joecot

wasm-nginx-module

https://wasmedge.org/book/en/use_cases/frameworks/mesh/wasm-...

Right, the issue is that they're going to hook people who are aspirationally looking to work at a FAANG and will not by any stretch of the imagination pass their interviewing process. They picked Pay Later because they figured they could pay for it later if they got the job, or given the funnel hacking discussed in the post, they never considered that they would have to pay for it later even if they didn't get the job.

This is a lower scale and lower cost version of the for profit bootcamps and IT schools. Yes, if you go in with the tools you need to succeed, you will probably gain something and get a good start at a FAANG or similar. The programs cannot work miracles and have a vested interest in casting as wide a net as possible even though that's a disservice to their customers. This service figured out they need to reign in that net to confirm people can actually pay their cost.

If you want to convince people to get invested in using PenPot, while you've also taken VC funding, then yes that is the way to go about it. The main way that open source projects continue if a company suddenly pulls out is if there is a robust volunteer community to be able to fork and continue. If you build that community, that would be able to continue maintenance and development if, say, your VC funders decided today it would be better to take the ball and sell it to Adobe for 8 billion dollars, then you will have built the contingency for when you inevitably lose control.

Without a community, an open source code repository is text files you can use to run or compile an application. An open source project needs maintainers, active contributors, a roadmap, etc. Github is full of very popular open source projects that have been completely abandoned, and forks of those projects that are also abandoned. An open source project having maintainers after a company has abandoned it is not the default. Sometimes it happens because the company nurtured an open source community before abandoning it, sometimes it happens because the project is crucial enough it scratches enough itches to attract volunteers. Sometimes it happens out of spite. But those are exceptions, not the rule.

Open source is only part of the equation. The other part is having maintainers and community. Being able to fork it is great, but if there's no community fixing bugs, if there's no security fixes, if there are no improvements, if the main product changes drastically from the open source version and the files are not compatible in between, there are serious problems. Many open source products stagnate and die, whether or not they were popular, when the company is no longer involved. Community is not automatic or instant.

1) We're a good company aiming to help people and make the world a better place, and we promise not to do any evil

2) We've taken Venture Capital funding in order to get ramped up much faster, so we can do all those great things

3) Because we didn't ramp up as fast as the Venture Capital funding wanted, we're changing our direction.

4) We're selling to a big company for billions of dollars who will either ash can our work entirely or totally ignore our initial mission.

Founders like to pretend they didn't break their promises when their VC funders or a takeover totally changes their product in step 3 or 4. But they broke their promises in step 2, the second they took Venture Capital funding. VC is investing a small amount in many companies expecting massive payout from one of them. The end goal is to go public or sell to a large company. Either means giving up control, which means you've agreed to give up control as soon as you take VC funding. A company can no longer be trusted to do what's in the best interest of their customers as soon as they a) take VC funding, b) go public, or c) get sold. No matter what promises they've made.

Point is, don't jump from Figma to PenPot thinking everything will be better, they will go the same route within 3 years if they're successful. It's nice that it is open source, but at some point it will not be open source, or will have significant changes for a professional paid version. Open Source is only part of the equation, it also needs either a community or consistent company support, and that's not guaranteed once VC gets involved.

They're already at sending reservists, who get around 3 days of training. Their front-line tank crews get exactly one practice shell per crew member, each year. Putin is going to run through all their reservists, and then start sending every Russian man who can physically hold a gun into the meat grinder. It only ends when someone in his government finally takes him out, or Ukrainians march on Moscow itself. How many Putin allies can fall down stairs or have strange accidents in 2 months time?

Given that crypto miners weren't willing to think ahead to the consequences of countries needing to fire coal power plants back up to meet their demand, or the problems with continuing to crypto mine during multiple worldwide energy crises, I am not surprised if they didn't think ahead to what would happen if the Ethereum merge happened exactly as planned.

I agree with all of this. The US and EU kept discussing inviting Ukraine to NATO or even the EU, and the US was pushing towards a military alliance with Ukraine. This would've caused tension even if Russia was a democratic country not run by Putin. With Putin it led to near certainty of a conflict with Ukraine.

