I'm super interested in this space, including in helping financially support some projects. I already emailed Ted about this, but would be happy to chat to anyone doing this stuff. My email's in my profile.
(Luckily this is niche enough I'm not worried about my inbox blowing up....)
This is great! If you're interested, I'd love to have you at a GIS/mapping-focused retreat I'm hosting at https://www.gradientretreat.com/ this summer. You can reach out privately at [email protected].
From what I can tell, Causal's models only run forwards, with no inference (ie, they can generate predictions from priors, but they can't update those priors from observations).
I'm helping build a new team for Stripe in a new Seattle engineering office. We're focused on building distributed, scalable infrastructure for user-facing search and reporting-related features of Stripe's product. This is an opportunity to work on new, high-impact projects in a small team, while supported by the scale of Stripe's overall engineering organization and business.
We're open to remote or distributed teams within the US and Canada. All else being equal, we'd prefer to hire people in SF, but for a sufficiently great team, being elsewhere wouldn't be a showstopper. We're conscious of not wanting to miss out on the diverse, talented set of people that happen to be outside of the bay area.
(I may be biased here: I work for Stripe from a small community off the Canadian coast).
I take your point that there are a number of possible explanations (at varying levels of plausibility) for this effect, but to address a specific example you mention: whenever we change something significant in Checkout like adding the "remember me" option, we A/B test it, and if it did in fact cause a "horrible drop in conversions" we would absolutely not release it. (It doesn't).
That's a fair concern. The sample sizes here are relatively high: you can probably back some estimates out yourself from the numbers given in the post (millions of dollars raised, mean donation of $88, 14% of donations in the last week were repeat, etc). I'll also say that the comparisons in the post are significant to a 99% confidence level.
Thanks very much for the feedback. (Feedback helps! As you may remember from the previous thread, we did change the Remember Me + phone number fields to be optional, in large part because of the feedback we got on HN.)
Each new payment method comes with its own constraints. We'll always try to give our users as many options as possible while working within those constraints. The constraints with Alipay are particularly tight, and for now the only way we can satisfy them is through checkout.js - but over time, if we can relax that, we will. We're definitely not moving to a model where Checkout is always the first or only way to integrate a new feature. For example, the two other alternative payment methods we have in beta right now are ACH and Bitcoin, neither of which are built into Checkout. We do hope to eventually support both of these in Checkout, of course, but in those cases, it was easiest to do the API first; in the Alipay case, it was by far the easiest thing to do Checkout first.
Sorry, I didn't actually answer your initial question: yes, Alipay is only available through a checkout.js integration, not a stripe.js integration. I think it's unlikely that we will do a stripe.js integration for Alipay - as Patrick mentioned above, it would probably have to be a redirect model like Alipay's other integrations.
However, it's possible that we could do a special alipay.js, which I think is what you're getting at with #2. This wouldn't be Stripe Checkout, exactly, but a standalone Alipay product where we provide the UI is certainly something we'd think about down the line. We don't have any specific plans here but feel free to email me at [email protected] if you want to talk more about that.
Can you say more about "(a) stable"? If you mean that you've had problems with robustness or availability, I'd love to hear about that, because in general we believe it's been very good on those fronts.
If you mean that it the UI changes from time to time, then (for better or worse), that's a fundamental property of Checkout: we are continually iterating and optimizing and adding new features (like Alipay!). We do understand that it's not for everyone, but a lot of people use it for exactly that reason.
How often do you actually buy things online with interac? I think I've maybe done it once, and the redirect-to-the-bank flow is pretty awkward. My sense is that this isn't ever a barrier to conversion for Canadians (except maybe for very large purchases?), but I'd be curious to hear otherwise.