5,534 karma · joined January 4, 2014
If you think you are a special unique snowflake that is irreplaceable, think again. There are a few handful of individuals in the entire world that might be exceptions to the rule and those people are not irreplacable because of their knowledge or talent but because of their charisma and vision.
If you have a special skill or knowledge or talent... someone else has it too.
I say this because building your own Billing System isn't any harder than any other platform problem. The difference is that most companies aren't in the business of building a billing system. They could hire engineers to focus on it, and they could build it just fine (it's not THAT difficult). It would just cost a lot of money and all they would do is recreate something similar to Stripe, Chargebee, and the other billing platforms out there, which have already solved these problems for you. These platforms charge you a relatively low fee (lower than the cost of a team of skilled engineers and PMs) to use it, so it doesn't make sense.
It's not that the problem is debilitatingly difficult. There is just not enough value in building it when off-the-shelf solutions exist. There are some businesses that might benefit from a custom billing solution because they are too unique to use an off-the-shelf solution. These companies do build their own billing systems and do just fine, but maintain a large team of developers dedicated to the billing product. Examples of this might include AWS with their billing, AT&T or Verizon with their billing, and so on. For most companies though, it would cost far more to build and maintain your own billing system, than it might generate in revenue. Especially relative to just paying a 3% finance fee and getting it "for free" with a provider like Stripe or paying a low fee for a wrapper like Chargebee (which charges only $500 for $100,000k in MRR).
So if you generate $100k MRR, would you rather go through the headache of building a billing system and spend $50k a month in a small team of engineers to maintain it, or would you rather just pay $500 for essentially the same thing with no headache? THe choice seems simple to me.
So it's not that Billing Systems are hard... they just don't make sense to build. Any competent engineering team could solve the problems from a billing system, it just isn't worth it.
I feel like the best part of the internet is dying (good written detailed content), but the worst part of it is surviving and thriving: social media (short lived, low quality, clickbaity, dopamine chasing content).
Contrary to popular belief: servers aren't free to run or buy or maintain. Software developers also don't work for charity therefore they require paychecks. Both of these things require money.
So if you have to pay the bills somehow then you either get users to pay for it (what Kagi currently does) or you get someone else to pay for it so it can be free to users (what Google currently does).
So if Kagi makes it "free" then they need to start advertising, which then breaks the model because their customers are no longer the search users, but the advertisers. Now motivations and incentives shift and before you know it, you rebuilt Google with a different name and we are back where we started.
The point is, that the fact that it is user-funded is exactly why its different. If you pick up the ad model then you will slowly evolve (devolve?) into what all the other search engines already are.
These sites are huge content sites, getting lots of backlinks. Therefore, as mentioned in the tweet, they can basically create any content they want and Google will reward them. In this case, they are just grabbing affiliate links from wallet companies and ranking them based on top affiliate conversion/payout rates. Which is why you see all the sites have the same recommendations but you buy it and realize they are garbage. They are just cashing in some free internet coins by leveraging their SEO trust status. As a result, the rest of us looking for useful content in this search category can't find anything because of low-quality affiliate content by sites that honestly have no business writing about this stuff.
[1] - https://twitter.com/SeanDoesLife/status/1716988691556798629
However click-through rate is only one component of SEO. The biggest and most significant component of SEO is backlinks, which are ranked by quantity and quality of the link. So if google trusts SiteA a lot and SiteA links to SiteB, then google starts to trust SiteB. If other trusted sites also link to SiteB then the domain reputation grows for that site. Then there is the same ranking on a per-page basis as well. So if one page in particular is very well-linked to, then Google starts to link that page higher and higher for relevant results. This is the largest and most significant aspect of SEO. The click-through rate is a fine-tuning algorithm once you get to the top, but it alone isn't going to help. Google will never test SiteA with SiteZZZZZZZ on page 12.
Anyway, point is when I wrote for them, we had a list of places we could link to and places we couldn't. A lot of them where other sister sites the parent company owned. If we needed a source we first had to try to find it there. If it wasn't available there then there were another list of sites we were allowed to link to, which was basically top 100 sites.
Then there were sites we were NEVER allowed to link to. I remember one of those sites was Reddit. But there were many others. Then anything that fell in the middle was something we linked to if it was critical for the article, otherwise we wouldn't link at all.
