skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stop using eBay and Paypal.

If you look, you can find stories like this every week since about 1999. This sort of behavior isn't new yet eBay continues to grow.
Crowdtesting: Using Crowdfunding to test an MVP
Steam is rockin it!
> I've started outgrowing Hacker News

For those who feel that are outgrowing HN, I'd recommend reading only those posts with more that 150 upvotes:

http://talkfast.org/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overlo...
"...Warranties against product flaws are mandatory..."

If that were true...

the software industry would be in REAL trouble.
That would be very cool. I wonder how hard it would be though. At least in Go I know that the standard lib contains lots of duplicate code (primarily so that things that should be small don't require larger things as dependencies. I think the time package's String() functions use reimplemented fmt package functionality for example, since fmt is a much larger dependency than time should have.)
KDE e.V. turns 15
http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/9.1.0/usr.bin/lam/

http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/release/9.1.0/usr.bin/rs/

Not finding 'describe' at present (I shall persist). There seem to be few dependencies in these source files...
Two points that I haven't seen covered yet:

1. Waste. If some component on your motherboard goes, you're on the hook for a new CPU (and vice versa). This seems tremendously wasteful. Maybe bigger repair shops will support mail-in refurbishing? Will people take advantage of that? Or just buy new for convenience?

2. Competition. Smaller motherboard vendors won't be able to sell direct anymore. I'm wondering if anyone can comment on how bad of a thing this is.
You can be anonymous if you use Tor with Bitcoin. The problem is that you need to buy bitcoins first, what usually isn't anonymous, but you might be able to buy them anonymously over the counter.
Which in this case is zero, because eBay is rife with scammers preying on the *well-educated?

Gazelle and Amazon present almost zero risk to the seller, hence the price differential.
>If you're selling something like an antique grandfather clock, you should be fine.

Paypal orders buyer to destroy antique violin:

http://www.regretsy.com/2012/01/03/from-the-mailbag-27/
Finding a startup name is hard... I went through a list of hundreds of names for my project, and all the ones I liked were already taken (the .com domain name at least).

I'm not sold yet on using something other than .com for a consumer-facing startup, unless it's not web-focused (maybe mobile apps can get away with non .com tlds).
From Bankers to Mushroom Farmers
This seems like a credit card/bank problem, it's not unique to paypal.

I was thinking about upgrading my phone and ebaying the old one. After reading this, I'm thinking maybe I'll go the craigslist route, or one of the online trade-in deals.

Does gazelle have this same issue? I'm not sure if Gazelle the company buys the product and sells it, or if they just connect me with a buyer like ebay does.
My dad broke the screen on his work Dell laptop. Entirely his fault. He called up Dell and they said they'd send a tech to his office to replace the screen. My dad said he was working from home that day and Dell said fair enough and sent the tech to his house. He had the screen fixed later that afternoon.

Now obviously I'm sure my dad's company pays handsomely for that service, but my point is that many companies do a lot better than Apple if you're willing to pay for it.
For the UK there's http://www.envirofone.com/ or http://www.mazumamobile.com/ or http://www.fonebank.com/ amongst others.

I've used the first 2 with excellent results. Obviously you get slightly less than selling on the open market, but you don't have to deal with scammers, and get the cash quickly and without issues.
> Well, it is already pretty easy to throw out any motherboards that don't correspond to the processor you've chosen.

Not really. You can use it to throw out motherboards that aren't compatible with the category to which your processor belongs. Which is probably a very loose category - "Motherboards which support socket AM3 CPUs", for example. That's just not a very fine filter - probably only vaguely more specific than "Motherboards which were released in the past 48 months."
We only use high quality screen printing, no digital printing or DTG printing here.

The great thing about using a crowdfunding model for apparel is you don't have to compromise of quality or price - you can have the best of both worlds.
Word. That reminds me, I need delete my LinkedIn account - spammy as hell, and wilfully obstructive when it comes to offering levers to opt out of stuff.

