amcnett

I would argue it is zero sum ("you've got some fraud" vs "you have no fraud") if there is any great volume of transactions and what's being sold is valuable, and/or marketable at a black market price below retail, and/or offers fraudsters liquidity options. I am skeptical because an untrained system is going to make mistakes out of the gate, even if it's trained on oodles of transactions from other businesses. Anti-fraud isn't a one-size-fits-all game.

Sure, maybe you offer "zero fraud" from a chargebacks-line-item-on-the-balance-sheet perspective. The impacts of fraud on customers' perception of a company, and the effects those perceptions will have on the bottom line, however, can be significant. This is not say I assume your service is deficient in any way...the marketing is just a little snicker-inducing from someone like me who works in the field. The only sure way to have zero fraud is to turn off sales.

Final control over force-approving rejected transactions is a nice feature on its face. I understand why your merchants don't use it...they'd have to soak the expense of paying someone to monitor accepts and rejects in an attempt to optimize sales (which is what they are paying you to do).

If a merchant does not have full visibility into and control of their anti-fraud program (and the expertise to know what to do with it) approval/reject/false positive rates are always going to be in the hands of people who don't know their customers or business as well as the merchant does. That is why larger, mature businesses invest in anti-fraud people and technology. That's certainly a bridge too far for the typical small business, so services like Bolt can certainly deliver a ton of value. I just advise a merchant who thinks that just because they can't see fraud there isn't any impact to their business that they're missing a potentially crucial part of the picture.

Those aren't interchange fees. Those are payment processing fees...Bolt is paying the interchange.

Fraud liability absorbed by a service provider isn't "zero fraud." It is: "you don't get charged directly for chargebacks and other financial penalties, but your brand is still at risk, plus you have no control over false positives."

I use five little 4oz paper cups (also not a joke).

I think that's a bit of a reach. That malaise may have contributed to certain aspects of the conglomeration of groups/sounds that came to be called grunge, but let's not forget the vigorous marketing efforts around it at the time. Economically-speaking, the decline of the timber industry in the Pacific Northwest may have as had as much or more to do with music-impacting unhappiness.

I cook ~80% of my meals. Generally speaking I try to eat out infrequently, and when I do I seek out items I would not typically cook for myself (or lack the expertise and equipment to attempt).

1. I love cooking, especially for other people. It's also far less expensive for me to cook delicious, healthful food than it is to eat out constantly, even with time spent taken into consideration. Throw in a partner with special dietary needs and there is further reinforcement.

2. I do if I have a special event on the horizon (holiday, dinner party, that kind of thing) or I am going to pack food for travel. Otherwise I just make a mental plan based on what I have and what is available/in season.

3. I grill a lot of spice-rubbed meats, bake muffins and scones using almond and coconut flours, bake fish, roast vegetables, make slow cooker soups, and the list goes on. My girlfriend and I also make homemade yogurt using one of these (http://www.amazon.com/Yogourmet-104-Electric-Yogurt-Maker/dp...), cooking the yogurt for ~36 hours until it has a custard-like consistency. Delicious.

4. My girlfriend has to follow the FODMAP diet (basically eliminating all fermentable substances...of which there are so many) due to a medical condition. She used to follow something slightly less restrictive called the specific carbohydrate diet, and with selective exceptions (I don't have any medical restrictions) I still do. Think little to no processed foods, no refined sugars, no grains of any kind, no starchy vegetables - lots of greens and meat and cheese and homemade yogurt. I throw in rice and some other non-SCD carbohydrates (rice, etc.) so that I can participate in endurance sports.

5. I plan to make leftovers. I try to think of meals in three stages: their original composition, how they'll taste as leftovers, and how they could become an ingredient in a quick third dish (like an omelette).

Fun. It'd be nice if there were some kind of transition to display the bot's shots.

My kingdom for a sarcasm detection algorithm!

Imagine, or hope?

Disorganized pseudo-infantry (i.e. pissed off individuals with guns) will always be inferior to organized paramilitary forces with armor.

Probably not t-shirts at Gators games.

Maybe the MRAP was requested in the event that the Puyallup Fair (the WA state fair for the uninitiated) gets totally out of control.

