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dobs

Re:Are Apple gift cards safe to redeem? on Thursday December 18, 2025 @02:21PM (#46317247)
> > #1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending.

> Just imagine laws would work that way.

This is how "tipping off" law often works in practice.

As a support agent you often lack full visibility into the treatment or history of the person on the other end of the phone, especially if they're a bad actor. You can't tell them what is or isn't fraudulent behaviour, or what might be construed as such.

Re:Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @11:55AM (#39030276)
But most people also aren't draining their battery every day.

I live in Toronto, own a Kona EV, and am lucky enough to have a garage. I've literally never needed anything more than 120V except when going on >300km car trips. Any daily commute that wouldn't be handled by an overnight charge at 120V probably isn't a commute I'd put up with even with an ICE vehicle.

Re:200k users abandon Netflix after crackdown backfires on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @11:18AM (#37309194)
Or decline in product offering relative to the competition.

In Canada at least Netflix's library seems to have been gutted with a ton of their non-original content moving to Prime, Disney+, etc. And even a bunch of their own formerly-exclusive content is now available for free on services like Tubi.

> If you are worried about safety, ride your e-bike/bike in the middle of the lane.

I'm the sort of person who "takes the lane" when necessary but it doesn't work great in practice: Many drivers will aggressively tailgate and I've even been "bonked" by one who thought it was a totally normal and acceptable thing to do.

I even live in an area where cyclists are recommended (by the police) to ride ~3 feet from the curb and we require drivers (by law) to give cyclists ~3 feet of clearance. If cyclists were to follow those rules they'd be taking the full lane almost everywhere. But likely due to a combination of it not being common in practice and motorists being generally impatient it ends up being a dangerous set of guidelines to follow.

In the greater context of this and the NYT article: The answer is probably better bike infrastructure.

Re:What Reddit Got Wrong on Wednesday June 14, 2023 @02:17PM (#36330160)
Part of the complexity of moderating on Reddit vs. moderating on Facebook is Reddit's open-by-default nature and limited control provided to moderators.

For example: Optionally requiring a questionnaire before being able to post to a Facebook group significantly cuts down on spam. Reddit doesn't really have an equivalent. If a Reddit mod wants to implement similar? They could use the API to write something that blackholes new members' comments until they respond to an automated message. Not a great user experience and what happens if Reddit pricing changes now make that integration prohibitively expensive?

Some mods certainly power-trip but ultimately the role isn't a glamorous one: You're a volunteer customer success agent. Most of the work isn't hard or controversial, but at the scale of Reddit there's a _lot_ of it. The hardest part of recruiting new moderators is finding people who'll remain even minimally engaged. Replacing them certainly isn't impossible but the process of replacing proven-engaged moderators with newcomers that need to be vetted can be a ton of work in itself.

There are a few bank-to-bank mechanisms (ACH, wire transfers) but they're slow (often multiple business days) and often have fees associated with them ($20+ for wires).

The lack of good transfer mechanisms is what has led to a proliferation of alternatives (e.g. Venmo, Cash App). Zelle has emerged as a bank-approved mechanism for "instant" funds transfer.

Re:AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) on Wednesday September 07, 2022 @06:49PM (#32758200)
It might be worth giving the Apple Store or online support another shot.

I was in basically the exact same position a month ago (pros bought launch week, very out of warranty, known crackling issue) and they replaced the ear pieces (but not the case) without question or hesitation.

Re:Elixir lang 1.10.0-rc0 on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @06:56PM (#21986633)
Probably 50/50 old (but popular) Erlang libraries and newer Elixir libraries.

For protocols, we have a not-uncommon use case for which there’s no mature HTTP client. Mint might be an option but it’s new enough that I haven’t evaluated yet.

Re:Elixir lang 1.10.0-rc0 on Tuesday January 07, 2020 @02:42PM (#21983898)
I feel like my experiences are in sharp contrast to many others here.

I love Elixir the language but find myself still having to throughly review new libraries to avoid footguns. In particular with "connectors" -- DB drivers, API clients, basic protocol implementations, etc. And resolving those issues normally means fixing them ourselves, often with a significant refactor to someone else's library. And in turn that's meant some of us having to become fairly proficient with Erlang.

So while I'm optimistic about the future of Elixir there are still some pain points that I think relate directly to the immaturity of the community.

