skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a story of how a payment processor froze an account that had a sudden, incredible jump in processing volume, just like any payment processor in the world would have done. When he contacted PayPal they, understandably, wanted some evidence that the money was going to be used for the stated purpose, because if it's not PayPal could be on the hook for $30k in chargebacks and a few thousand more in fees. Instead of doing some work to provide convincing evidence, he asks a CSR to donate all his account money to Red Cross which she can't do, then gives up immediately and directs them to refund all the payments.

I don't see anything about this story that makes PayPal look bad. Not objectively at least. Subjectively, we'd like the fundraiser to have worked out, but it's the processor on the hook if the fundraiser is a scam...
Sorry, I don't know much about twilio. Why is it so high? I thought it was $1/month for a number, plus 1c per text (sent or received).

I'm not sure you would need 1 number per teacher anyway. All you would need is 1 number, assuming a 1:N relationship between students and teachers. If there were 10 1:N relationships between students and teachers (some students had 10 teachers in the system), you'd just need 10 numbers.

But like I said, I've just scanned the front page of Twilio. Don't rely on what I've said.
As with a lot of things, the loudest most visible members of a group are usually the worst ambassadors. (See: environmentalists) I'm a cyclist, but stuff like Critical Mass really piss me off because it reinforces all the negative stereotype people have of cyclists.
Already the version number isn't really advertised -- especially compared to Fx 1 through 4. However, it is an incredibly useful thing to know if you ever need support.

Version number shouldn't be dropped, however it should be, has been and will continue to be deemphasized.
37s' rework has a great chapter, "underdo your competition", I think its really applicable to your case.
i use dwolla
Can you explain how the OP's situation is high risk?
I'm always happy to read a new The Setup that isn't a variation on "I use a MBP/MBA." +1 for the Arch Linux advocacy.
I'm going to be somewhat direct here.

I allege that what Paypal is doing here (holding funds over 10 days) is illegal.

In order to do what Paypal does in the USA, you need licensure. They point out that they are not a bank. Indeed, they aren't: in many states they are classified as a money transmitter. In 8 states, they have no license to operate.#1

And, Indiana also requires licensure for money transmission. IC 28-8-4-20 (a) A person may not engage in the business of money transmission without a license required by this chapter.

What is this money transmitter stuff? In essence, the law in all the locales I have checked (I have not gone through every one), indicate only a short holding period (5-15 days) and only allow holding of money of a known crime.
So indeed what they do is absolutely fraudulent. In other words, if you have a patent troll corporation with many lawyers, target Paypal for their illegal behavior.
#1 Source: https://www.paypal-media.com/state_licenses.cfm
If you haven't tried updating past 3.6, you should. Benchmarks may not be 100% accurate, but you can see the difference in JS-heavy apps (like GMail). The UI has been cleaned up and revamped. There are a ton of new HTML/CSS/JS features. Better memory management, and Firefox as a whole is faster. Restartless add-ons. The list goes on and on :)
1 cent a text - he offers 500 free texts to start and 200 a month free as well. i'm assuming those will all get used. Read the FAQ.
The article lightly eluded to the fact that the 10x'ers are able to transcend this, as a developer in his late 30's and a 10x'er I have seen it, my (guild) is getting younger and younger. Burn out has taken some of my age peers, while comfort or riches have taken others. Meanwhile, I keep on ticking, adopting the new stuff as soon as it comes out. There does come and age though where burn out sets in, and you either just start doing a job, or you drop out of the industry all together. I had one bad burn out in my early 30's in which I tried to leave the industry, but pastureing just does not seem to be in my nature. We will see when I am in my late 40's.
Fraud committed by postman in Colne Valley, West Riding, UK
Metallica before the black album is the Metallica I like, anything since then I can't simply listen to it.
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Any change in average processing volume and ticket size is a red flag at any payment processor. An individual/business suddenly getting a ton of "donations" is going to look suspicous. An individual/business that hasn't told their processor their plans, and gets a ton of "donations", is going to have to convince that processor the donations are really donations and are going to end up going towards what they said they'd go towards -- because if they don't, all those donors may charge back the payments, the fundraiser may disappear, and the processor is on the hook for all the costs.

OP's situation is pretty weird. If that conversation actually occurred, it wasn't handled well at all, and PayPal may well have done a lot wrong here. That doesn't mean it wasn't a high risk situation when PayPal initially froze the account to stop it from getting riskier.

