Introduction To Online Payments - TL;DR: It's A Total Bitch - <AUTHOR> http://blog.meatinthesky.com/introduction-to-online-payments-tldr-its-a-to <comment><USER2> TL;DR indeed. it doesn't have to be that complicated.

i needed a credit card processor for corduroy (plug: <http://corduroysite.com/>) to process monthly subscription charges. i filled out a form (i think, it was 2 years ago) on braintree's website (<http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/>), they emailed me back some info, i filled out and faxed over their forms about my business and already- established checking account, they created my american express/discover/visa/mastercard merchant accounts for me, and i used activemerchant (<http://www.activemerchant.org/>) to talk to their gateway via my rails app. according to my email archive, i received the signup forms from them on april 14th and they emailed to confirm my first charge through their gateway on april 22nd.

i wrote some simple code to use activemerchant to process the monthly subscriptions from a cron job that submits a charge to braintree using the customer's vault id (the only thing stored locally, braintree actually stores the credit card and address information) and the subscription monies are deposited into my bank account the next day.

i get a monthly statement from braintree in addition to instant email receipts. i've had to change my bank account and address information once, which involved contacting braintree and american express/discover/visa/mastercard and was relatively painless.

i'm not sure what is so difficult that services like recurly are trying to make easier, but if the problem is lots of different points of contact, i'm not sure that another middleman is the answer. braintree stores and charges the credit cards, the credit card companies deposit the money into my local bank account. simple.

<comment><USER3> Ha, looks like Bryan owes you a beer for this ringing endorsement. :)

There are a number of reasons why it can be that complicated - doesn't always have to be, but I think you are the exception rather than the rule.

First, most people just don't have a basic understanding of how it all works. The idea that a merchant account isn't a bank account at all is non-obvious to everyone I've walked through payments hell with. Recurring billing, in particular, is a huge pain in the ass, especially with upgrades and downgrades that users do as they try to optimize their freemium subscriptions. (There wouldn't be at least four companies doing just this if it wasn't a total PITA.) If you're not built in Ruby, and you can't use ActiveMerchant, you really have to evaluate the documentation for each of the various gateways - and good luck finding out the names of all of them - before you can even begin. AmEx, in particular, is a whole 'nother circle of hell, although OnePoint solves a lot of these issues (but, of course, for a price).

Honest to God, I'm going to try to learn Ruby this summer purely because ActiveMerchant exists. My existing startup is coded in PHP with a dash of Perl and Python, but online billing is so complex and so tedious that _I'm learning a language that's not useful to my existing startup_ because payments are so hellacious.

<comment><USER4> Well, he may be the exception but it lines up with my experience (also Braintree). I think I've spent a grand total of 1 day on our billing system. We do threshold billing, monthly subscription, and one time payments. We use the Braintree vault and everything just sort of works.

I've done some work with various authorize.net resellers in the past with similar results. Really, understanding the magic that is interchange rates is the most difficult piece of the whole equation:)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, top story on HN. Thanks, folks! I wanted to call out a number of things I glossed over to see if it's worth doing a follow up or seventeen:

      * Personal guarantee.  Most merchant account providers require a personal guarantee.  I signed one for Dawdle.com, but I never would again, even if it costs me more.
      * Recurring billing.  There are a number of startups focused here, including Recurly, Chargify, Spreedly, and CheddarGetter.
      * PCI compliance.  The physical access tenet makes it technically impossible to be compliant if you're using any cloud hosting provider for e-commerce; in reality, almost no one is PCI compliant.
      * Gateways.  There are a bunch.  ActiveMerchant (Ruby gem open sourced by the good folks at Shopify) can do basic handshakes with most.  There isn't an AM equivalent for Python, PHP, or other common languages that I know of.
      * Processors.  First Data ostensibly processes 75% of credit cards in the U.S.  This is a more academic topic than the others, but it's terribly interesting if you want to understand why online payments are the clusterfuck they are.
      * Chargebacks.  You'll almost never win one.
      * AVS and CVV.  They protect you, but goddamn, are they expensive to process.  AVS can sometimes cost you a dime (or more!) every time you check a card - and it rarely works on non-U.S. addresses (and American Express often fucks up apartment addresses even within the U.S.).
      * Vaults versus reference transactions.  Reference transactions are an elegant way to handle credit card data, but they lock you into the gateway.  Vaults give you portability, but those providers are always more expensive than the ref tranx folks.

<comment><USER5> I think a follow up is a great idea

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What frustrates me is that it's just so expensive to get started... I know that it's "just the cost of doing business" but it really bothers me that you have to give away ≈%3 of your revenue to get paid.

Braintree claims that their pricing is very competitive. I don't doubt that it is, but being in business with them for a single year costs a minimum of $1659* (supposing you need recurring billing). That's a lot for someone who wants to get started charging for a small web app.

I've been really discouraged to get started because I know that as soon as I do I'll be paying high monthly fees that I'm not sure I'll be able to cover.

Thoughts?

*<http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing>

<comment><USER7> Use Paypal & E-junkie for your first few months and sell folks lifetime subscriptions to your service. $5 a month for e-junkie (not strictly necessary but it will save you a few hours of integration work), ~3% for Paypal.

After you've got a better handle on your market, have traction, and have passionate paying customers singing your praises, switch to a subscription billing provider and grandfather in the old users at free for life.

This assumes that you have nearly zero marginal cost per account, or a growth curve which can absorb the early adopters as a cost of doing business.

<comment><USER8> My only concern about this would be selling lifetime subscriptions for an embryonic service. What if it fails? This may be built into the terms, but it could also sour customers on your future offerings (or hurt your personal brand).

Otherwise, this seems like a good strategy for testing the waters with a new product.

<comment><USER9> My own view on "lifetime" anything is that I'm taking a gamble on whose lifetime is longer, and consider that when choosing that option. Ultimately, the amount I pay comes down to how long I think the company/product will last.

Anecdotal, I know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sachin - the online payments industry is indeed very complex. I'm impressed that you both took the time to write this up and did such a nice job. I would add a few things. (Disclosure: I'm with Braintree)

1) There is much more than meets the eye when choosing a merchant account provider, and not all are created equal (it's very true that few understand online payments). We will be first to say that providing merchant account services to online merchants is very challenging for a host of reasons. Because it's so complex and because there are so many moving parts, no one is immune to mistakes, misunderstandings, complex situations and difficult situations. With that said, the importance of choosing the right provider cannot be overstated. Merchants need to find a company they can trust because when stuff happens (i.e. account closure, reserves) you need someone in your corner that can help navigate. In our experience, merchants are most likely to make mistakes when solely focused on price.

2) I'm very pleased to see you call out data portability. We were the first in the industry to start raising the alarm bells about providers holding stored credit card data hostage. It's a huge issue with very serious implications. To address this problem, we created the Credit Card Data Portability Standard and invited all providers to participate (<http://bit.ly/a0i86v>).

We've been blogging about the industry for years now trying to help educate merchants. Here is are two resources to contribute to yours:

a) New to Payments - <http://bit.ly/cIY58t> b) Don't get duped. Use this checklist - <http://bit.ly/dliMpH>

<comment><USER11> Bryan,

Can you add an email to your profile, or shoot me one?

Really, it's good to have a human being reachable. I was at your site all morning, comparing you to Zuora, and this couldn't have come a better time.

<comment><USER10> firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure why so many of these guides seem to operate under the assumption that having the transaction happen on someone else's server (ie, traditional Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, etc.) is a _bad_ thing. I would think it'd be a _good_ thing. Google and Amazon in particular are well known and trusted brand names that most customers likely _already_ do some amount of business with.

I know that for my own online shopping, I'm _much_ more likely to purchase from a site that uses Google Checkout or Amazon payments than on that wants me to enter my CC information onto their own page. I figure Amazon _already_ has my CC info anyway, and Google is more likely to have sophisticated security measures than joe-random ecommerce site.

<comment><USER13> That's true from a rational perspective, but people aren't rational. They have expectations of a nice, consistent experience that doesn't bounce them from one service to another.

I'm working on a business-oriented startup that requires credit card transactions, and part of my desire to have payments on my own site is because of the signal it sends out that you have your stuff together.