But while it's worth looking backward at that to try to get our leaders to not pull political moves like that in the future, it in no way changes the Ukrainians being on the right side of this war, and Russia being on the wrong side. Yes, the US's actions were likely to cause a war, no, Russia is not justified in starting that war. In the same way that European appeasement of Hitler and USSR's neutrality deal clearly led to the Nazis invading Europe, but do not in any way justify the Nazis invading Europe, or the Nazis being the right side.

> Never in history were "people of color denied from existing without harassment", etc.

I would suggest reading about Jim Crow, Red Lining, the fight against school integration, New York's Stop and Frisk, and a "Black Lives Matter" movement fighting against cops regularly shooting unarmed black men to death. I would suggest those things, if I had any indication your statements were being made in good faith.

Americans have been so indoctrinated to the idea that every issue must have two sides who should be equally considered, that when we have issues where one side is the obvious aggressor completely in the wrong, they don't know how to comprehend it. Our media has made everything a debate game because it gets viewers, and it's rotting people's ability to actually figure out what the right side of an issue is.

There is no equally valid argument against man-made climate change, evolution, gay rights, the right for people of color to exist without harassment, or Ukraine defending itself.

Your stripe transaction cost is probably around the advertised fee, 2.9% + 30¢

With an actual merchant account you can probably get closer to 2% or at least 2.5% + 25-30¢

At 5 million in transaction revenue, a .5% decrease would be 25k a year. You can probably get a larger decrease depending on how much risk your company's business has.

Stripe's sales rep might be contacting your company because you've hit the threshold where it's probably worth getting a merchant account, and they want to see if you're considering leaving to give you a discounted rate to stay. You're pretty much in Stripe's retention department because of your volume. It is definitely worthwhile at this point for your company to shop around for a merchant account. Some don't even have application fees if you're not a high risk business. At the least they can get an idea of how much they could save, and use that to leverage lower fees from Stripe.

I would still consider trying for a processing gateway that handles all the card transmission, though, even at a slightly higher margin. Handling the card at all means you need PCI Compliance. At your revenue you're probably PCI Level 2 or 3, which only requires a self-assessment questionnaire (that is lengthy but doable), and a quarterly vulnerability scan. At 6 Million transactions a year, you'll be PCI Level 1, which means you'll need an auditor to come in and look at your processes and policies.

Yes but it's complicated.

* It's possible that you could tokenize to each provider before making a transaction. But you'd need to see if the provider has a timeout on those tokens if you don't actually make a transaction with it. You'd also need to make sure your processor will even allow you to connect to them directly and authorize a transaction with that token later without consumer interaction.

* You can tokenize the card number and expiration, but not the CVV. Some cards you would be able to get an auth without a CVV, with a slightly higher processing fee (that may or may not get passed on to you). But some will just get declined without the CVV. You are not allowed to store the CVV.

* You're really supposed to get the CVV for any transaction that's an initial transaction. This is a recurring transaction, but since you are changing the agreement (by moving providers and a completely different merchant account), it's really a new initial transaction. Your customer will see a different descriptor on their credit card statement, they may complain, it could end up being a whole thing. And if you're worried about needing to use multiple providers, you don't have your own merchant account, so the bank doesn't come to you, they go to Paypal, or Stripe, etc. Now you have to explain to them why there's a new transaction with no consumer interaction, if they contact you to ask at all before shutting you off.

* Unless you're using a plugin like Stripe's for every processor, quickly doing a request to your processor directly in the user's browser and submitting each of the tokens to yourself, doing this would require you to at least accept and transmit credit cards yourself, not sending the consumer onto the processor's site to fill it out. You are now transmitting credit card data yourself, which means you'll have to go through the PCI Compliance process. It's a self-assessment, and you can skip a lot of steps if you're at least not storing the card number (which you probably should not), but it still a bit of an arduous process. No one's going to check you on this unless there's some sort of breach, but you should still definitely do it.

Yes, this is a risk. Which is why instead of putting all your subscriptions towards one company, it is a good idea to balance your subscriptions across providers. That way, you might lose some customers or have to ask them to come sign up again, but you don't lose all or even most of them.