I also think the OP's wrong about losing fees on everything twice even though the payments were refunded. When you refund something through PayPal, PayPal refunds its fees to you, even if it was a credit card transaction.
I remember the first time I found Sun bundling the Yahoo! toolbar along with the Java runtime.

I knew at that moment that Sun had lost its self respect and had no credible strategy for Java. I immediately went back to developing C++ for MS Windows and Perl for Linux.
What are some options available to a recent graduate who wants to move to Japan?
I'm graduating pretty soon, and I really want to move to Japan. However, I have to worry about my career. I can stay here in Silicone Valley and it would probably be easier to get a job and I can save up and then move later. Ideally, I would like to work in a startup, but I want to move out of the country more than anything. I wanted to ask HN and explore more options. What are some ways to accomplish my dream of moving to Japan while still advancing my career?
Samurai is really good http://samurai.feefighters.com
priced similarly to paypal at 2.3% + 30 cents

You really need a true merchant account plus gateway.
sorry, we'll get this fixed. the browser window is gaining focus after clicking the next button and we should refocus it back on the console
I think one subtle difference is that in iOS there is some degree of parallelism even in the UI Updates as they happen in the NSRunLoop of the main thread(main NSRunLoop).

So that an UI Update that is waiting for hardware can be delayed and the next UI update in the loop can be processed.

I dont seem to recall any such pattern for Java main thread UI Updates.
There is no good alternative. Existing alternatives require additional user signup, and the fees are the same.

The Internet needs a good Paypal competitor.
Amusingly enough, Mail’s compose window uses WebKit for the content area. According to http://webkit.org/b/73888 the issue is specific to the WebKit2 layer that is currently used only by Safari.
Ask HN: I'm selling some stock from a startup and don't know what to do with 50k
The stock has been trading for a pretty fair price recently and I decided to sell half to hedge against whatever the future brings. I don't really need the money. I eventually want to bootstrap a startup, so I don't want to lock up money in something longterm like a house, but I also don't want to lose money in bad investments. I don't really want to actively manage it either, I don't find that stuff too interesting, so a funds or money managers sound good to me. I just don't where to start. Anyone have any advice?
I have several websites; some sell products, some monthly subscriptions, some target consumers, some businesses.

Universally, on all of these sites, customers choose to pay with PayPal more often than credit card. For the most part, my payment pages are a secure credit card form with a "or Pay with PayPal" button to the right of the form. More people choose to click through to PayPal than to just put their card in to the form already on screen.

The preference for PayPal is larger outside the US among my customers.
Absolutely. Sprint chose Google wallet over ISIS:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385986,00.asp
indeed...
don't plan on using g'wallet myself, but this why i thank my fu@#ing stars that t-mobile isn't being eaten by at&t (nothing against at&t here really, but t-mobile has a pretty decent track record for being "friendly" on these types of things).
I'm a partner at a small but mature think-tank and business consulting company in Boston. We are an idea company at heart and have a strong track record in growing technology based joint ventures. In this case I would personally put the right people in the right seats to really get things rolling. If you'd like the business to evolve while you're working on devbootcamp, give me a ping at le@cirrosystems.com. I would love to chat more.
No doubt a 3rd party mod will be out within days that rectifies this.
Facebook Plans To Raise $10 Billion In Its IPO
The donate button thing -- that's got to be because of tax reasons, right?
I'm curious as to why this person would be told "oh, you have to do this," only to be told, "oh, you're not supposed to do what we just told you, and it's your fault that you did that."

It's like a page out of the "let me jam a pineapple up your ass" book of customer service.
Octopus Crawls Out of Water and Begins Walking on Land (Video)
How do you know he's progressing faster? With your base of paying customers, you should be able to iterate faster than your competition. If you can't, and if you feel it's that much of a serious technical threat, then you may want to consider hiring a technical professional of your own.

At the same time, your business co-founder (presumably you're the one responsible for the technical side of the house while your partner is responsible for sales, marketing and biz dev) should seriously investigate if there is any merit to the competition's revenue model, and whether it's in your best interest to adopt a freemium model of your own (it may not be).

Given that you claim to have a working paywall model (something that I think many media companies and media brokers would kill for), your content must be a niche of some type.

Attack this problem from as many simultaneous angles as possible (technical/feature-parity, pricing and marketing). If you can learn faster than your competition (that doesn't necessarily mean release features faster -- "learn" is the keyword here) from your paying customers, then you should be in a much better position to stay ahead.

The fact that you said that the "[...] products will be functionally identical once both are deployed and out of beta" is a red-flag to me that you either haven't done enough analysis of the competition's feature set, or if you have, then you need to increase the tempo of customer feedback to incorporate into your product.

