skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The better question would be "why wouldn't you ditch paypal for stripe?"

Stripe is much easier to integrate than the x.com/paypal.com family of conflicting api's, all of which lack easy to read documentation.

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

Compared to

https://stripe.com/docs

Stripe doesn't have a history of randomly locking accounts, and even if they do (if you process payments, I can understand the legal need to now and then) their customer support is so responsive and helpful I wouldn't really mind.

Stripe is easy to use. The web UI is fast, the api makes sense, I get joy out of it.

Stripe sent me a real, physical letter, to thank me. I was one of the early users of the beta, and we all got real letters, on thick cardstock, I wish I had taken a picture of it. That may be a virtue of being a small userbase startup, but if you start with that mentality, it means a lot.

Paypal does have slightly lower fees, but Stripe is worth it.

Paypal also makes it easy to add a paypal pay button to sites, but those a fraught with stories of accounts shut down, and are ugly.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

U.S. Constitution, 5th Amendment
It is my understanding of hacking that some people see compiled binaries as source code. Likewise, some really hardcore hardware hackers can manage to decrypt and reverse engineer a lot of stuff from chips. This include but might not be limited to : hardware encryption keys, communication protocols and specifics about sensors, which might help them to evade them in the future
There are a lot of interesting facts about the Australian economy in the article but the most interesting thing about the article is the beginning and the end. Australians are fed a huge amount of misinformation by the media and politicians.
Australians are very ignorant of the situation in other countries. Understandable considering they don't have direct neighbours but still a bit unfortunate.
While I see the benefits of having a short one word domain, I think it is more important to allocate your resources on talent or marketing. While a name won't make or break a company, having a poor product and running out of money will. If you are willing to search for a while you can still find good domains out there. (This is from the perspective of someone who is bootstrapping with less than half the capital of what you guys spent on your domain)
The post is spot on.

My initial attraction to Stripe was because of a reason mentioned in the post: not wanting to redirect or otherwise interrupt the normal order process of my site with another company's (branded) checkout form just to handle credit card payments. The other reason for initial attraction was of course their elegant API, which was very refreshing to see after having dealt with Intuit's QBMS API (shudder) in the past.

Stripe really sealed the deal though when I tweeted them to ask my first question about signup and one of the co-founders reached out to me. Since then, I've been in contact to share my feedback or ask other questions, and the quality and timing of their responses is one of the best I've ever seen.

When a customer of ours had an issue placing his order, I wrote Stripe to see if they could offer any insight as to what errors they might be seeing on their end. While the error was unrelated to Stripe itself, they were so awesome that they actually took the initiative to browse through our checkout page and point out the spot that they thought to be the issue.

A company that stands beside you when debugging your checkout page, maintaining swift response times on an issue that isn't even theirs? That's customer support.

I probably sound like I'm gushing right now, but I just have mad respect for this company. The product isn't the only thing that's top notch, the people behind it rock too.
The US drone program does not have a very good security history. Back in 2009, Afghans insurgents managed to tap into video feeds of the drones.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html
I am not sure how exactly I would do it, but my first approach would probably be almost purely mechanic.

Lets assume the drone is more or less blind to whatever happens above it as most of its sensors are pointed down and being stealth reduces its need to be aware of other planes (and forbids active radar). It should be feasible to approach it without being noticed and somehow entangling it (a net?) on its return flight, slowing it down (a parachute) until it runs out of fuel, and do it while jamming its communications so its owners won't have a clue of what's going on.

I think the worst problem is detecting it in the first place.
It's possible that including anything destructive that could be interpreted as a weapon would be a major diplomatic liability. However, along these lines, I know that these drones are designed to fly back to home base if they lose contact. That suggests that the Iranians, if they really were responsible for downing it, managed a more advanced electronic attack than merely jamming the signal.

That said, you're right that it's probably a more reliable failsafe to attach some explosives and a GPS device, separate from all the rest of the electronics, as a way of depriving the enemy of the UAV than to rely on it to make it's way back home.
The lack of structure you mention is my point. There are a million ways to compensate for it, and group lunch is one of them.
We could have a poll... What percentage of folks use Java because they want vs because they must? Would you use Java for your startup? With which stack?
The subjects of photos can choose to find and tag themselves in photos visible to them.
hey guys - bill from wepay here.

we contemplated building a JS solution as well, but using JS can place your site within the scope of PCI compliance. (this is somewhat up for debate) the reason we went with an iframe implementation is because it is firmly outside the scope of PCI, and we are working on making it even more customizable.

either way, you are in good hands with stripe or wepay. (at wepay we are big stripe fans - they rule!) to me, the big difference is whether or not you want the money to settle to someone's bank account directly (stripe), or whether you want it aggregated and stored in an online account first (wepay).
Yeah, I suppose they could have printed it out and mailed it in.
Droid Scan and Cam Scanner are decent Android alternatives. For reciepts it's ok, but for OCR it doesn't work well, which I was kind of hoping for. I'll just have to wait for camera's to improve.
[ PDF ] PHP – A Quick Overview - CEH - Saher Team
Document: The Symbolism Survey
And in practice copyright owners outsource their enforcement

Do they really? IIRC, every case of outsourced "enforcement" has resulted in failure. What successes should I be remembering?
and this is why I don't have flash installed
FFS, mate!

