I'm trying to peek at the data in the dev tools. It's doing a long running request to https://bfcm-globe-data-service-central.shopifycloud.com/pub... which is constantly downloading more data, but when I go to peek at the raw data in the "EventStream" tab it shows nothing.
It does look cool, but I do find the 'Carbon removed' ticker slightly misleading. In what way does this reflect carbon removed? Surely carbon added to the atmosphere is broadly proportional to the total value of sales.
Sadly those are almost certainly greenwashing bullshit. John Oliver did a piece on that. Also there was this guardian review that didn't find a single satisfactory project among 50.
Yes, afaik, direct air capture currently is miniscule and when it is happening the co2 is sold on the market, where it replaces waste-product-co2, so in the end no co2 is actually removed from the atmosphere.
It's currently in research phase, marketing it as "you can offset your carbon emissions here" is lies.
We currently can't both consume like this and improve the outcome of global warming. The whole idea of black friday goes against such efforts. Attempts to market it otherwise, even if they were credible are greenwashing.
To be frank, it sounds like you're deadset on being cynical no matter what. Shopify has committed to removing carbon from the atmosphere via direct air capture, and that's what their metric is counting. Direct air capture is literally removing carbon from the atmosphere, regardless of what's done with the carbon afterwards.
> Direct air capture is literally removing carbon from the atmosphere, regardless of what's done with the carbon afterwards
Regardless of what’s done afterwards? Sure, if we arbitrarily decide to ignore the full effects of any system we can make all sorts of fanciful claims. That’s not exactly useful, though.
My point was that Shopify is removing carbon from the atmosphere with their DACs. It’s not their fault if someone then purchases that carbon they removed and decides to shoot it straight back into the atmosphere, or whatever it is you’re concerned about, assuming just anyone can even purchase Shopify’s removed carbon. I suppose we can’t be satisfied until Shopify finds a way to remove the carbon and then ship it off of earth entirely using a space elevator?
No they are not, they are paying someone to do it someday. Those someone are shady. No carbon is currently removed from the atmosphere. Even when operational it will be a tiny fraction of what they are causing. It's a marketing stunt with no effect on the climate. In fact it makes it worse, cause people then think it's ok to keep consuming.
Your hypothesis is that it’d be better for the planet if Shopify were to remove no carbon from the atmosphere at all? Society as a whole would check the Shopify BFCM dashboard, see that there is no carbon removal metric, and have some kind of epiphany like “wow, Shopify isn’t removing carbon from my purchases, maybe I shouldn’t spend as much this holiday weekend”?
> Those someone are shady.
What makes them shady? I have a feeling you only think they’re shady because they want to do carbon removal, which you’ve unilaterally decided is ineffective.
Shopify lists their partners on the page and it seems legit enough, not just "Thanks for the $10, I won't remove this tree on the side of this mountain now".
It’s 100% false consciousness. The Black Friday consumption is a significant carbon pollution event, but ‘conscious consumers’ (and engineers) appreciate the carbon offset trick.
There's a lot of online fraud. We invest a ton in Radar, our payment surfaces, etc., to keep this as invisible as possible to businesses. (We don't always succeed, of course. But, despite the growing sophistication of the fraudsters themselves, we do generally get better every year.)
The intuition here is that the rules that block when CVC/ZIP doesn’t match necessarily happen after the bank already decided the transaction was okay, because that’s when Stripe learns whether CVC/ZIP match what the bank had on file.
So if you block on a mismatch, you’re throwing away an approved charge every single time since the bank already decided that other signals say the transaction is okay. The bank can block it themselves if they think it’s suspicious (which from my understanding wouldn’t increment this metric).
Out of curiosity do you share the suspected fraud with law enforcement? At that amount there are probably too many to chase down so I’d think this is just an unprosecuted crime?
Generally the bank will file a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with FINCEN for egregious cases. I don’t think intermediaries like stripe have any direct responsibility in this respect but I could be wrong. The volumes are huge and few SARs actually are investigated or prosecuted.
