Choosing a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gogemba.com/post/58534526652/choosing-a-payment-provider-for-your-europe-based-saas <comment><USER4> (I work at Stripe, here in London)

Great write-up - I hadn't seen that graphic before but it's great - <USER2> credit to the original source [http://startingandsustaining.com/](http://startingandsustaining.com/).

As a Stripe-r, I can't complain about the OP's conclusion in any way :) As stated they are based in Denmark, and Stripe is not currently available for Danish businesses - that's on us to fix, and we're certainly working on it.

However, re: the title "How to choose a payment provider for your Europe-based SaaS startup" \- the situation in Denmark is not representative of Europe as a whole.

Stripe has now launched here in the UK[1], and we now have betas available in Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Belgium - with the latest released in the past few weeks. So if you're based on one of those countries, please do give us a look. And if you're based elsewhere, well - I guess we need to keep up the pace and hurry to your country ;)

[1] [https://stripe.com/blog/introducing-stripe- uk](https://stripe.com/blog/introducing-stripe-uk)

As other commenters have mentioned, it's really easy to make mistakes comparing complex pricing across different providers. With Stripe and PAYMILL, the fees quoted are all you pay. With Braintree's interchange+ pricing, they actually state themselves that "Total costs are typically 1.8% to 2.6% of the transaction. There is a minimum cost of €100 per month"[2]

[2] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing- question](https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing-question)

<comment><USER5> _With Braintree 's interchange+ pricing, they actually state themselves that "Total costs are typically 1.8% to 2.6% of the transaction. There is a minimum cost of €100 per month"_

And that means it _can 't_ be as low as 1.8% of your transaction unless you're consistently taking in the region of €5,500+ per month -- low revenues for an established business, but not a trivial amount for a bootstrapped start-up looking for a payment service to launch with.

I've wondered whether this is a deliberate business decision by Braintree to discourage applications from brand new (and I assume on average more risky) start-ups. Then again, established businesses with serious revenues would presumably be considering a more traditional set-up where they can negotiate much lower rates with heavyweight payment services, and would perhaps care less about the hassle of setting those things up compared to the ease-of-use for developers of modern payment services. I'm not sure which part of the market Braintree are really trying to own at the moment: they do seem to have a USP among the "developer-friendly services" in the number of different payment methods they support through a common API, but this doesn't even seem to merit a mention on the front page of their site.

<comment><USER6> If you're charging customers and aren't making enough in a few months to cover the minimum fee then your business is going to be in trouble in any case. Sure the percentage is going to be crappy, but if you're a SaaS business and your margins are so small that the percentage is worth stressing about in the early days then you're probably doing something wrong.

(I bootstrapped my last startup and 100 euros is roughly what I was paying SEOMoz, my accountant, etc. on a monthly basis)

It's way more important to just get something working and out-the-door and grow the number of customers then to spend a lot of time over what comes down to a relative small amount of money, you can always re-negotiate the fees when you grow and the absolute amount becomes meaningful.

<comment><USER5> _If you 're charging customers and aren't making enough in a few months to cover the minimum fee then your business is going to be in trouble in any case. Sure the percentage is going to be crappy, but if you're a SaaS business and your margins are so small that the percentage is worth stressing about in the early days then you're probably doing something wrong._

Right, so if you're in that position, why would you put up with the onerous application process for a service like Braintree if you have a simpler alternative like Stripe available and it provides the functionality you need? You want a payment service that takes as little time as possible to set up and then just works, because you have a million more important things to be doing. Any advantages Braintree might have had if their pricing did work out more favourable than Stripe's flat rates is instantly lost because they can't give straight answers to too many basic questions (like "What does it cost me to collect a payment?") and their API and documentation are significantly more complicated.

<comment><USER6> I've not implemented either Braintree or Stripe before, but I'd agree with the principle of just doing whatever gets you out the door the fastest (for a subscription business I might including the proviso of using a service that will give you card portability so you can transition off in the future).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well I've worked with pretty much every provider available in the UK, so here are some brief opinions on the bigger ones:

PayPal: Awful, API changes regularly without warning (including changing parameter names for no apparent reason)

SagePay: Truly awful, datacentre seems to catch fire regularly

WorldPay: Awful, but not as bad as SagePay

Barclays ePDQ: You have to fill out an Excel spreadsheet to get a developer account

GoCardless: Great API, more or less limited to UK customers

Paymill: Good

Stripe: Very good

Braintree: Very complicated but not bad

And if you're downvoting me for this, feel free to ask for reasons why for specific providers. I have genuinely used all of them for at least one project.

