Ask HN: Anyone work in Honolulu? - <AUTHOR> Hey, I live on a Hawaiian island and I'm trying to migrate from freelance work (too all encompassing, stressful for what I get paid) to a "real" job.<p>Is the market as poor as it looks? I don't really care about the poor pay compared to the Bay but it doesn't look like there's anything there besides defense contractors. <comment><USER2> I've been a software developer on Oahu for ten years and I'm currently working on my own startup with my brother [1]. There are plenty of "real" jobs over here but to be honest, the community of talented developers on island is so small that you're not going to find the jobs online. Go to the local meetups and ask around and you'll find plenty of people that are hiring.

Not sure what your background is but if you're interested in the work we're doing at Kumu hit me up (think github meets gephi focused on social impact). We're hiring and have found it incredibly hard to find local developers that A) know their shit, and B) don't already have a better offer.

All in all, if you're a decent human being and you're good at what you do you'll have no problem finding a job wherever you look.

[1]: [https://kumu.io](https://kumu.io)

<comment><USER3> Your product seems interesting, although I do not fully understand it. Am I right in assuming it's a data viz tool aimed at people and orgs trying to improve society? What's your elevator pitch?

<comment><USER2> Yeah that's the gist of it. Helping people make sense of complicated relationships so they can make an impact.

If you're interested in this stuff Donella Meadow's book "Thinking in Systems" is a great introduction: [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H- Meadows/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Systems-Donella-H- Meadows/dp/1603580557)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You're going to have to deal with lower pay, combined with the higher cost of living -- it's a double-whammy that not many are prepared for when working in Hawaii.

'Not many jobs announced in public, except for Entry-Level stuff. The few higher-level jobs that ARE announced are usually environments with shameful turnover rates.

My recommendation: Unless you've got something lined up, it's not worth staying in the islands to hunt for a great tech job -- you could spend months trying to find something worthy of a solid skillset; or you will be deeply dissatisfied working in a less-challenging job just to get by.

Having said that, I'm always on the lookout for great talent for my own shop. .NET or Java backend (WebServices), or top-notch front-end Angular2 against Node or Rails. I can be Googled for contact info.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's definitely not as active as the mainland but there is a small startup community worth checking out around accelerators like Energy Excelerator and Blue Startups. I think Energy Excelerator has done a pretty good job of tapping into the defense and hospitality industry on the islands for capital and launch markets for their startups, and then finding roadmaps for their startups to break out later on into larger consumer and enterprise markets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just moved to Oahu (Kaneohe) from the mainland, thanks to flexibility of a 100% remote gig. Worth checking out, and if you play your cards right you can get a solid salary to boot. weworktremotely.com, angel list, etc.

<comment><USER7> Hi bjhoops1, I also moved to Kaneohe (about a year ago). I also have a 100% remote job, so there's no commute into town each day, its nice.

<comment><USER6> Awesome! Windward side FTW. :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So I get to do the HN thing, be overly curt and negative. Yay!

You're doing it all wrong! You already have the dream form of job, freelancer living in Hawaii. You just need to suck it up and fix the problems with your job (which you can do because you are your own boss)

For video material, Google "Fuck you, pay me!" Then check out these 2 people - Brennan Dunn "How to double your freelancing rate" and search HN for comments by patio11.

P.S. I spent 2 of the best years of my life living in Oahu, trying to get back :)

</comment><comment><USER9> I work for a small company in Kailua building real estate websites. The tech community here is small but super fun!

What's your skillset? Hit me up - kevin at realgeeks dot com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad there's a community in existence!

I'm primarily a web developer, been making websites since I was a kid and transitioned into that professionally years ago. I feel most comfortable and prefer to work in Python but I've worked with a bunch of languages.

The most recent thing I worked on that I thought was cool was taking all of the voting data + voter history from a state for the past 15ish years, cleaning it up, creating a database out of it then making it accessible with a webapp, allowing different queries to be run through the front end, generating stats, etc.

I'm going to toss you an email.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hi, I live on Oahu but I've been working for a remote company on the mainland for the last 4 years. When I initially started my job search for jobs in Honolulu, I found several leads on techhui.com, so I would start there if you're looking for local work.

</comment><comment><USER10> Aloha, I'm not on Oahu, but Maui. Pretty abysmal here as far as tech work. Been here since February, and now playing with the idea of looking for "real" work.

Still hacking on pet projects.

<comment><AUTHOR> Aloha!

I'm actually on Maui too for about 2 years. It is indeed dead here for tech work. There is some stuff in the Maui Tech Park.. Boeing, defense stuff. And I've see some job listings occasionally for work in Wailuku but it's mostly IT work.

There's tons of money floating around here, I feel like there's an opportunity somewhere to start something cool but it has eluded me so far. Good luck!

<comment><USER10> There certainly is, and it's a bit insane. My email is in my profile. Hit me up if you ever wanna hit the beach with some beers, talk tech/code and bon fire. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's wrong with defense contractors? Sends like a good match to the island pace of life?

<comment><USER12> There are things like clearances and drug tests that a lot of people in tech find prohibitive to working for a defense contractor.

<comment><USER13> I guess if drugs are a big part of your life that could be a dealbreaker. But what's the big deal about clearances?

<comment><USER14> I don't do drugs but I wouldn't take a programming job where I had to do drug tests

<comment><USER13> For the same reason that you wouldn't work for an employer that monitored your bank account balance or your diet?

Or are drug tests special somehow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given a lot commenters seem to be working remotely, what sort of internet speeds are you getting or any other challenges you have run into?

I am thinking of potentially working out of Kauai or Hawaii but I am concerned about internet connectivity among other things.

Last week I did a speed test from the condo I was staying in Kapaa and got 35/5 mbps which isn't terrible. Right now on the mainland I only get 50/5 mbps and that works well enough for video chat.

<comment><USER6> I don't know about other islands, but on Oahu you can get up to 300 down with Oceanic TWC. I was pleasantly surprised.

<comment><USER15> Wow that is significantly better than my mainland connection but I live in a rural college town right now (also TWC). What is the upload like?

Also do you have issues with latency or other network performance issues with the mainland? I have found video chatting and screen sharing to be useful tools when working remotely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do you have a resume? I have a position open. Remote is ok.

</comment><comment><USER17> Have you tried full-time remote? Benefit I see in your case is you are a few hours behind, which meshes well with late workers in California :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> What about working at / through the universities. UH or HPU used to hire quite a bunch of people in tech. (Alumni speaking)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hey so if anyone is a Django expert and wants a little part time work helping direct a semi-green coder building a webapp for a fulfillment business, shoot me an email at email@example.com

Bonus points if you're in HI so I can expense a trip to visit you :)

</comment><comment><USER20> I know of 2 ex-coworkers who live{d} on Oahu while working full time for a tech shop. It was possible only because they were able to get full time remote positions at employers based out of California.

</comment><comment><USER21> What's your skill set? I'm CTO of a startup in Honolulu and we will be hiring a Rails developer soon. If you don't do Rails, I'm connected with other startups here.

</comment><comment><USER22> I gave up on the local market pretty early, at least for Linux work. I work 100% remotely now from Kapolei (just west of Honolulu) for a company on the mainland.

</comment><comment><USER23> We ran Netgate.com from Hawaii from 2004 to 2011, when we moved (back) to Austin for high school for our son.

He just graduated.

Maybe I'll get back to Oahu in 5 more years.

</comment><comment><USER24> Funny I was just daydreaming about doing just this.

Currently in SV but considering a move out there for a couple years before heading home to the East Coast.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should do it, being by the ocean is great. You'll find tons of things you love.

<comment><USER25> Just curious. How do you manage the rusting of equipment? Tried living by the sea, but the A/C, fans, and everything else including the PC monitor was rusting away after 6-16 months

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Remote is possible, what is your focus?

</comment><comment><USER2> Why Honolulu if you live on Maui?

</comment><comment><USER27> Why is this flagged?

<comment><USER28> ...and why can we still reply to comments on a flagged article? Also, normally I have a "vouch" option on flagged submissions, but not on this one.