Update: Done!
Everyone who's been in the internet for a long time know that there are dozens of sites for people to go tell their "got screwed by paypal" stories.
Why paypal has always been the most used site for online transactions? That i don't know.. I know i would never use it.
Shameless plug; we've built one for automotive enthusiasts: https://www.styckyd.com

Our target is to serve the C2C market and make shipping less painless as well as eliminate some of the risk on the buyer's side. With the current climate for buying goods online companies serving the space are at risk for opening themselves up to scams like this one by buyers. The reality for anyone accepting credit cards is that you're at the mercy of the buyer.
tbh I think the rise in PC gaming again is soley down to two things

1) Steam
2) The fact that the current generations of consoles are nearly 7 years old with no hints of any upgrade
They are speaking at the Lean Startup conf right now. Amazing idea -- they create mushroom kits so ppl can grow them in their own home. They use used coffee grounds from Peet's all around the Bay Area.
Your experience may be different, but I've never seen a case where a $50 CPU yielded a significant upgrade.

The new CPUs tend to change sockets before prices drop that low. With memory bandwidth being the major bottleneck, a new CPU in the same system never seemed to give more than 10% improvement anyway.
White paper suggests Facebook is in a bad way
Heres the issue (and a opportunity for a startup?) - eBay remains the main place to sell second hand goods.

There are other options (craigslist, amazon) but the fact is it takes longer to sell and still flush with scammers.

What does the solution look like? A costco style paid membership with more information given back to the user? Ability to 'vouch' for yourself via facebook/twitter/etc. ?

With all of this, its still chicken and the egg. Hard problem to solve.
One bad incident out of millions doesn't set a precedent.
No group action possible ? such a pattern can't be left unprotected ...
You mean TechCrunch was wrong? What a surprise.
The chance of getting scammed like this on eBay is less than 2% (maximum chargeback rate)

Hence you are better selling 100 iPhones on eBay and taking the hit for two then sell all 100 on gazelle and not.
Seems like mostly a bunch of whining about how because you are a startup it is ridiculous to think you'd pay people decent salaries. This could have been condensed to "I'm a startup, therefore I pay pennies on the dollar; don't expect anything else." Full stop. ... All right, there was a tiny bit about people should expect to work on a variety of things rather than just Javascript or whatever, fine, but common sense to me.
This is mistaken, there are mid-term plans to make Rust code able to run standalone--without a runtime and with a C-compatible ABI--such that it will be entirely possible to call Rust from C.
> I think I agree, but there's still a tone in your and OP's words that makes it sound like you're appealing to some objective measure of a "high quality product."

> It's quite possible that 99% of MBP buyers would never even notice that ghosting problem.

Here's my takeaway from this incident. This problem doesn't affect 99% of users. If Apple needed to ensure this particular problem (almost) never occurs, it would cost a lot of money, for something that doesn't in fact affect most people.

Having a test as described in the article is worthwhile for shooing away the x% of the 99% of people for whom it really doesn't matter. But when a professional for whom it does matter comes into your store, and it is obvious that it does matter and he has done his homework on the issue, then when that person is treated like everyone else, to me it shows Apple no longer cares about professionals.

To do a certain kind of work, you need certain performance from your hardware. In the past, you could be certain that you could get it from Apple hardware, and if there was a problem, they would make it right. This seems no longer to be the case. The "new" Apple gets such a high percentage of their revenue from the consumer market, the "casuals", that they now have the power to thumb their nose at the power users and professionals, and it will have 0 noticeable impact on their bottom line. And it would seem they are now choosing to use that power.
Gosh, in many browsers it looks like this will mean the end of favicon.ico.
genivf.io
Gatling - Scala based stress tool
Inside the Beltway: Drones for journalists
Club Penguin co-founder to launch digital version of Leviathans board game
Why is the domain name so important? Dropbox didn't have dropbox.com until they could afford to buy it.
"You really need to stop drinking the Apple Kool-aid..."