<comment><USER14> Precisely it. Everyone knows _anyone_ can throw up a Paypal link, but to have the transaction go through on your site makes it feel more official. Sure, it's not completely rational, but people sometimes like it better (alternatively, some people will only pay through Paypal, but unfortunately I can't sell my merchandise through Paypal/Google/Amazon).

<comment><USER7> _to have the transaction go through on your site makes it feel more official_

You tech people keep forgetting that reading a URL bar requires superpowers. I guaranteed you, having suffered many customer support incidents because of this: many people cannot tell the difference between getting redirected to Google/Paypal and the site they were originally on. (For that matter, a huge portion of my customers don't understand that I am not Yahoo or Internet Explorer.)

<comment><USER15> I agree with noticing the URL change, but what's a lot more noticeable is when the look of your site changes. They're used to your site's look and feel. When you direct them to a different site, even if it sort of looks like the original site, it's a big speed bump in the flow. Makes you stop and think (hey, what's going on?!) and question if you're in the right place (did I click the wrong button?!). You may even get suspicious and leave. You'd probably feel the same if at a supermarket when it's time to take out the card and pay, within seconds the building changes, the cashier is no longer there, the door you came through is gone, the lightning is different, the people who surrounded you disappeared; only the colors sort of look the same...

<comment><USER16> In my experience, some level of similarity (colors) is all that really matters. People have no problem accepting that the shopping cart and check out experience might be a little different.

You may feel different about it but the average person doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you want another perspective on this, we have to answer these kinds of questions a trillion times a week at FreshBooks. We're posting a guide to help people get through it.

The most salient post is Part II, which helps people choose their gateways.

[http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/04/30/part-2-how-do- paym...](http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/04/30/part-2-how-do-payment- gateways-work-and-how-to-choose-one/)

Speaking as someone who frequently has to call into the payment gateways' customer support on behalf of our customers who have hit a brick wall, personally, I like to keep life easy. I recommend PayPal Standard if you're doing less than $2000-$5000 a month in transactions, and then Authorize.net or PayPal Payflow Pro.

<comment><USER18> How easy/painful would it be to switch from PayPal Standard to Authorize.Net or PayPal Payflow Pro, if the situation arises?

<comment><USER17> Moving from PayPal Standard to anything is pretty easy since for most people it's a very simple payment service.

The other gateways are more complex since you cannot migrate the credit cards, and if you have recurring profiles managed on the gateway, you will have a harder time moving as you'll have to convince your customers to punch in their credit card again.

<comment><USER19> >you'll have to convince your customers to punch in their credit card again.

Give them a free month, or 5 free GB, or what have you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We use PayPal Payments Pro. We do pretty solid volume with them, and have never had any holdbacks, or any problems at all. Our fraud is very low (if you steal a credit card, you aren't going to waste it on virtual coins in a Facebook game, you're going to buy things you can sell on eBay) which may be why.

The rate is a little high at our scale, but it's not quite to where it would be worth the developer man hours of switching yet, and I hear they'll give you a lower than published rate if you have enough volume and ask nicely.

</comment><comment><USER21> Suddenly the App Store doesn't seem so bad.

<comment><USER22> That's pretty poignant. We pay dearly for it, but the App Store and in-app purchasing is about as easy as processing payments can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to know if someone has pointers to a similar writeup but focussed on Europe rather than US. AFAIK neither Google Checkout nor Amazon Payments are available in Europe, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER24> You can't do a EU-wide guide easily, because you will need a merchant account at a bank in your country (and you typically can't use one from another country), and you will need a processor that can work with that bank (which will typically be a processor from the same country) and finally a provider that can work with that processor, again, mostly country-bound.

If you're in Denmark I can recommend <http://epay.dk> as a provider, their SSL relay solution + some AJAX allows you to make really nice payment interfaces that are completely branded and integrated, without the hassle of PCI compliance for your site.

(As processor we use <http://pbs.dk>, because, well, there's noone else really.)

If you're in Denmark for instance,

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the pointers, I should have mentioned that I'm in France so it looks like they're not available to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are two philosophies:

1\. Hire one provider, an expert, to handle everything for you - the merchant account, your billing logic (ex. recurring billing) and the payment gateway.

2\. Get the best in breed for each layer in the stack. The Chargify/Recurly/Cheddargetter set is working to be the best in class at handling billing logic. For most online services the billing logic is quite complicated (and gets increasingly complicated over time) and something that the majority of merchant account providers / gateways are not historically good at handling.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just use PayPal. I've been using them for years with zero problems. Their fees work out to be about the same as I'd pay for a merchant account, but without all the development hassle. There is also a new player on the block, <http://www.gunpal.com>, which I'm looking to add as an option just on principle -- they don't discriminate based on what you are selling or buying like PayPal does.

<comment><USER25> Paypal has a pretty high per-item fee of 0.30 / transaction and a reasonably low (and fixed!!) percentage fee of 2.2%-2.9%.

Therefore, if you have an abnormally large average transactions size OR get paid mostly by other businesses, with their business cards OR have an abnormally large share of amex transactions, paypal will be more appealing from a cost perspective than it otherwise would be.

At TransFS.com we include them in the auction results because the answer of how paypal compares in price is actually different depending on your situation.

<comment><USER27> According to this site, [http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/1027/a-comparison- of-3-al...](http://www.merchantaccountblog.com/1027/a-comparison- of-3-alternative-payment-methods) , which was linked from the original article, the Google and Amazon payment systems have the same fees as PayPal.

<comment><USER28> CheckVantage offers a cost effective solution for electronic checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> is there some new innovative way around this problem specifically for SaaS/ web apps that charge businesses? (Ecommerce, consumer purchases, and virtual currencies are different beasts).

\- Could we put together some type of invoicing system/coalition that lets users sign-up then pay by check? ie- you signup for a paid web service such as 37 signals/freshbooks/etc. _Agree to pay by check._ If payment isn't received within 15 days, the account is suspended. As a user, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't screw around with paying you since my data is important and continued access to the service. Businesses write checks all the time, especially for software purchases and services. This would pretty much eliminate the need for processing fees and all this crud. I don't know enough about ACH-debiting, but I believe there is no charge to do this. ie- you can do recurring payments on the bank account after one check is sent in.

Once again, this is only a suggestion for SaaS/business related apps.

<comment><USER25> Why not just do an ACH transaction? ACH is problematic because it is not very secure, but for subscription software can be a good solution since there is no cost of goods.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about the requirement that any code that touches CC payments has to be PCI compliant? Doesn't these leave only PayPal and Auth.NET as the only option for smaller players?

ref: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1314560>

<comment><USER31> If you use an API like Braintree's Transparent Redirect ( <http://bit.ly/d5wD4P> ) you can host the payment form on your site without touching any credit card data. That way you won't have to deal with the drawbacks of redirecting your customers to a third party hosted page. Disclosure: I work for Braintree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good article but could the site owner check their logic with using light grey text on a pure white background. The lack of contrast is killing my eyes... anyone else?

</comment><comment><USER29> This is where I see a pretty huge opportunity for facebook. Tie credit card to identity and offer a simple yet robust payment system.

<comment><USER33> The fact that I'm constantly getting friend requests from facebook accounts which are pretty transparently not real people does not reassure me about the idea of facebook doing identity verification with consequences.

As smartphones become ubiquitous, maybe we can go back to the cypherpunk idea of everyone having a public key.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you want to get into online payments with a lot less text, and a checklist of what you need, try my cheat sheet:

<http://jumpstartcc.com>

It even explains the different types of accounts, and how the whole shebang works - incl. Ruby and JavaScript code samples.

</comment><comment><USER35> OK guys, since it's a bitch, let's bitch about it, which will no doubt have the effect of attracting some bitchin' bitches.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you search for "-42" in Google? - <AUTHOR>

Prefixing keywords with a minus sign tells Google to exclude those words from the search. So how can you search for something that begins with a minus sign, like a negative number? <comment><USER2> Punctuation is generally ignored in searches (some exceptions: _, +, $ and # in limited contexts, e.g. "C++", "$1000000" and "F#"; the calculator; word separators, e.g. "a=b", "a/b", "a}b", etc.; Google Code Search)

[http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=134479) [http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...](http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861#exceptions)

</comment><comment><USER3> Also, how do you search for anything with punctuation? I frequently use Perl, which makes use of punctuation for functions, and am constantly frustrated on how you can't search Google for them. Try searching for "perl $!" and you won't get any pages referring to Perl's error handling function. Not even results referencing Perl code that uses it. Google just ignores it.