Something is weird here. I wonder if for some reason the submitted actually included "[flagged]" in the title and so it just _looks_ like a flagged article?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah, I definitely didn't add 'flagged' to the submission. Looks like it disappeared off the front page too which sucks. I emailed the mods(?) so maybe my poor post will receive clemency.

<comment><USER29> (Replying here as well as via email in case other users want to know.)

HN is for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, which this one arguably doesn't. Plus we have rules against people using HN threads for job/hiring/seeing-work posts (except in monthly threads designated for that). Those are probably the reasons why users flagged your submission.

On the other hand, it's a borderline call, the discussion is reasonably good, and the Hawaii angle is novel, so we'll cut you some slack and turn off the flags.

<comment><USER8> By the way dang, I just want to say thanks to the mods for still keeping a human hand in things.

I do understand that a site that has this volume of interaction needs automated moderation. But it's nice to see people step in and override the algos when necessary.

As a side note to people talking about AI eating the world: how could we train an AI to make these kinds of judgment calls? (This coming from me as a huge AI fan, I am really interested in possible solutions)

P.S. While I'm here, I did have to chuckle about Alan Kay's stackoverflow question about progress in CS being closed as not suitable for SO. Sometimes even human algorithms fail :)

<comment><USER29> Thanks! Btw, if people want to make sure that we see their question they should email firstname.lastname@example.com. Appeals to mods from HN comments are hit-and- miss because there's no way for us to read all the comments.

We haven't looked much into AI-style algorithmic approaches for HN moderation; we will eventually. But we're also interested in figuring out how to decentralize more moderation to the community, and what software we can build to support that.

I'm delighted to confirm that Alan's questions (and better still his answers) will always be "suitable" for Hacker News. They practically define suitable! [https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1](https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=alankay1)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Search Engine Backlash Against 'Content Mills' - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=377&bpid=25532 <comment><USER2> I had a discussion with tptacek about this one day. See, I don't think Google (the search engine whose opinion's most influence my thoughts -- no offense DDG) sees content farms as a bad thing.

If someone is searching for "how to make a blueberry pie", and they get an article entitled "how to make a blueberry pie", they're happy. Are they actually going to make a blueberry pie? _Probably not_. Therefore, it doesn't really matter whether they get a good blueberry pie recipe or a bad blueberry pie recipe. As long as they quickly get to a well-designed page _that they won't read anyhow because no one reads on the Internet_ which has a few bullet points they'll skim fast and a blueberry pie picture on it, they're happy. Their blueberry pie voyeurism need is fulfilled.

Content mills make that happen, for huge segments of the population. Let me strip that of euphemism: content mills make this happen for women, the elderly, and the technically disinclined. Absent the content mill, there is insufficient "organically produced" content on the things they care about on the Internet because their participation on the Internet is dramatically less than y'alls participation is and y'all -- speaking in generalities -- do not blog about good blueberry pie recipes.

You can think of content mills as an organism in symbiosis with Google: how to you juice relevance algorithms to identify the sliver of a sliver of a fraction of the Internet which talks about blueberry pies and other things your mom cares about, identify the best tangentially related article, and present it to her every time? Well, you could have your crack teams of geniuses work on it for a few years, even though your favorite tricks like PageRank are likely to function less well because there's less linking data to go around. Or, in the alternative, you could encourage content farming.

It surely has not escape Google's notice that their bottom line revenue increases by about 80% of the top-line revenue of the entire content farming industry, incidentally. Contextual ads are the perfect monetization vehicle for laser-targeted content produced at quality which will be solely viewed in search mode, and Google _owns_ that entire field.

<comment><USER3> I work in search quality at Google, and while certainly not everyone agrees that it's a problem, a lot of people do.

I could write a lot about this, but the central issue is that it is very very hard to make changes that sacrifice on-topic-ness for good-ness that don't make the results in general worse. We're working on it though, and I suspect we'll never stop.

I think a lot of the promise lies in as you said, identifying the tangentially related article, or as I like to frame it, bringing more queries into the head. We've launched a lot of changes that do exactly this. (But you are right, it is difficult, and fundamentally so. Language is hard.)

<comment><USER4> Can't you stop crawling sites that dish up your search terms for you (without any content)? A good example is eudict.com - search for an obscure word and this is the first that pops up.

It then returns a page with your search queries and no information.

What use is a site that simply returns search queries?

Why aren't sites that scrape content blacklisted?

<comment><USER3> >Why aren't sites that scrape content blacklisted?

The problem is more difficult than you'd think. For instance, virtually every news organization "scrapes" the associated press, but we wouldn't want to throw out every news organization.

Content-free search result pages are things we do try to remove, even manually if it becomes a big enough problem.

<comment><USER5> _virtually every news organization "scrapes" the associated press_

If they're not adding real value, like analysis or graphics or commentary or whatnot, why would you want to keep them if they're all just duplicates?

I had a friend work at a startup to solve this problem exact: we read virtually identical articles about the same bit of news on all the news sites. The startup was working on highlighting only the unique bits of each article and recommend the one article that seems to have the most pieces of information. You would read the one and skim to the unique bits of the others, and you would have gotten all angles and facts much more quickly.

Shame they closed it up.

<comment><USER3> We do filter near-duplicates within the same set of results. You'll likely see only one copy of an AP story with a link at the bottom saying something like "Repeat this search with the omitted results included"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish google would just implement a way to add a list of blocked domains to your search preferences. Then I'd never have to see crap from mahalo, expertsexchange, or the like ever again.

A way to opt-in to using a community managed list of bad domains would be even better.

<comment><USER7> This is such a good idea - and such a simple idea (spamcontent-block, like adblock) - that we should have had it 5 years ago already...

<comment><USER8> Didn't google some time ago have these up and down arrows, like here on HN with comments, which I never quite learned as to what they were for. That is not quite far off from marking sites as spam and I used the up and down arrows only perhaps once in the entire time.

Search is different from sites like this. Here we know we are going to spend some time reading interesting content, but not quite what we will be reading. When searching you know you needs some information and what you want to do is find it, preferably instantly, and get out of Google immediately. It is easier to click on the next link than mark some site for spam or click the up and down arrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't have a problem with content mill sites -- as long as they provide me information quickly in a format I desire.

I think lots of folks want "authoritative". So let's suppose I'm mentally disabled and in search of a recipe for cake. I google "cake" and I got 40,000 sites. Top of the list is the Cake Institute of America. I google airplanes and I'm looking at the history of winged flight. I want to learn to tie my shoes and spend 5 hours on the history of footwear in western culture.

This is just silly. Communications 101 says that the message changes depending on the audience and the medium. Yet those in the search engine business, it seems, want "authoritative" and "best" sources. I could give a shit. I want information custom-made to me -- who I am, how I speak, my culture, my mood, my life.

The "There can be only one" attitude is not helpful. Somewhere, right now, some guy wants to find out how to train speckled-bellied pigeons to dance. And those dang E-how guys probably have a video for it. Back in the day it was painful as heck to find information. Now companies are figuring out how to make each little penny they can on creating content. As long as the content is useful, I think that's awesome.

Having said that, the problem is that the drunken-angry-sailor-web-content is different from the New-England-school-marm-content. That's okay. There's room for growth. Isn't progress a good thing?

But the domain-squatting nonsense, and the sleaze factor some of these companies bring to the table? That's got to go. With lots more tlds I think the domain-name-spamming business has a limited shelf-life, thankfully.

</comment><comment><USER10> The article closes with, "In some sense, Blekko's approach is more democratic --if any content is good enough for your friends, it's probably good enough for you too."

If I'm going to use a social search, I want to see things that:

1) Are liked by at least one of my friends.

2) Are not explicitly disliked by (a meaningful threshold, perhaps as few as 1) of my friends.

And really, I'm not so sure that I trust #1, but #2 could be useful to me. Especially when "friends" gets replaced with "Hacker News," then I'm much more interested.

In other words, I don't trust the sensitivity of a social network to get me what I need; I may have interests that reach beyond those of any of my associates. However, I do, to an extent, trust its specificity for identifying badness, and that's why I might consider a "social"-esque search filtering service.

Actually, Gabe, have you ever considered creating some sort of collaborative filtering tool for duckduck?