I think that you should stop using such inflammatory language and grow up a bit.
Army’s own data mining system fails test: Palantir gets more leverage
I would think selling on Craigslist for cash would be a much better option if you live in any sort of city.
I'd be interested in what Seth's setup/theme/os of choice is .. :)
Talented engineers are well served by a rule of thumb not to reach for more equity, but rather to negotiate in terms of their actual rate. The startup that can't reason about your comp in terms of the going rate for engineers, that instead reflexively assumes you're wasting their time, is a startup you want to avoid working for.

Employee private stock outcomes are generally very poor even when the startup "succeeds". No party to the financing of a startup is served less faithfully than the ones who contribute via deferred or diminished salaries.

That doesn't mean you can't compensate engineers by giving them "skin in the game", but it does mean that when you write derisively about a candidate using their going rate as a starting point, you risk communicating something very unfavorable about your business and hiring practices.
awesome quote from article: "Why do something reasonable when you have the opportunity to do something ridiculous?" ... explains so much code ...
Maybe because people who have bad experiences tend to want to publish them more than people who have good experiences. I sold a damaged iPhone 4 (listed as such) on eBay+Paypal earlier this year. I got paid, the buyer was happy, and I did not write a blog post about it.
Well yes, I completely agree with you. That is what we should do. But each time I see more developers that leave production level apps like this. And not even small websites like http://absolutmexico.com (Has a fallback to other browsers but the developer consciously decided to not offer the same functionality for browsers other than Chrome, even after been pointed to a few plug ins that would do it for him); but also huge Frameworks, like Appian, which forces you to use IE for administration.

And there's another side of the story, in both of the above scenarios, the product/site where developed by Engineers and Web Developers. But each time, plug ins make it easier for "non-code-savy" people to implement (for example) effects on their websites that would be really complicated any other way; which is cool until the moment you notice most of those plug ins are poorly coded. The problem grows as this people sell themselves as web developers and usually charge (as freelancers) much less than the full implementation of the job would be worth. I know this happens a lot, and by a lot I mean that 85% of the independent projects I had this year were about fixing this websites or making them bigger.

I think the problem might be that, in general, we talk about all the marvels of the internet and our work with it that it just makes people want to jump in. We give tutorials, plug ins, API's, and any other tool that makes the job easier, without really pointing out all that should be needed to actually deploy to production.
What's the value prop for "make shipping less painless"? :)
> The company appears to present itself as a DMCA remover on the website yesitis.org but lists no address. Considering the many mistakes made by the firm, one has to wonder whether their “under penalty of perjury” statement that they represent the copyright holders above is accurate.

I think this has to be a prank. The website was generated with a GoDaddy website builder, filled with laughable plagiarized boilerplate, and doesn't include any information that would identify a particular company. All of the photos are stock photos. They include 'Adoption' and 'Personal Injury' under their list of services. I think someone is seeing if they can get Google to take down obviously legitimate websites when an obviously illegitimate source asks them to.
13 Practical and Tactical Cloud Security Tips in EC2
The power is fine. Everything computer-wise comes off the back off a large APC UPS. Nothing but apple kit has ever failed on it.

Regarding owning two, its because I don't put all my eggs in one basket. Why buy one when you can have two for twice the cost.
Oh, that's not nearly as big a deal then.

Still, it's kind of an annoyance just because the form factor of the computer is still so closely tied to the motherboard, even if the board itself is trivial. Are they going to get a ton smaller and just be CPU+RAM with cable ports for PCIe/USB busses?
I put no hardware cost because I'm looking at the instantaneous profit function (or close using a 24 hour window) for hardware owned prior to the reward reduction. The comment was referencing whether or not it is still profitable to mine given a certain electric rate. Also understand that some people will continue to mine even at a slight loss during the winter for free heat, while others will sell their hardware and put the money to better use.

