This is very weird take. I'm struggling to understand why this is incident as a reflection of "super negative practices" or is somehow a "scam". The CEO came here and publicly apologized for the mistake and mis-communication, and the issue is resolved for the user with no charges. What am I missing?
What price would the dude have to pay if he didn't publish it? How often does this happen and why is there no protection against charging free customers 100k out of the blue. Why charge it and shock the customer if practice is to waive it? The CEOs response kinda just made the situation worse.
Yeah, I don't buy this conspiracy theory. The reason why they charge it could be as simple as they calculated the bandwidth usage following a ddos attack. It amounted to 104k worth of bandwidth usage. There system is not sophisticated enough to recognize it was a mistake due to attack on their site. Thus a manual intervention was needed, and now it's resolved.
Right, but there's still a huge contradiction here. The support email says it's standard practice to charge 20%. Now the CEO's comment says it's standard practice to waive it entirely. So which one is true?
It's only a weird take if you don't have any common sense. It's super simple:
either offer unlimited bandwidth(since you're not charging these anyways), like Cloudflare Pages does,
or put in place controls that will allow customer to set a top limit for their budget. You can't just all of a sudden send them a $104K bill and expect them to pay when the've never spent more than a few bucks. And then even worse, you can't pretend to expect them to pay 20%, then 5% then pretend you're doing them a favor by completely liftig it off. That's just arbitrary billing and preying for any victim that would fall and agree to pay 20% or 5% etc. I'm just asking for common sense and practices that build trust, not arbitraty billing rules.
In New Jersey I have to let an attendant pump my gas. If I have a heart attack while he’s pumping gas, but I never explicitly say “please stop once it’s full” and he, innocently enough, takes the still-flowing gas hose and pops it into a sewer grate once my tank is full, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person agree that the attendant was throwing me a lifeline when he refunds me after I come back complaining about my $2k gas receipt.
This is a dumb analogy, but the point is there is very obviously a pattern in this payment process that is ripe for abuse. The question of whether or not you aim to be an abusive business, plucking every shady profit where you can put the onus on the customer to try to come get their money back is one that many companies are deciding, and many are erring in the direction of the dark pattern.
By not working to avoid this problem from the get go, there is an implication about how a company wants to make their profits.
Pay for what I use works for airline seats and reserved compute/storage resources.
I have no control over how much traffic my public sites get. There is zero value in me signing up for a service which charges me based on traffic if I can’t control the maximum they’ll charge me. Would you sign up for an infinite bill?
the CEO said they're "forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes" which effectively means "just make everything zero dollars bro".
And no, he didn't use all that bandwidth, he was victim of a DDoS which the hosting provider should have measures in place to prevent or limit the service if it happens.
Perhaps a bit ignorant, but to be fair that Netlify attempted to charge him is absolutely ridiculous. With my hosting provider, I would pay a whopping 50 EUR for the same bandwidth that he was asked to pay 104.5K USD for. That just shouldn't be possible to happen, especially on a free tier.
Any person seeing a user that normally has a $0/$10 per month bill suddenly spike to $104K would see that this is obviously a DDoS.
If it has always been a "policy" to forgive bills, shouldn't it have been 100% forgiven immediately after OP contacted support in the first place? Why go through the trouble of playing the hero by offering "discounts".
The user was asked to pay 20% then 5k on a service that's called "free" but has some extras which actually cost money.
After this the CEO comes along and says that the policy is actually not to bill for this kind of event... But the company actually tried to bill this user 3 times... soo it all stinks really.
Ouch. My team got bit by this today. TBH, I haven't been following what's necessarily included in "Dev Mode" and what's not. But, it appears with this move that they have redacted one of the most essential features of design/dev collaboration. (The ability to inspect, color, spacing, dimensions). This has always been available, until now. It's a lot more expensive, too. Dev Mode is just a huge price increase with not much value add IMO.
That's good to know. However, there was a ton more information that existed in the right hand panel that was pretty important for translating design to code that is now removed.
For as long as I've used Figma, I've been able to view the underlying CSS. This is no longer there. I can get it, but I have to copy/paste it somewhere else to see it. Very annoying. This existed before "dev mode" was a thing. I think it's fair game if you want to make this experience better in "dev mode" to differentiate, but to take away a feature like that is and then try to upsell it a money-grab IMO.
Speaking about the US only (w/o actual data to back it up, just a feeling over the last year) is that lower-wage jobs have been on the rise out of the sheer necessity for businesses to attract warm bodies. Folks in the middle (low-middle -> high-middle( have had their wages depressed and lowered while the wealthiest individuals have had no impact or have seen their wages increased at or beyond inflation. The combination of very wealthy folks doing better and the lower income earners having higher wages has created dissonance around the reporting in the overall health of the economy IME.
