pjan

Spreedly, TokenEx, Very Good Security are some that I'm aware of.

I'm surprised Stripe hasn't come with their own multi-processing router solution for enterprises at this point; whichever major payment processor who would do this, could become a de facto choice as primary or secondary payment gateway for enterprises requiring this.

Again, in my understanding is Stripe not forcing you to—-as a EEA business——settle USD in a US domiciled account; you can settle the USD in an EEA domiciled account and not incur the cost. If you then want to repatriate the money to the US with your bank, you can do so yourself.

I also just looked it up how much this costs with my bank, and it's a minimum fee of $25 + agent/intermediary bank fees on top of it, for amounts less than $5,0000.

I assume that Stripe can negotiate better rates though, but for the sake of simple pricing, and cost-averaging over different amounts (which are, given that they serve the long tail, likely heavy weighted on smaller amounts), it is not inconceivable that this 1% is closer to cost than one might imagine.

Banks starting to charge more for (crossborder) transfer, Visa/MC charge more for tokenized card payments, which they mandate adoption of, and most likely more of this.

Ideally, you'll support at least two providers you can switch between, if you can afford the development of supporting two

It is however not that simple if you want to remember your customers payment information, and don’t want any PCI-DSS liability or obligations. You’ll need a card vaulting solution in the middle, which comes as additional burden (and cost!) on top of the other payment provider integration. There’s big volumes you need to process to offset all of this, and probably not ROI sensible for many.

As far as I understand, you can payout in USD on a EEA domiciled account, and you won’t be incurring any fees.

It’s the crossborder settlement which they charge for, which I don’t think is crazy, as it just reflects the underlying costs Stripe must be incurring themselves.

As someone who ran a business in multiple countries, the bank always charged similar fees for these transfers between accounts. Stripe letting me settle directly in the account where I want the money to land, rather than me having to log in to my bank and initiating a transfer manually where fees are ~the same is definitely a better option, which I’m happy they offer.

Paidy | Platform Engineer & Data Engineer | Tokyo, Japan | ONSITE | VISA

We’re hiring Scala Engineers to scale, support and contribute to the continued building of our financial services, including our core product – Paidy. Paidy is Japan’s largest cardless online payment service, handling thousands of transactions per day for famous local and international brands.

We use Scala of the functional kind to solve the unique challenges of operating a complete payments stack, where we are the issuer, acquirer and payment gateway. As a member of the Paidy engineering team you will be thoughtful and deliberate about tackling bottlenecks, developing new features and improving existing systems. You’ll have the opportunity to develop a deep understanding of functional programming, distributed systems, data stream processing and machine learning. You’ll also be positioned to teach or mentor others.

We're an international team based in the heart of Tokyo, and will soon be one of the biggest Scala teams in all of Japan. We sponsor & manage the visa process.

Stack: Scala, typelevel libraries, some low-level akka, cassandra, elastic, docker, ...

The job descriptions we're hiring for are the following:

- Platform Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/466697084/

- Data Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/466817215/

and we have multiple openings for each of them, with a focus that may vary based on your experience and interests. For the current batch of hires, we focus on people with relevant previous experience.

Usual interview process:

1) CV check and 30 minute video call about your past, passion & interest in Paidy

2) Take home challenge, followed by a review interview

3) Final interview with one of the founders

Interested, or have more questions? pjan+hn@paidy.com

No, it is not!

I share my time over Singapore and Japan, and no one ever touches your stuff in both places; not during a bathroom break, not even during a lunch break when people leave their shiny macbooks to keep their seats warm.

This immediately invalidates all the other comments saying that uniformity of behaviour/lack of entrepreneurship is a consequence of this in Japan, since it also works in Singapore where (perceived) entrepreneurship is much higher.

Theft is a problem. It doesn't bring about good things, nor does the lack of it bring about bad things.

Quite the opposite!

In Belgium you get paid to do a PhD. For engineers it is competitive to market rates, for all other majors it's even much higher than what they receive in the private sector (but harder to get into/less possibilities.

This also applies for non-citizens.

Also: Japan authorities looking into closure of Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/26/bitcoin-mtgox-japa...

I do believe Mark Karpelès' LinkedIn Summary is due for an update:

"... I have a long experience in company creation, and experienced almost any imaginable kind of trouble. Now is the time to create something that will be solid enough to handle any situation, anytime."

For those interested: page 8 unredacted... http://imgur.com/aU5mCVP

Based in Japan here.

First, I don't think the author claims that the risk is the same; quite the opposite IMO. He clearly states that getting a high exit is very difficult here, that sales cycles are longer, ... which, all the same, make for a higher risk. It's however the task of the entrepreneur to take this into account and be successful within this frame.

Having said that, it is an undeniable fact that, in general, Japanese are culturally more risk-averse. Case in point are for example the low seed rounds that can be raised amongst the Japanese investors (i.e. VC not being an entrepreneurial endeavour), the popularity of the idea of life-long employment, ...

"lack of disruptive ideas" actually does ring with me, at least when it comes to web-based companies. "Unique ideas", no doubt about that. But disruptive ideas as 1) having a major impact, 2) being viable, and 3) not a localised clone of a successful foreign company... I do challenge you to name me some.

While technologically fascinating, is it just me or are we creating a really sad sad world, where we eliminate all human interaction and pollute or skies with these ugly annoying things. I wholeheartedly hopes this fails as hard as possible.

