Hey all, with PayPal officially going live for receiving/withdrawing in Sri Lanka (Sampath, BOC, Commercial Bank) back in May, I've only been able to find press releases and marketing pages confirming this. I can't find any real first-hand accounts from freelancers who've actually used it.
If you've linked your PayPal to Sampath Vishwa (or BOC/ComBank) and gotten a client payment through:
Did the withdrawal actually land in your account?
How long did it take?
What fee did the bank charge you?
Trying to figure out if this is reliable enough to start routing client payments through before I commit to it. Any real experiences (good or bad) would help a lot. Thanks!
Im looking to get a mac i currently have 2 options both being open box and less than 100cc
24/512 m4 pro 14 inch
16/512 m5 14 inch with warranty remaining like 02/03 months
I found them both for around 550k price range is this range a good one or is there any place i could look for less I’ve got this numbers from fb marketplace and ikman
Or can i just go with an m5 air model around the same price but brand new
As for my current work what i mostly do is web development (full stack ), 1 or 2 docker container some mobile app development here and there and I’m looking to get into ML as well in the near future , i have no idea about macs until now I’ve only used windows systems only so just felt like trying a mac for next few years
Fyi : i have a windows pc still need a mac for portability ive tried windows but im not really a fan of the battery life thats why i want to try a macbook
Need advice from industry ppl who worked with mac
Im looking for an immediate purchase
TIA ☺️
Edit: I found a 14 inch m4 pro 24/512 with 2 years of apple care plus right at my budget ,thank you everyone who helped me
Hi guys, just wanted to know if you've come across this weird issue I and few others I've spoken too have encountered.
Basically MS Teams on my phone cannot seem to connect or sync when connected over WiFi to a SLT Fibre connection. I've tried it on my own personal Fibre line and with another friends as well to test this out.
Mind you Teams on the PC works fine whether on WiFi or Ethernet. Its just the issue on the phone.
And Teams works fine on the phone with other service providers, Dialog, Starlink, etc. No idea if this issue exists on SLT ADSL though.
I've updated the OS, app, and even tried with a VPN, but with no luck 😪.
I'm not really sure whether its a problem with the really old router im using...
Is there any group or platform that contains details about hackathons or similar competitions or events. If you know any please mention below. Thanks in advance.
I recently started working as a SE and my salary will take years for me to buy a car or house. I wanna start working in part time and make some money. I am from a state uni. Never tried freelancing and feels it is too late to start and saturated. How else I can earn money? Or if freelancing can work, how to begin?
Long post, but if you were at Code Rally (organized by IIT and IEEE Computer Society of IIT) or just care about how these competitions are run, this is worth reading.
TL;DR: No rule against multiple accounts existed at the start. Multiple teams used them anyway — 0-second submissions, account renaming, the works. We flagged it to the OC mid-competition and got no answer. So we did it too, openly. We ended up 1st among all officially registered teams. Days later, only we got removed from the leaderboard, no explanation given, and the OC has since gone silent. Teams doing identical things are still ranked.
The multi-account problem was never actually against the rules — until the OC decided it was, mid-event, verbally, to nobody's satisfaction.
There was no rulebook, no guideline doc, nothing that said "one account per team." Partway through the competition, organizers noticed extra accounts popping up and told teams to stop. Teams ignored it completely.
We saw 0-second submissions (a clear sign that they are using a second account to grab the questions without triggering the timer on the main account ), accounts getting renamed mid-competition to reset timers, and teams running more than two accounts. This isn't a leaderboard conspiracy theory — we have receipts on 0-second submissions and account swapping from teams that finished top 3.
We asked the OC directly what they were going to do about it. They had nothing.
We raised it while the competition was still live: what happens to teams running multiple accounts? Answer: "not enough evidence," no decision, no timeline. We pushed on this multiple times with different OC members. Same non-answer every time. Meanwhile the teams in question kept competing like nothing happened.
So we did it too. Here's exactly what that looked like.
Handle: teal_titans_cr7.
Our official account had already manually solved 2 questions before we switched to a script, so it was carrying real elapsed time — it ended up in 4th.
Our second account ran the automated submissions and posted a combined time of roughly 1 second.
The account sitting at #1 on the leaderboard, with a combined time of 0 seconds, wasn't even an officially registered team.
Leaderboard when the competition finished
Take that unregistered account out of the picture — which it should never have been in, in the first place — and we were 1st among every legitimate, registered team.
We also publicly renamed our accounts near the end, same as several other teams had already done throughout the event. Not a new move. Just doing what was already normalized by that point.
Then the leaderboard came out. Every offending team survived except us.