Um, no. Banks file a lot of those. If it’s me using my dads credit card number then sure, not a SAR. But most of that activity is systematic: either backed by organized crime or a semi-professional fraudster. Those most definitely would get a SAR
Can you estimate what proportion of fraud is automated/bot/scripted versus manual human interaction? Do you rely much on botnet detection or IP reputation?
I assumed stripe founders had offline business experience before stripe :) Online maybe increase it a little more and make it more risky to the business because of "card not present". But hardly new to online.
There's also a lot of false positives if you verify too much on data brokers, as you just mentioned you do, instead of talking to the issuing institution on fears of chargeback and rate hikes.
12% of the money is suspected fraudulent, not the transactions, right? So could be that fraudulent transactions are a smaller volume of the total transactions, but they simply tend to be higher in terms of dollar amount.
Fraud is typically very small dollar amounts used to test the card. Partially to try to go unnoticed but also to leave as much of the limit available as possible for intended purchases later.
Card testing doesn’t require a purchase, fraudsters can validate a card by adding it to an online wallet. The retailer will send a $0 authorization to the bank.
Fraud happens across all transaction amounts, what do you think people use the cards for once they buy or guess a valid card?
$0 authorizations are routinely skipped, though - the fees add up substantially because of card testing, some card networks don't support it (and instead you need $1 or similar), and it can be confusing for customers.
How are "climate contributions" defined? The IRA spends hundreds of billions on climate related projects. If those count those would exceed the fraud numbers by orders of magnitude.
Lots of important info get posted in HN everyday without the fancy design that takes a lot of clicks and waiting times, so how could you assume it won’t make it to the front page?
This is why people need to stop using the “false dichotomy” card in every discussion. It’s so devoid of rigor in thinking and is always used lazily to frame another person’s comment in a paradigm that it wasn’t intended to be framed.
Have you considered that the design is more important than the data in this context? I mean, I sure don't care worth a damn whether there are 100, 1000, or 10000 orders being placed per second. It's a meaningless figure to me.
Your first sentence is exactly what it means to think in terms of form over function. There is exactly nothing unique about the 80s pixellated design but there is about the data being presented, which is actually valuable to many possible parties:
* competitors
* creditors
* investors
* employees
* academics
* journalists
* policymakers in financial services
The design is not valuable to anyone, even to those who have no serious business with the data but who somehow feel the need to defend the design in the comments section, because regardless of the design they would visit the link anyway for the information it contains and because of the clickbaity title, not because of the design.
All of this may be true, but Stripe's intention with building this is obvious: It's marketing; it's an advertisement showing how much volume Stripe handles during a busy shopping period. A big hint that it's an ad is that the Stripe API Uptime is not only on the first page of the stats, but is the only thing colored green. It's showing that Stripe is easily handling this crazy load, and it's only 13% (right now) of their "current capacity"!
Stripe is not building this to make sure that competitors, creditors, investors, employees, academics, journalists or policy makers have access to important data, that's just not the function of this dashboard.
Those unsure that Stripe will be reliably there for them might be swayed by seeing this during their holiday break. At least that's the marketing theory.
Aesthetics are absolutely a factor on the efficacy of marketing activities, and making it "fun" or "pretty" or "flashy" is part of that.
Not always. Fun and flashy makes sense if you’re selling consumer goods, but not if you’re selling your capability to provide a service and especially a critical one at that.
Who do you think are the customers of Stripe’s API? Are those people going to make business decisions on the basis of theatrics, or does pragmatism, performance, and stability matter more?
Upper funnel/lower funnel, depending. And don't forget the future employees that take notice of a culture that would allow for such an exercise. To me, it communicates good product management, roadmaps, and healthy financials to allow the room to breathe.
That’s not a dichotomy. In virtually all of design function is a prerequisite to prioritizing form, otherwise what you’re building might not even be possible and so you might not even be creating design but just art.
Thanks for taking my suggestion and changing what you said (from "all about" to "prioritizing"). Doesn't add much to the so-often regurgitated complaint I'm afraid.
Eh, your argument doesn’t really involve thinking and banks purely on semantics, which you are making arbitrarily strict and according to your personal preference. In practice, “just no-bullshit functional” as in my first comment doesn’t mean absolute neglect of form.
