I'm totally biased towards Android development using Gradle and kotlin.
Gradle can be a pain, but if I look at what our neighbors at the iOS team experience (constantly having to manually merge project files, not being able to simply import some libraries, ...) it's hardly a nightmare.
Specifically adding dependencies is super easy? Just specify which repo they're in (mavenCentral or Google or whatever) and add dependencies under "dependencies". When running or syncing, Gradle does the rest.
Yes, since we need Gradle dependencies in order to build rich UI with AndroidX or Material Design. But if you're interested in a minimal approach without Gradle, check out the example by @purpln here: https://github.com/purpln/android-example
At a previous workplace, Charles Proxy was not in the list of approved software. I don't recall the reason - it might have been cost, but we used lots of paid tools, and since it was in the restricted category, we couldn't pick and use (we handled a copious amount of Western PII, from reading, working on it, to storing it). Two were approved: Requestly and another was a link to an internal wiki with a really "interesting" process involving Wireshark and whatnot. Needless to say, that doc was one of the most clicked and least read. I tried Charles at a later place that offered a license, and I went back to Requestly, which I really found to be more straightforward or simpler to use.
"approved use" is usually just someone that doesn't understand what the software does.
I recently had the IT team at my work ban VNC client, they didn't understand it wasn't VNC server, which I could understand being a security risk, but the client? They're idiots.
While as a mobile dev most of my usage were limited to api client kinda usage I did use it for debugging traffic and hence its intercepting features. Haven’t checked their landing page or the tool itself in a long time (or any coding for that matter) so not sure.
SoundCloud once messed up a huge song import - hundreds (as in more than 9 hundreds). There was no way to batch clean/edit, or even clear/nuke (i.e delete everything). Support refused to help. They clearly said they "won't" do it and they helpfully asked me to do it one by one because that was the way users were supposed to do it. I kept requesting that they could just delete everything and I would set up everything again because at that point my profile looked all garbage and noise. They refused and stopped responding. I found a CxO email and mailed seeking help. I never received a reply. A few days later, I just deleted that really old account. I used to use the site very regularly since the beginning. But after that, they never even came to my mind until I saw this here on HN.
This is really sad that some people are in ways blaming it on the author. While I do advocate zero to almost zero usage of services by these OEMs or big corps, in today's world everything, or almost everything, is linked to your email and/or phone number and in turn with a computing device, which, for me, makes these OEMs essentially public service providers for a cost. Locking a user out literally casts that person out of today's society — communication, dating, groceries, transport, hell, in some cases maybe even health care and emergency services — you name it. So it's very ingenuous and unkind of us not to raise hell and shout for extreme accountability on these corps' part instead of reminding a victim of T&C and not having diversified the online services usage enough across providers.
Any company or entity ought not to be allowed to wield power over our lives, like locking someone out arbitrarily, let alone via some asinine, half-baked algorithm.
I am in a situation right now where Amazon delivered a fake product. Support suggested they can also try redelivery, and when I asked what if it happens again, they said it should not happen.
It happened - fake again. Now the customer support flow is: you upload images of the product (max. three), and the system approves the verification or rejects it, and then you have a way to contact customer care. System rejected. The trick is - they do not know why the rejection happened, they are not able to tell me, they are confirming the images are very clear and crisp, but they can't do anything to help me because the system leaves them with zero options to move forward - in fact, there is no further escalation matrix either. Nada!
The bank (credit card issuer) refused to raise the chargeback because "but the merchant 'delivered' the item". But it was fake, so? No, no, it "delivered" - that is what counts, so you have to sort it out with the merchant. But they are refusing any further help. You have to sort it out with them. And so on... in a loop.
Can I take them to court? Sure. It may take weeks, months, and maybe years, and even then, in the end (if I win), the court may just instruct them to refund and possibly (possibly!) compensate a trivial amount for legal expenses, which is never even remotely close to the actual legal expenses in this country's courts.
I had the misfortune of visiting an Amazon Go store. They charged me for items that I never picked.
No option to contest the receipt....until the "would you recommend a friend visit amazon Go" survey popped up. I responded negatively, then the "why?" question had a "My receipt was incorrect" option.
Suddenly I was able to go through the "contest receipt" workflow.
The system works as long there is user trust in the system. It is sad and annoying when something like this happens, but occasionally the best thing you can do is tell your story and never use a service again. I find there are still reasonable alternatives to Amazon, maybe not at the same price, but at least they deliver less fakes.
Does your country not have a small claims court or equivalent? This is literally what they are for: resolving obvious payment disputes with uncooperative corporations.
When I get bogus products from online ordering I just assume I got ripped off and that's that. A majority of my orders come through though so its not all bad.
Unless you live in a jurisdiction that is known to have very generous court judgements that fully compensate all expenses occured… wouldn’t this be true for literally every dispute you have above a certain threshold?
That’s simply the actual cost of living in your jurisdiction.
I don’t think any large retailer or bank on Earth guarantees there will be a viable escalation pathway for all possible combination of scenarios either.
Maybe a very high end private bank but even that’s iffy.
My parents had their account with Deutsche Bank private bankers. They had moved overseas and sold their house in the 90s and were living off the proceeds. Everyone got lucky that they bought their house in a big city in the 1960s. Since they didn't spend too much money, the capital accumulated for a while. It could have gone the way of Detroit but went the other way. When they passed away, we inherited the money and bought a house in the suburbs. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it changed our lives, no question.
