The Wretched Table: How Dinner in America Became an Ordeal - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/wretched-table-dinner-america-became-ordeal-79459 <comment><USER2> Why do people say it only takes 10 more minutes to make the food? They never factor in the time it takes to mentally prepare what you are going to make, go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards. It is never just 10 more minutes.

<comment><USER3> > go out and get ingredients, prep the food, then clean up afterwards

Plan food for the whole week. Buy the ingredients in one trip. Clean as you cook.

Take one day a week to pre cook and freeze as much as possible. Cook three or four nights a week and eat leftovers for the remainder.

Build a repertoire of around ten meals you train yourself to bang out quickly and without thinking.

If you're cooking for your kids, make them help with the cooking and the clean up. (This is how I learned to cook.)

It's not rocket science.

<comment><USER4> Seriously. CLEAN AS YOU COOK. It drives me insane that people don't get this. When I'm done with a meal I have a few plates to clean and maybe one pot. That's it though. Everything goes away when I'm cooking. Scraps constantly thrown in the compost. It makes you much more mentally organized.

It's an obvious source of fluster and stress for my friends who don't. They never seem to figure it out either. Even when I do it for them.

Plus. Stop determining what you want to eat first. Look at what you have in your fridge and learn to work with it. Have a few proteins and a few cheeses and kitchen basics and you can improvise many things.

<comment><USER5> I figure the main difficulty lies in the "economics" part of "home economics". There's a huge efficiency difference between "cooking every day" and "only cooking occasionally". The only way to benefit from cooking at home is if you accept the ongoing cost of keeping essentials stocked. Then, you have to accept that you're going to waste a considerable amount of money and time while you're learning to cook. When I started, it sometimes took an hour or more to get food on the table because I hadn't figured out mise en place. Then, when I did, I ruined more than one dish because I lost track of things and something got overcooked or burnt. Finally, I've had a certain amount of food go to waste because of bad planning- perhaps I bought too much for the week, and then went shopping the next week without keeping the existing "stock" in mind.

These are all huge stumbling blocks- especially when it's so easy to just order take-out, which will at least be consistently edible, with the added bonus of not resulting in wasted ingredients.

What ultimately turned it around for me was when my girlfriend and I decided to fully commit to cooking at home, and went and spent $150 on groceries- but instead of buying ingredients, we bought _pantry essentials_. Flour, sugar, baling powder, baking soda, cornmeal, table and kosher salt, seasonings, potatoes, rice, pasta, and so on. Not to mention an initial stock of perishable basics: onions, garlic, lemons, limes, milk, butter, eggs, and cheese.

While it left a dent in our wallet at the time, it turned out to be a game- changer. We found that it was immensely easier to plan meals, because we already had half the ingredients of any given recipe.

This is a huge societal problem, in my opinion. I'm a pretty privileged dude when it comes down to it, and I was able to absorb the inefficiency of not being able to cook at home while still eating pretty healthy food. Furthermore, I was able to get over the hump of figuring out how to cook on my own, because I had the resources to absorb the inefficiency of learning how to do it.

What about the folks that can't?

<comment><USER6> Don't wealthier Americans learn these skills at college?

I learnt how to cook properly at university (UK). I'd watched my mum a fair amount growing up, and in the final few weeks before I left she showed me things like how to shallow fry chicken, or check it was cooked.

I ate takeaway on the day I arrived, since everyone was too drunk, but on Sunday I paired up with people living on the same floor and cooked with them for the rest of the year.

It cost a fraction of what takeaway food would have cost, and we weren't trying to be super cheap.

<comment><USER7> > Don't wealthier Americans learn these skills at college?

No. The vast majority of college students I know don't cook. They either eat in dining halls or get take-out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every single one of the opinions in this thread, as well as that of the original article, are completely alien to me.

Dinner in my household is not difficult or fussy or unhealthy or expensive or bland.

We don't buy food every day, but we also don't buy processed food. We eat fresh meat and vegetables, with small servings of simple carbohydrates, going to the grocery store once a week. Our trips come out to about $100 total, which is about $2/meal per person.

I make dinner from scratch almost every night. I design it to leave leftovers for lunch the next day. It takes no more time to make four servings than two for most things. This means that the time I spend on dinner saves time on lunch.

Once a week, I make a meal designed to leave a LOT of leftovers, like a roast chicken or tacos or chili. Roast chicken takes a long time to cook, but takes almost no prep-time. Tacos take a little prep time, but almost no time to cook. Chili takes a lot of prep time, a lot of cooking time (if you want to do it right), but makes so damn much that we freeze half so we don't burn out on eating it for the entirety of the week.

And don't get me wrong: we don't eat the same thing every night. I'm somewhat of a fussy eater. I don't mean there are only a few things that I will eat, I mean I am very intolerant of poorly prepared food. We eat _extremely well_ in my house.

Oh yeah, there are nights where I say to myself, "damn, I'm just too tired to make anything special". That's when we eat the leftover, frozen chili. Or I dice up the leftover chicken from the roast and make a chicken salad out of it and we have sandwiches. Or we have tacos a second night, because we freakin' love tacos (I could eat tacos for every meal, and I know this because I have done it before).

Eating well doesn't mean complexity, it doesn't mean expense. Simple food, the right symphony of spices, and the correct cooking method. It's no different than programming.

<comment><USER9> So you have someone to do the dishes? Not everyone has children or someone else around to do it for them. There's also the extra laundry it makes if you don't use paper napkins/placemats. It's nice to have the time to do it, but it's not the quickest thing you can do in an evening.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps I'm revealing my ill-breeding, but people actually use _placemats_ on a regular basis?

If you don't feel like doing the dishes every day, you can just stack them up and do them once a week...

<comment><USER11> That requires having 7 times the number of plates your need for a meal....

<comment><USER8> Or washing one set of plates immediately before needing them, because you're waiting on the roast to finish roasting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Completely anecdotal, but I suspect some part of this comes from modern Americans' desire to have a meal that has a specific name and must be made with an oddly specific recipe that uses the exact ingredients. Apparently "thing of tomatoes and eggplant with some bread" is not acceptable – but when some chef puts the same recipe in a magazine and labels it "rustic Mediterranean bruschetta", people are all over it.

<comment><USER13> My pet peeve in discussions like this is that people insist on looking up or following recipes, slavishly, as if that's the key to making a good meal.

It's not. If you don't know how to cook, buy a _cookbook_ , one that has the fundamentals in it, one that teaches you about meat and bread and vegetables and starch and sauces and fish and condiments. And once you've learned the basics of "frying meat" or "cooking pasta", you can easily start to combine what you've learned into meals, and you can more easily follow recipes for variations or ideas on how to spice it or prepare it or present it.

<comment><USER14> I really love Ad Hoc at Home for this. It is Thomas Keller's most accessible book and in addition to recipes contains instructions for things like piecing out a chicken. I've bought the book as a gift at least a half-dozen times.

But, I do believe as you allude to in your last sentence that nothing takes the place of practice. I think a lot of people get overwhelmed looking at a list of ingredients. With experience you know what ones are critical to the dish and what can be left out or substituted as you have learned tastes and can intuitively understand measurements.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, what recipe collections don't tell you is that you need a lot of practice to be able to follow them, I've found that the hardest part of cooking is getting the timing right, and that just takes a lot of tries to get right and understand.

And to circle back to the article, I think a lot of young people in America simply don't even get to try cooking for themselves the way society is organized.

When I started university and moved out of my parent's home, I didn't move into a dorm with a cafeteria, instead I moved into a small student apartment. If I wanted dinner each night, it was completely up to me. Frozen pan pizza gets kinda boring, so I had to start cooking for myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to eat better without breaking the bank and without wasting food to rot: buy the cheaper, bulk packs of meat. Optimize for price per pound. Pork loin, chicken thighs, beef roasts, in as big of packages as you can find. When you get home, split them into single-meal proportions and repackage them in good quality ziplock bags, remembering to squeeze as much air out as you can. Put them straight in the freezer.

Then, when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water, maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in. In 15 to 30 minutes, the meat will be completely thawed and you can cook whatever you want.

Given the right recipe, you might even be able to work the thaw time into the vegetable prep time.

EDIT: There are three other options for defrosting meat: in fridge, on the counter, and in the microwave, in order of speed from slowest to fastest. In the fridge takes extreme pre-knowledge: you practically have to do it the night before, and I am too fussy of an eater to know what I will want to eat a day ahead of time. On the counter is same-day, but has to be done in the morning, plus some people might be squeamish about leaving meat out at room temperature for several hours. Using the microwave takes 15 to 30 minutes, but is imperfect and often ends up cooking the meat to a certain degree. In short, the waterbath method is the most convenient defrosting method.

