I can see how you're coming away from this article with that perception, but, this needs to be read in the context of everything said prior: its intent isn't to provide you a full narrative of the situation, just additional context.
This article is the missing piece explaining why:
1. Shopify, allegedly, "specifically demanded that at least one of the RubyGems maintainers, André Arko, be excluded from returning to the project."[0]
2. Rafael França, a member of Rails Core, publicly listed concerns[1] about "competitor tooling"/"admin trust" r.e. rv.
Both are components of Joel Drapper's post that gave me pause on my first read, as these statements aren't something said without basis. That basis being correct or not is another matter, but I wouldn't expect either Shopify or a member of Rails Core to have such concerns simply because they don't like someone.
Personally, I don't come away from this article with the sense the author dislikes André, just that there's perhaps more rationale coming from a camp that's largely not said much so far.
Looking into the crystal ball of future predictions, the battle lines we're going to see in the Ruby community will be based around the acceptance or rejection of some of the allegations here about Ruby Together's spending.
I recall Ruby Together advocating for personal sponsorships in addition to corporate. It's one thing to be treating Apple adapters as disposable HB pencils & buying dinners on the company card if companies are funding you, but it's a different matter of fiscal responsibility when you're potentially spending personal donations.
Coming out of this, I'll suspect everyone will align that open-source contributors should be paid, and companies should in some way support open-source, but we'll see fractures over if André's alleged behaviour is acceptable.
I'm looking forward to someone/something assembling an entity which is trustworthy & responsible. If Ruby Central can't be that entity, we'll need a replacement.
It isn't explaining why Shopify finds André to be a risk, its explaining why Justin Searls finds André to be a risk.
> but I wouldn't expect either Shopify or a member of Rails Core to have such concerns simply because they don't like someone.
Being given authority doesn't result in a person being given the ability to be reasonable. Of Rails, there is several years of controversy of how one notable member presents his concerns and who he targets with his concerns.
Going by Hologram's public pricing, a GNSS "heartbeat" per-minute would cost $4/month on a PAYG model. With tiered contract pricing, I'd expect that to drop to $1/month for a mid/large-sized telematics organisation.
Looking at the definition of "premium cards"[0] they're actually business/commercial/corporate cards, not premium consumer cards. A horrendous term that's bound to cause confusion.
The scariest part of this pricing split is that Stripe seems to be determining the fee "based on the information available from card networks at point of capture", instead of being directly told what the card type is, and even allude to this determination being potentially incorrect.
This gets even more frustrating when you think that business spend is on average higher than personal/consumer spend, so charging a higher fee for this is just a triple whammy.
It's easy to crucify Stripe for this, but this is probably a product of a cost review they're undertaking as part of IPO/next round prep (if The Information is anything to go by). We need a new Visa/Mastercard.
It's next to impossible to get the clearance for an Apple Developer Enterprise account unless you know someone at Apple. It's necessary to have an Enterprise account to sign MDM certificates, so I've had an application open for over six months without hearing from them, and the first application was rejected after 10 months without any dialogue.
With this article shining yet more negative light on the program after the Facebook/Google spying-on-the-internet-access-of-kids debacle effectively shut the Enterprise program down, the MDM space will be even harder to innovate in, considering no startup will ever meet the required bar for signing up for an Enterprise account.
This looks absolutely incredible, and given the supply issues with Intel's NUCs, couldn't have come at a better time!
Do you have an estimate of when the Framework Marketplace will be available for UK customers? Currently Marketplace links redirect to the UK homepage, and is only accessible after manually selecting "United States" as a country.
We're currently setting up the logistics infrastructure for the Marketplace for UK and EU. We'll have waitlist functionality open sooner so that you can at least browse the product catalog though.
The experience is a little rough with the redirect, and I'd love it if I could put an email somewhere for a reminder when it launches. Otherwise though I'm really looking forward to ordering soon!
I don't doubt that from your perspective as the founder of Stripe, that's the workflow you'd like to have for when things "go wrong", but from the perspective of someone currently interacting with Stripe support, I strongly doubt that simply raising a support ticket or reaching out on Twitter would result in any meaningful movement on a rejection like this.
Regarding Stripe's support: I emailed last night to confirm how to delete a user's card when it's represented as PaymentMethod, and in reply I received a link[0] to the cards/delete API documentation (which, in case you're not as steeped in PaymentMethod's as I am, won't work because the two objects are fundamentally different).
Given this rather lacklustre handling & having also been on the receiving end of someone trying to fraud the company I'm working for, I highly doubt someone who is asking for reconsideration after receiving a fraud ban would actually receive an escalation via the front-line agents manning support@stripe.com, and if they could, the actual legitimate bans that Stripe no doubt needs to put in place would simply abuse that channel and waste everyone's time.
I appreciate it's a really challenging balance of trying to provide an escalation/appeals process that won't be abused itself, and by comparison Stripe's approach of direct-founder-contact seems easier than Apple, as if your developer account application is rejected[1] you have absolutely zero recourse apart from going H.A.M. on Hacker News & hoping the community helps you out, whereas in this case there is a magic button that starts an invisible and unaccountable appeals process, that ultimately resulted in another rejection.
