Severance as in a 'voluntary' payment by employers is a US thing that I don't understand. Do you mind explaining why it gets paid at all?
In the UK, it's common for employers to have contractual obligation to pay a notice period, and for longer term employees they are legally obliged to be firing them on capacity or redundancy grounds - so it is common to pay some severance in order to pay the employee to resign themself and sign some legal paperwork saying it's okay.
I don't get why employers pay extra money "just to be nice" where there isn't some legal reason to do it...?
Not only is not common but it's definitely not "extremely common." In the current wave of layoffs signaling the end of the "cheap money era" it does seem more common however. At least among the types of companies that are likely to make it onto the HN front page. I've worked for plenty of startups where we got nothing more than being paid up through the day we were laid off. And most of those withheld our last check until we returned all company property.
Severance is definitely not common in startups. They'll usually burn the cash right up until the very last investor says 'no more' and then call it quits. They might have one more pay period (or two) in the bank.
Employers are by dollar amount the biggest actual thieves by far in the US. Business owners ought to generally receive more scorn and critical evaluation than common property thieves who represent a thin fragment, if we really care about theft
Doubtless for some cohort of employers you are correct.
Unfortunately your statement is painted with a wide brush, covering everyone from Jeff at Amazon to the owner of a corner grocery store. Everything from profitable FAANGs, to VC funded startups with hypergrowth ambitions, to small, finally profitable, boot-strapped endeavours.
Clearly among that group there are some who have embraced late-stage capitalism, who are milking their custoners and employees at every turn.
However, I would suggest, that many more have spent a life-time working harder, with less income security, doing what it takes in good times and bad. Looking after employees, treating them, and customers, fairly.
If after all this time they become well compensated, perhaps even rich, calling them "theives" belies the effort, and sacrifice, to reach that place.
To respond briefly, [Jeff at] Amazon has been convicted of being one of the leading wage thieves, and small business owners like the corner grocery store are also frequently accused and caught for wage theft. It is a pretty wide brush that's needed to evaluate the majority category of theft in the US.
I haven't mentioned anything about the effort or value employers provide. I don't think hard work from owners is relevant to the amount they thieve. And I wonder why you don't mention anything about the hard work provided by the labor who are victims to the largest category of theft, who by definition do the majority of the work obligated in business to begin with.
Why don't you go start a business and become one of these rich employers you speak of? If taking such risks wasn't rewarded accordingly, then I don't think people would be nearly as eager to start a business.
I'm talking about a system at scale, not individual actors. You don't know what I'm doing as an individual and it's not relevant to a discussion of material reality as observed. If your solution to this problem at scale is for everyone to become a rich employer in order to avoid wage theft, I don't know what to tell you
Re: risk staked, I will add that for many business owners their greatest risk and fear is simply having to work for a wage themselves.
It’s definitely common in parts of the world where workers have organized to have severance required by law or through other organized means. When workers demand it one on one with their employers, they have no leverage and are at the mercy of “nice owners” (ones that value reputations effects created by worker-favorable market conditions)
This kind of package is very rare. It's uncommon to get any kind of severance without tenure and many companies have been laying off w/no severance what-so-ever in my area regardless of tenure. They pay through the current week, expect you to return all equipment, and f right off.
Most people will just use the sql templating and scheduled cron jobs features of the cloud, which is very easy to self host.
There is cloud IDE, which is just ok in my opinion. I'd rather use a local editor, but might be a value add for some.
The cloud plans also has metadata features and APIs, which could be worth it for some use cases.
The most interesting thing tied to the cloud is the new metrics feature, but I don't really like how it's done (metrics are defined as sql fragments in YAML). Really using metrics depends on proprietary parts that dbt cloud only has, so if you are using this, you'll probably be paying for the cloud.
The cloud offering makes development easier for analysts, that are good at SQL, but not necessarily familiar with tools like VSCode. It is worth $50 per developer seat, however not $100 and definitely not $600 if you are onto the enterprise plan. For the enterprise, there are discounts available, however there is a high risk they won't be available in a in years time.
