Viewing profile — brass_cannon

I'm not a developer, so I can't confidently comment on the value of specific code evaluation techniques. In other disciplines however, it can often be fairly easy to sort out the t…

You're missing my point regarding Samurai. It's main value prop is a gateway with developer friendly docs. This has nothing to do with risk. Feefighters tells their customers to go…

You're going to run into some degree of issues wherever you go if you're accepting pre-orders. Because your essentially taking payments for a product that doesn't exist yet (and th…

PayPal is horrible at providing support, documentation and resolution channels in these type of situations. They also, at times, can appear to arbitrarily take adverse action again…

Samurai doesn't solve this problem. A merchant processing through them still needs to obtain a traditional merchant account, and therefore exposes their business to the same risk o…

As another October 8th birthdate with the opposite impression of how many October kids there are, I had to look this up. 8.62% of all live births in the US during 2006 occurred dur…

Valid point, but if I am rich enough to be living on an isolated island micro-country, and will fetch a healthy enough ransom for pirates to snatch me, I am also investing a fair a…

To your point, someone used the Hubble Effect in the other HN thread on this story to show that this observation is actually closer to 9.5 billion years old, which is significantly…

I like the idea of using Mercury's orbit as a comparison. Some more fodder: Just over 13,583,569.4 times the volume of the Sun. [2] [2] http://www.smartconversion.com/otherInfo/Vol…

Given that the difference between our calculations is a result of the margin of error in determining the Earth's ocean's volume, I wonder what the margin of error is for NASA's mea…

1.918 * 10^35 cubic liters [1] [1] http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/SyedQadri.shtml

Age 7: Lemonade stand Age 9: Created a 'museum' in my bedroom comprised of all the interesting things I could collect (geodes, baseball cards, trophies, shark's teeth, etc.). I cha…

It really is dependent upon your work environment, and the people you work for. When I started at my current job, we had two weeks vacation after 6 months, plus half a dozen holida…

All good points, and I live by them when setting up meetings. The author recommends freeconferencecall.com, and I use them as well. Just be aware that your calls will be preceeded …

I was liking that reply in 2010, noob (technically true, living in Chicago).

Did anyone else immediately think of the ubiquitous blue and yellow tropical bird that uses the exact shades of blue and yellow that the ugly website example in this article uses? …

To me, the fact that Visa / MasterCard are in a heavily regulated (and to some extent, subsidized) industry is a separate issue. Perhaps the government should have less influence o…

AFAIK (and I may be off here), the government has not officially requested that any entity take negative action against Wikileaks. The implied threat that action may be taken again…

But you're missing a huge point here. Visa and MasterCard don't have a responsibility to allow you access to their networks. This is akin to arguing that your free speech rights ar…

Except your assertion requires that the availability of imported tea was an essential component to the American Revolution's success. The founders didn't reduce their available res…

That's an interesting idea. Is there any additional reading related to this?

The way most vaulting services work is, you pass through credit card details, and they store in their vault. They then send you back a token to reference for future transactions. I…

It's not widely adopted yet (and it's doubtful that it will ever be adopted by Auth / Paypal), but of significance to this discussion is http://www.portabilitystandard.org/ . If th…