skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm the same. I sold a few things on eBay a few months ago, nothing of great value, some old Nokia 8850's I had lying around and 2 Raspberry Pi's I had purchased but not used. I photographed everything, against a verifiable backdrop (in this the BBC website on my monitor) and filmed the product in use and put it up on Photobucket so that the upload was also time stamped. No problems whatsoever with the sales, but you know, just in case!
What's a question here you think would require an unreasonable amount of self-awareness to answer? (I'm not disputing that some of my questions do, I'm just curious).
I do the same. Sometimes sellers harass me to put feedback tho. I filter it, but still, interesting.
They weren't working for 1% - that's what I was offered. A chance to work for $0 for an undetermined amount of time on something with no other technical resources or colleagues, all in exchange for perhaps getting 1% of something I have little control over.

I've said "thanks but no thanks" both times.

In one case, I mentioned that typically someone working for $0 with no end in sight, essentially building a prototype from scratch is more considered a founder/cofounder, and would generally be given a more equitable split. I got told that I didn't understand, because person X had already put a lot of time in to the project, and since I wasn't there on day 1 (when they were thinking about it in the garage), then I wasn't cofounder material (or words to that effect).

Odd how much the 'startup myth' prevents some people from moving forward.
So what's the quickest and easiest way to buy bitcoins?
Stop with the Series A schadenfreude
I actually wrote about this 6 years ago when eBay first started leaning their policy towards protecting buyers at the expense of the sellers. I went from selling things on eBay regularly to never using them for anything. Especially an iPhone or any new "hot" item you will be inundated with scam bids. And as an additional slap in the face you can't even give a buyer negative feedback anymore so what's even the point of feedback? It reminds me of when the post office, in response to long lines, resolved the problem by removing all clocks.

I know this was in reaction to scammers placing fake auctions but eBay basically threw out the baby with the bathwater with their buyer protection policies. The scammers just moved to the buyer side where they enjoy lopsided protection.

This is my post from 2006 - a variation of the scam, but the seller protection is equally non-existant:
http://verysimple.com/2006/08/13/ebay-laptop-scammers-part-i...
As an ecommerce merchant, I've frankly come to view the whole chargeback thing as excessive and unfair buyer protection. The customer really is not always right - but the staff at merchant banks and PayPal seem to operate under the assumption that he/she is.
Perspective: “Why C++ Is Not ‘Back’”
This happened to me once as well - there's no eBay dispute resolution process for shipping scams. If you spring for an extra $20 shipping cost to get it express, there's nothing, absolutely nothing, stopping the seller from shipping it media mail and keeping the $19. EB/PP will tell you to get bent as long as you get the item.

I had someone do this to me a while ago on a laptop. As usual, Paypal and eBay were utterly useless. I marked the guy all ones on his shipping ratings, but considering this was a high volume seller, the effect is probably nonexistent.
I was trying to visualize the so called 'magnetic highway' and found this along with further explanation.

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-voyager-encounters-region-deep-...
Apparently all your friend had to do was raise a claim as "item not as described"...

But yeah, I get your point and try to avoid eBay as much as possible, although sometimes, very rare now, I have no choice. It eats me up inside when I do though :-(
What we need is a competitor that disrupts credit cards altogether

http://www.dwolla.com
1-2% (max!) equity in a company doesn't make me feel like an owner. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973106
October 19, 2012
Bitcoins (no chargebacks) and a preference for buying through friends of friends on social networks (almost like a darknet) could be worth looking into.
I have no faith in PayPal as a payment processor any more. There's these problems, problems with PayPal placing random account holds etc.

They really don't want business from the little sellers any more.
I converted my WP hosted blog over to socrates last year. Very familiar and enjoyable environment being someone who does python, and served up using GitHub pages. :)
The Linux client is still in private beta, but you can easily circumvent it by just downloading the .deb and installing/running it on Linux anyway. FWIW, I wasn't invited to the beta right away, but about a week after I started running it anyway, I was invited.