Perhaps you will say that as soon as you deploy new features based on your customer learnings, your competition will copy you. If that's the case, then (from a marketing angle) you will always be first to deliver features and should be able to please your customers faster, hopefully resulting in greater adoption (until you saturate your market).

I smell a lot of fear from your post. It may help to reframe your situation in a more positive light, since imitation is usually the highest form of flattery, while competition is sometimes used as a signalling mechanism (to yourself and others) that you picked a potentially profitable addressable market.

tl;dr

1) Congratulations! You're validating your business model and market with actual paying customers and (now) competition.

2) Figure out how long each of you can last if one of you gave the content away for free. Consider freemium for your own offering (teaser content?).

3) Increase, analyze and act on feedback from your customers faster.

4) Hire better technical talent.

Sorry I didn't answer your original question of "What do you do to push through it?" Hopefully the suggestions above will help to combat the dejection and loss of motivation.
I have a buddy that owns a vending company, he lost a pretty big account and was hurting, I thought about how I could help him and I obviously thought, teach him to develop a web presence and teach him adwords. He learned and learned how to program in the process, I was amazed at how much, given his inside knowledge of the business he had built to support new ways of doing business. Not only did he replace the revenue, he created entirely new revenue stream. I always thought,hey coin operated vending is just coin operated vending, but a guy armed with the ability to develop and deep knowledge of his industry is a formidable business man. He said to me, he should have learned to develop a long time ago. We may not know how software can help a baker but a baker sure would, if he knew what software can do, and could assemble it and the day that someone translates thoughts into applications is the day that we fundamentally change the world again. It probably wont be pretty for individuals in pure development roles.
When PayPal terminates an account and holds the funds, they're returned after 180 days. The same as any merchant account that's terminated. It's to cover potential chargebacks, which can come in months after the fact -- though they really shouldn't do that when the only payment the frozen account received wasn't funded by a credit card.
http://i39.tinypic.com/25fizw1.png

Paypal wins still?
But that's my point. The attitude is that since he has had issues with the software he labels it bad software on that basis. I don't have those problems but for some reason I'm not allowed to dispute his label of the software.

I'm just trying to use the false logic presented to me in the same manner. I do not have problems with Mozilla Firefox, therefore, I demand that the world agree with me that it is "good software". How is that any different?

But in the end, it's just "software" and different people have different experiences.
OK, so that's up to $7 signup (including invite bonus) plus $2 a month. I'd hope that most will not use it so much, and many who do would sign up. Otherwise, it would be time to prune the free quota.
This was probably a bit rhetorical but have you contacted Paypal to ask? Maybe they could help since some of the policy seems a bit grey. These bigger Paypal stories come up every 6 months or so. I have my own issues with them and certainly am no cheerleader but I do wonder if these groups get clarification before they start their campaigns. I would guess they might not have followed some policy/regulation correctly which gets them shutdown, especially if they are a large, worldly popular website that takes donations.
Accidentally upvoted. No, some strategies are strong even when uncovered.
The problem isn't so much being cut off as having no recourse. PayPal didn't just freeze the assets temporarily, pending investigation. They arbitrarily decided that this organization shouldn't be allowed to access the customers' money. No appeal or review is offered. That's the horror story.
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Know what.. I need to get some sleep because that message was really generic. We just have lots of great projects that shouldn't be in the public eye at the moment. Well, let me know!
I'm confused. Did Microsoft make a deal with Cnet to include this on every download, or did a third party do this? StartNow (startnow.com) is run by an independent company:

"The StartNow Start page is owned and operated by Zugo Ltd, a start page platform company. Our start pages are usually official operated on behalf of one of our clients or partners. Some pages may be "unofficial" and in support of/dedicated to improving the user experience for an existing product or extending a product's existing functionality."

This sounds like really bad PR for Microsoft. I wonder what they will do.
I'm in Australia :(
So:

1) You're going to tell me that those customer service interactions were perfectly normal?

2) You think that at the end of this the customer should be forced to sign something admitting wrong-doing? "I tried to take donations, but really it was all a scam and I'm a scammer. Paypal was right to freeze my account." Even when PayPal's own documentation was not straight-forward enough to let people know that they should not be doing what the OP was trying to do?
> Websites should sniff the user-agent code and automatically serve up the mobile version when accessed from a 7-inch tablet.

I take issue with this as a hard and fast rule. During my time with the Acer A100 7 inch Honeycomb tablet, I always preferred desktop sites over awkwardly oversized mobile sites (which are always designed to match iOS and not Android, adding to the annoyance).