</comment><comment><USER11> If anyone has domains to report, feel free to email me and I'll add them to my training set. I've recently thought about open sourcing this whole piece.

</comment><comment><USER12> "We cuts out what Cutts leaves in."

Which is probably an unfair comment given Matt Cutts is dealing from inside a massive, listed company, but epi0Bauqu / DDG are certainly addressing a definite user experience problem. Indeed, this is a more tangible benefit for using DDG than the focus on security and privacy, which I don't believe is understood by most users.

<comment><USER13> Wow, I think the statement is just a bit of fun.

<comment><USER12> I agree (I made the comment - that wasn't a quote from the article), but I wanted to clarify to ensure it didn't come across as snarky or unhelpful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is actually interesting enough that I'm trying DDG as my default search engine for a bit currently. I probably should've already (I intellectually like what they're doing, and check it out occasionally), but Google just works well enough for inertia to keep me there. Getting content-farm results is a common daily annoyance, though, so this is the sort of thing that could make for a noticeable improvement in my Search Happiness even in the short term.

</comment><comment><USER15> Want to thank moultano (from Google) for replying to so many stories.

One technique that I have manually begun employing to stop landing at what I would call value-less sites is looking at the PageRank (Chrome extension) of the host page before considering the individual story.

One reader complained about the hollow/bullshit review sites that match whatever word you are searching for and then make your eyes bleed with sheer number of ads once you get there and inter-related affiliate links -- these sites never have a high page rank and can be safely ignored.

I don't know if DuckDuckGo or Blekko (is that the new one in Alpha?) are going to take this type of data into consideration when ranking search results, but _I_ sure do and it has never failed me.

If you want to see a quick example of bullshit websites -- try and Google for ANYTHING health-or-weightloss-related. Try "HGH review", "Sensa review" or just about anything else that you might be curious about in the health/medical realm and I guarantee you that it will be atleast 3 pages of search results before you find a single article that is not Google-fodder that actually has _real_ content in it.

In the old days you used to be able to tell a "real" website from a "bullshit" one by looking at how pretty or professional the site is... un/fortunately the barrier to a beautiful site is much lower now and running across value-less sites that look as good as professionally developed/run sites is hard to spot instantly.

This is where peeking at the PageRank of the host has helped me quite a bit.

Yes it misses some things, like the case where a useless site produces _1_ article that is good, but in general it keeps me sane and stops me from giving up search in general.

It would be nice if there was a Chrome/Firefox extension for Google's search result page that I could click "Submit Complaint" to submit links to Google complaining about the quality of the result or the site itself. I know they would have a lot of noise to work through from something like this, but I would hope over time it would help them be able to spot patterns in these affiliate-linking-ad-smattered-nightmare sites and get rid of them.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a huge problem to address, and could be the thing that changes the dynamics of search. Google has become useless to me for a lot of searches -- many things that attract "MFA" -- because of the overwhelming amount of search spam. The problem has gotten much worse over the last few years because of the content mills presumably. Fortunately Google's still great for sufficiently obscure things that don't lead to transactions (like research papers).

</comment><comment><USER17> It seems for every query you really want to have good Wikipedia quality level equivalent page summarizing the best knowledge available. These content farms are trying to fill the gap where Wikipedia won't have a corresponding page, however, they do not have enough revenue per page to pay for content that is good enough.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nothing to see here. New up and coming search engine contenders don't list every site Google and Yahoo! do as a way to differentiate themselves from the well-entrenched competition.

<comment><USER8> We live in capitalism. Communicate or survive.

To address your point though, I think what is new about the article is that some search engine is trying to address a problem which annoys a lot of HNers. A problem I might say which differentiated Google from the then MSN and ALtavista etc. That is irrelevant or shallow search results.</comment></comment>


So Long, Wunderground - <AUTHOR> https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/So-Long-Wunderground <comment><USER2> For those who didn't read the article: wunderground is still around, but the writer of this blogpost is leaving.

<comment><USER3> The writer of the blogpost is Dr. Jeff Masters, who was the meteorologist founder and runner of the site until he sold it to The Weather Channel. He's finally leaving what's left of his company.</comment></comment>


What happens when you swipe a credit card - <AUTHOR> https://tech.affirm.com/deep-dive-payments-60f5d17f6c71 <comment><USER3> > What happens when you swipe a credit card

People look at you funny for not knowing how a credit card has worked for the last 30+ years. Here chips got introduced mid-80's and all cards had chips circa early-90's.

Why did it take so long for credit card to feature chips in the US ? Because it took a while for CIA's in-q-tel to take over control of gemplus, the company who owned the smart card technology, which happened early 2000's. This is known as "l'affaire gemplus". Once they got control, the company HQ got moved to luxembourg tax haven and the R&D and tech moved to the US. A few years later in 2006 it merged with competitor axalto to form gemalto famous for making SIM cards and recently for their SIM crypto getting in NSA hands[1]. In 2009 french government tried to counter the takeover by becoming gemalto's major shareholder, but it was too late, CIA got what they were after as shown by in-q-tel selling its shares in 2010 which coincidentally was the years EMV credit card got introduced to the US.

[1]: [https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim- heist/](https://theintercept.com/2015/02/19/great-sim-heist/)

<comment><USER4> And what did the CIA want? Any recommended reading on the CIA's control of financial systems?

<comment><USER5> I would check out [redacted] written in [redacted]. its a really [redacted] story which covers the [redacted] orders from when [redacted] was president and the [redacted] court which had oversight.

really exceptional reading material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm kind of disappointed that you didn't go into the security features present in a typical credit card transaction. For example, you could describe the crypto protocols used to communicate with the gateway and/or card processor, what kind of data the stripe and chip contain and how it is used for authentication, etc.

Another thing I find interesting is the anti-tamper features that are present in a standard credit card terminal. There's a great CC terminal teardown video by EEVblog that walks you through them: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCgtTPwlDSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCgtTPwlDSo).

<comment><USER7> The way I see it, this is describing the system exactly as much as it needs to make its case that 'banking system is bad and expensive, use our stuff'. Covering security, or the lower fees in Europe (thanks mostly to the security features), goes against the narrative.

An interesting tidbit: An extra reason US fees are so high are premium credit cards choke full of rewards: Not every card has the same fees, and the highest fees come from cards that are handing you extra rewards, that are paid pretty much directly by the merchant. It's just that banks know that the better the rewards the more people will use the credit card, and the easier it is to take the business away from cheaper cards, as nobody charges you more at the register for using a Chase Sapphire Preferred instead of a debit card.

Security features also make US cards extra expensive, as the best you have is Chip and signature, and that doesn't cover online. If we demanded 2FA in every transaction, including online, fraud would go very close to zero, and with it, fees.

With more modest rewards and better security, interchange fees could shrink by over a percentage point: Banks just don't do this because there's little to no competitive pressure.

<comment><USER8> Well if we really believed in the free market and consumer protection, there'd be a law requiring the total transaction cost be printed on the sales slip. Whether the merchant pays it or passes it onto the consumer would be up to the merchant, but the amount would appear on the slip so the consumer sees these costs and who is paying for it.

What we really have is mercantilism, where the issuer by contract disallows full information to be conveyed to the consumer without the consumer's consent, and this is in effect protected by law by the fact it isn't illegal. You could also call it an example of chrony capitalism.

<comment><USER9> > Well if we really believed in the free market and consumer protection, > there'd be a law requiring the total transaction cost be printed on the > sales slip.

So "if we really believed in the free market", we should regulate the details of how a private transaction can take place?

Leaving aside any other aspects of that proposal, whether positive or negative, it doesn't seem reasonable to describe it as "free market".

<comment><USER10> _> So "if we really believed in the free market", we should regulate the details of how a private transaction can take place?_

The information that has to be expressly stated as part of a contract is not some minor detail. It is at the very core of enabling free markets in the first place.

Some seem to think of free markets as a sort of natural phenomenon and of regulations as a distortion. But that isn't true at all.

