Brystephor

I agree that having poor customer service is unacceptable. I agree that losing your access to email is a tragic thing and extremely difficult to resolve all the other issues that come with that. I'm not really commenting on the situation other than that issuing a chargeback commonly results in a loss of access to that companies services.

I work in payments. This is pretty normal AFAIK. Doing a chargeback is a good way to be "fired" as a customer and not allowed to use that companies services anymore.

How do you start this? It can't be as easy as a website and some online ads right.

> These companies have turned areas they operate into upscale meat grinders that lure you with a "welcome" price only to systematically hike up your rent way beyond inflation.

In my experience with downtown Seattle, the high end luxury apartments this rings true.

I had an apartment that I was renting for ~$4k a month and gave me like 1 month free. The building then decided when it was time to renew our lease, I should pay an additional $400 a month. I moved out of that apartment and then they relisted that apartment for $3700/month with a 1 month free offer.

My next apartment was $2300/month. Same thing, 1 month free. Come lease renewal time (1 year later), they said the new rent would be $400 or $500 higher (a 17% or 21% increase). Recently they've decided to give an "exploding offer" where the new rent would only be $2500/month with 8 weeks free if signed by X date.

TLDR: 10%+ rent increases are the norm for my building. I've never actually paid the full listed amount for rent though when you take the concession into consideration.

It'd be a different version that's not intended for backward compatibility. This would be beneficial for any new projects or new learners who don't need to sift through decades of changes.

There can still be the standard updates every 3 years for backwards compatibility, but Id assume version upgrades don't happen very frequently. Meaning, if a project is started on c++11 then it's probably going to stay on c++11 indefinitely, never making it to c++17 or some other later version.

If that's true then that would imply in general the projects using c++17 or later are created from scratch using that standard and therefore wouldn't suffer from backwards compatibility.

This is all said as someone who works with Java where I don't see folks migrating from Java 8 -> 11 or later.

Why doesn't c++ offer a language version that's trimmed down to "modern" rules? Meaning all things that were deprecated, or not recommended, are cut out of the language. What I find difficult is that there's several ways to do the same thing but each option has some nuance or gotcha with it. This is said as a beginner who did half of learncpp

> I'm not sure their example of "improved" short-form messaging improves things much

The bad short form message is bad because 1) it's ambiguous and 2) it has a short lifespan. By lifespan, I mean the time that a message can be read and can be useful.

Using terms such as "it" and "she" leave a lot of ambiguity. If you read the message 7 days later, 1 day later, maybe even an hour later, all context of what "it" is and who "her" is could be lost.

Using names instead of "it"/"her" means you can read the message 24 hours later, maybe even a week later and still understand what it was, or at least it gives you more information to figure out what the context was.

In short: I think the improved message is significantly better than the first.

> The terser the better.

In general I agree with this. I have no evidence but I'd bet some people prefer the conversational message over the status update. Again, it depends on the context. If it's a status update, make it a status update. If it's a conversation, let it be one.

How is this different from intelliJ Ultimate?

Yep. Anything greater than 1% is leading to trouble such as huge fees or being kicked off a card network.

So who is the target audience for this type of work? I mean if I want to learn more about something such as combinatorial algorithms, this doesn't seem like it'd be the right place to begin. I want to learn more about the things that I don't know, but at the same time, learning absolutely everything about a single category is typically more depth than I require.

Dynamodb doesn't do well with complex queries. Imagine you've got 4 integer fields, any combination of which can be filtered by a range.

Using dynamoDb, you're going to have a hard time querying if field A, B, and D are included. If you add a fifth field, it's going to be a pain to add to historical data.

I agree with your premise that this should apply to candy and cookies.

I also like your idea of keeping things simple. The hard part, as always, are the edge cases. If the tax is associated directly with sugar in some manner than diet sodas won't be taxed. Another possible albeit silly argument is why not tax sugars in fruit?

Note: Im a software engineer. Not a dietician. I really don't know a detailed difference between artificial sugars and natural sugars or how our bodies process them.

According to the Amazon recruiter that reached out to me for Amazon Ads, their growth has been significant and they're now one of the largest sources of income for Amazon at $30B+ a year in income.

All the Amazon devices are likely whats being targeted for Ads. Kindles, Amazon Prime, Audible, alexa, firestick, and now that Prime has access to Thursday night football they'll get some of that ad revenue too.

TLDR: Amazon is going big on advertising.

No idea. That's not my area of expertise/work. Sorry about that.