So, when my mom passed, our family had to deal with DB. I have never, ever hand such a bad experience with a bank. The bank overseas was so courteous and efficient that I asked if I could open a bank account with them but I couldn't since I don't live in the country, just a frequent visitor. The IRS and government were easy. The will was as easy as it gets. Do things by the book, you'll be fine.
The NY DB office, to which I would have to go frequently and sit in some luxurious waiting room with nice art, was insane. My lawyer and accountant could not understand how they could repeatedly ask for the same information, deny they had received it, ask for information that literally the US government does not give out to anyone and on and on and on. And no there was nothing shady or shifty about my parents' lives. My lawyer started sending meaner and meaner letters to them, the kind that talk about making my client whole and litigation.
And yet, a few years later it turned out that same bank was often in the news for, among other things catering to Jeffrey Epstein. Who knows, maybe he spent his last hours complaining about them too. I could only hope he had that experience to add to his all-too-brief punishment. Actually, I have often wondered if we got raked over the coals because they had genuinely fishy clients and thus all the clients, especially the ones overseas, were on some kind of government watch list.
As someone from India — who has written this kind of comment against India and Pakistan in forums, with poor reception, and later realised it was rightly so — some more detail and nuance, possibly with some easily readable sources, would help a great deal - mostly for the people who want a picture of that because slavery is a very evocative term.
Not exactly on the backend, but I worked on the frontend (SDKs) at a previous employer whose product offering was fraud detection literally. Over the period of those years, I realised the team wanted "get whatever you can" and then just kept it and used it as needed. A few things I recall - heuristics, some matches with data sources they had of fraudulent actors, et cetera. I am talking about the time when "AI" as we know it was just picking up, and that company was actually calling these systems ML-backed. They pivoted to "AI" as soon as the term became more commonplace, and in the beginning it was just the name change, but I am sure they'd have changed the systems as well, or I hope so.
I can tell you that any kind of "abnormal" combination of system metadata (basically sysinfo) was technically frowned upon by that team, and of course, the system was designed by that team. So, say you had a rooted Android (we had solutions for all devices out there; pretty much) - naughty boy, the system suspected you of spoofing GPS - instant reject, disabling GPS - it was not a mandatory permission in the app (and we asked for it only for some clients) – but it didn't like it, you had changed the default resolution of the system - suspicious, we also captured typing/tapping speed (not only for text entry but also for interacting with the interface) - too fast was considered weird because you were not supposed to have known our interface (because it was interact once or twice in a lifetime or years, kind of thing).
I am speaking more from memory of new joinee intros and rare discussions with the team. The team was kinda "different," so other teams just wanted to avoid them and also wanted them to stay away from other teams. So a lot of things might not sound exciting, might not be accurate either and these are not technical observations anyway.
Another aspect I just remembered. Say you had an app list (oh, we read that too) that matched with known fraudulent actors datasets, you had app(s) that showed you were not well off (we served a lot of instant loan givers around the world), you had an old phone, your OS was very old – all these things were taken into account, along with your PII (which were of course mandatory), when their backend received the data and we gave the final reco/score to the client's system in the API response.
I worked in BT almost a decade ago for 4-5 years. My first job. I had never worked close to the hardware. It was nice. Even though the work was not assembly-level close to hardware. Then the rot hit. I saw BT had been there more or less for decades and in one way or another it was going to remain there. The big bad world of backward compatibility and having to support older devices out in the wild was so crucial (as per the companies' POV and I am not judging it either way) that I realised I do not want to keep copying and pasting one line for a driver fix from one code base to 373 for different devices. Given it could have been improved with CI/CD and better source control (maybe!) but it was just not worth it.
Then the rest of the software world hit hard, and I saw, yet again, that the grass is green and that at least the world of BT had epic job safety, slow but stable growth, and best of all - no rush to fix something in the next 37 mins or millions of ad revenue will be lost.
But I see, as I had guessed, not much has changed "more or less" :)
I blame Apple as well, or both Apple and SIG for not making adoptions faster. But then Apple had nothing to worry about when it came to backward compatibility. So "Apple-rest" never really happened in a meaningful way, and whatever happened happened quite late.
I had received a video call request from a German asst prof after I had applied for CS MS and a full scholarship to his department. I had written back saying I'd be okay with that and had asked whether he could tell me what it was about. He was upfront: "English proficiency satisfaction call" (yup, verbatim). 2-3 minutes into the call, he chuckled and said, "okay okay I am satisfied with your English". He was from Eastern Europe, and English wasn't his strongest suit, and he had to ask for meanings a few times. I am from an ex-GB colony. Anyway he mentioned that his department (and no other department there) faced a lot of situations from this part of the world where applicants had perfect GRE and TOEFL/IELTS scores but in reality they struggled with communication, and with laughter he added, "and your score had a big red flag". Mine were not perfect; just that my TOEFL and GRE verbal scores were at odds.
It was Diwali vacation in India. It looks like the managers were not able to force everyone to walk around with their laptops and pagers hanging from their necks and waists, respectively, which they normally do.
If there's one thing I have learned from my Amazon mates, then that is they never have a true time off. Hills, beaches, a marriage in the family— no exceptions. It's so pervasive that I can't really imagine it to be voluntary, and my friends' answers on this topic have never been clear.
