skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Stripe Destroyed Our Business after 7 months of working on our product
We established our Stripe account in February 2023, and over the past seven months, we've been diligently developing our product, integrating Stripe into it and striving to go live by acquiring clients. Our website is (https://onclickcheckout.com/), functioning as a Stripe Connect marketplace account where we promote other Stripe accounts and secure them clients without any initial fees. We only levy charges when their customers make payments through us using the application fee feature of Stripe Connect.

Our platform operates on the basis of Stripe Standard Connect which allows those with existing stripe accounts to collaborate with us for client acquisition.

A few days ago marked a significant milestone for us; after seven months of rigorous work on building our advertising platform, integrating CRMs and securing five clients (five connected accounts), we finally launched successfully. The launch was commercially successful as well - within just a couple days our technology facilitated sales worth $30k. This success meant that I could finally compensate my team who had not yet received payment for their hard work.

However today brought an unexpected setback: without warning or explanation beyond citing "fraudulent" activity or "unauthorized payments",Stripe suspended operations on our account freezing all funds therein.They provided an appeal form but its scope was limited to uploading company formation documents which were promptly rejected upon submission

Our site as you can see don't have good copywriting as we have solely focused on core product and our sales proves it

I would like to ask if someone from Stripe team can see this post and reach out that will really help us
The trooper was shot immediately prior to the return fire which killed the protester. This timeline is not coherent with the facts.
Statistically implausible.
Yeah, it's amazing work, but the amount of information here is really hard to digest.
Dr McDougall suggests 80% of calories should be from complex carbohydrates, and it’s a diet that has worked well for many— especially for diabetics and people with heart / blood pressure problems. I think it’s really hard to know exactly what is good vs bad for any given individual.
Participate politically, seek employment, and of course the examples you gave.

When pubic safety and goodwill comes in to focus, that's where the role of automation is scrutinized and minimized more heavily. Copyright itself is an invention and area of balancing individual rights and greater public good.

Machines are not human and they are not sentiment and sapient at a level where we can view them differently. Perhaps they will change one day, but as it is today these systems are not entitled to do the same things humans get to do. They are tools performing a task, so the laws apply to them as they apply to, well, machines; copying and reproducing whole code blocks or novel chapters without attribution or licenses is something we allow a human to do in their head and not what we allow a machine to do in a prompt, regardless of the non-human mechanisms in between.
As for me Mac did bring programming to me, just with its durable chassis and well working memory management and relatively stable OS.

- I can lift a Macbook with one hand creating tension on the chassis. When I do the same on a Lenovo T14 Gen 1 it shuts off. When I get excited and am just in the middle of programming, just grabbing the laptop to bring it closer to me kills my work.

- Stable firmware, stable startup, stable wake from sleep without losing progress

- Can swap dozens of gigabytes

- Doesn’t corrupt after updated

- Usable trackpad

- Color calibrater high-res screen since 2012

For me it’s these purely usability centered aspects that enable me to even do programming. Automatic sleep/hibernate features don’t work with the other models at all.
Have never been able to ascertain what model it actually uses e.g. a system of linear equations, if so which ones?
If you worked on these images, surely you would be irresistably tempted to leave little easter eggs referring to past characters? "Hey Kim, how are you doing?" "Great, thanks! Apart from going a littleh hard on the ravioli last night!".
It's a matter of how you utilize it.
> I have mixed feelings about the IRS too but people need to remember they are chartered to enforce the law as it is defined.

The issue is that they're classifying it as an investment instead of a currency but the rules for investments make in impractical to use as a currency.

Conceivably this could be better suited to new legislation, but it's not obvious that they couldn't have done something more sensible, such as treating large holdings as investments and small holdings as currency.

> we can see now by the traditional investment community trying to offer bitcoin ETFs, etc.

Banks will do whatever makes them money. Offering ETFs of any kind where they get a vig makes them money. Replacing existing payment networks where they currently get $0.30 + 2.9% with new ones where the transaction fees are lower and go to someone else costs them money.

> With the scheme you have described there are obvious avoision loopholes, such as people avoiding taxable events altogether by just executing all of their trades in amounts under the threshold.

This is not a new problem. There is a $200 personal exemption for foreign currency. If you have a million dollars worth of Euros and the Euro is up against the dollar and you execute 5025 separate trades of Euros for US dollars in the amount of $199 each, what do you imagine happens?

> The other issue is knock-on effects - this regulation would have to apply evenly across other asset classes as any language to specifically exempt crypto would also be nebulous and very gameable.

It would be great to be able to use fractional shares of market ETFs as a global digital currency too.

> It's clear people don't want to use it, they want to gamble.