I’m sorry but you’re not as clever as you think, and your reasoning signals that you’re not known as a good communicator or collaborator in your organization.
Your emotional response to the ways things look and feel is a "function" as valid as a button or a slider. Actually, it's more functional in the digital ecosystsm where everything is a symbolic abstraction of light except for your emotional response to their meanings-- it's in fact the only real outcome of the design intent.
So if you see it as a problem and not a strength of modern visual design you are fully clueless, no offense.
"You… go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.
You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets... And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.
However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room… from a pile of 'stuff.'"
Pretty sure no one outside of stripe has any use of real time revenue for only one day on an aggregated level. Doesnt have to be functional because people dont really "use" it. It is just for fun
Doesn’t matter if it’s for fun. The function here is to show information so in that regard the design failed because it makes you go through hoops irrelevant to the goal
with respect, I disagree that the function here is to show information. the (primary) function here is to advertise Stripe, and they obviously believe the aesthetic will increase the chance that viewers of the advert with share it with their friends and coworkers, increasing the effectiveness if the advert.
if this was a page they provided to all their customers, all year round, as their means of monitoring their own sales then I agree that this is a terrible design. but they have a fairly utilitarian dashboard UI for that function.
The design isn't crashing their browser, the implementation of the design is. You could argue that the design is simply not implementable with current technology to serve the widest array of users (this is doubtful), and possibly Stripe's marketing team made a judgement that they just didn't care about that - but you seem to be laying quite a lot at a designer's door there. I would guess that they are prioritising standing out to a niche audience of developers with expensive laptops over casting a wide net, which would be reasonable for this kind of campaign. Perhaps what you dislike is the marketing campaign and it's goals, rather than the nebulous "bad design" of the page?
And, for the record, I clicked the link because it was at the top of HN and I was bored. How did it get to the top of HN? because a lot of people saw it and thought it was cool. If they took a more utilitarian approach, would that have happened? I guess we just don't know.
So what if it was a designer who acted on the whims of a marketing team? The criticism was directed at the design not at a person. Regardless of their intended audience the site is still representative of the point I wanted to make about modern day design.
And no, not everyone is clicking on all the front page links of the same score (you included) so your argument is kinda weak and something must have caught your attention about the title.
My point was that it seems you are critiquing the design of the page as if it's purpose is to display sales data, and I was suggesting that it's purpose is not to display sales data, but actually to simply advertise Stripe. When judged by this outcome, the design is (arguably, it seems) more successful.
Regardless, I find no joy or purpose in talking to someone that tells me I'm incorrect when I tell them my motivations for doing something. It betrays a certain ignorance on your part. I think let's just leave the thread there. Have a good rest of your day.
Even if the purpose was to advertise Stripe, the ad has very evident intention to provide value to the viewer of the ad, which is to provide information, so the purpose is not singular; and yet both its intended purposes are not being done very well.
I think that what really happened here is that you are upset because you found yourself arguing for a position that you can’t rationally and convincingly defend, which is a position that no one forced you to maintain in the first place. You should know that there’s also no joy in dealing with someone like that.
The problem that people make quick judgements based on appearance is not modern. I also would like to just make things functional and have people quickly see the value, but unfortunately we're stuck with the need to also make things look cool.
Similar to the concept of “user as the product,” when data is made to look cool the purpose of the data is to attract attention, not be the object of attention.
Is any person looking at that “live dashboard” as an actionable data source?
Competitors of stripe would, to set their own targets. Creditors of stripe can use it to get a general idea of whether they made any money to pay their loans with. Investors of stripe for the same purposes but in expectation of dividends or increase of market value of their equity. Academics for research, journalists for reportage… there are plenty of people out there other than design nerds.
~$3.2B USD in processed transactions through stripe (so far). ~42M transactions.
~$92.8M for 2.9% fee.
~$12.6M for 30 cent fee.
~$105.4M just for processing transactions on a single day.
Above assumes the “standard” pricing [1]. It’s not quite clear how much stripe takes from the 2.9% and 0.30 cut. Likely have to share this with card network and issuing bank.
