HN user
Were there cases of finalized invoices and fund transfers while the error was in place?
The sudden loss of working capital while awaiting a refund would be extremely disruptive for even large businesses.
Why London of all places?
Stripe advices to refund based on signal's they get that a disput is requested.
I think that's if you're lucky enough to receive an early fraud warning, in which case, you have maybe ~12 hours to refund the money, but who knows, it's completely opaque to the merchant. As a merchant, I've even had previously refunded payments become disputes hours after issuing the refund.
Most of the time, the charge back is sprung on the merchant without warning. It can be worth fighting some. I've successfully countered several, it feels like I win maybe around 50% of those that I counter. I usually counter when the reasons are nonsensical, such as "Subscription renewed after cancelling", yet there was only one payment for the subscriptions creation.
To add insult to injury, Stripe charges an additional fee to counter the dispute (which you might get back if you win).
The whole process is infuriating. Charge backs are a tiny % of transactions, but cause a large amount of distress. I can't see why Stripe / banks don't offer an early dispute window, in which the merchant has say 7 days to refund without penalty. If they ignore or decide not to, it becomes a standard dispute.
I can't find an official source, but I suspect the blast radius isn't limited to the AZ.
I have systems running in us-east-1, and over the course of the incident, I noticed unexplainable intermittent connectivity issues that I've never seen before, even outside of az4.
For me, a long running and historically stable ECS service suddenly stopped.
Ordinarily this would result in failed health checks and auto service restart, but in this case, the service simply died without logs or alerts.
Nice shots of Australia on Apr 02, 6:41:23 PM (left = north) and 6:42:35 PM (down = north), including Tropical Cyclone Maila (I think).
A good lot of them seem to be from Matt Lakeman, whose writing I highly recommend. He goes into detail about history, politics, and tries to understand why things are the way they are in the places he travels.
The list is missing Lakeman's recent travels in Afghanistan: https://mattlakeman.org/2026/01/05/notes-on-afghanistan/
can't buy smokes at all ever
They can, they will be available on the black market along with every other widely used illicit recreational drug.
Banning tobacco won't make the problem disappear, people want their poison, including sensible rational people who accept the risks and use in moderation.
Banning tobacco will push it underground, giving criminals a new revenue stream which can fund more harmful activities.
Not only will the govt lose out on tobacco tax, they may have to ramp up law enforcement expense to crack down on the now illicit tobacco trade and ever more empowered criminals.
Users of the black market products will have no guarantee of quality assurance, products may contain additional harmful additives.
There's an optimal level of tax and regulation to keep distribution out of criminal control, educate the general public, and offer support to the serious victims, all the while collecting tax to fund these activities.
This is precisely what many countries are already doing to varying degrees.
And the same argument can be made for many vices, including gambling and alcohol.
As a consequence there is a quiet crisis in young people, 18-30, deeply in debt, working second and third jobs so that they have a bit more money to gamble.
Do you have a source for this?
We installed mitmproxy on a Mac, configured an iPhone to route traffic through it, and installed the mitmproxy CA certificate on the device.
All HTTPS traffic was decrypted and logged. No modifications were made to the traffic. The app was used as any normal user would use it.
Is it really that simple to inspect network traffic on an iPhone, namely to get it to trust the user-installed cert? I do quite a bit of network inspection on Android and I find it to be painful, even if the apps don't use certificate pinning.
Regardless, it highlights the importance of having control of our own devices, including the ability to easily inspect network traffic. We have the right to know where our data is being sent, and what data is being sent.
I recall during COVID it was discovered that Zoom was sending traffic to China. There was also the recent case of Facebook tracking private mobile browsing activity and sending it to their servers via the FB app. Imagine how much questionable traffic goes unnoticed due to the difficulty in configuring network inspection for apps.
There are a huge number of factors to consider depending on your company's goals and your personal goals. Things like access to investors, access to talent/staff, your desire to relocate, your profit/reinvestment intentions and tax treatment.
Maybe describe why you're interested in Netherlands & Estonia.
The TLD owner in this case was Radix, which also owns
.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website
Vibes
Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be?
The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
Thanks for the video link, it's way more informative than the original article.
If you've ever built a website for mobile but never heard of PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), I recommend checking them out. In essence, adding 2 files can make the site installable from a mobile browser and define caching behavior for offline functionality.
1. manifest.json: a JSON file that defines the app's name, icons, theme colors, and how it should launch when installed.
2. Service worker: a JS file that controls things like resource caching for offline usage
Unfortunately PWAs don't receive first class support compared to native apps. Still, I still hope to see wider adoption. I think for many not-too-complex apps, they can significantly lower the cost of development, and the development experience could be as simple as
- Building with HTML + JS + CSS. No clunky SDKs, reduced need to test on painfully slow emulators or expensive physical devices
- Installable from a browser. No need to maintain a listing in the Playstore/App Store, avoiding policy headaches, rent, etc.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...
