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kitbrennan

383 karma · joined August 2, 2012

Founder of Thrust Carbon, a carbon intelligence business for the travel industry.
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kitbrennan··on No excuses – we let you down
Brief downtime?

Revolut positions itself as a full service bank, including account number and sort code - they will have users that understandably use their product as their primary account. There will be regular users that will be unable to pay for lunch, and business users that will be unable to pay employees and suppliers (don't forget that it was last Friday of the month, a common payday in the UK). To let their customers go without access to their funds for an entire working day is not a 'brief downtime', it's completely catastrophic.

I'm also not surprised that user's did not hear back from support. I was formally a Revolut premium user that used the 'premium support', and they frequently had support response times >4 hours (one time over >6 hours). It's no surprise that when something serious happens their support infrastructure completely collapsed.

I want to give them the benefit of the doubt over their downtime, but I struggle to understand how it took them an entire working day to realise that an application server was playing up, and why a single server was able to take down up to 75% of their transaction processing?

Lastly, if there is anyone out there considering Revolut, please be aware that despite their advertising that they do not add FX fees they actually do add fees on the weekend: https://community.revolut.com/t/weekend-exchange-rate-surcha...

kitbrennan··on Worldwide airport chaos after computer check-in systems crash
Amadeus operate out of their own datacenter http://www.amadeus.com/web/amadeus/en_1A-corporate/Amadeus-H...

Maybe if they didn't have a single point of failure and instead used a multi cloud installation this wouldn't have happened...

kitbrennan··on Data from man's pacemaker led to arson charges
In your example I think it's right that the driver is found at fault. The effects of sleep deprivation on driving are very well documented and are comparable to drinking. If a driver is not fit to be driving a car, then they are a danger to the other road users and must take responsibility for their negligence.

The same evidence could of course be helpful to the driver. If their sleep tracking app shows they are well rested and their phone's use shows no distractions while driving, then they could use that as evidence to fight a charge of driving without due care and attention.

kitbrennan··on Why read old philosophy?
> its continually losing ground to science in every area and its methods are questionable at best

Philosophy is a very broad school and many areas do not lose out to science. While science helps answer such things as the free will debate, it cannot answer the question of morality or the debate over how to govern society correctly.

Often science can bring us closer to understanding the world but not provide an answer on how to act. The classic example is abortion. Science can tell us when the heartbeat starts, or brainwaves begin firing, or when we feel pain; but it cannot begin to answer whether it is ok to take a life before/after any of those biological points - that is where philosophy comes in.

I'd go as far as arguing that it is one of the most practical disciplines. It gave me answers on how to act rather than relying on pure feeling. Too many of us support the same political parties as our parents or having the same moral code as our peers, without questioning whether that is actually the ideal way to act. These philosophical arguments go to the heart of society, morality, politics and law.

kitbrennan··on Why read old philosophy?
I'm not convinced by the author's argument. The difference between philosophy and physics is that old philosophical arguments do not become less correct over time. In physics, later physicists build on the earlier body of knowledge and refine it, making it more correct. In philosophy, later philosophers may suggest a counterargument to the early philosopher, but as philosophy does not normally deal in absolutes it is impossible to say the later philosopher is now more correct and worth reading instead of the earlier philosopher.

For example: a philosopher may argue that murder is morally wrong, and a later philosopher may argue that murder is morally right. Neither answer is factually wrong or right. We should therefore read the work of both philosophers to get the most value out of our studies and to form our own opinions.

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I'd also argue that it's not always worth reading the earlier philosopher's work if someone else can rewrite it in a better form. Personally I think Immanuel Kant's philosophy is interesting but poorly written, and you'd get more value out of reading a later text about his philosophy that his works himself.

Other writers such as Plato have stood the test of time and are worth reading (assuming you have a good translation).

kitbrennan··on Vitamin pills don't work and may be bad for you
The publication bias would go in the other direction. A drug company showing the effectiveness of vitamin pills would publish that research to help them sell more vitamin pills; A drug company finding vitamin pills to be ineffective would be incentivised to not publish the research.

Further more, we're not talking about just one study here against a sea of studies in favour of vitamin supplements. Free radical theory has been shown to be effective in a petridish, but it has a neutral or negative effect in most large scale human studies.

kitbrennan··on Uber rival Karhoo shuts down
I'm not surprised.

They were sending out free credit emails every weekend for £45 (£15 off three separate trips); no minimum spend, no qualification criteria, just free trips. That's well over £150 of free credit some months!

Even with the free credit though, I still used Uber because Karhoo was a terrible experience:

* The time estimates were never correct, no matter which car provider you selected. You were always waiting longer than 15 minutes for a car. * Dial-A-Cab always said there was a car 7 minutes away but that was a lie. You then joined a queue to be assigned a taxi, and that car could be any distance away (I never received a Dial-A-Cab taxi in under 25 minutes). * There was no continuity in the rules between providers. For example, cancellation fees were apparently on a provider-by-provider basis. * The prices were often far in excess of Uber, but for the same cars that UberX uses.

kitbrennan··on Crowdfunding campaign against US patent on personalized content
"The patent has just expired, but the troll still has 6 years to ask anyone for the licensing fees or the damages that they incurred during the term of the patent — which is 20 years."
kitbrennan··on Show HN: CuriosityStream – Netflix for non-fiction
Looks like an interesting proposition.

