I'm not sure if you're serious or not. I think the connection that was being made is that, if you evaluate usage based purely on time, Pandora may have a ton of time in use. But, much (or at least some) of that time may be people who've left it to stream for hours after they've left.
Leaving your work computer on doing anything has nothing to do with the usage of a mobile app. He's not leaving his phone on playing music overnight at work.
Pandora isn't claiming to be the most used app in the world, they're claiming to be the most used mobile app in the world. People take their phones with them and for battery life alone are not likely to leave them playing music while they aren't listening to it.
I think Pandora stops if you leave the app playing for some hours without any interaction with the app. Most streaming services do that to save bandwidth.
The terms may prohibit, but in my observations, I know of many restaurants and small businesses that do it anyway. I'm sure most ignorant of the policy, but how many would stop anyway if still known of it.
Seconding this. I love my etymotics. You can get a pair these days for about 70 bucks (or less). Take the time to try out different tips to find ones that are most comfortable.
The author's post immediately before this one was another story about how David Sacks joined Zenefits as COO. So, possibly the author isn't a shill, but she's just scraping her inbox and publishing anything that comes across her desk.
I had a mixed reaction to this blog post. On the one hand it is helpful to understand the risk involved with using Stripe for payment processing. I presume, because Stripe wants to onboard users as fast as possible they back-load some of the review process for new accounts. That's an obvious double-edged sword and clearly impacted these guys negatively.
But, on the other hand, I felt that the tone was a little bit strange. Stripe doesn't have to do business with you, or anybody else. It's not offensive to my sensibilities that Stripe has it's own processes and concerns as it relates to it's customers (not to mention regulatory requirements).
And this bit stuck in my craw "..So overnight without warning Stripe had decided to stop us from using their services after 5 days.."
That email was your warning. You did, in fact, get a warning. You got 5 days to change payment processors.
If you think 5 days is "warning" in this situation you either have never written a line of payment processing code, are not a coder, or are horribly misinformed. 5 days is NOTHING, they got lucky b/c they had a paypal backup but if they hadn't they would have probably needed to stop taking payments for a period of time while they re-wrote their payment stack. In 5 days they were expected (note at least 1 of those days was a weekend) find a new processor, get approved (not all are as fast as Stripe), link their bank account (2-3 days min), write code to use it, write tests (this is handling money after all), manually test the different cases, and deploy it. Not to mention that every other project those developers were working on have to be put on hold (assuming none were more urgent). This is nothing to sneeze at and let's also remember that the OP was doing nothing wrong (so much so Stripe has reversed their decision). So just let that sink in, a company is given 5 days to rewrite a substantial piece of their platform code or be cut off all because of a false positive with no realistic way to communicate with Stripe (No, email tickets doesn't cut it).
Right, that bugs me too. "We are disrupting the payments industry! So we would like our customers to shoulder more of the risk in our market. We've decided you're too risky, so drop everything you're doing right now and spend the next few days finding a new payments provider. Thank you for choosing Stripe!"
Imagine if you build a platform around Stripe payments, and then having to rip it out and go with something else. If that's the case, five days is essentially overnight, if you have retask developers/hire contractors or do it yourself.
I have no idea what kind of transactions he was performing, and whether cutting him off is ultimately justified. What's concerning is a TOS agreement that provides no means of arbitration, with notice comes via an email (what happens if this goes in the spam filter?).
I believe the point made in the blog post is that 5 days warning for basically just kicking you out for no reason is not something you would expect of a business partner.
Stripe is a provider, yes. They can choose who to do business with, yes.
But the way to handle this is basically giving no recourse to the customer? I mean, like the post says, not even an email where you could at least argue your case for those times when there are misunderstandings at least?
I think it's not so much about kicking the off Stripe as much as the way they did it and how they left no alternative to these guys (except for public shaming, which apparently worked just as expected).
Design nitpick: The alert every time you add something to your cart is really annoying. What if I want to add 4 backpacks and 3 water purifiers, etc... I click add, get a pop-up, click ok, then add again, rinse repeat....
Maybe instead just use a floating div to appear, say xyz has been added, and then fade away after a second.
Great point, we had added that as a stop gap measure, because not all users realized they had to scroll down to checkout the cart. From an overall design perspective we kind of need to revamp the entire first part of the flow, so this is great feedback. Thanks!
Upon re-reading my comment, it sounds more critical than I had intended. I really like your site's clean design aesthetic. Great work.
p.s.
Please never come to Arizona. That will remove my last excuse for not going camping (purchasing a bunch of stuff, that I may never use more than once).
This is exactly what we're thinking! A little thingy that floats up and fades away. Almost like... points in a game. The only thing is we're thinking of doing it over the item, so you know that item has been added. Upper right corner, people's eyes may not see (though the movement will probably catch). Something to test!
I think peripheral vision responds better to movement. (Evolution of our ancestors making the peripheral vision less detailed but quicker acting to be quick acting for possible attacks. I could be mistaken though)
Um.. That's sort of their job? Why the outrage here? It's not like the story actually calls for Snapchat's CEO's head to really be severed. That might be offensive.
I think the author's point is a good one. If CEO is really so obtuse he should go. If he is being coached to act this way then his coach should be fired[1].
Pretty straight forward business journalism. It's not like the business journalist went on a long diatribe about API security. That would be out of place.
[1]Unless your argument is that in order to criticize a business leader's actions you must outline each of the myriad possible corrective steps between "Do Nothing" and "Terminate".
On one hand you have a CEO that responded slowly to a fairly mild privacy exploit. On the other hand, he created an apparently billion+ dollar company almost overnight. So, I'm going to guess that SnapChat should keep its CEO.
That is a totally fair point, and you might be right.
But I cannot understand the low-grade media backlash here. That was my point. It seems like writing an article with the thesis that "whoever is planning crisis management at Snapchat is horrible an needs to go" isn't wildly beyond the pale.
I don't necessarily think you're wrong, but I don't like this point. Sure, often people stop listening after Yes,... but...
You don't have to accept that. The general excuse, "Managers man... they suck", is something that really bothers me.
Why not stand up for your idea, insist upon the Yes, IF... and hold management accountable?
Document concerns and don't be shy about raising them. In my experience I have seen people make the assumption that management will not listen and therefor not act more often than I've seen management ignore feedback.
That's not to say that management wouldn't ignore you, or dismiss negativity in favor of the "yes", but the defeatist attitude as it relates to 'management' troubles me.
Again, Michh, not to give you a hard time. Maybe I'm naive.
If you have the power to hold management responsible, great. But you probably don't. See your sibling comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6999303 . Documented concerns ignored, including after they were proven right. Credit rises, while blame falls.
It's a shame they don't have a leader board on that site; I completed the challenge in 4:21, but I have no idea whether that's good, bad, or indifferent among everyone who's done so. A Twitter search on 'I completed "You Can't JavaScript Under Pressure"' suggests that score is merely on the good side of indifferent, but given the relatively competitive idea behind the whole endeavor, it seems like formally ranking completion times would be a useful thing to do.
(The "you won" screen is also godawful, not least because of the potential risk of triggering seizures in the epileptic, but also very much because it's incredibly ugly. I mean, I know that tasteless is the new tasteful, but really.)