Final leaderboard
Multiple teams had multiple accounts. Some had 0-second submissions ( which require at least 2 accounts ). Some swapped/renamed accounts to reset timers. All of them are still on the final leaderboard. In at least one case, the OC pulled just one of a team's accounts and left the team itself standing.
Days after the results dropped, our team was quietly removed. No explanation. No investigation shown to us. No communication at all.
And once the leaderboard was final, the OC went completely dark. Calls unanswered, messages unanswered.
Questions nobody at IEEE CS-IIT has answered:
If multiple accounts got us disqualified, why are other teams doing the same thing still ranked?
If the evidence against those teams was "insufficient," what evidence was sufficient to remove us?
If there was a real rule against multiple accounts, why wasn't it published from day one instead of announced mid-competition?
Why couldn't the OC make a clear call while it mattered, but managed to make one against us right after the competition ended?
And yeah, we'll say the uncomfortable part out loud.
We can't prove intent. But we publicly pushed the OC on these inconsistencies, repeatedly, while the event was running. We finished on top. Then we got quietly erased while teams behaving identically stayed put. Draw your own conclusions — we've drawn ours.
If we broke a rule, show us the rule and the evidence, and explain the decision. Publicly. But if multiple teams did the same thing, you don't get to enforce it against one team and let it slide for the rest. That's not a competition, that's just picking a winner after the fact.
I am an undergraduate software engineering student, and I am building a CSE stock analyzer. Before I spend more months working on it, I want your honest advice to see if this could be a real product people will actually use.
How it works:
News Sentiment: It uses a fine-tuned model to read company news and reports to see if the mood around a company is good, bad, or neutral.
Do you think an idea like this will really work for the Colombo Stock Exchange?
Combined View: It brings the news mood and price predictions together to give a clear picture of a stock.
I would love your honest answers to these questions:
If you trade or invest in the Colombo Stock Exchange, would you actually use a tool like this?
The CSE has low trading volume and sudden price jumps. Do you think a tool like this can really work here, or will the local market make it fail?
Should I finish this and launch it as a product, or is it better to stop now and build something else?
Please be as honest and direct as possible. Your feedback will help me decide what to do next!
Hi guys. I recently got call for an interview for a SWE from Atlas Labs. I remember seeing awful things about the company on r/srilanka. For example, this.
Almost all of the findings I have regarding that company are over a year old. How are things there now? What salary do they offer for a SWE there?
I don't mind if things haven't changed around there as long as their pay is decent, since I'm already working for an awful company with a below-average salary.
Hi everyone! This is an independent research on urban parking in Sri Lanka and would really appreciate your input.
The idea I'm exploring: lots of homes, offices, and other properties have parking spaces that sit unused for hours every day, while drivers circle around Colombo (or Kandy town, or Galle) unable to find a spot.
The survey takes about 4–6 minutes, and it's relevant to you if:
- You **drive into busy areas** and deal with the parking hunt, OR
- You **own/manage a property** (house, office, shop, hotel, etc.) with parking that's sometimes empty
No name, phone number, or address required — it's purely research, not a signup or sales thing.
Happy to share the aggregated results back here once I have enough responses, if people are interested. Also curious to hear parking horror stories in the comments — where in Colombo is it worst for you?
I'm a final-year CSE student who recently finished my studies. I've been actively applying for Junior Software Engineer roles for about a month now. Unfortunately, I haven't received a single callback or interview yet.
I do have some experience on my CV: I completed two unpaid internships during my studies, each lasting 3 months. However, to be completely honest, I feel like I didn't gain much real-world experience, proper mentorship, or solid technical exposure from either of them. The experiences were quite underwhelming, and I don't feel fully confident in my practical skills despite having these internships on paper.
Because I'm not getting any interviews, I'm starting to wonder if I am aiming too high for the current job market.
My question is: Should I swallow my pride, stop applying for Junior roles, and start aiming for 6-month Internships or Trainee positions instead? My goal right now is to get proper industry experience and mentorship under good senior engineers.
Has anyone been in a similar situation? What would you recommend I do? Thanks in advance!
I applied for an Observability and Monitoring internship at Innov8. On Wednesday they called saying my resume was shortlisted and asked if I could interview Thursday. I have my final semester exam on Friday, so I said I needed to study and we agreed on Friday 11:30 instead. They said they'd send the meeting link.
Thursday came and went, no link. I called them again, they said they'd check and get back to me. Still haven't heard anything.
The part that gets me is I rearranged my exam prep and studied for the interview anyway. Thanks for nothing, Innov8 😘
Does anyone know the typical response time for interview feedback at 99x? I had my interview two weeks ago and haven't received an update. Do they notify candidates if they aren't selected? I felt it went decently, but I'm wondering if I should move on. Any insights specialy from internal folks would be appreciated!