<comment><USER15> > when you want to have a meal, fill your kitchen sink full of hot water, > maybe half-full, and throw one of those ziplock bags in.

Meat should only be thawed in a fridge or, in an eemergency, in a bath of cold water.

Plunging it into hot water is heaven for bacterial growth.

<comment> barry-cotter This is the sort of comment that makes me aware of how alien even very similar cultures can be. I'm Irish and I grew up there. I had never defrosted anything in a fridge before moving to Shanghai. It was all either countertop defrosting or hot water. I wouldn't defrost fish in hot water because it'll cook or let it defrost at room temperature for more than an hour which should be plenty for most fish. If room temperature where you live is above 20 or so degrees you probably shouldn't counter top defrost unless you can check it regularly to see if it's done and

Hot water isn't really that bad for bacterial growth. Lukewarm water is the enemy but even that's fine as long as you cook the meat within half an hour of taking it out of the fridge for defrosting. If you're taking longer z than half an hour that's a substantial cut off meat and you really should be able to plan a day ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This isn't about the mechanics of cooking. It isn't really even about food. It's about social expectation, and the unreachable perfection of TV lifestyles, and family, and the end of passing down certain skills matrilinearly while they are not yet taught equally to kids. It's also about time and money.

</comment><comment><USER17> None of this seems to apply if you don't have children. I've never had this kind of stressful meal (on a recurring basis) with friends, housemates, colleagues, conference friends, customers or other work people, or significant others. Sure, maybe one-off unpleasant conversation or something ("we need to discuss the production outage which affected our site last week"), but not on a repeated basis.

Whether you cook from scratch, make some kind of prepared food or leftovers, have take-out/delivery, or go out to eat seems irrelevant by comparison.

</comment><comment><USER18> As as society, we're all agitated about dinner because we're trained to be by billions in ad spending. Part of that is a self loathing of one of the key elements of the dinner meal -- culture. Nothing is good enough.

My sister is a good example of this. She picked up a crazy, pain in the ass fad diet, has two kids and high powered corporate gig. Her husband is in a similar gig. The kids are in care from 7-7. So yeah, even buying a vegan, glueten free burrito is a pain in the ass. I worry about her, as she's going to have an anxiety attack someday.

</comment><comment><USER19> The "Norman Rockwell dinner" is definitely doable - my family did it when I was growing up. But my mother didn't work outside the house, so she could shop during the day and thaw frozen meats and what not while working mothers are still trying to get away from the office.

That, I think, is the key. It's not reasonable to expect a big production dinner when both parents have full time jobs, particularly professionals who have to work late on occasion. That takes a level of organization most people just don't have.

</comment><comment><USER3> > At home one night after my meal with Ochs, as I labored to make pasta sauce > from scratch while a child wailed at my feet

Everyone knows you start the gravy (aka sauce) in a big pot on Saturday morning, make the kids stir it all day long, then heat it up for quick dinners throughout the week.

</comment><comment><USER20> The comments by the parents to their children made me cringe.

It's hard to read this and come away from it feeling that the problem is anything more than willfully ignorant parents (healthy eating information isn't hard to come by), indolently wallowing in their lack of self-awareness and inconsistencies.

In other words, normal people.

<comment><USER21> The spaghettios and burritos comment rang true, however. Particularly for families with both parents working.

I get how some people derive great pleasure from making a meal from scratch, but for people in a great hurry, it's one of many checkboxes. And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family time.

<comment><USER22> > And time spent stirring a pot or slicing vegetables is hardly quality family > time.

Invite your kids into the kitchen. Teach them how to cook. Cooking can be some of the best quality family time if you make it a priority.

<comment><USER21> Totally agreed, but the fish sticks come out because dinner has to happen every single day, no matter what else has come up.

As an example, I take my kids camping a few times a year. I show them all kinds of things, like how to stake a tent, how to make a fire safely, etc.

If we had to do these things every single day just to cook and go to sleep, I suspect it would quickly devolve into running through the chores as quickly as possible while they stand to the side and poke at ant mounds with sticks.

We do make healthy quality meals and involve the kids with what we're doing, but this is certainly not an every night thing. Often, it's much easier to simply find a way to solve the problem and move on.

<comment><USER8> If you had to do these things every day, you'd get better at them and the kids would get good enough at them that they could do some things without your direct supervision all the time and you'd get used to them that they wouldn't be a significant distraction from your day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There is a big problem in America with people not knowing how to cook anymore, especially from scratch. I wasn't taught very well as a child and had to learn myself in my 20s. Now I spend a small amount of time cooking and trying out recipes, and have gathered a huge notebook of things my family loves. We do lots of soups which take very little time to make and can last for several days.</comment>


Microsoft Announces Dividend Increase and Share Buyback - <AUTHOR> https://news.microsoft.com/2016/09/20/microsoft-announces-quarterly-dividend-increase-and-share-repurchase-program-2/#sm.0001dr77jqbdtfiexsf1slqhsqo4c <comment><AUTHOR> Do they see no growth over the cost of capital?</comment>


White hat or black hat? Firefox hacking tool Firesheep raises ethical concerns - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/28/white-hat-or-black-hat-firefox-hacking-tool-firesheep-raises-ethical-concerns/ <comment><USER2> _There is, however, a somewhat deeper concern. Namely that providing the tools that makes misdeeds easier makes a person accountable to a degree._

Under law? I mean, I know there's a similar law where I live (Greece) for prostitution, and it's equally ridiculous. _Tools_ , the objects the article is so adamant to categorize Firesheep under (and rightly so), are lifeless, inanimate assistants to whatever purposes a human puts their mind on.

I think it's downright ridiculous to blame a tool, or a tool maker for that matter, for the actions of its users.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do all payment processors charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction? - <AUTHOR> I have been looking into multiple payment processors and it seems everyone charges the same thing. Why is that? <comment><USER3> It's not quite true that _all_ payment processors charge 2.9% + $0.30. In the real world you'll find rates almost half that for brick and mortar merchants, more like 1.8% + $0.15, which is very close to a processor's wholesale cost (called "interchange"). It's specifically ecommerce processors that are easy for anyone to sign up with.

There are two main reasons "no hassle / developer-friendly" ecommerce processors charge so much more:

1\. Value-added features, like easy-to-use APIs and friendly customer service

2\. Higher rates of fraud

Fraud is a big issue. You see, processors essentially "vouch" for the businesses they add to card networks. If a fraudulent business starts up, runs tens of thousands in fraudulent card payments, and takes the money and runs, and then all those victims issue chargebacks to recover their money, the processor is left holding the bag.

This is why signing up for accepting credit cards at lower rates has traditionally been a pain in the butt. It was like applying for a loan. The processor wanted to do some due diligence on you.

So the easy-to-use processors are not only offering nice software, they're also taking on more risk by letting anybody sign up and get paid quickly with minimal due diligence hurdles. There's a lot more work and investment they have to make on the backend to mitigate this risk.

Footnote 1: Amazon's new payments service is a good example of how to do a more competitive rate without sacrificing ease of use. They start at 2.9% + $0.30, but then scale it down to as little as 1.9% once you have established three months of high-volume activity. That's a pretty good protection against fly-by-night fraudulent businesses.

Footnote 2: Other commenters have noted the role of interchange. But this in itself does not explain why no-hassle ecommerce processors charge _more_ than other processors. Interchange is really not such a mysterious thing: it's the wholesale cost that processors pay to card networks, which in turn mostly gets passed to the bank that issued the card. Competitive banks will in turn pass this on to their customers via reward programs and benefits. It gets press because merchants resent having to pay out an extra 1-2% or so that mostly gets funneled back into their customer's pocket (long interesting story about how Visa used this to drive adoption of their network). But the main reason that "friendly" ecommerce processors charge _more_ is quite simply higher fraud risk.

<comment><USER4> It's worth mentioning a specific term here, too: "card not present" That covers all ecommerce, and even some card scanning technology, too, EVEN if the card is present. As you pointed out, it's all about fraud/risk. It's easier to circumvent the credit card companies' "security" features (magnetic strip, hologram, signature on the backside of the card, the actual card itself, a chip if your card has one, etc.) when the card is not present during a transaction. A good analogy would be paying with counterfeit $100 bills. There are security features built into cash that allow merchants to verify their authenticity. It's difficult to prove that the person on the other side of the internet is who he says he is when paying with a card. Is the card stolen? So as you pointed out, card not present transactions are riskier, thus require a higher interchange fee, etc.

<comment><USER3> That's not really the main reason. Ecommerce interchange is higher than card present but only by maybe 15-30 basis points (0.15-0.30%).