Contracts, property rights and the responsibilities of all participants in a trade are concepts of law. Without them you would have to rely on implicit cultural conventions and resolve disputes by means of duels and vendettas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly, interchange fees in Australia for credit cards are going to get capped to 0.8% later this year. This is forcing banks to re-evaluate their reward card offerings. AIUI, American Express isn't affected because they have direct relationships with each individual merchant.

The big 4 banks in Australia have historically offered an Amex card and a Visa/MasterCard linked to the same account (because Amex isn't accepted everywhere and often attracts surcharges). If ANZ's recent move is anything to go by, it looks like the banks won't be able to afford offering a linked Amex with their accounts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody know if using Stripe if we can pass the 2.9% fee onto our customers? We offer customized consulting plans that vary and typically in the thousands, so thinking of just adding a 3% credit card processing fee to the invoice for clients that use card.

Researching around the net, it seems for traditional brick and mortar, some issuers don't allow you to charge a percentage based card processing fee. Any idea is this is allowed on Stripe?

<comment><USER13> It's complicated and depends on things like where you're charging and whether or not it's a "fee" for using the card vs. offering a cash discount (how these are not essentially equivalent is beyond me):

Sections 22.214.171.124 & 5.6

[https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about- visa/15-April-2...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/about- visa/15-April-2015-Visa-Rules-Public.pdf)

Section 5.11.2

[https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/mccom/en- us/documents/...](https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/mccom/en- us/documents/BM-manual-May2015.pdf)

IANAL, etc.

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I may have to reach out to Stripe directly to get an answer. My fear is that Stripe will say it depends on Visa, Mastercard, AMEX and defer to them which is not very helpful.

<comment><USER13> That's very likely to happen, unfortunately...

I did run across this link, which might explain why when you asked your initial question I was thinking "no way", but after reading the recent agreements was like "maybe so" (I worked in payments for a number of years, and always heard that cash discounts/surcharges for credit card use were disallowed).

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/business/mastercard-and- vi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/14/business/mastercard-and-visa-settle- antitrust-suit.html)

So apparently there was a suit about that very problem which was settled in 2012. It looks like you would be able to, but if you're charging multiple thousands on the regular, it would probably be worth it for you to pay a lawyer to make sure you're in the clear. HTH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i've always found it to be profoundly messed up that address validation (AVS) and security code validation (CVV/CSC) happen _after_ the funds are authorized and held by the issuing bank.

this means if you choose to decline transactions for cvv or avs reasons in your gateway settings, those funds are still actually held by the customer's bank as pending for ~24h, preventing them from trying the auth again if it puts them over their credit limit.

the only way to release them is for the merchant to call the customer's bank and provide the, cc number and auth code.

we've had to leave these "security" settings off in our payment gateway and just assess the processor codes ourselves. then manually call the bank if there are mismatches. it's a massive pain in the ass and pretty much a neccessity if your avg order is hundreds of dollars. >:(

<comment><USER15> We wrote our own system that preauths to get AVS, mandates a match to proceed or automatically voids the auth. You wouldn't believe his many people don't seem to know their own billing address. Customers get frustrated about the strict enforcement but we've only ever had one or two complaints about held funds. We just explain that those pending charges will fall off in 24 hrs, and they accept. Frankly, if the charge risks putting the customer over their limit, then it might not be such a good idea to deal with those customers. The cheapest customers are the most trouble and carry a higher incidence of returns fraud, fraudulent chargebacks, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >If the merchant doesn't settle within a certain time frame specified by the network, then the authorization expires and the reserved funds are released (as with every complex system, there are caveats here too).

Where can I read specifics for each network?

Also, the post doesn't do a good job of explaining what affirm is. All I know is it's some kind of alternative.

<comment><USER14> it's almost always a 30 day window to run a capture from the date of initial auth.

i've seen few "caveats". paypal has some tighter constrains on their fund availability guarantees. they make you run a re-auth after 48 or 72 hours - <USER2> forget the specifics, but it's in their api docs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> kinda like [https://github.com/alex/what-happens- when](https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when)

</comment><comment><USER18> The OP has things mixed up quite a bit. For starters, Point Of Sale flow should be described separately from the Card Not Present (as in online purchases) flow (protip there really is no such thing as transaction void in POS world). There are also things like auth reversals, partial captures etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> > swipe your card

Sadly swiping is being replaced by chipcard.

<comment><USER20> Chip cards replaced swiping over a decade ago, and a couple of years ago contactless replaced chip cards for most purposes.

Does anyone literally swipe a credit card any more? I can't remember seeing it done in years except in some parts of Europe.

<comment><USER14> well, there's the rest of the world, and there's the US, where chip cards are recent and still lack chip+pin requirement for now. we still use imperial units, too! not to mention the worst (read: non-existent) maternity-leave laws on earth - worse than many less developed countries.

<comment><USER21> Exactly! He said that with such authority, didn't he? :) Chase just issued me a chip card in the last couple of years, and every time I check out of a store equipped with a terminal that can do both, it's still pretty much a 50/50 chance they'll tell me the chip reader doesn't work yet and I need to swipe.

<comment><USER22> In my experience most stores are pretty good at this point about having some sort of sign or label if their chip reader isn't working. But I'm sure it's not always the case and there was certainly a lot of confusion a year or so ago when they were first phased in.

<comment><USER23> Well, now they would do well to put a sign up if the chip reader _is_ working. Because now I by default assume the terminal vendor is lazy and won't implement it until they have a financial incentive to do so.

<comment><USER24> > until they have a financial incentive to do so.

They have had that for over a year in the States. Weakest point in the chain takes liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Depending on the category of the merchant, the network charges an interchange fee, the cost of which is split between the issuing bank (which takes most of the cut), the card association, and the acquiring bank._

This isn't entirely correct. The interchange is the part of the transaction fee that goes to the issuer. The card network gets a scheme fee, and the acquirer/processor charge a fee on top of that. If a merchant pays the same rate, regardless of what type of card is used, (credit/debit, consumer/business) then the processor or acquiring is basically rounding up.

</comment><comment><USER26> _> Visa and Mastercard alone control 70% of the market based on purchase volume. And lack of competition reduces the incentive for firms to improve the efficiency of their technological systems or price their services fairly._

Some detail about the pricing might help here. Most of the fee is actually going to customers, believe it or not, and sometimes processors. It is an interesting study in complex two-sided market dynamics. This is critical to understand when thinking about how to improve the system, and it's something many startups figure out the hard way.

Most of the processing fee goes back to the _issuing banks_ , not Visa/MC. On a typical transaction:

1\. Visa takes "only" 0.11% + 2 cents.

2\. Depending on the card maybe 1.5-2% + 10 cents goes to the bank that issued the card (e.g. Chase, Citi, Bank of America). These are fixed and published rates called interchange.[1]

3\. The remainder of the fee is processor markup (e.g. Stripe, First Data). They are responsible for merchant fraud so their markup can vary a lot depending on merchant risk profile and bargaining power. E.g. Starbucks pays virtually nothing in processor markup, while Stripe's markup on thinly vetted ecommerce sites is huge.

So while 0.11% of all card transactions is a lot of money for Visa/MC at scale, most of the "high" 2-3% card fee is actually going back to _banks_. Competition between Visa & MC keeps their cut to where it is. Even though they control "70% of the market", there is two-party competition there.

So what's the deal.. what are fees so high? Don't banks compete with one another? Well, yes, they do, but it's not by picking lower interchange rates. There's one more piece to the picture: _card benefits_ like reward programs that refund 1-2% to the customer, thinning the bank's take considerably. Banks compete on how much reward to pay out to the customer.

Merchants dislike higher fees, obviously, but given the importance of card acceptance to completing a sale, they are more tolerant of fees than customers are tolerant of poor card benefits. The bottom line is banks need to compete for customers more than card networks need to compete for merchants.

The only way merchants have been able to reduce card fees is through regulation. Visa/MC have built systems that effectively leverage the power of customer choice. If you want to build something different you need to look at the _customer benefit_ side of things, not just offering merchants a lower- cost method.

[1] [https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa- in...](https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange- reimbursement-fees-2016-april.pdf)

<comment><USER27> Nice summary. Worth mentioning that processors like Stripe and Paypal rake in the net difference between the fairly low Durbin "signature debit" rates and their 2.9% fixed fees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gateways like Stripe or Braintree are used for online payments only, aren't they? They are not involved when you swipe a card in a physical store's terminal.