<comment><USER8> I've been using various online credit card processors since 1995, and my experiences are slightly different. Worldpay is absolutely excellent - <USER3> service is amazing, and their support is absolutely top-notch. Definitely the best solution if you're in the UK.

I'm not sure what you're doing with paypal, but there haven't been any API changes that have affected us in the 7 years we've been using them. In fact I just looked at our paypal code, and it hasn't really changed at all since 2007.

<comment><USER7> I've had so many issues with PayPal that it's just unreal. First up, they have something like 10 separate API interfaces for taking payments. Second, the documentation is -terrible-.

We implemented one of the APIs (can't remember the name, it was something stupid at least) recently, and half way through our implementation the parameters we received back changed name for no apparent reason, and the PayPal sandbox was entirely changed; this resulted in our account becoming broken, constant errors where code was previously working, and it was never resolved.

WorldPay is incredibly outdated, underfeatured, and rarely improved. Their support is pretty decent, however.

With Stripe and Paymill now available, I don't see any reason why people should continue to use what we've been struggling by on for the past few years. They're so much better that I can't even really draw a comparison.

<comment><USER8> I just had a look at Stripe, and it does seem like a good service. If I was building a new site I'd probably consider it. The annoying thing about paypal is that it doesn't allow you to change subscriptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not going to get any "OMG new stuff" love for this, but we are currently in the process of integrating with Worldpay. We are using their "hosted payment page", which works pretty much the same as Paypal in that you redirect the user to them to enter their card details. However unlike Paypal (who we currently use) you can fully customise the pages, so it can match your site and appear pretty seamless. They also provide a full merchant integration, but we didn't want to have to deal with the full PCI compliance thing.

The main reasons why we chose them are:

a) None of the shiny new providers (we tried Braintree and Paymill) would accept us as we are a travel booking service.

b) Their rates were better than anyone else we looked at.

If you are taking a large volume of payments you may want to consider switching to them. However for a small startup probably not, as we have to pay a fairly large monthly fee on top of transaction fees (but overall it works out cheaper).

EDIT: Also regarding currency conversion costs we accept payments in USD, EUR and GBP and have bank accounts in all three.

<comment><USER10> Well it seems their "World" doesn't include Latin America, same as all the other shiny new solutions, so PayPal and BitCoin are still the only game in town down here in Brazil.

<comment><USER9> What are the main payment methods there?

<comment><USER10> Credit cards for sure, I suppose many are international too so americans can easily get our money. It's the other way around that's tricky, setting up a SaaS from here and getting a payout. PayPal is here so they work with Brazilian banks. As for all the other payment processors, no luck. Though someone here linked to Intel's solution[1], which proxies through PayPal and seems like the way I'll go.

[1] [http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/comm...](http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/commerce- services)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Of all the things, Intel also has a payment processor as part of their cloud service platform - [http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/comm...](http://software.intel.com/cloudservicesplatform/service/commerce- services) \- I don't know why it's still labeled "beta" and how and if it actually works but it seems to work in about 50 countries now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have Braintree really standardised their transaction fees at the 0.9% + €0.10 rate shown in the table near the end of the article? I thought that was _in addition to_ the interchange rates, which vary widely. The difficulty in figuring out what a transaction would actually cost us with Braintree was one of the major reasons we never got going with them.

Edit: The Braintree FAQ[1] appears to agree with this. It also says they have €15 as their chargeback fee, not €11 as shown in the table in the article.

[1] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing- question](https://www.braintreepayments.com/faq#pricing-question)

<comment><USER12> Yes, it is plus interchange fees. And €100 minimum per month in fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> We are Belgian and happily use [http://adyen.com](http://adyen.com) for 3 years now. Receiving payments from about 60 different countries without any problem.

The implementation was easy. And on the rare occasions we needed support, they were very quick to respond.

I didn't do a price review recently, but at that time they were the most interesting for us to start.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting summary. I'm located in Germany and I'm thinking about switching from PayPal to some other payment provider.

Does anyone have experience with chargeback fees? PayPal doesn't have chargeback fees and I'm a bit worried that chargeback fees might have unexpected consequences. Many of my transactions are 6€ or 12€. When does a chargeback fee trigger exactly and how likely is it if you have a customer base of a few thousand?