There are online processors that offer much lower rates than 2.9% + $0.30 if you meet certain qualifications as a merchant. Amazon goes as low as 1.9%.

The main reason that certain processors have such a high rate is the lax signup requirements. It allows higher-risk and outright fraudulent merchants to use them. So yes, card-not-present has a slightly higher fraud baseline, but the key factor here in the rate is the merchant qualification.

Source: [http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa- interchange-...](http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange- reimbursement-fees-april2013.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You are probably only looking at high level solutions, like Braintree.

Take a look at the more do-it-yourself solutions, and you'll see different numbers. For instance, we have a merchant account with Merchant e-Solutions. The base rate is 2.19% + $.20/transaction. I say "base rate" because there are other costs that depend on the particular card.

For example, for Visa there are these:

• "Acquirer Processing Fee", $0.0195/transaction.

• AVS fee, $0.01/transaction, only applies to transactions that make use of the address verification service.

• 0.097% if the card is a commercial rewards card. (10% of the cards)

• 0.45% "international acquiring fee" if the card is international, and 0.40% "international service assessment" on top of that.

• 2.39% labeled as "VISA NON-QUAL". I have no idea what the criteria for this is, but it gets applied to about 5% of the cards.

So, the actual cost of a transaction for a particular Visa card can be as low as 2.19% + $0.2195, and as high as 6.4% + $0.2295.

Last time I ran the numbers, it worked out that for Visa cards it averaged out to 2.62% + $0.23/transaction, and for MasterCard 2.80% + $0.23/transaction.

The downside to this is that providers that offer this kind of fine grained pricing tend to be targeted toward merchants who are looking for low level solutions--merchants handling their own credit card storage, doing their own recurring billing, and so on.

That is probably not a road you want to go down, especially if you are small and just starting out, and doubly especially if your servers are not servers you own. Doing PCI complaint credit card handling in the cloud on something like AWS is difficult and not something you want to deal with while dealing with the other aspects of a young business, like developing and promoting and supporting your product.

</comment><comment><USER6> NYT had a discussion a few years ago: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/your- money/credit-and-debi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/your-money/credit- and-debit-cards/05visa.html)

> While there is little controversy about the fees that Visa collects, some > merchants are infuriated by a separate, larger fee, called interchange, that > Visa makes them pay each time a debit or credit card is swiped. The fees, > roughly 1 to 3 percent of each purchase, are forwarded to the cardholder's > bank to cover costs and promote the issuance of more Visa cards.

</comment><comment><USER7> Everyone forgets points/cashback. That visa card you just got that gives you 2% cashback? That doesnt come from thin air. It comes from the merchants pockets paying their transaction fee.

<comment><USER8> It was VISA et al's way of taxing people purchasing with cash. They had contract terms that wouldn't let you sell at a discount when the customer paid in cash; under Obama the federal government finally banned them, and several states had already done so, but I think usually only for gas purchases.

I think the contracts (or consumer inertia) still make stores advertise at the credit-card price, and the different price for cash has to be advertised as a discount.

<comment><USER4> VISA et al can still take away a merchant's ability to charge customers' credit cards if they catch you asking for minimum payments on cards or offering discounts for cash. It doesn't happen all the time, and usually consumers don't report establishments that practice this behavior.

<comment><USER8> Minimum payments maybe. But you have the right by law to give a cash discount (and apparently the right to charge a credit card fee):

[http://www.interest.com/credit-cards/news/you-soon-could- be-...](http://www.interest.com/credit-cards/news/you-soon-could-be-charged- extra-for-using-a-credit-card/)

From that article it sounds like it was part of a lawsuit that was settled. I had thought it was through one of the consumer financial protection bills that happened after the housing bubble pop.

<comment><USER4> ah, yes, that particular angle could probably use some more research. I haven't read the consumer financial protection bills, but then again most legislators probably haven't either, and there certainly could be some loopholes that someone is trying to exploit right now.

Also important to note that most merchants opted NOT to switch to charging extra because it would have upset their customers, so really, by allowing that in the past, it primed consumers to expect the same price for both. Tricky devils...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why can't the merchant's funds simply be quarantined for say 2-3 months? ... Victims of a fraudulent merchant would have 30 days to 1) get their bill and an extra 30 days notice of the fraud charge on their bill to cancel/dispute. If the customer did not pay bill; the 'visa' could avoid crediting the merchant. A 2.9% transaction fee is like a 1 year quarantine. quite long me thinks.

<comment><USER10> What merchant would sign up for that?

<comment><USER9> A one year CD goes for about 1% now ergo 3% is a long time horizon on value. 2-3 months is ~equivalent to a 0.1% fee per CD rates.

<comment><USER11> I think the vast majority of merchants would find more utility in the expedited payout & resulting liquidity than the extra 2-3%.

<comment><USER9> Retail merchants have capital tied up in product; what difference does it make if its on the shelf or already in customer's hands? ... sure cash strapped people always pay more. But the reason the rate is so high; 3% on month > 36% APR b/c of network leverage and government regulations.

<comment><USER12> > what difference does it make if its on the shelf or already in customer's > hands?

Actually, it makes a huge difference:

1) I pay property taxes on all inventory held on the shelf at the beginning of the year

2) I can offer a discount to move product off of the shelf now at a lower rate (equivalent to paying a higher transaction rate) to achieve actually present cash-flows

3) I can write-off inventory that sits on the shelf too long and depending on my accounting method, I may have to claim income on a sale today, even though I haven't been paid yet.

> % on month > 36% APR b/c of network leverage and government regulations.

No, it's 3%. Period. Not 3*12, just 3%. Don't conflate accrual of interest with acquisition costs. That'd be like saying that since labor on production is 2% of COGS, firing everyone increases my yearly margin by 24% (at best, it would be 2%, if you could still produce). Consider that any method of capturing payment, whether cash or credit card, has an acquisition cost (time, money, labor, etc.). Paying a 3% fee on CC optimizes time and labor in exchange for money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone is basically following PayPal's lead. To make price a compelling differentiator, you'd have to go to a place where it'd be very difficult to make money. 2.99% looks kinda lame. 3% is perceived as much higher. PayPal's choice was spot-on.

<comment><USER14> For some reason this resembles the issues you get with numerical precision when doing things like ray tracing with shadow maps, or Z-figthing in depth buffers, or guessing prices on Price Is Right.

Here each processor is trying to achieve a market position relative to their competitors almost as an epsilon. They want to be seen as cheaper but no cheaper than necessary, and they want to retain simple terms. That drives them to tweak the 1st and 2nd order terms (constant + a scale factor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's mostly driven by competition. Because all processors have to pay interchange (about 2-2.2%) at scale, and also cover fraud losses - there isn't much room to slash prices and still make a profit.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are some great answers here.. I'll take a higher-level perspective of looking at having your own merchant account versus using a payment processor's merchant account (e.g. Stripe, Braintree).

By establishing your own merchant account with the processor, you'll have lower rates but signing up will require a lengthier process of providing your business info and having that reviewed. Basically this mean that you're taking on the risk of fraud or chargebacks directly. The benefit of course is that you'll have lower net costs esp. at higher transaction volumes with the variable pricing aspects that has been mentioned here already. It also allows you to add more value-added services that align to your business needs, such as subscription billing or other servicing layers.

On the other side, signing up under a payment processor's merchant account (e.g. Stripe, Braintree) can get you up and running instantly with a simple pricing structure. This often make sense for businesses who need to get up and running quickly without having to go through a merchant account review process. Also, the risk is actually taken on by the processor since it's their merchant account with the processor. Of course the processor in this case monitors fraud on your activity in order to protect themselves. What you'll find though is that as your volumes grow, there will be an inflection point where it'll be more cost effective to switch to the first option.

There's benefits in both models, but as always, companies should see what makes sense for them.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've always wondered what kind of rate a high volume company like McDonalds or Walmart could negotiate? Could they be paying pennies per transaction?

<comment><USER18> AFAIK, Wal-Mart is the only retail store that negotiates directly with Visa and MasterCard, and that only really happened after it sued both card networks a decade ago over being forced to accept cards with higher fees if it wanted to accept debit in its stores. They're still not happy with what they're paying; they urged a rejection of the settlement offer in the latest class action suits over processing fees because it still left Visa/MC's ability to raise those fees when they want intact.

So it's likely even large chains like McDonalds still pay the 1-2% interchange rates everyone else pays, just with a lower markup than average. They do pre- negotiate rates on behalf of their franchisees, which own the merchant accounts for their individual stores.

<comment><USER19> Both of these companies process through First Data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It doesn't quite answer the question, but we use GoCardless to handle payments from our sellers on our marketplace and that's 1% per transaction - <USER2> difference is that it's processing direct debit payments (withdrawals direct from one bank account to another) instead of credit cards.

