MichaelApproved

> My friend just needed to redo the foundation on his house. He could have spent 10-100x what he needed to and installed a reinforced concrete foundation with deep steel pylons. But that would have been a waste of his money when wooden peirs works just as well for all his intents & purposes.

Is your friend Grady from Practical Engineering? His latest episode talks about foundations and replacing the old wooden piers holding up his house https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_KhihMIOG8

Also reminds me of the classic phrase "Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands."

Budget friendly, low cost, entry level. All great alternatives to the word “cheap”.

The word ”discount” in their name makes sense to me. I see it totally different than the issue with “cheap”.

- Discount is only referring to price while cheap can refer to price as well as quality.

- They’re going after a different segment of the market. Business to Consumer clients are not expecting the same level of professionalism as B2B clients would.

- Maybe it’d be a concern if they only sold their own tires. You might figure lower price means lower quality products. However, they sell the same tires as everyone else. It’s easy to see that it’s just a price play, not quality.

I'll never understand using "cheap" for a company name, especially when people who require signatures are usually in very professional environments.

- They're positioning themselves to always compete on price, not offerings.

- It's professionally embarrassing to use a product named "cheap" anything. I have so much trouble recommending namecheap.com to my clients because of this. They're reliable and budget friendly but the word cheap makes them worry about trusting their domain name to them.

- "Cheap" refers to price but it can also refer to quality.

- I'd be surprised if lawyers weren't their #1 market and I can't imagine they'd be comfortable sending their clients to a "cheap" product.

I'm sure they did market research to make it worth using the name. I'd love to hear their take on it.

Who knows, maybe this domain name is only for the initial marketing rollout and the actual product will use a more professional domain name.

> I wonder how Americans can tolerate this situation.

Several reasons this terrible system continues to exist but it essentially boils down to entrenchment.

- The private healthcare industry pays politicians to maintain the status quo. The alternative government run solution does not.

- The private healthcare industry creates propaganda and pays the media to spread it. An improved government run solution does not.

- Many Americans have decent coverage from their employer. For them, it’s not worth upending the system for what might be moderate gains. More over, propaganda has made them expect worse coverage from any alternatives.

- ACA gave many without employer coverage a good enough solution. It’s still expensive as fuck but it subdued enough voters.

So, after considering voters who are happy enough with the devil they know, you don’t have enough votes left to overturn the system.

I'm guessing you're also getting downvoted because sarcasm and rhetorical questions and not great ways of starting meaningful discussions.

Agreed and more.

Lots of companies monitor HN for negative posts and respond to them but few do it as well as Stripe.

While some companies just put out the OPs fire, Stripe seems to do better.

I have a rare trust that they’re genuine and will actually follow through with improvements to prevent the same issue from happening to others.

Great point. This does seem like an important vulnerability.

I think one method of protection would be using Stripes Radar service to screen transactions for malicious patterns.

While it probably won’t catch all fraudulent charges, it’ll catch a bunch. You can use that increase in rejected transactions as a canary to take a closer look at the other transactions coming through.

Does anyone else have ideas on how you can protect yourself from this kind of attack?

Edit: thinking about this more, it would be a pretty expensive attack to attempt. Stolen credit cards aren't cheap, like email addresses are. You'd need a lot of them to attempt the attack and you likely wouldn't succeed.

I think you'd need 1% of the target merchant's transactions to be chargebacks in order to get them kicked off. I'd assume at least 50% of your attempts would get caught before the chargeback even happens, so you'd need at least 2% of their transactions.

Seems like you'd need a large number of cards. Anyone know the value of a stolen card?

I think the point is that this attack vector can be pretty anonymous and absolutely deadly to the target company.

This attack is also not protected by insurance, like someone setting fire to your office would be.

It’s fair to explore just how vulnerable a company can be to this type of attack from a malicious competitor.

Yes, I’d trust my “laundered” sources over some random person’s second hand anecdotal information from unnamed “fire personnel”.

You might be fine with anti-science anti-vaccine conspiracy spreading media sources trying to influence you with their lies but I’ll pass.

If a media company promotes anti-vaccine and QAnon conspiracies, as the Epoch Times does, I will refuse to look at anything they produce.

Those are my basic standards for how trustworthy a media company is.

You’re free to choose your own.

That video is produced by the Epoch Times.

From wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times

> The Epoch Times is a far-right international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement.

> The Epoch Media Group's news sites and YouTube channels have spread conspiracy theories such as QAnon and anti-vaccine misinformation. In 2020, The New York Times called it a "global-scale misinformation machine".

EFF reported on it.

https://eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-215-expired-year-r...

> "On March 15, 2020, Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act—a surveillance law with a rich history of government overreach and abuse—expired due to its sunset clause. Along with two other PATRIOT Act provisions, Section 215 lapsed after lawmakers failed to reach an agreement on a broader set of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)."

biodegradable plastics are deceiving because the landfill they go into must be specifically tailored to biodegrade the plastics. Otherwise they stay there forever, just like regular plastic.

