skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reasons are perfectly predictable. PayPal's risk department acts like any other merchant processor's risk department. The things that trigger a review are...

* >1% monthly volume chargeback rate

* >1% monthly volume refund rate

* too many payment disputes

* violating the terms of service (including what types of products may not be sold through PayPal)

* selling products or services with known high chargeback rates

* a sudden increase in processing volume

* a sale an order of magnitude larger than your average ticket

* accepting payment too far in advance of shipping a product or providing a service

I'm sure there's also some program in there looking at interactions between accounts to find strange patterns, but that's not usually what trips people up unless they're actually laundering money or factoring. It's always the obvious stuff.
When I first saw the post by RMS, I tried to hold back my initial desire to simply post "He's an asshole". I tried to take the emotion away from it but found that I couldn't. I couldn't find the right words so I posted nothing.

You posted my exact feelings in a more intelligent way than I ever could have.

RMS and people like him in the free software community is why I have never 100% committed to a free software way of doing things. I do a lot of development in Linux but I do just as much in Windows. Even though I contribute to the open source world in my own small way and see the importance of it, I find myself caring less and less about the philosophy behind it, At least when it comes to the zealots that are involved.

We all know that both Apple and Microsoft have pulled asshole moves before. But I can't help thinking that zealots like RMS would do the same thing if the FSF was in control.
I actually agree with Stallman, not because I believe everything has to be FOSS, but because I believe users should have the freedom to make their own decisions about how they use their devices, and that's something that Apple products work hard to remove - case in point, their refusal to allow Flash to run on iOS. They may not want it there and HTML5 may be the better choice in the long run, but they are denying users the option to decide for themselves.
Robot: I Now Have Common Sense. Engineer: Great, Go Fetch Me a Sandwich
So, care to describe some ways of dealing with it?
Music Artist WebGL Graph
http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2011/04/tutorial-part-2-adding-...

"Translating RPython to C is pretty cool, but one of the best features of PyPy is its ability to generate just-in-time compilers for your interpreter. That's right, from just a couple hints on how your interpreter is structured, PyPy will generate and include a JIT compiler that will, at runtime, translate the interpreted code of our BF language to machine code!"
An Analogy of Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs
Absolutely. Literally ridiculous "journalism".
Wow seriously? This shit is ridiculous. Theres so many applications web/phone/desktop based that have allowed purchases within the application before Apple.
Ginecomastia que es y Problemas psicol�gicos
MLM Network Marketing
Can someone explain what specifically PayPal doesn't like about pre-orders? Is there something specific in their terms of service that doing pre-orders violates? I'm seriously considering a future project that will involve pre-orders so it seems important to get this clarified...
Not really. He might be defending his position with the same zeal that others defend their religion (it's difficult not to be zealous about something for which you have made important sacrifices), but there is a huge difference.

Religions have questionable basis and use: it is both impossible to prove they are objectively true (at least through the scientific method, the only way we currently have to discover what is true) and to claim that they offer something valuable, which could not exist otherwise, to a human society.

Software freedom (or lack thereof) on the other hand has objective, practical consequences. They might not be direct, or apparent, or significant for every user in every possible use-case, but it is rather easy for a semi computer-literate person to understand that they exist and that they can be pretty negative and serious in too many cases.
And now it's there: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3766
This is a great lesson in capitalism. When you're the boss, nobody gives your partial credit for good attempts. Either the team succeeds and everyone is happy, or they don't, and the boss takes the fall.

Taking this a step beyond the intended message (of football and business), this shows an interesting dichotomy in education in jobs. In many countries (example: Japan, France) school is results based, with admissions based soley on rigorous exams. The real world is softer based more on credentials and connections than results. Compare that to the US... Being a good football player (or trombone player) can help you get into school, but the real world is much less forgiving.

Our economy has tough times, but the unforgiving cruel world helps us stay strong.
Woz is worth $100 million, as far as I know all due to his role in Apple, despite not having done any work for the company in about 25 years. I'd say that's pretty far from "nearly free". He may well have gotten shafted a few times, but the end result seems to have come out well.
Is the point a modernized "You can write Fortran in any language"?

I am getting a little tired of these types of responses to "you can't parse X with regular expressions." Someone always feels the need to come up with a tremendously complex solution that mostly works. Usually using backref matchings, (making the regular expression not so ... regular). Meanwhile, the author never seems to talk about the parse time. Which, will be exponential. See http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/ for all the glory details.

Specific points:

> I’m talking about parsing XML, not checking whether some input actually is XML. Correctness is a Boolean, after all: invalid XML is not XML.