</comment><comment><USER4> C'mon...you've now gotta tell us why you were searching for "-42"...

</comment><comment><USER5> Similar question for command line options in unix. :)

<comment><USER6> In GNU tools at least (not sure if others follow this convention?), the option '--' indicates that subsequent parameters aren't to be interpreted as options. For example, this lets you cd into a directory named '-foo':

       cd -- -foo

<comment><USER7> This is a feature of GNU `getopt`, and I think it's supported by most BSD getopts. It's also recommended behavior by the SUS, see guideline 10: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/basedefs/xbd_chap12.html)

So it's not _mandated_ , but it's the behavior of nearly all modern UNIX systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> this reminds me of the worst band name of all-time: !!!

they're actually fairly popular for those that aren't familiar, but i can only imagine how many potential fans they've lost because you can't readily find their online presences.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm reasonably sure that Google doesn't index punctuation marks.

<comment><USER10> Actually, a big point of pride for Google in the early days was that you could search for "C++" and get relevant results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> do search for negative 42. spell the word out. if you are lucky then google will pick up the integer -42 as a synonym and search it too.

</comment><comment><USER12> search for minus 42.

</comment><comment><USER13> "-42"

<comment><USER6> That doesn't actually work, but for different reasons: Google drops the punctuation and just searches for "42".</comment></comment>


Show HN: A bash script to easily traverse directories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vecrios/TerminalDirectoryTraverser.git

<comment><USER2> Note, if you are using Bash, then the $CDPATH variable, already built in to Bash, will let you do everything your script provides.

<comment><AUTHOR> The CDPATH variable tends to be somewhat ambiguous, to me at least. Appreciate for your comment though!

<comment><USER2> The trick is you have to set it one level up from where you want the expansions to appear. So to allow "cd Downloads" to find /home/user/Downloads, you need to set CDPATH to /home/user

Now all directorys in /home/user/* become match points for "cd dirname".</comment></comment></comment>


The Origins of Tarot Cards - <AUTHOR> http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-surprising-origins-of-tarot-most-misunderstood-cards/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting, but especially so for me since through my Italian/Slovenian mother we were introduced to Briscola, a trick-taking card game which uses cards derived from these. The second image in the article is very reminiscent of those we still play with today.

Briscola is easy to play with a standard Western deck, just removing 8, 9 and 10 of each suit, though it loses some of the charm IMO.

Wikipedia page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briscola](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briscola)

Pictures of the cards here: [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=briscola&safe=off&es_sm=1...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=briscola&safe=off&es_sm=119&source=lnms&tbm=isch)

</comment><comment><USER3> So that sort of explains the new Unicode 7.0 characters "fool" and "trump-1" through "trump-21" as well as the existing "knight" playing-card characters. Wikipedia helps too.

'A Tarot deck corresponds in every particular with those called Tarocchi by writers of the 16th century. It consists of 56 numeral cards of four suits and 22 emblematic cards called atouts (trumps). Each suit consists of fourteen cards: ten "number" or "pip" cards, and four "court" cards, the Roi (King), Dame, (Queen), Chevalier (Knight), and Valet (Jack). Of the atouts, 21 are numbered from 1 to 21, and a non-numbered card called "Fou" ("Fool", also called "Mat" or "L'Excuse" in play) has various meanings depending on the particular Tarot variant being played...' [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot,_tarock_and_tarocchi_gam...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarot,_tarock_and_tarocchi_games)

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article for sure. Personally I get a lot of value out of Tarot because I love the flexibility of the concepts. Things like the hanged man, death, the falling tower, the hierophant - they all take on multiple meanings depending on the context. Not as a fortune-telling mechanism, of course, just as concepts, archetypes. You start recognizing empresses and pages of pentacles wherever you go because the ideas go so far back - long before Tarot was invented. Reading up on the fascinating ways of interpreting cards in light of other cards or information is a great way to spend an hour or two.</comment>


iPhone SDK And Restrictions: Some Of The Details Aren't Great. - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/07/iphone-sdk-some-of-the-details-arent-great/ <comment><USER2> Wow. Where is my 500 dollars going, exactly?

As a developer, for me this is a Dead End. Being able to work on something, go work on something else, and come back to the first task, was a key revolution in computing -- compare DOS to Windows.

What use is instant messaging if you have to sign off to use the browser?

What if I'm reading a document and then have to take a phone call? I'll have to re-open the document and find where I was!

I have a Sidekick 3, and one of its biggest benefits is that, not only can I do IMs while I browse and take notes, I can take a phone call, and my IM session is kept alive on a server, and I can still send and receive messages, and the state is all coalesced once I hang up the phone. _This_ is mobile computing.

I agree with jgrahamc: I'm sure we'll see interesting new applications that adapt to this environment.. I'm just not currently going to be one of them.

<comment><USER3> The built in applications also terminate you leave them, but no one notices (except for some browser apps where you can tell). The key is just restoring the user to the same place they were when they left. Word processors have been doing this for years. It isn't much code when you are in an MVC model already.

The part about not being able to run anything when you aren't the active program is more limiting. Clearly it is possible, mail gets received even when mail isn't the program, but that is Apple. I can see their point in restricting it, a single lazy coder can degrade the entire user experience and run down the batteries, but there is a class of programs that can't be built in this model.

If I want to write a system monitoring application to keep track of my important machines, that is easy and I can be very slick. But what if I want to be notified when there is an anomalous condition back at the server farm? If my app is running I can hold a connection and monitor it for incoming alerts, but if I'm not the running application I'm completely out of luck. I suppose the server side code could send me an email telling me to run the client, but that is a sad sad way of living.

I expect they will address this in the future. I can think of a couple ways...

1) Add a program to the sandbox that runs at startup but with brutal resource limits. Implement just the bare necessities of listening as efficiently as possible.

2) Make a remote notification manager of some sort. The server can make a remote call, the app runs a call handler briefly and then exits.

3) Do a cron-like operation where it looks at a crontab-like structure in the app's directory. Again, enforce brutal resource limits to keep lazy programmers from ruining the user experience.

All of these also have the problem of how to speak to the user during another program's session. A pop-up box is probably doable, you see those for carrier issues when away from AT&T and they work ok. The ability to play an audio message would be nice, especially if it ducked any existing audio.

<comment><USER4> Or Apple could have simply implemented something similar to the Service process used in Android. A service is scheduled and will run as long as resources (memory, battery, etc) are sufficient to keep the high priority processes (the UI currently visible, etc) running. If resources become low, Android can kill off Services as needed. And there you go, no degradation of user experience.

I am curious as to the _real_ reason why Apple neglected to implement a Service capability. The iPhone is effectively not multi-task capable and that is a monumental shortfall. I can only guess that they had too much to implement and didnt want to take the time (at least yet) to implement the service scheduling properly. Or I give equally likely probability that they simply dont want 3rd created applications to rival what Apple can make. They seem pretty anal about maintaining tight control over their walled garden.

<comment><USER2> I wonder what the reason is. Is Apple being extremely careful, as they're new to the phone market? Are they trying to avoid mistakes they made with the Newton (this is a wild guess because I'm not very familiar with the Newton)?

It may just be system resources -- either they're too limited, or Apple wants to make sure that the currently-running application (especially if the front application is playing a video) runs smoothly

Another reason may be battery life: Maybe if there's more than one app running - especially if one of them is playing music or video, and one is using the internet - the battery drains very quickly.

I can say that on my Sidekick 3, your application can do whatever you want: constantly read off of sockets, use a bunch of CPU -- but before your application can be downloaded by users, it has to be approved by Danger (and probably T-Mobile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> A few other interesting restrictions, which users will probably appreciate:

Applications MUST comply with the Human Interface Guidelines.

Any image or audio capture must clearly indicate when it is in use.

Anything which transfers information out of the iPhone must provide notice, get consent, and comply with all applicable privacy laws.

You may not use the location services to spy on users without their consent.