Let’s be honest, it’s hard enough getting Americans to the ballot on Election Day, we don’t need to introduce more complexity.

Ranking requires far less brain power than a rating system would.

Maybe the energy expenditure between the two is small for the HN group but for the general public, the aversion to doing the mental work would be enough to dramatically reduce turnout.

This goes for all countries, not just America.

Not to mention how easy it is to spread lies for something as simplistic as FPTP. The more complicated a system is, the easier it’ll be to spread lies about it.

Why are people presenting examples from parliamentary systems for an American voting process?

The two systems are so dramatically different that no cautionary tale would ever be meaningful.

> We rolled, and it turned out fine.

Who is “we”?

Like, every single time. Their execution is amazing.

Serious question, have any of their products had a poor rollout?

I’m not asking about a feature you’d prefer that’s missing. I’m asking about something being buggy, poorly documented, or having a confusing marketing page.

What’s the back story with that channel? Is he an independent maker or is there a production company behind him?

Not knocking him or the channel, I enjoy watching his videos and the recent collaboration with Lock Picking Lawyer was great.

Just wondering how it’s structured because it was so well produced from the first video.

It’s rare to see a maker create such polished videos from day 1. If he’s truly independent, he deserves even more credit for his talent.

It was even worse before the ACA.

At least with Obamacare, you (likely) won’t go bankrupt if you break a leg.

You also get preventative care fully covered (or ~$30 copay) even with plans that have $6,000 deductibles.

That includes both low & high cost items, like annual physicals and colonoscopies.

No, Obamacare shouldn’t die (as you said in an earlier comment) but it should be replaced with something that improves on what it’s already done.

Personally, I favor Medicare for all.

You: “Was it patched? No”

Also you: “but that cost literally _nothing_ to the company.”

Risk is an expense.

> at least you can have a person responsible for fixing it

At what cost? Even with the occasional outages, Slack is still more cost effective than having your own person (or team for larger organizations) handle your communication software.

Not even at 99.999% the speed of light. You’d need to even faster.

When you accelerate away from me in an elevator, only one of us experiences additional forces during that acceleration. Only your body feels heavier as the elevator speeds up.

Here’s a minute physics video that shows how acceleration explains the twins paradox (the “common” explanation) https://youtu.be/0iJZ_QGMLD0

After you watch minute physics video, you might feel like you understand. Nope, can’t have any of that. Now, you must watch this Fermi lab video that says the common explanation is “not fundamentally correct” https://youtu.be/noaGNuQCW8A

Time dilation isn’t dramatic as you might think. For example, at 66% the speed of light, you only get a 1.3 (or 30%) time difference.

You have to get into the 90% range for something meaningful. Even at 96% the speed of light, it’s a 4x speed difference.

99.99% is 80x time difference. 99.999% is 240x time diff.

To have time speed up to the point of civilizations rising and falling in a matter of days, you’d need to be traveling at 99% (with a few 9s in the decimal places). Though at relative speeds that high, it would be difficult to actually see what’s happening.

Here’s a calculator that’ll show you time dilation at different speeds https://keisan.casio.com/exec/system/1224059993

For a star that got ejected at near light speed from the galaxy, any orbiting bodies would probably be flung in other directions and no longer orbit the star.

Assuming the planet miraculously hung around for the ride, after the initial acceleration, it would be no different then what we experience here on earth.

Remember that everything is relative and perspective is key. A question about speed depends on who you’re asking.

To us, the other star and it’s planets are traveling at near light speeds away from us. To that stars system, it’s Earth that’s traveling at near light speed away from them.

Space flight would be the same and so would gravity and time. To them, nothing changes within their stars system because it’s all within the same reference frame.

I guess the night sky would be the main difference for people on that planet. They’d see the galaxy they left behind as red shifted and anything they’re speeding towards as blue shifted.

Since they’ve left the galaxy and was red shifted, they probably wouldn’t see as many stars with their naked eyes.

That’s good for internal bookkeeping but it’s not enough to prevent the unfair advantage.

Take this example: Apple Music “pays” 30% to parent Apple Corp. That 30% payment cuts into Music’s revenue and now they’re operating at a 25% loss.

However, that rough calculation still allows parent Apple Corp to consider Music to be profitable, since it’s a net profit for Apple Corp. It’s happy to take the 25% “loss” in the music division because it’s just a paper loss. In cash terms, the Music division increases Apple Corps profit.

The only real way for this division to be fair is to spin Apple Music off into its own company that is not owned by Apple Corp.

Thanks!

> Putting moving parts in salt water off the UK coast is always a tough prospect.

I’m guessing salt corrodes metals and barnacles grow on them which make the moving parts seize up.

What are some of the less obvious issues that they face?

I know you’re joking around but does the universe seem hacked together to you?

I feel like it’s incredibly elegant. All these low level rules are able to create such complex structures with beautiful order to it.

It’s so orderly, we can play things backwards billions of years. We can look back to how things were just a fraction of a second after this version of the universe began.

It’s astonishing.