Tableau | Senior Backend, Infrastructure & Cloud Operations Engineer | Palo Alto, CA | Full Time | Onsite

Would you like to work on one of the most disruptive products in the Business Intelligence industry? Tableau revolutionized self-service data visualization by replacing paper reports with dynamic, interactive data visualizations to help people see and understand data. Help start a new revolution as an Infrastructure & Cloud Operations Engineer on the Natural Language Processing team, leveraging cutting edge technologies to enable analytical capabilities powered by natural language.

Interested? Visit and apply at https://tableau.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/job/Palo-Alto...

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

I'm still waiting for the final book!

We all are... sigh. That and the final book in the "Christopher Snow" series by Dean Koontz.

"Earth distance to sun" gives the correct answer: https://www.google.com/search?q=earth+distance+from+sun&oq=e...

Interesting. It says 149.6 million km, which is correct.

[distance earth to sun in km] gives 149.6 trillion km, which is 15.81 light years.

It seems very likely that the change was motivated by payment processor fees. Patreon uses Stripe to process payments, which charges a flat rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge. Compare that to the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35 — where presumably the extra $0.05 per transaction is the cut Patreon takes off the top for themselves.

> the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35

The problem was that was per pledge. So if, like me, you support a couple dozen creators at $1-$3 each, you would expect to pay 24 x $.35. But all those payments are charged in one transaction. So they are only paying $.30. It isn't 5c per transaction they were planning to skim, but $8.

Part of the change was no longer aggregating the charges but running them through individually. They wouldn't have been pocketing most of the fees.

Which honestly makes it even more baffling an idea.

I believe the idea was to give the money to creators immediately rather than end of month when they charged everyone.

...which is still baffling! The core value of Patreon is microtransaction aggregation. This isn't just "product management screwed up a feature", it's product management doesn't understand their own product at all. Crazy.

It's like designing a fancy new electric car but leaving off the wheels.

It's like designing an electric car, but requiring you to use a diesel generator to recharge it.

You're assuming that Patreon will issue all of those charges at once.

However, they talk about that problem in the article. What if a Patreon supporter pledges/makes a subscription on Day 1, then another on Day 2, and a third on Day 3, and so on?

In their original blog post [1], they spoke about how, ideally, they'd issue each of those charges to the supporter immediately; and then begin recurring billing 30 days later after that date. However, if those charges are made on different days, and the anniversaries occur on different days going forward, then they don't have the opportunity to condense them into a single transaction.

Patreon are looking for a solution where someone can create a subscription, be billed for it immediately (i.e. not wait for beginning of next month), and then continue from there with recurring monthly payments. With a naive system each subscription would have its own cadence, preventing transaction consolidation. They also talk about how, if they have a standard monthly billing period, then there are issues with waiting until the next period to make the first charge.

Perhaps they didn't explain this as well as they could have, but it made sense to me. It seems like a "Patreon Wallet" could indeed be a solution to a lot of these problems. Refill your wallet with a single large transaction, then draw funds from it when pledging to support creators.

[1] https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/

If I back a new creator, it charges me immediately (I think, at least it seems that way from my billing history), but going forward I'm billed with the rest of my support in one transaction (definitely). I really don't see the problem.

Patreon's docs until recently noted that they get charged 1.9% by Stripe, so there's more than $0.05 being skimmed there.

Don't forget it's now 2.9% of $1.37 instead of $1.00. Reducing their piece by another 1 or 2 cents depending on how Stripe rounds

Patreon does enough volume to qualify for discounts - their Stripe rate is 1.9%, not 2.9%. (This used to be on https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606125-How-..., but it's gone now.)

Looks like they wanna be nice guys running a marketplace at 5% and claiming to be good guys.

And then VC dogs biting them to make fatter profits so they find ticket master like shoddy processing fee scams.

minus their likely bargain with Stripe. I doubt they pay as much as a small customer.

Weird that they’d even use stripe as they could likely skip the middleman and save more money. Stripe is great for small business. Patreon isn’t that.

Stripe isn't really a middleman. In fact, as they also handle the acquiring process with efficient high-volume rates, generally fewer parties are involved than normal.

Even for very large businesses, actually processing cards directly is pretty difficult and generally not worth doing. Instead you can just get a processor like Stripe or Adyen to give you good rates on an interchange-plus model.

Whereas Paypal will apparently do 5% and 0.05, which makes the dollar go to $1.10 instead of $1.38.

I actually took CS107 in 2012 with Jerry Cain, and we still used this handout as a reference guide.

Argo (https://argo.io) is a web-based tool that enables fast, natural-language based question asking and visualization of data. It's designed to be used by a non-technical user, so you can share dashboards and visualizations with people, and they can ask their own questions.

Under the hood, Argo uses advanced search processors to turn natural language queries into SQL, optimized for visualization.

You can request a demo on their website: https://argo.io

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder and CTO of Argo

Looks like the site is down. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/gitualize.com

I appreciate the difficulty there is in keeping up with large loads of bandwidth, but if you're going to compare yourself to one of the most resource-intensive websites on the internet, you could at least handle HN traffic.

The site is back up. Sorry for the interruption.

If I enter a public Github repo and click on Gitualize, its taking forever to load. Don't know what is wrong.

I'm sorry to hear that. Can I ask which repo you are requesting so I can try to reproduce the problem?

Sorry. I checked in the Network tab of the chrome developer tools. I'm behind a proxy server. So it is not loading. No problem with the website or the application :)

ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED as of right now :<

Still getting ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED

Still the same. Waste of time...

Still down, no cached version either. Womp womp. :\

Ditto for me, 40 minutes later.

Cocoa motivates and accelerates learning by combining gamification with social network integration, skeuomorphic design, flexible study exercises, external content recommendations, games, and more. Still in development, the app will be available for usage by invite only in the near future, after which it will be made publicly available for free.