They also don't mention we (I'm Australian) lost the Ashes. That's not the point - they are saying we talk about the bad things all the time, and fail to take a step back and look at how good we have it.

To address your points:

they try and play down the government debt because it's low, but omitted the fact that 4 years ago it used to be zero and now is growing faster than Ireland did before it went bust.

Well, no.. they specifically talk about government debt. They point out it is lower than almost any other developed country. I don't understand your point about "it growing faster than Ireland" - yes, there is currently a deficit budget (which means borrowing is occurring). I've never heard "it is growing faster than Ireland did when it went bust" argument before, but it doesn't make much sense to me. The Australian economy is much, much bigger than the Irish economy, and the Irish debt crisis was caused when the Irish government suddenly took over billions in private banks debt, not by government borrowing.

They also omitted the fact that personal debt - ie debt owed by people rather than the government is also one of the highest in the world.

This is true, but is misses the point that Australian savings are also at record levels [1]. People are choosing to keep debt while saving money.

Australian also homes usually take out the top spots in the 'most unaffordable' list.

This is true, but at the same time is one of the things that has driven household assets to the highest in the world. [2][3]

They also omitted the fact that the workforce has gone from being one of the most free back to a much higher regulated workforce, and as a result productivity has dropped precariously and strike action has exploded.

That's a very political statement that I disagree with, but I don't think the argument would be useful here.

There is no mention in the article of what is termed 'the two speed economy' where manufacturing firms are struggling and retail businesses are closing their doors

The "two-speed economy" and Dutch Disease is the biggest challenge facing the Australian economy over the next few years. But that wasn't the point of this article.

[1] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/household-t...

[2] http://www.smartcompany.com.au/wealth/20100429-average-wealt...

[3] http://www.beesnees.com.au/thebuzz/2011/11/landlords-in-a-gr...
To be sure, I wasn't suggesting the problem hadn't been practically solved, and I understand quite well that beyond a certain point, there's very little incentive in improving the solution any further.

In retrospect, I probably should have kept my thoughts to myself, and I probably deserve the downvote or two that I got for not doing so. =)
A good % of me and my friends are all sitting on our hands and waiting as well. We're all about the same age as our parents were when they got their first house (late 20s early 30s).

The prices are nuts, at least the market has flattened out of late, but with the population growth rates we are seeing around the country the pressure for housing isn't likely to lift any time soon.
Ask HN: will you validate my idea. history wiki
wiki for history. based around cities. main content will be user gen'd stories, videos, pics

idea came from talking to old people about the town i grew up in and wishing there was some place where all of it was
SOPA is the industry attempt to change that because it's too much of an inconvenience for them.

Correct.
Shouldn't you narrow down "build a big business charging consumers"?

Even in just digital goods, there are general software companies (Microsoft, Intuit, McAfee), gaming companies (Zynga, EA, Valve), online dating companies (Match, Eharmony), geneology (Ancestry), health (Weight Watchers Online) that make 1+ orders of magnitude more money than Evernote.

Most of them also have freemium models. What's special here?
I was one of the beta users too–I showed the letter to my co-founder and we both got huge smiles on our faces.

Here's a picture of it: http://yfrog.com/nz99532600j
318,774 toys have been donated thanks to Star Wars holiday e-greetings
I stopped reading at that line, also.
You don't have to put enough explosives to qualify it as a flying bomb. All you need is explosives on critical parts (electronics, structural elements, engines, fuel tanks) that make enough damage as to make the debris useless. Break the wings, make engine parts fly through the fuselage and destroy the electronics. If you do it 20 thousand feet above the ground, your friends will have a lot of fun assembling your puzzle.
Realize this is a worthless comment, but I couldn't stand the exclusion of graph theory.
It is, but it's being fixed. I expect the situation to be __very__ different by JSConf 2012.

It's been clear where SproutCore has need to go since 2009, but there hasn't been the support to do that, due to the various personalities involved. Those people have moved on, and now SproutCore can do what it's good at: building fast, desktop-style applications that run in a web browser.