The invisible hand of traditional banking system taking money out of our pockets every time.
If you want to go all the way into the consumer value matrix - Has anyone on HN ever had much a 2nd thought about whether or not their card would 'just work' out in the world?
I used to work in the actual room where acquirer links were monitored in real time 24/7/365. At least 8 people were in that room at any given time. I've never worked in nuclear power but I imagine you could draw some parallels.
This kind of reliability is not cheap or easy to come by. There isn't a clever technical trick you can employ to realize it. The only way to achieve the kinds of reliability we have in the world today still requires lots of human involvement throughout.
Does anyone dream of having a google-style support experience next time they are standing in line at the grocery store? This is basically what you are demanding when you say you want zero % fees on all transactions.
It’s always been a hard problem to solve, and the bankers who solved it always got paid handsomely for enabling commerce.
In the old days everyone bartered. Then came shells. Then precious metals. The gold had to be literally shipped around. Everyone from the Roman to the British empire had to physically ship chests of gold to it’s soldiers. Cross border commerce was absolutely fraught with risk. Piracy and shipwrecks galore.
Then the Rothschilds opened the first international bank, dramatically cutting the difficulty and expense of international trade.
We got cheques, paper money, and the credit card control room you worked in.
At every step, it got faster, cheaper, safer, more ephemeral. Trade increased dramatically. It’s amazing! The much-maligned banking sector is really a triumph of capitalism.
Another innovation is JPM coin, which is technically a cryptocurrency, and they're using that to power their internal international money movement systems.
In the old days, even with the existence of precious metals and coin-based currency, a more community driven "help your neighbor" system thrived, moreso than a tit-for-tat system of exchange prevalent today or even theorized in the barter system.
> The much-maligned banking sector is really a triumph of capitalism.
You should indeed ask yourself that very question: what's in it for me?
Do you want to send little bits of gold and silver all around the world, or would you prefer modern banking? The choice is yours, pick the one that's best for you!
Well there’s the FedNow Service which will introduce instant payments. Should eliminate the need for parasitic credit card processing networks.
A good “FedNow” or instant payment provider can easily disrupt the debit and credit card processing companies. At most, businesses charged 5-10 cents per transaction.
No more dealing with credit card network fees. Chargeback fees. Exchange fees. Issuing bank fees. Premium card fees. Just a simple 5-10 cent per transaction. Only need a US bank account.
I live in the UK, where we've had instant, free, interbank payments for the last few years (we've had free interbank payments for > 10 years, but the instant part came in a few years ago as part of the Faster Payments scheme).
Spoiler alert: it has not eliminated the need for credit cards. The credit card system has a lot of flexibility and integrations to make for a superior user experience in a number of situations. For example, a lot of banks let you create virtual cards for specific purposes (eg: I have one for all my online subscriptions, and another for merchants I've not dealt with before). Not to mention Apple/Google Pay and their integration into basically every single online payments platform.
Knowing that is part of “figuring it out”. A lot of people wouldn’t expect something that harsh to be possible and/or don’t keep up with news about gas fees. A mistake that will never be repeated but a mistake most of us have done the first time.
The first and last time I'll ever pay "gas fees". I can wire arbitrary amounts around the world for a fraction of that gas fee with the full backing of the global banking system.
Well i learned a different lesson. It's now extremely easy to set up a global transaction network, or you can choose from one of the thousands of existing ones. Maybe you mean the regulatory aspect, not the technical?
> Maybe you mean the regulatory aspect, not the technical?
Both... but also neither. I meant mostly the marketing aspect. Or for a better word, prestige aspect. People really hate crypto as online cash. Examples:
1. Patreon has held a poll about what new features to add [0]. Crypto was the only feature the creators actively voted against. Note that for creators, crypto means one more way to receive money.
2. My anecdote: I was in a discord group where one member commissioned a short animation from another. They're from different countries and the commissioner couldn't use paypal (for some reason) however. I suggested USDT and explained how to convert it from/to fiat.
They ended up using international wire transfer (fee: ~$30).
They're definitely not running at a loss, 40% profit margin in fact.