A classic case of Singapore indoctrination. Living there myself, I can tell you that customer service and efficiency is just plain bad - the level of service you get in most stores would require most of them to close down if they were to be located in Western Europe.

Public housing is run as a tight ship, because the government makes tons of money from it - supply is so tightly regulated just to make sure that prices don't go down - why don't you just ignore that it makes accommodation for a lot of people nearly impossible, that it has increased the wealth gap, and that the city is as gentrified as it can get, turning it into sterile and boring place, playground for the rich. Measures to cool the market are just measures to prevent a popping bubble, but definitely no measures to make it affordable for those who can't pay for it (now, and probably never will).

Sure, Changi is part of another league when it comes to airports, and the MRT is one of the better public transport systems (yet still miles away from Japan or Seoul IMO) but please, don't generalise it for all Singapore businesses.

Same thing here: it's used as a negative hiring signal by some, but that doesn't validate their thinking. These generalisations are a huge risk for loosing out on potential talent...

"Why having an over-simplified title/line-of-thought gets you more clicks"

An MBA doesn't invalidate their previous experience. An MBA doesn't specialise a person or decreases his/her usefulness to only C-level positions (quite the opposite in my opinion, as they often acquire additional skills). An MBA doesn't make you a strategy guy/girl per se or makes you less an implementation person.

Apart from the social pressure one -might- experience because of their achieving peers (and maybe even the financial pressure to pay off their debt), I only believe it increases a person's skills (be it soft, finance, ...)

Eventually, it always boils down to peoples motivations to join X or Y. An MBA should at most encourage you (the recruiter/hiring person/... to ask some other questions during the hiring process.

Next in the series I expect:

"Why having worked for McK/BCG/Bain is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"

"Why having investment banking experience is a negative hiring signal (for startups)"

"Why having studied law is a negative hiring signal (for startups)" ...

I really don't get these coding interviews.

I can't imagine a construction engineering company asking their applicants to do a construction calculation in an interview, and in this case, bad design can actually kill people (as opposed to a bug at twitter).

What else does it bring apart from some amusement to the interviewer?

I thought the Guardian article was ok-ish - it was hitting the point, yet interspersed with anecdotes and definitely clickbait titled.

The worst was BBC's documentary (which I would expect to be of high quality and standards) that was painting Japanese men as all being part of this in fact very tiny niche of a niche of virtual-girlfriend-dating otaku from AKB.

As a westerner living in Asia, I must admit that some have quirky habits to my standards (but then again, which nationality hasn't in the eyes of foreigners), but the way they are portrayed in media is sensation seeking, mostly plain wrong, and a caricature akin to "the infantile Africans in Tintin in the Congo".

How about "Human Resource Depletion"?

The system only works when there's growth... a huge decline in population (hence births, hence sexual activity ...) is the biggest fear of all governments, as it deflates the foundations current countries/systems/power balances/... are built on. It's also the reason why worldwide "family values" and "the traditional family (unit) as cornerstone of the society" are main political points, independent of culture, religion, ...

If you allow some self-promotion: you can take a look at the ansible playbook repo I've been putting up (including some documentation and background in the doc directory): https://github.com/pjan/the-ansibles

In all honesty; the steps in the TO's article are only providing basic security. Pointing the ansible playbooks to your server will further enhance it.

You should also consider changing the SSH port, but that's up to you (in which case you also need to change the firewall settings!)

Hi Michael. You're welcome.

Tried working with roles, but it didn't allow me the fine-grained control I was looking for, at least not at the scale I'm currently using them.

I like to have the ability of just adding a new 'role' (wrong official terminology, but applicable to this use) to a machine (so adding it in a [x:children] in my examples here) without having to create a specific/exceptional role for it, yet also keep track of it (rather than just pointing a role to a machine without an audit trail). - If this makes any sense (Happy to discuss on another channel if you're willing to :-))

If you're new to ansible, I just released a quite extensive set of roles (basic server setup, security hardening, firewall, mailserver, nginx from source, oracle jdk, scala, monit, ...) on github [shameless plug]. I was missing these when I started out, so I hope it will help others. There's even a complete personal cloudbox setup (including an extensive idiot-proof tutorial) based on this included, as well as a vagrantbox to test the others.

https://github.com/pjan/the-ansibles

^ Since the number of (extensive) Ansible examples are still sparse, I decided to clean up the ones I have been writing and release them, for reuse and educational purposes. I know I would've benefited greatly from them when I started out, and hope they will help others now. I have a couple more of them, but they need some additional clean-up before I will add them to the repo.

Inspired by the "NSA-proof your e-mail in 2 hours" article, I created a similarly complete setup for a personal (mail/web/...)server on a VPS as al3x did a couple of weeks ago using the scripts I had, and wrote an idiot-proof tutorial on how to set it up (https://github.com/pjan/the-ansibles/blob/master/docs/cloudb...). Manual steps are minimal, and "It just works" - start to finish should take you less than an hour.

If you haven't tried Ansible before, there's no more excuse not to now.

Enjoy.

Or what every pro-PRISM person should be shown & aware of: even if you have "nothing to hide", it can be used against you...

And they're not alone: mixpanel Django site admin: https://mixpanel.com/admin/