</comment><comment><USER5> Since Apple's trying to sell a zillion phones, they'd rather hear complaints like "I can't run multiple apps at once" than "How come my iPhone keeps getting slower and slower every time I open a program."

Remember the iPhone is technical enough for a geek, simple and pretty enough for your grandma, teenagers, MBAs, etc

</comment><comment><USER6> True enough, but I'm sure we'll still see interesting applications that don't need to break these restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't see these restrictions as a huge problem. Having one app running allows the app to use the full resources.

The key will be the handoffs between apps, so that you can start back where you left off and things like that.

</comment><comment><USER8> I lack a mac and so, I can't use the iPhone SDK.

And not being able to run anything in the background, means that my application wouldn't work well at all on the iPhone.

I guess it's Android for me.</comment>


Light - If you view the Earth from far enough away can you observe its past? - <AUTHOR> http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/11940/if-you-view-the-earth-from-far-enough-away-can-you-observe-its-past <comment><USER2> On a related note:

A 3GHz computer (ignoring multi-core, hyperthreading, other issues) executes 3 instructions every nanosecond. Light travels 1 foot per nanosecond. Your head is about 2 feet from your monitor. In the time it takes the light from this post on your monitor to reach your eye, your computer performs 6 instructions. Scale as appropriate.

When I first realized that, I wandered around in a slight daze thinking "wow, light is slow..."

<comment><USER3> Did not know this, love it and am also amazed that all of us are alive right now in an era where humans are dabbling with technology that is starting to ram right up against (perceived?) physical limitations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I remember thinking of this one time as a teenager. Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays. It makes perfectly good sense that if you _could_ travel faster than the speed of light you could use a massive telescope to peer back at the earth and see it's past geological events -- and I mean millions of years even, not just something trivial -- or given a strong enough telescope perhaps more detail could be seen. All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe.

<comment><USER5> _All of the information that left the earth as light is still out there, all over the universe._

A very poetic point of view. :)

As others mentioned in the thread, you don't necessarily travel yourself. If you had a mirror far enough away, you could look into the past as well.

<comment><USER6> Right, but the mirror would have to have been placed at least as far back as the half way point to where you want to see. If you want to see back two million years, you would have had to place the mirror one million years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There must be a calculable limit to the size of the event that you can see at a given distance. There are finite number of photons which are emitted from an event, these spread out with the inverse square law, so as your distance increases the probability of collecting sufficient photos to reconstruct an image of the event decreases and I would think at a distance of one lightyear it would be guess hard to see something much dimmer than an atom bomb.

<comment><USER8> But light travels as a wave, and my humble (and possibly mistaken) understanding (or conjecture) is that photons are nothing but particle-like manifestations of whatever thing light is "really" made of.

Waves travel in all directions, they get weaker over long distances, but it's not as though some photon particles reach us while others don't. (or is it?)

I mean, if light is just photon particles, then we'd have to be really lucky to see that many starts that are billions of light years away.

Of course, I could be totally wrong!

<comment><USER9> Light travels as both a wave and as particles. Whether you observe light to behave as mostly particle-like or mostly wave-like depends on the circumstances. When you are dealing with very small intensities, you usually observe mostly particle-like behavior (but wave-like behavior still shows up in things like self-interference as demonstrated by the two-slit experiment).

If you think that it's unlikely for a photon from a distant star to reach us, then you are simply vastly underestimating the number of photons involved. Consider by analogy the process of smelling something: actual molecules need to fly off the object, travel through the air, and impact your nasal passages in order for you to smell it. That means that anything you smell is constantly dispersing its mass into the atmosphere, but an object can remain pungent for a long time without significant weight loss. Photons are vastly more numerous than olfactory molecules, and carry incredibly small amounts of energy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One pottential difficulty in achieving this in practice would be that the amount of information (photons) available to measure would rapidly attenuate with distance, so you'd need to mitigate this by building larger and/or more sensitive detectors.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fascinating question and fantastic answer.

That being said, as Edgar added to Vintage's answer, if you put a mirror 13.5 light years away, and watched your reflection from earth, that would be the same as being 27 light years away.

So if I doubled the number of mirrors (2 in orbit, 2 on earth) and halved the distance to 6.75 light years I could accomplish the same thing.

If you take that example to it's conclusion, could I construct an (expensive/complicated/etc.) device here on earth that had so many mirrors it could let me look into the past at all?

The physics-answer seems "yes" so my question is "Why haven't we tried that?" and one obvious limitation, I suppose, would be just how many mirrors you would need.

Light travels 5,878,499,562,554 miles (5.78 trillion) a year[1].

Given that, if I just wanted to see an hour into the past, I think that means I would need to observe earth from: 5,878,499,562,554 / 365 days / 24 hours = 671,061,594 miles away.

Or I could stick a mirror in space 335,530,797 miles away (~ 540,000,000 km) from earth and stare at it.

Mars, at the widest distance from Earth, is 401,000,000 km away[2], which is close enough for my purposes (I'm not picky)... so I guess if I stuck a mirror on Mars and looked at the reflection of earth I could see something like 45 minutes in the past.

The Moon is almost exactly 1000x closer to the earth than Mars[3], so I wonder if I used it for my mirror array instead if I could just put a station with 500 mirrors on it to accomplish the same thing.

Or build something on earth with millions of mirrors in it to accomplish the same thing.

I would normally think something like this impossible, but I just watched a docu on the LHC and now I wonder if even at a micro-second scale, if we have tried building something like this and observed two points in space using a computer and seeing if the visual data coming in is micro-seconds apart from each other?

For example (assume I have a camera and visual-diff software sufficient for this and that my "mirrors" have sufficient magnification capabilities to make this seem like an easy setup), if I pointed one camera at a monitor drawing a unique pattern 2' away from me, then point another camera at a mirror that has bounced the image 10 miles before being displayed... I imagine, like sound, there would be a lag in that image if we bounced it enough times.

(DOH)

It suddenly dawns on me that using this method to look into the past is effectively the same thing as recording something with a video camera and playing it back later... you are literally capturing the light for review at a later date.

So as cool as this idea is, I think I just answered my own question as to why we haven't tried to build a million-mirror-array before... cause I can buy a video camera for $300 instead :)

[1] [http://www.universetoday.com/45047/how-far-does-light- travel...](http://www.universetoday.com/45047/how-far-does-light-travel-in-a- year/)

[2] [http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to- ma...](http://www.universetoday.com/14824/distance-from-earth-to-mars/)

[3] [http://www.enotes.com/science-fact-finder/space/how-far- moon...](http://www.enotes.com/science-fact-finder/space/how-far-moon-from- earth)

<comment><USER11> Since you'd need to put all this stuff in place before the event you want to see actually occurs, wouldn't it be easier to just break out a video camera and record it?

<comment><USER3> hugh3, you are exactly right. I updated the original post as I was thinking through how this amazing physics experiment could be helpful, and it dawned on me, it wasn't.

I could just use my Canon to accomplish the same thing.

I think my brain was more caught up in the fun of walking through the thought than accomplishing something with it.

<comment><USER12> Even so, I think it would be fascinating to interact with a device that consisted of mirrors, even if was just to experience a delay of a millisecond (or whatever is the minimum amount of time to perceive a delay).

<comment><USER13> You can slow down light <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/655518.stm> and see the past!

<comment><USER12> Exactly. I think it'd be incredibly cool to walk in front of a thin transparent wall with this property, run around to the other side and see yourself walk along it.

I wonder if you could information in this fashion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What? Nobody has mentioned a worm hole yet? Screw mirrors to cut the distance needed in half (although requiring the same amount of time).

How about this:

Step 1) open up a worm hole at a point along the path of light emanating from Florida on June 16th, 2008. 2) install a video camera with a giant lens around the same point pointing back at us 3) send the wireless ;) signal back through the worm hole. 4) Determine if the Anthony jury is a bunch of idiots or not.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is something I have always wondered about.

Can the reverse be true too? i.e. if you are on the moon and can see what happens 1000km away, before someone else on earth 2000km away from that event, is that the future? Is that possible?

Can that then be extended to 27 lightyears into the future too?

<comment><USER16> I think it is relative. Your argument considers time as a non relative entity and the past and present as static points in a timeline. So the same "event" is one man's past and one man's future. It depends on your space coordinates from the coordinates of the even if this is your past or present or how back in past.

