brogrammernot

One word why I think this will work out well: money.

I can see FB/MS tapping into deep pockets to offer some top streamers a great deal to move platforms. If they get enough of them to move and the service is stable, intuitive and fun to be on then I can see FB doing well.

FB knows how to build communities, they know how to build engaging content and how to run that type of business. I would bet on them figuring out how to leverage their subject matter expertise on that side house to bring a very good product offering in this new vertical.

There’s an ecosystem there that they can tap into as well, marketplace, pages, etc that if they can pull it off, could make it a very lucrative all-in-one solution for the streamers.

Well this blew up, and the deal got pulled anyways.

I don’t get the hate on this offering. It’s a huge gamble for sure, but the upside is there if they pull it off.

Do I think they will? No, I don’t.

However, as long as someone isn’t betting their life savings on this I don’t see or take any issue with it.

Makes a ton of sense. I’ve experienced and dealt with a lot of customer confusion with Facebook, Google etc sign in where they lose access to that account & then it’s just a cascading failure of whack a mole trying to have them get their account setup etc.

I can imagine how awful it feels to be at the stadium gates (I’ve ran into this on TicketMaster’s lovely app where it can’t pull up the ticket) and you can’t figure out the login while you/your kid/friends wait on you awkwardly. Customer support has to love this decision.

Reducing friction in a signup flow is key and that’s what FB login did. It made signing up easy as people already had an account. You could pull some data attributes depending on what you were looking for but overall, it made signup flows significantly easier.

Now FB doesn’t carry the same brand trust it used to and folks prefer their own signup flow.

AZ salaries, when factoring in COL, are more than most tech jobs in California. This is leaving the allure of non-valued startup options but on average the salaries I’ve seen (yes, n=1) are in the realm of the upper curve of Bay Area salaries .

There’s plenty of programs where you don’t need a BS, you need the requirements.

New or used?

If new - the best bet is to call your local dealers and talk to them. I'm aware of many dealers that haven't turned a unit in 3 weeks now, they need the business and likely will be willing to give you a great deal because they need a move inventory.

If used - I would wait until some of the auction houses re-open and try bidding on a car. If that's a little stressful (it can be) then I'd look at Carvana, Vroom and Shift (depending on your geographic region).

From there I'd look at local used car dealers - don't let them game you or try - Carvana/Vroom/Shift all recondition to a Lexus CPO (Certified Pre Owned) standard you just can't legally say that if you don't have the approval from the manufacturer (another weird quirk) - you should be able to find a like for like vehicle between Carvana/Vroom/Shift & a local dealer.

Whoever gives you the best deal take it, but both online and in-person dealers are marking down inventory.

If you can wait a few months, the prices will be lower with all those vehicles come off-lease.

Keep in mind that with Hertz filing for bankruptcy that other rental car companies aren't that far behind, so there could also be a massive influx from those folks needing to liquidate some assets.

It's already happening. Auction houses are down significantly, and you're seeing like 70-80% of MMR value at auctions for vehicles (https://publish.manheim.com/en/services/valuation).

It depends in which manner they need to liquidate, if they can hold the inventory it often makes sense to do so instead of losing the 20-30% of market value liquidating it (you just do the calc of depreciation per day versus selling right now).

You can't really liquidate new cars, because there's regulations around selling new cars that prevents folks like Vroom, Carvana, Shift from taking on that inventory but those are the only folks who could really afford to do so with their respective funding from external sources.

Financing incentives are risky, but you account for that with increased income verification and other items - the deferral of payments for 90-180 days is getting more and more common.

This situation seems different from the 08 recession, as lots of folks _should_ get their job back once things are opened & we get back to a new normal so if you treat the risk as such you're hoping that 90-180 days is enough of a time period to have people be able to afford the loan they've gotten.

The real looming issue is you have ~4M or so vehicles coming off-lease later this year, so you will have an incredible influx of used vehicles to an already saturated market leading to great deals for consumers but not ideal times for most folks.

The harder part of selling online for dealers is that their money maker is in the hard-selling of ancillaries (Warranties, the "paint protector" and so forth) plus the F&I office (financing and insurance) but if you can't hard sell customers anymore then the majority of your profit center is gone so it's having a material impact on the dealers.

Happy to expand more or answer further questions as I work in the auto space.

I’m sure I’ll get downvoted but why should it be? Stripe has thousands of items in the backlog across many areas, and in a larger company there’s prioritization at many different levels.

I’m happy that they addressed this but I often see on HN that folks expect that an email to support staff gets the same level of support/awareness as a highly viewed post on HN does.

As a Stripe customer, there are several things that I’d love to see improved or modified but I don’t expect all, if any, of them to make it into the roadmap immediately as they’re trying to scale & fix really big issues that have already been identified.