It seems to be partially down to the underlying costs of processing credit cards and partially down to competition.

<comment><USER21> What is your experience with GoCardless? How do they handle chargebacks?

<comment><USER22> Do charge backs exost in a direct debit world?

<comment><USER23> Yes, and I'd say they are even harsher than for creditcards - i.e., return cash first and ask questions later.

The DD system doesn't do dispute resolution - you can make DD's easily, but the customer can revert anything he 'didn't agree to' and that's it; and the EU rules allow doing that for at least 13 months (UK says unlimited, I'm not sure on that).

<comment><USER18> > Yes, and I'd say they are even harsher than for creditcards - i.e., return > cash first and ask questions later.

That's how it works with credit cards as well. You're always debited before you're even notified of the chargeback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It has to do with the fact that the processors you are talking about are called "PSPs" or Payment Service Providers. 2.9% + $0.30 is a standard rate that incorporates risk, operations, interchange (visa/mc), etc... while still making a profit. That's why PayPal, Stripe, etc... price accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER25> Dwolla doesn't charge that but I have no idea who uses them

<comment><USER26> Dwolla doesn't charge that way because they're not billing credit cards. You give them your bank details and they do an ACH transfer with them, IIRC.

I've heard both good and bad about them, but they don't have large use yet.

<comment><USER27> That's correct on the ACH bit.

In so far as large use cases, they have some really good traction in the bitcoin market. I believe that they are the go to for transferring USD in and out of MT. Gox.

<comment><USER28> Not anymore: [http://www.coindesk.com/dwolla-bitcoin-companies-virtual- cur...](http://www.coindesk.com/dwolla-bitcoin-companies-virtual-currency- exchanges/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've wondered this for a while – could it simply be competition? Nobody wants to drop below that mark?

<comment><USER30> Wouldn't dropping below the mark let you beat the pants off the competition?

<comment><USER31> Depends on what margin of this is profit. If they're not making money through nonpayment then they would be losing money each transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Credit card processing fees. Dwolla gets around it by using ACH which has negligible fees.

<comment><USER33> The problem there is you have to have the money in your account. If they could find a way to do instant withdrawl/hold of funds, then people could use Dwolla to make a purchase direct from their account.

As it is, you have to put money into your Dwolla account and let it sit there until you're going to spend it, making impulse shopping a lot harder to do.

<comment><USER32> They've got something in development that may be exactly that. I'm not sure though because it's not out yet:

[https://realtime.dwolla.com/](https://realtime.dwolla.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Processors have upstream costs to Visa/Mastercard/etc that are charged in similar ways. The idea behind them using a percentage is that it relates to the risk. The more you spend, the more could be fraud and might need to be written off. The $0.30 is effectively a lower bound to stop micropayments. Otherwise people could do a $0.10 transaction and only pay $0.003. This could be to avoid system load.

While it might seem expensive, until a few years ago, taking card payments required getting a merchant account at a bank with high monthly fees which could take months. Now you can pay similar rates but without the misery of dealing with the banks.

<comment><USER24> Are you from the US? If so, that stuff about merchant accounts isn't true. While they're backed by a bank (acquiring bank), you don't have to go to a consumer bank to get one. You can go through any company called an ISO. In my opinion banks are the worst place to get one. We do merchant accounts with a monthly fee of $5/mo and instant setup (you can start processing in less than 2 minutes from when you complete the form). All backed by our friendly customer service team in Ohio.

Now if you're in the UK...things are very different :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> There are interchange fees that Visa and MasterCard charge every on every transaction range from 0.05% + $0.21 to 2.40% + $0.10. The processor that you're dealing with has to mark this up, and is taking a little bit of a risk that you won't charge lots of cards all at once and run away with all the money.

Basically, it's hard to make money on lower amounts if all transaction types are lumped together into one category. Some people such as Groupon Payments and Square can charge less on card present transactions, because the interchange fees are lower on those.

</comment><comment><USER36> Not an answer to the question, but does anyone have experience with PayLane? I'm met them at the next web conference and their rates seem pretty fair. Since I will be processing small transactions, I'm looking for a payment provider that has a low fixed amount to integrate in my startup product. $0.30 is quite a sum of money if you only process $10 and you make about $0.50 margin on top of that.

</comment><comment><USER37> For credit cards, some of the cost is prepaid interest. If a consumer pays their card on time, they don't get charged interest--however the bank loaned them money from the day of the transaction until they either get paid with the same billing cycle, or they start officially charging the consumer interest (which can take up to 60 days). The merchant pays this interest, which is high.

Debit cards are another matter.

</comment><comment><USER38> Just an FYI...

I was recently asked to fix some code for a website that was using paypal so it could use litle.com.

I was told that litle.com was almost half the cost of paypal and without a lot of the things that make paypal obnoxious to merchants, like holding your money on a whim.

Also, the Litle dev people were way more helpful and friendly than what I've seen from paypal in the distant past.

</comment><comment><USER39> Braintreepayments is somewhat strange in this case by fixing price to 2.9% + $0.30 but only for US accounts. For EU it's less clear "Interchange+.9% + 10c" while also having a 100 EUR minimum monthly payment on 10c commissions.

I hope they fix up the EU pricing so it's less confusing and with no monthly minimum as they have with the US.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interestingly, Plastiq charges the consumer instead of the merchant and they only charge 1.99% (to as high as 2.49%)

<comment><USER41> Plastiq opens up a lot more borrowers and lending opportunities for the processing networks ( e.g. people use their Visa on items they previously could not --- tuition, rent, etc. ), so Plastiq is able to negotiate some of the lowest rates in the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> You can get lower rates depending on volume if you contact gateway resellers. Also this is for online transactions which have more risk. I have gotten quoted 1.2% for physical card swipes.

</comment><comment><USER43> SparkPay.com (capital one) is 1.95% with no swipe fees, but they're a card- present competitor to Square, with no API. They've been great for us, awesome customer service.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is what PayPal have charged for as long as I can remember. I always assumed that later entrants (Stripe etc) adopted that price point to be competitive with PayPal.

</comment><comment><USER45> Most of the answers will be variants of: Payment processors have to pay interchange, and then will mark it up.

The question arises: Why are the interchange fees immune to competition?

<comment><USER46> Technically, they aren't. If you're willing to start a new credit card company, and get enough people on board, you could compete on interchange fees. However, how are you going to convince the consumer that they want a credit card issued by you?

<comment><USER23> Large associations of merchants (who'd benefit from lower interchanges) can do that, IIRC there are some examples of successful country-local cards. Making any of it an international network comparable to Visa/MC would anyway take decades and billions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Short Answer: Nash equilibrium.

But it is not really true that _all_ payment processors charge that.

</comment><comment><USER48> link to your company's website?

</comment><comment><USER49> Good question +1

<comment><USER50> Please avoid posting comments like "+1"

They don't add anything to the discussion and it's redundant after you upvote.

Thanks! :)</comment></comment>


Is your user interface culturally insensitive? - <AUTHOR> http://fbflex.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/is-your-user-interface-culturally-insensitive/

<comment><USER2> Hmm, interesting data point, and a good example of voting with your wallet :) I wonder how many of these assumptions the booking system shares: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)</comment>


WADA Confirms Attack by Russian Cyber Espionage Group - <AUTHOR> https://www.wada-ama.org/en/media/news/2016-09/wada-confirms-attack-by-russian-cyber-espionage-group <comment><USER2> > Let it be known that these criminal acts are greatly compromising the effort > by the global anti-doping community to re-establish trust in Russia

Seems like they imply the Russian state is behind this but they don't explicitly say it, probably because they have no proof, as always. What trust do I have in WADA when they clearly have a bias against Russia?

<comment><USER3> The conclusion is not WADA's, so your distrust of WADA has very little to do with the story.

<comment><USER2> What do you mean? That statement was made by Olivier Niggli, Director General, WADA

<comment><USER4> They are not the organization that conducted the investigation.

<comment><USER2> You didn't get me. In this post they say the attack originated in Russia. I hope you don't think that automatically means the government did it. In any case, wada does not explicitly accuse the government. But still they give that condescending statement, as if Russia now has to become a country without criminals to win trust back. I think it is telling of their bias.

<comment><USER5> You would do well to read the article, specifically:

"WADA has been informed by law enforcement authorities that these attacks are originating out of Russia,"

A quick google search of Fancy Bears (the name the hackers have used on their release page) links them to APT28:

"APT28, as it's known by FireEye/Mandiant, is also called Tsar Team by iSIGHT Partners, Sednit by Eset, Fancy Bear by CrowdStrike, and Operation Pawn Storm by Trend Micro. This attack group goes after NATO, Eastern European government and military agencies, defense, and Russian adversaries, the report notes."