The gamblers want to gamble. I'm still not clear on why a global digital payments system with lower transaction fees than credit cards should have no market in a non-adversarial regulatory environment. That seems like something people would want.
Nice write up! I also have a Mac SE, but I found an Asente Ethernet card and installed that. Then ran ethernet to a small custom pcb that bridges to wireless, all tucked inside the original case.

PS, Then run this on a rpi or something, kudos to this repo for dialing back the entire web :)
https://github.com/tghw/macproxy
To give some context here it should also be said that many 18 year olds don't even remotely have a fixed vision of what that "something else" will be. In Germany there are multiple programms in schools for students around the time the decision for university/ learning a trade/ ... etc. comes to explicitly prepare people to find that "something" for themselves.
People that want to build their own furniture will do so no matter what the end-user environment is. Most people just don't want to.

Software engineering is no more magical. Some people like to build things. Most do not.

A couch is more of a black box than a smart phone.
Networking is a continuous, ongoing process. You must pre-plan networking.

It must be executed well in advance of actually needing a favor from the network. It is the opposite of a "transactional" interaction, such as buying something from a store.

You must make an effort to continue having a social relationship with people you meet (former employers and colleagues, etc.) from the moment you meet them. What exact activities must be done depends on your local culture.

It is very possible that contracting -- which absolutely requires maintaining a social network of business contacts -- is not for you. That's fine, everyone is different and some people for various reasons don't want to or cannot do the social networking part. In that case, you might be happier as a well-paid employee.

OTOH, if you want to learn to do the networking part, it is possible. There are courses, books, even clubs that teach this sort of thing and create opportunities to practice it. If you see it as an interesting challenge that is outside your comfort zone but doable, that might work. Don't do it as a chore because you feel you must, though; if it is forced or reluctant, it won't work well.
iPhone’s auto complete and form fills drive me absolutely mad. It’s honestly just basic stuff that should have just worked a decade ago. I’m not even begging them for LLMs or some fancy ML, just learn basic words I type out all the time. For example my full email address? how about my last name? This seems like basic stuff
Brings a new meaning to Caves of Qud
It's almost as if that's by design...!
The poor. Elderly. Unbanked. A huge global population, not to mention people who don't trust banks.
I like Howard's blog. However, in this post and many others, he seems to regard the Mac as a continuous story line from 1984 to the present.

I actually think the Apple of today is completely different company than the Apple of the late 70s / early 80s, and the two companies have basically nothing in common at this point. The way I see it, before the iPhone, Apple had never had any truly mass market, "it's for everybody" product line. They had a long series of niche products. The iPhone really changed them, in ways good and bad.

Nevertheless, I appreciate Howard's perspective, even if I'm not totally bought into it.
we do email marketing powered by Open AI but when we built our landing page we did not even had the product and our developers basically built in couple days, you can even check this on webarchieve and see our site never changed since then. I will ask our team to update if that's huge problem
While they are certainly safer they aren't automatic and require someone to turn the pages, which this project attempts to solve, although it certainly should be done in a more gently manner as to not damage the books.
Helium would leak out fairly rapidly, no?

I can see the benefit of impedance mismatching but i truly think that for an application like this it cannot be worth the effort until you add in the "marketing" intangibles.

Why not fill the panels with water? gloinggg

edit: IIRC argon filled double pane windows are a thing partly because the argon doesn't absorb moisture like air does; so there's less chance of condensation happening in between the panes. So perhaps they just bought double pane panel that were commercially available and ran with the sales brochure from that to fill out a press release.
The fair use argument is quite strong

If you dissect the plaintiffs claim they are arbitrarily conflating training and regurgitating

Training is using for criticism and comparison purposes, hence fair use

And there is no lawsuit against what it regurgitates and the purpose of its output, whether someone asks it to give a list for comparison purposes, or specifically asks it for a story that has a plagiarized result
Some people claim that there's a cartel to blame
But I know, it's my own damn fault
> critical reading is imperative

Indeed.

