pocket_cheese

I think therapy can be used very strategically. Maybe you want to end a friendship and don't know how to break it to them. Or maybe you don't like the way you are being treated by someone and you want to know effective ways of setting boundaries. Therapy can be super useful in giving you the tools to confront difficult emotional/psychological situations.

They're not. Almost all of their infra was on prem when I worked there 3 years ago.

How about Apple maps, windows 8, the Samsung Galaxy with the exploding batteries, the entire metaverse.

Not trying to be combative - but you do have a choice to refuse. To me, it seems like they wanted to add diversity to account for bias and failed hilariously. It also sounds like this wasn't intended behavior and are probably going to rebalance it.

Now, should Google be mocked for their DEI? ABSOLUTELY. They are literally one of the least diverse places to work for. They publish a report and it transcends satire. It's so atrociously bad it's funny. Especially when you see a linkedin job post for working at google, and the thumbnail looks like a college marketing brochure with all walks of people represented.

Investors in Google should consider Google's financial performance as part of their decision. 41% increase YOY in net income doesn't seem to align with the "go woke or go broke" investment strategy.

Fortune 500s are laughably insincere and hamfisted in how they do DEI. But these types of comments feel like schadenfreude towards the "woke moralist mind-virus"

But lets be real here ... DEI is a good thing when done well. How are you going to talk to the customer when they are speaking a different cultural language. Even form a purely capitalist perspective, having a diverse workforce means you can target more market segments with higher precision and accuracy.

A few different techniques -

1. use mobile phone proxies. Because of how mobile phone networks do NAT, basically it means that thousands of people share IPs and are much less like to get blocked.

2. Reverse engineer APIs if the data you want is returned in an ajax call.

3. Use a captcha solving service to defeat captchas. There's many and they are cheap.

4. Use an actual phone or get really good at convincing the server you are a mobile phone.

5. Buy 1000s of fake emails to simulate multiple accounts.

6. Experiment. Experiment. Experiment. Get some burner accounts. Figure out if they have request per min/hour/day throttling. See what behavior triggers a cloudflare captchas. Check if different variables such as email domain, useragent, voip vs non-voip sms based 2fa. your goal is to simulate a human. So if you sequentially enumerate through every document - that might be what get's you flagged.

Best of luck and happy scraping!

You're right - no legitimate bank would serve those criminals. You have to be a white-collar criminal for banks to serve you.

While I believe selling zero days to NSO group is significantly worse than working for Google or building surveillance capitalism software - we are mercenaries. Like 60% of software work is vehemently anti-middle class. Almost all of us have either contributed to some spying apparatus (analytics platforms), build some automation that replaced several humans, or developed something that contributed to the environmental destruction of our planet.

Let's be clear though, I'm not saying tech is bad. We'd all be doing manual labor on a a farm without it. I do think our demographic (including myself) has completely set aside any consideration for our impact in the name of optimization or a fat paycheck.

I have lots of criticisms of Google, but let's not forget they have Gmail + workspaces,Google Domains, Android, Google Cloud, Google Fiber, Google Fi, The pixel, Nest, Maps, Youtube, Fitbit, and probably the browser 90% of people on here are using. Would losing search devastate them? Absolutely, but they're not exactly IBM levels of irrelevance without it.

Payments and stablecoins have many usecases. Like international payments, irrevocable payments, and auditing. However NFTs are just a deed to an address space on the blockchain. I don't see anything useful that can be implemented with this.

IP restrictions are easy to overcome using mobile networks. Basically, mobile networks assigns your device an internal ip and NATs out to a very small pool of ip public addresses. If they block you, they also block a very large chunk of legitimate mobile users. I'm a big ol' dummy when it comes to networking, so I imagine I explained something poorly... so any mobile network nerds feel free to pile on!

Captchas are super easy! There's a gagillion captcha bypass services for every type of captcha. Just snag the captcha token, send it in an API call, and then you get a verified captcha token.

See CGNAT for more details about mobile networks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT#cite_note-of...

It's pretty much impossible to stop the top 1% of the most dedicated scrapers without affecting end user experience.

What happened to Cardpool was pretty messed up! I knew some people in the industry who knew the people in charge and mentioned that one day they just started getting a bunch of complaints, and then bam - out of business.

But yes! especially in b2b sells. I always try to be super anal about kyc with selling to business buyers in bulk, and avoid buying from them. I straight up stick to institutional suppliers to avoid this issue :(

Haha, I bought the domain debatelord.com to build something similar, but never started development! This is awesome. Will check this out.