However, from a particularly pedantic point of view: To parse is to check whether the input is in your language. If your parser excepts input that is not XML it is not an XML parser. It is a parser which accepts some language which largely overlaps with XML, but is not XML.

I know it's an academic point, but it is an important one. When you have properly parsed your input, you should be sure that the input is what you were expecting. A parser that excepts a different language than the intended one can be highly misleading.

So I am left to wonder what is the point of it all. You never say in the article.

tl;dr

Read the dragon book. Learn what a Language actually is. Study some Chomsky. Write a recursive descent parser. Lay in the green green grass. Think about Kurt Gödel. Write a parsing framework for LALR grammars. Think. Then, I believe, the desire for using regular expressions for in-appropriate purposes will have left you. Your other tools are just so much cooler.
The reason why we often "charge $x per GB after y GB transferred per month." is that this is simple and the customer can understand it. Usually the idea is that metering costs more than the bandwidth, up to a point, so you get a 'don't worry about it' quota, and then a punishing price after that. Me, I limit people after the 'don't worry about it' price, because, well, the sort of people who are my customer don't want to get hit by unexpected bills.

what would that look like if you had the 'don't worry about it' quota with a more reasonable price on overages? I don't know. It used to be that you'd set the 'don't worry about it' quota a little too high, 'cause with the unreasonable cost of overages, most people would error on the side of not using it all.

(metering costs more for both the provider and the customer, but mostly the customer; the provider side can be automated, so it's largely a fixed cost. The customer usually prefers a flat rate over a variable rate, even if the variable rate was slightly cheaper on average, because variable rate billing means that the customer needs to pay attention, which is expensive.)

When dealing with more savvy customers and selling amounts of bandwidth that matter, charging on the 95th percentile is pretty common.

That said, any major ISP who claims it costs them more than a few pennies per gigabyte to move traffic is flat out lying.
I'd say you're being downvoted because you're rather clueless about the qualifications of the manager designing unmanned drones.
When Multimedia was Black & White
Unfortunately not directly. I am a software developer, and there is not an obvious correlation between "a piece of software is deployed" and "we just got a new client". It is a B2B venture so the total number of clients is pretty small, but each client is very profitable. However, I don't participate in sales or networking.
EU Green Party adopts the Pirate Party's position on copyright
It probably has to due with the risk involved with how to handle chargebacks if the company doesn't fulfill their promise of the product, and PayPal assuming liability if the company doesn't have sufficient funds in that case.

There are plenty of horror stories around pre-orders on PayPal. I'm not sure how Stripe handles this specifically, but they may be a good alternative: https://stripe.com/ (we use and love them).
It's not at all clear to me that Khan Academy is really "disrupting education". They may be awesome and all, but when an industry is disrupted something more fundamental is at work -- other businesses are displaced and shut down, people lose their jobs, and billion-dollar market segments get turned into million-dollar market segments (or eliminated completely).

To compare, look at what's happening in the music or book industries right now. It's hard to find a retailer that sells CDs today because that business has been disrupted.

It's far from clear to me that KA is actually having that "disruptive" effect, or that they will be able to do that in the future.
Is there a way to use javascript to detect how far zoomed in most of your readers are?
Thank You, Steve Jobs (from Stacoviak, Ihnatko, Irelan and others)
The problem is, all the things we don't understand could be labed as non-determined (i.e: quantum particles moving "randomly")
Xbox Live Tv Expected This Holiday
I’ve actually done all of those things, and using regular expressions for inappropriate purposes remains entertaining, especially for the reactions. Perhaps you need to revisit the joy of making something work in completely the wrong way.
http://www.amazon.com/Emerging-Physics-Consciousness-Frontie... << Good luck finding a 'brief' summary. It's a lot of theoretical shit that isn't absolute yet but you CS kids would do well to take a tip from your mind and move beyond booleans and algorithms into multivalued logical systems and logarithms: www.fuzzytech.com/binaries/ieccd1.pdf

(I bet you can find a copy of the aforementioned book on http://library.nu as it contains a pretty wicked intro to many different paradigms regarding these matters)
Jason Hickey: Introduction to Objective Caml
This reminds me of one of my favorite drawings from Hugh MacLeod (www.gapingvoid.com)

Nobody Cares: Population 6 Billion
http://alecsharp.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/nobody-cares.jp...
DHS testing FAST: a "pre-crime" detection system
So many critics don't understand that leaving the case unchanged from the previous model is a feature, not a bug. All of the accessories that attach to the phone, cases, tripod mounts, battery packs, etc., don't have to be redesigned. They will all be ready when the 4S is released. They'll take up less shelf space in stores.
But the same would apply to other phones which do not seem to have this "pent-up demand". Perhaps the iPhone is simply better and more desirable than other phones.
1) Put up pre-order page.
2) Collect money.
3) Fail to deliver, intentionally or not.
4) Paypal eats all the losses.