If you don't trust that the multiple media outlets have managed to copy and paste quotes correctly, then go to the original source reports and draw your conclusions.
The Catalan language name is written Català.
A Regret Maximization Framework
Don't go into the trap to think that all northern lights are that faint. Iceland are pretty far South in many ways, in addition the intensity varies. Sometimes it is just spectacular, a lot more spectacular than on pictures.
It's akin to suing a person for memorizing things from a book. Don't complain, go write something.
Probably because it's a good way to avoid spam filters in emails I guess, since the group posts would come straight from Google?
And I would recommend "The Well-Grounded Java Developer" (2nd edition) to those who have mastered the functional-style Java of "Modern Java in Action". It covers JDK 17 (and beyond) and also has a a polyglot JVM focus with coverage of Kotlin and Clojure.

https://www.manning.com/books/the-well-grounded-java-develop...
I agree with his preference, but I think the reasoning should go like `sizeof` is an operator with possibly unclear operator precedence, while `return` is a statement.
I fully agree with you, but with one exception: I think hacker news has very much become a place of love for black boxes. Many people here love and praise apples "it's not a computer, it's an appliance" approach.
OK, he owned a gun, that was found with him, at the time of his death, and his hands were found to have primer residue. Circumstantial evidence is evidence.
training will be ruled fair use which doesn't require any license, while there is no lawsuit on the output
Whoops, I totally misinterpreted that! Apologies.
The indigenous people of China are dumping rather a lot of plastic into the ocean.
This is absolutely not about hardware (or even software). It is about indemnification from copyright infringement claims. Adobe's main selling point for Firefly (or whatever it is called) is that is trained on Adobe's data.
Also allegedly, right?
One of the rare cases where I think he's just not seeing the whole picture. For one, sizeof is not a runtime function but evaluated at compile time. (pretty obvious). More importantly, sizeof is syntactically a unary operator. It isn't syntactically a function call, just like "-a" or "*a" aren't function calls.

That's just how it is, and really what's wrong with it? We're not in lisp after all. Let's not pretend it's a function, because otherwise an expression like

sizeof(obj).member

would be at least confusing.
> Yeah it seems like enshitification during the long tail is the point of the VC model across all industries. Give product away for free, figure out how to screw the install base later on.

It needs two sides for this to work:

1. a company attempting to "fish" customers with this approach

2. customers who fall for this trap, and did not create an emergency/backup plan when the respective company becomes "evil"/untenable.

Every company sooner or later becomes "evil" (and be it because of ownership changes because the original founders die or want to retire). Having made no "backup plan" for such a situation to happen is in my opinion gross negligence.
I guess technically fictional, but grounded in their public writing and speech.
We use Stripe Standard Connect, which means you can connect your Stripe account to ours, and we work on your campaign with no upfront costs and bring you clients by using marketing tools we built. We also leverage Open AI to automate the most marketing efforts which is the reason it took us 7 months to go live and when we bring you the customer based on negotiate we take application fee (% of your sales)
The article interchanges killed with murdered. It'd be nice if they talked about the circumstances a little more, though I doubt many of the killings were justified or legal.
>Figured that's the best most people can hope to see(...) so the pictures just aren't representative of what you are likely to see while in these countries

Its quite wrong to assume your three month experience is representative for what you would expect to see of northern lights in Iceland and Finland.
Just curious - Once we scan, we have all contents in digitized format. So, why unbinding a book to pages before scanning is not a scalable model? Is this to avoid additional work of unbinding?
> The idea that people should be free to go around shooting other people because it's a cause they believe in is when society really falls apart.

This is literally what the cops already do
True, but history books have an inherent subjective distance. It’s always “person X writing about person Y”. I expect AI historical-person simulacra to be inherently more convincing than can ever be justified.
Localtalk was great, RS-422 is a low-cost long-distance serial transport, and Apple took advantage of that to build networking into the Macintosh. Our computer lab in high school used Farallon PhoneNET transceivers, which made it easy to daisy chain computers using low-cost Category 1 RJ-11 phone wiring.

In college (Miami University), our computer lab also used PhoneNET (it really simplified wiring) combined with a Cayman Gatorbox to bridge to the campus TCP/IP backbone. By modern standards, painfully slow, but in 1992 the whole university was connected over a single 56K uplink to Columbus, so we hardly noticed.

I have fond memories of playing Spectre with networked opponents over LocalTalk.

To get online from our dorm rooms or offcampus, the only option was dial-up to the university phonebank, a 2400 baud terminal. Using the LocalTalk connection from a lab was much more responsive.
If companies wish to make their own currency, they should be treated like a bank, and comply with the relevant regulations, including whatever regulations are necessary to create a new currency.

IMHO PayPal dollars are the worst because they trick you into believing you hold currency when you don’t. PayPal may, at their discretion, allow you to convert your PayPal dollar to another currency. They also may take it away from you for no reason, without recourse - something that happens to thousands of people daily.
Those things are cool... but I don't need them. I suspect many of us don't.

I like BSD's simplicity, consistency, and its native integration with ZFS. I don't know about deterministic builds but I suspect it does that without making a big deal, since everything can arrive via ports.

