sturgill

Apple creating an ecosystem is fine. Apple forcing devs to use their ecosystem if they’ve previously implemented login via Facebook is a cowardly move. Even Apple knows that very few devs would implement this if it wasn’t a requirement.

I’m writing this from an iPhone (and just bought an iPad Pro yesterday). I don’t hate Apple. I don’t trust Facebook. But the only way Apple can do this at any scale is to leverage their control over the App Store.

For anyone who argues that Apple doesn’t have monopolistic power in the app space, I present this as a counter point.

I’m a big fan of everyone in the world just using UTC and calling it a day. A meeting at 0700 is exactly what you think it means. But I also never expect it to happen.

My interpretation of this is that this group is mostly the acquihires. He’s looking at this specifically from the Instagram view, where the product continues.

Obviously many projects are shuttered (“Our Wonderful Journey”) but I don’t think that’s what he’s addressing in this point.

Come on, man. You can write better arguments than that. I don’t know anything about that particular legal structure.

You used the ellipse cleverly but I’ve been pretty respectful even when others have spoken poorly of some of my deepest beliefs. The least you could do is be cordial in response even if you hold the opposite view.

I called it an entity that invests in businesses. It very clearly has an investment arm (which I have known about for decades). The Church owns physical assets and I’m okay with that. I’d rather it have liquid assets than struggle to pay its bills like in the 1800s - early 1900s. I’m a fan of financial prudence.

At the end of the day, and as unpopular as it is, I believe Joseph Smith saw the Father and the Son. Other things are details. I’m not a naive or ignorant person, but I honestly have no issue with how the Church handles its finances (as an organization). Given that we do not believe that anyone is infallible (including the Prophet) I will stop short of absolute statements of any one particular person. But, as an organization, they handle their finances prudently.

Which I appreciate and respect.

Bad comparison when you’re skeptical of an entity investing money in businesses who employ lots of people...

There’s a reasonable conversation to be had about when to spend and when to save. I don’t pretend to have all the answers there.

But as someone on the inside, I’ll say this: local congregations have very strict budgets allotted to them, but the welfare component of the budget is essentially unlimited. Local leaders are encouraged (and it is part of their mandate) to “seek out the poor”. Most individual welfare happens at the local level, and local leaders are not expected to limit their assistance to the money the local unit pulls in. This is a simplification of the process, but welfare assistance is one of the few places where local leaders are not given explicit caps.

For a very centralized organization they give a lot of leeway to local leaders to let assess local needs.

I’ve never found that number substantiated anywhere.

But we agree that the Church is tight with its money. I just argue that’s a good thing...

I don’t know enough about the legal structure of [1] to have an informed opinion. Contacts and contracts are always the gift to children of connected parents. I hope to give the same to my kids... ;)

I’m sure it happens as it does in any family (hello Biden!) but I’m not convinced it’s more prevalent in the Church than any other organization of people. It’s an interesting thought, but I’m not sure how prevalent it is.

I have met several general authorities in various capacities (including Bishop Waddell who was quoted in the article). They are humans and suspect to all the frailties that entails, but they have all been serious minded people who take their roles as stewards seriously. I’m sure some amount of fraud or nepotism happens, but I also have a religious view that suggests that whatever wrong is acquired in this life will be corrected in the next.

I have known people who have done things with Church money that they shouldn’t have. All of them were excommunicated for the same. The Church takes its financial stewardship seriously with required audits at all levels.

I agree with the first half of [2] but not the complaint that follows. It was only recently that more members of the Church lived outside the US. As the Church has grown out of Utah and throughout the US (and outside world) they have done a better job of calling people from more areas.

I think this is part of human behavior as well. It can be frustrating, but it’s hard for someone in Salt Lake to know I could serve in capacity X without knowing me personally. Again, it’s getting better as genera leaders travel more and get to know local leaders, but it’s always easiest to think of the person you know.

This happens in business as well: a new CEO brings “his/her team” — I’d like to see less of it (and fully expect to as the Church continues to grow globally).

Find me the executive team of a multimillion person company with hundreds of billions of assets making the living stipend of the (relatively few) ecclesiastical leaders of the Church and your argument will have more weight.

IIRC, the living stipend for members of the Twelve was around $100k? Or less than the salary of an intern at Google...

Can you imagine the criticism if the investment arm was losing money? The Church does amazing work providing resources during crises. I’ve personally cut trees off of people’s houses with chainsaws provided by the Church and given buckets of sanitation supplies when hurricanes swept through Florida.

