exactly. UK has fierce banking competition and you have so many digital banks that compete with the brick and mortar and beat them on pretty much everything except for not having actual branches. It's the closest you can be to being happy with..banks :)
Then you go to Greece and you pay exorbitant transaction fees for everything. 3E for any incoming transfer, regardless of amount. 10-15E to transfer 10k between banks in the country. Sky high interest rates for lending, unreasonable guarantee requirements and it's still really hard to get a loan.
And then you get 0.25% for saving accounts. e-banking that may be pretty looking but a shame functionality wise.
And you only have 4 banks (+1 zombie bank).
The bankers are still making bonuses like it's 2007 and the public is funding them with transaction fees. The traditional banking business model of making money from the spread between lending and savings rate is pretty much dead.
I can't believe there can be any other country worse than Greece in the EU. Change my mind =)
As I grow older I witness that the people that built the computing industry are slowly but surely fading out.
The next generation now stands on their shoulders and keeps on building the next generations of computing.
Thank you Gordon Moore. RIP.
agreed. You are under huge distress and don't have a viable alternative and your life is in danger and you sign what is really, a contract to pay with the amount to be paid being blank.
So essentially and legally speaking, how is this different than blackmail?
not only there are options, but there is excellent transportation in London, especially compared to the driving hell because of the all day traffic all around Bay Area.
Another parameter I don't see people mentioning (not surprisingly, since its HN after all) is the monoculture in Bay Area, versus living in one of the few global metropolis.
In the Bay all you see and live is tech, in London tech is only a part of the overall life experience.
But yeah, overall it's highly personal depending on personal circumstances than anything else.
Admittedly, all of these are real issues. The thing is that for a company with 1.816 trillion (1816 billion!) market cap as of today, all of these issues are easily solvable.
But it's not a matter of "we can't solve it" or even "we don't have the resources to do it, there is some higher priority problem to tackle first".
It's not an engineering problem at all at its heart.
It's a marketing/business problem that someone somewhere is thinking that Amazon can provide a free service to X users, knowing that Y (X, Y positive, Y << X) users will go over their "free tier" usage and pay for all X's costs, maybe even more, making the free tier a profitable business on its own.
The type of questions you are mentioning are basically saying different people would need different configuration options and come up every time you design any complex technical feature that is going to be used by millions of people. These are mostly product and UX questions, and NOT engineering ones. The only engineering problem I can think of is the latency in getting real time billing information.
The way you usually solve this is by having sane defaults, and giving users different mechanisms for configuration based on how complex their configuration needs are. This can take a tiered approach.
As an example, simpler and straight forward things (such as disable egress traffic from S3 if the bill exceeds X) can be in the UI itself. Then, for customers who need more control, an option to configure via json or yaml similar to cloud formation. For anyone who needs even more giving an option to call a customer defined lambda function would give them the ability to at any metrics and take appropriate action.
1. How do you actually have a billing system reach out to every other system? It has to resolve the resource, network with it, have IAM permissions, a network route, etc.
2. How do you handle consistency?
3. How do you make it responsive?
4. How do you add this to every billable entity?
I mean, it's just a shitload of work, and all of that just to get to a terrible idea.
> The way you usually solve this is by having sane defaults, and giving users different mechanisms for configuration based on how complex their configuration needs are. This can take a tiered approach.
The sane default is you pay for what you use, and you can listen to billing events and build all of the logic you're talking about if you want to.
McK will bill $3 million, the 23 year old may get at best same as your $100k salary. Which makes everyone feel sour, esp the youngster for getting 3% of what their boss charged the client...!
same here. Admittedly it supports just a few language pairs but the translation quality is consistently and considerably better than Google Translate and other major offerings.
Then you go to Greece and you pay exorbitant transaction fees for everything. 3E for any incoming transfer, regardless of amount. 10-15E to transfer 10k between banks in the country. Sky high interest rates for lending, unreasonable guarantee requirements and it's still really hard to get a loan. And then you get 0.25% for saving accounts. e-banking that may be pretty looking but a shame functionality wise. And you only have 4 banks (+1 zombie bank). The bankers are still making bonuses like it's 2007 and the public is funding them with transaction fees. The traditional banking business model of making money from the spread between lending and savings rate is pretty much dead.
I can't believe there can be any other country worse than Greece in the EU. Change my mind =)