Linux, as much as I love it, is a rat's nest of different ideas and the inconsistency between distributions makes me want to pull my hair out. I care less about how it does things, and more that I only have to learn one system to understand each component -- as opposed to the mess that is init.d vs systemd vs upstart or whatever.

man pages are good but the FreeBSD Handbook is better.
Exactly. I don't use Reddit anymore and when they will inevitably kill old.reddit.com I will stop altogether.

As for Twitter I'm one leg into Mastadon, but the space flight news folk is still on Twitter.
It sounds so believable that a protestor bought and owned an M&P Shield, a gun extremely popular with police, and brought it to a protest. It's also super believable that while surrounded by armed police that this person decided to shoot a single round at an officer from a sitting position.

Super. Believable.

/s
That's where I got hooked as a kid. And I've been solving them ever since. Nonograms Katana on the Fold 3 with the S Pen is amazing. For someone as addicted to them as me, it almost made the price of the phone worth it in itself. Yeah, I'm a bit crazy.
Plant protein capsules could make it easier to add Vitamin D to drinks
I was thinking that opening X up to more free speech could actually work against people who post hateful things, more than if they didn't. If by law they have to report such things, that is. That's where things get uneven quickly.
Thank you for your feedback.

If you feel any of my comments violate HN commenting guidelines [0] feel free to quote them and/or reach out to dang.

Here are some examples; I wasn't able to find any references to "performative politeness":

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
You can get pretty close to that now with a) clever system prompt engineering to incorporate user behavioral and personality metadata and b) getting said user behavioral and personality metadata, which is the harder problem.
Shower thought: Someone with no knowledge of programming but uses an LLM is a D&D sorcerer, while someone that has the understanding of CS would be the wizard class. In D&D rules, sorcerers can cast "more magic" per day than wizards as they are unencumbered with any thoughts about the technical details. Wizards can cast a vast range of complex customized spells that the sorcerer is unable to perform, and thus are able to maneuver far more complex situations.
this photo from the article amazes me: https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//3703047/a37c...

that's a packed stadium, up to the nose bleeds
If you have an itch to solve a few, https://griddlers.net has you covered for just about a lifetime. Even huge multi-grid-puzzles, triangle ones, colors, no colors.
>The initial crime lab report showed no gun shot residue

The initial report was only a visual inspection. When you do a more sensitive test, you get more accurate results. There is nothing sinister about this sequence of events.
I think newsgroups would struggle to survive and be useful if they would get a massive wide adoption like social networks do. It would just be impossible to filter out useful stuff and avoid spam. They worked ages ago because the internet was a smaller place, and they still work today because the number of people who use them has not increased by much (sorry, no source to back that up)
Not really, the async libraries hide the implementation details from you. It's an issue for library developers.
Difficult for the author, but not for static analysis. A static analysis system can pretty easily enforce that `limit 1` be set when a query is used in that position.
This is a hilarious and fun take on ChatGTP. I can imagine that at some point we have deployed so many of these technologies that we might start living in a Terry Pratchett novel.
Congrats. What are you doing with that extra 195 hours?
One approach that I've been using with a local LLM, mostly brainstorming for my friends and my dungeons and dragons sessions, is to set up a prompt to be completed with some certain detail of storyline, character background, etc., Then running that prompt maybe 50 or 100 times and keeping informal statistics on the different results that come out. In such an application, it can be used as much for inspiration of how not to sound bland, commonplace, or derivative. You can pick the one in 100 oddity that strikes you as interesting, or simply make sure not to use any of the outcomes that the LLM came up with.
> and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries)

Better how?
What people would say is:

"What kind of fish do you keep in your fish tank?"

"Oh, well, I actually have more (animals) than just fish in there."

"Oh really? What else (what "other animals") do you have?

"Turtles and frogs."
We provide this to existing Stripe accounts, and we use Open AI API to automate the most processes of lead generation and advertising and innovative business plan which is not charging you any upfront fees
I think this is the same syntax as the one used for casting -- a "type expression" will only be recognized immediately after an opening paren (or at the start of a statement, in case of a declaration statement). So this is rather consistent.
That's a good question. If you need to ETL to a traditional data warehouse in order to do analytics, wouldn't you need an ORM, which is exactly what they're trying to avoid? (Also note that it's usually ELT instead of ETL these days, like if you're using Snowflake)

Or is Fauna a hybrid transactional/analytical database so you can do analytics in it using FQL? (Maybe the long-awaited possibility of true hybrid databases is real?!) But then you'd need to train all of your business intelligence analysts on FQL, which would be a drawback.
They have the money to pay the bills. They're all either plants or giants.

The barbie soundtrack has a massive budget so you can just pay for the samples.
Are they open source?