The Payments Engineer Playbook underscores the critical role of accurate ledgers in fintech startups, highlighting the pitfalls of neglecting double-entry accounting systems.
Alvaro Duran shares a cautionary tale from his startup experience, where the absence of a double-entry system led to financial discrepancies and customer dissatisfaction.
Duran is contemplating authoring a book on creating scalable and future-proof ledgers, seeking feedback on its potential interest.
Engineers in financial systems must avoid errors, as seen in Synapse's case, where their ledger inaccurately showed more customer balances than actual funds, resulting in missing millions.- Fintech companies often promise FDIC insurance, but it only applies if the bank fails, not if the fintech mismanages funds, highlighting the importance of accurate financial tracking.- Double-entry bookkeeping is vital for accuracy, ensuring every transaction is balanced and traceable, which helps prevent errors and potential fraud in financial systems.
Momentum scrolling plugins are criticized for disrupting the natural web browsing experience by degrading usability, accessibility, and performance.- Key issues include violating user expectations, causing motion sickness, reducing accessibility, and inconsistent performance, particularly on older devices.- These plugins also increase page load times, break native browser features, and add maintenance overhead, leading to user frustration and complexity.
The discussion emphasizes frustrations with Single Page Applications (SPAs) affecting web navigation, particularly concerning URLs, browser navigation, and the back button.- Critics argue that improperly implemented SPAs compromise web fundamentals like bookmarkability and navigation, prioritizing performance over user experience.- The conversation also addresses issues such as hijacking standard browser functions and the importance of respecting user autonomy in web design, advocating for maintaining traditional web functionalities.
Hetzner is increasing prices in the US by up to 27.52% for CPX21 servers while reducing bandwidth by an average of 88.19%.- The changes, announced on Thanksgiving, are intended to align costs with resource usage, as lighter users were subsidizing heavier users.- New pricing and bandwidth limits will take effect from December 2024 for new servers and February 2025 for existing ones, with Hetzner maintaining it offers the best price-performance ratio.
Car tires are a major source of microplastic pollution, contributing to a quarter of all microplastics in the environment.- There is a debate on whether to tax tires based on their compounds to address pollution, as opposed to taxing vehicles by weight.- The discussion includes privacy and practicality concerns regarding taxing based on weight and distance driven, with examples from the UK and the Netherlands considering different methods for implementation.
The discussion focuses on the Ninja build system's role in Android's AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and the transition complexities from makefiles to Ninja.
Users debate Ninja's advantages over Makefiles, considering architecture, social issues, and the impact of iteration time on programmer satisfaction.
The conversation also mentions other build systems like Samurai and the challenges of maintaining handcrafted build systems, highlighting the role of social dynamics in tech environments.
A 2024 benchmark tested memory consumption for running 1 million concurrent tasks using coroutines across various programming languages, including Rust, C#, Go, and Java.- C# with NativeAOT demonstrated the best memory efficiency, outperforming other languages, while Go consumed more memory than anticipated, even more than Java with GraalVM.- The study underscores that some languages, like .NET with NativeAOT and Java's GraalVM, have improved scalability, whereas Go's goroutines were less efficient, and Rust's memory usage was optimized by adjusting task handling.
In 2024, the memory required to run 1 million concurrent tasks varies by programming language and concurrency model, with Rust and C# using around 0.12 KiB per task, while Go uses about 2.64 KiB per task.
Node.js, despite appearing efficient with promises, does not execute tasks in parallel, highlighting differences in concurrency handling among languages.
The benchmark underscores that real-world applications involve more complex operations than simple tasks, impacting memory usage and performance.
A Reddit user criticized Rust for its complexity and limited job opportunities, comparing it to Betamax and Esperanto, which are technically superior but not widely adopted.
While some users appreciate Rust's strictness and safety features, others note its slower adoption rate compared to languages like Go.
Despite these challenges, Rust is gaining traction in major companies like AWS and Microsoft, with some viewing it as a potential future replacement for C++.
GIMP 3.0 is anticipated to release soon, marking the first major update since 2018, featuring a modernized GTK 3 interface and improved performance.- Key updates include non-destructive editing, enhanced color management, improved layer workflows, and a new extension system for easier plugin management.- Although the exact release date is unknown, development builds are available, indicating a significant advancement for the open-source image editor with more frequent future updates expected.
GIMP 3.0 is under development, adding support for color palettes beyond sRGB, such as CMYK and CIELAB, which are important for print and publishing.
The update seeks to enhance color accuracy by converting to other color spaces only when necessary, minimizing data loss.
Despite advancements like non-destructive editing, some users are concerned about GIMP's user interface and functionality compared to Photoshop, citing slow development due to a small volunteer team.
Vince is a Golang-based port of the Plausible Analytics dashboard, designed as a single binary, single-user system for multiple websites without runtime dependencies.- It includes features like automatic TLS (Transport Layer Security), outbound link tracking, file download tracking, 404 page tracking, and custom event tracking, making it nearly equivalent to the Plausible dashboard.- Vince aims to make the Plausible dashboard accessible for self-hosting, serving as a drop-in replacement for personal websites, with a demo available on a $6 Vultr instance.
Vince is a self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics, developed as a Golang port of the Plausible Analytics dashboard, focusing on dashboard-related features.
It offers features such as automatic TLS (Transport Layer Security), outbound link tracking, and custom event tracking, with no runtime dependencies, making it suitable for personal websites.
Vince is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant, uses Pebble for data storage, and is available as an open-source project on GitHub, providing an accessible self-hosting option without Plausible's setup complexity.
Australia has implemented a ban on social media usage for individuals under 16, igniting discussions about child protection versus parental rights.- The law mandates age verification, which has raised privacy concerns and fears of increased surveillance.- The legislation was expedited with minimal public input, leaving its effectiveness and enforceability in question.
Bolt.new is a tool that allows users to rapidly create web applications, demonstrated by building a screen-sharing app in just 30 minutes.- The app functions by generating a unique code for a room, which others can use to join and view the screen being shared.- The project was further developed using Cursor and is available for viewing on GitHub, with a live demo hosted on Vercel.
A browser-based screen-sharing app was developed using Bolt.new in just 30 minutes, allowing users to create and join rooms with unique codes for screen sharing.- The app is available on GitHub, with a demo provided, and has received feedback regarding screen sharing stoppage issues and mobile compatibility.- The app does not utilize a TURN server, which is typically used to relay media in WebRTC applications when direct peer-to-peer connections fail.
Prometheus 3.0, the first major release in 7 years, introduces a modernized UI, Remote Write 2.0, UTF-8 support, OTLP support, and native histograms.- Key features include improved protocol efficiency with Remote Write 2.0, enhanced interoperability with OpenTelemetry through OTLP ingestion, and more efficient metrics with native histograms.- Users should be aware of some breaking changes and consult the migration guide, but the release maintains backward compatibility and encourages user feedback.
Prometheus 3.0 has been released, introducing features like reduced memory usage and support for OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) ingestion.- The release has prompted discussions on its scalability compared to alternatives like Mimir, Victoria, and Cortex, with some users opting for these solutions for enhanced performance.- There are concerns about the clarity of the release notes, indicating a need for improved communication from the developers.