</comment><comment><USER29> That title is a lot less fun if you're standing in front of a whiteboard and someone is judging your answer.

</comment><comment><USER30> Swipe? Swipe is old and boring, no single mention of smartcards in the article or in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER31> It doesn't say if the data ends up with advertisers, but I wouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER32> Sure they do, it's not a secret:

[http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/information- services.html](http://www.mastercardadvisors.com/information-services.html)

[https://www.americanexpress.com/uk/content/merchant/business...](https://www.americanexpress.com/uk/content/merchant/business- insights.html)

[https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/commercial- solutions/...](https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/commercial- solutions/solutions/advertising-loyalty-card-programs.html)

<comment><USER33> The data doesn't really end up with advertisers though, does it? I can't call up AMEX and ask for a list of all the places my member of Congress uses his card, can I?

<comment><USER32> You can't ask for individual data points; you ask for a segment of the population (eg. "musicians over 40 with children") and they'll return the data aggregated in bulk.

<comment><USER33> I don't think they will actually return the data though. I think it's the same as Facebook. You can target ads to a certain segment, but they won't actually tell you who is in that segment or what the actual data is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> anyone got a collection of more posts like this?

<comment><USER35> Are you asking about payments specifically or general "how things work" series?

When Apple Pay launched, Clover had a detailed post on tokenization. [http://clover-developers.blogspot.com/2014/09/apple-pay.html](http://clover- developers.blogspot.com/2014/09/apple-pay.html)

<comment><USER34> either payment or in general

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What annoys me is the expiry date and CVV. It seems like their solution to "more secure" is just to add more numbers. How about put the last 3 digits on the back, and call it the cvv ? How about use alphanumeric card numbers so we dont have to use as many digits ? Get rid of the expiry date used as validation. It's just more entropy, if you need more entropy then add another digit. It's just annoying having to type that crap in all the time.

<comment><USER12> I think we can all agree the correct model is a card that generates a globally unique card number for each and every transaction (e.g. coin _failed_ , final). It should also have a 2nd factor authorization like CVV which is not embedded in the magnetic strip (can't be read by swipers).

<comment><USER37> Which is (roughly) exactly how EMV chips work. Crypographic challenges that result in unique tokens for every transaction.

<comment><USER38> Of course, EMV is _still_ a broken piece of crap, because the signer can't actually verify the transaction being signed.

<comment><USER39> Plus, you still have to support plaintext between the EMV chip and the reader. This opens an entirely new class of places to steal card details (like PINs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I stopped reading after the first sentence "Ninety percent of Americans have used a credit card" which I find to be completely untrue and fabricated.

<comment><USER41> They're obviously talking about adults and I don't think that number is too far off, what would you put it at?

<comment><USER40> I realize, like most people, they were referring adults and a quick google search has the number pegged arround 72%.

[http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership- statis...](http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/ownership-statistics- charts-1276.php)</comment></comment></comment>


Kinetic Building Facade - <AUTHOR> http://www.aedas.com/ADIC-Headquarters

<comment><AUTHOR> See the video on the left for a description of the system.</comment>


Iceland Carbon Dioxide Storage Project Locks Away Gas, and Fast - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/10/science/carbon-capture-and-sequestration-iceland.html <comment><USER2> They convert CO2 to calcite:

"[S]cientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and other institutions have come up with a different way to store CO2.... Their approach involves dissolving the gas with water and pumping the resulting mixture — soda water, essentially — down into certain kinds of rocks, where the CO2 reacts with the rock to form a mineral called calcite. By turning the gas into stone, scientists can lock it away permanently."</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with a non-performing co-founder? - <AUTHOR> 6 months after I started a startup I invited a freelancer to be my technical co-founder. I gave him a good share of the company (vested 4 years+1 cliff). We have been working for 5 months now.
He is a nice guy and his heart is in the right place, but he is not very talented as a developer. He also have told me that he wants to stop being a dev and start being the biz guy, and he doesn't have experience/knowledge being the biz guy either.
This question in Quora http://goo.gl/TJLcG that describes well my question. Just wanted to know if you, founders, have faced something similar or how do you deal with a problem like this.
(posting this from a throw away account)
Edit: I'm a business co-founder that can code <comment><USER2> An approach that I just took with my underperforming cofounder was to give him a week trial to prove himself. The goal wasn't to actually get him to prove himself, but rather to show him that he no longer was a good fit so he could make the decision himself. On Friday, I said the following:

"I'm concerned that something is seriously affecting your ability to be productive with this startup. You and I both know that you aren't accomplishing what you're capable of. So instead of letting this grow into a problem I wanted to talk about it and see how I can help. I'm also afraid I haven't communicated my expectations reasonably. I'm sure you can understand my concern since this our entire lives right now. I don't want you to feel like you're trapped or forced to do something that you're not interested in. You know by now that doing a startup takes more than a 100% dedication. If you feel like you have lost some passion for it, then I want you to pursue what you are 100% passionate for. I won't have any problem at all because I know how hard it is to feel like you would be letting someone down. If I'm completely mistaken, then I want to be clear about my expectations and give you a week to make sure that you want to pursue this. [Outline expectations]. This is a decision I can't make for you, so I want you to think about it and starting Monday you can start to see if you're still interested."

On Sunday night, he resigned without me having to "fire" him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sit him down and say "sorry, but it's not working out. No hard feelings, I wish you the best of luck, but this isn't the right project for you."

You did the right thing by vesting options, and it seems clear that there is no fit for him. So, the outcome is inevitable, you owe him nothing but politeness, the rest is just timing.

<comment><USER4> Considering he gave him a good share of the company he may have to buy him out if he goes this way.

<comment><USER3> How so?

If it's only been 5 months, and there is a 1 year cliff, I don't see where the issue is. On top of that, he would only have the right to exercise (purchase) options if he wanted to, and you would have no immediate obligation to buy him out of anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you break up with a girlfriend? Speak plainly and clearly. Keep it short, no need to go to much into the reasons apart from 'it's not working out'. Then sit through the 'buts' and 'whys'.

I'm not sure how it works with the vested shares, if you owe him any compensation. Perhaps you can/should offer him some cash, since he did put in 5 months?

</comment><comment><USER6> Be aware that these situations can sour very quickly. Be prepared to compensate him fairly for his contribution, and ensure that he doesn't have control of any pieces of the business (code, domain names, etc) that are irreplaceable.

</comment><comment><USER7> You need to be honest with him and tell him things aren't working out and that he was originally brought on as a technical cofounder and he hasn't been working out for that role and he wants to switch to being a business cofounder which is not what you need.

Talk to an attorney about something called the Termination of Service agreement, have him sign this agreement along with the Convention Invention Assignment agreement. You'll need to compensate him some dollar amount for signing the agreement in good faith but it'll be the cleanest way to separate and vitally important moving forward.

</comment><comment><USER8> Talk with him,and say "That's not working for me in a long term" and pay him some cash to go.That's what i did.No way to be with him anymore.If he is not a good fit ,if he stays,that will make you very sick and will make every day a hell.Better to fail alone or succed alone as he is not the rigth person to be a co-founder.</comment>


Oil Is the New Data - <AUTHOR> https://logicmag.io/nature/oil-is-the-new-data/ <comment><USER3> Hasn't Big Oil been a leading edge customer of IT all along? Wasn't processing of seismic data one of the drivers for commercial High Performance Computing and then for Beowulf clusters?

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah.

I almost took a job with Halliburton in the early 90s. Everyone I talked to had 4 shelf-feet of orange VMS manuals and a huge color display for looking at seismic plots in 3d. They were absolutely at the confluence of 3d visualzation, DSP, fluid dynamics, geology, and all sorts of things.

I'm glad I didn't participate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're working in what we commonly call tech, and you're not in the clean energy or automatization sector, you're part of the problem. I know I am.

After the clean tech bubble burst, there's a lot less funded positions that directly work on reducing GHG emissions. So you'd have to be willing to take a big cut in pay - and lifestyle, unless independently wealthy. Very few people do.

