happywolf

I had a LG Nexus 4 and the battery got bloated after a year of use. When I tried to get help, LG just ignored me even though that was a safety issue. Thumbs down on it.

What this guy can take advantage will be victims don't check their bank statements carefully and he can get away with the money, or else he will be in pretty bad shape to handle all the charge-backs. I will say the chance of a stolen POS is low as his goal is to get the money. If he borrows the POS from his merchant friend for this purpose, then that is not cool at all.

To me this is not a serious security threat to ordinary people.

I had a bad experience with StartSSL using their free SSL cert. Basically they just treat you like a thief or scumbag trying to take advantage of their freebie. Eventually I found a company selling $10/year cert which I am happily paying. Now this adds another excuse for me to avoid StartSSL even more.

Would like to add Baidu isn't better, too.

Example, try search proprietary software, say 'Autocad', first few results are always pirate sites, while google will show the Autodesk site and the wikipedia post.

Recently Baidu also under the spotlight for monetizing illness-related forums[1]. The issue is some patients accused the Internet giant selling their private info to _unqualified_ private hospitals. These hospitals charge a lot but usually their hardware and staff are underqualified.

[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-01/12/content_230...

Citing this example isn't very convincing.

Would be more interesting to know what language he uses when he finishes his Ph.D.

It depends on where you are, and for some countries only certain % of the population will get it as it ramps up slowly. For some products, the new isn't ready so it falls back to the old stack. It could be due to the ramp, WIP, or just that the old code is too old to the extent no one wants/dares to modify it.

BT has much less technical debt and thus more modern design. Most new merchants are encouraged to use v.zero (BT's xo product)

I agree with the first paragraph.

The second paragraph hinges on the rationale that if customer data were available, then CS (Customer Service) agents would have made every effort to contact the ops/engineering team to retrieve those to avoid a social disaster.

Unfortunately, this isn't true in the companies that I worked for, which are big customer-facing MNCs.

First of all, for US consumers, the CS teams most likely are contractors in Philippines, Malaysia, or India, they are trained with scripted responses. For any issue that is beyond the scripts, their standard response will be "Sorry we can't help you because we can't do x", one reason is they have no incentive to escalate the issue and get oneself more work to follow up, other times, it is the management explicitly decided this is to prevent too many cases hit the ops and eventually, the engineering teams. It is not that the management is stupid or nasty, just that the 20:80 rule dictates 80% of the issues usually are raised by 20% of particularly picky customers. For the 20% customers who generate 80% of the revenue, each of them will be assigned an AM (Account Manager) who can get things done much faster and more efficient than the CS team. This group of high-value customers are often given access to VPs to make sure all their issues are heard and handled properly

Second reason is most teams in a big company will not concern anything that doesn't hit them directly. For example the CS team in my ex-company upon getting repeated complaint on an erratic component that didn't get bug fix for months, eventually the CS told the upset customer to fuck off and complain to CEO directly since it was engineering department's fault.

Unbelievable? Maybe, and that company remains one of the largest high-tech companies in the world.

Nope, the only assurance you can get is you won't be access your data, I am not sure how one can come down with conclusion of "no way they have a copy or keep it in archive/deep backup"

Having a backup and letting you to access it are two entirely different issues, and most of the time customer service staff don't know how the data management is being done by the engineering/operations team.

Anyone here uses D? I recall it was kind of popular a few years back, and its features look very similar to Rust. Thoughts?

But the tone of the blog post implies this graph thingie is _the_ solution:

"How graph databases stop fraud e-commerce frauds in real-time" - note the use of 'stop' and 'real-time'.

"Fortunately, graph database technology is able to detect the patterns that arise around these e-commerce fraud scenarios and put an end to them in real time"

Again, look at the terms used: 'put an end' and 'real time'.

I am not trying to nit-pick, but what has been discussed is far from being able to put an end to fraudsters. Maybe this could weed out some of the newbie frausters, but that is it.

Disclaimer: I work in the payments industry.

The title is misleading because this is focused on Android, but the title seems to imply generic API design pitfalls

Agree. It is simplistic to conclude China's economy is slumping just because the demand for raw material is falling. There is a finite number of infrastructure a country can build and once these are completed, the demand for raw material will naturally slow down. Growth will be slow, but I won't say it is 'slumping' for now.

Here I do see a business opportunity for a device that has: 1) adequate battery life (> 1 week standby) 2) focused on note-taking + sharing 3) enable plug-in/extension for future compatibility

Unfortunately what I am seeing devices nowadays are racing towards thinner + bigger screen which to me is really missing the point. Who cares the device is 0.9mm thinner than the previous generation?