</comment><comment><USER15> Having tested and used most of these solutions in the UK, Stripe wins hands in almost all scenarios for bootstrapped companies. Its just so easy to get up and running, and their support is top-notch.

There is one big downside though - you can only charge in USD, GBP and EUR. We sell to other countries who like their pricing in local currency, and this is a major issue for us.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does anyone know of a service provider which also allows you to SEND money (via wire transfer) to customers? I've been looking for that since a long time and contacted airbnbs provider, but no reply at all. This function is used if you are acting as the middle man between 2 parties.

</comment><comment><USER17> I evaluated payment provider for my Germany-based SaaS and came to a similar conclusion. Paymill is great to get started, but Braintree wins in the long run (just do the math).

Obviously when your product is growing you don't have time to just rewrite the payment processing and migrate all data to a different provider.

I guess this is where something like "Spreedly" comes in. It is an additional abstraction that allows you to switch payment providers easily. At least so I read. Does anyone have experiences with that?

<comment><USER18> I just did the math real quick as well, and i really don't understand their choice for Paymill. Braintree's rates are so much better, they are loosing so much money in the long run!

Posted a chart in the comments at the blog.

<comment><USER19> In the long run yes, when they have revenue. But they mention:

 _But then, one day when I came back to their website, I saw that they had added a minimum fee of €100 to their plan, and that unfortunately tipped the scale for us, as we pay everything on our own, and we have zero revenue coming in._

So the problem is for the first few months during which you pay everything out of your own pocket. It probably all depends on how confident you are that you'll get revenue.

How simple/hard is it to migrate from system to another?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great article! FYI, I'm an engineer at Braintree. We'll be eliminating our monthly minimum very soon - stay tuned.

</comment><comment><USER21> As someone who's not familiar with payments, how often do chargebacks generally occur, and why are they so expensive?

</comment><comment><USER22> Thanks for the blog post and going into how difficult it is to accept payments in Europe.

I would like to add one - IMHO important - point to PayMill: They do not support credit cards from the USA.

source: [https://www.paymill.com/en-gb/pricing/](https://www.paymill.com/en- gb/pricing/) (click on "fees for card types and countries" \- the US is not mentioned in that list)

<comment><USER23> hi all, we support cards from the US (although processing and payouts in USD), but we can not onboard merchants based in the US at the moment.

best

Kilian (MD PAYMILL)

<comment><USER22> Hi Kilian, Thanks for clarifying this! Good to hear

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hipay comes in handy for the card + digpass combo</comment>


Analysing the alleged Minneapolis police department "hack" - <AUTHOR> https://www.troyhunt.com/analysing-the-alleged-minneapolis-police-department-hack/ <comment><USER3> > it's extremely unusual to see the same email address with multiple different > passwords in a legitimate data breach as most systems simply won't let an > address register more than once

I've actually built a system which did this years ago, over our initial protestations, and the reasoning went like this:

Our client (this was a white label product) has lots of elderly couples as customers, these are our end users and although they're on the Internet (makes sense, this is after all a web site you've white labelled so if you have customers without Internet that's a red flag right there) they only have one email address between them. So some end users want two accounts, but with one email address.

This made the login procedure a bit hairy and obviously there are scary corner cases for things like change password (Alice decides to use the same password as her husband Bob, now we can't tell their accounts apart!) but we felt that arguing with clients about why they should do Single Sign On (and thus eliminate the separate login for our white label product altogether) was more valuable than trying to change old people's minds about what constitutes a reasonable thing for two people to share.

<comment><USER4>
      firstname.lastname@example.com

      email@example.com

<comment> inspector-g The number of websites that prevent me from doing this, because somebody wrote a shitty regex to invalidate most punctuation in an email address, is infuriatingly high.

<comment><USER5> Haven't had a problem with a lot of popular services, only Sling so far. Even my local utilities let it fly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great analysis on uncovering a credential stuffing attack (using passwords found from a previous breach) disguised as a "MPD hack" by "Anonymous" which Troy also discussed here. [0]

> But anger shouldn't mean throwing logic and reason out the window and I > cannot think of a time where fact-checking has ever been more important than > now, not just because of the Minneapolis situation, but because so much of > what we see online simply can't be trusted. So by all means, be angry, but > don't spread disinformation and right now all signs point to just that - <USER2> > alleged Minneapolis Police Department "breach" is fake.

