Plaid is really just a centralized API layer for all the different bank accounts and bank systems which all have different specifications and data formats. Plaid just makes it easy for to get it in a clean JSON response. They don't store the transaction data themselves, they're just a middleman.
Fortnite skins have become somewhat of a social status amongst kids and their friends, especially since its a game where they play with their friends. Many times kids are asking parents to buy these add ons to keep up with their friends, and may feel excluded (or even bullied) if not staying with the latest trends (AKA latest Fortnite skins). Parents denying kids that can definitely impact the kids even outside of the game itself. To these kids it is much more than bit flips in a database even if that's actually what it is.
Of course Facebook would made this change now. They have the freedom to do this now. They have effectively won social at this point. They control 3 of the biggest mobile social apps in the world: Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself. No startup really poses a realistic threat to them anymore. This policy change is just FB saving face in the eyes of regulators (and developers like here on HN).
Uber has done the hard work of normalizing ride sharing everywhere and giving consumer pricing expectations of rides, just for Google to sweep in with it fixed-cost self driving car ride sharing service to start collecting massive profits. It is going to take a while to spread nationwide but Google will do it eventually, really just a matter of time (not even money for a company as rich as Google). I'm really wondering where Uber goes from here.
Uber definitely has the levers to become profitable anytime they want since they are entrenched in hundreds of major cities in the world. At the end of the day they control the supply and demand of their own platform and most Uber users will pay whatever the price is since they have been a necessity in many of their user's lives.
No, the blame would be on you then and you would be held responsible for whatever legal action is necessary, not the company trying to block Europeans users like you. Benefit of the doubt is for the company because of their best effort European citizen blocking.
Google's search expertise was meant to succeed in voice. That is just their forte, like Facebook's is social and Amazon's is commerce. I don't see how Google doesn't win voice in the long haul.
Office 365 operates at scale. Of course they can offer prices that low for so many valuable services. They have millions upon millions of users. The more customers they acquire, the cheaper it is for them to offer those services per customer.
Of course it's all upside for the company and down for the customer. Which company wouldn't love predictable revenue from customers every month. It's an amazing business model for software businesses, especially when the customer completely forgets about it and just let's their card be charged every month.
There have been a good few of stories of people trying to get jobs, internships, client meetings with clever hack like this. I don't why this hit the front page.
Related to your story, it's either this person really wants to work for your company or you're part of a huge bigger list of employees whose company the person wants to work for. So the person might have just lumped your company with the others in the ad targeting set up.
The reality of business is you don't have to be innovative. A lot of successful businesses are not even new ideas. Of course there is the whole concept of the first-mover advantage but in the world of SaaS there is plenty place for competition. Making a 30% improvement on one specific feature of a popular product or service can very well be a business on its own. I think a lot of people get held up on the idea that it's unethical to just steal an idea so they try and start something brand new. Innovative businesses are the riskiest.
I definitely would not say it is a sizable portion. I'd say it is infact a minority of Youtube's audience. Their CEO revealed they have 1.8b logged in users [1] every month watching videos.
FYI All your subscriber's emails are accessible at https://whiteboardfree.com/email_subscribers.json since you didn't put any authentication on those endpoints. It's a basic Rails app so I'm guessing other users may got a hold of the list already.
Pretty sure that is exactly the case. GDPR went all out on user privacy that is simply a burden for small businesses to deal with EU citizens, it's financially more sensible to just block the entire EU from their services.
I'm convinced this is the start where EU citizens become second class Internet users. Many businesses just don't want to go through the troubles of GDPR regulatory hoops. For most businesses, there's enough customers to sustain their business in the US, Canada, rest of the world that they can ignore all EU customers.
Amazon simply does not need to have cash on hand. They can attain massive profits at literally any point by just increasing their margins ever so slightly across whatever business lines they operate in. This is the benefit of the scale they operate at.
Credit where it's due. Customers love Amazon and that is what really matters at the end of the day. The people they serve enjoy the service and products Amazon provides. Bezos has very successful worked his way up to become one of the top dogs of capitalism. 20 years is a considerable amount of time work towards a goal, but Bezos was patient and hardworking.
I can understand Facebook knowing what you look like from pictures of you other people upload and your email from others connecting their Gmail address books. How will they know your birth date though?
(FYI, they probably know your phone number and who you made phone calls to, when, and the durations for the last 5 years)
Very much disagree. Youtube's suggestion algorithm are improved incredibly over the years. It is increasingly surfacing content that I find interesting. I spend much more time on Youtube nowadays, easy more time than Facebook. I regularly just go to Youtube.com landing page to see what it wants to show me and always shows great quality content. Youtube has done an amazing job with their algorithms, and its showing.
Google easily makes the money back over time. A PC is used for many years over which Google shows those consumers tens of thousands of ads, easily worth more than the unit cost of a default browser deal.
I always wondered how the global offices looked for these big charity organizations. With $500M, I imagine they have offices in those urban corporate office skyscrapers and Silicon Valley tech company styled HQs.