GeneralTspoon

The expected return of working for Big 4 in your 20’s is a coke habit

Except PHP isn’t dead - in fact it’s probably going through a renaissance.

The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.

This type of thing happens all the time. In the UK you can work as an independent contractor for years then one day HMRC will randomly decide to make a case that you're were actually an employee the whole time and should have been paying a significantly higher rate of tax.

I assume you're referring to the IR35 laws - which were brought in specifically to combat a form of tax avoidance by highly paid contractors on long-term projects, who functioned exactly like employees (by being a contractor instead of an employee you could save a whole bunch of tax in the UK).

Yes, IR35 is a complicated pain - but everyone and their dog in the UK tech scene knows that contracting is/was the way to pay less tax. So it makes sense that HMRC is attempting to close the loophole.

Uber paid their taxes as they understood UK tax law.

They were specifically attempting to use a loophole to avoid paying VAT the standard way (by claiming they're a "Tour Operator"). They've already lost multiple cases around the world for doing similar bad-faith interpretations of laws - so I think in this case it's Uber doing the exploiting.

You don't send anything to the merchant. The information goes directly to the PSP and the PSP sends a token to the merchant.

This usually works by the PSP embedding iframes for the CC fields on the merchants site (so you're inputting directly to e.g. stripe.com)

No, because React is dynamically generating the HTML on the fly.

If you pre-compile the HTML using something like Jekyll, so that the webserver is just serving HTML files without any dynamic/on-the-fly processing at request time, then it's considered static.

Everyone's at a different step in their journey.

Text book example of being condescending.

I used to work way back in the day on PHP too,

This is your issue - PHP < 5.3 is very different to PHP 7+. Not just at the language level - but the community, frameworks and best practices too. No more random scattering of SQL statements in HTML files!

Modern PHP (with a framework like Laravel or Symfony) is probably one of the most productive ways to build web applications.

It's not beautifully well thought-out the way Python is.

This is definitely an interesting take... Python hasn't even solved package management yet. And the 2.7 => 3 migration is probably the most famous example of making a mess of an ecosystem with backwards incompatible changes. In contrast PHP has Composer and 5.3 code is pretty much compatible with 8.0 (although ideally all code from the 5.3 era should be burned at the stake).

and people who don't know any better keep championing it. I think people do eventually catch up with what's going on though as soon as they personally experience writing anything remotely serious (5-10,000+ LOC) that isn't a simplistic web-app.

You've basically just said that PHP devs are too inexperienced to be able to scale a codebase past 10k LOC? Pretty much every serious web dev using Symfony/Laravel would disagree with you.

PayPal offers a micropayments option (5% + $0.05) - which reduces overall cost for businesses where the fixed fee eats a major part of their revenue.

ads for cigarettes

When did this happen? When I was in Munich a few years back there were poster ads for cigarettes everywhere. I remember them being not very subtle about their “smoking is cool” message.

This won’t affect that case, as it uses stdClass (which is allowed to use dynamic properties).

This is only for cases where you have a specific class like User, and you don’t want people setting random dynamic properties on it.

If you do you can also mark the class with an annotation to allow dynamic properties.

That would be nice - but I doubt it will be coming any time soon.

After 6 months Maplibre doesn't appear to have changed that much from the original MapboxGL version - which makes sense, because Mapbox pay a bunch of people a bunch of money to work on it full time.

And the engineering effort to implement this would be significant (probably an understatement, given how much this likely complicates the codebase going forward too). So I don't know where Maplibre will get the resources to do this (although it would be amazing if they did)

Yes, but if their own ad converts the user to a paying customer, they don't pay 30% of their revenue to Apple.

This whole thing is nonsense - pubs aren’t closed. And most people aren’t anywhere near a race track on St. Patricks’s Day. Unless they’re in Cheltenham, which is in a different country.

This “fact” isn’t a fact. Pubs aren’t anywhere near closed in Ireland on St. Patrick’s day.

It’s probably the busiest day of the year for them.

Try any Flutter-based website and see for yourself!

Hint: It’s J A N K Y

Bluetooth permissions are grouped in under the Location permissions on both iOS & Android.

This is because Bluetooth _could_ be used to determine a user's location by using beacons and constantly scanning or whatever.

But this has led to nothing but endless confusion for users (and constantly gets highlighted as suspicious in online forums), so they really need to come up with better wording. Like "This app is requesting Bluetooth permissions, which _could_ be used to determine your location".

Potentially. But there’s also an inheritance loophole that allows them to avoid that: https://www.thebalance.com/how-the-stepped-up-basis-loophole...

Even without that loophole there are probably a bunch of tricks their financial planners have to minimise taxes (e.g. using trusts/charities, various tax free allowances).

Or alternatively, because they essentially get to defer taxes for as long as they like (by refinancing the loan), it means they have the full tax free amount of cash available up front to buy more wealth generating assets.

They borrow money using their assets as collateral

Yeah this is still the case AFAIK - very annoying. I believe their recommended workaround was to have 2 separate merchant accounts with different fee structures and group your products accordingly.

It's not a "good deal" in any case....

The minimum purchase price on iOS is $0.99, so at worst you'd be paying basically the same rate (~30%).

But most payment processors offer separate pricing for micro-transactions (e.g. Paypal is 5% + $0.05 IIRC). Which works out at around 10% for a $0.99 transaction.

And actually - Adyen offer much better pricing than the "Stripe rate" of $0.30 + 2.9% in the first place.

Of course the UI is laggy - the web app is built with Flutter! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as soon as you step out of playground level programming

Uhh... pretty sure 99% of all complex JVM applications were written using an IDE.

In fact, if you joined an experienced team at a senior level and weren’t using IntelliJ, you’d be laughed out of there pretty quickly...

Yeah this entire thing just reeks of low effort clickbait.

Classing OkHttp as "Medium Risk" is ridiculous (especially since under the hood it's been the default HTTP library on Android since something like 5.0). That alone signals that the authors don't have the the skills or expertise to carry out this study.

It's a shame - since I bet there is definitely data being leaked places it shouldn't be in apps like these, and a proper investigation would be interesting.

Ah yes, all those African American people in Kenya

And we call it "Chinese Whispers" in the UK

You could also just use any merchant of record service to handle all that book keeping for you.

They’ll charge a hefty fee compared to doing it yourself, but still far below the Steam cut.

Although publishing on steam obviously has other advantages.

True. But you can’t really buy anything with it.

Which means you need to cash out to fiat $$$. And then you need 3rd party authorisation while jumping through all the KYC hoops.

This looks super cool!

We just moved away from Datadog because their log storage pricing is too high for us. We moved to BigQuery instead. But the interface kind of sucks.

Would love to get this up and running. A couple of questions:

1. Is it possible to setup outside of AWS/GCP? I would like to set this up on a dedicated server.

2. If not - then do you have a pricing comparison page where you give some example figures? e.g. to ingest 1 billion log lines from Apache per month it will cost you roughly $X in AWS hosting fees and $Y per seat to use Opstrace

Where are you located? And what did you not handle properly?

In the U.K. at least you don’t need to do or handle anything VAT-related if you have VAT-able turnover of less than £85k

Very cool idea! Useful for evaluating whether or not to order a new MBP now or later.

One minor bug - Sketch shows under all apps, but not under design apps (I thought it was missing altogether because I didn't see it under Design).