WADA didnt investigate, the investigation is done by competent security analysts, and whilst I am aware that anything is this sphere is possibly misinformation/propaganda from both sides, it would seem evident that after Russia were sanctioned for doping, then hackers release data on suspected US doping that there is an easy link to make. And there is very little to be gained by another adversary trying to make trouble between the US and Russia with such an attack.

<comment><USER2> You would do well to try to understand my comment better. Is there proof this hacker group is the Russian government? I don's hear any and even wada did not claim this. Therefore it is a criminal group from Russia. Why should Russia as a state be punished for its criminals? Is that how it works now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How WADA can distinguish Russian group from any other? How anti-doping agency becomes proficient in cyber security?

<comment><USER7> Likely the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Canada's Federal Police Force) given that WADA is based in Montreal.

The quote from the article:

"WADA has been informed by law enforcement authorities that these attacks are originating out of Russia," he continued."

<comment><USER5> And even without that it was pretty obvious who the attackers were given the released data:

1) Focus on US athletes

2) Bear mentioned in name of hackers

3) Focus on sports doping (which Russia was recently found guilty of)

Now I know that many hacks and hackers will obfuscate the trail to them as much as possible but this is a fairly basic attack with little in the way of real impact as a result of the releases. It was obvious even to a non-security professional that the most likely culprits were russian nationalist hackers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sadly, I conclude that devices connected to the Internet are irremediably insecure. Air-gap it or lose it, I guess.

<comment><USER9> That is ultimately too pessimistic. Security is a gradient, and there's a lot you can do make yourself both a smaller target, and a harder target.

Compartmentalization is one of the strongest defense tools we have. For example, with the icloud leaks an attacker was able to gain access to all the data in a single strike. If it's true that Apple can no longer decrypt user's icloud data, an attacker now needs to hack people one-by-one. Hacking takes time and effort, and a one-by-one payoff may make it that hacking icloud is no longer worth the effort. Users are safer, even though they are still theoretically vulnerable.

A lot of people are stepping up to the plate to offer stronger security on digital systems. (Qubes, for example. Let's Encrypt, for example). If choose to take security seriously, hacking will become harder, the rewards will plummet, and the world will be safer.

<comment><USER10> Unless I am mistaken iCloud wasn't compromised.

There was an issue with allowing brute force attacks which was fixed. But all the publicised hacks were to do with individual accounts being compromised.

<comment> k-mcgrady 99% sure you're right. It was a mix of brute force and phishing iirc.

<comment><USER10> And social engineering.

I think in one case the "secret questions" used to reset accounts was actually asked during a media junket by a fake reporter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Recently I've become worried that almost all "leaks" are done by nations.

<comment><USER12> nothing in that article suggested that Fancy Bear was acting as the nation of Russia.

the game is to sell the data to any nation that bids the highest

<comment><USER13> The Sofacy Group (also known as APT28, Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear and Sednit) was linked to the FSB (Russian Intelligence) during the German Parliament attack

[http://www.lse.co.uk/AllNews.asp?code=kwdwehme&headline=Russ...](http://www.lse.co.uk/AllNews.asp?code=kwdwehme&headline=Russian_Hackers_Suspected_In_Cyberattack_On_German_Parliament)

<comment><USER12> okay, but the article didn't say that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _While it is an evolving situation, at present, we believe that access to ADAMS was obtained through spear phishing of email accounts; whereby, ADAMS passwords were obtained enabling access to ADAMS account information confined to the Rio 2016 Games._

It's amazing that people are still being phished successfully.

<comment><USER7> Why? It's the standard security imbalance. The attacker only has to be successful once while the defenders have to _never_ make a mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _"This is just the tip of the iceberg," a statement posted to the Fancy > Bears site said. "Today's sport is truly contaminated while the world is > unaware of the large number of American doping athletes."_

What's up with hackers and their English grammar? Shouldn't it be _doping American athletes_? This reminds of the adjective-word-order rule and Tolkien's "green great dragons" story. [1]

[1] [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27890](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=27890)

<comment><USER15> I'll wager their English is better than your Russian.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Has there been an increase in the number of large hacks originating from Russia in the last 12-24 months or is reporting just increasing?

</comment><comment><USER16> This is insanity...and whats worse, is Russian state-media are trying to say they were doping...theres NO doping on those charts.

<comment><USER17> As far as leaks go I find it interesting.

We see that athletes are allowed to take some very strong and beneficial drugs and its not doping.

I had always pictured that "clean" athletes were not eating OxyContin or required vast amounts of asthma medication to make it through the day. (This last part if from a different disclosure).

I think an adjustment to the current regiment would be that each athlete disclose exactly what type of drugs they are consuming.

What is doping and what is not is not arbitrary but it certainly changes over time.

<comment><USER18> Just like nearly any moral line, morals here are contingent. I think it is hardly necessary to point out the arbitrariness of which recreational drugs are illegal, with one of the most dangerous being legal and considered moral in moderation.

As far as sports drugs, I honestly don't care about it, not being someone who watches or participates in any of them. But I strongly suspect that we'll see the "ok"/"not ok" lines being drawn towards maximizing viewers, perhaps with a sop towards athlete-health down the list somewhere.

I also predict that conversations about doping will sometime soon indirectly put enough pressure on the US NFL to cause it serious problems about player brain injury. It is hard to worry about player health regarding drugs and ignore the people broken by other aspects of the games.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another question is why doping tests data paid by taxpayers of the World are not public? Why do we need for hackers (thanks a lot guys dependless on your nation, race, gender etc) to know the truth?

<comment><USER19> Lots of things are paid for with tax dollars that shouldn't be automatically public. Health care, school results - just because someone is an athlete doesn't mean they lose all right to privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why the hell US government, US media and pro-US organizations (ex. WADA) says that the Russian government was behind all hacking attacks in the last 6 month (maybe year or even more)? It sounds like a broken joke from 60s...

Yes, I'm Russian. Yes, I live in Russia. And Yes, I like my country.

<comment><USER21> Here's a description of Russian state sponsored trolling. It's worth a read, even though it's long.

[http://www.stratcomcoe.org/internet-trolling-hybrid- warfare-...](http://www.stratcomcoe.org/internet-trolling-hybrid-warfare-tool- case-latvia-0)

Especially page 60 onwards is useful.

<comment><USER20> I can give you my contacts or meet you anyway in the world, so you can be sure, that I'm not a troll, that was payed by Russian government. Just pay me for tickets. I'm just a simple family man, who works as a programmer and in less the one year I will post my startup here, at Hacker News :)</comment></comment></comment>


Unexpected Startup Lesson #1: Quitting the day job - <AUTHOR> http://www.currentlyobsessed.com/2010/05/10/unexpected-startup-lesson-1-quitting-the-day-job/

<comment><USER2> Something to keep in mind: the MBA wasn't intended for entrepreneurs...way back when it originally was created it was designed for major corporations, like GE and GM, who needed professional managers. Business schools and MBAs are designed to produce them.

I'm not going to say that an MBA is useless, but it serves a specific purpose...and that purpose is not to foster creativity and entrepreneurship.

Like Dave has suggested in the past, there's a need for some sort of EBA-- entrepreneur business school. Steve Blank also talks about this idea...his point of view is that the E-School (as opposed to B-School) should be attached to the engineering department (as opposed to the business department).

Here's a link to Steve Blank: [http://steveblank.com/2010/05/10/entrepreneurial- finishing-s...](http://steveblank.com/2010/05/10/entrepreneurial-finishing- school/)

<comment><USER3> We have an entrepreneur focused MBA school here in Austin called Acton MBA (<http://www.actonmba.org/>). I almost went there, but decided to go to the University of Texas for my MBA instead. I learned entrepreneurship from several killer professors: Rob Adams and John Doggett. I am an entrepreneur and always will be, and I learned a tremendous amount from my MBA. It wasn't anywhere near worthless. In fact, I think it was the opposite. I feel that I can do any job in the realm of business or technology in big or small companies. Just like an undergrad degree, an MBA provides options. If you know you want to be a programmer and have the discipline to read all the programming books on your own, then you don't need that undergrad CS degree. Same with MBA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post looks like a great example of networking :)

It looks like the blogger, the guy who posted the link (1 hour ago) and all the 8 commenters are based in the same town.(I also know that many of them know each other) Most of the commenters have karmas less than 25 and it is probably not unreasonable to assume that most of the 29 upvotes came from people who know these 8 commenters.