The above text really does question what we see on the internet since it is very easy to fabricate news and evidence like this. With that being disproved, we should take such news on social media with a grain of salt until the full evidence from each side and analysis is available.

Once we do that we will be less susceptible to being deceived unlike the retweeter at the bottom of the blog post.

[0] [https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1267237884949483522](https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1267237884949483522)

<comment><USER7> My heuristics is, By default, Anything controversial I see on the internet is fake until it's proven to be true. I've been advocating this to my parents and a few others for quite a while. Especially from a country like India where there are people being lynched and killed just based on WhatsApp videos (mostly fake), Skepticism is required more than ever.

<comment><USER8> This rule means you have to consider almost everything as fake. Like say, a video of police brutality filmed by one person. How do you "prove" it to be non fake?

<comment><USER6> > a video of police brutality filmed by one person. How do you "prove" it to > be non fake?

You might have almost answered your own question. If there are many videos shot by random bystanders in multiple angles of the event, even if one is fabricated, another video can disprove it; making it harder to fake the event.

This would mean that one would have to 'fake' all the videos and angles from other people which is difficult to do, especially if it is live. So with that, it can be proved to 'have happened' but only if the bystanders are un-related to each other. Otherwise it will look 'staged'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My take: I don't think the government understands how must distrust there is for public institutions. The fact that they keep going on these pressers and lying to the public, only to be discredited after the fact, shows how tone deaf and disconnected from reality the politicians are. What's even more bizarre is all the people who are cheering on the police brutality, and encouraging more violence against unarmed protestors.

There are systemic issues all throughout the government, and as long as cops keep killing people the riots will continue. Maybe they'll temporarily subside, but when the next killing happens it will flare right back up. Cops operate with impunity, and the politicians go on TV apologizing for them because they're afraid of the police too. Just look what happened to de Blasio's daughter, who was arrested by the NYPD under questionable circumstances.

It's crazy watching this all unfold, but if real change isn't implemented soon it will continue to foment. It doesn't help that along with racism, there's significantly economic inequality. Real unemployment is somewhere around 24%[0], food prices keep going up[1], and many still haven't been able to access unemployment benefits.

[0]: [https://fortune.com/2020/05/28/us-unemployment-rate- numbers-...](https://fortune.com/2020/05/28/us-unemployment-rate-numbers- claims-this-week-total-job-losses-may-28-2020-benefits-claims-job-losses/)

[1]: [https://apnews.com/54f1efe0afa71b0a939fda91cf917366](https://apnews.com/54f1efe0afa71b0a939fda91cf917366)

<comment><USER10> > What's even more bizarre is all the people who are cheering on the police > brutality, and encouraging more violence against unarmed protestors.

There's lots of people cheering on the violence. The strangest are the white collar professionals, the celebrities, and the executives. I will say, in a few instances it felt good when these Twitter agitators got spooked as the violence they wished upon others neared their own gated neighborhoods (and I don't say this lightly as my neighborhood is being terrorized right now).

[https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/c...](https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/wp- content/uploads/2020/05/chris_palmer_nba_5-31-20.jpg)

<comment><USER11> Historically they used to do this for slaves where they would fight each other for entertainment of the elites or upper class people. It seems perfectly in align with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The power of disinformation even when it was not even done well. I swallowed the report hook, line, and sinker.

<comment><USER13> I'm sure some would reject this but it's the human condition, we've all let our guard down at some point and let falsehoods...not just the uncertain or unsubstantiated, but outright intentional lies...gain purchase in our worldview.

<comment><USER14> For sure. I forget who said it, but there's some quote about the intelligent person having strong opinions weakly held. I'm willing to reevaluate my beliefs on things, but unless I've seen evidence to the contrary, I hold them strongly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most often, when the media/pr announces a "sophisticated cyber attack" has happened, what actually has happened is that the password was "123456" or the site ran an old WordPress version, etc

<comment><USER16> Example?

<comment><USER17> The Cambridge Analytica scandal comes to mind. It was reported in some places as a "hack" when they literally just used Facebook's APIs for their intended purposes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the point of fabricating this attack?

<comment><USER19> Consider whose voice, opinion, or stance stands to gain by making the police look incompetent or incapable of managing their own affairs.

<comment><USER20> Or, stands to gain from making Anonymous appear more threatening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I get the point that's being made here, but the real question is do the passwords work even if they are derivative? Did someone extract anything of value using them?