So, if you want to amortize the loss of hardware value over 24 hours be my guest. If you want to purchase hardware to (profitably) bitcoin mine, then (as you clearly recognize) you need to get the new specialty hardware not an off the shelf video card.
You're right. It's not really. I just that fully expected it to fail, and was pleasantly suprised when it didn't.
Have you called an attorney? If you have one that you're on any kind of friendly basis, I've generally found that you can get a quick read on your case (30 minutes' worth of time) without any cost.

IANAL -- first and foremost -- but I would think the best tactic may be to go after PayPal to get them to discharge your supposed debt to them, given that you've already swept the money out. Their seller's assurance contract terms would seem to be vague around what is required for the item to be determined "not as received" -- also, as you mention, there is a a pattern on behalf of the seller -- is EBay/Paypal acting dilligently to protect your interest in return for your seller's fees and auction fees?
Maybe since you're such an advocate for Flash you could post your Flash version of the same widget, and show us all how much better/cleaner/faster/easier-to-code your version is?
Small UI gripe, why do I have to click a button that says "Engine Start" just to realize its a registration link? No idea what that context is supposed to mean.
Seller Protection should protect the seller in the case of obvious fraud like this regardless of what the credit card company says.
If Intel's offering holds the performance crown (and/or the performance-per-$ crown) I'd have thought they'd hold onto a lot of the enthusiast market. A lot of modding, after all, is oriented towards getting performance.
It's not so much of a challenge, git-achievements does it in a few lines of bash: https://github.com/icefox/git-achievements/blob/gh-pages/git...

(The interesting logic happens elsewhere, but the above template demonstrates that one can wrap git without too much trouble and without reducing functionality.)
Again, the use of "piracy" here is ironic, sarcastic, facetious.... As such, it doesn't really equate "piracy" with "copying" in a general sense, only in the sense used the author of the website. In a general sense, everyone knows it isn't piracy if it's legal.
CoffeeScript Redux Compiler — Current State
It seems like you didn't want to pay to have the best engineers or you advertised the position in the wrong way. To be honest it feels like you believe you are entitled to have the best while not having much to offer in return.
Ah good point. Although I would agree that it's better to not need the repairs in the first place. Either way, Apple has clearly been doing a good job satisfying their customers.
Intel's Haswell Architecture
Windows 8 Thunders Past Mac OS X on Steam
Or, you know, just download the actual game instead of a clone. EA released the first three in the series (Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert, and Tiberian Sun) for free several years ago.

[will edit in link when I'm not on a corporate network]
That's a variant of one of the oldest scams in the book on EBay. Removing seller feedback actually fixed the issue, at least for buyers.

Back in the day, the formula for an EBay sell-side scammer was to:

1 - Setup a phony account, or network of accounts.

2 - start selling small value things to each other. (Postcards, keychains, digital pictures, etc) Leave positive feedback, including nonsensical feedback (ie. My laptop works great, A++++ for a $0.99 recipie).

3 - Wait a few months for the active links to the auctions to be de-activated by EBay

4 - Start selling a dozen high-value items like laptops. Ship nothing or empty boxes.

5 - Withdraw funds asap.

Now the same scheme works, but only in reverse for high-value items that have immediate cash value.

Solution: Never use EBay for anything.
The wonderful thing about a free and open Internet developed by passionate participants is that they were anticipating not just having bad actors being criminals working outside the law. They anticipated states being the bad actors (which has proven to have been quite prescient, even in the case of "good" states like the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc.); states with the ability to bribe or force participating network owners to allow unfettered access. And, they built the protocols to work, anyway.

Of course, this is also just a side effect of good security practices. If a state can break it, a well-connected criminal can, too. But, I'm pretty confident the creators of SSL were also thinking of China and North Korea and other violently oppressive regimes.
Isn't this going to introduce lag into Intel's sales pipeline?

In this new model, Intel will be unable to simply new ship chips to distributors to go to system builders. They'll have to ship all their CPUs to "the land where things are soldered" (Asia, presumably) and ship everything back again.