YC has generated enough wealth from these and other endless consumption ideas for a thousand lifetimes. The billionaire's playbook now dictates you focus on building your legacy by using disruptive technology to save the world.
Well, if YC is positioning themselves as "helping to solve the problem" I think it's completely valid to call them out for previously "helping to create the problem", in a humorous way.
Because YC and other VC shops wouldn't shut the fuck up about crypto, web3, and blockchain across 2020-2021 and that sort of behavior doesn't get a free pass. Now they've moved onto Generative AI.
"Carbon removal credits on the blockchain. Using blockchain technology to solve the double-counting of carbon credits is an attractive idea but in our experience it’s just a technology choice and a small piece of the product you ultimately have to build."
And it begins. We’re going to see a lot of VC-backed firms with mildly decent products or teams sell for down-round valuations to those who are still flush with cash.
And remember, in these deals, common stock/option holders (i.e. employees) usually get nothing when the sales price is less than the total invested due to liquidation preferences. This is why it's so important for employees to look at how much a company as raised when considering the value of their equity.
down round sale doesn't mean purchase price is less than invested.
i.e. company brought in a total of 30-40 million in investment at a 300 million valuation. sells for 200 million. they still sold for a lot more than invested.
also, for people still at the company, my observation from friends who were in that situation is that if they are buying the company for the talent, they get good retention offers.
In this case, yes, it could be that they are wiped out, but the employees got a salary and the investors will lose money overall. so the employees come out ahead of the investors.
In this case, they got over $300 million in total funding, not just valuation, so your point doesn't apply here.
> In this case, yes, it could be that they are wiped out, but the employees got a salary and the investors will lose money overall. so the employees come out ahead of the investors.
Except, and this is what a lot of startup employees don't really grasp, is that a VC is always widely diversified while an employee can't be. At any given time a VC will have lots of investments, and they should expect most of these to be relative losers. Employees, however, can only work for one company at a time, and for startups they usually take significantly under market rate given that they're taking a chance on their equity.
One should never work for a startup for the equity.
The equity is a "bonus/lottery ticket" for the future.
IMO, You work for a startup because you get to work on exactly what you want to work on in a way that would be more difficult in a larger company (in terms of technology, the amount of effect you can have, the learning experience....) and the salary is sufficient for your goals and needs (i.e. support yourself in a lifestyle that you are content with and able to put sufficient savings away for the future so that you will be able to afford the things you want/need in that future).
If the salary isn't sufficient, you shouldn't work for a startup banking on the equity, as you can't bank on it.
If the experience of what you will be working on isn't special and you could work for a larger firm that pays more, you should work for them, not the startup, as you aren't getting any extra value to make up for the lower pay from the startup.
At the end of the day, a startup that goes to 0, the investors lost all their money, but all the employees got a salary for the time being there + whatever growth/value they personally got of the work that they can take to their next job. If the startup doesn't go to 0, but goes to under invested dollars value, it is effectively the same thing, the equity employees were issued is 0 and the investors have lost money, while the employees at least are net positive on their salary.
I really think people who say to work for a startup to take less salary because of the lottery ticket that is equity are making the wrong decisions. I'm saying that as someone who is now on his 3rd non public company, where the first job didn't work out for me (and the company was then sold at a down round, though more money than they had raised), the second company ran out of money and was "aquihired" by a larger firm and "Hopefully" this third company will go public (though current market trends make that a hazy crystal ball for the foreseeable future). But none of these jobs I took because of the equity, I took them because the salary was sufficient for my goals/needs and I got to work on things I really wanted to work on in a manner to have an impact that I couldn't have elsewhere.
yes, I was responding to the concept of a down round in general and explicitly noted that in this case, the company was worth less than what the people invested.
