It's interesting that the author picked the home depot delivery as an example, because I don't think it was caused by software bugs at all.
The delivery notifications right at the end of the delivery slot happened because the driver has an unrealistic schedule, and to hit their metrics, they will mark deliveries as "delivered" rather than missing an assigned delivery slot.
And that the expensive two-man-handling and delivery to the apartment service got "lost" between seller and subcontractor is more likely cost optimization and banking on most customers not complaining hard enough to actually force them to provide the paid-for service. "Software bug" being a convenient excuse the subcontractor can give to the rightfully enraged customer.
The reason I tend to think it's a software bug is that it seems that the system to dispatch deliveries is automated. The subcontractors get their orders from some kind of computerized system, it seems. That system seems to systematically fail to specify when they are to carry items indoors/upstairs. Whether that's due to negligence or intentional malfeasance, don't know.
What I do know from experience is that there are numerous bugs on their website, besides the "unknown error" problem I've listed. It just seems like really shittily built software... So I would tend to think there's an issue with really poor software engineering practices at that company.
I loved your article. You might consider joining the Handmade Network [0] and related conferences that I run [1] because this is precisely the sort of behavior we want to curb in our industry.
NuvoAir | Senior Backend Engineers | Onsite or Remote (EU/US)
NuvoAir focuses on complex patients, initially targeting respiratory conditions such as COPD and asthma. The relationship-based clinical service delivers continuous, proactive care by combining best-in-class remote monitoring technology with proprietary biomarkers, deep clinical expertise, and a data-driven infrastructure. NuvoAir's care teams are designed to work in close collaboration with a partner’s existing care infrastructure to utilize NuvoAir's technology and data to personalize the care of each member.
Our tech stack includes Python/Django/DRF on Azure for backend, Vue/Typescript for Frontend as well as native Kotlin/Swift apps. We're looking for Senior Backend engineers and also other roles, check out our careers page: https://nuvoair.com/careers
I personally work there on the backend side, if you would prefer to ask some questions to an engineer first, feel free to reach out to me (email in profile).
Glovo | Senior (Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Engineering Managers) | Barcelona & Madrid, ES | Warsaw, PL | Onsite after Covid | VISA
Glovo is not just another food delivery app - we also bring your groceries, medicine, and parcels, and we want to become the everything app for your city. We are active in 20+ countries mostly in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Our tech staff is currently distributed between our HQ in Barcelona and our tech hub in Warsaw. Another hub in Madrid in the works. Work is (optionally) full remote until it's safe to go back to the office, when we expect to have a mixed model of teams gathering in the office for a couple of days and working from home for the rest of the week.
We are hiring frontend, backend and mobile engineers, as well as data scientists, engineering managers and lots of other tech and non-related roles.
I personally work at Glovo as a backend engineer, but I can assure you we have a great team of recruiters that will handle the application process. If you would prefer to ask some questions to an engineer first, feel free to reach out to me (email in profile)
Glovo | Senior Software Engineers | Data Scientists | Engineering Managers | Barcelona & Madrid, ES | Warsaw, PL | Onsite after Covid | VISA
Glovo is not just another food delivery app - we also bring your groceries, medicine, and parcels, and we want to become the everything app for your city. We are active in 20+ countries mostly in Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Our tech staff is currently distributed between our HQ in sunny Barcelona and stunning Warsaw, with a new office in Madrid in the works. Work is (optionally) full remote until it's safe to go back to the office, when we expect to have a mixed model of teams gathering in the office for a couple of days and working from home for the rest of the week.
We are hiring frontend, backend and mobile engineers, as well as data scientists, engineering managers and lots of other tech-related roles.
I personally work at Glovo as a backend engineer, but I can assure you we have a great team of recruiters that will handle the application process. If you would prefer to ask some questions to an engineer first, feel free to reach out to me (email in profile)
The German postal service is still paying for a couple of flights during the night to make sure it can guarantee E+1 delivery. They use regular passenger planes with a special set of seat covers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKORFvrttPo
If you want to catch a glimpse into the lives of some of those workers, kolostories.com[1] "interviews" the workers of their captcha solving microworking site. It's macabre yet fascinating.
Wait, is this a real company? What employment agency (sort of) promotes their service by showing how easy it is to ditch their workers and visualises that by shooting them down?! [1] If it is not a parody, macabre doesn't even capture it.
So you are doubting the integrity of a company that circumvents captchas, which are supposed to prevent fraud?
> Wait, is this a real company? What employment agency (sort of) promotes their service by showing how easy it is to ditch their workers and visualises that by shooting them down?!
The buff guy wearing the mask and cape is supposed to shoot the cheaters, not the honest workers. On the other hand, at your command, he will shoot the second guy who is clearly filling in the correct answers. In other words, if you just want to see the world burn, he will be your willing henchman.
The items from the Cuil collection were "made dark" (i.e. you can not directly view/download them). I do not know the specifics, but as far as I know most web crawl data on the Internet Archive is not directly downloadable, but you can use the Wayback machine if you are looking for a copy of a specific website.
Depending on what you need the data for, Common Crawl[1] might be an alternative.
At the 26C3 congress in 2009 there was a talk[1] about just that happening: companies that were looking for abandoned ASNs/IPv4 allocations and then using shady tricks (creating similarly-named companies, ...) to get them in their possession.
I wrote a Django app that uses LaTeX to create invoices and some other stuff. It allows me to create nice-looking invoices and reports without manually specifying the (x, y)-position of each line of text, which some PDF generating libraries require. Maybe docgen.io can help others to also create nice invoices.
Unfortunately the "Try me" part seems to be broken - no matter what I input, it always shows the same PDF.
Check at the log tab and the tex tab, the tex tab is the tex file compiled after templating and the log is the output generated by pdflatex. In the log you should see an error. Likely you Tex file contents ins't properly understood by the system
The log tab says error, but it still displays a PDF. Actually, it displays the last PDF that was rendered on the server, even if that PDF was created by a different user.
yeah I have to fix that render bug in the example implementation. The try this uses the same API_KEY for every client. In real life you wouldn't be seeing other peoples PDFs
The delivery notifications right at the end of the delivery slot happened because the driver has an unrealistic schedule, and to hit their metrics, they will mark deliveries as "delivered" rather than missing an assigned delivery slot.
And that the expensive two-man-handling and delivery to the apartment service got "lost" between seller and subcontractor is more likely cost optimization and banking on most customers not complaining hard enough to actually force them to provide the paid-for service. "Software bug" being a convenient excuse the subcontractor can give to the rightfully enraged customer.