Disclaimer: This is deduced logic and not scientific information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Somewhat of a tangent, but the exploitation of this very phenomenon is one of the things that endears the book "Battlefield Earth" to me. Despite whatever other issues the author had, he wrote a darned good science fiction book.

<comment><USER12> I've never read Battlefield Earth, but I found The Forever War to be a really interesting view on the effects that relativity would have on light-year-scale war (and the expansion of the human race).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> We definitively can, but there is an issue: The light can be absorbed by some substance or refracted. How do you account for that?

You can account for that by recording every atom/photon on the space and then using some kind of miraculous processing power, to calculate how everything goes and estimate/verify the past actions.

For the processing ability, certainly some day we'll get there. For the possibility of getting the coordination/nature of any atom/photon in the whole space, this will need a discovery of something faster (way too much or may be instantaneous) than the speed of light that gives us the ability to recognize particles.

This is not amazing. This is sick. We'll be able to watch Pharaohs with an infinite precision. See how the earth was billions of years ago and how life evolved.

<comment><USER19> You want to record / analyze every atom in the universe with a machine that exists within the universe?

<comment><USER20> Just for fun... it might not be impossible:

You can reduce R^2 to {x | 0<=x<=1}[1] and thus, by induction, we can reduce R^n to {x | 0<=x<=1} for any integer n.

If I remember correctly, there are about 10^80 particles. The position of each particle is a point in R^3 so the position of all particles is R^(3*10^80). So, the position of every particle could be stored by the position of a particle on a 1 meter (foot, inch, whatever) long stick.

Of course, you run into problems if space is discrete or, in any event, with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle but you can still store a lot of information with each particle.

Horribly impractical of course, but like I said, just for fun...

[1]<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/infapp.htm>

<comment><USER21> Your argument from cardinality of sets is not relevant -- current state of knowledge of nature of the universe prohibits building a device which carries on with computation using real numbers. See Bekenstein bound.

Actually, if we could perform computations using real numbers (think of it as we're back using analog computers and the universe is continuous again and not discrete/quantum), we would for instance be able to solve NP-complete (also #P-complete) problems in polynomial time.

Anyway, the rest of your argument is what philosophers were arguing about two, three and even four hundreds years ago. See Wikipedia pages for "Determinism" or "Mechanism".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> one of the commenters: "the question seems to lead to the idea that traveling faster than the speed of light == traveling backwards in time"

It's just a point of language, but that's silly. Seeing a video of France is very different from traveling to France, so one would imagine that seeing the past would not be described as "traveling" backwards in time.

edit: although, you may think about going faster than the speed of light as traveling backwards in time because of the "effects" of time dilation when your speed is > c

<comment><USER9> Faster than light travel isn't classical time travel, until you turn around. If you only travel away from Earth FTL, then that doesn't automatically produce nasty paradoxes. However, if instead of sticking around to see all the light pass you by, you just turn around and head back to Earth, again FTL, then you can arrive before you left, and cause all sorts of trouble.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Strictly speaking, everything we see happened in the past :)

<comment><USER24> err.. the first sentence of the link:

      From my understanding of light, you are always
      looking into the past based on how much time
      it takes the light to reach you from what you
      are observing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> We cannot even resolve the lunar lander site on the moon with Hubble.

How the heck exactly are you going to take advantage of that distance or mirrors?

</comment><comment><USER26> Or, you can videotape yourself and then watch the past whenever you want.

</comment><comment><USER27> The question has been protected on stackoverflow, so answering here. Yes a mirror 13.5 light years away can do the trick. But there is some fundamental lack of understanding regarding relativity that has lead to such a question. In fact, the top answer is incorrect on several levels.

1\. Technically the only way a person can travel 27 light years in 27 years is by travelling through out at the speed of light. Ignoring the infinite amount of energy required for such travel, there is another aspect of such travel that is not being considered. Time Dilation. So assuming you were born and take off at the speed of light. Yes you will be able to observe your birth on earth 27 years later, but you would still be a baby and not 27 years old. Time would have been effectively frozen for you as you traveled.

2\. The top answer says that you are always viewing and hearing the past. You are hearing the past, but you are actually viewing the present. The light radiating out of an event you are observing are also causality horizons. In your reference frame you are observing past events depending on the distance. However thanks to relativity and Lorentz contraction, there are reference frames where the distance between you and the event can be arbitrarily close to zero, effectively making the events simultaneous i.e. when you see an event you are effectively watching it as it happens simultaneously, you are not watching the past. This is also an alternative explanation for 1. i.e. the baby cannot grow older if you put it 27 light years away in 27 years time. It will be able to watch its birth, because its only just been born.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_diagram>

</comment><comment><USER28> If you could figure out a way to invert all the constants and principles in the universe, then we could relive our past, in reverse. tea cup fragments on the floor would assemble into a teacup then accelerate up into the air and then sit on the table. The universe would play out, right back to it's formative moments. Then you could watch yourself being born, though you would have to wait years for it to render.

<comment><USER29> I don't understand the physics but I do believe Stephen Hawking disproved this[1]; he said that after entertaining the idea that as the universe contracts time might reverse he concluded later this was wrong.

[1] A Brief History of Time (the documentary film)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if there is research into gravitational lenses or other possible sources of naturally occuring space mirrors or lenses that we could use to collect light rays from the earth's past, maybe to detect its spectral content.

<comment><USER11> There isn't any research, but only cuz it's damn impossible. The number of photons ever emitted by Earth in the distant past which are gonna ever come back to Earth is... very very small.

<comment><USER30> Yet, since there are not many similar atmospheres in the region, if there were any backscattered radiation it wouldn't be impossible to detect.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Battle Hack - <AUTHOR> http://battlehack.org/news/2013/05/31/introducing-battle-hack/ <comment><USER2> 'We have a tradition at PayPal of supporting hackers' Yepp, just like you've given the deserved prize to this teen <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5779719> when he found a serious bug in your site.

<comment><USER3> That's a way to recover PR I would guess :)

<comment><USER4> A better way would be to make good on your promise and fix the mistake, not pretend it didn't happen.

Although, in real life, for the majority of people... maybe the opposite is true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like a fun idea to start, but it's being pitched so badly given paypal's history and the site is actually shockingly bad. The major branding is Twitter's! The links don't work! The design is horrible! It's hosted on Github!

This seems to be some muddle of an organization that previously organized something called Charity Hack and Paypals dev evangelists, probably why the whole message is coming across so jarringly at odds with the reality of developing with paypal.

At first I thought they had a cool, if out-dated, easter egg, but they seem to have lifted the code without any credit:

(enter the konami code or open your console and enter goApeshit(), warning, loud)

<http://battlehack.org/javascript/ie5.js>

<https://github.com/moovweb/harlem_shaker>

</comment><comment><USER6> The Twitter logo at the top left is very disconcerting. It looks as if the website was made by Twitter, but it only points to the BattleHack Twitter account.

</comment><comment> acheron-fossae Who cares about a trip to Silicon Valley and $100,000 USD - I'm after the shiny axe!

<comment><USER7> So are we. Imagine how I feel having to give that thing to the winning team instead of being able to keep it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> No southern hemisphere city? :(

Why we down here are always forgotten?

<comment><USER9> Annoying, isn't it? Google has offices in multiple southern hemispheric cities -- still no "Summer of Code" for _half of the planet_.

I should however single out AWS. Amazon have two sales engineers here in Perth.

Perth, of all places! Kudos, Amazon.

<comment><USER10> _Perth, of all places!_

How far the legendary galactic center of .sigs must have fallen, if even its own residents disparage it so!

<http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/#perth>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to do Perth. Good tech scene there?

<comment><USER9> Small but enthusiastic. We have a sprinkling of tech service / consulting firms and startups, two VCs and some meetup groups, but that's about it.

Realistically, any such contest held in the Southern hemisphere would be held in Sydney, maybe Auckland or Wellington and maybe, _maybe_ , Cape Town.

<comment><AUTHOR> Again would love to do it. Will keep it in mind for next year. I mainly was wondering re Perth as I have family there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wufoo held an API contest in August 2010. First prize won a battle axe. [http://www.wufoo.com/2010/08/02/win-a-real-battle-axe-in- the...](http://www.wufoo.com/2010/08/02/win-a-real-battle-axe-in-the-wufoo- api-contest/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Try to bring that battle axe on the plane after you win...