Worse, they probably lost money. Many employees exercise their options anticipating a liquidity event so they can pay the long-term tax rates over the short-term rates. Anyone who exercised their options is probably underwater.. By A LOT. Fungible was really hot at one point. I can imagine employees losing $10k-100k if they thought a sale was coming.
You should always be able to know revenue, so valuation is x 2 if a consultancy and x 10 if software. Likewise, increase/decrease based on whether revenue is doubling/tripling annually or not. The average multiple goes up and down all the time, so don't fixate on the value this month / year, as an exit, if any, can be many years out.
Nowadays typical to have no participation multiple, just 1x preferred shares ("first money out"), so you can add up the money raised, which is often ~public
Ex: a co that raised a total of $100M on $10M revenue... returns you nothing. They can call themselves a unicorn but that's between them and the investors. The investors, through preferred shares, own all the current market value.
Also, ultimately, this is all funny money. A company no buyer wants is worth nothing. Likewise, if some sort of existential PR bet by the acquirer, the acquisition $ can be magnitudes more than any sense of team/IP/revenue $, like the early acquisition of Cruise.
It becomes even weirder when you consider that big vc’s can send you business from other companies they’ve invested in, or those of their friends. Suddenly, it’s like your value just went up 10x the sales price. Basically vc’s become like market makers, and startups are somewhere in between crypto and publicly traded companies. There are key differences though, like that startups can actually create new value and bring in new money to the ecosystem, or that there are real regulations to speak of, or that vc’s are usually protected and get cashed out first. All of these things influence the real valuation.
Having been burned by equity of nothing too often I tend to flat out refuse equity in general, but since you bring it up what is the advice/recommendation here?
Trying to work for actually profitable companies should help! (No, haven't seen any profit from any options yet. I usually negotiate for mor cash when I can.)
Yup. Working for early stage start-ups is like entering a lottery that sells incredibly expensive tickets. Sure, you might get really rich some day, but there's a much bigger chance you miss out on wages and spend more than 40 hours a week working with no payday ever.
People should really be more aware of this, but as usual, everyone only focuses on the winners.
Are they? 300,000 units * $30 = $9M - 30% Steam tax = $6.3M in a single year take out federal taxes (just gonna call it 36% and ignore SFJ/MFJ), leaves them about $2M each. I'm sure they're some sort of a legal entity in WA state and will owe the b&o tax too.
They deserve it absolutely but $2M each does not put them in a position of "fuck you" [1].
$2m in the bank is enough to easily draw $100k/yr from interest, which fits the GP’s “set for life if we make wise choices” IMO. That is way above median income in wealthy countries. Assuming you don’t try to live in SF!
Even in the US, $100K/yr puts you comfortably above median income. If I had $100K/yr of GUARANTEED income, I would stop working for money and do whatever I felt like for the rest of my life.
Up until recently (healthcare reasons) the Adams were basically doing just that. I guess they won’t need to sign/sell little dwarf artworks for DF donators anymore though
A 4 or even 3 percent withdrawal rate is more likely to be sustainable. Those are also rates I see suggested more commonly on retirement planning sites.
If you're assuming withdrawing at a safe withdrawal rate you're assuming you're not compounding. You're assuming a safe withdrawal rate from principal/dividends/interest that will, on average, leave the principal constant. Of course, if you're older and are not looking to pass down money you may be fine with drawing down principal to some degree.
So, yes, $2m should probably be modeled at about $80K income per year before taxes without touching principal but without building savings.
(May be somewhat higher with higher interest rates/inflation.)
I said an annuity. An annuity would draw the principal down as well, and you generally make a drawdown assumption that leaves you with some safe margin for extended life and maybe some inheritance.
That is not accurate. The 4% withdrawal rate is based on the Trinity Study[1], which showed that it was unlikely to exhaust retirement funds over a 30 year retirement. It already includes compounding and draw down calculations.