Nothing wrong with any of this, and no offense intended, but I often see posts asking how posts get to the front page. Well, for all of you, here is one example of how posts can get to the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a friend of Joe's and I read his blog so I posted this. I know some of the commenters - some of them were in the YCombinator program. If I knew you and you wrote a great post I'd probably be inclined to vote for you too and my comments might be a little more positive so that you're more likely to buy me a beer next time we run into each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I had a similar experience. No doubt, it's an expensive education, just a different kind.

If you set aside a $100k a year job to make nothing, you're "leasing-to-own" that equity and that education for $8,500 per month. Once you can pay yourself an insulting $50k salary, you're leasing it for $4,250.

Financially speaking, it's a helluva lot more painful than an MBA... But (for me) it was worth it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have to say this again, be careful with giving advice like this. To me, what should be encourage is people to think for themselves; just as you can figure out this start up game most other's can too. 41% of Entrepreneurs succeed on their first go; I think advice like this just taken as static algorithm for success without considering the context of your situation can be very detrimental.

<comment><USER7>
      > 41% of Entrepreneurs succeed on their first go;

That's awfully precise. Not 40%? Not 42%? What is the sample size? Where did you get the data?

<comment><USER8> That's the source: [http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheS...](http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheStudyOfEntrepreneurship/Anatomy%20of%20Entre%20071309_FINAL.pdf)

<comment><USER7> You claimed that 41% of Entrepreneurs succeed on their first go, and then quote the above link, but now you've got me very confused. The paper says that of those being surveyed, 41.4% were on their first business.

Interesting paper, but I don't think it supports your assertion.

For example, it may be that 100% of entrepreneurs succeed on their first go, but that 41% of those interviewed are on their first (of many yet to come).

On the other hand, it may be that all of these on their first business will fail, but potentially go on to succeed on subsequent attempts.

In short, that 41% doesn't at all say that 41% of entrepreneurs succeed on their first try.

Can you explain your thinking further?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Once a person has made the decision that they'd like to start a company, I only see one reason to consider an MBA, and that's the networking element. OK, a second could be to have a great support infrastructure during ideation, testing, development, etc.

But, the cost/benefit just isn't there, especially not for people who already have solid professional networks -- for those, they'd be much better off diving in with a good partner.

And, if things don't work out after 1-2 years, there's always the MBA option then, and you'd have so much more knowledge about how businesses work, and what makes you excited.

<comment><USER10> Great advice. Part of my decision to do the MBA was based on market timing...I applied just as the web 1.0 bubble was bursting. I hadn't considered much just doing a startup during the down economy, but that would have been a good time, and I know many others who did and it paid off big for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the ideas expressed in this article except it lacks specifics, examples etc. For instance, he says "about 4 to 5 months after quitting my job I was already ROI positive in terms of networking, learning and satisfaction." And he leaves it at that. He doesn't expand on how he networked, whether they're from school, social group or whatever. And it's short. No offence but I don't see how this article got this much upvotes

</comment><comment><USER12> Joe seems to be one of those hybrid hungry entrepreneur types that happens to have an MBA. I went through the same debate and decided to skip the MBA, but I have friends that went Joe's route and it can clearly work. So in the end, it's more about the person and whether they have the stuff and circumstances than any particular degree - at least imo.

</comment><comment><USER13> _Chewing on these types of questions was totally unproductive and made me feel shitty. I've come to realize that doing startups is mostly an irrational choice. Just effing do it._

Right on. I went through this same unproductive time and finally came to a similar understanding. Though I'd argue that instead of "irrational" I'd characterize it as "extremely risky". To many people in technology and business those are the same thing. Which leaves the rest of us to take on such irrational risks and occasionally succeed...

<comment><USER10> Right on! Good way to characterize it. If you are strafing from zero, the downside risk is low, relatively speaking....so might as well go for it. This is why (in my view) it is good to go for it when you're young and/or it is a bad economy,

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the MBA gets an overly bad rap these days, but looking forward to reading the next installment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the MBA in the post is just a story of "How I got into debt after some entrepreneurial education". It could have been "After my first 4 startups failed to go huge and I was in debt up to my eyeballs I decided to start another".

<comment><USER10> Yes, totally (that was my point). Not dissing the MBA -- it was also an amazing experience and investment / risk. My real point was about weighing the financial considerations of taking the startup plunge against the intangible benefits. There are many forms of "debt", from forgone salary, stress on one's marriage, sacrifices to personal health stemming from high sodium intake from top ramen, etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Ambient Computer Noise Leaks Your Encryption Keys - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2013/12/20/ambient-computer-noise-leaks-your-encryption-keys/ <comment><USER2> Substantial discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905) (tau.ac.il) (94 comments)

More discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948526) (schneier.com) (34 comments)

Other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940827](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6940827) (theregister.co.uk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6938536](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6938536) (dailymail.co.uk)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6935289) (tau.ac.il)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6933255) (slashdot.org)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932445](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932445) (slideshare.net)

</comment><comment><USER3> HN guidelines for submissions are to post the original source for a story, which is linked in the article. [http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/](http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~tromer/acoustic/) This has been posted efore with lots of discussion. [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927905)</comment>


The "Wash my Ferrari" Problem: A Meditation on Risk - <AUTHOR> http://theothereight.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/the-wash-my-ferrari-problem-a-meditation-on-risk/ <comment><USER2> I have seen two predominant forms of risks factored in by the larger incumbents waiting to be disrupted. One is, like the author puts it, the risk due to breakage. Be very mindful of this risk and insure against it if possible or change something to avoid/lower the risk (sorry, we don't wash Luxury cars).

The other risk factor is pure CYA. Nobody wants to prepare a costing worksheet for a customer quote where your cost is too low because you didn't factor in the various overheads. Only after the annual financial statements are made will you find out if you lost money on the product or not. Do you want to be the guy who buys at $10 and sells for $20 only to find out before bonus-time that overhead was $90 per unit? So you factor in the cost of capital, inventory hold charges, shipping delays, warehouse pallet transfer cost, foreign exchange currency buffer, and tons of other charges. This makes it appear that your cost is high and so it is only natural to charge more for the product. Boeing isn't going to sell an Arduino + LED light for $100. It will be $500 because of risk of breakage and be $5000 by the time all the CYA risks have been tacked on by six levels of middle-managers.

The wonderful thing about CYA risk factors is that they help justify your high prices and if you are able to be lean, they give you a terrific margin. THIS is what you want to disrupt. You can charge less than the incumbents because they are playing it way too safe as nobody wants to lose their neck for selling a product at a loss. But don't charge so low that risk of breakage ends your business. The good thing is that the risk of breakage is not as large as the CYA risks in most every costing sheet that I have seen. YMMV depending on the industry/product.

<comment><USER3> Just a side note for people like me: CYA is cover your ass.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I always thought it's 'cover your assets' but I was wondering about the 'a' all along ;).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting discussion on risk. Here's another consideration, you can self- insure to an extent by changing processes to minimize risks. If you must charge $10 to wash a Ferrari because your risk model says that it will cost you $5 in mistakes, use a different process to lower mistakes. Let's say that instead of the standard wash process you use for regular cars, you take extra time on the Ferrari, using your best washers and new materials. Now, the risk goes down from 1 in 2,000, your risk is 1 in 10,000. Now you can charge more for the special, risk-averse treatment and only a $1 risk surcharge on top of that.

Effective risk management doesn't just mean that you protect yourself against "bad things". The ability to manage risks better than your competitors is a competitive advantage. I heard it best described as the brakes on a sports car. Good brakes let you take corners faster.

<comment><USER6> Just a nitpick, 'cause it was on my mind. 5$ might have been that "different process to lower mistakes". I was wondering how it could still just be $5 to manage risk of damaging a ferarri, myself.

<comment><USER5> I'm having a difficult time parsing your comment. The $5 from the article was the cost of paying out $10,000 1 in 2000 times. If a different process costs $5 to implement, then they might as well accept the risk as is.

<comment><USER6> I was trying to say: "What if they've already reduced their risk as much as is reasonable, except for special cases that they see one day every three months: that Ferrari."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, great discussion on risk. The only thing I would add to the discussion is that before you try to model risk, you should read 'The Flaw of Averages', by Sam Savage - <http://flawofaverages.com/>

Put simply, any real risk model should probably avoid being a 'single number', but a range of probabilities. This models the distribution of possibilities much better and helps you make better decisions.

<comment><USER8> 'Fooled by Randomness' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is also a good book I frequently recommend to people trying to comprehend probability or randomness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I vaguely know somebody through work who is involved in high end legal services.

Around a year ago he hired a webdesigner to redesign his website, apparently the cost paid was around $20,000. Now bare in mind that this was for website design _only_ (logo etc already existed).