Do I wish it was possible for businesses to address every single customer/consumer complaint? Of course, but that’s not the reality we live in.

Also - I’m not letting any company off the hook with this statement, there’s plenty of companies out there that intentionally neglect glaring issues because they don’t want to deal with the noise that comes along with it but Stripe hasn’t really even been one of those companies.

Sometimes it is the best company policy to ignore items until they go away, and to deal with the ones that rise to the top naturally.

Agreed.

Renting my router/modem makes sense to me too. I rent an apartment and if I had my own place, I would own my equipment as I’d want the extenders, more cat drops etc but with renting a place it’s much easier to rent the combo.

If it breaks, which it hasn’t in 3 years now, I can just swing by one of the stores and pick up a new one.

I pay $8/month to rent mine, and it’s worth it. It’s a dual modem/router & works fine. Considering a nighthawk or similar would end up being the equivalent of ~24 months or so of renting the unit I have it makes sense to rent.

Now, I will say I do this intentionally because I’m renting apartments and not owning a home. Once I own a place, I’d do a setup with many more Ethernet drops and all of that but since I can’t do that (I could, but tearing it down is a real pain in the ass) renting it makes sense.

Isn’t senior debt always the highest pecking order in the event the company fails? I thought that’s how the bond agreements worked, but I haven’t dealt too terribly much with senior notes so if you know more please expand :)

They don’t have a ton of cash to tap into it would appear on their balance sheet.

Selling bonds is an odd move, they don’t have any real collateral for the investors to get back their money first making it incredibly risky to hold the bond. What do you take? The original series IP and then try to sell it to a different studio?

I don’t know about this, are there other examples of tech companies with minimal physical collateral selling bonds/senior notes?

Sure, you could.

We more or less do this today, but if you need to setup a new workflow to take payments (one-time or recurring) there's a lot of work already done for you in the Stripe.js ecosystem.

So in our case, to take one-time payments it would've been more work to stand-up the checkout page itself and all of that work behind the scenes. It is much easier to just create a checkout session (basically just hitting the DB to pull the outstanding payment record and creating a stripe customer if one doesn't already exist) and redirect to Stripe's checkout.

The PCI part isn't overstated either, that checkout session lives on Stripe's domain not ours and that's where payment method is collected & stored within Stripe so you're not having to worry about it.

It's pretty nifty, give it a look - https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/one-time

We are, indeed.

As far as PCI compliance, I was just saying your comment about more work is true depending on your setup w/o using Stripe.js.

In our business we already have our own proprietary fraud models and other PII we secure, so the level of effort to keep PCI compliance for the additional Stripe components is a wash whether or not we use Stripe.js

I totally agree if you're going to use Stripe and you don't have to deal with PCI already in your normal course of business it's a complex area to navigate & using stripe.js is a much smoother path to take.

Basically goes back to basic principles, don't add more stress or work for something outside your core competencies unless necessary & in many cases, I can see where companies should just leverage stripe.js plus the UI utilities as they're well done & save a lot of time.

Big fans of Stripe, even if your ACH rates are significantly more than Wells Fargo or others :P

We’re big-time Stripe users (ACH mostly to the tune of $300M+ annually) but soon will be branching into debit/credit & in the research so far have found the Radar product impressive.

Having this information up-front and center makes it easier to pass to our Infosec folks + another check in the transparency box.

As far as not using the JS, I was under the impression as long as you’re not storing the account or card numbers & utilizing the tokens properly you’re still at the base level of PCI compliance - meaning you’re securing your website, endpoints, data store etc in the same manner you should be already.

The JS package is really nifty and helpful though, we will be able to standup a one-off late payment page utilizing their checkout flow & one-time payments (server/client - couldn’t expose all the SKUs to folks so had to go that route instead of just client) but the fact we could use Stripe to send the emails with our branding & all we have to really do is pull the payment they owe & create a checkout session to hand-off to Stripe is pretty awesome.

Considering they just released they had 60 positive tests, they’re still testing.

I’d take a look at SVB, Brex and others (PNC is good as well) depending on what you need the business account for. I have one with Chase and haven’t had any issues but it’s a small account anyways so might not apply for you.

I fully believe that the former CEO didn’t actually know what was going on and was just looking at top line metrics. You have this in many companies, not the fraud part, but the mantra to be succcessful at whatever cost. In this instance, that permutated down to the branch workers who were incentivized to skirt the rules & meet the metrics set.

Kinda feels like the housing market when loan officers were paid a ridiculous amount for variable interest housing loans versus fixed loans. The banks and everyone were buying them up as that was their top line metrics but ignored how it was actually happening.

I hold the CEO and other top executives there for staying ignorant but I agree, this made minimal money for WF so I don’t think it was the true intent of the CEO to have this happen but they should’ve looked into how markets with not large enough populations had so many accounts. They didn’t and deserve the punishment.

