You may also like Will Wight's Cradle series. It's an american style of Xianxia/Cultivation novels but very good. The audiobooks are also highly praised.
I was so skeptical when my recommended the series. It sounds so juvenile and low brow but is actually SO GOOD. Both funny and genuinely well written and structured. Love that it's doing as well as it is
They don't understand the model where SaaS businesses use Shopify as a billing channel on top of their own subscription model, it's all or nothing - they assume that anything in the app store can only use Shopify billing if the user installs via Shopify, which is fair but their billing API has glaring issues:
- App Charges get added to clients bills, you're not getting paid right away (60+ days in some cases) vs getting paid instantly
- If someone doesn't pay their Shopify bill, tough shit you're not getting paid
- Got fraudulent accounts billing via Shopify? They can use your app then never pay anything - fun
- Want to do refunds? Too bad there's no way to do it via the API you have to manually email Shopify then they apply an App Credit (not even a refund) for the customer, then you email them back
- Uninstalling the Shopify App cancels billing, so you lose complete control of your normal downgrade process
- Payments come via PayPal bi monthly :(
There's plenty more, but you're basically losing all the upside of Stripe in exchange for the App Store promotion of your app.
In my experience the "ApplicationCredit" is virtually worthless. You can't apply a credit after a merchant has uninstalled your app since their Shopify API access token has been revoked. And in the vast majority of cases, refund requests happen after a merchant has uninstalled the app.
Why so many refund requests after a merchant has uninstalled your app you ask? Because Shopify inexplicable doesn't prorate app charges when a merchant uninstalls your app in the middle of their 30 day billing period. Even if a merchant uninstalls your app 1 day into their 30 day billing period then Shopify's billing system still charges them for the full 30 days and doesn't automatically refund them back the difference. So we're often inundated with refund requests from merchants. We then have to send an email to Shopify's billing team to have them refund the charge. It's absolutely nuts!
Can you provide any more details on your stack and what you're seeing that blows away alternatives?
I'm running a staging version of our Rails 3.8 app with MRI 2.1 and Puma in clustered/threaded mode and everything looks pretty good .. but I haven't been able to throw a ton of concurrent traffic at it yet. Potential thread safety issues give me the niggles, not quite ready to replace Unicorn on production just yet.
> Can you provide any more details on your stack and what you're seeing that blows away alternatives?
The really big thing is how just one puma worker with 8-16 threads can actually replace a set of about 6-8 unicorn/passenger worker instances and give you about the same level of performance.
That level of memory savings lets you use smaller boxes or put more puma workers on one box and eliminate others. Admittedly I'm not doing twitter request/minute numbers but I still was very pleased with my findings.
Theoretically, the number of puma threads you're running should be the same as the number of unicorn processes. That is, equal to the number of available CPU cores on the machine. So, if you're running on a machine with 8 cores, you should run 8 process or threads.
What continues to be the major issue with anything thread-based in ruby is that to reliably reach desired performance at load in a threaded setup, you need to be running an interpreter than can make concurrent use of native system threads. MRI has a global interpreter lock, so two pieces of ruby code will not run at the same time. IO is not subject to the GIL, so a lot of what happens in a web app can run concurrently (DB calls, etc), but other things that all happen in ruby (routing, view rendering) cannot.
So, basically, to reliably achieve similar performance using threads, you need to be using Rubinius or JRuby, which don't have a GIL.
Whilst it's truly amazing that they've found 3 separate photos of the same person in the same spot at the blast there's a few questions that come to mind:
- If he was planning to commit the atrocity he did, why would you stand & talk to someone? (unless they were perhaps working together)
- There's a water bottle in the backpack which leads me to believe that person is a runner?
- The bag seems a bit small to hold a 6L pressure cooker. Plus he doesn't seem to be straining/leaning forward.
- If you're standing in the crowd most people will take a backpack off & put it at their feet?
- The crowd in the second & third photos is much busier which means it's not the same spot. If you planted a bomb why would you stand in the crowd?
Been trying to line up the flags in the last 2 photos to get an idea of where he's standing but can't manage it.
> If you're standing in the crowd most people will take a backpack off & put it at their feet?
I do. Both to alleviate the weight, minimize the space I take up as well as reduce the chance of someone slipping a hand inside my bag. Likewise when I'm carrying a messenger.
I'm a little weary of this set of pictures. It seems like he's edging to the front of the crowd, whereas I thought the explosions occurred a little further back. Moving to the front would be a great way to get stuck, much like ending up against the rails at a concert.
Anyhow, I think crowd sourcing this kind of investigation can potentially be of great help to law enforcement, but I really hope the internet community keeps itself in check when it comes to determining guilt & doling out punishment.
>it's truly amazing that they've found 3 separate photos of the same person in the same spot at the blast //
I looked at a few flickr images and identified about 6 people who were in 2 or 3 images at the location of the Marathon Place bomb¹ without too much effort. So I don't find that particularly amazing.
>If you're standing in the crowd most people will take a backpack off & put it at their feet? //
Based on this limit section of the marathon watchers that "most" appears to be patently false. I only saw one guy standing in that area with a bag between his legs but at least 20 other backpacks (or similar). This surprised me, I hold my backpack on my front in any crowd to try to avoid being robbed.
¹ - you can use the video footage to "triangulate" the location, the video line-of-sight passes through a tree from the centre of the finish line, you can see these details on Google Maps. Around the area between the South African and Norwegian flags.
I dunno, seems like the firing is more to seem like they are "doing the right thing" I personally don't think someone should be let go over comments that are part of a private conversation. It was fine for Adria Richards to make sexist jokes on Twitter yet SendGrid firmly stand by her as a company.
We've actually considered ticket response times, a lot of hosts use WHMCS to manage their nodes - which we could make a plugin for. But a large amount of the more established hosts use a custom system.
Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality. Anyone could respond with a "We're looking into it" within 5 mins & not get a resolution for a few hours.
Thank you for ServerBear, I use it all the time and send others to it often.
Can I give you a feature request? Can you track terms of service or somehow summarize them? I would love to filter/find hosts based on how liberal their terms are.
See also this comment/response from armored_mammal re: DigitalOcean's ToS:
That is a pretty good idea, I'll pop it into our roadmap. We've got a chunk of time allocated this month to work on some stuff & that's an easy quick win :)
> Problem is, ticket response time isn't an indication of quality.
I didn't say it would be easy... you'd have to have a somewhat subjective metric of "did a person answer?" and "did they tell me something useful?". Maybe you could use Amazon's mechanical turk or something like that...
I've recently moved to an iPhone 5 after being on Android for a few years. I'm a heavy Gtalk user & it pains me that there's no official Google app for it on iOS - something I'd love to see.
The audiobook is also really well narrated.