skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it says:

"learn Python, win over your peers".

"don't be a dick, win over your peers".

"learn ruby, convince your peers you're good at CSS too."

"work at facebook/google and be popular."

Mixtent is a popularity contest. My bet is, if you asked someone on the street with no knowledge of programming "who is a better engineer". Split by name it would be random 50/50. But if you included where they worked, then the Facebook or Google person would win.

It is interesting though.
Almost this exact scenario happened to me a few months back, and they did the same, asking me to sign an agreement saying I knew what I did was wrong (it wasn't) and that I wouldn't do it again. I absolutely refused to sign such a thing, and thankfully a friend of a friend knew someone in a high position at PayPal that finally got it all sorted out. Two weeks of extreme stress later, but at least it got worked out. Take unusual measures and if you are lucky you'll get it worked out.
I'm a huge fan of WePay. They don't play these games.

With all of the different competing solutions out there these days, I don't know why anyone continues to use Paypal.
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On the promise of quantum computers
I'm sure everybody knows by now, but this is certainly not the first time paypal has done this kind of thing:

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/paypal-fiasco-summary.p... (slightly nsfw)
Is there a current best alternative to PayPal that you would recommend?
The 700 MHz spectrum that Verizon uses for their LTE network has neutrality restrictions, including "Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_2008_wireless_spe... Blocking an app would appear to violate that rule.

However, Google may be "voluntarily" witholding Wallet on the Galaxy Nexus to avoid regulatory problems.
So, what a Firefox 3.6 user is missing out on is running a bunch of artificial benchmarks faster?
40% of my customers will only pay with PayPal. I went without PayPal for about a month at one point and sales were down dramatically even though I still had credit card and other options available.
If you are building desktop apps with web app technologies, you are really making compromises on a lot of important areas (native UI, responsiveness, runtime footprint, respecting platform conventions[1]). I can understand forgoing all of that, if doing so at least buys you broad cross-platform support.

However in the case of platform-specific projects such as this, you're not even getting that.

[1] http://readthefuckinghig.tumblr.com/
Mobile API Versioning Made Easy
LED Light
We go to great lengths to ensure that our products are the best quality and technologically innovative. We work closely with our design team and manufacturers to ensure that our customers receive the best products whilst in the comfort of knowing that we are determined to drive down the prices of LED solutions in the Australian market. Our success relies on our customers’ success.
I'd be curious to know how conversion rates vary when you have Paypal vs. a merchant account (or something like Stripe) vs. both. Anyone have any data?
Because in reality paypal is actually pretty awesome (note: I work for Etsy which uses paypal as a payment processor, so I guess I'm kind of biased). The cost for the business, compared to maintaining your own payments platform at scale, is pretty reasonable, and the failure rate is pretty miniscule when you consider the amount of potential fraud that goes through the platform.

Paypal wasn't really designed to handle one off personal payments, it was designed to let small (and large) businesses accept payments, internationally and fraud free. This is ridiculously difficult (how many of you have ever written software that integrates with a bank? ugh.) PayPal does this exceptionally well and because of that many huge businesses are built on its back.

The reality is, in most of the situations that people complain about freezing their money, without paypal their entire project would've been a no-go anyway.

I do feel for people who legitimately have their accounts wrongly frozen (I am one of them, though mine was unfrozen after a few days), but you have to understand how small a percentage of people that is, and that you can't have a system without failure. Again, paypal's failure rate, when you consider what they actually do, is astoundingly low.

Edit: Just for absolute clarity - I work for Etsy and have zero affiliation with the blog from the OP, and it has zero affiliation with Etsy. Also these are my opinions not my employers etc.
Flipboard Goes to China
No it doesn't. It implies that you don't want people to know about it. But there's plenty of things in business that are legal and ethical, but you still want to keep quiet. For example, Google kept their search revenue quiet for a long time and intentionally did so. Were they doing something wrong? I'm sure Apple would like to keep their supplier deals quiet.

