anaccountexists

My impression from the article is that they were still linked (directly) to the company’s developer account.

If that’s wrong, and they were removed, then you’re completely right and everything I said is very wrong.

That’s exactly my point though. If they hadn’t worked there in 3 years, why were they still associated with the developer account in the first place?

There’s a couple of ways (that are best practices for any company) to avoid this problem: - Have separate Google accounts for work / personal use - Remove old employees from the developer account when terminated

Credit worthiness, yes, though that’s typically at approval time and not later on.

Risk bans or bans for suspicious / illegal activity? Totally different story (see the stories of Stripe / PayPal / etc shutting down accounts). The government (at least in the US) will punish banks pretty hard if they don’t crack down on fraud hard, so banks tend to lean more towards over enforcement.

Maybe we work with different banks, but in my experience it’s more of a “1 strike you’re out” type of thing if they detect illegal activity and to me that feels like what happened here. I get what you’re saying though.

Fraud is hard. If you don’t crack down enough, you get in trouble with the government, many legitimate account users, and companies working with you. If you crack down too hard, you might mess up people’s lives who did nothing wrong. Even with an appeals process- its rare to get everything right. I think the reason we had about it with big tech so much is because their userbase is so large, so even with a low false positive rate, you’ll see high numbers of people getting flagged.

I’d liken the latter to having a company credit card account. Regardless, in the bank case there’s a high chance adjacent / connected accounts would be frozen (at least for a time) because money laundering tends to happen in rings.

I see your point, though.

There are problems with how transparent you make things though (i.e., giving away the underlying signals). There’s a moving target between fraudsters and risk teams at companies where the fraudsters will try to run just up to the edge of alerting systems without passing over, then scale and repeat it.

If the signals used are made public, fraudsters will win every time. It’s the same with search engines- if they publish how a score is calculated, people will game it immediately.

Maybe the signals should be required to go through a review with authorities? Idk.

In my experience, the algorithms are much more forgiving than humans. At least, when I worked with the risk team at my FinTech company, algorithms flagged people for review and then humans decided to unflag or terminate their accounts. The only time we’d do a freeze is if it looked like an account take over (since that could super badly affect the account owner).

Before saying anything else: I’m sorry OP. This is miserable to deal with and I know you’re probably very upset right now.

On the other hand- at every company I’ve worked at, this is why there’s clear onboarding and off boarding policies. Yes- if you have someone on your developer account violating terms of service, they’ll shut down the account. No, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you personally.

To put this differently: if you had a bank account shared between your developers, and someone who left the company started using it for money laundering, the entire account would be shut down and you would not be getting that money back. In fact, you might even be investigated by authorities for money laundering since it ran through your account.

As someone who works in FinTech, we deal with tons of people just trying to steal / defraud others on a daily basis, and we’re required but governments across the world to be on the lookout for people doing “fraudy” things and terminate their accounts ASAP. If we just said “oh, it’s fine, you’re not in trouble because your (insert X relative here) was the bad person, not you,” then social engineering fraud would be rampant everywhere.

To me, the Google situation is identical to the bank situation. There’s not a good way to prove the bad account shouldn’t be associated with your Play store account. This is why you have to be diligent about who has access to these things.

Isn’t it… the opposite of a blow to Apple? If there interoperability, why would I ever use anything than my phone’s default messaging app? (Especially if E2E encryption is a requirement, which it looks like it is)

This is just regulatory capture cementing the OS owners above app developers.

My company uses the same DB sharding tech. It took us about a year of daily / weekly outages until we finally were able to fix our performance issues. 256 database splits, lots of cross-shard queries removed, etc before we finally reached a happy-ish state for a year.

Now it’s scheduled to fall over in about 6 months and everyone is freaking out again. It’s not new features that are hurting us, it’s the existing core product line. All the new stuff is built on horizontally sharded DBs from the get-go.

Teams is built on top of Skype for Business, SfB is one of the main backends for them.

I feel like there’s a happy medium where you have a quarterly session where you meet with coworkers in person to get face time but work remotely the rest of the time. That’s been great for my team, at least.

There’s a lot of reasons to get mad at Google. Not setting a recovery email is not one of them.

I feel bad for this person because it’s a horrible place to be stuck in, but even if Google had great customer support allowing people to reset passwords over chat / phone would be ripe for abuse

The most common use of “tracking” cookies is just to be able to count unique views for your site, which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. Knowing the impact of your site is something pretty much every website producer (including governments, individuals, and businesses) wants to do.

Other examples of where cross-site tracking is useful is for preventing online payments fraud. You have a similar IRL version of this where your bank will freeze your card if it sees purchases being made in different countries simultaneously.

Somewhere along the line, counting views or helping reduce fraud for customers turned into “store full demographic information about someone who never signed up for our service”, which is where everything went wrong in my mind. The cookies themselves aren’t the problem, it’s how they’re being used.

Isn’t the actual problem that we’re sending people to 4 year institutions who… don’t actually need the education they’re getting? I have so many friends that graduated with ridiculous amounts of debt to go into escape room design or being a barista (neither of which had anything to do with their degrees). They were told a lie, like many others, that they should “choose what makes them happy” when studying and now they’re screwed for the foreseeable future finance-wise.