Two pieces of feedback:

* Alarm bells ring when a company says where they are mentioned in the press but fail to link to any articles.

* I really struggled to find your pricing. I saw plans starting at $2.99 but the obvious next question was: "What are the plans? How much will I actually pay?" I ended up in your Help Center before I could find an answer.

kitbrennan··on Fundraising Advice for YC Companies
Really this advice is born out of two things:

1. Many investors argue you should build your product in a narrow vertical that has the opportunity to turn into a much larger market. Given you start in a narrow vertical, you should aim to dominate that vertical ('Crossing The Chasm' makes a very coherent argument in favour of this). 2. Investors are aiming for 10-100x returns, and it's hard to do that if you are not going to become the clear market leader.

Whether this leads to a better society is an interesting question. One might argue that it makes your company more likely to be successful, and successful startups are job/value creators which is better for society.

kitbrennan··on Apple unlock: Judge compares request to execution order
I'm not saying there isn't a line to be drawn - obviously given your example most people would shrink away from the idea of using someones thoughts to convict (literal thought-crime).

It's a question of where we draw the line. If we don't allow a judge to issue a search warrant for a phone where there is reasonable suspicion of illegal activity - why should we allow a judge to issue a warrant to search a car/property/paper-work?

Of course that completely oversteps the line in the other direction though. Conviction rates for many crimes would drop through the floor if the legal authorities have no way of obtaining evidence.

Given how powerful smart phones have become and you come run a criminal enterprise solely through your phone, it is reasonable to expect that the police with a proper warrant would be able to inspect your phone.

kitbrennan··on Apple unlock: Judge compares request to execution order
It's a pertinent example because we think of peodophiles making photos - which is something phones are very good at.

However, it doesn't require much of an imagination to think of other scenarios:

* Keeping records of drug sales on a phone. * Messaging a hitman to carry out a murder. * Recording days and times of homes being empty in preparation for a break in.

kitbrennan··on Apple unlock: Judge compares request to execution order
Something we forget on Hacker News is that the vast majority of data and information requests are not made to spy on citizens without due cause.

The majority of requests are made because someone suspected of a crime (pick any crime: fraud, possession of child pornography, drug dealing) - and they believe there to be evidence on the device.

If we prevented legal authorities from accessing data on your phone, then in theory a peadophile would only have to ensure he/she downloads illegal images to their phone to ensure they cannot be caught.

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The reason we have warrants is to ensure there is a second layer to verify that a search is proportionate. Obtaining information from a phone should certainly require a warrant issued by a judge; but it certainly should not be completely unobtainable.

kitbrennan··on Sonder Keyboard
For a product focused on improving a user's experiencing of using a computer, it seems odd that they would deliberately override my browsers scrolling in such a horrible way.

Not only that - but their scrolling override has also broken swipe left to go back a page.

The keyboard looks pretty - but I dread to imagine what the experience is like when setting up keybindings.

kitbrennan··on Stripe Is the New PayPal
As mentioned by many others - there are a number of details missing here that are extremely relevant. What are you selling? Where? To whom? If you had hundreds of charges in your first month, did you migrate over from another payment supplier or are they brand new customers? If you migrated, how did you migrate?

I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into:

* The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system.

* The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure.

* The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true).

* The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this.

===

Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two.

That said, as much as I love what Stripe in general, it is completely unacceptable for them not to have an escalated support/appeals process for fraud complaints. If they have made a mistake (which happens even with the best fraud systems), then they could be destroying a business that might have customers/employees/suppliers that are also relying on them to receive their payments on time.

kitbrennan··on Hammer.js: Add touch gestures to your page
MacBookPro user - not really sure what I'm supposed to be experiencing? I can click and drag the white box and it moves back to its original position, is that it? I've tried all the standard Mac touch gestures.

Is this library only for tablets?

The page that was linked is pathetically vague.

kitbrennan··on AWS Lambda as a back end for a single-page app
But the same is true of any backend. Once you know the endpoint being used by the frontend, you can blast the backend with requests and one of two things will happen:

* You will take down the site (a DoS attack). * Or the victim has auto-scaling and you rack up their AWS charges.

This is hardly a unique problem to Lambda.

kitbrennan··on Ask HN: What are the best product landing pages you've stumbled upon?
Looking at that page I have no idea what they do. It's taking the 'vague' landing page to the extreme in a very annoying way.
kitbrennan··on Project Fi by Google
Likewise, although I'm finding that Telstra throttles me quite a lot. Turns out you can use any network in Australia (with no roaming fee from 3), so I've manually switched to Optus and my speed has dramatically increased.
kitbrennan··on Adopting Microservices at Netflix
You're confusing 'development cycle' and 'pushing code'.