Things haven't looked as positive for SproutCore in two years. I pumped.
I can only see two reasons why someone might need PayPal rather than Stripe: if the business resides outside the US, or if they need to take methods of payment other than credit cards. Other than that, Stripe seems like a no-brainer.
Why is it hard to believe they decrypted the pattern recognition? Iran topped the World's most scientific nation, surpassing the US and China in the amount of scientific publications published; From the NewScientist Magazine: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20291-iran-is-top-of-t...

I'm in noway supportive of the Islamic regime, (or any other regime) but most of the comments here seem to be rooted in an underestimation of Iranian (Ar'yan) antiquity.
Oh, you're very tolerant if you valorize smalltalk about DTWS over not eating lunch together.
agree, I'd like to know conversion numbers after the switch.
I'm the lead API engineer at WePay, so I'm definitely biased toward the WePay API, but I do think Stripe is a great service.

The WePay API does allow you to embed the entire checkout experience on your own site with our iframe checkout. The iframe contents are customizable (header color, button color, etc), but as Greg mentions in the comments, it's not quite as customizable as Stripe or another merchant account based system.

Unfortunately, even with Stripe, you are still liable for most of the PCI spec (our iframe checkout gets around this). We made a bet that there are a lot of developers out there that who are willing to give up a little on the customization side to not have to deal with the headache of PCI compliance (we've gone through that process ourselves and it is complicated and expensive).
And it's nothing new. In 1964 Donald Horne penned a book "The Lucky Country", which caused many Australians to start referring to Australia as "The Lucky Country". The bit they miss is that the full quote was.

"Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck."

Ouch! It's a bit harsh, in that Australia does punch above its weight in some areas (eg. excellent radio astronomy program and some very good medicos). It's spot on for other areas though, such as the majority of business and political leadership. One gets the feeling that the things that succeed in Australia do so in spite of the leadership, not because of it.
So art should never be consumed, only be created? If somebody listens to a song, he is wasting his time, but then what is the point of creating a song?
>>Apple wants to corner the market on simple design. Imagine if your coffee cup couldn't be designed to be round, have a handle that goes from the top to the bottom, or have an opening on the top to drink from.

I don't understand this point of view at all. It's seems loaded and emotive. I'll ask you this; why can other hardware manufacturers make tablet devices that are aesthetically appealing to consumers that aren't using a near identical visual language.
^^ Don't take this advice. For every startup that doesn't care about resumes there are 20 or 30 just regular companies that need someone to write line-of-business apps and their HR department -- the people who will be your first contact -- do care about them. What they don't give a shit about is your github commit log. Now once you make it past HR and are speaking to actually coders that you might be working with, having code samples is excellent. But if you need a job, you need a resume.
Would it feel better for you if the slot was only 19mm wide instead of 21?
Yes, but look at why Skyhook is suing them. We live in a weird bubble where if a company gets sued then they are the victim. No one even fathoms, when it comes to Google at least, that maybe they did something to deserve being sued.
Apple is the worst.

- They don't allow to run your own programs on your own computer. Can you imagine Windows blocking Firefox? Microsoft was about to be disintegrated just for making a web browser, yet Apple can fully block competing programs.

- They are very expensive, so the great majority of world population can't use software made for Apple systems.
@nl you couldn't have summarised better.

There are plenty of problems in Australia, including insane housing prices, negligible government support for the manufacturing industry and comparatively lower research & development spending (I don't have data to prove this, but I think this is obvious in comparison to other countries esp. the US).

BUT, on the other hand, we have what other citizens in other countries lack:

* an excellent superannuation system
* a social security system that provides some real security (centrelink)
* a medicare system that provides for all Australians
* a public university system (although since the Howard govt. universities have suffered)
* an excellent public schooling system
* relatively low gun crime and,
* a tolerant, multicultural workforce.
You can claim trademark on anything you like. You can threaten legal action over the claimed mark. You can start litigation over the claimed mark. These facts do not mean you have grounds to win.

Registering a mark gives you better protection and drastically increases your odds of winning against an alleged infringer. Registering numbers, AFAIK, still is not allowed.
I've been using Debian/Ubuntu since ~ 1999, and it took be about 20 seconds to figure this out. "ls /etc/motd. Oh, it's a symlink, ok, rm /etc/motd. Done."

In Debian, almost everything in /etc can be edited, and the system is designed to preserve the sysadmin's changes. Maybe this isn't obvious to new users, but if you've been using Debian for a while, this behaviour is exactly what you would expect.

Also, a quick visit to #debian or #ubuntu IRC would have resolved this in a few minutes.
You almost always get amazing customer support from early stage companies. I'm certain people got amazing customer support from people high up at PayPal when it was just starting. You cannot judge a company on whether a co-founder responds to you on Twitter in a short period of time, and if you did, you should probably judge it negatively: I would wonder what was wrong with PayPal if someone that high up had enough time to be sitting around checking Twitter.