There's a whole active debate around exactly what numbers are sufficiently safe over what time horizons and what portfolio mixes. For a fun long read, see ERN's series on safe withdrawal rates https://earlyretirementnow.com/safe-withdrawal-rate-series/
LOL. Who is getting 5% risk free interest rate on USD? No one. I guess 1% after taxes is a more reasonable expected return. Remember that interest rates on retail deposits were pretty much zero for last 10 years. So, 20K USD per year. But if they can keep it up for next 5 years, then yeah, pretty much can retire on 1% interest rate forever.
Long term (~50 year) average stock market returns on reasonable indexes (like S&P500) is 10% per year.
The only real challenge is a portfolio mix and withdrawal strategy that minimizes the damage from withdrawing during downturns. That's where the 4% rule becomes relevant.
> 2m in the bank is enough to easily draw $100k/yr from interest
5% interest hasn’t been avail from a bank in a couple of decades, and the fact that we’re close to it again doesn’t mean it will stay that way…
You just can’t get a guaranteed risk-free return of that range indefinitely, which is why a lot of people shoot for 3-4% when they don’t have more capital to invest in riskier but higher return investments.
The article also mentioned money going to other people working on the game. Unclear how's much that is though.
Edit: this also touches on a grievance I have with progressive taxation and annualized retirement savings. These guys might have been in a Lowe tax bracket for many years and be back in a low tax bracket depending on how sales go over the years. The one time they hit it home they are in the top tax bracket and can only max out tax advantages from retirement contributions for that one year. They'd be in a much better position in this regard of their income was spread out. The entire system is build assuming people earn pretty much the same year to year. Same for other self-funded founders with exits.
They could easily set up a corporation and pay themselves over 10-20 years to avoid a windfall (and max out tax advantages over multiple years) if that’s the goal…
The corporation would actualize the income as profit at some <=1Yr period, where it would be subject to corporate tax. Not saying your idea wouldn't work out best tax-wise, but that you'd still need to run the numbers. I'm pretty amateur at accounting, so I don't know.
I do get a kick out of the idea that these guys basically revolve a lot of their life around developing DF. I wonder how much of their lifestyle could be legitimately expensed from a corporate account without any IRS hassle.
Would be nice if you earned a 401(k) credit/allowance each year so when you do hit it big you can rapidly play catch-up on the past 20 years or whatever.
> Would be nice if you earned a 401(k) credit/allowance each year so when you do hit it big you can rapidly play catch-up on the past 20 years or whatever.
No kidding. I spent most of my 20s and part of my 30s working for companies without a 401k (several small startups or video game studios). I'd love to put in more than the max now to make up for it, but have to make do with just buying stocks without the tax advantage.
I think that if you're considered 'behind' for your current salary and age, especially significantly so (I bet a bunch of people here, even those 10 years younger than me, probably have 5-10x more in their 401k than I do), there really shouldn't be much of a cap on what you can put into your 401k.
Like the cap should just be a max total you can have in there based on your age, not a cap per year.
That's 300 000 units in 7 days since launch if I understand it correctly. Even if we consider (I don't know if that's true or not), that theses 7 days are going to be the best ever for them that's still only 7 days.
They'll get a sale from me here before too long. I just know I don't have time for another addiction right now, at least not until the new year. Probably quite a few people being more frugal now because of the holidays that will buy it shortly after. Wouldn't be surprised if it's 500k+ sales by the end of January.
DF is quite special though. It has existed for two decades before being for sale on Steam. It's also a very niche-y game. I don't think normal rules apply to it. I'm afraid sales are going to drop much quicker than predictions say.
If they’re smart they hopefully have incorporated and will only need to take money out of the corporation to pay themselves to cover their expenses. So they won’t pay tax on the full amount up front and will have most of the money pretax for future business expenses
That's not how corporate income tax works though; the company pays taxes on all that sales income less expenses, and then they would likely take dividends at a preferential tax rate and pay yet some more tax. I doubt they've been carrying much of a loss over the past 20+ years to offset this.
