>the usual rule is that if your cabbie starts talking about it, it's time to get out of the market.
>If your cabbie understands BTC you might have a point. We aren't even close to there yet
The point is that the cabbie likely doesn't understand BTC. When an asset class becomes so popular that people who have no idea how it works are putting money into it and loudly campaigning for others to do the same that is a sign that you are in a bubble.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the bubble is about to pop. Some bubbles can last decades. See real estate in a variety of locations around the world as an example. However lot of dumb money (people who don't understand what they're buying) flowing into a thing because of fomo can be a predictor that prices are unsustainable.
Have you participated in any bug bounty, responsible disclosure type stuff?
>a gift card phone bot that calls gift card phone lines, bypasses captcha, and transcribes balance.
It probably doesn't but does that company have a mechanism for people to report security problems?
This is partly about what you do with what you find out or build. If you discover some loop hole or vulnerability report it to the company then publicly publish your code etc once the security problem is fixed that is very different to finding a problem and directly using it to acquire money.
>because they only solve the problem that the PR submitter needs solved right now.
This is something that can lead to angry interactions between maintainers and pull request raisers. Never mind adding technical debt, pull requests can outright break uses cases they don't care about in order to implement the single use case they do care about.
raiser: "Merge my PR. It fixes this issue."
maintainer: "It fixes this single issue but you've broken this for everyone else."
The rule of thumb I've picked up somewhere is that for hard cheese you can just cut mouldy bits off. For soft cheese you should throw it out.
This is of course talking about the kind of mould that grows on it while its in your fridge. Not the outer layer some cheeses acquire during production.
>I feel like we would have a hindsight to design it better, faster, and cheaper.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic but I suspect the opposite would occur. It would be buggier, slower and more expensive once you started trying to operate at any kind of scale. The reason being that hidden within all the accumulated layers of cruft are a million fixes for specific security, reliability and performance issues discovered through real world usage.
>Nightlife is horrible, bars pretty much close at 1am
Serious question. Are there many night clubs and any day clubs? I was last out so late/early quite a few years ago but in most (possibly all?) Australian cities there are night clubs that were open through the night until 6am. I can recall one place in Melbourne that opened at, I think, midnight and didn't kick people out until 10am.
There were also a few day clubs in Sydney and Melbourne, which are like a night club but not opening until night clubs are just closing.
Personally, I've not been to San Francisco. I'm just staggered that given the cities fame the night life is so constrained.
The problem is that the risk is borne by honest business owners and honest customers. Scammers exist in both directions and the scammers typically bear none of the risk.
Regarding businesses specially, someone operating one or more scam online retailers is actively trying to suppress word of mouth. They also don't care about repeat business because their profit margin is so high. Their process may even specifically include periodically cutting ties with their previous name, websites, vendor accounts etc when victim ill becomes unmanageable.
>with all the registration, taxation, regulation etc headache this implies!
>It's not if you are in the US.
Its also not if you are in Australia. I'd suggest that the number of developers and designers who at least occasionally take on paid side gigs or who have revenue generating side projects (even if it barely covers hosting etc) is about 1/3.
I have heard of someone trying and pass off repos forked into their github account as their own work. A quick google or even just looking at the commit history in their fork made it obvious it wasnt true.
Manipulating one or more git repos to claim it as yours then ensuring your lie is not uncovered by googling would be technically challenging enough that those who could do probably don't need to.
I was recently surprised to discover that Foxtel still exists. Even living in Australia it had been years since I had heard or seen anything to do with the company.
Personally, I dont feel like Foxtel is a problem so much as the business model of locking up a show within a paid streaming service. There are so many of them. If a show or movie isnt on the streaming services I already have access to I immediately just discard the idea of ever watching it. Its unlikely to even be worth the bother to find a way to watch it.
Why do you need to work up to being a founder? Any bozo can start something new especially given that the vast majority of start ups either never go anywhere or flame out somewhere in the first year or two. Even I've "become a founder" a couple of times.
A random bag of advice based on my personal experience.
1) If you are recruiting and if you are attracting new recruits with phrases like green fields projects, bleeding edge tech etc stop doing that at least some of the time. The problem you have is partly a recruitment issue.
Try and get at least one person who is content to be chugging through bugs, low level security issues, performance improvements, and test coverage. Having at least one person in the backroom who just does this stuff makes a massive difference over a year or so.
2) If you know that specific areas need to be reworked allocate a non-trivial part of your development time to do maintenance. That means shipping less new stuff. You have to be ok with not shipping some new thing in favor of re-engineering some internal system that no customer even knows exists.
3) If you don't know what unit tests, integration tests, and snapshot tests are you should learn. Figure out what your test coverage is like. Don't go nuts and start aiming for 100% but you can likely cover the majority of your code with automated testing.
4) When you need to fix a bug think about whether you can create a test. Create a test that fails while the bug exists, fix the bug, test now passes. That will prevent you ever reintroducing that bug. Don't be surprised if this significantly increases the time it takes to fix the bug but it pays off in long term stability.
5) Collect performance data. Look at it regularly until you have an intuitive sense of what normal looks like. That way you will know when it gets better/worse. If you can have a dashboard on a monitor showing stuff like average request duration all the better. If you can get stuff like error count, request volume etc on there too you will have gone a long way to gaining an intuitive sense of 'something is wrong' before anyone else notices.
as I read the above PayPal wasnt a button on eBay yet. Just based on the above comments it sounds like initially PayPal staff were doing a bunch of buying and selling on eBay and insisting they they be paid via this thing called 'PayPal'.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...