I only go to authorized distributors, where the brand themselves has approved the vendor to resell the cards. For game keys, I haven't done anything in bulk, but the best route is going directly to the publisher and getting permission, but this requires large order commitments and game prices fluctuate too much and can be super risky.

My real biggest risk though is when I open up my own store is chargebacks. Digital goods have a very very high chargeback risk, and I need to be clever on how I mitigate that!

There's a bunch of shady ones that I avoid, and the really big legal ones are blackhawk networks and incomm. Becoming an official distributor requires a lot of vetting from their side though, so it isn't like any joe blow can apply and get approval.

Correct! customer buys a playstation $10 card for $9.80, I buy it for $9.20, and pocket the spread.

Fraudulently obtained inventory is actually something I actively want to avoid. I don't want to go to jail, or risk getting banned from marketplaces - among ethical considerations.... I only go to authorized distributors where there is legal permission to resell these types of items. Incomm being the largest. Blackhawknetwork being another large player.

I am a gift card reseller. Pretty much, there are marketplaces where you can sell gift cards and cd keys for games and when a customer places an order, I make an API call to procure that item and deliver it.

Currently at 70k Euros a month. It took me about 3 years to get here. And it took a few months to get to 2k monthly revenue.. However, the first two months I was at break even and it took me about a year before I could figure out how to get this system running profitably. Currently profit margins are about 7%

You can still do a few things to make it super annoying to scrape your site. Cloudflare bot detection, captchas, 2fa, obfuscated JS, api/ip rate limits, georestrictions, anti-replay tokens, not exposing API resources that can be enumerated, and a few other techniques can make most people not care enough... You can prevent 50% of scrapers with only a little bit of effort, 90% with more effort, and 99% if you wanna be a try-hard.

OMG I owe me pushing my career to the next level due to Pavlo's course! There's so many technical interviews where I've impressed my interviewer with explaining low-level details of how databases do things. Don't be fooled by the course name though, it's pretty rigorous but so rewarding and practical (especially if you are a data engineer). I give this course an A+ for teaching me about B+ trees in C++ :D

My experience at FAANG was that every major service had like 9 layers of abstraction or had to traverse several hops to do the actual thing. I've kinda become jaded and feel like most things that make money are ugly. Whether it's a giant plate of spaghetti served up by some start-up trying to be the first to market, or a lovecraftian horror that is only exceeded in scale by it's unknowability - like what OP posted. The end result is the same... 40 api calls to submit a form :'''(

In my experience, the thing that makes me actually have to lug out my ol' headless browser is that a lot of websites are starting to implement obfuscated cryptographic puzzles in their JS, making it really difficult to emulate without just running it in a browser.

Could you elaborate what you mean by "naive indexes"?

The company that mints BUSD Paxos actually is the most regulated crypto company in the US. They are a trust and have proof of reserves which is audited by a big 4 accounting firm every month.

My very amateur guess is that Paxos sees stability issues with Binance and wants to cut ties, or they are getting too much regulatory scrutiny to make it worth it and are dropping them like a bad habit.

I 100% recommend browserflow. It's fucking awesome!

FAANG is what you make it. If you wanna coast and make 350k for 20 hours of actual work, it's doable. But if you wanna work on some super fancy team, make it to staff eng, make an impact etc... there's a path for that too.

Neither of them are wrong approaches to working at FAANG

The worst case scenario with a union is bad employees taking advantage of a company. Without unions, the worst case is a bad company taking advantage of its workers.

If you are a capital owner, I can see why unions are bad. If you are a worker,(i.e. 99.9% of people), I have no idea why you wouldn't want unions.

This is not true. Any column store database (bigquery, Redshift, snowflake) implements distributed compute behind the scenes. When an analyst/business intelligence people have a query return in 3 seconds instead of 15 seconds, it's actually huge. Not just in aggregate amount of time saved, but in creating a quick feedback loop in testing hypothesizes. This is especially true considering that most analyst type people look at data as aggregates across some dimension (e.g. sales per month , unique visitors per region, etc...)

These types of questions are orders of magnitude faster with a distributed backend.

Magnificent software is software that makes money or ads value. With Python, technical debt has a higher interest rate, but the loan amount is greater. Right now, I've worked on a webapp that actually makes me money. It took my 6 weeks with really hacky python to get it running in production and serving requests. My last company is still 4 months on their iteration of a similar product because they wanted to build it the correct way with a typed language and better abstraction.

IMHO for greenfield startup projects/POCs, I much prefer python for making things fast and getting things out to market asap. Spaghetti gets me fed.