I think AMD may have just been given a gift of 6 weeks.
I think we're pretty much on the same page here. There is an ocean of great stuff to explore, and 19th century Russia is just one lovely part of that ocean. For example I haven't read Dickens or Eliot - I still consider myself pretty well-read, but there's always more out there. And of course with foreign-language writers there's always the additional dream of learning the language and reading in the original. One reason to hope for radically-extended lifespans eh?

I wasn't trying to claim that Tolstoy et al are better and more important than anyone else, just trying to counter the suggestion that the only reason to read them is to try and impress people. Faux-reading to try and cultivate a sophisticated appearance is, I think we can agree, just stupid.

Personally if I had a choice between Tolstoy and Saramago or Le Guin, I think I would pick one of the latter. And yes, Nietzsche is the 19th century bomb.com

NB: I read a lot of non-fiction too. An educated person has to have his or her fingers in a lot of intellectual pies I think.
Every developer is familiar with Shell and Unix tools, it's trivially simple to lookup documentation and get something working really quick with unix utilities even if you are not familiar with the tool in the beginning. On the other hand the idea of learning an entirely new programming language for quick and dirty trivial stuff is a little off-putting. That being said I did not know how simple it is in R to play with data, will have to check it out.
This would only work in major cities, but I always thought there was a business in having a physical escrow service aimed specifically at selling small, high-value items. You sell an item online, deposit it with the company (who takes a small cut; you could even mail it to them), who then pass it on to the buyer when payment is confirmed. The company can confirm it's in working order, and take some photographs for proof.

Much more pleasant for both buyer and seller. No more news stories of people getting mugged after an online ad, no more scammy eBay purchasers, the lot.
That's not quite genuine. You need to look at probability of a scammer winning your auction, not the probability that a scammer still has room under his/her chargeback cap. And even after that, I somehow doubt that those statistics are satisfying to the person who lost 100% of their money after selling 100% of their phone inventory (one phone).
In the pick up community, this is called keyboard jockeying ... basically the blind leading the blind. I think this is extremely prevalent in the start-up world except people don't get called out as often as they should. Just look at half the guys who claim to be experts at lean. For most of them, their biggest success has been their ability to brand themselves as experts at lean.

So while we begin with agreement that at times you feel like a fraud, I think in many cases we are being 'fraudulent' by offering untested, unproven advice. The best guys I know, especially ones who have been successful, say 'I don't know' to a lot of questions. Meanwhile, the armchair experts with a thin history always seem to know the answer.
Clickable links:
Flicksery - http://www.flicksery.com
Blog Post - http://tmblr.co/ZemAIvYPpv2C
Leftist tolerance
This doesn't apply for Chrome or Firefox, as the favicon goes in the tab, not in the address bar.
If you plan to sell 100 iPhones, you are absolutely right.

If you are selling an iPhone and actually need the money, a 2% risk of being left with neither may be worse than just getting 50% of the money, safely.
I've learned to buy rev. 2 or rev. 3 products for all my Apple purchases, when possible

It's not just Apple products. A few years ago, I bought the first model year of a new car. That's not something I'll ever do again.
It's still used in the tab, just not the address bar.
Should you expect your going rate at an established company plus equity? That seemed to be one complaint from the article; they offered him a big salary with less equity:

"He...took the two offers we gave them (big salary/small equity and small salary/big equity) and created a custom big salary / big equity + bonus counter offer that was laughable at best."

[edit] I agree that most engineers overvalue equity, just like most people overvalue a lottery ticket.
Definitely, it seems super obvious to us that fraud has occurred and that's the long and short, to the credit card companies all they can see is that they might be severely out of pocket. They will generally fight back against it, and side with their money. It sucks.
Pinged you on Twitter, but I'd love an invite for our small (< 10) person team...we literally spend all day on Hipchat and while it's good, something with a bit more organization would be very welcome. Email's in my profile.