</comment><comment><USER22> somebody with a twitter handle "Antifa Bunny #BlackLivesMatter #ACAB  " doesn't need this analysis to discover that he/she is dumb.

</comment><comment> a-wu The other thing I keep seeing is a "leak" of a court filing by "Anonymous" alleging that Trump and Epstein committed various sexual offenses. I think it's unfortunate that the disinformation attributing this to Anonymous is spreading because the court filing has been publicly available since 2016. It seems that two Twitter accounts are parroting this around under the guises on Anonymous which really discredits the actual group.

<comment><USER23> Has Anonymous ever been an actual group or more of a loose collection of people claiming the name?

<comment><USER24> Read the wikipedia page, its pretty accurate. There have been arrests for 'Anonymous' hacks but it's not really a group, more so an idea.

<comment> a-wu You're totally right and I shouldn't have referred to them as one entity. Even so, I think that Twitter accounts "representing" Anonymous spreading misinformation really discredits the work other Anonymous members do.

<comment><USER25> I don't think the point of taking up the "anonymous" moniker is to get credit. That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the underlying meme, which is populist, not meritocratic or whatever. It's spelled out quite well in V for Vendetta...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like the 'hack' wasn't one. From the article:

> So by all means, be angry, but don't spread disinformation and right now, > all signs point to just that - the alleged Minneapolis Police Department > "breach" is fake.

<comment><USER27> Yes, that's why the title has scare quotes and says "alleged"

<comment><USER26> It's a long article and I thought I could be helpful by summarizing the conclusion; I don't think a person who didn't read it would grasp that from the quotation marks alone.</comment></comment></comment>


'Boarding' mentally ill becoming epidemic in Washington state - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021968893_psychiatricboardingxml.html <comment><USER2> _" With no psychiatrist on Evergreen's staff, it took nearly two days before one arrived to examine him."_

Why isn't there a consultant psychiatrist available in an accident and emergency hospital? Genuinely surprised by this as many mental health problems present in an acute fashion.</comment>


The unsolved math problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp?

<comment><USER2> Indeed, students and younger academics are often the ones making the breakthroughs, simply because they don't know what's "unsolvable".

<comment><USER3> This is true in some instances, but not generally. I think most advances are made gradually by very experienced people who understand exactly why things are "unsolvable" and what paths may be more fruitful.

Secondly, it is doubtful that a student will solve a millennium problem or make any other advance of that caliber.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Reminds me a little of the story of the fleas. They can normally jump 3 ft, but when the are put in an 18" high container with a lid, they can never jump more that 18" for the rest of their lives, even when the lid is removed.

Sometimes I wonder how much I let the rest of the world turn me into a flea.

</comment><comment><USER4> ignorance is truly bliss

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this relevant to Hacker News ?

<comment><USER6> Let me see... it's a classic story about a fascinating event in the history of a field that many people here find interesting and/or have studied. It's about a creative breakthrough that came about in an unanticipated, nonstandard way - something very much in the hacker ethos. It's information that many of us would never have run across if it hadn't been posted here (if it was posted before, I missed it). It even has a cameo by Knuth!

The story is in fact so relevant to Hacker News that it would be hard to imagine anything _more_ in the spirit of the site.

The only thing lame about it is the title. The problems were obviously not unsolvable.

Edit: while I'm at it, a lot of people here are students, or were recently students, or are lifelong students. Many have spent time in the academic milieu described in the story and are familiar with this kind of folklore. The meme of the math professor assigning unsolved problems as homework is a familiar one.

<comment><USER5> Sure, yeah, there's a Ferma's last theorem as an "extra hard exercise" in Knuth, a story of Huffman and his codes, device for thin shaving IC for the purpose of cloning them, etc, etc

It's all part of a standard CompSci folklore package. If you dig into Math or Physics folklore, there's even more stories. In fact, there are thick books filled with them. But do you seriously want to see them on a front page ? I can assure you many of them inspiring and a lot of them are far more "in the spirit of the site" than this one.

<comment><USER7> Yes. I want to see them on the front page.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but not on this site.

<comment><USER6> From <http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html>: "The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I can only speak for myself. This story appeals to my intellectual curiosity an order of magnitude more than the mediocre blogs and transient tech-du-jour articles that constitute the bulk of what gets posted even here (a site which is well above average). I would love to see more high-quality historical material and it boggles my mind how anyone could _not_ find it interesting.