Anything else is at best neutral on GHG.

<comment><USER6> I'd love to find ways to make my career focused on fighting climate breakdown and haven't figured out how to do so without defaulting on debts/obligations

<comment><USER7> You're not alone in that. People are out here working to pay not only their own debts but their landlords debts as well.

<comment><USER6> Debt, combined with shortages of necessities (often unnecessary) is a fantastic way to ensure people work on what makes the most money and not what they'd like to be doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The TCO managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping > them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn't convincing in the > slightest.

OP clearly has very little experience with a post-soviet work culture. In Russia, Kazakhstan and other nearby countries, drinking at the workplace (and I mean, getting blackout drunk) and stealing from your employer is still very common for blue-collar workers.

<comment><USER9> It's such a blind cultural arrogance. Build a narrative of how the world works in the high-tech areas of the USA and just bring that with you everywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Slightly tangential, but:

> _Chevron alone has thousands of oil wells around the world, and each well is > covered with sensors that generate more than a terabyte of data per day._

That's around 12MB/s, which sounds extremely high for something as "boring" (for lack of a better word) as an oil well. What could they possibly be monitoring, and at what frequency, and most importantly: for what purpose?

<comment><USER11> Monitoring 11000 wells (in the US alone, according to Wikipedia) at that rate is only roughly 1KB/s per well. I'm actually surprised it's so small. Sampling intervals for most sensors must be on the order of multiple seconds - <USER2> there's not many sensors.

<comment><USER12> Isn't a single CCTV camera going to give you MB/s? To be honest I'm astonished that there are oil wells without video cameras. Or perhaps those are counted elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like that author suddenly became aware that Oil companies use IT more extensively than Uber. Wow. So many new things to know.

<comment><USER14> Good on you for knowing already. But not everyone knows or knows how deep the rabbit hole goes. And articles like this are good reminders or good ways to learn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This comment section is full of people criticising the tone, the writing style and the "injection of personal politics" to avoid facing their compliciteness in fundamentally unethical businesses.

<comment><USER16> One can report facts about unethical businesses without asserting personal beliefs, otherwise it's just bad journalism. If the background and evidence are sufficient, the readers can draw their own conclusions. There is no need to tell the readers what is evil and what is not.

In this case, the author emphasized too much on his/her own belief, which erodes into the integrity of the valuable facts he provided. His/her personal opinions turned an exposé into an editorial.

<comment><USER15> This is hyperindividulaism driven to an absurd degree. Activism is a good thing. We shouldn't all be limited to apolitically spout facts at eachother, hoping enough people will independently come to the right conclusion and spontanously solve the problem.

Convincing people and trying to organize are essential in affecting change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The number one thing that will derail the whole "public cloud" is the idea that the cloud is not public. It is highly likely that every Fortune 500 company has at least some business that someone in the tech sector would find unseemly. If they get the idea that they are an employee protest away from losing their business, they are not going to transition to the cloud.

For this reason, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have been signaling that they intend to keep it a public cloud. Going forward, it is reasonable to expect that the workers who do these type of protests will find themselves let go from the companies.

<comment><USER18> Public cloud already disallows spamming. Additional restrictions don't seem implausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Very interesting to see how tech-giant employees are recognising their positions of leverage and feeling compelled to take a stance for what they believe in, even if they are unsure of what the implications may be.

climateaction.tech [0] has a useful community and provides some ways to get involved if this sparks curiosity. I'm using it to inform my opinion on where I stand.

[0] [https://climateaction.tech/](https://climateaction.tech/)

</comment><comment><USER20> What's the point of using a pseudonym? It won't be so hard for Microsoft to find out who the writer is.

<comment><USER21> But not as easy for other parties. Maybe that person wants to be able to get a job at other companies in the future and not get pointless hatemail from randos?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let's imagine American tech bails out from oil contracts in those countries - overnight. What happens? Russians will replace them immediately, or Chinese. That won't help those countries in any way. There is no quick process to get those countries jump over hundreds of years in general education and gradual development of business and manufacturing culture.

</comment><comment><USER11> While the essay's main drive is on climate, can we put that aside for a minute and talk about the orwellian surveillance apparatus talk in the central section of the essay? Or am I supposed to take the lack of comments on that as a combination of apathy and the increasing acceptance of persistent surveillance?

Like

> When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone > present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete > normalcy.

I get being uncomfortable working with Big Oil when you care about climate, but that kind of discussion spooks me way more. That goes way beyond climate and uncaptured externalities - that's pretty much a direct line on helping repress a people (in the service of ossifying existing power structures, ofc); potentially an attempt to utilize technology to help enforce a modern day kind of class slavery. Is that not the most obviously wrong new piece of information here? Isn't that that most notable component of this essay? Big Oil seeks to extract more Oil - that's to be expected, given their profit motivations, however unfortunate. You feel about that how you feel about that, and with respect to this essay, I don't think it's putting up much new information. But the surveillance goals of the management there? Those feel _new_ - like, if some engineer made the mistake of agreeing to assist creating those tools, that seems like it'd be _much_ more likely to goad people to anger. Me, at least, clearly.

> In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that > could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in > that activity.

Using ML to pick people out of a crowd for enforcement before they actually do anything seriously wrong... Literally the plot of a bunch of fictional dystopian thrillers, no? I find the concept that we'd actively seek to build such a thing quite disconcerting.

<comment><USER5> >before they actually do anything seriously wrong

In this context, it's preventing industrial accidents before they happen. Obviously, after they do something wrong, the harm is done.

This is already done currently by human supervisors BTW. Go look at any construction or industrial site. Why not free that supervisor from this burden ?

<comment><USER11> You could call it Luddite, but I think I'm much more comfortable with human judgement being involved. Especially since that also provides an obvious place for blame to lie, if such preventative enforcement is used extrajudiciously or without reasonable cause (there is a degree of tension between supervisors and workers - that's part of why unions exist). I can also trust to some degree that the supervisor will pull someone aside and engage in a conversation, as a fellow person - robosupervisor might not be so considerate without serious consideration by it's implementors and executors (especially if such consideration doesn't help the bottom line).

<comment><USER23> Why do people jump so easily from "lets build an efficient monitoring system" to terminators? Why do you think that first action that will be taken in such a condition will be something bad for the employee in question? Might be a simple notification for the human supervisor to check the situation out or it could even be a notification for the employee: "don't walk there, you might fall in the bloody tank".

<comment><USER24> Because in terms of human relationships, there's such a thing as "too efficient". Compassion, mercy, discretion, joy, friendliness - they all exist in the inefficiencies of a system, they happen in places the ruthless process hasn't reach yet. They die when turned into code - whether on computers or in papers, as bureaucracy is nothing but software running on a distributed protein runtime.

People aren't worried about a system that can deliver a timely safety warning to an employee. People are worried about a system that can spot everything that looks like wrong or inefficient use of your time, everything that may _perhaps_ lead to a problem but didn't yet, and count all that against you, and then _keep counting_ until you cross the threshold of getting fired, and there's no one who cares or even can do anything to help you.

Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding - and it's all too easy to everyone in the command chain to excuse themselves from responsibility by saying "but the system says so", or "but the system doesn't let me!". Next time you're wasting hours dealing with a customer support clerk of a bank or a corporation, constantly hearing "the system won't let me do that", think that at least it's just some product you're paying for, and not your very livelihood.

<comment><USER25> > Systems are buggy, their inputs aren't reliable, they have no understanding

Unfortunately this gets less and less acknowledged by many of today's technicians and engineers (I'm a programmer myself). People need not necessarily focus that much only on the Kafka-like stories or on the Bentham- inspired panopticon (both of these being real problems, I agree), but instead they should also go back to (re-)read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad" [1] in order to see what unreliable and buggy systems can do to a society that relies too much on them.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How you can continue reading after such childish intro:

      Big Tech is forging a lucrative partnership with Big Oil, building a new carbon cloud that just might kill us all.