</comment><comment><USER13> Good luck flying home with that trophy!

<comment><USER14> They thought of that:

> Yep, it's an axe trophy.

> Good luck clearing airport security

<http://battlehack.org/berlin/#prizes>

Just didn't have a solution obviously ;)

<comment><USER15> Don't check in your ax, at least not with United. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Breaks_Guitars>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "We have a tradition at PayPal of supporting hackers. " Really?

<comment><USER17> Just make sure you are at least 18 years old... [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2039940/paypal-denies- teenage...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2039940/paypal-denies-teenager- reward-for-finding-website-bug.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The comments on the page are pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER19> "world series"

</comment><comment><USER20> that's quite the axe-tropy.

What a cat-axe-tropy.</comment>


Chromium OS - Digging deeper into the open source Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Chromium-OS-Digging-deeper-into-the-open-source-Chrome-OS-866031.html

<comment><USER2> if you've loaded the USB or VM version of ChromeOS, hitting Ctrl+Alt+T will get you to the terminal.</comment>


Fibonacci Numbers in the Real World - <AUTHOR> http://lee-phillips.org/lispmath/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting, thanks for writing it! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, and thanks for reading.</comment></comment>


Flight Track 5 was just killed by Expedia - <AUTHOR> https://www.mobiata.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure if others use this, but I loved this app and recommended it to all my friends. I have every flight I've ever taken in here since 2015. It was awesome because it worked really nicely with my Apple Watch. It's always a shame when great products like this get killed off. I'd be curious to hear about why from a founder or employee if possible!</comment>


Designing Twilight Struggle, the top-ranked board game - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/designing-the-best-board-game-on-the-planet/ <comment><USER2> I like Twilight Struggle a great deal, but I find its top BGG ranking somewhat odd.

I'd wager there's a sort of selection effect: the sort of person willing to sit down for a 2 player game in the first place is probably the sort of hard- core gamer who enjoys highly complex brainburners, and thus is more likely to rate it highly.

Compare that to the sort of moderate/casual boardgamer who prefers something along the lines of 7 Wonders. The former will play 7 Wonders and (may) give it a mediocre rating, while the latter aren't even going to try TS. Just a theory.

And for the record, the last time I played, TS took 5 hours, but neither of us were fluent and were thus often consulting the rules and/or stuck in analysis paralysis.

<comment><USER3> [http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nicodv/bgg/blob/master/BG...](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/nicodv/bgg/blob/master/BGG%20Top%201000%20Reanalyzed.ipynb)

Spoiler: Twilight Struggle still #1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried playing this game but I really didn't like it. I found it way too long and complicated. We never actually finished a game. I much prefer <1 hour games.

So sad, since there are so few great two player games. I was really hoping this would be one of them.

<comment><USER5> For a great two-player game, obligatory plug for Netrunner: information asymmetry and mind-games in a Gibsonesque cyberpunk setting.

<comment><USER6> Huuuuuuge plus one here. Netrunner is such a good game. They could really work on their templating, though, but that's Fantasy Flight...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of you who haven't seen the Tabletop series [1] yet, it's a fun way to get a feel for the many shorter board games out there. Previous seasons had shows on Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Catan, and King of Tokyo mentioned in the article.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSl...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7atuZxmT954wz47aofSlvu0zbD4YuPOF)

</comment><comment><USER8> As a major Twilight Struggle fan I urge any newbies to check out: [http://twilightstrategy.com/](http://twilightstrategy.com/)!

(I am not affiliated with twilightstrategy.com in any way)

<comment><USER9> Twilight Strategy is fantastic. I made something to better navigate the card strategy pages (hyperlinks between cards):

[http://twistrug.jjt.io/#/cards](http://twistrug.jjt.io/#/cards)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am dismayed that Connect Four has a below-average rating. Still a great game in my book ... I burned many hours in Thailand playing this on the beach, Beer Chang in hand.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't be surprised if it were ultimately related to the fact that it's a solved game. Programs exist which provably never lose. So the strategy is known, there are (in principle, anyway) no "hard choices" that many of the higher-ranked games have.

<comment><USER12> Yes, it's become a poster child for "bad game" and so it's rated worse than it deserves and lower than games that are (i my opinion) worse because so many people have heard that it's solved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a computer game and not a board game, but I'm surprised that "Balance of Power" wasn't mentioned as a predecessor.

<comment><USER14> It started as a board game. The digital port is very recent.

<comment><USER15> There was a Balance of Power - geopolitical game in the 80's. It was all about influencing various countries, nudging them left or right. Then there would be an impasse and the missiles would start flying. It didn't seem like much of a game to me.

<comment><USER16> Chris Crawford created the game. On the Mac, it was really a great game for the time (1985), and I'm not sure I ever managed to win. (Blowing up the world or losing to the Soviet Union tended to be much more likely outcomes given my incompetence at playing brinksmanship.)

I liked it because it was probably the first turn-based game I played that really made great use of Mac graphics featuring great interactive maps and mock newspaper headlines summarizing the reaction to actions, along with a frustratingly tough AI opponent.

Crawford was of an era where the interesting games were much more about teaching and conveying the designer's worldview, and less about creating Skinner boxes for maximizing IAP or expansion pack sales, or franchises.

The reason the missiles would always fly had a lot to do with the fact that as a player, you had to really view it not as a confrontational game, but as a cooperative game (with the AI) where mutually assured survival meant concessions were more important than aggression. This is pretty much antithetical to the conditioning in every other game of playing to win.

Some good history on the game here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_(video_game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_Power_\(video_game\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _Two-player games are attractive for a couple of reasons. First, by definition, half the players win. People like winning, and are likely to replay and rate highly a game they think they have a chance to win. Also, with just one opponent, there is little downtime. You don't have to wait while the turn gets passed around the table to three, four or five other players. That's boring._

I can give some insight into why 2-player games are popular. (ETA: when I wrote this, I missed that 3-player games do slightly better.)

I'm a guy who engineered (optimized?) the fuck out of a 4-player card game (to minimize card-luck in a trick-taking game) called _Ambition_ : [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhHZh5IEKBDf56ExgErv4o/edit)

I succeeded in the design challenge, and I think it's a damn good game, but the game hasn't caught on and player-number (or, for math people, player _arity_ ) is almost certainly the biggest culprit. It takes _exactly_ 4\. (There's a 3-player variant, but it's not as fun and I'd rather just play a game designed for 3, like _Skat_.) The reason I bring this up is that I have insight into what 2-player games do so well. It's cultural. A 2-player game (or a 2-party game, like Bridge which has 2 teams of two players) is a showdown and it's _decisive_. It develops a "mind sport" culture. There's less of a feeling of decisivity in a 3- or 4-player game because you can't always separate "A outplayed B and C" from "B played best but C's mistakes unintentionally advantaged A over B and A won".

Game outcomes generally have four components: Chance, skill, strategic interaction, and flux. Flux is minute-by-minute engagement in the game (which can be modeled as a fluctuation in skill). Skill and flux are what we care about. The "strategic interaction" term might seem odd, because "strategy" and "skill" are often used interchangeably, but it actually refers to the scenario in 3+ party games where A, seeking his own strategic goals, unintentionally advantages B over C. This is sometimes called "strategic luck". (Or, it can devolve into a king-maker scenario. Or it can become an influence of table position, as in _Puerto Rico_ , that some dislike. Or it can be made a part of the game, as in _Diplomacy_ , where people pre-arrange interaction effects-- but might defect.) It's inevitable if you have more than 2 parties. And it makes it easy for people to feel "screwed", just as chance does, so while you can have that element and still have a good game (just as I'd argue that random chance doesn't make a game "bad", even if the Euro aesthetic eschews it) you're not likely to develop the "mind sport" culture of _Go_ , _Chess_ , or _Bridge_ if that's the case.

I don't know for sure if this explains 2-player games getting higher ratings, but 2-player games and variable-player games (like Texas Hold 'em, which accommodates varying player number better than, say, a highly-engineered trick-taking game) do the best job of catching on and developing a reputation. A 2-player game is a showdown and a variarity game accommodates a group of unplanned size; exactly 3, 4, or 5 limits the audience and "catch on" speed.

