I used to make sites when i was a kid in the 90s. i want to get back into webdev but without all the complicated stuff. How can i make an html only site? any site builders like dreamweaver in 2018?
GitHub pages is free and great for static websites.
Readit NewsI used to work on billing and a bit of payments stuff for a large SaaS company, so I have some experience with this.
When you charge a credit or debit card, send a bunch of messages that end up going to an organization called a payment processor. Payment processors do stuff like make sure your account has enough money/remaining credit and also have fraud checks and other security features. Sometimes, the payment processor rejects a payment because of insufficient funds, suspected fraud, their system being down or a malformed request. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is pretty archaic and there are a few layers between your servers and the processor, so it's very hard to debug. On your end, you could simply retry payments if they get rejected, but that might lead to a set of ping pong failures that might even trip fraud alerts to the customer. You can also have retry logic that uses an exponential backoff, just like any other request. That's a reasonable strategy, but you can probably do better.If you're a big company, involuntary credit card churn is actually a pretty sizeable source of churn for you. 99% transaction completion rate sounds pretty good until you realize it means a guaranteed 1% churn rate (assuming people don't sign up again), which is not insignificant. You really want to get this as low as possible.
Enter Stripe: Stripe has handled a very very large number of payments, and they probably have really comprehensive data about failure rates. This allows them to identify patterns and come up with some rules around retries. A simple (fully hypothetical) example is: If a transaction is declined for insufficient funds, retry again on the 15th and the last day of the month (usually when people get paid). These rules can get really complicated. We had some rules that were as complex as "If the cardholder is in Spain, and the card is Amex, retry in three days before 5pm if it's a weekday, otherwise wait until Tuesday."
Overall, this is a pretty nice feature for large customers with high transaction volumes. We did the data analysis/rule generation ourselves and hand rolled the retry logic in our system, but offering it as a built-in service is a convenient (albiet probably expensive) perk.
Woah, TIL. Thanks for the comprehensive response, tschwimmer.
izzygomez commented on Report of Active Shooter at YouTube HQ twitter.com/Lavrusik/stat... · Posted by u/coloneltcb
Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :)
And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with!
Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)
Congrats Drew!
One of the highlights of my MIT experience was going to your ~yearly tech talks that you did at the beginning of the fall semester. I’m excited to see Dropbox continue to grow as a company. :)
izzygomez commented on Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica situation facebook.com/zuck/posts/1... · Posted by u/runesoerensen
I'm slightly irritated that there seems not to be a single problem currently that someone would not be proposing cryptocurrency as a solution.
To be fair to the previous commenter, they did not explicitly propose cryptocurrency as a solution; they're just asking a question. Also, cryptocurrency != blockchain technology.
That said, I do agree with your sentiment that the blockchain-as-a-solution space is getting a bit ridiculous. I can't imagine a way to translate this problem into a smart-contract-solvable form.
> Nobody who lives in a market that Uber serves will ever be willing to go back to the old way of calling a taxi dispatch line by phone, waiting on hold, and being told the cab will arrive in "five to thirty minutes". Seriously. Think about this.
In New York, every taxi is now hailable from a smartphone app that shows me the current locations of nearby taxis and reliably gets me one in 3-5 minutes from most places in the city.
> Nobody used to Uber will want to waste time taking out a credit card and swiping it through a dirty slot or handing it to a driver only to wait several minutes for it to finally go through.
Even if I don't hail a taxi from the app, the screen inside the car shows a code that I can use to associate my app's payment account after I get in the car. (Also, the real problem here is drivers claiming the credit card machine broke, but that's stopped happening.)
> Compared to the average Uber vehicle, most taxis are filthy and full of all sorts of odors.
You need to clarify what market you're in. Not NYC, surely.
> The taxi/livery industry is simply too used to enjoying a monopoly business to be able to fix itself.
It fixed itself in NYC, and if it can fix itself there it can fix itself anywhere.
Seriously. I do credit Uber and Lyft with making the taxi industry realize that they're doing things wrong and have an easily-eatable lunch, but they're figuring things out. I'm more curious about places (like the college town I grew up in) that have Uber service but barely any taxi service.
I'm not a native NYer, but when I have been there this has not been the case. FWIW, everything that the original commenter mentioned is true of Boston and the Bay Area in my experience.
The article speculates what the AGI will be like. The AGIs that exist will be the ones that proliferate. Ultimately, the AGIs that survive and proliferate will be ones that put their own interests before anything else. People talk about benevolent AGIs, that’s like looking at the earth billions of years ago and saying that if life ever formed, it would be benevolent. It has been shown again and again that where there is arbitrage, no matter how gruesome, a suitor will manifest. This is because unfulfilled arbitrage of any kind is an inherently unstable configuration. An AGI hampered by human society and interests will not win every engagement with every other kind of AGI. And it will only take one loss for humans to be rendered transient. I don’t do a very good job of explaining it here.
I used to be a singularity person, excited for AGI. But then I thought it through all the way. These people like Demmis, Peter and ray kurzweil are reckless. They have their heads in the clouds with respect to AGI.