So yes, its basically an SEO circle jerk at the top. Which is why you see the same 100 sites in all search results.
It's a very confusing Call to Action.
Tailwind is a way to justify writing inline css in our HTML. This was once considered the cardinal sin of a frontend developer. You avoided inline-css at all costs.
But now Tailwind just makes a class for text-color-blue which simply abstracts the `text-color: blue;` css property away into its own class. But don't fool yourself, you are just writing inline css by a different name.
There is no way to explain how it is more maintainable to write `class="rounded button hover:bg-color-black-700 bg-color-black-400 active:bg-color-black-500 focus:bg-color-black-500 rounded-sm text-sm text-color-gray-300"` instead of just `class="btn btn-primary"` using the "old-school" semantic approach. I can list numerous advantages of the semantic approach here. The only advantages of the tailwind approach is that you can style as you go and you can see the resulting style in the HTML page.
Tailwind fanboys will say "it's easier to style in the html". But that's not true. Tailwind to be done right needs a fairly complex set of tooling to enable the hot-reloading, minification, and parsing into your pipeline. None of this is necessary with simple CSS. Semantic CSS "just works" with no tooling whatsoever.
Then again, I'm old enough to have contributed to the famous CSS Zen Garden back in the day. So maybe I am just an old curmudgeon. But like all things, I expect that Tailwind's popularity will wane. Remember that before Tailwind, everything was Bootstrap. The point is that whatever tool lets developers be lazy and avoid learning fundamentals will be the tool that prevails.
The point is exactly that you don't need to worry about styling in the HTML. You just structure the HTML. If you want to know what primary means that you open the css file and search .primary and see all the css properties right there. It was never rocket science.
The HTML was designed to be the structure of the site. So you can designate items as buttons, primary buttons, secondary buttons, success buttons, and so on. Then in the Style document (CSS) you would design what you want a button to look like, what a primary button would look like, how a secondary button should look like and so forth. Then together you have a website. If you want to change the primary color of the company from blue to purple than you change it in one place in the CSS and now the website is updated. If you want all the buttons to have a new hover state then you add it in one place in the css and the HTML doesn't need to know or care about it, but it updates everywhere. It was a simple system. Now we are designing inline in HTML.
Yes you could abstract it with frontend javascript components like you suggest. But thats like building a boat to cross a puddle. Not to mention it just brings you back to the original semantic styling context, but using multiple unneccessary layers of abstraction over what could be simple CSS. You suggest using tailwind to put into a react component, just to style a button with a semantic name. When you could use native css to do exactly the same thing with no dependencies or integration workflow required.
Some original ideas will always exist, but the AI will be so hungry for new ideas that they will be sucked up and regurgitated immediately.
WJLX is a radio station in Jasper Alabama. It operates a standard music+talk radio station that they brand as "WJLX 101.5". They are licensed to operate on AM 1240 frequency. But most (seemingly all... as addressed later) of their audience listen on the FM 101.5 version of the channel which is a simulcast of the AM 1240 frequency. They don't have a dedicated FM license, but are able to legally use this 101.5 FM frequency due to a loophole for old AM stations that allows them to reach FM audiences by translating the AM station on an FM frequency. This means that if the AM broadcast stops, that they immediately lose rights to broadcast on FM 101.5, which is the frequency they brand their station under and most/all their audience is. All this information is important as will be apparent soon.
The station owns an AM Radio tower for its "primary" frequency. The story goes that a brush cleaning crew was hired to clean up tall brush around the station, as is required. They showed up and found no tower there. They called the tower owner who then confirmed that the brush cleaners were at the right place. He then drove down to the site and when he got there, confirmed the tower was gone. So he then called the police who showed up and deemed that the tower must have been stolen.
As soon as the FCC heard that the tower was gone, that means the AM station isn't broadcasting which means that WJLX is no longer allowed to broadcast on the FM frequency since they are only allowed to do it as a translation of the AM, which no longer exists. The station was ordered to go offline within 24 hours of the tower being reported stolen.
The station has been operating at a loss for its entire existence and relied on public broadcasting government grants to break even. It can't afford to rebuild the tower. So it started a GoFundMe to rebuild the tower. Looking for $60k and currently has around $20k towards that goal.