<comment><USER8> There's a lot of things that are interesting. All needs to be taken in moderation or this place will end up chokeful of Digg-style news.

TOP 10 BESTEST HISTORICAL MATIREAL

OMG .. THE MOST AMAZING URBAN LEGEND YOU READ TODAY !!

etc etc

There's nothing wrong with the orginal story, but if you are after _quality_ anecdotes, then scooping them from an urban legends site should be your last option.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Everything I Know About Startup Marketing I Learned From Punk Rock - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/97adae5415fd <comment><USER2> Always be on the lookout for emerging channels so you can test them out to see if they are a good fit for your business. Sitting on the sideline will cost you the first mover advantage. Even better if other businesses in your niche don't use some channels. You can dominate them then.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing!</comment>


Visualizing Sorting Algorithms with Web Audio for the Heck of It - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@caspervonb/how-i-visualized-the-sorting-algorithms-and-brought-them-to-life-with-sound-ce7c5c6cb6ef <comment><USER2> Sounds like a retro game!</comment>


AWS Cloud9: Cloud IDE - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ <comment><USER2> Hosted here:

[https://github.com/c9/core/](https://github.com/c9/core/)

Notable tech: Emmet (snippets, HTML autocomplete), Engine.IO (web-sockets), MsgPack (message serialization), RuSHA (browser-based SHA1), Tern (code analysis, AST etc), Acorn (JS code analysis, faster than Tern)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been waiting for this to finally start to come along -- you can see the trajectory of AWS/GCP/Azure/etc to be fully hosted development platforms.

I switched to cloud-dev about a year ago. Took some getting used to, but I can't imagine going back to local-dev now.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oops! Two different people each submitted about the same topic: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15817544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15817544)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems to be the final step of the integration of the Amsterdam based startup. Cool job guys</comment>


Google Warns Staff About Protests During Official Pride Events - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-25/google-warns-staff-about-protests-during-official-pride-events <comment><USER2> Crowder is a comedian who got under the skin of Carlos Maza, a MediaMatters activist pretending to be a journalist at Vox. One of Maza's stated goals is to deplatform people he disagrees with. His agitation led to Crowder being banned, even though Crowder did not violate any terms of service.

If anyone is being abusive, it is Carlos Maza.</comment>


Ask HN: When to not use deep learning? - <AUTHOR> Given the "unreasonable effectiveness" of recurrent neural networks, and the increasing ease of their application to a given learning problem, I'm often left with the following uneasy feeling when reading through academic papers covering more specialized approaches: "Hmm, this was written in 200X... am I wasting my time reading this because deep learning could blow this technique out of the water?"<p>I want to develop my "smell" for judging whether reading through a paper for a non-RNN model is a good use of my time.  Does anyone have any heuristics, red flags, smells, entire domains, etc., that they use to put things immediately in the category of "nah, this is smoked by deep learning techniques"? <comment><USER2> Never use deep learning if you have to explain how this works to business people.

Neural networks work "like magic". If you're using something that can't be modeled with a formula in excel, or as a tree, then it is not businessplan- ready.

Probably this might be different for a native-digital company; but for traditional companies this is the norm.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can't use deep learning in cases where normal statistical modeling is invalid, like multicolinearity among features. (Of course, some deep learning methods can get around that!)</comment>


Understanding the Python GIL (Pycon 2010 Slides) - <AUTHOR> http://dabeaz.com/python/UnderstandingGIL.pdf

<comment><USER2> Isn't this just a good argument for event-based programming ala Twisted or Node.js, to avoid the system thread overheads altogether?

It seems to me that programming with event-based frameworks like Node.js is much less fraught with peril, confusion, and error.

(Having written a couple of small but complete (bare iron) real-time, thread/process-based operating systems (and applications for them) for workstation-class CPUs back in the 80's, I'm highly aware of the peril and confusion possible. ;-)

<comment><USER3> That only works for one thread. Many (most?) cases for using multithreading are when you need to do something CPU-bound, for which event-based mechanisms don't help.

<comment><USER2> In that case you can use webworker-like computational threads, avoiding global data locking, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Attempting the slide 3 example on a dual-core Core 2 Duo CPU running 32-bit Linux with Python 2.6 I get

      * single-threaded: 8.9s
      * two threads: 10.4s

Overhead is ~17% (compare to 2X slowdown reported on quad-core Mac OS X). Interesting.

<comment><USER5> He did mention in the talk that Linux does not act as weird due to the scheduler differences.

