Well, (a) why would they? (b) "uptime" has shifted from a binary "site up/down" to "degraded performance", which itself indicates improvements to uptime since we're both pickier and more precise.
Yes, I'm asking why they'd lock themselves into a contract around 5 9s of uptime since the parent poster mentioned that they won't do so. Of course, AWS actually does do this in some cases and they guarantee 99.99% for most things, so it feels a bit arbitrary - 5 minutes vs an hour, roughly.
It’s not that absurd and happens all over the world in university systems. I had a Comp. Sci. Professor that taught assembly and graded on a curve. As you might imagine the one guy that was a wizard at assembly caught flak from the unwashed masses.
I had another professor that not only did a curve but dropped statistical outliers to prevent this problem, he literally explained his system on Day 1 of the course. This was 15+ years ago and by no means a new idea.
I tried to search for it, but even the 2 documents that superseded the one from around the time my daughter was at school at not available.
I mean, the site doesn't even have a valid secure certificate so...
In the site below (In Spanish) you can search for 10/2019 and a cursory translation of the document title will show that this is the proper document (For 2019 onwards, the replaced doc 04/2014 isn't available either)
How do you reconcile the fact that many people in Anthropic tried to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements for quite some time?
It’s hard to take your comment at face value when there’s documented proof to the contrary. Maybe it could be forgiven as a blunder if revealed in the first few months and within the first handful of employees… but after 2 plus years and many dozens forced to sign that… it’s just not credible to believe it was all entirely positive motivations.
The desire to force new employees to sign agreements in total secrecy, without even being able to disclose it exists to prospective employees, seems like a pretty negative “value” under any system of morality, commerce, or human organization that I can think of.
That's a perfectly fine belief to have. I might even agree with you. But you're not really advancing a discussion thread about a company's strong ideals by pointing out some past behavior that you don't like. This is especially true when the behavior you're bringing up is fairly common, if perhaps lamentable, among U.S. corporations. Anthropic can be exceptional in some ways while being ordinary in the rest.
(I have no horse in this race. But I remain interested in hearing about a former employee's experience and impressions about the company's ideals, and hope it doesn't get lost in a side discussion about whether NDAs are a good thing.)
Read the beetle example in that article. It's exactly on point.
You believe Anthropic is a rare subspecies of beetle (an "unsavory" company) based on a certain pattern on its back (certain NDA-related behavior). I and several others here have noted that lots of companies have that pattern on their backs. Which means that you are basing your conclusion on weak evidence. If you use Bayes Theorem to calculate the actual probability, you'll find that "[trying] to hide the existence of secret non-disparagement agreements" barely moves the needle at all. Does it move the needle? Sure. But much less than you think.
Lots of companies do it. Doesn't make it right, but HR has kind of become a pretty evil vocation, these days. I don't believe that they necessarily reflect the values of their corporations. They tend to follow their own muse.
Your parent post isn’t suggesting it’s always the same user submitting, just that users submit a lot of posts from this person.
Can’t say I agree, though. I don’t recall ever having seen one of his posts on HN, and a cursory search suggests they’re not even upvoted that much. Highest I found was under 30 points. But my methodology is flawed, as I basically searched for the name.
Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
A smaller firm could be way simpler. Because they simply wouldnt have enough money to provide a decent payday for dozens of malicious geniuses going at them 24/7/365.
Is this true? I would expect most of Stripe's fraud overhead to be statutory in nature, not something they hire for because they're a concentrated target.
(They certainly have more staff because more volume, but the actual regulatory requirements I'd expect to be roughly the same for the service they provide.)
When we used Stripe, we opted out of all their fraud prevention stuff to save money (not sure if that's still an option). As a b2b SaaS where payment happens after a free trial (not at signup), we're just not a target for fraud, so it was totally fine.
I can't speak to why Stripe's fraud protection is so expensive. Is it because they're a target? Or maybe because they realized people will pay for it (it seems valuable for something like ecommerce)? I dunno, but I can confidently say that as of ~5 years ago, it wasn't required by any regulation, and my business was perfectly fine without it.
Now we use Paddle, and they also try to sell us a bunch of stuff we don't need at ridiculous prices. We're just using them because we wanted a merchant of record (where they handle taxes and stuff), but no, I'm not going to pay a % of my revenue for basic dunning emails, fraud prevention, vague "optimizations" that "increase conversions" (lol no they don't), etc.
Stripe was already a big target for basically anyone and anything 10 years ago. Fake merchants, card testers, the works. People were selling guides to defraud Stripe. And we are not even counting just losees due to nonsense like the Fyre festival.
You really don't have to be that big a payment processor for dozens of malicious geniuses to decide that they want to fleece you. If anything, the ROI is better in less sophisticated companies. Most ways to trick a payment company are, if anything, standardized. The smaller company can often be attacked by just changing the API calls, but otherwise taking basically the same actions you would to try to defraud a bigger fish.
I meant geniuses in the real sense, not colloquial sense.
If someone could reasonably expect a cushy 40 hour/week seven figure job, even a malicious personality wouldn’t risk criminal fraud without a much much bigger payout.
And to have dozens focusing on one company…
So anyone handling under a few hundred million per day are safe from that kind of coordinated attack.
> Stripe needs all that byzantine fraud prevention, on top of what they had a decade ago, because they are a huge concentrated target.
This is not true. Every payment processor needs this effort because as soon as you broadcast that you're a payment processor you're going to get about 3-5 scammers a day.
As an aside I really think Mercury bank should audit their onboarding process.
Forget about Costco, if some people here are so convinced this behavior is illegal they should be going after every fast food company that offers anything like "get a free/cheap xyz with any drink purchase!" Where the subsidy is obvious.
Costco gets to sidestep a lot of regulations because they technically are a private club with paid membership. The US anti-monopoly laws are also unusually weak.
In other countries, selling a $7 chicken if it's subsidized by the sale of other goods can indeed be illegal.
That would most likely be illegal in Finland. You're not allowed predatory pricing. And the same is true for the EU as a whole, although you may have to be operating in an international market, not just a local one. See Abuse of dominance in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_102_of_the_Treaty_on_t...
So if I could charge less for chicken because I use that as a doorbuster to get you inside the store, but I charge more for other items, that is predatory pricing and against US law?
Some people genuinely believe the european copyright system (and La Liga and the Spanish judiciary) has more than 0% legitimacy… is it truly that hard to imagine?
I would say Catalina in 2019 already had enormous issues, there were hard faults in Console pretty much daily that Apple never bothered to fix. (Plus hundreds of minor faults per day)
I had to downgrade to Mojave so the wheels likely came off internally around then.
It should be low risk to offer such guarantees then.
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