Since this news broke that a 200 foot tower (2/3 the length of a football field) dissapeared without a trace, it has started getting a lot of attention. The station owner is standing by the fact that it was "stolen". Internet sleuths are trying to figure out if this is plausible. OP's link is to various Google street view images that show that the last recorded image of this tower standing was in October 2022. It shows that another streetview image in March 2023 shows the tower missing.
This means two things:
1. The tower went down between October 22 - March 23
2. The tower has been down for almost a year and was just reported stolen a few days ago
So how did the station owner not notice for a year that his tower was missing?
Some people are speculating that the stolen tower is a ruse to gain attention and sympathy to fund building a new tower. It came out recently that the owner had let the insurance on the tower lapse. So he has no way to rebuild it. He is unable to afford it and it was uninsured.
Within a day of the tower being reported missing, some nearby software developers decided to go out on a saturday and investigate the tower site to see what they found. The video is here: https://youtu.be/78PvlGCqM84?si=5II7VeKY1tv41mXL . Namely they confirmed that its been down for a long time. The video might be interesting to see the state of disrepair of the location.
So now the mystery is whether the tower was really stolen and if so, how did they do it with no one noticing? A lot of people are suggesting that the owner is manufacturing the theft story in order to gain sympathy for his GoFundMe.
The station owner likely knew within a few hours to a few days that the tower went offline. At the very least the power bill would have been very low or non-existent that month which would make it pretty obvious. And to your point they could tune their FM radio to their station frequency and see if it works.
The FCC is a federal organization. I doubt they have an office in Jasper Alabama. So the FCC monitoring is the one in question here. Because as soon as the FCC notices the AM station is down, then the FM translation (which is what the station was really marketed around and gaining its viewership from) is shut down. Which means the station owner is out of a job. The FCC's monitoring is probably not realtime and I could see someone at the FCC getting an alert that this AM station in Jasper Alabama is down and they do think to themselves the monitoring is bad or flaky and don't immediately panic. The FCC isn't going to be able to just tune their radio to the AM station to check since they aren't in range of the station.
I think its possible that they only send someone out once a year to check for active frequencies. When they see a problem (AM 1259 is missing) then they send out the brush crew.
Point being, I highly doubt that realtime monitoring exists everywhere. The owner of this station probably banked on the fact that no one's watching Jasper Alabama that closely. When someone at the FCC gets their annual paperwork about this station, they probably just do a cursory check on it and push it through, not putting a lot of time or energy into this tiny station.
People follow him on Medium, presumably because they want to follow his thoughts and are interested in what he has to say.
So for him to post to a platform of followers, explaining the most major life change of his life and announcing that he effectively won't be as involved in the Android community anymore all seems pretty reasonable.
If someone has a gun to your head forcing you to read it against your will than I suggest dialing 911. For the rest of us, there is nothing forcing us from reading it. So if its not of interest we just move on.
This data dump is loading research papers, which is going to primarily come from Graduate/Doctoral students
For so long if you had even a small yard you had to have a mower, an edger, a hedge trimmer, a weed wacker, maybe a small chainsaw for standard homeowner tasks throughout the year. Each of these had small gas motors in them that required priming, starting, gas, oil, lubricant (for chains and other things), and potential tuneups of the throttle and small components like that. It was honestly a huge pain.
The worst is that you had to have all these small gas cans around the garage that were premixed with different ratios of oil for many of these engines.
For a homeowner you needed these tools to keep your yard looking good. But they don't get an abundant amount of work. You might fill a weedwacker up with fuel 2-3 times all summer. A hedge trimmer once. Then in the winter you need to try to drain the fuel so bad fuel didn't rot in there. Then undo it all in the spring. It was a lot of work and small engines just deteriorate while sitting still.
We have seen electric tools in the form of drills and drivers for a while. But they had never been powerful enough before to operate a huge lawn mower or weed wacker reliably. Now they are and it makes home lawn and garden so much nicer. When you start one of these tools you only have to make sure the battery is charged. It starts with one click. No priming, no mixing oil, no winterizing. Not to mention it is quieter.
