johnm212

Paymentech. It's a hassle to get started but it's worth it. It's also a lot cheaper than Stripe and you don't have to worry about random account closures.

maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.

From the article: > Twitter already had a $400m paid API business

If this is true, the API would be generating almost 10% of Twitter's revenue. This is a serious business unit for Twitter.

It looks like facebook disputed this story

Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesperson, responded on Twitter on Wednesday saying the screenshots are from early March “when the ad account was briefly disabled for a few days due to an unrelated payments issue.”

Osborne added: “The ads themselves were never rejected as they were never set by Signal to run. The ad account has been available since early March, and the ads that don’t violate our policies could have run since then.”

This is from: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/06/facebook-and-signal-are-figh...

Either way, it's a great publicity stunt by Signal.

I've been hiring on Upwork since 2007. I love the idea of being able to hire people with particular skillsets for a short time. For example, we had a unique issue with elasticsearch. We hired someone on Upwork with a Ph.D. and wrote a book on it. For a few hundred dollars, he was able to resolve our issue in a few hours.

For every good experience, we have had about four bad experiences. The Upwork marketplace is filled with accounts pretending to be in North America and using fake photos. If you start looking at the profile pics on Upwork, you'll see they have the fake teeth from thispersondoesnotexist.

We've accidentally hired some of these fake people. Not only can they code, but they are pretty good. Upwork usually freezes the contractor's account when they try to get their first payout and fail the identity verification. Then we get a request from the contractor to pay by Paypal. It's a mess.

Here's the chat response from one of the contractors when they were found out:

OK, let me explain. To be honest, i am based on China. But i can complete the task really well. But i can't work with high rate on upwork as Chinese. I am really sorry for that. You can confirm me through video call. Anyway, i am really good developer in Bootstrap 4 and css3, Html5 and etc. you can check my result.

Upwork should be doing more to fix this. They are very aware of the issue. I once emailed their old CEO about the issue and got a reply from an assistant offering an account credit.

I wish there was a good alternative!

Build your crypto business with Stripe

I would hesitate building any business on Stripe. However, if you are considering using Stripe Crypto, build the integration it in a way that you can easily migrate away.

We built our credit card processing and invoicing on Stripe. We've only processed $2.5m and now we are migrating away. We are 2 months into the migration.

It's worth the migration cost, working with Stripe has been an absolute nightmare. Really wish we had built our billing system differently... and not with Stripe.

Apparently this guy doesnt know much ... but enough to waste some peoples time with useless FOIA requests.

I think this is really useful.

Apple and Microsoft have some of the most sophisticated BD/partnership teams in the world.

Many companies who partner with Apple use an internal codeword and don't let others within the company know the client, terms of the deal, or the scope of the work.

Being able to see how Apple is approaching these deals is really interesting and valuable. They are going into 50 states and dealing with the DMV. The DMV has a reputation of being disorganized and not very technical. Apple has the opposite reputation. We are getting a front-row seat into how "disruption" happens.

Even if partnership deals don't get you excited, having transparency into how private companies do business with the government is almost always a good thing.

we scraped it all (at least as many as we could find on their English site) 12,118 questions

There's a lot more questions on Yahoo Answers. Their robots.txt file contains a sitemap: https://answers.yahoo.com/sitemaps/sitemap-us.xml

That sitemap contains links to 2,115 other sitemaps. Each of those sitemaps contains links to around 47k questions.

great list