It's also not the full picture to call them state funded. They're owned by a consortium of banks, both private and public. While the state maintains a level of ownership through their equity in public banks, the company itself is self- sustainable from an operations point of view.
A lot of the fee goes to the customer's bank that funded the transaction, which is what enables Credit Card rewards programs. If you limit that fee (like the E.U. has), Visa et al. don't go out of business, but then you won't see any similar level rewards programs like we have here in the US (e.g. 2% back on everything, or 3-5% on specific categories, etc).
At this point, every local restaurant in my area is charging 2.9% fee for using a credit card. Let's just lower these processing fees, get rid of credit card rewards, and small businesses can stop charging fees for using credit cards for payment.
Such fees just encourages bad incentives. Such as terrible security because reimbursing people / financing organized crime is cheaper (cheaper for the bank, of course much more expensive for society).
There's plenty of things about modern finance you're free to complain about. Things we're largely forced to do with onerous and useless fees attached - Realtors taking 6% of multi-million dollar transactions for doing nearly nothing has been in the news recently.
Pretty sure nobody is forced to buy info products on Black Friday for an 80% discount.
Also there is a parallax effect if you swipe that is really well done.
When I was a student working at Atos Worldline, Belgium, they had a similar dashboard in the entrance of the building with the number of transactions and money transferred around Xmas.
Technically very impressive. I get a little dizzy when considering everything (physical) bought is also sourced, manufactured, stored, packaged, transported and so on.
Numbers look impressive, but seems there is a baseline missing. For example, currently 8.5K businesses are having "their best day ever on Stripe", but what does that number normally look like?
12% request load vs current capacity seems low to me.
In my experience, as much as you can distil it down to a simple number, we've aimed for 30-50 depending on capacity for risk.
Is 12% normal for stripe? Especially cautious knowing demand will spike this weekend? Feels pretty non-optimised, assuming their infra can scale quickly.
> Especially cautious knowing demand will spike this weekend?
At Stripe's scale, I doubt you could accurately forecast demand for a weekend like Black Friday. Last year's sales are just a data point; what matters this year is consumer confidence on a global macroeconomic scale. Who knows what that translates to?
> assuming their infra can scale quickly
Even if Stripe is handling spikes by scaling on a hyperscaler (e.g. AWS), this scale requires advanced coordination with the hyperscaler. They can't just spin up tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands of VM's on a whim, the underlying abstraction would leak and fail.
> Even if Stripe is handling spikes by scaling on a hyperscaler (e.g. AWS), this scale requires advanced coordination with the hyperscaler. They can't just spin up tens of thousands / hundreds of thousands of VM's on a whim, the underlying abstraction would leak and fail.
AWS uses predictors / models for this when you are on serverless and automatically allocates instances for you ahead of time.
No one needs 10,000 machines.
They likely have scale issues and cannot scale their database quick enough so they planned for the worst spike possible which is likely for a hour on cyber Monday.
Current capacity might not be referring to actual current point in time provisioned capacity but an estimate of how much the overall infra can handle over the next few days.
No idea but ultimately this is marketing. If you wanna say we are just using as much as we need that's impressive to engineers but would it require or warrant a dedicated widget there that hovers around some sort of fixed utilization ratio?
Saying "look we are processing this much but could easily handle more" you are impressing a larger group. So my guess it's more about that.
Interesting that GBP has a volume of 413 million and EUR 420 million, I would have assumed that EUR is much bigger than GBP, does anyone know why they are so close?
Also, interesting that the top conversion is GBP -> EUR.
I'm not sure how believable are those numbers. Businesses having their best day ever on stripe being exactly 9001 (It's over 9000!) for quite some time now seems rather suspicious.
Companies who use Stripe for payments would very much skew towards that. They have a great representation of up-and-coming specialty internet retailers. And the year-over-year numbers are unencumbered this year after being dragged down by pandemic and recession effects in the last few. Plus inflation pushes up the raw numbers.
All the text that I assume should be on the monitor is hovering below the display and I only see it if I zoom out (Chrome on Win 11). Seems like it's working fine for others though?