Pushing code too fast is clearly a problem that causes bugs, and neither developers or users are a fan of.

The 'development cycle' includes the total time to implement something, including time taken to fix resultant bugs.

Where you can speed up the development cycle without introducing more bugs (eg. by implementing comprehensive testing and QA practices), then no one is going to complain.

kitbrennan··on Elementary OS Freya Beta 2
While I understand their explanation - and agree with the theory - in practice the same active choice would be achieved by displaying a $0 button that users have to actively click on.

The simple fact is: when I first went to their website I assumed it was a paid package.

kitbrennan··on Harper Lee to publish Mockingbird 'sequel'
I think you missed the point. The brilliance in To Kill a Mockingbird is the way it makes us feel the confusion felt by a six year old looking at an adult world.

At the time, many people did see race relations as 'black or white', and people thought there was a perfectly legitimate debate to be had about whether someone that was black was 'less of a man' that someone that was white. What Scout really shows us is that children are not born with this pre-conceived notion, and are generally confused by it... and we should be too.

To address your specific points: the black people were not supposed to have much of a voice in the novel, because black people didn't have much of a voice back then. There wasn't much insight (in terms of speeches or things said) around race relations, because to a six year old girl the insight doesn't matter. All that matters is one of fairness - that a child cannot fathom how crazy adults must be to not give black people a voice or to treat them differently, just because of their skin.

PS: In response to your comment about Finch, you're right. Finch is perfect - because he's Scout's father - and most six year old girls do think of their father as perfect; if Scout hadn't been written that way then her character would have seemed shallow and wrong.

PPS: I've clearly thought about this too much and what I've wrote seems a bit preachy - as with any book, it all comes down to personal taste.

kitbrennan··on Man saves wife’s sight by 3D printing her brain tumor
It's important to remember that this article is probably simplifying the doctor's advice. I imagine the neurologist ended with: "However, please come back immediately if you feel worse or notice any other symptoms."

Obviously that 'may' have been a critical delay, and therefore Scott and her husband were certainly right in hindsight to be proactive about Scott's health.

kitbrennan··on In a First, Square Tops $100M in US Sales in One Day
noting that this kind of sales volume ranks it as the 13th largest U.S. retailer by annual sales

Statements like this are very misleading. Square isn't a retailer, it is a payment processor. The real question is how Square compares against other card processors, both terminal POS based and mobile reader based?

Alternatively, how much of the market has Square actually taken, and what is their current growth rate? Without knowing pertinent numbers, Square topping $100m after 5 years of operations could be evidence of a damning failure (I'm not saying it is, but rather that we do not have nearly enough data to know).

Edit: grammar

kitbrennan··on Ask HN: What book changed your life in 2014?
`Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance`

The book looks at what it means to say something has 'quality'.

It didn't teach me any new philosophical methods or theories, but it did make me look at my own work differently and start asking: how can I make something with the highest quality? What compromises that quality? What is a method that leads to the highest quality?

Translating that to my business life: in the startup scene I've scene a lot of startups treat lean as gospel (myself included at one point), and as a result they compromise on the quality that both themselves and their customers are happy with. So I certainly found it useful to have a book that made me think about this.

kitbrennan··on MacGap – Build Native OS X Apps with Web Technologies
You didn't actually explain why this is a terrible idea?

At the end of the day it enables developers to access native APIs such as notifications or file writing through their language of choice.

kitbrennan··on Couple 'fined' £100 for leaving a bad review
It is true for business contracts that the written word is considered the ultimate authority. The principle is called 'caveat emptor' which can be translated to 'buyer beware'; essentially a business that enters into a contract is expected to read that contract and consult legal advice.

That said, there is protection for consumer contracts. In the UK you have the Unfair Contract Terms Act that protects consumers against businesses attempting to discharge liability to negligence. Europe wide you have the Unfair Terms In Consumer Contract Regulations which prevents businesses from inserting onerous terms into contracts with consumers that are not 'individually negotiated' (eg. almost every contract that a consumer signs without using a lawyer).

kitbrennan··on Show HN: One Adaptive API for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive
Actually I'm using a Macbook Pro. The problem with messing with scrolling is that my usual flick of the trackpad does not get me to the point that I expected to reach on the page. It's very mildly disorientating.

I was going to scroll down to the next section on your page anyway, so there doesn't appear to be any benefit in dictating exactly where I scroll to. Unless you have a very specific reason for overriding the scroll behaviour (eg. an interactive story), it's best to steer clear of it.

kitbrennan··on Show HN: One Adaptive API for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive
Please do not mess around with my scrolling when I visit your website. It means my first experience is horrible.
kitbrennan··on Angular-data: data store and caching for Angular.js
A simple example would be storing data on your 'logged in user' on a large application that has multiple controllers/services.

A scope only extends as far as a particular controller/service. If you wanted every controller/service to have access to that user's data (eg. that user's ID), you would create a service that would store that data, and then inject that service into each place you need to access the data.

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