I recently came across Open Web Advocacy (OWA) who summarize my mobile-platform concerns well. They "advocate for the future of the open web by providing regulators, legislators and policy makers the intricate technical details that they need to understand the major anti-competitive issues in our industry and how to solve them."
Their top 3 priorities:
1. Apple's ban of third party browsers on iOS is deeply anti-competitive
2. Web Apps need to become just Apps. Apps built with the free and open web need equal treatment and integration. Closed and heavily taxed proprietary ecosystems should not receive any preference.
3. All artificial barriers placed by gatekeepers must be removed. Web Apps if allowed can offer equivalent functionality with greater privacy and security for demanding use-cases.
Website: https://open-web-advocacy.org/en/
Very cool, well worth watching
And the Martian beers can drunk in Mars' bars
I figured if a single AZ has an outage, let alone the entire region, I can rest easy knowing much bigger companies will have bigger problems. It will probably be newsworthy, and when customers email in, my excuse will be defensible, since I can send them links to external status pages, news articles, etc.
Whilst this was mostly true, it was still a very unpleasant experience, and my service was hanging by a thread for much of the time. I recently moved an important part of the stack from EC2 to Fargate, with two services: a single task to post jobs to a queue, and another service running many tasks to process jobs from the queue.
The incident knocked out the job posting service, which would not come back up. Had I left it to AWS to resolve automatically, my service would have been out for maybe 12 hours.
Fortunately the worker tasks were still available and waiting. I tracked down the old "job poster" code that used to run on an ec2. I sshed into an old ec2, and "deployed" the code by copying and pasting onto the server. The service came back up, although I had to edit the code directly on the ec2 to slow things down, since the ec2 had 1vCPU and an upgrade was not possible during the incident. Furthermore, Fargate workers would not scale out if they had too much work.
This was at about 2 or 3 AM my time, and was carried out whilst customers were emailing in, and cloudwatch alarms were going off all over the place. Once the service was back up, even with my unnerving hacky solution, I got a couple hours sleep.
What I've learnt:
- When the incident was first reported, I thought it would last 2 hours max. A 12 - 16 hour disruption to AWS resources is absolutely possible.
- Maybe don't use us-east-1 for future projects, but I'm not convinced there's much logic to this. Despite past issues, it's impossible to predict where an outage might occur and the affected resources, as well as spillover into other regions.
- Think of ways to make my service more portable, to other regions, even other cloud providers, but the motivation to do this will be gone by tomorrow. It's way more valuable for me to focus on customers, new features, etc, rather than bomb-proofing the service. I don't write airline or medical software. An outage of my service isn't going to kill anyone, and most users are understanding. I'll accept the hit.
Well worth the read. Absolutely fascinating.
Precisely my response to many articles, which is why I have many 10s of browser tabs open at any given time.
Now I understand how AI causes people to lose their jobs.
Will enabling "HTTPS-Only Mode" block http://localhost? If so, it would interfere with web development.
I never told them what my business does or what I'd use the money for.
This stuck out to me. I'm in the process of opening a bank account in Singapore for a newly registered company, and boy is it difficult.
Hour-long KYC interview. Details of what the business does. Anything remotely controversial could be a red flag. They want to hear about boring B2B services. They want to see evidence of customer communications or contracts, so they can see you're a legit business and not a shell company. This is very difficult for a company that hasn't started operating yet. Why would I start operating without banking? How can I show business activity before commencing operating?
By comparison, I've opened business accounts in both AU and the US without hassle.
The meta-analysis of 33 studies, the first of its kind, looked at the relationship between sensitivity and common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety. Researchers found there was a significant, positive relationship between the two
In the study, sensitivity was defined as a personality trait that reflects people's capacity to perceive and process environmental stimuli such as bright lights, subtle changes in the environment and other peoples' moods.
Around 31% of the general population are considered highly sensitive
I recently deployed a few static websites on Cloudflare. I use AWS as a registrar, and I had to use Pages since Workers don't support "Custom domains outside Cloudflare zones" [1]. There's no way I can transfer the domain since I have subdomains tightly integrated with AWS services.
If anyone from Cloudflare sees this, are there plans to have Workers support external custom domains, or is this a fundamental limitation of Workers?
[1] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/static-assets/migr...
It's not bankruptcy if the company has no liabilities. You're allowed to wind down a profitable company because you can't be bothered running it any more.
A question of legality might come from German authorities determining if this is solely to avoid tax, which is open-ended. It might be hard for them to make this argument if you can prove you transferred operations to country X to maximize company's growth, access local talent, closer proximity to customers etc.
Regardless, anther commenter pointed out that the exit tax applies to all companies that you own regardless of location. In that case, the approach isn't feasible.
Also it goes without saying, seek your own legal advice rather than trusting random comments on the internet.