TBH, I don't remember touch targets being an issue. I probably zoomed & panned more than I do on my iPad and less than I do on my iPhone, but I wasn't constantly hitting the wrong UI element. This sounds like it's more of an issue with the Fire's overall rushed execution and cut rate hardware choices rather than a systemic problem with 7 inch tablets regardless of power.

Noting that fact, I would take all general recommendations (In other words, not specific to the Fire) with a huge grain of salt. There are other 7 inch tablets out there. It's a little irresponsible of the author to insist that this is how all 7 inch tablets should be treated after using just the underpowered Fire. At least test your assumption a 7 inch Tab or A100 before giving it as advice.
Тhе sales figures fоr thе PSVita Uncharted Bundle
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This is a great comment I totally missed: just launch. The fact you have paying customers is a good sign what you've got is good enough.

+1
A lot of us have similar experiences with Paypal. When something like this has happened to you personally, it's a lot easier to accept that it's true.

What I'm having trouble understanding, is how he even got through to someone who spoke English.
"Video without audio"

I think it possibly might have something to do with federal wiretap laws.

"Electronic eavesdropping is the use of an electronic transmitting or recording device to monitor conversations without the consent of the parties"

"Federal wiretap laws apply to oral, wire, and electronic communications. However, the federal law does not currently regulate silent video communications, such as webcams or other video monitoring without an audio component. "

https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs9-wrtp.htm

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/school-lapto...
False dichotomy. You can be a programmer who "knows their stuff" and also know the right languages.
Next time use bitcoins )
I like the fact that he doesn't use almost any apps on his smart phone. I'm close to the conclusion that smart phones are becoming a curse. Not only did I see this at my family Thanksgiving (were most everyone was in the family room heads down on their smart phones), but also myself. Where brief moments of quiet were reserved for self-reflection are now substituted with OCD email checking and tiny wings high score getting. Sigh.
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The regulatory situation has made it nearly impossible to start a payments company in the United States.

http://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html
If you give 40% to a designer, how much are you going to give to your biz dev person (when you need one in three months when your beta is done)?

If you both use equity to give to the biz dev and the biz dev requires more than 20% to retain, you just lost majority of your business. :(

40% is way too high for a designer.

Also, make damn sure you vest any equity you give out.

Remember, you can only give it away once, so do so sparingly.
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I'll take it! In all seriousness I am extremely interested in the idea. I am a programmer who has been considering startups in the education space and I think classparrot is something that could really make an impact on modern schooling.

Additionally, I have a team of talented programmers ready to get behind the project and capital is not an issue for us. You can email me at sawsym at hotmail.com. Thanks for your consideration.
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Is he demanding that the world agree with his assessment?
> Risk Management in Software Talent Investment

Stopped reading one paragraph into that section.
Thanks for this. I think there's a subtle distinction at play here: having software as a core function of your company vs its core business.

I think you're still in the publishing / music / insert_industry business; software becomes a core function of your business.

But I don't think your core business necessarily becomes software (though it could).
$100/mo is nothing for a business user. If it is important to their business, it is not an issue. In fact, emphasize that paid support means you will be around to answer their questions.

Work on other forms of stickiness. If historical data can be presented in a useful form, then people will less likely to leave because it means leaving their old data behind.

Another form of stickiness is friends or social aspects.
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Hospice nurses helped both of my parents die as quickly and peacefully as possible. My father had congestive heart failure - a slow death over months, and my mother had dementia, and eventually started losing the ability to control her basic functions like breathing and swallowing.

If it weren't for the kind advice of my mother's doctor, who instructed all of her caregivers NOT to allow her to be taken to the hospital or be picked up by an ambulance, she might have ended up in a vegetative state in a hospital as well. He explained how it's a hospital's duty to do everything in their power to resuscitate someone, regardless of whether it's really humane or not.

It was awful watching them both die, but sitting with your family while you're given liquid morphine is much better than going through a frightening, painful, lonely death in a hospital.
Oops, rereading my post... it was highly ambiguous.

What I meant to say is that in all tests on web sites that I frequent Firefox 3.6 is better (both in terms of speed and memory) than Chromium 14 (which is why I do not understand that everybody says it's faster).
uhm... don't use paypal?
If you're not in the US then the number of competing solutions (that don't require a merchant account) shrinks dramatically.

I'm in Australia, and I don't know of one (have checked out WePay, Stripe, Samurai all mentioned in the comments here.)