It would take 20 years to pull it off, and tax legislation may change, but a married couple can earn next year ~$115k/yr federally tax-free ($89k long-term cap gains + $27k earned income). So that source of income would only be subject to the initial 20% corporate tax.
This blogpost [1] explains in detail but the gist is:
* Standard-deduction next year is $27,700 married ($13,850 single)
* Long-term-capital-gains is 0% on first $89,250 ($44,625 single)
Thus if you have the tooling to perfectly control your income, e.g. you take $27,700 in treasury bill payments and then sell off enough stock (or take qualified dividends from your corporation's bank account) in the total of $89,250, you'd end up with:
* Ordinary Income: $27,700 - standard deduction of $27,700 = $0 taxable income
* Long-Term-Capital-Gains of $89,250 = 0% ltcg tax bracket
= $116,950 ($58,427 single) of federally tax-free income
Then if you're in a no-income-tax state (such as WA, like the Adams brothers), you don't owe any taxes at all.
If it’s a C-corp, then the corporation will have to pay income tax on its profit. If it’s an S-corp, then the owners will have to pay income tax of the corporate profits even if they do stay in the corporate coffers.
As far as I know you can do clever accounting with IP licensing but I don’t know the specifics well enough to know if it’s feasible at the scale the Adams are operating at
I also read, though who knows whether the source was at all accurate, that after the Steam cut, Kitfox takes a goodly chunk (north of 50% IIRC) out until their own expenses for development are paid, and then their cut ratchets down to 20% or so.
Oh, I didn't realize they had a publisher involved too. Yeah, this is a nice payday but it's just a start before it's life-changing for these two hackers. Let's see another 300k in sales!
2m each is not "Fuck you" money perhaps but it is enough to comfortably retire to the original post point. It depends on lifestyle you desire but if I could retire tomorrow, I would make that lifestyle work.
> 2m each is not "Fuck you" money perhaps but it is enough to comfortably retire
That is exactly what "fuck you" money means. It's not about having so much money you couldn't possibly want for anything. People will always want. It's about having enough that you're not beholden to anyone for your basic needs.
I always thought it meant something like "enough money to tell literally anybody to go fuck themselves without fear of the economic consequences". But I did a little googling and apparently "fuck you money" is one of those things that doesn't really have a clear-cut definition. Which is weird.
In theory there is some specific dollar that you earn which puts you over the line into "fuck you" money. If you're a dollar away from financial independence, are you worried about saying "fuck you" to your boss? Hell no! Which must mean that you're already safely in "fuck you" territory.
So that the magical greenback--the one with the serial number ending in "FU"--must come way earlier. Maybe it's the buck that puts your bank account into five figures for the first time. Or the one that tops off your 6-month emergency fund. Hell, if the dollar that puts you in the dos commas club doesn't send a surge of "fuck you" power running through your veins... you might just not be the "fuck you" type.
It really doesn't work that way, for several reasons.
First, you can't predict what will happen with the economy vis-a-vis your investments and cost-of-living. Sure there are rules of thumb, but depending your age and the current situation, assumptions like "I can perpetually do a 4% drawdown" may or may not be reliable.
Second, the ability to say FU to everyone is not a black and white decision. Perhaps you value earning more to live a higher lifestyle in the short-term, with some optionality to say FU if things go sideways. Other people might have been burnt and would rather live a life of poverty than be forced to capitulate to The Man one more time. In the immortal words of Lawrence from Office Space: "you don't need a million dollars to do nothing". Most people probably fall somewhere in between.
And last but not least, declaring financial independence raises new existential questions which people may not be ready to answer. Having a job gives a baseline social connection and sense of communal utility. To actually declare financial independence poses a risk of alienation, which may have no upside once the immediate threat of short-term dependence on one's employer is removed.
I'm not sure how that contradicts what I wrote. It's above US median income, albeit without benefits. So, it's of course reasonable for someone to decide they don't need to work any longer with that income stream while others may feel differently.