(edit: I typed this over too long a period of time, and some of this post appeared after I had already submitted a draft with the above paragraph that received some upvotes, so I've now edited again to add this edit paragraph to explain that everything after this point was added after I received said upvotes. ;P)

Also, I'm very curious about their API... I didn't see much information on chargebacks. Processors like Litle & Co make it very easy to fully automate the chargeback representment flow. PayPal, incidentally, does /not/ provide this either, but they do have APIs that let you (with only some hoops to get through bugs that I've filed with them, and we may see fixed fairly soon) correlate and track all of the chargebacks and how they relate to your transactions.

Yet, when Stripe first started appearing on Hacker News, their website seemed to have almost no information on chargebacks. I asked after this, and the page "appeared" with an apology that it was supposedly there but not linked, but it then had very little information on it. I still (checking again now) see no information on how I'd determine /which/ transactions had chargebacks automatically: they seem to seriously rely on sending an e-mail? Why does their API page never once mention the word "chargeback"?
Gabe Newell must hate this website.
about:plugins in chrome to disable flash.
Out of curiosity, how does an embedded iframe let you avoid PCI completely and an external javascript lib not?
I was absolutely enthralled with the support I received in their Campfire chat.
wouldn't people that know the answers be able to give a fuller explanation taking more words?
(I'm Australian)

It's interesting to note, if you say "The Luck Country" to Aussies under about 25 years old, they have no idea what you are talking about.
That article only discusses the video feed, as the grandfather comment noted.
What are your experiences with this style of writing web apps and SEO?
Will there be 'websocket.io-client', high-performance server-side WebSockets client module, in the near future?
Discount Women's Timberland 6 Inch Boots Grey New Arrival for Sale
Again in some places in Europe I have seen the equivalent
of two up two down terrace houses of less than 100m2 in
size converted into 4 separate flats.

Around here we call that "Newtown", or "Ultimo".
Do people normally bring their laptops/notebooks/tablets to these things?
It also works as expected on Ubuntu. The main difference is that /var/run/motd is generated on each login, rather than only on boot, but that's irrelevant to the author's problem.
The parallel vs serial queuing problem is very well established within the operations research community.

And, IIRC, it's not that there's much impact to average performance, but rather that the variation (sigma) drops by a factor of n.
How much would you pay for dull.com? It's for sale.
Combining virtual sequences: Clojure-inspired pseudo-sequences in Common Lisp
Fairest... except for the censorship.
There is a great article that came up a couple weeks ago that I'm going to spend the next half hour trying to find called something like "the X ways you need to be marketing online" or something similar. I'll try to summarize in no particular order.

1. SEO on your website
2. Blog
3. Guest blog elsewhere
4. Email related blogs asking to feature you
5. Create an Affiliate program
6. Paid search
7. Create viral incentives in the game
8. Spam everyone you've ever met on twitter, Facebook, G+ etc.
9. Spam the email list you've got (you do have one right?)
10. Set up your game to ask for a review.
11. Partner with other indie devs for a bundle

Ok I'm out of ideas for the moment but every one of those items has multiple blogs (not just posts) dedicated to it. Do as many things as you have time for and then hire a virtual assistant to do the rest of them.
If you don't plan on living in Australia permanently, be aware that your effective tax rate on contributions to your superannuation is 50%. You pay a flat rate of 15% on your contributions like everyone else. When you leave Australia permanently, they take out 35% before giving you back your money.

http://www.ato.gov.au/superfunds/content.aspx?doc=/content/3...
Google Currents: favorite publications, tuned for your tablet and smartphone.
Did you just buy it in 1998 or something and keep renewing it?
Perhaps it would be nice if the game came with instructions.
Or an IRC bot: https://github.com/rpjohnst/markbot :)
Bash completion for git on Mac OS X
an advantage of the robotic age is at least we don't have to worry about negotiating for the life of a US serviceman ...
This looks very interesting. So is it safe to pass clear text credentials over to another site? Is it via HTTPS?
The linked article says "Iran is top of the world in science growth", not total amount of articles published.
Google Schemer is a deliciously diabolical attack against Foursquare
Red Sox Beats by dre Studio Headphones From Monster for sale
It's still really early going, but we've seen some new patterns. For example, we had a customer enroll in four different courses (we help schools offer online courses) in under five minutes. This -never- happened when we only offered PayPal.

Our current enrollment process is so fast and simple with Stripe that we're curious to see if our conversion rate is -better-, for our current audience (older, non-technical users at this point). While a $30-$90 course isn't an impulse buy, lowering the barrier to enrolling in more than one may leave us better off.

But we'll be able to discuss that better after we have more data.