<comment><USER6> I thought he said the reason Linux performance was better was because the locks were better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The talk was FANTASTIC. Hopefully the video will be up soon.

<comment><USER5> I agree, the best talk of the conference thus far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was fortunate enough to attend this talk. It was quite an eye-opener as far as how wonky thread performance is. The overall equation seems to be something like:

       # of threads * # of cores == context switch storm density.

David was clear to say that his presentation was not to discourage people from using threads.

The take-away for me are to really pay attention to implementation of my thread usage and to see if linux processor affinity would help in a situation where you control all the threads in your app.

The upcoming changes to the GIL for 3.2 has a dramatic impact on stability of behavior in threading but a negative impact on IO threads, which they are planning on addressing.

<comment><USER5> While David had dismissed CPU affinity because of the potential of other threads in the stack not benefitting from additional cores, I wanted to test and see what impact it would have. Granted these are single run #'s on linux, but it's interesting to see that even a single thread adds minor overhead.

Code:

        http://gmr.privatepaste.com/7ee226e690

Single call of the function:

        gmr@binti ~ $ ./test.sh
        real	0m10.840s
        user	0m10.824s
        sys	        0m0.008s

With Processor Affinity on Single CPU:

        gmr@binti ~ $ taskset 01 ./test.sh
        real	0m11.210s
        user	0m11.207s
        sys	        0m0.004s

Without Processor Affinity:

        gmr@binti ~ $ ./test.sh
        real	0m14.389s
        user	0m12.488s
        sys	        0m3.789s

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And it's typeset in Gill!

Did anyone who went to his Open Space session have a report?</comment>


Show HN: RocketJourney – a gameful app to achieve the habit of exercise - <AUTHOR> https://www.rocketjourney.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! We're really excited to show you RocketJourney, we're about to launch in the USA, after years of work.

We built this because Fitness Apps are failing us, we can't stick to our goals. We tried tracking apps like Fitbit and Nike. We tried gamification apps like Habitica and Fitocracy. But we keep failing. Is it us? Or these apps aren't effective enough?

Maybe it's both, but here's a theory:

Gamification is powerful if done right, and it's not being done right today. Gamification and Verification should go together. Games are fun because you can win or lose, in a verifiable way.

This is why we created RocketJourney. RocketJourney offers gameful challenges, with verification.

\- - - - - - -

Our main challenge is the Survival Challenge:

1\. The goal is to exercise at least 3 days per week to increase your streak. 2\. To verify 1 day of exercise, track one of these: Gym attendance, 150-calorie workout, 30 active minutes or 10k steps. 3\. You have to get your 3 days of exercise before Sunday night. If not, you'll lose your streak. 4\. Unless you have enough cheat days. 1 cheat day pays 1 missing day.

* Week after week, of those who started the same week as you, you'll see how many keep their streak alive.

Direct App Store/Play Store link: [https://rckt.fit/download](https://rckt.fit/download)

\- - - - - - -

About our tech:

We're using Elixir in the back, some Erlang for a critical service which queries multiple databases for a huge gym chain, Estimote Beacons to verify attendance to gyms, Swift for iOS, Java (and trying out some Kotlin) for Android.</comment>


US intelligence chief: we might use the internet of things to spy on you - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/09/internet-of-things-smart-home-devices-government-surveillance-james-clapper <comment><USER2> This is why people should be very wary of any device that phones home or generally connects to the internet when it doesn't need to.

Unfortunately, most of the new companies and products in this space seem to be quite willing to do the most insane, privacy destroying things imaginable because their obsession with the 'service' business model.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> ""In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said."

This is one more way that the NSA will break the "in-home" barrier for surveillance, as though keeping track of your online thought isn't enough. It may not be exactly the same as having a camera in your home, but it's uncomfortably close when your toaster can tell the government about your habits.

</comment><comment><USER3> Um.... duh?

This is the essence of the Snowden revelations: there are no meaningful restraints on the NSA. We can safely ignore everything they or other government representatives say about their activities and assume that the NSA is spying on everyone, all the time, through every mechanism possible, and will continue to expand their reach indefinitely.

Of _course_ they are going to spy on us through IoT devices. That's a given. The interesting question is this: what would we have to do in order to make those spying efforts unproductive?

</comment><comment><USER4> Where "we might" means "we already are."

</comment><comment><USER5> IoT = "Intel on Thou".</comment>