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Comment by hoppla | Hacker News Reader

«A Booking.com market manager in south-east Asia admitted at a recent industry event that payment delays were caused by the installation of a new payment system. Staff salaries were also affected, she said, explaining it as a risk they had to take.»

It seems like there is a misunderstanding of who is on the taking and receiving end of risks

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Sad to see the top comments in the thread not even bothering to discuss the technical reasons and legal implications behind this .. and instead everyone wants to just discuss unrelated anecdotes about their personal travels.

The story here is about how booking.com is screwing over hotels and hostels, not guests. Someone should create a different thread for that, because apparently people have a very strong need to tell their tangentially related stories.

Wage and expense theft by companies is not just anecdata.

You've seen how discussions work in real life right? There's no requirement to stick to some topic at hand, it's a free-flowing dialogue. That's what you're seeing happen in this discussion board too.

Real companies have competent adults build and test this type of thing so they don’t stiff their vendors or miss payroll. It’s not an area where you should let techbros move fast and break things.

It’s booking.com, they are notorious for not being competent adults. Just check out this article about their working conditions [1] (you might want to google translate it you happen to not speak Dutch).

1 - https://www.computable.nl/artikel/nieuws/development/6777910... (

> the developers complain about Perl programming language, which forms the basis of the online platform and to which, according to them, is held far too rigidly. Criticism of Perl may even result in dismissal, according to an anonymous source.

If this machine translation is correct and the statement true, then this is borderline hilarious. I know that some companies keep their languages dearly, but that's taking it to the next level.

After duckduckgo, this is the second time in a few days where I hear about some relatively big company using Perl for their backend.

Any hosting provider running cPanel is running on Perl

Perl used to be a really popular language for cgi scripts. So much easier than writing them in C! I can't describe how amazing PHP was at the time of its inception. While I have trouble picturing somebody starting a big website in perl today, it's certainly plausible that momentum prevents a switch pretty much indefinitely.

some of the older stuff at OVH is also in Perl.

All the newer stuff is in Go or Python (thank God), but there's an acrophyal story about someone asking Octave Klaba, the founder of OVH about any regrets he had, and he allegedly responded "maybe using Perl was a bad idea".

> Criticism of Perl may even result in dismissal, according to an anonymous source

That statement is absurd. You can't dismiss an employee in the Netherlands for such a stupid reason. I used to work in their HQ as a developer, and complaining about Perl was always water cooler talk.

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