If you're getting a good deal with competitive advantage, you often want to keep that quiet -- and it doesn't imply you're doing anything wrong. Now if they statement ended with, "or we could all up in jail" then that would imply they were doing something wrong. This just sounds like they found a sweet deal and wanted to make sure they could milk it with as little cost for as long as possible.
At the risk of being perceived as the devil's advocate, let me ask a question.

I've heard of dozens of stories about Paypal along a similar vein. "They locked my account for unreasonable reason X and now are keeping the money".

Most of these stories seem anecdotal. Can someone point to a rigorously documented set of cases where both Paypal and the customer's side of things are reviewed?

Over the last few years, all of these "Paypal screwed me" stories have sounded like all the complaints a few years ago about Apple seeming to reject apps arbitrarily. As far as I know, the complaints about Apple from devs have largely died down since we've had a fairly straight-forward list of do's and don'ts to work from.

If most of the people reporting problems with Paypal are doing things that are inconsistent with their policies and then saying publicly how they're being screwed, then that creates a negative reputation for other people who have never personally had a problem with Paypal.
Because it is what most sellers offer for transactions.
Elections in Russia denies the basic math
This, and preinstalled "crapware" on newly bought computers/phones happens because vendors have no incentive not to do it, except perhaps out of goodness their heart. Yes, it disgusts me too, but moral issues aside:

(a) Vendors are looking to make money (simply speaking) and bundling crapware is a low-hanging fruit to do so. They have a choice between making $X per customer and $X+30 cents. Which choice should they pick?

(b) Users are not savvy or discerning enough to notice that they are getting the said crapware. We, techies, care. Do mainstream users care? They buy a new computer (or download an app), and they get the computer or the app, as far as they are concerned. How can grandma know that the "monthly anti-virus subscription" popup is "unwanted"?

People will buy/download from $VENDOR with or without crapware. Companies want to make more money and they have no reason to be "good." They gain more than they can lose. Until these variables change (say, if users revolt, or class action suits arise, or $CONGRESS_PERSON complains, or advertising revenue somehow diminishes, etc.), this will sadly keep on happening.
> These horror stories are so common

Don't take that for granted. PayPal has 232 million registered accounts, and many more unregistered buyers. Even if 99.99% of PayPal account holders were completely satisfied and never had any problem, that'd 0.01% would still be 23200 pissed off people.

Is it right to wonder "does anyone still use PayPal" if 99.99% of PayPal users have no problem using the service?
Fun fact: The horror that is PayPal came from the same guy who gave us our hope for the bright future of commercial spaceflight. PayPal has vertically integrated every step required to stiff you. They can do it safely and reliably, but a public mishap like this one may cost them.
I wrote the software that integrates with WePay. They are a 'real' bank. Works great. ;-) https://github.com/lookfirst/WePay-Java-SDK
Agree. My wife is a MD also (internal medicine) and the only time I saw her cry was when she received a call in the middle of the night and found out that one of her patients that was dnr/dni (an elderly lady) had exactly that done to her. The staff at the hospital where she was off shift had overlooked the directive.
Is that manual cleanup really necessary?
I find it amazing how narrow the gap is between brilliant and average, particularly for intelligent people. A couple of hours of reading a textbook can sometimes be equivalent with about a year of public school education.

Case in point: Took AP Computer Science my sophomore year of high school. I got C's on most of the tests (mostly code tracing) for the first two months or so. After getting a particularly bad grade on a test (near failing, and I got all A's in everything else), I went home and thought "fuck this" and pulled out some Java book and read it for about 5 hours. After this, I moved from being about 40th percentile to best student in my class. I got high A's the rest of the year without trying particularly hard, and I actually enjoyed the class, and this lead to me starting to program on my own for fun, and eventually becoming a pretty good programmer.
Follow up to “Android graphics true facts”
Adira Asuransi Kendaraan Terbaik Indonesia
Burdened by the big amount you're paying for your auto insurance? You don't have to because there are lots of tips you can follow for you to get considerable auto insurance savings. There's also a good chance that you could find better insurance rates from other insurer than what your existing insurance company is offering.
I knew a Verizon Nexus couldn't be trusted! No wonder they didn't get the Nexus One, or the original iPhone. I'll be getting my Galaxy Nexus in GSM flavor, unlocked.
Well, it is annoying corporate-speak, but I can understand it: "this development program is now closed to the general public. It will be open only to partners that can help us making money."
I've used Authorize.net + a merchant account at a real bank a few times. It works, every time.