There is always a tension in “what do you spend now and what do you invest for later” but I honesty feel like the Church cannot win this argument. Those who are distrustful of organized religion can win if the church is poor (“why didn’t their ‘prophet’ know better”); if they’re rich (“why don’t they give to X”); or if they do nothing (“they teach their own members to save but don’t practice that themselves—the hypocrites”).

I’m a believer so my view is not disinterested, but where is the conversation that they are conservative in their investments; won’t make money from industries they teach against; etc.

There are very few people in the ecclesiastical arm of the church who work full-time and are provided a living stipend. And many of those people were very successful before leaving their professional lives.

The current President (Russel Nelson) was a pioneer in open heart surgery. I’m pretty comfortable assuming he would have made more money in his life had he not accepted a calling to full-time ministry.

To me this article is interesting but the reaction is predictable. People will read into the confirmation of whatever biases they had to begin with.

For my part, I’d rather the church invest wisely than poorly...

Agreed. LookML is to SQL what SASS is to CSS: not necessary but it sure makes certain things easier.

I’m not connected with Looker in any way, and they are pretty expensive, but the product is awesome.

I’m a fan of Recaptcha v3. There are many actions where you can ask for some additional input in a non-puzzle way. Simple example is sending a confirmation email before signup when the score is below a certain threshold.

Because I freaking hate those captcha puzzles...

The minimums are annoying but understandable. You pay a flat transaction fee (15-30 cents) plus a percentage of the sale (roughly 1-4% depending on the card type). If you’re doing a lot of small transactions, that 15-30 cents is a huge hit to your margins.

Buying a single pack of gum on a rewards credit card might lose the merchant money. They’ll make up for it in aggregate, but that transaction has a negative return. I understand the desire to limit how frequently they sell at a loss.

Credit card agreements used to require parity with cash and no minimums (as Visa and MasterCard had to create new buying habits). But recent laws have placed restrictions on those restrictions.

I created a new RDS instance via Cloudformation just last week and immediately had the notice that I should update the cert. Looks like the new cert will be the default on 1/14, but I thought that was really weird.

More charitably, AWS provides a CLI for most resources and commands and (in large measure) either provides backwards compatibility or a long depreciation window. This allows hackers to build syntactic sugar on top of their infrastructure.

I love that a community has an option to build components and share the same. It has made my work much more productive.

But we certainly agree on that last point: it’s an incredible business model.

Content has a cost; I don’t apologize for maximizing the return of that investment.

I’m personally not offended by exit intent pop ups. They are an expected part of the browsing experience. I don’t think of them like the pop ups (or pop unders!) if the early 90s. An exit intent is limited to the window displayed.

That said, I do strongly believe in respecting user preference. If a person clicks the “no thanks” button I do cookie that preference and suppress additional exit intents. And I have problems with how some companies hijack the back button on mobile to show exit intent style content.

But I disagree with the sentiment that surfacing an offer to a user is hostile.

Still not close to the same. I pollute a river and generations struggle. I distract you while you’re browsing online and the real impact rounds to zero.

Eventually you’ll die and no one will care about that time you got annoyed. But no one is ever going to swim in the Gowanus... at least not without billions of dollars being spent...

I’m not sure exit intent pop ups are the same as polluting finite natural resources, and the more I learn about the recycling industry the more I believe that everything is just trash any way (reduce and reuse are the only viable paths).

Also, as a quant marketer I can tell you: exit intent works. Most traffic bounces and never returns. Being able to capture email and nurture leads is a profitable way of maximizing the return of your traffic.

There’s a reason why every furniture store is going out of business and has someone twirling signs: we are evolved to pick out movement and change. An exit intent that inverts the color scheme is obnoxious but only because you have to see it.

The interesting question (for me) is how obnoxious do you go before you start to hurt returns.

This comment is (oddly) unlikely to be popular on HN (odd because of HN’s heritage as an offshoot of YC), but exit intent works. It’s one of the first things I put in place at any new company.

You’re right, but it’s pretty simple to slap CloudFront (or Cloudflare) ahead of those origins if you need to in a pinch. I don’t work for Amazon (and have no dog in the fight) but I am a fan of AWS. And if you’re ever using AWS for anything, there’s no reason to _not_ use their free certs.

Someone else mentioned Azure having a similar offering (I’ve never played with Azure so I can’t speak to it). And if 2/3 of the providers offer it, I’d imagine GCP will at some point as well.