I get that professional lawn care might still need the power of gas tools for a while longer, but homeowners can finally kiss that world goodbye. I replaced my mower about 5 years ago. Then the next time I had trouble with the weedwacker I replaced it with an electric one of the same company and batter system. Since then I have bought a leaf blower, a hedge trimmer, and a small garden tiller, and a pole saw, all that use the same battery system. It has been amazing and truly simplified my life.
But I'm curious if this was the real origin behind Apple's infamous "Think Different" campaign. IBM was the big competitor at the time and Steve Jobs didn't have a high opinion of them. Was he familiar with this slogan and decided to play on it while also backhanded criticize it with the "Think Different" slogan for his own company?
They put on a good front for the public investor meetings, but behind the scenes I have decided that every company is just running one day at a time.
Like you, I was confused about Justin Gray since he repeatedly quoted himself. There were also a lot of unclear pronouns throughout (things like, "He told him how he did that") which I really struggled to follow initially. However, watching the video it made more sense.
So Justin Gray is the reporter who did the story. He narrates the video, and so the transcript makes it seem like he is quoting himself, but its just a narration. Like I said, I read the whole article first and felt like it was written by a 5th grader. Then I realized it was a video afterward.
> Surveying nearly 30,000 bachelor degree programs... 28 percent of programs left students worse off economically than when they started
> 4 in 5 engineering programs have ROI above $500,000, but the same is true for just 1 percent of psychology programs.
> Only 63 percent of full-time American students who enroll in an undergraduate program graduate in six years.
> Meanwhile, half of the American workforce has built lives and families working in jobs that don’t require a degree.
--
Basically, most people don't need college degrees. Especially for those people, getting a degree just takes time which they could be starting a career or trade, while gaining excessive amount of debt which they will struggle (or may never) to pay back through their chosen career. Furthermore, lots of people start degrees and never finish them, while accumulating debt in the process.
The pending "college debt crisis" in America where student loans start defaulting unless loan forgiveness is instituted will be a very interesting turning point in the country. The children of these people will see the damage caused by college and turn higher education into a fear for the next generation.
The article points out that college isn't all bad. Investing time and money into a degree for Lawyers, Engineers, and Doctors is well worth it. But getting a psych degree and then working in HR might not be as worth it.
Metro is a terrible title for this, because metro is used in every major part of the country to mean the metropolitan area of the relative city. In this case it refers to Atlanta, but it could just as well be Denver metro, Chicago Metro, or anywhere else.
The title should read "Instagram account lets you squat in Atlanta homes"
The story never explains how they get the keys, which was the part I was the most confused about. But after looking into it more, what I think is happening is that they tell the person to choose any home on the Rently website. I have used Rently before, which has an awesome feature that lets you tour any home on your own schedule (without a real estate agent or homeowner). You basically just schedule an appointment through the app, then at your scheduled time you go to the home and you get a temporary code for a lockbox which has the key inside. You let yourself into the home and tour it, then put the key back when you are done.
I am assuming that after you "choose" the home on Rently, the people running this Instagram account put fake IDs and info into the Rently form, and then show up and get the keys from the lockbox. They probably cut the lockbox off after that (or maybe they don't care that much and just leave it on). Then they bring you the keys. Then you take the keys and squat in the house.
Which is funny, because there's no reason you need the middleman here. If you're going to be a criminal by squatting you might as well save the $1,400 and steal the keys yourself.
I laughed at the final sentence. My wife and I were talking with friends last week and both of us have independently decided to cancel prime on the next renewal because the prime shipping is random. We summed it up the same way, "For $12 /month we will deliver your product for free... eventually".
Sometimes I get it stuff the next day (rare but does happen), sometimes I get it in 3 days, sometimes a week, sometimes several weeks. I have a book that I ordered 3 weeks ago. It never shipped, so I cancelled it. Then as soon as I cancelled and went to the product page, I saw that it was available to get the next day, so I ordered it again and sure enough the new order arrived the next day. We had a package that arrived about a week ago. We weren't expecting a package, but we opened it up, and it was something that we had ordered 6 weeks earlier and had forgotten that we ordered.