<comment><USER27> Worse yet, this is the fourth submit in 36 hours:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Oil%20Is%20the%20New%20Data&so...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Oil%20Is%20the%20New%20Data&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This exposé would have been more convincing if the author/whistleblower did not inject so much of his own political views into it. State the facts and let readers decide.

I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and oversimplification are counter productive to the cause.

<comment><USER28> > _I am a big proponent for climate actions, but excessive vilification and > oversimplification are counter productive to the cause._

I'd argue the opposite. Excessive "it's too complex", overanalysing, and spreading the blame thin, is counter productive and is used all the time to obfuscate pressing issues, delay action, and deflect blame...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Dear OP,

The basic principles of economics show us supply means little withour demand. The dependence on fossil fuel is not due to current supply of the fuel source but rather a result of how the global economy has evolved to rely on it. You don't even have specific actions recommended as solutions big oil can implement to alleviate fossil fuel dependance. At this point you can't even blame them for the cost disparity with renewables since they are much more competitive. These "oil" companies call themselves energy companies because they are investing well outside of petrol for energy supply (such as wind farms).

Fossil fuels are not strictly oil and gas. And petroleum had many many critical uses well outside of fuel. R&D is focusing on making "smart" things instead of cheap renewable powered solutions. The likes of Exxon spent a lot of money trying to lobby against climate change mostly to protect their business interests but why are your politicians sk easily bought out? It seems you have a political problem here. Should they listen to big tech's lobbyists instead? Or maybe big tech should protest government's being bought so cheaply by any big corp?

Regardless, what is your solution? Make it harder for them by denyig them business? Slow them down? That won't happen. How hard is it for big oil to buy out one of the lower end cloud providers and offer it as an industry optimized alternative to big tech?

How about protesting car and plane manufacturers,airlines and cruise ships,etc... as well? You're picking on big oil because they're big and loud not because they can affect the most change.

Is this much different than targeting drug cartels in the drug war? Did it work? The solution it appears after all this years is solving for the more difficult problem of why dependence is formed and how to legally and safely administer drugs while solving for the root cause.

The problem is too critical to waste time and attention on curing symptoms. The root cause needs solving. The planet was dependent on oil long before climate change research was established, why was dependence formed and what steps can be taken to elimnate it?

It feels nice to blame on big bad guy and have a villain to terminate but in the process you're wasting time and effort.

And also, please ffs stop trying to do activisim by making companies do things politicians should do. Figure out why the election ballot is not effective before you vote with your wallet.

<comment><USER30> How much did an energy company pay for you to write this garbage?

<comment><USER29> None. If someone has an opinion different than yours this is your reaction?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> These conversations about how "[industry 1] is helping facilitate the the proliferation of [industry 2] and indirectly is part of the [problem || solution]" is deeply disturbing and signals to COMPLETE fragmentation of entire civil societies.

Fill industry 1 with the likes of tech, finance, government, oil.

Fill industry 2 with the likes of CO2 emitters, military, human rights violators, deportation police, surveillance machines.

Proliferations and advancement in harmful tech (nukes) leaks into helpful tech (nuclear medicine). And vice versa. One cannot exist without the other.

But if we start choosing who to help based on some random ideology and random understanding of when an indirect action becomes complicit in an act, we are destined to become unstable in our judgement and motives.

There needs to be a line drawn.

Canada president Trudeau is anti carbon. But supports the proliferation of Canadian oil. And he hears vitriol and accusations of hypocrisy. But being anti carbon doesn't mean you have to hurt supply. It means you only hurt demand.

Thoughts like if you don't like war, then hurt weapons manufacturing, can also create war by causing weak rich countries envied by strong poor nations.

There is more to say and more examples to give but I'd rather ask the more intelligent hn crowd to say them.</comment>


How to Build a Real-Time Object Detection iOS App Using TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://heartbeat.fritz.ai/https-heartbeat-fritz-ai-building-a-real-time-object-recognition-ios-app-that-detects-sushi-c4a3a2c32298 <comment><USER2> You're probably going to get much better performance if you convert your TensorFlow model to CoreML (use tfcoreml). Also has the advantage of not needing to compile TF for your phone yourself, and distribute it with your app.

<comment><USER3> If, and only if, it can be compiled to CoreML.

(I wrote and maintain Keras-RCNN. It does not compile to CoreML. Yet.)

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, why does compiling to CoreML fail?

<comment><USER5> Not every op supported in generic Tensorflow (software) can be converted to CoreML ops (hardware), which means a number of the more complicated models can't be automagically converted. If you have specific domain knowledge you can add substitute ops/roll your own, but this is beyond the scope of most people trying to bring models over to mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of the "see/seafood" app pitched by Jian-Yang from Silicon Valley

</comment><comment><USER7> This is image classification, not object detection!

/pedant

Edit: /eats crow

<comment><USER8> Actually, this is object detection because there is a bounding box which is generated localizing the object(s). Classification would be if each frame returned a class and class score without the bounding box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> High-performance != Real-Time

</comment><comment><USER10> Are they still using YOLO for object detection in TF?

<comment><USER11> [https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/research/ob...](https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/research/object_detection/g3doc/detection_model_zoo.md)</comment></comment>


Google obects to "Gchat" - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2012/02/10/google-says-gchat-is-not-a-word/

<comment><USER2> I must not be cool because I'm not really hearing "gchat" thrown around in normal conversation. Certainly not enough to write an article about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Chat must seem down market to them.

Not to be confused with the AIM users, Google prefers folks to "talk".

</comment><comment><USER4> Call it Buzz. It'll really confuse people if they know certain things about various product names.

</comment><comment><USER5> It is easier to type Gchat via text message then Google Talk or Google Chat</comment>


Pixelmator goes exclusive to Mac App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2011/01/07/pixelmator-goes-exclusive-to-mac-app-store/

<comment><AUTHOR> Another reason for being exclusive in the Mac App Store: Getting to the top of the Top Paid/Top Grossing lists which help more customers discover them and provide social proof the app is worth buying. By not having other ways of buying this app, it concentrates the buyers through the Mac App Store which helps their ranking.</comment>


Show HN: Sync Google Docs to Your Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://docswithoutborders.com

<comment><USER2> Am I missing something? Doesn't Google Doc/Drive come with syncing if you download it?

<comment><AUTHOR> A couple things:

1\. It syncs PDFs as well as links. Assuming you run the Dropbox app on your computer, you can view your Google Docs even if you're offline.

2\. If you already use Dropbox and sync it to your computer, you no longer need to run another sync client (Google Drive's).

3\. If you use Google Docs and Dropbox, you can keep everything in one place.

<comment><USER2> I see now, it's for Google Docs users who don't have Google Drive installed</comment></comment></comment>


Asset Forfeiture and the Cycle of Electronic Surveillance Funding - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/asset-forfeiture-and-cycle-electronic-surveillance-funding

<comment><USER2> This is the difference between a slippery slope, and a well lubricated slide. As effective as it was early on for dealing with drug cartels, it is, was and has always been wrong...</comment>


Everything is Broken - <AUTHOR> http://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1

<comment><USER2> I felt.. sad, reading this part:

"Then there's the Intelligence Community, who call themselves the IC. We might like it if they stopped spying on everyone all the time, while they would like us to stop whining about it.

After spending some time with them, I am pretty sure I understand why they don't care about the complaining. The IC are some of the most surveilled humans in history. They know everything they do is gone over with a fine- toothed comb — by their peers, their bosses, their lawyers, other agencies, the president, and sometimes Congress. They live watched, and they don't complain about it."</comment>


Amazon will be the Largest Company in the World and 1st Trillion Dollar Company - <AUTHOR> http://alexdmoore.com/amazon-will-be-the-largest-company-in-the-wor

<comment><USER2> "They are currently valued at about $50BN, but are growing at about 20-25% annually and will continue to do so for the next few decades."

Hello, unfounded assertion...

<comment><USER3> "The housing market is growing 20-25% annually and will continue to do so for the next few decades."

<comment><USER4> He might simply be assuming a high inflation rate.

At 10% inflation, prices will multiply roughly 8x in 20 years, so a trillion dollars would only be about $125B in today's dollars. That's only about half of Wal-Mart's market cap.