<comment><USER18> A 2-person game also is also just a good match with the fact that there are probably a lot more situations where 2 people want to play a game with each other than there are situations where a group is available to play. (Depends on the environment of course--school or a social gathering vs. a couple or a couple of friends--but I suspect 2-player opportunities are a lot more common in general.) That doesn't directly explain the high ratings for 2 person games given that 3 is even higher but I suspect it's one reason that higher player counts tend to have lower ratings.

<comment><USER19> This holds double for deep or complicated games. Trying to find 3 ASL players will be hard outside of a convention.</comment></comment></comment>


How to Build an Income Sharing Agreement Product - <AUTHOR> https://www.moderntreasury.com/journal/how-to-build-an-income-sharing-agreement-product <comment><USER2> Is it just me or does it seem like we're now one step closer to turning people into companies with shares that can be bought and sold? It feels like a small step from ISAs for education funding to ISAs for all kinds of funding instead of traditional loan agreements and at that point you might as well sell shares of yourself to the highest bidder so they can trade your future income on a secondary market. (Note this is reminiscent of some aspects of the novel _The Unincorporated Man_ ).

<comment><USER3> Which leads us back closer to the ugly reality of people owning other people. ISA used to stand for Indentured Servitude Agreement.

(Not saying Incoming Sharing Agreements's are bad, we just have to be careful...)

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you, but I'll note that the non-dischargeable terms of medical and student loan debt in the USA essentially do that already, with the added caveat of not even incentivizing the note holder to get the borrower on their feet. Is this no better than that? I think it's moving in the right direction. It's capped, and while there's still the potential structural issue of middleman taking an unfairly sized cut, the incentive structure of "we don't make money unless our education helps you do so" seems like an order of magnitude better than the alternative.

<comment><USER5> >I don't disagree with you, but I'll note that the non-dischargeable terms of medical and student loan debt in the USA essentially do that already

As a preliminary matter this is false...student loans are dischargable in bankruptcy, they are just treated differently than other debt. However, there is a reason everyone thinks student loans aren't dischargable and the myth persists...

>the incentive structure of "we don't make money unless our education helps you do so" seems like an order of magnitude better than the alternative.

Not when the real alternative is student loan forgiveness and free tuition moving forward. The issue is framing the problem as student loans for life or a financier owning a % of your labor for life, when there are other models.

<comment><USER4> Student loan forgiveness would be great, as would be free tuition, but do you mean on a federal level? I'd love to see such a policy come to fruition.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to make it about politics or a politician, but you can search for their campaign platform proposal for additional details. As far as I know there is only one candidate running on this platform of student loan forgiveness, so it should come up quickly in a search.

<comment><USER4> It's great to have a presidential candidate that is running on this platform (and I think I know which one you're talking about), but I'm more interested in whether the broad coalition in congress exists, or whether it's being formed. There are a few members of congress I can think of, but not in remotely the size necessary to pull this off.

<comment><USER5> >I'm more interested in whether the broad coalition in congress exists

Seeing as no "mainstream" political party candidate is running on this platform, I think the answer is no. Of course, I would probably say the same of any campaign issue any mainstream candidate is running on due current political climate of our 2 party system.

Whats interesting is if this candidate won the election, perhaps the 2 parties would have no choice but to concede the issue, if for nothing else to realign themselves with their own constituents and win back their votes. Then again maybe we can extend the market saying "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" to politics "political parties can remain irrational longer than you can vote."

<comment><USER4> Glumly inclined to agree with the latter half of your analogy there, that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is to "political parties can remain irrational longer than you can vote." On the other hand, there's power in numbers, and I keep wondering if some kind of equivalent to crowdfunding will emerge for lobbying and/or local politics. So much of the visibility seems to be at the national level, but a ton of the clout in terms of how things get done occurs on the city, township, county and state level. On one hand, that makes it a combinatoric explosion of complexity, in that you have 1:N:N:N just to get up to the state level, but it also lowers the boundary towards critical mass significantly. What's interesting here is that it looks like this has already been happening; at least from my end, I saw a significant amount of this sort of activity in the 2018 midterms. To some, it looked a little bit like a referendum. My question is how much further is needed for the critical mass to be achieved? Is it predicated on a generational shift?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It used to be society wanted people to have an education and that people with degrees would get higher paying jobs which resulted in a net benefit to society through higher taxes.

Now education is just looked at as a way to in debt young people for the rest of their lives. Because 1M people default on their student loans every year and the bubble is on the verge of popping, the parasites are looking to own 10% of every dollar you make to finance your education.

The problem isn't that an API doesn't exist to automatically debit 10% from the people you own, the problem is an education doesn't get you a job anymore, much less a high paying job.

Instead of owning peoples labor via API, why not consider the 1 Presidential candidate who is campaigning to forgive all existing student debt and make college free moving forward by god forbid...taxing the same banks the taxpayers bailed out from bankruptcy just 10 years ago.

<comment><USER6> At first you mention how higher education doesn't get you a good job anymore, but then you mention support for a candidate who will make college free. Don't you see the contradiction here? The reason college graduates have difficulty finding good jobs compared to the past is because so many people have a degree. Even if you forgive all of the student loans and make college free, people still won't find jobs based on college. College might not even get you anywhere because it'll become a default requirement for every job. There will be some other criteria used instead and somebody's probably going to make money off of that too.

There just aren't enough jobs that require the qualifications of English literature majors or similar.

<comment><USER7> That's still better than the present, where college still doesn't really get you anywhere, except in a mountain of debt.

<comment><USER6> But if that's truly the case then shouldn't people _not_ go to college? If there aren't enough benefits then people should be able to realize that, no?

<comment><USER5> a Job isn't the only benefit of an education...an education is a benefit in and of itself. Society benefits from having an educated public. Society does not benefit from being in debt.

Your logic is as follows: if college degree doesn't get a job, then don't go to college.

Your logic breaks down because not going to college isn't going to get you a job either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The currently proposed legal framework for ISA's[0] seems like it would make ISA's dischargeable in bankruptcy, which would likely cause all sorts of issues with people signing up for them, using them to pay for tuition, and then immediately taking on as much delinquent debt to declare bankruptcy. That seems like a very perverse incentive for schools to deal with, since degree's are permanent but bankruptcy only stays on your credit report for a bit.

[0] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriffin/2019/07/18/a-rare...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisongriffin/2019/07/18/a-rare- bipartisan-bill-takes-on-student-debt/)

<comment><USER9> Clearly default and a lifetime of ruined credit is the better option.

<comment><USER8> I'm saying that bankruptcy at 22 or however young is the much better option. You get it discharged before 30, and so it doesn't even impact the terms you get if you're trying to buy a house for a lot of people. If your options are bad credit for 7 years in your 20's, or 250k in debt, then everyone is going to choose the bad credit every time.

<comment><USER10> maybe that's how it should be. Then kids wont get approved for 250k loans due to the risk and colleges will have to either ask for more money upfront (good luck), expect less students (not good for funding), or lower tuition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I generally like the concept of ISAs.

The current system in the US incentivizes colleges to provide an exclusive "luxury" _experience_ , regardless of cost. Here the incentives are more properly aligned.

In addition, ISAs place a natural cap on college cost. Where cost could previously grow without bound (all loans are backstopped by the federal government), now cost is tied directly to the prevailing wage of the graduate. To the extent that wages signal the needs of the economy at large, I'd assume that ISAs would increase the number of graduates in in-demand fields at the cost of some fringe benefits.

The big losers in this equation are the lesser-paid but still socially valuable professions such as teaching. However, it's unclear to me that these skills could not also be delivered at significantly lower cost (as they were several decades ago).

</comment><comment><USER12> The biggest downside to the rise of ISAs is the decline of the humanities. There are some majors where the cost of educating the student is simply more than the school would earn in a lifetime of work, but they still have value to society. We would need some way to account for that in a world where ISAs fund all education.

How do we incentive schools/lenders to fund people who want to study art and literature? Or should we?

<comment><USER13> You incentivize this by attacking the problem directly - which is to realize that the cost of education is not rising due to scarcity, its rising because of misguided administrative practices and budget allocations.