Mostly, just use multiple providers. There's no reason to put all your eggs with Stripe. Setting up with Paypal, Google Payments, Amazon Payments, etc, requires essentially no business overhead. Just the extra overhead of needing to setup multiple payment providers in your software.

Use multiple providers, if one shuts you down you still have other options. When you're large enough that it makes financial sense, apply for your own merchant account and use a processor like Authorize.net for that too.

Yes, this is why my previous company never went the IPSP route (letting customers accept payments with your merchant account). They are incredibly arduous to get approved, you practically need to have a bank CEO as your godfather to get it. Also you need to be at least PCI Level 1, which involves actual auditors going through your business and policies. That part is significantly easier than the IPSP though. OP doesn't sound like they were trying to do that though. They talk about their client's individual Stripe accounts being turned off.

This is probably what a business like OP's would need to do. When their customers are small, use a processor like Paypal or Stripe. But as customers get larger, OP should probably do what we did: partner with an ISO, who can get the customer their own merchant account. OP still does the processing for them, but the risk and finances run directly through the client, not OP. The ISO can also add in a margin on the transaction fees for OP if that's part of their business model.

If someone uses WooCommerce for their store, they have 79 different payment integrations, including Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Payments, along with merchant account gateways like Authorize.net. Some of them are paid extensions but rather cheap considering the use.

https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensi...

Unfortunately I know little about the process for actually applying for a merchant account or where to get it from. That's what the ISO we partnered with handled. Also it was "high risk" accounts (cough adult cough), that is different banks than you'd be using. Same with the competitor payment processors I'm aware of. If you're unfamiliar with the process and can't find a bank to walk you through it, an ISO is not a bad idea. They'll walk you through the process and help you find a bank, and also a processing gateway. They'll also add a margin on the processing fee, but it's not a big one, and certainly less than paypal or stripe.

For processors starting out, there's nothing wrong with using Stripe or Paypal etc. When you ramp up to using your own Merchant Account, Authorize.net isn't too bad as long as you're not doing recurring payments (those get tricky), or maybe even Rocketgate.

The difference is between the company having their own merchant account with a bank (which is what most large companies do) using an online payment gateway, and not having one and leveraging the processor's instead (which is what Stripe, Paypal, etc provide). When you apply for a merchant account you get that approval and underwriting, but with a hefty application fee for obvious reasons. If your payment gateway shut you down, you can just switch to a different one, but there'd be little reason for them to do so. Your bank is much less likely to shut you down, because you were preapproved. The main reason would be for high fraud/chargeback percentages.

When you use Stripe or Paypal or similar, you don't apply for your own merchant account. You make transactions using their merchant account. If there's a fraud or chargeback percentage issue, the banks will have a problem with them, not you, but it also means the service needs to be proactive in policing their clients so the banks never come after their merchant accounts.

When starting up a company, use a Stripe or a Paypal to get up quickly, but probably ramp up to using multiple quickly, so you have backups. As your revenue increases, apply for a merchant account and move your transactions over to that. There is an upfront cost, but the processing fees are significantly cheaper, and no one will pull the rug out from under you without quite a bit of correspondence. Even when using your own merchant account, you can find processors who will handle all the credit card input and transmission on their end instead of on your site, which greatly limits your PCI compliance requirements. Regardless, when you build your service, abstract the payment process such that you can easily add or switch providers. Don't be married to a single one, because at the least you should be switching to a merchant account when the application fee is lower than the transaction fee percentage difference.

Source: I also worked for (and was the principle developer of) a high risk payment processor, providing a processing gateway for individual merchant accounts serviced by an ISO. We tried to look at becoming an IPSP (I think that's the acronym), letting customers leverage our merchant accounts like Stripe or Paypal do, but it was significantly more work and process with credit card companies than we wanted to deal with.

Twitter is a publicly traded company, which means it can be sued by shareholders if it makes business decisions which will harm its value. Giving up complete control of its protocol would harm its value. Giving up its algorithm which traps its users in a whirlwind of vitriol would harm its value, because its advertising dollars would go down. Dorsey might have been at the helm, he might have a lot of clout, but when it comes to making the internet or the world better in return for lower profits, most of the time the company leadership does not actually have the control we think they do.

