I have my lived experience, which take it for the anecdata it is:
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
Hi Tyler, since first reading a thread on your IDE-as-a-service on Hacker News I have consistently wondered, who could possibly be using this product? I have tried it, enjoyed learning about Docker and containerization and makefiles, but have found it basically useless for anything like "real developing." The localhost pipeline is just too effective on a reasonably priced machine with a good editor and a browser. Throw in stuff like ngrok for secure tunneling to localhost for demos, and it's basically over.
Maybe it's just for the people who are doing elaborate clusters/containers/orchestrator configurations. I have no idea.
I'd love to hear stories from the community about uses for this product. I'd love to hear reasons for Red Hat to care about acquiring such a thing beyond, maybe, shoring up a new piece of the Linux ecosystem in some tangential relationship to Docker? Everything about this feels like overreach and products in search of problems.
The next level of this may be that those parts of a brain that fire when considering a deity's will are more highly correlated with the parts that fire when thinking one's own desires, than when thinking of the will of others.
Perhaps we're really describing the same mental faculty - conflation with brands, and religions, and political parties, are all just manipulations of the brain's habituated desire circuits, and to the person experiencing the "loyalty" just feel like being "true to oneself."
I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, and while it's just one data point, building a career in software developing without formal training or education is what I have been doing for a few years now.
Anecdotally: I attempted to get into a degree program in CS from my local university after having taken the required prerequisites, and getting mediocre grades in those classes, and was rejected. So I resolved to keep studying on my own, get Tech Support jobs and learn on the job, and keep applying to programming positions.
I worked two fairly low-level tech support jobs before I applied (internally) and was hired on as a junior level programmer. It was only for about six months, until a new CTO canned me, after which I spent about a month getting hammered with job offers and recruiters' emails, then went with a great smaller company I'm currently working for.
Furthermore, I fully submit that those who have a real passion for the work of programming, who get a buzz from figuring out how the small problems they're tackling aggregate into the kinds of large, effective systems that make companies run these days, those people will do very well. If the original poster's friends are motivated mostly by getting a good-paying job with some job security, but don't derive much satisfaction from the work itself, it will likely burn them out in no time.
Agreed, and if we can also agree that there are likely varying amounts of cultural involvement and self-awareness in any broadly painted group of humans, I think this follows:
It seems the root cause and motivation of many people who get classified as "hipster," who aren't simply reacting to or against whatever is the prevalent culture around them, comes directly from this Internet-driven, information-saturated, always-on media environment. It also directly results from how identity politics and marketing are dovetailing to constrain peoples' ideas of self-agency. People performing whatever actions are considered "hipster" are doing so from a position of ambivalence toward being constrained in such a way. They are resisting categorization, specifically because 1) it seems to immediately lead to someone trying to sell you something based on limited or superficial evidence, and 2) because, like the above commenter mentions, there is no longer a "mainstream". It's dissolved into countless iterations of pastiche. The people who have seen this all happening have determined that they'd rather select from the detritus of cultures past, as it's all being recycled anyway, and not subscribe to ideologies beyond what interests them in the moment.
All this also comes off as quite superficial and easily derided.
But beneath the derision, I think the loudest anti-hipster voices are upset that this kind of person doesn't seem to attach themselves to an Ideology. This must terrify some people.
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
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