Quality educational materials are certainly not more scarce today than they were 50 years ago, or somehow astronomically more expensive today.

Quality educators are not astronomically expensive and costing students more. In fact, educators are being chased from the classroom because we treat professors and teachers as a cost center and have systematically eliminated long-term confidence in career stability by replacing career professors with graduate students and adjuncts.

<comment><USER14> There is, however, quite a bit more demand for college degrees today than 50 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Alternatively, [https://leif.org/](https://leif.org/) can manage all of this for you.

Disclosure: I work at Leif

</comment><comment><USER16> I find it interesting the recent rapid rise of ISAs. I remember back in 2013/14, hearing Upstart pitch to my college for their ISA program. From what I recall, their pitch fell mostly on deaf ears. You can still see their ISA agreement online funnily enough: [https://www.upstart.com/funding_terms](https://www.upstart.com/funding_terms) But they discontinued it in 2014: [https://slate.com/business/2014/05/upstart- pulls-income-shar...](https://slate.com/business/2014/05/upstart-pulls-income- share-agreements-in-favor-of-traditional-loans.html)

It's not clear to me why the market pull for ISAs has grown so much recently, although I am happy to see it as an alternative to debt. Perhaps it's the increasing student loan debt burden in the US? Perhaps capital markets opening up to ISAs as an investment vehicle as well?

<comment><USER17> I think the tech boom/talent shortage has a lot to do with it. It seems fairly unprecedented that a smart person with no education can take a ~1 year course, then reliably expect to be making a significantly above average salary immediately, and a six figure salary within a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Relevant podcast about baseball players forming pools to share their earnings: [https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773493342/episode-947-some- of...](https://www.npr.org/2019/10/25/773493342/episode-947-some-of-the-money- ball)

</comment><comment><USER19> How gross. Seems like a poorly thought out product -- isn't my incentive here as a borrower to avoid making documentable income?

<comment><USER20> Or setup a contracting corporation, accumulate your consulting income in the corporation. Have a home office. Pay yourself as little as possible to cover living expenses during the 5 year period and accumulate all the capital in your corporation. Pay your 10% on that small amount. Cash out the corporation afterwards, possibly over several years to lower tax burden.

<comment><USER7> I have a feeling that would be a breach of contract due to fraud. I also think that since you were able to come up with it, other smart people would be, too, and some of them would be people drafting these income share agreements.

<comment><USER19> Usually these financial engineering schemes gloss over obvious defects and stick the investor with the risk.

The whole reason that student loans are non-dischargeable is that medical students would become doctors, then leave the country for enough time for debt to go away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So... share-cropping, basically?

</comment><comment><USER22> And we're basically back to where we were 300 years ago, where you had to give part of your income to your feudal lord.

</comment><comment><USER23> Only reason (as a college student) don't like ISAs is because they take up to something as ridiculous as 10 million over a 10 year period (if you do happen to make that much). I think ISAs may find a place for a greater majority of America though.

<comment><USER24> Isn't that the whole point? The very successful ISA participants are subsidizing the less successful ISA participants. An ISA with an income cap is just a loan with a lot more downside for the lender.</comment></comment>


Facebook HipHop serves 70% more traffic on same hardware - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/31/facebook_hip_hop_performance_improvement/

<comment><USER2> Three comments: 1) The Register is to 'news' as the New York Post is to the New York Times, which is to say its amusing at times and sometimes a good lead into something that is actually important, but rarely the definitive source for any story.

2) The entrepreneurial take away is that Web 2.0 has been racing ahead of hardware, its been able to do that because computers got better faster and iterating has proven more valuable that polishing.

There are opportunities to be found by taking a good long look at where the technologies used can benefit from abstraction/compilation love. Remember that in 2005 putting together a 8,000 'node' cluster was really on the fringe, today that is 500 boxes with a dual Core i7 motherboard in them.

3) In case you haven't noticed this reads like a Facebook Fanboi insulting a Google Fanboi. Apparently it was modestly successful in this regard if you measure success by vitriol in the comments on the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> What could this sentence possibly mean?

"His crew can build a more than 1GB in about 15 minutes (after stripping out debug information)"

1GB binary? 1GB of PHP? 1GB of C++ output? None of these sound like a good idea.

<comment><USER4> Stop playing telephone and just read the original: [http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hiphop- fo...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/hiphop-for-php-more- optimizations-for-efficient-servers/10150121348198920)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Original FB blog post, which has more facts less fanboi trolling: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390751>

</comment><comment><USER6> Article is factually incorrect; MediaWiki doesn't run on HipHop yet. They're currently discussing adding support on their dev list.

</comment><comment><USER7> _The idea is that you can still code with high-level PHP, but then get the performance of C++_

I love this quote, because C++ was built with the exact same abstraction in mind.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Unlike Google, you see, Facebook has been known to promptly open-source some of the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure."

<comment><USER9> Is this actually inaccurate though? Google has released tons of open source software, but which of them are important pieces of its back-end infrastructure? Hadoop and all its sub-projects are inspired by Google papers but aren't based on Google code, as far as I know. The projects that come to mind are Sawzall (of dubious usefulness to people outside Google), gold linker, possibly Go language (but I don't know to what extent that's used within Google), and what else? Probably a lot of contributions to open-source that it uses, like the Linux kernel, but I'm after whole projects created by Google. Python doesn't count because it was already open source before they acquired GvR.

Compare to Facebook, which has open-sourced Cassandra, Hive, HipHop, Thrift, Tornado, and others which I may be forgetting. Seems to me that Facebook is way ahead.

Edit: just remembered a Protocol Buffers, that's a good one to put under Google's column.

<comment><USER10> Google has a lot of smaller projects that are very useful and well-written:

\- Closure Compiler for Javascript: <http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/>

\- Sparse hashtable: <http://goog-sparsehash.sourceforge.net/>

\- Chromium

\- Android

\- V8 JS engine

\- WebM

And this more comprehensive list: <http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:google>

<comment><USER11> Right. None of which you could reasonably describe as "the most important pieces of its back-end infrastructure," unlike HipHop, Thrift, HBase, Cassandra, memcache, etc. at Facebook. Google has contributed a ton of wonderful products to open source; however they will never contribute BigTable, MapReduce, GFS, Chubby, GoogleBot, their indexing pipeline, the actual reverse index query execution engines, the search engine aggregators, Spanner, etc.

If you think about it, this is all perfectly sensible. Google sees back-end technology as a key competitive differentiator. Facebook needs to build back- end technology, too, but is not as vulnerable to a technologically equal competitor; if we were, Google would have made good on their promise to destroy us by now.

Disclaimer: I'm a Facebook engineer who contributes to the HipHop effort.

<comment><USER12> i guess thats all true. i think the release of the go language will prove to be a huge milestone for google both in terms of open source releases and in terms of projects by googlers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So they dropped some rarely used functionality from PHP,... like serialization.

Excuse me, "rarely used"?? Drupal strongly depends on serialization, to store data structures in the database (or, as they call it, "the cache").

You cannot effectively run Drupal without serialization. So "The likes of Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress are now using HipHop." sounds like it cannot be true.

<comment><USER14> I _think_ they're referring to how APC serializes data structures internally, not the serialize() function. I might be wrong, but that's how I read it.

edit: [https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/Unimplemented- Fu...](https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/Unimplemented-Functions)

That's a list of unimplemented functions - unserialize_callback_func is unimplemented, but that's it wrt serialization functions.

<comment><USER15> Except APC doesn't actually serialize anything except for objects. Arrays and scalar types are directly memcpy'ed in and out of the APC user cache. But this author is extremely confused. I think he may have confused APC with Memcache here. They have done some work on the PHP Memcache extension to remove the need to serialize making it behave more like APC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> PHP, the COBOL of the 21st century.

<comment><USER17> No, Java is the COBOL of the 21st century. There's not a whole lot of business logic being done with PHP. There's a ton done with Java, though.

<comment><USER16> Yea but at the end of the century no one will ask with the same incredulity why we wrote anything in Java as why we wrote anything in PHP.

<comment><USER18> If you're going to inflame language wars why hide behind throwaway accounts?

<comment><USER16> Haven't felt the need to comment till now. Language wars help pass the time when you need a distraction :).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>