At least for what I'm saying, it's not that someone would "decide they don't need to work any longer". This is what contradicts what you're saying.
It is about significantly improving your economic baseline, your p90 negative outcome. You can be making a million dollars a year and still be needy as hell. You need to keep your job, need to your investments stay up, need interest rates to stay down. If you're leveraged, there's a decent chance you'll go broke on a long enough timeline. And you'll always be partly aware of it. Your baseline is getting a job you hate so you don't go homeless.
If you have 2 million in the bank and don't leverage too hard, your baseline is being the average American while working 0 hours a week. You can do that until you figure out whatever is next, instead of sending out resumes.
Exactly. They can use it to boost the opinions that they favor. The feedback loop of "I talked about opinion X and got tons of love" and "I talked about opinion Y and everyone got mad / ignored me" is very powerful, especially on young people.
* "X seems to be a pretty big deal because I keep hearing a lot of people upset about it"
* "I haven't seen anything about X. It must not be that big of a deal."
All social media seems to be moving toward individualized echo chambers, but it's another level when it's an individualized black box controlled by foreign interests.
Keep in mind the context of this thread. It's some shitty blog suggesting you do every fuck thing on postgres. Myself and the other guy are simply suggesting that running a single-node instance of redis is an infinitely better and simpler choice than implementing a cache or a job queue on a rdbms.
I don't feel designing for a guaranteed high-availability application was part of the discussion at all.
If you don't find it applicable, feel free to discard what I'm saying, I take no offense. But I just don't quite understand your perspective. Maybe I have oncall firefighter brain rot, but a distributed job queue is exactly the sort of thing I'd want to be available, and a cache is something I regard as being very dangerous and requiring utmost care.
Yes, mostly. There are a few things to take into account though:
- No multiple queues
- No priorities
- Practically no scheduling (the delay is very limited)
- Creating and tearing down a queue takes a lot of time and the number of queues is subject to AWS account limits
- The FIFO/LIFO semantics (remember about no priorities?) will bite you when you least expect
It does have great durability unlike Redis though and will scale to much, much larger queues in an easier way.
You can make good job queues out of this, combined with sharding or consistent hashing, for low(ish) latency applications. Each shard has a stream, they operate on data stored in Redis, and you pass them the key to this data over their stream.
But SQS is great, and a great rebuttal to the article. Totally easier to prototype a job queue that way than with pg, and you probably won't need to move off of it.
I have used both SQS and PG-based queues and for the smaller workloads/smaller systems (read: "not very very large systems") I now prefer the latter. There is also a non-trivial amount of stuff that we turned out to need for operating SQS at scale on the application side, basically to compensate for the things SQS does not have. It is great it doesn't have those things, but if you have a smaller application you might want to have those things instead and sacrifice a bit of scalability.
The advantage being that you could sort things to implement priorities and such? Did you use listen()/notify() at all?
ETA: seeing your list of missing features now, that all makes a lot of sense. In my mind the biggest advantage of SQS is that it glues together all the other AWS offerings, so you can go AWS -> Lambda for an instant job queue (with concurrency limits, etc. so you don't blow your hand off - perhaps undermining the simplicity argument). But everything you're saying makes sense if your job queue needs any degree of sophistication.
Redis isn’t just a cache. That’s memcached. Also SQS absolutely sucks for a job queue as soon as you want to do anything like control concurrency or have job priorities, but if your needs are simply “I need a background job queue” then SQS is likely a great choice.
Chiming in to concur. Redis is amazing and simple software. You can use a managed service like Elasticache or install the binary on a VM instance. Folks using a relational database for a job queue or a cache when an infinitely simpler and more appropriate tool is available are just making poor technical decisions.
But it's not simpler when you consider all the things you've got to do around and after installing that binary on a VM instance. Consider the overhead of managing it - monitoring it, updating it.
Failover when the node dies. Clustering for high availability?
