Yeah, Mercury's going to have to up their game if they want to stay relevant. I remember my disappointment when I found out I had to park 250k in a 0-yield checking account to qualify for the 1.5% yield on a savings account that can only do something like 5 transfers a month, making it a complete non-starter for running a real business. It felt like they're playing all the same old tricks on us as the incumbent banks, just with a prettier UI.
This new Brex account with 0 fees and 1.6% yield on the entire deposit with no transaction limits feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.
I wouldn't be so sure, there was the rather plausible speculation that the 3% from Robinhood was a loss leader that wasn't meant to last long, in order to drum up hype for the launch. They could very well have been planning to earn the fed rate and fronting the difference for a period of time and then bait & switching (and/or introducing some premium plan to make up the difference).
Also, money market funds, which are generally considered cash-equivalents, don't usually yield north 3% either afaik, and I can imagine putting customers deposits in riskier higher yielding investments could have also have ran foul of banking regulations.
Brex is using neither of these strategies here as far as I can tell, and they're providing a decent amount of transparency into how the funds are going to be handled, so it should be fairly easy for regulators to review. If regulators do take issue with their strategy, I suspect we'll probably hear about it in the news soon enough. In the mean time, it's still an early access product, so it's not like we can use it immediately anyways (I'll definitely be signing up though).
From the first sentence under the "What are securities" section:
> SIPC protects stocks, bonds, Treasury securities, certificates of deposit, mutual funds, money market mutual funds and certain other investments as "securities."
Surely I can't be the only one irked by the fact that they're bringing the concept of "copies" and "borrowing" to what are just bytes sitting on hard drives that can be copied and transmitted at 0 marginal cost?
I agree that it's a better user experience than the non-digital alternative, but I'd like to see digital books at libraries be available for free to anyone who wants it at any time, without any arbitrary restrictions whatsoever.
> SIPC protects against the loss of cash and securities – such as stocks and bonds – held by a customer at a financially-troubled SIPC-member brokerage firm.
It sounds like SIPC protects against loss of cash for the purpose of purchasing securities _and_ the loss of the securities themselves. So in this case it sounds like by sweeping customers' cash into a money market fund, SIPC protection would apply to the money market fund investment.
I think Robinhood's issue might have been that they didn't actually do any securities trading and tried to just rely on SIPC insurance for customers' cash that's just sitting around.
Regardless of if my interpretation is correct, I'd be _really_ surprised if they just somehow ignored the whole Robinhood fiasco and managed to make the exact same mistake on the regulatory side.
From the deafening silence I'm going to take the less charitable interpretation that it's meant to enable Cloudflare to essentially sell Warp users' IPs to Cloudflare customers as an added perk.
I wished on more than 1 occasion that I could just use one of my ZeroTier nodes in other locations as an exit node and tunnel traffic through it though.
I think that might already be possible but it'd be nice if the configuration was abstracted away behind some simple interface.
That'd allow it to replace Wireguard and Mullvad for me as I mostly use it as a means to bypass georestrictions.
Most successful companies do both. Listening to your users is of course important, but it can't be a wholesale replacement for data driven aggregate behavior analysis because people have their own biases can forget things (and sometimes lie) and individual feedback can't be easily generalized to your entire population of users past a certain scale.
> forgetting the kind of person who is techie enough to use RSS feeds is probably techie enough to turn off telemetry
More like they have no choice but to ignore them because these are users who explicitly chose to be ignored.
If you want your usage patterns to affect product decisions in a product you use, then don't disable telemetry for that product. You can't have it both ways.
That explains why everybody puts up with it. It doesn't explain why a startup like Mercury can't come along and shake up the status quo by not nickle and diming their customers like the greedy fucks that are the incumbents.
I can absolutely imagine why existing tech companies would be interested if the protocol became so popular that they'd be stupid to ignore it and start from scratch with their own protocol, like XMPP was at one point.
I'd be more interested in seeing how they plan on preventing the whole Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing pretty much every company pulled with their initially XMPP based chat apps that gained market share, turning them into back into closed silos.
Thank you for providing your side of the story. While I can no longer edit my post to point to this, I have upvoted this post to hopefully bring some visibility to it, and encourage others to do the same.
Until someone can provide a chat log of what was actually said in that conversation that led up to that comment, it's still going to be difficult for any outside observer to make up their own mind on whether or not those words were indeed taken out of context to the degree that you suggest. But I can appreciate that it could be frustrating to deal with someone who behaves as you claim, even if his intentions might be to keep the protocol open and secure.
To quote one of the follow up comments from the author:
> If you go to matrix.org and look at the list of about a dozen or so servers: you will find that none of them actually work except the reference implementation, and maybe sometimes Construct. Even thus, the phrase "able to build" is questionable. I have spent months reverse-engineering their software and its interactions before, and after, it was at all documented in this so-called standard (by the way, it's just documentation of their software -- errata and all (and rather poor)).
> Construct server is the single survivor out of the ones listed and even more who have attempted and given up early which we don't know about. That being said, it is still incomplete.
A spec that "Anyone can implement" doesn't have much value if it's so bad/incomplete that in practice nobody else is actually able to create a complete working implementation of it as the post claims.
And regardless of what they're planning on doing about any security issue, there's never a good reason for a discussion of a potential security issue in an "open" protocol to end in "good luck talking to your own federation." That's the behavior I'm pointing to that's hostile to competing server implementations.
Of course, the quote could be taken out of context, or straight up made up. But until proven otherwise, I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the small independent developer who seems to genuinely care enough about the openness of the protocol to build their own server implementation.
I had a pretty positive view of Matrix until I came across this post and the follow up responses from the developer behind an unofficial Matrix server implementation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968
I'd say tread carefully given their apparent hostility towards competing server implementations, which is literally the only thing that makes the protocol meaningfully "federated" to begin with.
This part in particular was deeply disturbing:
> I can quote the CEO of new vector in an argument we had about the insecurities of the protocol and what needs to be done to fix them where he said "good luck talking to your own federation." That reveals a lot.
Not exactly the kind of attitude I'd like to see from the stewards of an "open" protocol.
> I think it's best to change your situation so that the right choice is the easiest to make.
Lowering the activation energy required to do cardio by getting my own treadmill in the living room really helped me get into the habit of doing cardio more regularly.
Now instead of paying every month for a gym membership I rarely used, I end up doing a good 3-4 hours of light cardio every week, opportunistically, because it's so easy to get started, and I can play music and watch shows while exercising without worrying about disturbing others, making it a much more enjoyable experience overall.
This new Brex account with 0 fees and 1.6% yield on the entire deposit with no transaction limits feels like a breath of fresh air in comparison.