Furthermore, we used to have Amazon Key delivery into our garage. I know a lot of people think its creepy but we loved it. Packages were always safe, we had a camera in the garage we could see whenever the driver dropped it off, plus packages always were delivered to the right house since they could see the garage door open, the knew it was the right place. Then randomly, Amazon started charging either $3 extra per delivery for this a few months back, or you had to wait an extra week to get it for free. What? We pay a premium subscription for delivery already, why do we have to pay more for a delivery that is more secure, costs Amazon nothing, and was more reliable? So we started just getting stuff delivered to the door. Since then, we have only received about 2/3 of our deliveries. They are consistently delivered incorrectly. So we are forced to either a) pay a $3 premium per order to get it delivered reliably, b) wait a week to get it delivered without a surcharge (only the cost of our subscription), or c) roll the dice with the door delivery.
Keep in mind, UPS and FedEx never have problems with deliveries, only Amazon because they are random gig-worker drivers who are not experienced, just delivering as quick as possible to get the next gig shift.
On top of the "eventual" delivery, now Prime Video, which was already the worst of all the streaming services started doing ads. I bit my tongue on it, but now the loss of Dolby Vision and Atmos pisses me off, because I have an amazing home setup that supports both of these and we really appreciate and notice these technologies.
All in all, we are cancelling Prime. Prime Video was not that great anyway. And if I am just going to get random delivery times that can take upwards of several weeks to arrive, then I see no reason to pay for that. I can still get free shipping on $35+ orders from Amazon that will also arrive in a week without a prime subscription. Or I'll just pay the surcharge when I need a faster delivery. This all leads to us using Amazon less, which I am honestly fine with.
I ended up getting an email from the team within minutes asking for a zoom where they literally begged me to keep going because they liked me the best of all the other candidates but are forced to have me go through the other interviews. They tried to get an exception for not doing the other interviews. They ended up being allowed to have only one more interview and they said that they could have an offer letter together within 24 hours of that interview. So I knew they were serious, but I was too tired and didnt love the bureaucracy of that place, so I just moved on.
Not to mention, you really should be connecting to a DB Pooler anyway, which handles your DB connections, rather than designing the individual implementation within the application or micro-service and try to keep all your services aligned.
People will deny that it hurts you, but I guarantee it does. I've been in many meetings where people make comments about weird photos like that which portray you negatively.
So I have accepted it as a necessary evil. If you have to have a profile image and its going to represent you, then make it as professional as possible. Don't go for goofy or silly, just be professional and boring and its the best look.
I have also had the problem with my browser history and always blamed my device.
Maybe I was giving Google too much benefit-of-the-doubt.
As someone who works with AWS every day in the Government space and needs to have strict compliance with FIPS and many other government standards, I wanted to clarify this document so people don't get confused.
Not all of these services listed here are fully FIPS compliant. This list is for FIPS-compliant endpoints to interact with service APIs.
For those that don't know, FIPS is a standard for federal information processing. It has a few parts to it, but for the context of cloud providers, FIPS-compliance generally means using encryption standards and cryptographic protocols that have been approved for transmission of federal information. To stay compliant with this standard your computers can not transmit information that is insecure, and it must secure that information with specific cryptographic strategies, using approved cryptographic modules. This means that a standard SSL connection might not always be FIPS-compliant depending on the handshake negotiation between the sender and the receiver. But a FIPS endpoint will ensure that the server only accepts FIPS compliant encryption methods. Furthermore the server will only use approved cryptographic modules for things like key generation.
So in this case, AWS has exposed normal endpoints used for communicating with the services. In addition, most of the services (not all) have FIPS-compliant endpoints. These are communicating with servers that are compliant with FIPS and will ensure only FIPS compliant methods are used in the transmission of data when calling these services.
But... here's the kicker. Some of these services may do stuff that is not FIPS compliant. So just because a FIPS endpoint exists, it only means that you can communicate with the API in a FIPS compliant manner. The service itself might not FIPS compliant and/or may do things that break FIPS compliance. Therefore do not be satisfied with flipping this switch in AWS and assuming you are good to go. You are far from it.
Also of note, if you want or need FIPS endpoints you can do two things to get the AWS CLI and SDKs to use these endpoints automatically.
1. Set the environment variable AWS_USE_FIPS_ENDPOINT=true in your shell
2. Set the value `use_fips_endpoint = True` in your `~/.aws/config` file
Now the CLI and SDK tools will automatically use these endpoints and if you communicate with a service that doesn't have a FIPS endpoint you will just get a nice fatal crash.