Backups? For a cache, probably not, for a job queue broker, probably necessary.
Making sure your app deals with inserting into Redis on successful transactions and not when a transaction is rolled back.
Getting up and running can be fairly painless, staying running on all edge cases and handling partial failures is what gets you.
I’m confused the scenario you have where a) a singular postgres install which does everything is acceptable vs b) as soon as redis comes into the picture, suddenly
you need HA and monitoring and apparently running transactions with full ACID integrity?
It’s just a nonsensical and unfair comparison. You can run a single Redis instance with normal rdb disk syncs and don’t ever update it for years on end without issue. Is that guaranteed resilient? Absolutely not, but that’s not the scenario in discussion. We’re talking about the context of a bootstrap/MVP scenario, not an enterprise setup.
I’d take a single-node redis job queue everytime over a HA citus/postgres cluster improperly acting as a queue.
I think the point is they have a Postgres server running anyway as the datastore and the job queue being in Postgres gives you HA, backup and Transaction for free. I think Redis in particular won't give you transaction right?
Needing Transactional semantics for jobs alongside an application operation makes a lot of simpler queue/tool choices difficult.
Technically speaking the portion of the email address before the @ is case-sensitive. However in practice it is ubiquitous that they’re treated as case-insensitive across all mail platforms.
This means however that you should store the original email and not just lower case it on insert. Imagine if you could reset password for Jane.Doe@example.com by registering the jane.doe@example.com address (assuming example.com does differentiate between the two) and requesting password reset for that.
Surely this is why standards are important. An email server could use whatever logic it wants to determine which account to deliver an email to. But if email is to be used by other services as an authentication mechanism there certainly better be a widely adopting standard for how emails get delivered.
It goes deeper than that. If emails are case sensitive, everything changes in the context of unique accounts. If you have jane.doe@ and Jane.doe@ attempts to login - what do you do?
You create a contact address from a normalized version of the entered address (after address verification) and an independent account ID. You can also generate an account ID derived from that normalized address.
The positive response of the address verification will tell you the address is deliverable and the user has access to it. Later if someone tries to register a capitalized form of the address it'll get rejected because of that account ID collision. Then the user can be pushed to a password recovery path where they'll need access to the e-mail/MFA to get control of the account.
My point was that I think it is bad user experience if my email is "jane.doe@", but autocorrect has me input "Jane.doe@" (something I have experienced before). As a user, I "entered the same thing". On a technical level, they are different, but a decision must be made as to what is the true representation.
Amusingly, the context of this thread was in using case-insensitive search for email fields, but if emails are truly case sensitive, this is all moot, because you can only do direct comparisons.
In practical terms e-mail addresses are case insensitive. So if on account creation your normalize the address (lower case, trim white space) and send a verification e-mail and they successfully verify you can safely derive an ID from that normalized address. It won't matter later if autocorrect tries a mixed case address since you normalize and compare it on the back end.
If you run into a case where their e-mail server enforces case sensitivity they have bigger problems to deal with. E-mail has long been a system that requires loose adherence to the specs.
Does anyone know a single example of a case sensitive email provider or email server implementation? I believe I saw a positive answer to this 10 years back (an old university mail server?) but these must be quite rare.
Aside from maybe Company of Heroes 3, what RTS games have came out anytime recently at all? I want some mid-to-late 90s style RTS games (C&C, AoE, TA, War2, SC, SC2) where you collect resources, build and expand bases, and wage war on your enemies.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliances has a significant community with FA Forever. (https://www.faforever.com/) It reworked all the stock solo missions with updated units and co-op. There are survival modes, phantom modes. There is a reasonable community online for ladder or team vs team play. In a week or so, the SupCom:FA game should be a couple bucks when the steam sales spin up. Well worth your time one remembers Total Annihilation fondly.
AoE4 is a refinement of AoE2. Frostgiant is planning to release a beta of the Starcraft spiritual successor next summer. Immortal: Gates of Pyre is in alpha
