A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.

Bitfinex files discovery in "Yo bro, where did our $800 million go?" action and it is every bit as interesting as you'd expect it to

Here's their CFO describing their agreement (which we know from other litigation was never contractualized because, presumably because money launderers hate paper trails):

Bitfinex's CFO was shocked, shocked to learn that the money launderer they engaged to provide money laundering services while I-swear-to-God-this-is-an-actual-quote "we learned to bank like criminals" may have from time to time lied to banks.

"Institutional constraints" means, here, "We were attempting to avoid velocity checks placed by our banking partners to detect fraud and money laundering, which would have detected our fraud and money laundering."

Money at the speed of code, yadda yadda yadda, the Bitcoin economy is surprisingly blasé when several hundred million dollars is in an interstitial state for months.

In a situation never before encountered by a financial institution: the check was not, in fact, in the mail.

One of the big promises of software is composability. You can build rich, powerful experiences out of basic building blocks.

APIs add new things to the toolbox. For example: Treasury, which lets an app/platform store, move, and track a business’

I've been a small business owner and can talk at length about SMB banking, and will later, but let's put on the software developer hat right now.

Lots of software talks about money, keeps records about money, does calculations about money, but can't *touch* money.

This is extremely frustrating when you're building SaaS apps for businesses, because you have total control over your UX right until your app needs to touch money... at which point all data about it lives in a silo you can't access.

So you generally push work to the operator.

For example, suppose you’re writing a business-in-a-box system for electricians, including an invoicing feature.

You need to be able to read bank transactions to reconcile. You probably can't. The owner can. So you ask the owner to do mind-numbing work a computer does better.

It sure would be great if your business customers had bank accounts you could actually introspect and operate on their behalves! You could just get the list of incoming payments and match against the invoices.

There is some software to write but it is not rocket science.

My friends @robwalling and @einarvollset just launched TinySeed, an accelerator for software companies where a successful outcome is a healthy, sustainable business rather than attempting to ride the rocketship trajectory. https://t.co/LSHqZNcVid

I have some thoughts:

As somebody who bootstrapped ~4 companies, I feel like I had to make some clearly suboptimal decisions early in them for lack of what is, in hindsight, not all that much money. But there's a huge gap in the product space for investment options.

It's weird: you can get $25k from Amex trivially, and angels are very willing to write a check for that much, but you have to make representations about your goals/ambitions/market/etc which don't really apply to everyone.

And so you see the traditional angel/VC ecosystem fund companies where honestly the returns are probably not there, and this is knowable pretty early, but the chase of them will wreck what could have been a perfectly happy business.

(To make the math work for traditional VCs the company has to at least have a market-appropriate shot of $100 million a year. There are a lot more $10 million a year companies than $100 million a year companies. That is *not* a bad terminal outcome for founders/employees.)

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.

Just published 15,000+ words on security keys. 🔐📱💻

With SIM attacks at their highest, now is a great time to take a closer look at your online security.

Removing SMS from your two-factor auth is a start, but authenticator apps have downsides too...

https://t.co/Dk0MPJHL2V

Just look at these headlines from recent SIM swap and port attacks.

It's all too established for attackers to find ways to socially engineer control of your phone number and start gaining control of your accounts.

I first talk about some general security tips.

Unfortunately not all websites let you remove your phone number from accounts.

You may consider migrating your phone carrier to @googlefi , which requires email account access to do anything (and can be locked down with security keys and even Advanced Protection)

Beyond SMS, I talk about issues that TOTP authenticator apps (the code generators) have as a form of two-factor auth. They're so, so much better than relying on SMS for your second factor but they still have issues like utilizing shared secrets and lacking phishing prevention.

Enter security keys!

Utilizing public key cryptography they don't have any shared secret between the client and the server. They prevent phishing by taking the website domain into account.

Even if you get tricked by a clone phishing website, your key won't.

argh chrome updated and it seems they've intentionally broken custom search engines. I have had a keyword search for "foone" which searches my own twitter, so I just type "foone BLAH" and it gives me a twitter search for when I said BLAH, right?

but now I get that option in the titlebar of "search twitter self-search" which is the name of the search"
if I just type "foone blah" now...

it ignores the search I have had defined for years and just googles it.

and this is definitely on purpose because they didn't just break it, they changed it. it's now "fooneblah"

there doesn't seem to be an option to make this stop and get the old behavior back :(

Wellcome to our virtual walk from Ambleside to Howtown on Lake Ullswater. I’ve based the route on #HadriansHighWay by @fellranger1 which he uses a variant to the main route. Books can be bought direct or through @VindolandaTrust

A view of #Ambleside from Wansfell our starting point in the heart of the #LakeDistrict @CumbriaMagazine

We can start at the roman fort at the edge of #Windermere. The Romans stated to push into the lakes in the early 90’s AD, this fort dates to the rebuild in Hadrian’s Reign possibly after warfare which brought about #HadriansWall #Ambleside

The #Ambleside posting wasn’t always a peaceful one as the gravestone in the @ArmittMuseum shows one man was killed “in the fort”

Time to leave and head out of town passing this scale model of the famous Bridge House in #Ambleside #virtualwalk