I love how easy it’s becoming to launch SSL. LetsEncrypt did a lot to make it mainstream. I’ve never used LE but I am grateful for their impact on our industry.

I remember growing up in the 80s that there were only a handful of people in the entire community that had multiple TVs. In the 90s some teens in the upper middle class had a tv in their bedroom.

I remember buying my first tv as a married couple around 2007. We were still in undergrad and quite poor, but saved up and bought a 32” HDTV from Walmart for like $400.

Fast forward to today and you can get a 65” 4K tv from Best Buy for that same price [0]. Is it a good tv? No clue. But in 2007 a 32” tv seemed huge....

[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/promo/xl-tv-savings

AWS certificates are free. Cloudflare will also put SSL in front of your origin for free.

So if you’re using AWS you get it for free. Or you can slap CloudFront or Cloudflare in front of your origin.

I think the barrier is low enough that I SSL all the things (including my small side projects).

Frequent use of these patterns is a good smell test that one should reconsider design choices. Are there times when usage is justified? Yes. Should it be the first / default mechanism? No. Learn the rules first, and then it will be more clear when you should break them.

I have no problem with the general rule nor a built-in mechanism for breaking them.

Simple example: if I ever have a row lock I wrap the corresponding block in recover to ensure that I never have a deadlock. But I certainly don’t wrap every function in recover...

I saw this play out several times when I lived in NYC. Many friends would hit that point where kids were now a consideration and one of the partner’s was ready to transition to a new job. They’d talk about moving, and usually the spouse in a transition phase was ready to go elsewhere. But rarely were both spouses ready to go at the same time.

This isn’t a normative statement, but two income families are inherently less mobile (absent one spouse working remotely). It’s a world of trade offs...

I don’t know anything about revlifter. But I’ve been in this space long enough that I’m skeptical of most claims.

I usually try to build flows now that don’t ask for coupon codes at checkout (because that leads to deal searching right at the last moment). I prefer dedicated URLs with embedded offers as much as possible.

If you need to go the coupon code route, I recommend how Namecheap does it: they registered a unique domain (namecheapcoupons.com) that publicly list all coupon codes. They rank #1 in organic search results.

But, as a general rule, I encourage you to avoid working with deal sites and coupon affiliates. This is a general rule, but they tend to drive very little incremental revenue. You should also disallow any PPC campaigns using your branded terms.

Rewards and coupon websites are notorious for leaching off the affiliate process without driving much incremental revenue. In the heyday of ABestWeb.com they coined the phrase ParasiteWare for places that stuff cookies like this.

The overall affiliate channel has become increasingly challenging to manage profitably from a merchant perspective. But it’s very easy for a “manager” to see all of the sales affiliates “drive” and assume that it’s making them money.

If you let affiliate sell for you, you had better invest in a professional affiliate manager that you can trust. If you source it to an intern you’ll lose a ton of money to leeches and fraud.

I simply didn’t want my car impounded while I was cuffed and put in the back of a police car.

These were my undergrad years and I was in a different state studying (loosely defined). And there’s always a permanent record (short of expungement).

“The background check for the job shows you were arrested; can you please explain?...”

Honestly I don’t know how long stuff like that sticks around. And I’m also glad I never had to find out. It can be a funny story with a framed letter saying there’s no longer a warrant for my arrest. No Rick Perry mugshot pic circulating Facebook...

I once had a warrant issued for my arrest because I forgot to take care of a “fix-it” ticket. I got the letter in the mail and even the stress of driving a car was incredible. All it takes is going just a touch too fast and your life would change in an instant. Any whirling lights created intense anxiety.

I only lasted about a week after I got the letter before I went to the station on my own time. Technically they were supposed to book me and then process the “fix it” paperwork (burned out headlight!) but in their words “the booking room is full and you’d just be released any way; but maybe next time take care of this faster?”

I did send my mom a copy of the letter informing me the warrant for my arrest had been rescinded...

They own Bamtech (came out of MLB and eventually powered ESPN as well as WWE and other properties).

I was having issues this morning but just with home and category pages. The “featured” links to content worked fine, but the index type pages I’m assuming were just getting hammered.

“[S]harding alone is very painful even without introducing a ton of new application-level constraint logic at the same time.”

I typically espouse app logic to check state and use foreign keys to ensure enforcement (eg, race conditions that are very hard to ensure at the app level but are built into many RDBMS). Foreign key failures are just treated like any other failure mode.

But honestly, I haven’t been part of a company that have really hit those upper limits that require sharding. They exist, yes. But most companies will never need to worry about it. Which is my point.