BrainTree is awesome too.

If you're doing subscriptions, http://spreedly.com/ is good.

And Stripe looks cool but I've never used it. (https://stripe.com/)
BOUGHT AUD/USD and NZD/USD
I've been sitting here for the last five minutes trying to make a point eloquently. I'm having a hard time with it. So I'll just put it like this:

What else can we really expect from a product whose parent is eBay?

This company is a fucking fossil with all the hunger for customer satisfaction of a used tissue.

Is it convenient for users? Yeah. Is it worth gambling your entire business on? Given the lack of accountability these clowns enjoy, I'm going to say probably not. Neither eBay or PayPal has evolved in any meaningful way in the last decade. On the contrary: they've steadily declined in user experience and customer satisfaction. Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern?

On principle, on practicality, for the sake of all of our futures: just say no to PayPal.
Sorry about the slow reply:

US LLC Incorporation and registered agent ~$300/y

Everything else is essentially free, I have a registered mailbox that redirects my mail and a US Skype Number attached to my iPhone. You'll need a US address to setup the bank account initially.
Vote For Your Favourite Ruby/Rails Resources
I've yet to see a "PayPal horror story" that didn't fit into one of the "any payment processor in the world would consider this high risk and temporarily or permanently freeze the account" slots.

If this discussion with the customer service rep did occur as written, it's the most ridiculous one I've seen yet, though. It's a major customer service fail even if the original reason for freezing the account was valid.
I can't. I replied elsewhere in these comments that it happened to a client of mine. I made a lot of money in one weekend doing emergency "I told you so" payment gateway switching for him so he could take reservations.

But it's my recollection they're not a bank, and so they have no real obligation to act like one. So when they do this kind of stuff, I'm not surprised.

And I wouldn't want to be them. They probably deal with fraud and schemes on the scale none of us could possibly imagine.

PayPal - the Mos Eisley of e-commerce.
I've been on this forum for a long time, and I'd estimate that a new Paypal horror stories surfaces once a month. There's no shortage of them. Every one of those costs them something, no doubt, but not enough for them to knock it off.
"compatible with the Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint"

It is Google's choice to currently keep Wallet limited to the S 4G on Sprint and without any actual evidence at all to support that Verizon is actively blocking Wallet this article is just that. Speculation.

http://www.google.com/wallet/faq.html
Take Uber’s New Logo For a Spin
Procera AVH Ingredients
It's more subtle than that. Looking past the technical terms, the first formulation is very distilled, and cites a specific action. It's an elegant expression. The second one uses fluffery like "performed" instead of "did". And that's what sets off the BS detector.
...but I didn't get that the article talked about every company's core business now being software.

Here is a quote from the article where he lays out the Andreessen Hypothesis[1], and links to David Kirpatrick's article that restates that hypothesis into a format more readily grasped by business readers[2].

Which brings us to David Kirpatrick’s now famous line that every company is now a software company.

We are only just beginning to understand how software is now the core function of every company, no matter what it makes or what service it actually provides.

I have some reservations about these kinds of sweeping proclamations (which if I posted would turn into a tl;dr for most people), as they miss a lot of the nuance of the situation on the ground. That might be deliberate, as part of consulting at these guys' level is to get clients hooked on the sizzle of a catchy idea, then sell them the steak of the nuances you've worked out.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190348090457651... Not that Andreessen was the first to realize this of course, but he just happened to catch the news cycle with his verbalization of this observation at the right time to break into a more mainstream meme, that many in the industry already either tacitly or explicitly acknowledge.