That's what they don't like about pre-orders; you are putting off your business risk on them. Credit card companies disallow pre-charging cards when goods have not yet shipped for the exact same reason.
German Chaos Computer Club analyzes and releases government malware
From the press release: "The largest European hacker club, "Chaos Computer Club" (CCC), has reverse engineered and analyzed a "lawful interception" malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet."
Each memory is stored as a neural connection
I have heard of many googlers, who use Ubuntu on their macbooks. Besides that is an ability which is not a prerequisite for majority of the computer users. Look I am a Ubuntu (not on a macbook though) user myself, and being a developer love the freedom that it provides, but we have to remember that everybody's requirement of freedom is different, for vast majority of the users freedom means, freedom from spending hours to tinker with something to make it work, things should just work for them, and Steve provided that kind of freedom.
try emclient
As long as we have the technology we have today, everyone notable. If there is a nuclear war, biological outbreak or other 1000x Black Swan event, perhaps no one. Those who do survive an apocalypse won't be too worried about remembering anyone as they'll be too busy foraging and trying to defend themselves from roving bands of cannibals.
In this situation it's not as much a question of personal ideology as it is basic interpersonal skills. You generally avoid telling the world you're happy someone's gone immediately following their death. It's completely arbitrary, and no one's going to throw you in jail if you do it but it's just one of these things.

How you think software should be developed doesn't really come into at this level. It's just a question of how you deal with people and that's where Stallman's fallen short here.
What’re you more thankful for: Cheap RAM or cheap hard drives?
You're going to run into some degree of issues wherever you go if you're accepting pre-orders. Because your essentially taking payments for a product that doesn't exist yet (and therefore may never exist - it's a possibility), paying customers may never receive what they order. If that happens, and you can't refund every single order, PayPal needs to cover your customers.

If you have a lot of cash on hand, have great credit, extensive positive history with other processors, etc., it will be easier for you to get going. Rather than being shut down like this author's business though, some merchant account providers may tell you they need to keep a rolling reserve of 5-10% with them for a period of time.
"As he saw it, the main challenge for Pixar was getting its different cultures to work together, forcing the computer geeks and cartoonists to collaborate."

It's entirely likely that Steve sees a different set of challenges for Apple, and to the extent he had design input into the new Apple campus he made considerations based on those challenges.
This reminds me of Ometa http://www.tinlizzie.org/ometa/
New Sony PS3 Remote Will Now Control Your TV and Netflix
Bravo now casting Silicon Valley reality show
Sounds like we seriously need to get some of that superstitious dark ages politeness back ASAP.

I think XKCD had it right -- people should have to listen to their comments read aloud before they're published on the internet.
This brutal rationality about death guff misses all sorts of points. People dying makes other people feel sad, it's just how the world is. Everyone dies and yet it's still a big deal.

It's really hard to explain to someone who doesn't get it why death is a big issue but if you don't take into account that death is a sad thing for some people you just end up looking like a dick at the funeral.
You needed to pledge $650 to actually get a Bilibot, versus $78 for a Romo. It looks like for $5665 three Bilibots will be built.
This appears to be a defensive maneuver in Apple's litigation with Lodesys. You obviously didn't read the article so I'll quote part of it here:
"The idea is, in general, very similar to the Lodsys patent, however, it is much more specific. If Apple was granted the rights to the patent, both sides could easily challenge each other's patents. The question, of course, would also be what Apple would do, if this patent is granted, about Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry developers? Most likely nothing, as there are countless iOS developers who offer their apps for multiple platforms and Apple may not have an interest in upsetting them."
Stallman doesn't even want that users know about that option. From Wikiquote: "The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists."
What I do is split the window vertically (C-w v), and resize the left window so that the text in the right window is centered on the screen.
Enjoyed this talk, should certainly be taken with a grain of salt but overall some great lessons to learn.
I'd say this was fairly generous, and I've never heard of it repeated by any other technology company:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Apple_Mac...

Even Jef Raskin's signature is in there, for crying out loud, and Jobs stole the Mac team from him.

But to your general point, have you ever seen a product intro where the entire team is brought up and named one by one? It seems like you're holding Jobs to an arbitrarily high standard.
And it's things like that that will make even more people vote the Pirate Party.

Luckily the German public is by and large opposed to surveillance. (for historical reasons)
This article says essentially nothing. The third sentence, about Apple's preorder numbers, is the only new information it provides. Everything else we already knew: last year's preorder numbers, specs for the 4S, and commentary on sentiment about the 4S. This would have provided more value to the reader as a one-sentence statement.
Maybe the moral of the story is that you should upgrade your OS.
They only appear non-determined when you think of them as particles or waves. They're neither.
As someone with a business process patent pending, let me just say, business process patents are ridiculous.

