eponymous book.

So at minimum they've got your identity and much of your browser history.

Seems reasonable to call that obscene.

That's not the purpose of grandfathered pricing, they just want to raise prices without upsetting active users.

If you cancel you're not an active user anymore :)

This may not have been a serious question but I'll give a serious answer: depending on the interviewer, you could get bonus points for going "above and beyond" or, yes, you could be penalized for "not reading the spec."

I've found that the best way to handle it in a conventional whiteboard interview is to mention it when appropriate and offer to add the functionality later.

"Now, here's the part of the code where I'd deal with odd N. Since we're guaranteed even N in the problem statement I'll skip this for now, but we can come back to harden this function later if you like."

It seems to me that "because, deep down, we don't want to" is a perfectly legitimate answer to the question posed by the title.

I agree, though, that _why_ we don't want to would be a more interesting article to read.