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/techonomy/2011/11/30/now-every-c...
This happened to software from my company (ActiveState), and we made a request to remove the extra wrapper bits (very much not the user experience we wanted), and CNet complied. Someone just has to ask.
[edit: of course, we did also find out _after_ the fact, which we didn't appreciate. We would have pulled our various bits, had they not complied ... but they did]
Railscasts?
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Taking credit cards on your own site with a merchant account and gateway. But it'll almost definitely cost you more, you'll invest 10 times the resources into handling and stopping fraud, and some customers won't trust your site with their credit card. The reality is PayPal has a lot of benefits for both sides.
It looks like a great idea and website. Me and two friends are going to graduate soon from a BS in Computer Engineering and we love to hear more details (expenses!). We are seriously considering a startup but we lack a good idea. We have some knowledge in: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, DB (SQLite, MySQL), Linux, Apache, Javascript, HTML and CSS (including using Bootstrap). Please contact me here: http://goo.gl/kgLWc so we can share details if you're interested. Thanks.
To add an anecdote to your point (A), a former workmate of mine used to tutor maths at a university level. He had a student that was very good at rote learning, they could do any of the set problems quite easily by just going through the steps to solve them. But when faced with an unusual presentation of the problem they were stumped.

I'm pretty sure I was guilty of that sort of rote learning more than once, and it seems to be the first thing that disappears once exams are over.
Yikes, are you really only allowed to use "donate" buttons if you're a nonprofit? I use them as a "tip jar" on my blog. What's the options for for-profit when you're giving money for nothing in particular?
I think this is what the author was trying to convey, and the article does a fairly good job of providing information from and insiders prospective, even if it does objectify developers. I think most developers move between the two, what you stated seems to be very normal and 10x'ers seem to pick up other 10x'ers along their way. I have about 8 guys in my (guild) now and we float in between contracts and start-ups. I am working on funding of our next venture and I will be calling them in. When I do, they will come and that is very hard for someone on the outside to understand. Our dynamics work very different than other industries and it is very hard for people outside of it to understand. That is probably the think that I think made Steve Job's so formidable was his understanding of the dynamics of creative employees.
"reality the majority of the healthy public has no understanding of what true chronic pain entails"

Agree. And forget even chronic pain. Simply having a nagging pain, a bad cold, nausea, or a bad headache is certainly enough to take the joy out of many things in life. Even a drip in my throat can kill my buzz.
Perhaps what we could do is set up an arena and force them to work together as a team. If we design the experiment with care then we might be able to settle the question of imitation vs. communication.

For example if we hide food beneath inside a container and put several such containers in a grid then we could see if they co-ordinate the search. We could control for imitation by making the pool pitch black and covering the dolphin's eyes, thus forcing them to use echolocation extensively, which we should be able to capture. If we can track the direction and the nature of the clicks as well as the position and subsequent actions of the dolphins after making them, then we might be able to answer this question.
Firefox 3.6 user here. I'd love to upgrade, but the new versions don't run on PowerPC
Watch New Year's Eve
Watch New Year's Eve Online is produced by Mike Karz, Wayne Allan Rice, and Garry Marshall and written by Katherine Fugate. Film making is by Charles Minsky and edited by Michael Tronick under New Line Cinema, Wayne Rice Films, and Karz Entertainment studio. This is distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures and scheduled to be launch in cinemas on December 9, 2011.
Toshiba Battery Test
In my mind there should be two main reasons to raise money

Seriously?

Try doing a startup with a hardware component without up-front funding.
HeapWorker.c uses pthreads. doing a quick check on one of the functions dvmLockMutex (in Thread.h) uses pthread_mutex_lock.

// Grab a plain mutex.