Sorta. This feels more like Jack/activist investor coming to common ground on the direction of the company and also a proper succession plan for Dorsey to walk away from Twitter.

He only owns 2% of the company, and at this point I’d imagine his only options were to strike this truce & have control over how he exits as opposed to be outed right now with a power vacuum causing Twitter to destabilize a bit.

I’d expect to see a succession plan where Jack is out within 12-18 months but getting to help pick the next CEO.

The same reason that Quality Assurance or Manual testers as been re-branded as “Quality Engineering / Quality Engineers”. Everyone wants to be an engineer and it’s a recruiting tactic.

Do you see many DBAs anymore? I haven’t seen them for awhile, I’ve seen plenty of Database Engineer or Database Developer job postings.

I’d say if they’re going to call you an engineer, asked to be paid like a software engineer.

Except there’s enough cases now that show that isn’t the case. The H1N1 was more “mild” than the speculation but COVId-19 isn’t. H1N1 also managed to be starved out more or less, but so far that doesn’t seem to be a real possibility for COVID-19.

If the olympics are being considered to be postponed, and tons of large conferences have already been canceled paired with companies stopping all international travel & discouraging domestic travel that’s more than enough evidence that the right thing to do is cancel your event.

The thing that a lot of folks seem to be missing is as a healthy, young adult you’re probably going to be fine if you get it and take care of yourself. With a longer incubation period than H1N1 though, you’re more likely to spread it to others who may be immunocompromised or at risk if they get it. That’s the risk with a conference, you can end up infecting many folks who infect other folks leading to high death rates.

The only way you don’t do that is you start to make the hard but right decisions to cancel events. China acted very quickly with quarantines outside of Wuhan, which is why the numbers are not growing at the same rate it was previously. There will surely be a second spike with spring break & other travels in the spring as China re-opens more areas but this isn’t going away, it’s only going to stay at the same rate or get worse over the next 6-8 weeks.

I do, but only if you seemed like you mucked up part of the interview. I’ll go check Github, spend 2-3 minutes googling the source code to see if you copied/pasted or if it’s yours.

I’ve passed a few candidates who bombed technical interview via phone because Github showed they know what they’re doing & just had an off day.

Granted, I’m sure most do not do that but technical recruiting is so expensive so spending 5-10 mins on a candidate I already spent 30 mins with is a drop in the bucket if it gets me even 1-2 more hires who would’ve slipped through the cracks.

I need to go back and check, we might be in one of their test groups as I haven’t heard any issues with 2FA. We do a catch-all and based on the error, we prompt the user to manually provide their banking info to proceed.

Worth noting I don’t work for a financial services company so the use case is likely very different than the services you’re discussing.

Apologies if I came off strong, it appears I may be a one-off consumer as opposed to mainstream.

Not even close to true. We’re one of the larger clients with Plaid and that’s not on Plaid but the service provider to not provide a manual entry.

Plaid works great and we’ve ran into next to no issues with customers linking Plaid

It’s such an infrequent purchase that you don’t have a baseline for what is a good price or not. It’s not like when you’re buying food and you always buy bananas for $1 and you stop to grab a few items at somewhere new & bananas are $2 so you don’t buy them cause you have a baseline.

It’s the same exact thing you seen in automotive sales, how do you tell if something is a good price? Well looking at the car compared to other cars in that area may help but what about one model vs another and so forth.

So go lay on a mattress or test drive a vehicle, all that does is tell you if you absolutely hate the item in question not if you actually like it so you add a wide range of prices on very similar items with unlimited reviews or information on them it’s incredibly overwhelming.

Caspar & others (Tuft & Needle) did a great job with the market by appealing to those concerns. 100 night free trial (T&N) and if you don’t like it, we’ll arrange to pick it up/drop it off at a homeless shelter or similar. Casper did something similar.

Once a decade or half decade larger purchases without a baseline is incredibly stressful for most consumers.

See a new doctor. Getting blood work is super important and can help pinpoint if you’ve got something else going on. When dieting it’s also important to weigh yourself once a week, ideally in the morning about 20-30 minutes after you wake up. You may not lose weight your first 2-3 weeks on a caloric deficit as your body adjusts.

Coming back to the bloodwork, you should get a full panel at least 1x/year if not twice a year. I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to do so, but most of the time insurances cover a large portion of it as preventative care. Blood work can show if you’re out of range on items like your test/estrogen levels, thyroid function & many more areas.

If your current doctor doesn’t support that, I’m sorry but that’s not a great doctor. Blood work is important.

Common practice to sue or appeal the decision to make sure your company didn’t get screwed out of it based on unfair terms. You can also find out where you went wrong on your RFP and make adjustments for the future. Knowing why Amazon lost to MS is just good business practice and understanding how to be better next time.

Joy app vs MyFitnessPal in a nutshell?