eshyong

I think they meant the scooters have firmware which can limit the top speed of the rider.

This recently happened to me as well - Venmo tried to invalidate my payment method and pushed me to go through their "instant verification" process. Note that "manual verification" (i.e. the deposit method) is still an option on their app, though you may have to remove your current bank credentials and re-add it.

I see, thanks for the detailed reply. Yeah it's sad that companies have no incentive nowadays to support open protocols (besides the ones that already exist). I wonder if regulation could solve this problem or at least encourage healthy competition into the marketplace.

I see this argument made often on HN, but it's not clear to me how an internet protocol would make social networks more accountable towards their users. Do you mind explaining your reasoning here? Specifically, how would a protocol prevent motivated companies from tracking your personal information?

I think the issue isn't that they're spending money on an order in the moment, it's an auto-renewing subscription that users may not even remember about.

From the last paragraph:

> Strict modules are still experimental. We have a working prototype and are in the early stages of rolling it out in production.

Sounds like it's in-house to me.

What language was the team counting in nanoseconds using?

It's satire written by a disgruntled engineer :P

It seems like payment/e-commerce companies in general are shifting towards offering "express checkout" experiences nowadays - Shopify, Paypal, Amazon Pay, are a couple prominent examples. My former employer Affirm was also very concerned about owning the checkout experience/acquiring users up-funnel. It's a smart move, really.

I wonder if they're referring to this? https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/16/peter-thiel-palantir-nhs-dea...

My impression is there are a segment of technically-minded backend engineers who look down on frontend work - who cares what the damn thing looks like as long as it works?

I think the truth is, most engineers just aren't comfortable with A) working with stakeholders and translating requirements to specs, aka soft skills, B) any sort of design (which is actually hard!) or C) learning the HTML/CSS/JS ecosystem. Also, I found learning how to write frontend applications to be just as challenging as writing CRUD apps.

Except that in Go, you always return the error alongside the value, like this:

    return 0, errors.New("unable to get price")

It's less elegant than Options but still, very common practice. GP's company clearly hasn't bought into Go if they're using a library that doesn't follow well-known conventions.

Sounds like your company is just using a unidiomatic library. It's poor practice to return a zero value as an error instead of, well, returning the error. As someone else said, it's standard practice in the vast majority of all go code to return a value, error tuple and check at each call site. In fact, it's so common that it's the number 2 complaint about go code after not having generics (error handling too verbose).

Go has its problems, and it isn't a perfect language, but I have never felt unproductive using it. In fact, my company uses it for all backend services. It has a great stdlib and first class tooling. Most of the discussion in this thread seems to be coming from people who barely use it or have only dabbled with go.

As a tangent, it's really tiring to see HN engage ad nauseum in these pointless language debates. Every language has its place; use it when it's appropriate.

My read on it is the author is saying that seemingly small changes can have big impacts. I agree it could have been worded better, though I doubt he's trying to promote himself as a genius (as other people are saying) because he clearly highlights the effort his team put into the project in the footnote.

Not saying this applies to every company, but I've worked at two different companies that have done something similar:

* Healthcare startup that basically outsourced its entire infra/security team from a consulting company. The consultants rewrote everything and took over engineering leadership, basically acting as gatekeepers for anything SRE-related.

* Worked at an older DNS company that hired a bunch of consultants to help engineers migrate their web framework from Play to Spring. Said engineers used Play because it was shiny but didn't have the Scala expertise to keep maintaining it, so they moved to pure Java.

Probably cost of training. You'd have to hire consultants to teach best practices and that could cost significantly more than hiring a new engineer. Plus there are other risks to maintaining two codebases in different languages.

True, there are definitely edge cases to account for. Maybe the problem is these AI assistants are trying to make everything location-aware when that may not always be the desired behavior. If there are ambiguities the assistant could ask you to clarify, but that might make for a worse UX.

But you'd still be in the same time zone, no? For different queries, like the one you mentioned, that might be reasonable, but asking for the time in London means the assistant should infer England's time zone, if you're in Ohio.

As someone who works with Python a lot, Coffeescript always looked more like Ruby to me, especially with all the syntactic sugar (lack of parens, keywords like `unless` or `isnt`, #{} for string interpolation, etc)

Why do you think it's a huge disadvantage? Your advice seems defeatist, and at best, is highly discouraging. Do you really think it's a good idea to tell a young high schooler to game the system to get into college?

Yeah... I wouldn't listen to GP, because being Asian-American is not a disadvantage, and gaming the system is bad advice. As someone who is Asian and went to a predominantly Asian high school, I saw tons of my schoolmates succeed in getting admitted to great colleges. College applications, like job applications, are really all about how you present yourself and how you tell your story. If you have a strong essay, you have a good chance at convincing an admissions officer to let you in.

My advice to you would be to:

a) Talk to a counselor about your essay. My fiancee worked at a SAT prep school and she helped tons of people get into Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Ivy League schools. Your essay matters a lot. It's the only thing that shows you're more than a statistic, and gives you a chance to show off your passions. Having someone look at this helps a lot.

b) Apply to as many schools as you can. Don't fixate on individual schools, try to get as many opportunities as you can. College admissions, like job applications, are mostly a numbers game, so the more place you apply to, the higher your chances you'll get into something you like.

c) Don't be too disappointed if you don't get into your first choice. In the end, college is really more about what you make of it, rather than the pedigree of the school itself. I've worked with tons of great engineers with degrees from top universities and small community college alike. College pedigree doesn't determine your success, hard work and discipline do. Having a passion for CS is great too.

Good luck! Don't give up hope, I'm sure you'll get into a good school.

While I agree with some of your points re: online companies doing well, I don't see how you can take anecdata about local grocery stores and extrapolate it to the rest of the economy. Also, don't forget that 16 million (that's 5%!) Americans are unemployed right now. Can you imagine the damage that's going to do to businesses across the country?

If that isn't a sign that a recession is coming, I don't know what is.

I'm guessing a lot of this is location dependent, and based on warehouse-proximity.

Or underestimating the bureaucracy of the system. I did some work for a startup that interfaced with the government, and basically the government insists on doing everything in triplicate, getting approval from multiple layers of hierarchy, and does things on a yearly cadence.

I think the average HN-er doesn't realize just how slow/inefficient government really is. But when you read these stories it's apparent that the problem exists at an institutional level, and isn't really as simple as people think.

The two games have totally different vibes, which is fine. AC is more for relaxing and unwinding, while SV is more of a story-driven/objectives-based game.

I've played ~20 hours of Stardew Valley and ~10 hours of Animal Crossing so far, and the vibe is totally different. Animal Crossing is slower paced and very relaxing, whereas Stardew Valley is much more story/character driven. IMO the point of Animal Crossing is personalization, and making the island your own space, which I enjoy. It really helps me unwind at the end of the day.

At some point, playing Stardew Valley felt like real work, and that's sort of when I lost interest.

IMO the real reason open floor plans persist is because it's cheaper for the company than the alternatives (cubicles, offices). The more people you can pack into work "pods" the better.

Don't think so. GP acknowledges that it'll still let the virus in, but at a lower rate than someone without a mask at all.

From what I heard, they only put the number of shares and an estimated value in the offer letter, so that amount is only accurate at the time they give the offer - since Lyft's shares have dropped in value it's probably worth significantly less now. Some companies give refreshers to compensate, but not sure if Lyft does.