RE: the meth labs, etc. it would be interesting to see usage data for the equipment. Who knows...if an occupied meth lab is raided every week, the vehicle could make sense (not that I have any tactical expertise in the slightest).

I was surprised to see a number of mine-resistant vehicles associated with very rural counties in Washington State. Not being completely sure whether a mine-resistant vehicle was a tank or not, I googled the term and came across this article:

http://news.yahoo.com/as-wars-wind-down--small-town-cops-inh...

Choice quote from the article:

“Here’s the thing,” Shellmyer says. “Washington, Iowa, has 8,000 people. We have an MRAP now. We have a SWAT team. We have [police] dogs, and we have a SWAT team transportation vehicle that’s not armored.

The city councilman began to think: “Goodness, this is overkill.”

I myself am not blessed with the gift of faith, and I don't particularly enjoy Rails, but I greatly appreciate your making your very mature passion project available to one and all. Very impressive!

I enjoyed: "It's like a cross between Facebook, Google Groups, and SharePoint, but it's completely free and open source and awesome." I especially like that it's awesome in addition to being completely free and open source, rather than _ just because_ it's free and open source.

Top flight professional cyclists with larger muscle mass (relative to their more slightly-built counterparts) can produce watts in that range for several minutes. See: http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/racing/tour-of-flanders/pave-...

The best track sprinters are in the 2000w for several seconds range.

The little animation on the homepage is pretty great.

Eunu.ch - solid gold. {{ 100-percent-off-sale-joke }}

This is a trail-poacher's dream. It'd be wonderful to have this cross-indexed with any extant publicly available data sources (state/national parks, property lines etc.) to try to determine the legality of a given route. Illegal trails are likely illuminated by this heatmap, but their illegality is not.

I code at approximately the same rate as the core rope memory weavers wove. I wouldn't trust mine to help people fly to the moon, though. That's incredible!

"Figurehead" doesn't exactly apply in this case given her role specifically entailed the orchestration, coordination, and authorization of unconscionable (at worst) and morally repugnant (at best) acts.

All this time I thought the line item reading "roll my own dropbox clone with a raspberry pi or something" on my Someday Maybe Projects list might always stay buried low on the stank rank.

Then this news broke. My personal digital exodus has commenced. Best not to wait until she conveys the authorization of Dropbox's administration to submit user data and activity in a privacy-flouting fashion.

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture," she replied. "So that's -- and by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency . . .By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture." - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-trounstine/stanford-anti-...

I agree. Good tools could enable a second/separate tier of professionals to create a disruptive presence in the areas dominated by Bloomberg users. It would be simple to expect that Bloomberg would react accordingly.

That's a bit like saying Seiko ought to be able to steal marketshare from Patek Philippe. Exclusivity has its own utility aside from nuts-and-bolts functionality.

The F-35 is not exactly a resounding success: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-22/flawed-f-35-fighter...

It'd be interesting to scrape videos for this kind of information in order to map them en-masse. Great post!

The "metric" in this case is a score contrived using your proprietary algorithm. The value I read you describing appears more relevant to you/others interested in measuring populations. It doesn't seem especially helpful to the individual. To imagine one person say, "hey, I'm a 41, you're a 36" sounds like personal vanity metrics.

It's like two people comparing their BMIs - it doesn't tell a lot. I do see your app being potentially _very_ valuable in being able to tell individuals when their behaviors are or are not in line with vetted guidelines, or _nudge_ (heyo!) them to do healthful things at a rhythm in line with their best days.

I once worked on a payments platform whose viability depended on mass adoption. One of the reasons we failed, I believe, was due to being more focused on feeding data to merchants and banks vs. providing value to the consumers who were the actual ultimate hurdle to adoption.

Hey Mac - great looking stuff. The marketability of a single healthy living score is pretty clear, but isn't it a fairly artificial and opaque approach to making an actual measurement? The measures inherent to the donut chart-y UI element that's part of your site's hero loop (appears to be hydration, nutrition, sleep, activity) looks more useful to me than the single score.

+1 on that! What a great little tool.

I am waiting for NortonDesktop.js to be implemented.