<comment><USER5> In the case that level of general inflation actually happens and other large companies grow as much as well, one of the companies with higher valuation than Amazon today would be first instead of Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Amazon is leading two separate businesses that are growing very fast: online retail and cloud computing. It's sort of like being in the chain store business and the electricity business at an imaginary point in the 20th century when they both were about to take off.

Disclaimer:I am (stupidly) waiting for a local minima in AMZN's stock price to buy more.

<comment><USER7> The stupid part about waiting for a local minimum isn't the waiting, it's the thinking that you can even identify a local minimum.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I once gave a presentation on the absolute futility of trying to time stock markets based on this excellent paper: <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1032962>

Given that and my long horizon, it is absolutely stupid, but that's (my) human mind for you.

"On average across all 15 markets, missing the best 10 days resulted in portfolios 50.8% less valuable than a passive investment; and avoiding the worst 10 days resulted in portfolios 150.4% more valuable than a passive investment. Given that 10 days represent less than 0.1% of the days considered in the average market, the odds against successful market timing are staggering. "

N.B.: To put a less stupid slant on it, I am _sure_ ;) that the markets will shortly give in to periodic hysteria about the economy tanking, affecting retail, taking Amazon down with them

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For 2009 they're listed as position 130 on the F500, so only 129 positions to go.

Take a trend and make some wild-ass extrapolation.

I'm very much impressed with what amazon is doing in general but I don't see them ever holding that top spot.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To answer some points: In 2008, revenue grew 29% to $19.17 BN. You can go back over the past 5 or 10 years and nit pick, but the numbers are all solid and within the ranges mentioned. I used 15% in the article over 20 years to express my confidence in ecommerce overall and in Amazon's ability to capitalize. The thrust of my argument is changing consumer behavior, but also a strong long position on the value of computer science. Amazon will leverage CS and technology generally better than all competitors. I stand by my claims. The data backs it up. I am confident current trends will continue because the underlying phenomena is so powerful.

</comment><comment><USER9> >bullish future where our society continues to have plenty of natural resources (oil, food and fresh water)

Thorium would cover a great deal of that; the critical resource we need is _optimism_.

</comment><comment><USER10> If I had just kept growing at 20-25% annually I'd be over 260ft tall today.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yea.. there will always be overly optimistic bulls and overly pessimistic bears. The future always falls somewhere in between. If you look back a few years, you'll see that Amazon had its fair share of doubters. Analysts and critics questioned their investments, and wondered whether or not they would ever be able to sustainably turn a profit. Amazon's definitely done well, and their long term philosophy works. See [http://www.salaminder.com/2010/01/amazon-diversification- diw...](http://www.salaminder.com/2010/01/amazon-diversification- diworsification/)

Nevertheless, the OP definitely falls into the "overly enthusiastic bulls" category. What large companies have grown at 15% a year for 20 years?

</comment><comment><USER12> "... in 20 years maybe. They're currently worth 5% of that though". Paraphrasing the article of course.

At current trading, Wal-Mart is worth just over 204B, just for comparison.

</comment><comment><USER13> I grabbed the last four annual revenues for Amazon and Walmart from Google Finance. The average growth (in revenue) for Amazon over that period is 31%; for Walmart, 9%. World GDP growth is about 7% per year (over the last 30, through '08).

Assuming those continue then Amazon will sell $1T nominal in 16 years. Unfortunately for the author's claim, Walmart will do it in 12. And also unfortunately, with that rate of growth, Amazon's revenue will exceed world GDP in 41 years.

</comment><comment><USER14> He seems to assume that market cap moves in lockstep with revenue. A company's current market cap factors in expectations of future growth.

<comment><USER15> And by those standards, the market is as optimistic as OP; Amazon is trading at a P/E of 76.

Edit: I don't mean this necessarily as vindication for OP. A P/E of 76 seems very expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I <3 Amazon, but I've started looking for alternatives (for buying, not for reviews) ever since they started charging us NYers tax. Sure, not their fault, blame NY state, but the point is, they are about 10% more expensive suddenly. Summary: If they do become super-big expect more taxes or more hindrances.

</comment><comment><USER17> Beware of linear projections.</comment>


Increasing Bitcoin-Privacy Using the Lightning Network - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@scidexer/increasing-bitcoin-privacy-using-the-lightning-network-or-how-to-delete-the-origin-of-your-bitcoins-3c611d072e40 <comment> crypto-jeronimo Along with increased centralization?

I can see some important (in "PageRank" sense) hubs emerging, which could give rise to problems that are analogous to those in the current proof-of-work setting, and the associated mining pool centralization.</comment>


Parasite test shows where validation studies can go wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/parasite-test-shows-where-validation-studies-can-go-wrong-1.16527 <comment><USER2> There are two things humans are really bad at:

1) Thinking

2) Communicating

It's difficult to tell which one we're worse at because they depend on each other. Muddy thoughts can be clearly communicated, or clear thoughts can be poorly communicated, and it has the same result. In the usual case we have muddy thoughts that we communicate badly. Hilarity ensues.

In this case, the replication team didn't initially use precisely the same molecule as the original work because the original team just assumed the replication team would process the raw molecules the same way they had.

This is a very common failure mode in both thinking and communicating: we implicitly assume something, then proceed as if it were generally true (it isn't) or that everyone knows it (they don't). That's not the only failure mode, but definitely a very popular one.

Good scientific communication involves over-communicating nit-picky details, and even then it can be stymied by the use of conventions that are less generally known than the authors assume.

I got a call once from someone working on a similar experiment to one I'd published, asking where a particular factor of two had come from in an equation: I had left implicit the limits on an integral that some people took over a full sphere and some people took over a half-sphere (with a factor of two due to symmetry). He basically wanted to make sure I hadn't screwed up, which would have given an extra factor of two in my result and explained a difference with his. If I had been explicit about the limits of integration I'd used it would have saved a phone call.

That was an easy and obvious case. When attempting to express complex ideas that you yourself are frequently unsure of (that's the nature of research) things can get far, far worse, to the point where it's fairly amazing we can communicate our imperfect thoughts at all.

<comment><USER3> I do not see it as humans being "really bad" at those things. Comparatively, across all mammals and other animal species we are really good at it that we engage in thought and communication beyond what is necessary for immediate survival. So we have deliberate (necessitated by purpose and aided by thought) communication across time and space.

I see it as, the purpose to which thought and communication are employed is complicated.

That is a nice supplementary anecdote.

<comment><USER4> Compared to animals sure. But we are the first thing to evolve intelligence, it's unlikely we are anywhere near optimal at it. It'd be like the first amphibian believing it was good at running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It saddens me that people look at this and don't see a new experement demonstraiting the initial paper was wrong. Instead they treat it like the old paper was right and the new experement just added pointless clarification.

Sorry, if someone following your procedure as written would fail to replicate your results then your paper is flawed and it should be withdrawn. Otherwise labs have a huge incentive to fudge things slightly so they get a little longer to explore the new information without competition.

<comment><USER6> Or, alternately, since it's a minor fix, you could just issue an errata, which is a thing journals do all the time.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but the root problem IMO that still leads to a wide range of perverse incentives. Science has a huge push to be the first to publish and little emphasis on accuracy. Which leads to a lot of crap being published making some disciplines nearly worthless.

<comment><USER6> And suggesting that if a minor and immensely flexible _non-error_ but simple lack of detail in a paper that could be instantly solved with errata will instead get it retracted is a major overreaction in the other direction.

An emphasis on reproducibility is good. An emphasis on going back and making sure papers say what we think they said is good. Automatic retraction is like zero-tolerance policies in schools - you'll get absurd and entirely foreseeable outcomes from wanting to appear to be tough, and not actually solve the problem of a screwy incentive system.

That a paper that _can_ be reproduced and be fixed with a minor errata, from authors that were fully cooperative with the replicating study, is the one being pointed at for that kind of treatment is illustrative of exactly that problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds like what would happen if I built a new javascript library, but instead of publishing source code, I just wrote blog post describing how to build it again in natural language. I've never been in a lab or witnessed one of these experiments, but wouldn't it be great if you could write up a set of instructions and feed that into a machine anywhere in the world.</comment>