This is yet another great example of why. For one, you already get a copyright on the software you write, as well as any books or pamphlets that your company might write to describe your business process. So there really is no reason for the patent -- you can use your copyright for all types of business practices.

Second, the purpose of patents was to protect an inventor for a limited time to encourage invention. They required you to turn in a prototype to get one.

I think we need to go to a system where you have to turn in a working prototype of a physical invention to get your non-renewable three year patent.

If you can't turn your prototype profitable in three years, move out of the way so that someone else who can execute better than you can do it instead.
> Apple have vision while Android just slavishly copies them. Siri is a perfect example of this. They didn't make it but as soon as they saw it they knew it was what they wanted, where they wanted to take it.

This is sort of blowing my mind. After the release of the iPhone, Android shifted from a trackball-based design to a touch-based design (which is a big shift), and copied the Apple homescreen for its app drawer layout, but to call it a "slavish copy" is disingenuous. Android diverges - and innovates - in a lot of very significant ways. Google has been offering voice search/commands/voice-to-text for Android long before Siri. It did notifications and task switching far better than iOS did (and iOS has now "slavishly" copied those concepts). The back button and activity stack make the device usage behaviors ridiculously different from iOS usage. It's been doing wireless sync and cloud-based stuff for a long while; Apple's just now starting to integrate that stuff.

iOS has better-looking stock art assets/widgets, and the application approval process guarantees an adherence to Apple's UI design policies, which does help produce a more consistent experience for the things that Apple cares about, but to me personally, iOS feels like a toy next to Android. As non-fanboyishly as I can say it, I genuinely believe Android is better software than iOS. Apple has the vertical integration down better, no doubt, and their marketing is about a thousand times better than anything that any of the Android handset makers are doing, but I don't think you can use both OSes and seriously dismiss Android as a cheap carbon copy.
Could you please stop submitting everything you write, just because you can? If everyone would do that, it'd be terrible!
At Solar Decathlon, Innovation Shines
Is Twitter becoming THE reference for the content web?
Few weeks back, Twitter announced that the tweet button is present on 3 million websites now. Even looking around, almost every piece of new content (esp textual content), whether it is a WSJ article, blog post by an unknown guy or a local newspaper item, gets tweeted about almost as soon as it is published.

If almost all (or a lot of) of the web's content is getting referenced on Twitter, then can Twitter become the most authoritative source for finding relevant information? On any and all topics?
I would love if someone from Stripe talked about how they handled this sort of stuff. Everyone keeps saying "I use Stripe and love them", but the process people describe of signing up seems to be begging people to scam them.

There are actually good reasons why merchant accounts work the way that they do, and Stripe doesn't provide any argument for why they don't: until they do, I can't imagine trusting them for anything important at my business.

I mean, they are almost sketchy when it comes to talking about "when bad things happen"; example: when chargebacks happen (and they do happen: I get one every couple days), can I easily (as in: no human interaction) tie it to an individual payment? The only mentions on their entire website about chargebacks are in the painfully informal FAQ/pricing (that it costs $15), and in their terms of service (which indicates that the $15 doesn't include mediation, which I'm pretty certain PayPal's $20 does).

The first thing I think, of course, is "they charge more, duh": if you do any kind of volume at all, or are involved in small transactions, they are a /lot/ more expensive than PayPal: I'd easily be paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the privilege of not spending a few hours on the phone negotiating a merchant account.

(For those not looking at their pricing, their fixed fee is PayPal's worst case fee; PayPal discounts 1-2% from that for volume, and supports a fundamentally better fee schedule for payments under $12: 5.0%+$0.05 vs. 2.9%+$0.30. Unless you are handling small numbers of transactions all over $12, Stripe is going to burn you on fees.)

However, when I think through "where does the risk of credit fraud mostly occur", I'd imagine it would be reasonable sized transactions (trying to launder tons of money $1 at a time will get noticed pretty quickly), and I'd imagine the merchant fraud is mostly small volume (as if you actually have a functional business, you are able to easily able to cover the risks).

So yeah: I just don't get it... is the Stripe 7 day hold enough? (PayPal doesn't have any hold for most businesses.) I certainly wouldn't touch it over PayPal if the only reason is "PayPal seems overly cautious": Stripe simply seems to be "asking for it".

(And this is just looking at normal chargebacks: pre-orders are a whole different ballgame, and if Stripe doesn't have a policy forbidding them then they will probably be out of business, seemingly out of nowhere, in a few months.)