The website itself was a relatively bog standard wordpress setup with about 10 pages of copy, a basic WP template and a handful of stock art images, no custom code at all as far as I could tell; I could have done a better job myself over a weekend most likely.

After hearing about this price I was curious as to who had been lucky enough to get hired for such a contract, turns out it was a designer who had been referred to him by others in the legal business.

So the question is, has whoever did this found a goldmine of customers who are willing to pay such huge sums of money just because frankly $20K isn't a lot to these people.

Or was it more to do with the risk of providing services to somebody who specialises in suing the crap out of people?

<comment><USER5> From what I (think I) know about the web development business, I'm guessing it had more to due with the fact that this developer found a goldmine of customers. Then again, maybe the developer is very concerned about clients from hell so he can quote princely sums to clients he or she isn't sure are worth the hassle. I suppose that's still a measure of risk. Not risk that you will be sued, but risk that a demanding client will require special treatment and hand-holding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I realize that the post is making an analogy, but it's based on fact. I worked in a car shop for a few months, and we charged a premium for "exotic" cars - something like 2x the cost of normal service. The reason was entirely on the insurance costs for handling those customers' vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER11> I always figured this was one of the "grey" advantages startups have. For a very short time, a startup has so few assets that an entire class of risks exist that will simply put it out of business. When you're brand new, it doesn't matter if you damage a Honda or a Ferrari, either way, you're done. This gives you a slightly evil and transient advantage that let's you temporarily undercut the established players by just ignoring those risks altogether.

<comment><USER12> But couldn't knowledge of this fact by your potential customers make them wary of giving you much business, thus canceling out your advantage?

<comment><USER13> Yes and yes, but not necessarily. Customers do not have perfect information about the market, and especially not about the inner workings of your company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've seen this happen first hand. I joined a lean startup full of smart hackers building software in a fast-growing industry. It was great, and we made a load of money. Then problems started happening, and we blamed people: incompetent, tired, one-offs, whatever.

Then our customers started getting serious and regarded these events as unacceptable, just as they became statistically certain, and impossible to manage out. So costs have gone up, processes multiplies, checks increased. And now lean startups are nipping at our heels...

Think medicine.

</comment><comment><USER15> Last weekend, I was a little irritated when Southwest Airlines charged me an extra $5 to get a glass jar in my luggage bubble-wrapped when I would have preferred to save the $5 and take the risk of it breaking/leaking. The Southwest agent's explanation boiled down to more or less the same point as this article's. Kudos to her.

</comment><comment><USER16> When people talk about risk (and return) I always feel like there's something I'm missing, something I don't get. Can never quite put my finger on it.

I guess it's something to do with wilfully gambling vs. relying on your own abilities. They seem like very different things but somehow get classified together.

</comment><comment><USER17> This was a very good article. I have never thought about or considered looking at potential costs this way. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just curious, how much of this risk can be mitigated by contracts (terms of service) between the buyer and seller?

<comment><USER19> Agreed. I would be interested to hear thoughts on this as well. As an example, if Coca-Cola uploaded its secret formula to a Dropbox, the damages resulting from a data breach would seem to be immeasurable. But I'm sure Dropbox's TOS limits damages to cost of the service (no extraordinary, consequential, etc.) Is this amount what's at issue here, or is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER20> eh, yeah, but you need to set expectations. I mean, people that will lose thousands of dollars every minute you are down have... rather different hosting expectations from people that are making a thousand dollars a month.

I mean, which would you rather have, assuming they were paying you the same money (and using the same capital resources, e.g. both of them use a full low- power dedicated server that costs $1,200 up front in parts and $20/month in power. Both use about as much bandwidth.)

Customer A. who is hosting email, web and ftp for his family, and maybe has a dev setup so she can test out the new webapp she's developing.

or

Customer B. who is running a website with $10,000 per day worth of sales.

Assuming they both have my phone number and can wake me up at 4am and yell at me, I can tell you that I am going to want a lot more money to give customer B the same service as customer A, because first, customer A isn't going to call me at 4am very often, and if I do flub something up, I can give customer A a free month, an apology and an explanation of what happened, and she is going to think I'm okay.

Customer B? man, customer B is going to wake me up every time there is even a little networking blip. And if I screw it up? they are going to have reason to be really angry, and possibly sue me for a bunch of money. a free month is unlikely to mollify them.

(also note, insurance might cover the payout if I get sued, but they certainly won't cover the time and aggravation, even in the best case.)

So yeah, I can see how hosting customer B would be exciting, but I'd want a whole hell of a lot more money to deal with those increased expectations.

If we want to go to the car wash example, when I was driving my maxima with unrepaired body damage? my neighbour caved in the rear passenger door with her land rover. "Don't worry about it," I said, "You did not significantly lower the utility or value of my car." - I mean, the whole thing was probably worth about as much as the bumper on her land rover.

If she had done the same to the new M3 in the next space over? you can bet her insurance would be making it just perfect, for a price that could have bought my jalopy several times over.

That's the thing. Nobody reads the legal bullshit until the knives are fully out and the lawyers are at the table. When you think about it, it doesn't make sense to spend the effort until then. I mean, you're talking about thousands of dollars of effort to understand a contract, and that doesn't make any sense on a contract that is worth two hundred bucks. Setting expectations is an important part of avoiding the situation where the lawyers need to come out and understand the contracts.

(Of course, this is why most contracts are as one sided as legally possible; there is no advantage to giving quarter, as the counterparty won't really read it until the relationship has soured and they are actively hostile.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To the list of industries where there is a built in x10 on all quotes add Weddings...

<comment><USER22> But that is for a different reason... it's not increased pricing because of increased risk, it's increased pricing because of increased willingness to pay combined with a sense of "more costly must be more valuable".

<comment><USER23> I would think that risk could be a part of it (or at least risk mitigation)...

If I were a photagrapher, I would likely want to charge more for a wedding then say the engagement pictures (or other portraits) which have a similiar amount of effort. If I have a problem with a portrait I might need to call them back in to reshoot. If theres a problem with the wedding pictures I'm stuck.

The workaround is better preparation, more people, more equipment, etc. All this costs money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Mr. car washer. By your argument, McDonalds should charge twice as much for a big mac to fat people because they are more likely to get health problems and sue McDonalds.

I think this model is just wrong and charging any customers more due to profiling should not be practiced by any company. Assuming that your formula is correct. Don't raise the price because of the probability and risk. You should train your employees and improve your quality of service, so that the probability is low enough, now you charge back the same $5 for a fararri carwash.

<comment><USER25> _> > Mr. car washer. By your argument, McDonalds should charge twice as much for a big mac to fat people because they are more likely to get health problems and sue McDonalds._

No, The consequences of faulty equipment or service are fairly acute–i.e. someone dies or something is damaged _right away_. I think long-term consumer risks like obesity and lung cancer are different than what the author is referring to.

Also, most class actions suits against McDonalds have been thrown out [1]. Malpractice lawsuits and the like are very numerous, on the other hand.

* >> I think this model is just wrong and charging any customers more due to profiling should not be practiced by any company*

That's absurd. The entire insurance industry is based on this. As is any financial product that takes your credit score into account.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-27/mcdonald-s- obesity-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-27/mcdonald-s-obesity-case- judge-rejects-bid-for-group-suit-status.html)

<comment><USER24> The McDonalds was just an example. Your points about lawsuits to being thrown away against McDonald, is irrelevant. Whether people successfully sue McDs or not, is not the point, McDs should not charge more to certain people. Do you agree? Yes, the insurance industry do charge more depending on the person. But my point still remain, The model is Bad. Besides if you have a SET price, you should not change it because of probability or risk per person.

<comment><USER26> McDonalds can certainly refuse to sell to groups like lawyers if they have a persistent high cost from such a self-selecting group. I have no problem with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> garbage article

<comment><USER28> Garbage comment; garbage account.

<comment><USER29> The best thing you can do for comments like that (esp. when they're made by "green" accounts) is to just downvote and ignore. They'll be downvoted to grey, then deleted. The accounts will be hellbanned in time (comments autmotically deleted, posts only visible to poster). Replying only clutters the discussion.

<comment><USER28> Never heard of hellbanning, but I'll keep that in mind. Cheers

<comment><USER30> Hellbanning is precisely why I have showdead on. There have been some notable users (creators of products and various websites) whom they were hellbanned for no apparent reason. Having showdead on shows even them, however you still cannot comment to them directly.

I think I've only seen 2 or 3 spam posts on dead. And a few 'special people' whom are hellbanned. In a nutshell, the S/N does not get noticeably worse with showdead on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The price of a car wash should take into account the aggregate probability for _any_ car to get damaged. The idea that one would price discriminate via the exact make and model is absurd and when I stopped reading...