Maybe I'm just hard to please, but they missed a trick not using a CRT effect over everything using OpenGL shaders - they sort of tried it in the Stripe logo
Now you can see in real time as Stripe freezes your account with little recourse for some reason whose specifics are kept opaque and possibly arbitrary.
While the computer adds some nostalgic value, cramming all that stats into it makes the dashboard very hard to read and is the worst size ratio for mobile. Shopify wins this round [1]
Doesn't work on brave by default, also doesn't work with shield turned off. When turn on the dev console, then it works. Hmmm, a bit sketch doesn't work when it require js from another domain.
Which OS are you running and which browser? We've optimized for many common browsers/OS combos but have clearly missed yours (nothing to do with your specs).
The old version of this was even worse for performance.
Stripe has had an internal dashboard like this, open to anyone on the VPN, for at least 15 years: Started on a hackathon IIRC. One, serious view had a month-long by-the-minute chart, letting people see the growth. A typical first-of-the-month tradition was to try to predict where the total volume was going to end up, and celebrating when the daily processing record was beaten.
But the real problem wasn't that one, but a far more expensive variation that instead of giving you a number, represented the processing volume with little characters that would dance around the screen: The higher the volume, the more characters would come in. The problem was that this was created when Stripe's total volume was quite small, and Stripe was growing exceptionally well. So if you opened the dashboard on black friday (Or even worse, ten years ago, when black friday was on December 1st, and therefore also got many customer's subscription volume), then the number of flying Totoros would just overwhelm anything and everything any laptop would throw at it.
While the totoro-based performance was not up to Stripe standards (we should have gone in and added an extra zero or two to the threshold for every character), letting the entire company see that side of the financials live was a great move. So many startups out there just aren't candid with their employees regarding the economic state of affairs, while early Stripe let everyone see the processing volume, and thus whether growth was accelerating or slowing down.
It's also what is surprising of seeing this visible outside: At the same time that finances were very open internally, Stripe was very secretive of the data for the outside. Every time a major business news outlet made an estimate of the real processing volume, they were hilariously off, and that's because there were very few leaks, even after launching a new round where investors definitely were handed the real numbers. Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.
>Based on this data alone, I'd expect people with some practice would be able to get a reasonably close estimate of what Stripe processed this year.
Stripe recently started publishing their yearly processing volume in user letters (see, e.g. 2022: https://stripe.com/annual-updates/2022). I assume they will publish the 2023 numbers as well.
Kills Firefox? My entire laptop, including my cursor and typing into a terminal, dropped to something like 10 fps.
The lofi version posted in reply to this is definitely better, but it's still crazy they managed to use up an entire laptop for their status page. Cool, but crazy.
Doesn't kill Firefox for me, but my machine is beastly. Windows 11, i9 12900K + RTX 3080Ti, seeing 35% overall CPU, Firefox using 1.2% of that, Task Manager indicating 15-20% of the GPU.
Maybe they fixed it, though.
Actually Firefox works a bit better, as the hitbox for the Next/Previous buttons is weirdly offset in Chrome but is spot on in Firefox, kudos.
That means nothing.. what type of linux? what kind of customizations you did in your distro? WM? Based on which one? Drivers installed? And I’m not even going with your Firefox setup and what kind of addons you have.. such statement is expected from tech illiterates that see linux as a monolith thing or like MacOS where your OS will be identical to another for the most part, technically Linux is just a kernel per se. I use “linux” (mint cinnamon) with Firefox and ubo addon and that page loaded perfectly on thinkpad T470.
For what it's worth, this page was freezing my Windows computer in both Firefox and Chrome. Once I updated my AMD graphics drivers, it now works smoothly. I have an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. Graphics driver version 23.11.1 .
Running Firefox 115.4.0esr here and there is no problem, you may be running a different version (debian testing). My four core cpu is at 23%, even with thinkorswim running.
> It is the first Firefox-branded browser not to use the Gecko layout engine as is used in Firefox for desktop and mobile. Apple's policies require all iOS apps that browse the web to use the built-in WebKit rendering framework and WebKit JavaScript, so using Gecko is not possible.