Re:Beyond Meat S-1 on Monday April 22, 2019 @02:30PM (#19721428)
I'm a meat eater and my partner's a vegetarian.

A&W was our go-to fast food hamburger place even before beyond meat burgers as their veggie deluxe burger was already fairly good, though I'd still order a meat burger.

Now we both get the beyond meat burger and I honestly can't tell the difference between them and their standard meat patties. Granted, that's a lower bar than fresh ground beef coming off a barbecue, but still impressive.

Re:GraphQL: A Retrospective on Thursday November 29, 2018 @09:01PM (#18565975)
One service-to-service case where I've found GraphQL extremely useful is report generation.

For example, in one case we had around a dozen services with fairly typical REST APIs, a few of which we wanted to pull large inter-related sets of information from. Using GraphQL allowed us to:

- Have a single large-but-human-readable query to retrieve all report data.

- Analyze deep nesting up front to determine opportunities for caching and eager loading.

- Abstract details regarding what data was coming from what service, plus handle any quirks (e.g. inconsistent auth strategies) at the GraphQL layer.

Without having to make many modifications to the underlying services. We also saw a two-order-of-magnitude performance improvement that would otherwise have required building out a lot of service-specific awareness into our reporting service.

Granted reporting is a unique case, but the simplified gateway layer and potential for query analysis are also major advantages as the number of API consumers grows.

Re:How to GraphQL – A Fullstack Tutorial for GraphQL on Tuesday July 11, 2017 @05:04PM (#14748051)
You might be interested in postgraphql: https://github.com/postgraphql/postgraphql

Otherwise it depends on your GraphQL implementation and what DB adapters or ORMs they support. For example, `graphql-ruby` includes a generator for a Rails-compatible GraphQL schema.

Re:Bootsnap: Optimizing Ruby App Boot Time on Friday May 19, 2017 @02:10PM (#14378067)
Gave this a quick shot on my own monolithic app and it cut startup time almost in half. Impressive considering how easy it was to configure!

Startup time was one reason we started migrating away from Rails in a previous workplace, between frustrating startup time in development and test and occasional quirkiness of zeus and spring. Bootsnap would have been a godsend.

Re:API Design Guide on Wednesday February 22, 2017 @06:57PM (#13710414)
> In reply to fixermark, there is also nothing stopping you from very complicated queries in REST.

What I believe others are getting at is that those complicated queries themselves need to be expressed somehow even within a REST request. GraphQL provides a convenient mechanism for doing so.

In theory you can even do GraphQL RESTfully, with each REST endpoint exposing its own schema. But in doing so it quickly becomes apparent that it would be easier just to forego REST conventions and expose a single consolidated schema.

Speaking for my own GraphQL experiences, on one project we had a GraphQL query generating reports that was around 50 lines long, with half a dozen fragments. Flattened out to match the approaches you've suggested for POST data and GET params it would have been hundreds of attributes. It's unclear that there's any open standard that would have provided as simple of a solution for expressing and executing those requests.

Re:JavaScript libraries should be written in TypeScript on Wednesday March 16, 2016 @10:07AM (#11297381)
Which leaves me wondering why I'd use Typescript over sticking with ES6, especially with tools like Babel making many future features available right now and libraries like React actively making use of them.
Re:Reddit: A Nine-Year Case Study in Absentee Management on Thursday August 06, 2015 @11:13AM (#10016997)
> The article is terribly condescending towards Reddit's founders and moderators.

Quibbling point, but I found the article fairly flattering toward moderators. And as in the article, it's moderators who're often the quickest to call the admins out for the burden their inaction places on us. A lot of what reddit is now has been accomplished by moderators in spite of that burden.

Re:How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will on Monday July 07, 2014 @01:30PM (#8000030)
Someone started creating fake business listings on fake side-streets with the names of major intersections throughout my city about a year ago. So if you searched for directions to something like "Main and 1st" you'd get redirected to someone's backyard several miles away.

Reporting it when it first started happening led to nothing but rejections and it's only in the last month or so that some of the listings are finally being purged.

If they can't be bothered to take reports seriously when they're verifiable through authoritative sources (or heck, streetview) then it seems like a hopeless case for small businesses.

They could just pull the licenses from the OSI's list (http://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical). And people writing their own licenses contributes to the license proliferation problem, so should be generally discouraged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/License_proliferation).