<comment><USER24> brandon, you are right. This article is just flawed.

<comment><USER31> Why am I getting downvoted for this? I am not making any commentary on price discrimination but instead, saying that the artificially created scenario could at least be more approachable for readers.

<comment><USER26> Because you said the article was 'wrong' and that you stopped reading, without actually doing anything to counter the point in the article.

That's a bad way to contribute to a discussion.

I didn't even realize your point was solely about the example. I thought you were objecting to the entire argument. Bad examples are more common than termites in a snowstorm and you should focus on the meat of the article.

<comment><USER31> I somewhat misspoke. I lost interest after when I read enough to deem the article too artificial an example and lost interest. I wanted to give honest feedback and see if other people perhaps thought the example was I contrived as I did - not berate the article or the author. If I was writing myself, I would want the same sort of feedback. Do you think I'm being unfair by giving that sort of criticism?

To me not finishing something is a measure of persistent captivation. It's not the first time I fell below my minimum. After I wrote the the comment, I figured people would harass me about not finishing and that perhaps I was being unfair to the author if I missed something redeeming at the end. I finished it, wished to change the comment appropriately, but it had already been downvoted. I should have known that it's very easy to look antagonistic when you're not saying something positive but I did say explicitly what I objected to. I really was just hoping to help by nature of sharing my opinion and was totally open - hopeful even - that someone would change my mind rather than just being looked upon as some asshole who just wanted to be holistically critical.

<comment><USER26> Well they can't change your mind if they don't know what it is. You never commented on the meat of the article, so someone downvoted because of that. It's easy to think of better examples, and the way to debate for learning as opposed to winning is to either ignore non-critical flaws in arguments or even fix them for your opponent.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shoes - <AUTHOR> http://shoesrb.com <comment><USER2> Navigating to the tutorials section, I discovered to my joy that _why was clearly involved in this in some way. The online book[1] is written by them in their inimitable style.

See also _why's other classic Ruby-related book, the Poignant Guide to Ruby[2].

[1]: [http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf](http://evc-cit.info/cit020/nks.pdf) [2]: [https://poignant.guide/](https://poignant.guide/)

<comment><USER3> I hadn't heard of shoes until I saw this post, but it looks really attractive for certain cases.

Thanks for mentioning the _why connection. I started reading WPGR years ago when another CS major showed it to me, but I had to quit because could tell I wouldn't be able to restrain myself from spending way too much time on it instead of my coursework. This was shortly after I decided to try Gentoo "real quick" the week before midterms...

Anyway, I never got around to trying ruby for one reason or another -- already use Python, didn't come up at work, some friends are ambivalent about Rails, etc.

So, is being decently competent in ruby still a good skill for a full stack/generalist type dev in 2020? (if there even is such a thing anymore) Is ruby just so cool that it's worth the opportunity cost not to miss out?

Or should I, metaphorically, just try not to screw around before midterms?

<comment><USER4> Ace your midterms and then build + (most importantly) ship side projects in whatever languages you want. Python and Ruby are both great choices, so go with whatever the jobs in your area use. I'm biased towards Ruby, personally, but the language you choose is less important than the projects you ship and can demo.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Years ago, I needed to parse and view custom logs from our proprietary app, and I needed to do it _now_ , so I cranked out a little Ruby script. But then I needed to share it with a non-programmer... so moments later, I slapped on a little Shoes GUI and it was good to go.

I believe the same tool is in use even now, over 10 years later.

Probably the fastest script-to-GUI iteration I've ever done, and a good showcase of Shoes' simplicity. (Although, the GTK gem is actually pretty easy to use as well, and my most recent conversions have been with GTK.)

<comment><USER6> Back when I used Ruby and was more of a beginner, I used to upgrade my projects' Ruby CLI scripts into little Shoes admin panels that I could launch and keep open during dev. Not only did I like seeing all the available commands as buttons, but I could add arbitrary visualizations and logic, like whether the local Redis server was running or what the queue depth of my background worker was or maybe some input fields for common tasks.

As a project matured, so would the admin panel. It could be really polished.

Ever since I stopped using Ruby, I never tried to find an alternative in other languages I was using, or they weren't as trivial as Shoes. I kinda miss it.

<comment><USER7> PySimpleGUI for Python, while stylistically very different than Shoes, is pretty similarly simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Way back when shoes was new, I used it and Hpricot to create a super simple web browser. Very fun, and also demonstrated to me a lot of the hidden perils of trying to make a web browser.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, this is a last from the past for me. Ruby and shoes were some of my earliest programming experiences. _why's book seemed like the most fascinating and wonderful weird creation, unlike any learning material I had come across. I've just fired up my 'space defenders' game, made 8 years ago, using the newest shoes version. It works! A pleasant surprise - I'd assumed this library died when _why went walkabout :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds of Tcl/Tk and its derivatives like Perl/Tk. Simple cross platform GUIs are really simple with these. Of course you wouldn't write a Browser or a Office Suit with it, but for many apps it should be enough. I never understood why it didn't gain more popularity.

<comment><USER11> If my recollection from the late 90s is to be trusted, tcl/tk was indeed very popular for a time, but gtk and qt came on the scene and quickly dominated as folks wanted their apps to share the look & feel of gnome or kde.

<comment><USER12> For the open source UI sector, yes. Tk also fell back in the support of widgets people knew from e.g. Windows. If I recall correctly, an editable combo box was only available through extensions. In those days, memory consumption was also an issue, where native apps just did better. That was also what brought down Mono/Gtk.

I think for quite a while, Tk was still a good option where its competition were things like Swing -- enterprise and engineering apps. Especially visualization, quick input dialogs for otherwise CLI apps etc.

Not that visible for regular users.

Tcl/Tk had its issues, and we probably would've been better off with something like Display Postscript, both as a language and display technology, but it was a very pragmatic solution for quite a while. I'd still say that a lot of ad- hoc UIs could probably be done faster with Tk than with some web framework.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There was a period where all the python scripts I needed a GUI for I slapped the GUI together in Adobe Flex and communicated with python over xml-rpc.

Those were the days,

</comment><comment><USER14> I might be missing some Ruby context here, but why does the tutorial show the {} syntax and later the do...end syntax like do...end is somehow better? (And then in the shoes4 repo it also shows do...end syntax as an example there).

Maybe I'm just used to {} but is do...end superior to most ruby devs?

<comment><USER15> I've always worked with the convention that {} is for single line blocks and do ... end for multi-line

<comment><USER16> I've also heard people discuss a convention where do end is used for side affecting code and {} is used for pure blocks.... but I've never seen anyone really stick to it so single-line vs multi-line is as good as anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is the fact that it's mature and stable for all uses the reason for it not being very actively worked on in the last few years?

</comment><comment><USER18> Oh, hey, this is neat, I can use my shoes stuff again.

</comment><comment><USER19> Being in ruby the name of the project must be related to this great talk from David Heinemeier Hansson [https://www.newpathconsulting.com/2012/05/dhh-on- the-secret-...](https://www.newpathconsulting.com/2012/05/dhh-on-the-secret- to-making-money-online.html)

<comment><USER20> First commit on [https://github.com/shoes/shoes- deprecated.git](https://github.com/shoes/shoes-deprecated.git) predates that by about a year. Might not be the first time he'd given that talk, of course, but I always thought of _why and DHH as being at totally different ends of the ruby community.

<comment><USER21> This would pretty much be true. While DHH's claim is to Rails, I wouldn't say he was really a Ruby community guy. Where _why was specifically about Ruby, and non-commercially aspiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The name's generic nature is going to make searching for it difficult.

<comment><USER23> "building gui with ruby" \- second search result in google for me. It's a lot more than just the name that goes into being discoverable and related to a topic/keywords/etc.

<comment><USER22> OK, but what if I don't want the main site, but other resources like examples and user troubleshooting of obscure issues?</comment></comment></comment>


Bootstrapper's paradox (Justin Jackson) - <AUTHOR> https://justinjackson.ca/bootstrap-reality/ <comment><AUTHOR> In this post, Justin reveals that the founding myth of Basecamp has had an important part of it left out --- that Jeff Bezos personally bought a small equity stake which made both DHH and Jason Fried millionaires.

This is what gave them the ability to say no to VC offers and continue to bootstrap their business.

Since Basecamp is one of the most famous bootstrapping stories, hearing the "entire story" is important.

Justin then did an excellent follow up discussion where he went into greater depth about these "omissions" in other bootstrapping stories on the TropicalMBA podcast:

[http://www.tropicalmba.com/costofbootstrapping/](http://www.tropicalmba.com/costofbootstrapping/)</comment>