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It's interesting to hear about offline merchants accepting bitcoins. I wonder how much of it has to do with the fixed card processing fees as a component of the small transaction size.

The goal would seem to be when the restaurant can pay their bills in bitcoins, so they never have to convert it to a fiat currency at all.

Nice!

I wake up every day around 5:30am and try to get up and going as quickly as I can.

You nailed some of the key things I already do in the morning: - check the weather - figure out what meetings I have for the day

The other thing I look for is if there was anything interesting for me that happened while I was sleeping. The best example is how I check to see if there are emails from specific people or internal monitoring services.

I could give you about 10 email addresses that I care about and get a digest of emails just from those email address.

ACH has a dispute system like credits cards. Credit cards have a dispute window of 120 days. Personal bank accounts have a dispute window of 60 days. Business bank accounts have a dispute window of 3 business days.

The problem with disputes on ACH debits is that the process is not formalized through a standard network like Visa or MasterCard. It's a mess operationally, and there's a near zero chance of winning the dispute. This becomes even worse because of the size of ACH transactions.

We've reduced the risk by requiring trial deposits on any bank account that you want to debit, which is also a problem for a lot of our customers.

We're still trying to figure out the right pricing and are discussing it openly (https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/2#issuecomme...).

The risk scales with the size of the transaction. Granted, the risk does not scale at the same rate as the transaction size, but we wanted to keep it simple in the beginning.

What do you think about 1% + 30¢ with a cap?

I'm sorry if we gave you that impression.

All three founders have engineering degrees. I built the original version of the product, was the second engineer at Milo.com, and wrote DDoS prevention software in college. Mahmoud built high-frequency trading systems for Wachovia Securities and built Milo.com's matching and categorization system. Jareau studied Electrical Engineering at U Penn, built GPS enabled devices in college, and wrote Milo.com's original systems to interact pull in data from retailers.

Even our General Counsel codes. He studied Symbolic Systems and wrote some of our internal reporting systems in Python.

I completely agree. I apologize if it came off that way.

We launched payouts in February: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/14/balanced-payments-ach-api-o...

Balanced requires name, DOB, and address only to underwrite the recipient as a merchant to avoid the marketplace becoming an aggregator. It is still possible to make a next-day payout directly to a recipient without this information:

  curl https://api.balancedpayments.com/v1/credits \
      -u f97912a2cd8a11e2a411026ba7cd33d0: \
      -d "amount=10000" \
      -d "bank_account[name]=Johann Bernoulli" \
      -d "bank_account[routing_number]=121000358" \
      -d "bank_account[type]=checking" \
      -d "bank_account[account_number]=9900000001"

In that case you can also use Balanced only for payouts by funding your escrow with your own bank account. Stripe would require you to charge your own credit card to perform this service.

As you said, the main difference is about focus. Balanced has focused on supporting marketplaces from the beginning and continues to do so.

(I work at Balanced)

Balanced (https://balancedpayments.com) provides a payouts solution for marketplaces like redditgifts, Crowdtilt, Fancy, Artsy, Visual.ly, and many others.

The differences with Stripe include the money being available for payout immediately (instead of 5 days), and the recipient will receive the money the next business day. Balanced has also performed a lot of work to verify merchants with as little information as possible — name, dob, and address. Instead of SSN for an individual you only need to pass in the last four.

The Balanced Payouts service has been available for some time. Our ACH Debit (pay with bank account) is in Beta however.

You can send money to debit cards using the ATM rails a la Pulse, STAR, etc.

It's something we've explored at Balanced: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/32

It's been about 9 months now that Balanced started the approach towards openness: https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues?direction=as...

Building an open company wasn't part of the initial vision. It's something that we've embraced as we grow Balanced.

Regarding the homepage, that's a great suggestion.

pull requests welcome and much appreciated ;-) https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com/issues https://github.com/balanced/balanced-dashboard/issues

you just reminded me of a mobile display issue on the blog: https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com/issues/32

Much of the frontend for the blog was done by github.com/joonas (not a Balanced employee): https://github.com/balanced/balanced.github.com/pull/3

Excited to have an incredible group of angel investors onboard!

Google's new design language handles this pretty well using "almost flat" design. They still have a rectangular button (no gradient or rounded corners), but there's a slight drop shadow.

We put a lot of work into this release. This covers about 15% of bank accounts. Here's more information on the blog post: http://blog.balancedpayments.com/introducing-balanced-same-d...

SWIFT or wire transfers are international and next-day at worst and intra-day at best, but it's really freakin' expensive—$15 vs. the 25¢ that Balanced charges.

The worst part of SWIFT though is that the recipient also gets charged on the order of $15.

Rap Genius is limited more by time than by money if anything. It would make more sense to throw money at the problem instead of people.

It's not that their that much weaker. You have 60 days as an individual to dispute a debit, but it's seriously painful. You will likely have to go into a branch and fill out a physical document. In comparison, Amex has a link that says "dispute" next to each transaction.

You can always use HelloFax (same company) if you're interested in paying ;-).

I get what you're saying though. B2B is not like building a consumer app. I'd rather pay as long as it's reasonable.

How do you "demonstrate one is out of touch reality"?

That's just as difficult to define. My argument is that there's no black or white answer.

> The concept of physically restraining someone from committing suicide is completely antithetical to the idea of man being free. You cannot believe in one while advocating for the other.

Suggesting that you put someone in a "rubber room" is a bit ridiculous, but it's normal to put someone that is suicidal under suicide watch. Keep in mind that mental health can be a huge factor in someone being suicidal. In other words, they're not thinking straight, so it's fair to help them during that time.

Having the right to end your life is different than others trying to help you through a challenging time and show you that there are other ways out.

The reinforcing lesson I take away from the post is that you should know your company's weaknesses. Don't support remote workers if you don't have the culture or structure to support remote workers. Otherwise, you'll end up as a company that allows remote workers but doesn't truly support them, which is worse than not having remote workers at all.

I'll throw in on Gittip: https://www.gittip.com/tenderlove/

Would also be happy to give you a hug ;-)

spidey may not be actually associated/used by Art.sy. It's not on http://artsy.github.com/open-source/

It also handles resizing the window pretty well. Give it a shot on http://art.sy/artist/ansel-adams

> actually have a use for the fillwidth plugin right now.

That was the main project that caught my eye as well.

What are your recommendations?

The advantage is that you can easily ping other developers, comment, and reference other topics.

Completely agree with your reasoning. However, there's a difference with how Balanced operates. The marketplace understands the credibility/reputation of the seller in a way that a merchant processor never could.

Balanced gives the marketplace the ability to control when the seller receives their money. The most important factor is trust and some form of buyer confirmation that fulfillment has happened to their satisfaction. It's the job of Balanced to push the money to the seller as fast as possible.

There's two posts on status pages on the HN homepage right now. This and Balanced:

- http://blog.balancedpayments.com/status-page/

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4877643

The hardest problems to me are properly monitoring and computing downtime. Heroku's uptime calculation uses time[1], which breaks down for an API where it should be more about the number of requests.

Any idea how Github is measuring downtime? Is there a difference in Github's measurement for when there's low usage vs. going down during peak hours? How are sporadic errors computed vs. a complete outage?

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-status#uptime-c...