The only "solution" (if any) I can see to counter the negative experience (& associated PR) would be involvement in the appeals process, where you are allowed to effectively "state your case" via video call or submission of evidence, but this draws a thorny parallel to the judicial system, and I doubt Legal would sign off on such a process.
This is a problem that impacts basically any kind of appeals process, and Stripe's not alone in suffering from it, but that perspective doesn't help the dozens of founders that don't have the connections to sort this issues out in private, and are burning the attention span of Hacker News in the process of unblocking their businesses. Front-line support also isn't the answer, unless specific processes can be put in place to handle rejection escalations and get them into the eyes of the right people.
[1] Long story short: to use Apple's Mobile Device Management APIs, you need an Enterprise developer account, which thanks to The Verge & gambling apps skirting the App Store, isn't possible unless you went to Stanford with a future Apple PM. Admittedly, the chances of an Apple executive personally addressing this if I were to email is statistically quite low compared to emailing you.
If someone from Apple is reading this & would like to pre-empt the classic "Apple screwed me" Hacker News post, do feel free to email me on luke@ghostworks.io and I'll happily brief you on The Great Saga of Enrollment 4HZY7VX69S.
The only "solution" (if any) I can see to counter the negative experience (& associated PR) would be involvement in the appeals process, where you are allowed to effectively "state your case" via video call or submission of evidence, but this draws a thorny parallel to the judicial system, and I doubt Legal would sign off on such a process.
There's also the question/option of considering reputation, which also brings up scary thoughts about China's moves in that area. If you're complaining and are a well known highly voted participant on HN, YouTuber with thousands of subscribers, etc the risk that you as a public-ish figure are trying to scam is lower.
Oh absolutely, and that's something I'm taking into heavy consideration as I figure out the next move with Apple: I have next to no social clout or network, so if the loudest move I make in the tech sphere is "Apple screwed me", is that all I want to be known for?
I'm not hopeful for any change in these sort of review processes without any legislation changes, but it would be a truly tragic state of affairs if it were to escalate that far.
Ah! I knew I was forgetting something: much like that dude living in a cave in Lost, I have to SSH into that server and HUP nginx every ~80 days, as the user that does the certificate renewal isn't the same user that runs nginx.
One day I'll overengineer something to solve this, but for the meantime it's "ssh statichost -- sudo kill -s HUP 947" every so often. Thanks for reminding me, much appreciated!
R.E. "unified experience", this slots so cleanly into Stripe's stable of products: all of your reporting would be available in Sigma, all of your fraud data available in Radar, and with a little magic in the SDK side, all of your customer data available (unified) in Stripe's database.
Imagine if you're running a web store, and you want to go to a conference or convention or something and start selling your stuff there. All of your tools still work, all of your reporting still works, and crucially your accounting flow remains identical.
The customisation options are probably up in the air right now - I imagine developers won't get the ability to customise the UI available on the PIN pad in the first release, but I imagine that's where they want to get to.
I don't know about you, but every time I've attempted to use Sinatra for a project, it's either been for something that wouldn't ever see the light of production, or I've just ended up with franken-rails.
We had this problem at work: a Sinatra app that had pieces and pieces of ActiveSupport bolted on, and it got to the stage where we needed a beefier database than Redis before the CTO eventually generated a new rails app and transplanted the Sinatra app on top of it.
It's all well and good saying "use Sinatra", but when you get to the stage where you're adding ActiveRecord because it's the most mature ORM out there, it's usually late enough in the game that you're actually writing a poor excuse for a Rails application.
I hear that sentiment a lot (I blogged about it here: [1]). Basically, "every time I use Sinatra, I ended up with franken-rails" means that Sinatra was either picked for the wrong reasons or misused. If you want to build something large based on Sinatra, for the love of $deity, please use organization systems people have built for you, be it Padrino, some Sinatra stack or something else. It doesn't mean that Sinatra is bad, but its often misunderstood.
This article is the missing piece explaining why:
1. Shopify, allegedly, "specifically demanded that at least one of the RubyGems maintainers, André Arko, be excluded from returning to the project."[0]
2. Rafael França, a member of Rails Core, publicly listed concerns[1] about "competitor tooling"/"admin trust" r.e. rv.
Both are components of Joel Drapper's post that gave me pause on my first read, as these statements aren't something said without basis. That basis being correct or not is another matter, but I wouldn't expect either Shopify or a member of Rails Core to have such concerns simply because they don't like someone.
Personally, I don't come away from this article with the sense the author dislikes André, just that there's perhaps more rationale coming from a camp that's largely not said much so far.
Looking into the crystal ball of future predictions, the battle lines we're going to see in the Ruby community will be based around the acceptance or rejection of some of the allegations here about Ruby Together's spending.
I recall Ruby Together advocating for personal sponsorships in addition to corporate. It's one thing to be treating Apple adapters as disposable HB pencils & buying dinners on the company card if companies are funding you, but it's a different matter of fiscal responsibility when you're potentially spending personal donations.
Coming out of this, I'll suspect everyone will align that open-source contributors should be paid, and companies should in some way support open-source, but we'll see fractures over if André's alleged behaviour is acceptable.
I'm looking forward to someone/something assembling an entity which is trustworthy & responsible. If Ruby Central can't be that entity, we'll need a replacement.
[0]: https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/#:~:text=Shopify...
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/rmfranca.bsky.social/post/3lz7alpob...