I appreciate the condolences. I have no idea if I'm affected or not, but I don't expect to be since I work in payments. I'm waiting to see who will be affected and how I can help them.

edit: I've received notification that I'm not affected by the layoffs. Part of me thinks having 4 months full compensation would've been nice to have. Part of me is glad to not need to do the interview process again (at least not immediately).

Maybe this one can be updated with the axios article?

https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/snap-restructuring-layoffs

I imagine their businesses are more resilient due to more income streams. Snap is pretty dependent on advertising income. I have no idea what Google's dependence on advertising income is, but I'd assume the ratio is less. Apple has multiple sources of income and I would be surprised to see them do layoffs.

I'm more curious about other companies such as Meta. Especially since Zuckerberg has openly stated there's probably people who shouldn't be there.

Evan also released a report this morning. Some departments such as Snap Minis & games, snap originals, and a few other things like that pixy will be cut heavily/stopped entirely.

Team members in the U.S. are stated to receive at least 4 months of "compensation replacement". Those relying on work authorizations will receive additional support and flexibility according to the email.

Other notable pieces is that Jerry Hunter is being promoted from SVP of engineering to COO.

As a side note: I've had several recruiters reach out to me since yesterday. Yesterday (08/30, day of verge report release) I had 9 unprompted recruiters reach out. Door dash, 2 from Amazon, and a few from some lesser known companies as well. This is with my LinkedIn profile set to "not looking for a job".

sources:

[1] https://www.axios.com/2022/08/31/snap-restructuring-layoffs

[2] I'm a snap software engineer.

The data model matters doesn't it?

If it's /org/orgId/blog/blogId and a user has access to only a single orgId and needs to be logged in then doing it in /blog/blogId makes sense.

But if a user has acess to multiple orgs via different orgIds, then it makes more sense to do the former with /org/orgId/blog/blogId because then the page is sharable via URL. If you do just /blog/blogId that prevents a user from easily accessing a new organization (unless you use query parameters)

Not sure what criteria they used. But I totally believe this for any e-commerce store or company that doesn't have a physical presence.

You also get charged for each chargeback, which is likely included in that $138bn number. And if you have a high enough chargeback rate you will be fined an additional amount.

FedNow is only allowing depository institutions to participate and layers on top of them. The base price for a transfer might five cents, but I'd expect the bank to charge a fee on top of that. And if this scenario is a customer paying at a store, either online or not, there's almost certainly going to be another middle man (or multiple) between the merchant and the depository institution. Each of which will have its own set of fees, and one of which is likely to be a % of the transaction.

Basically you get a similar cost.

> As with current Federal Reserve Bank services, the FedNow Service will be available to depository institutions eligible to hold accounts at the Reserve Banks under applicable federal statutes and Federal Reserve rules, policies, and procedures.

I wish this would be more available to directly connect with versus having to go through an existing bank. It also leads me to believe that adoption won't be widespread for a few years after release.

With Real time payments (RTP, the clearing house instant payment rail) it still has banks onboarding to the network each month. RTP was launched in late 2017

What does A2A stand for?

Is UPI a protocol, an interface/set of messages, or is it an actual payment rail?

Like, could I use a credit card with UPI?

Is there a place where you can see a list of system design patterns and their use cases?

People are typically ranked by influence at companies as well. If you want to increase your influence, hire more people beneath you. Amazon managers specifically will be looked at for how good they are at hiring and how many people are beneath them to see if they're ready for the next level. At least this is what an Amazon EM told me.

It's due to fraud risk. If googles threshold billing is X, then their risk of revenue loss is X*(N+1) where N is the number of virtual card numbers that have been created for a single physical card. The +1 is for the physical card.

Visa/Mastercard likely don't supply a way to link a physical card to it's virtual card generations (that'd be a security risk), so Google doesn't know that virtual card A is associated with physical card B.

It can be a hard problem to solve, but it is frustrating. Google ads has a threshold billing system in place (based on their public docs). What this means is they probably track how much each payment method has spent, and charge that payment method when it reaches $X.

My theory is below, but I have not researched or looked into virtual cards.

The problem with virtual cards or privacy cards: What's stopping a single physical card from having multiple virtual cards generated for it? So if someone had a card they knew could only be charged $100 and googles threshold is at $200, they could make 10 virtual cards and add the physical card resulting in 11 payment methods. Now they can theoretically get $2200 worth of ads (if all ad campaigns reached the threshold at the same moment).

In other words, fraud risk can go up significantly.

Do they hire people on a per contract basis or do they hire full time employees and use them for contracts that they find?

I got lucky. I did no research before hand. There was a gym near me offering a deal for personal training and I signed up with an instructor who had a similar body style to what I wanted to achieve tbh.