Debt forgiveness addresses a symptom, not the core issue. I support it because I’ve seen firsthand how much of a hole it’s left people who made bad choices as a high schooler in, but we can’t keep making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place.

When you have to coordinate between AU, US, CA, and UK time zones and do 100% async communication to resolve conflicts during a project, getting everyone into the same physical space for a few days to work through issues saves so much time in the long run.

I don’t really care where I work, but I’ve come to strongly value travel / face time with my coworkers given that my team is fully distributed and Google Meet is just not the same as meeting someone face to face. For example, I ended up having a 5 hour rambling conversation about the history of our company with another coworker which suddenly shed a lot of light on why I wasn’t able to make progress pushing for certain org-wide changes. This would’ve never come up in a WFH context, since it’s “inefficient socializing,” but in the long run it’s going to help my communication skills a lot.

And the last thing: whenever I’m in the office, I get lots of interruptions, mostly from other ICs (I’m a tech lead). Although my personal progress slows down, I’ve noticed that my coworkers all move faster because they tend to be more likely to ask questions in person than scheduling meetings to pair. In person we tend to dive a bit deeper into the “why are we making this change” which helps people grow more than a direct answer to the “what”. To be honest, Slack and email are far worse distractions for me than the office ever is.

I mean, if you don’t want to denormalize your data, you’re going to need to think about indexes in some capacity regardless (this is true for non-relational DBs like Dynamo and Mongo too).

"get the 10 latest comments on this market, plus the associated avatars" couldn’t be better suited to a relational DB. That’s a textbook use case that Postgres would be amazingly well suited to.

Also: remember with Firestone that you’re paying for redundancy and availability that’s entirely Google managed. Most DB offerings you work with on your own are significantly more hands on as far as recovery / backups / replication go.

Engineering time is usually more expensive than server costs when you’re a startup, so think about how much time it’d take to do it yourself before you decide to optimize your server costs over R&D costs.

I would say, without a doubt, that more people in Seattle fall asleep at or after 10pm than wake up before 5am during summer.

Plus it’s all a moot point because you need blackout curtains for good sleep in the area anyway.

If you have a permanent disability, there’s definitely government programs to support you indefinitely- I have several relatives on those programs (one for muscular dystrophy, one for autism) and they haven’t worked for a long time.

There’s more challenges around the short term disabilities, but pretty much every US state has a low-income / zero-income healthcare program that helps cover those individuals.

And as for overall homeless numbers, the US is pretty much middle of the pack per-capita with a lot of European countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...

I don’t think it’s necessarily true for B2C. It just depends on who your target audience is. It’s pretty normal for a game, shopping app, etc. to start on iOS and make its way over to Android months later.

The only place where you need more completeness is if you’re building a social app, in my experience. People want to be able to respond to messages everywhere.

Google is the closest group to the consumer here, but the actual bad actors are DoorDash / GrubHub / etc. The delivery companies add the restaurants to their sites without permission, then Google indexes those pages and provides smart widgets for them.

Take away the delivery companies’ bad practices, you take away the Google experience the restaurants don’t like.

You can’t directly book through Google, if I remember correctly. They’ll kick you out to the business’ site to do that.

They’re just an aggregator and get paid in referral fees. The value for you is in the aggregation engine.

Awesome seeing Svelte used in new stacks. It’s definitely my favorite FE experience I’ve had in a long time, made it fun again.

For my team, the WAF wasn’t about protecting us but rather reducing the amount of junk we saw coming from the public internet to our service. We’d get lots of weird payloads that would cause Nginx or Rails to throw an error even though they weren’t causing any breaches.

The WAF took away at least 99% of our random nighttime pages from the bad payloads. Best investment we made for oncall quality of life.

I work with a lot of fraud teams at a FinTech company, and we have the same exact problem. If you give out too much information around what caused the enforcement action, people are able to figure out the exact formula used to trigger a risk check, and will float right under it.

It’s a really hard problem.

This seems more oriented towards tech interviews, which are rightly critiqued. I do think that it would be wrong to equate product decisions with “bad engineering,” though. There’s a lot of Google engineering in particular that made waves in distributed systems and AI. Many NewSQL DBs are all based on the Spanner white paper, and BigTable was one of the bigger NoSQL DBs that people looked at as inspiration. Even things like protocol buffers have seen more usage lately as a way of sending typed messages between systems more easily.

Now, none of that means that Google can actually build and market a chat app correctly, but I’d say these are all “top engineering talent” foundational infra that only are needed at companies that operate at that scale.

Square has the largest Ember app outside of LinkedIn. I think it’s close to 3 million lines of JS?

Really? I think you can make a generic “US bad, <insert other country name, typically from Europe> good” and you’ll get a cheering chorus from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc. on… almost any topic these days.

As a US citizen I just don’t really care anymore, I sometimes get a good chuckle every time someone tells me I’m oppressed or living in a hellhole. I’m happy where I live and though I recognize there’s faults and I do try to improve them where I can. Maybe it’s state actors, maybe it’s not; I wouldn’t care about a stranger’s opinion in real life, so why would I bother caring about a stranger online? Too little time in life for that.