I enjoyed the writing and analysis of the team at 538 over the years. I don't plan to visit on the new ABC platform, sigh. Can anyone recommend some good alternatives?
Although, I was hoping for forgiveness to proceed. The decision is not really the upsetting part (for me). IMO the interpretations of the legal framework and decisions for SCOTUS often quite conveniently align to modern political party lines.
As I've mentioned in another comment, SCOTUS is compromised by political interests despite the facade of impartiality. The legal framework we have is no different than the bible or quran or any other text that has produces religions, political parties or ideologies. There are many interpretations one could make about such texts, but somehow judgement often is split by modern party affiliation. It was kind of cool to think for a while that SCOTUS was just doing their job and above political polarization. I no longer hold faith in that belief.
Obviously the court is somewhat political (as it always has been). But I think modern reporting makes it seem far more that way than it actually is. For example look at Bostock from just a few years ago.
Disappointed by the outcome, but not surprised. IMO SCOTUS is no longer trustworthy when it comes to impartiality. Polarization has infected every branch of government including SCOTUS. This judgement simply falls along US political party lines. Perhaps, it has never been the case. However, I think we have seen an increase of conservative policy and interpretations of law become the standard due to a Republican super majority.
Giving children and teens unfettered access to social media and the internet seems to be more of a problem to me than any particular piece of hardware. The cell phone I had access to as a teen was a flip phone from Virgin Mobile that ran on "minutes". There was no web browser, no apps. I used it for texting and calling.
It's up to parents to control access to the content (unfortunately, the tools and hardware that exist for this sucks, which is unfortunate). So if you're dropping an unlocked iphone into your kids lap and walking away, well then maybe you're putting them at risk and neglecting them (which might be further causing mental health issues.)
My daughter is young now, but I will eventually run into this as she gets older. I've thought about this issue and I plan to lock down the content (either via software or targeted hardware) until she's an adult.
Good to get some other perspectives from OoT fans. I played it multiple times as a kid. No other video game came close in terms of the connection. It was the perfect game IMO.
My interest in video games declined greatly as the trend in the video game industry shifted toward heavy violence and more realistic graphics. Fast forward to last year, I decided to pick up the Switch as I found one for a really good deal. I wanted to try the new (to me) Zelda. I felt pretty unimpressed, decent not great. As it turned out, I had mistaken the much hyped BoTW release with the Zelda release that I bought. I was playing Skyward Sword.
Once I realized my error, I picked up BoTW and took it for spin. I now think the hype is totally justified. I got all the feelings I felt with OoT. It's been wonderful so far. I'm only about halfway through and stocked for Tears of the Kingdom.
Personally, I wish we could stop judging individuals without understanding the context. There may be a million different reasons for someone that needs frequent job changes in a four year periods. Asking good questions to candidates will be far more informative and useful to the business than having a set of rules for dismissal or judgement.
Furthermore, the company is rarely/never accountable for swiftly laying people off individuals that may otherwise be excellent workers.
Frankly, if a company is discarding CVs based on perceived loyalty, then I perhaps those same companies to provide candidates with a contract reciprocates that loyalty via generous raises and job security.
> I wish we could stop judging individuals without understanding the context. There may be a million different reasons... Asking good questions to candidates will be far more informative
You won't even get to the "good questions" phase (i.e., get past the screening) if your resume is full of <1 year stints.
> Furthermore, the company is rarely/never accountable for swiftly laying people off individuals that may otherwise be excellent workers.
I've seen tons of resumes where people have done 12 companies in 10 years. think it's unlikely that was due to constant layoffs.
> Frankly, if a company is discarding CVs based on perceived loyalty, then I perhaps those same companies to provide candidates with a contract reciprocates that loyalty via generous raises and job security.
It's not about a noble ideal of loyalty. A person who leaves companies in 9-12 months is unlikely to have anything significant done in years (due to ramp-up time, etc). Not worth the risk to bring them onto your team, knowing their pattern is to be gone soon.
> I wish we could stop judging individuals without understanding the context
"judging individuals without (enough) context" is basically what resume screening is, sadly. There may be 10 resumes that are otherwise equally strong, but one has this "issue". Then that issue might cost the opportunity to give more context. That's just how screening works.
It's useful as a Bayesian prior. Repeated past behavior is a reasonable predictor for future behavior. There may be context that explains it, but hiring is really expensive and you want to get someone who will stick more than a year.
Leave a job per year for 4 years is at least a yellow flag to me.