The problem isn't that Twitter is a company, the problem is that they went public. Any promise or good will intention a corporation has ever had is null and void the day they sell the company or go public. I'm sure Dorsey will cry into piles of money over it.

My company had a chrome extension they used for making twilio phone calls. V3's service worker focus made that a complete nonstarter. Ended up writing a thing to make phone calls in a background tab, use the Broadcast channel Api to communicate between the background tab and the active tab, and wrote instructions on the background tab for allowing sound permissions explicitly. The plus side is that we likely won't be dependent on chrome anymore, but I expect I'm not at the only company who got a rude awakening from the v3 transition. And yes, you can use v2 extensions with chrome enterprise, which I have no interest in doing.

I find the easiest way to set it up is using docker. Running openvpn or wireguard in a docker container (they often have a killswitch built in), then having my transmission and other docker containers use it as its network. The docker image I use for wireguard with PIA is thrnz/docker-wireguard-pia

You get promoted at Google not for improving and maintaining great products, but for building and releasing a product. This is why you see them building seemingly competing products for the exact same sector (Duo and Allo anyone?). Someone leads the project, they get dozens of engineers to work on it, it gets released and announced at Google I/O. The manager who got the project completed gets promoted, the product ends up languishing.

There's no incentive to maintain a product, or improve a product, so Google just puts out an endless series of half baked products and abandons them, while existing products are barely touched. If their only real goal is to produce new executives and higher level managers, the system works great.

No, because you see that would reduce property values. The line is only supposed to go up. You can't create affordable housing, or allow multifamily housing, or do anything that would stop the people who own homes there from having their property value raise 50k every 6 months.

But you also can't have homeless people around, that would be unsafe. Also they still expect people to live there and do service jobs for them, even though there is no place affordable to live.

I've been in 2 different class action lawsuits about vehicles: first Honda Civic Hybrids (where the battery always died like right after warranty ended), and a Nissan Versa with CVT transmissions (same but the transmission). Both ended with a slight extension of warranty that was no longer helpful to me, and a voucher for a few thousand off the next vehicle I bought from them. I never bought another vehicle from them.

> Re: the first point about contribution, this is why Wikipedia doesn't let people be their own primary source — it's because, when that primary-source person eventually stops maintaining the page, who will then be able to take over the maintenance?

It's also because people use having personal Wikipedia pages as a credentials boost, and they write puff pieces about themselves or their friends. If a person is notable, there will be multiple editors on their article, and the hope of the project is that multiple collaborators will reduce bias. If someone is not notable enough that people besides themselves and their friends would contribute to their page, there is room for substantially biased puff pieces. Most people take Wikipedia articles at face value, and don't delve into any of the sources cited, so that is a huge problem.

Wikipedia articles will always struggle with bias issues, but for the reasons you mention, there is no point in spending volunteer time verifying articles and removing bias when they're for people who aren't notable. That's why they just get removed.

If they were going to have Tuxedo Mask show up and outshine all the women, did he at least throw a rose while doing it?

Yeah the title is very misleading then. I expect that 40% refers to option 3, which is wrong, but is way less concerning than believing the entire earth was created 10k years ago.

Those arguments are from different groups of people. I'm in the camp of wanting crypto to have way more regulation. I would also like us to not hasten a climate crisis by turning on coal power plants to mine crypto that is useless.

There wouldn't be an endless series of unfunny comedians making "Comedy" specials called "Trigger Warning: How I'm Canceled by Snowflake Cucks" for Netflix if people weren't watching it.

Our primary problem isn't that there's a bandwagon of male comedians whose whole show is crying about snowflakes cancelling them or making exactly one joke about trans people. It's that there's a ready audience excited to watch them do it. If there wasn't Netflix wouldn't keep making the specials. I'm still going to call the comedians and Netflix immoral hacks for cashing in on it, though. And I hope the cancellations keep rolling in so Netflix can see us vote no with our wallets.