INLINE void dvmLockMutex(pthread_mutex_t pMutex)
{

int cc __attribute__ ((__unused__)) =

pthread_mutex_lock(pMutex);

assert(cc == 0);

}

and here's pthread_mutex_lock.

int pthread_mutex_lock(pthread_mutex_t mutex)
{
if (mutex->kind == PTHREAD_MUTEX_NORMAL)
{
if (atomic_exchange(&mutex->lock, 1) != 0)
{
while (atomic_exchange(&mutex->lock, -1) != 0)
{

if (wait(mutex->event, INFINITE) != 0) return EINVAL;

}

}

}
else

{

pthread_t self = pthread_self();

if (atomic_exchange(&mutex->lock, 1) == 0)
{
mutex->recursion = 1;

mutex->owner = self;

}

else

{

if (pthread_equal(mutex->owner, self))

{
if (mutex->kind == PTHREAD_MUTEX_RECURSIVE)
mutex->recursion++;
else
return EDEADLK;
}
else
{
while (atomic_exchange(&mutex->lock, -1) != 0)
{
if (wait(mutex->event, INFINITE) != 0) return EINVAL;
mutex->recursion = 1;
mutex->owner = self;
}
}
}
}

return 0;

}

and here's an excerpt of dalvik/vm/Thread.c

Notes on Threading

All threads are native pthreads. All threads, except the JDWP debugger
thread, are visible to code running in the VM and to the debugger. (We
don't want the debugger to try to manipulate the thread that listens for
instructions from the debugger.) Internal VM threads are in the "system"
ThreadGroup, all others are in the "main" ThreadGroup, per convention.

The GC only runs when all threads have been suspended.

...
Absolutely: that every other payment processor in the world would do the same thing is hugely relevant. Paypal is just the only one it's easy enough to set stuff up with, so they get all the bad press.
Backspace sent me back to this post and I lost my progress.
Also depends which version of "billion" you're using, it could be either: 1,000,000,000 (short version) or 1,000,000,000,000 (long version).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion

edit: add link & proper version titles.
I have never seen a company more in need of competition. I realize its massive installed base makes it tough to approach, but isn't there somebody who can compete credibly? I have to think that there's enough user dissatisfaction that people would defect in droves, given a decent alternative.
Open Letter to CNet (RE Bundleware)
Learn to create some amazing infographics
Are You Using iTerm2?
I got one of those after years of service with 0 problems, so I canceled my PayPal and eBay accounts. I haven't missed them.
Metrics, also useful
If the products are identical as you said, then, even if the other developer is building at faster speed than you are I would say you still have the upper hand because of your greater visibility.

That said, if I were you I would launch a beta, even if its only a private beta, just to get the word out there, that way you can preempt his launch by getting the word out there. See every feature that its not completely necessary to the minimal viable product, cut those and launch.

Bests of luck!
A friend of mine down the street tried to sell an online account via PayPal. The would-be buyers sent the money to his PayPal account, got the online account credentials from him, then took the money out of PayPal. The money was lost but the admins for the software he used the account on reinstated it to him since this happens a lot. There are scammers with deep penetration into PayPal.
So we've got two competing things we could believe here:

- Google said "Eh, you know, I think that I only want this strategic product I've been talking about forever on a smaller carrier, and not the biggest carrier in America. It's not like a payments system benefits from a network effect anyway."

or

- Verizon, famous for gimping core features like Bluetooth to protect their shitty ringtone business, said "Hmm. Okay, let's just switch this competing service off... aaaand, we're done." And then Google's like, "Oh. Fuck. Well let's be sure and spin this in a way that doesn't make us look like complete eunuch clownshoes."

I mean, obviously there are further alternatives. But absent additional evidence, I like the one that's most consistent with existing patterns of behavior.
Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook (hour long BBC documentary)
I'm sorry that you don't realize what you are trying to do is nearly equivalent to a Nigerian scam, but in the eyes of a payment company, it is. So cut Paypal some slack.