Scrum retrospectives will no doubt help to address voids in work flow, product, or technology. However this seldom make one as manager.

In fact, very likely once good programmers done all the work, some jokers (within the team or otherwise) will jump out and grab the credits by sending out emails, then the joker is promoted.

This is the initial stage of what I described in my previous post. Again, you need technical strong managers to see through the mist, but sadly, these managers are rare (at least in my industry).

This practice can easily be abused or/and cause unintented consequences. For example, once employees know this is a short cut for promotion, they will focus a lot of their energy and attention to find 'the void' and try to fill it, or act like they can fill it, thus neglecting the real work that need to be done.

In fact, this could be a cultural issue where everybody tries to act like taking a lead (usually by blanket emails including the management team that say "XXX has been launched!! Contrats Y!!"), however you will find behind the backdrop, things are just half-baked or down right totally fake, because real execution is boring and not getting attention. So once an excitement dies down, people will scramble to find another 'void' to fill. You may argue the manager can check the work, but in a big cooperation, the middle managers are most vulnerable, and thus they care much more about their own asses than to ensure their staff get real work done.

In other words, this tactic is only applicable when the company is small, say, less than 20 people, and the boss knows everybody and the projects well.

Thanks. I will send an email to you.

Actually I wasn't aware the difference either until the admin (she was my friend as well) complained about there was nothing left to 'optimize'...

I must clarify i called it quit not because of the lack of 3-ply paper for my backside, but I felt it was really an issue for a company trying to save on such thing. My reasoning was right.

I had a really relevant experience in my ex-company. It was a small company doing video analytics and monitoring. It did well in initial stage and the pantry was stocked with real bean coffee maker, beers, sodas, and pastries. Then its business went down hill, and the beer was removed (beers are expensive in Singapore), then cheap beans were used, then no bean coffee but 3-in-1 instant coffees. Guess what was the ultimate items they scrimped on? Toilet paper. You read it right and I am not kidding. They swapped 3-ply to 2-ply and that was when I called it quit. The company went bankrupt after 1.5 years.

The lesson here is not about how much 'gift' it was taken from employees, it is more on the changing wind in the air that employees need to watch out for. If a company is so desperate to cut snacks, usually it means it has much bigger shit at the backyard that employees may or may not be aware of.

No doubt there are good people in Baidu. This happens everywhere, including the now defuncting Nokia, however those people are not put in good use.

To turn the question around: what makes you think they are technical competent? Can you provide 2 examples instead?

Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis.

Let me elaborate

Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services.

To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu.

Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders.

As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point.

Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency.

Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.

I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are other researches on ghost cities using methods like at night counting the number of units with lights on and do this for consequtive n nights, or measure the total power consumption over a period of time.

Amazon's arguments are flimsy at best, and it renews the focus back to this piece of news which most people have not talked about. Staying quiet or saying something more humble would dull the backlash a lot.

I think you are not comparing apple-to-apple. Sure, SV pays good money, but the rent is also much higher. In Texas the pay may be lower, so is the rent.

I have a friend who works as full-time freelancer in a small town in Malaysia (Taiping, if you are really curious) and she helps local businesses to do IT projects. For example, she built a custom room management system for a small hotel. She used to work in Motorola Penang, and the freelancer job gives her much more freedom and time, and interestingly, her income is way better than what she got in Mot, even she just serves such a small town with population of around 245K (2010 data)

View it another way: shaving seems to be a pain for many people, to the point people are willing to throw millions at a dubious (sorry if this word isn't the best adjective) claim of shaving with laser.

What if one could invent a working bladeless razor? It is a blue ocean waiting to be delved in.

Just thinking out loud.

Anything that heats a hair to the point it burns off, no matter what the heat source is, will give out a bad smell. Good luck if one has thick beard, and no, I am not convinced this will work cleanly.

I am a product manager in the financial sector and generally I agree with this list. What I want to add is "A good PM knows how to balance competing requests from stakeholders and know when to say no". You can't please everybody.

I agree the google translate link above pronounces this character very close to 'Arr', however do note the Pinyin (Chinese phonetic system), 'Er' starts with 'E'.

Just for the sake of discussion, here is character that starts with 'A'. See if you feel the difference.

https://translate.google.com/#zh-CN/en/%E5%95%8A

Would like to point out a caveat listed in that page, as follows. Don't convert all your photos in your drive (yet).

"WARNING: FLIF is a work in progress. The format is not finalized yet. Any small or large change in the algorithm will most likely mean that FLIF files encoded with an older version will no longer be correctly decoded by a newer version. Keep this in mind. "

No, it has 'er' instead of 'ar' sound. In fact, 'err' is a better word than 'earl'