The only issue you might run into is that it'll sometimes say your account is not authorized to use the Linux beta, but there are directions online on how to get around this by adding some flags and launching it from the CLI.

I'm not sure why I bothered though, since my Linux ultrabook can barely run any games anyway.
Yeah, 100%. Just blind commenting. Dude read it again.
Not sure if I understand your point, can you explain a bit more please? Are you saying event loops with select {} are considered code smell?
Why are you asking engineers to be investors in your company? Don't you need engineers to build your secret sauce and you have investors to invest?

If you need money ask VCs for money and hire the people which will make you rich. It is really that simple. It is 10x easier to get 20K more in investment than finding an engineer which will work for 20K less than market salary.
one where the rules of the lottery might be changed in all sorts of ways after you sign on the dotted line.

There is a pattern:

Company: We will give you 1% of the company.

Employee: Sounds good.

And the Company probably believes this in good faith, and that the employee will not be diluted

<years later things go bad>

Company: You now have 0.01% of the company.

Employee: I had 1%.

Company: Not anymore. That wasn't any kind of promise against dilution. Check the paperwork.

Switching from the "let's trust each other" to the "let's go by what's written in black-and-white" is a common trope. You, as the Company, don't even need be engaged in bad faith for it to happen. But it's often considered rude to tell the employer "these shares are probably worthless."

Being an early stage employee but not a founder is the worst of all worlds

Founders usually are completely averse to giving anyone hired after them a better deal then they have. (I've done it as a founder, too, so I understand those feels.) But non-founder non-investor shares are extremely vulnerable. If you aren't prepared to fund very close to market salaries, you need to give something spectacular.
I love the minimal design of this, reflects what you are offering so well.

Well done, I wish I played Minecraft :)
Do they work on linux?
Jaded much?

I think that depends a lot on what you mean "a decent attorney". Sure, a partner at Proskauer isn't going to take your call, but in my experience, the nice woman with the office down the street might be glad to help you put together a plan, critique your demand letter, etc. This kind of "decent attorney" is willing to work with you on the small stuff, in the hopes that you'll come back to her in the future with bigger business, and refer your friends and family as well.

A piece of advice -- as you mature and your life becomes more complex, it's not a bad thing to have a good relationship with an attorney. Here are some situations that have come up in my life:

Reviewing my ISO and non-compete agreements when I took a start-up job

Getting my security deposit back from a landlord who would not pay up

Reviewing the sale agreement for same start-up 10 years later

Representing me at closing when I bought my first home

Advising me when my bank "misplaced" a $10,000 deposit for over a month (they cashed the check but didn't credit my account)

Discussing will and estate planning when my first child was born

For all of this, and probably some other things I'm forgetting, I probably paid him less than $2,000 total -- and half of that was in closing costs on the house.

More recently, a different attorney (I moved) handled another landlord-tenant dispute for me with a couple of letters to the landlord's attorney, and never even sent me a bill.
One Running Shoe in the Grave
Yeah, this has really pissed me off since installing the Linux beta, since I have two machines regularly logging in now.
That "offer" just shows that they don't know what they are doing.
I'm wondering about that, too. Shouldn't the article say something like, "The new data lend support to models predicting that a region with the observed properties will appear during certain parts of the solar cycle." Is that statement not true?
I would have expected David Marcus (PayPal CEO) to chime in by now but apparently not.

Counterparty risk is definitely a hard problem to solve but this situation seems easy to solve: if the buyer is complaining "not as described", there should need to be some sort of attempt to return the item (at seller's expense or split).
Yes, it's particularly troublesome with Big Picture- isn't the idea that I'm going to have this connected to my TV, i.e. without a keyboard?

I can live with being unable to run games on two computers at the same time, but I wish I could stay logged in on two computers. Or at least, I don't know, pass a token.
Make a console, Valve!
Class action suits are less about getting restitution and more about forming a large enough clue-by-four to beat misbehaving companies with
Ooh, I think I might have had a conversation with Narayan! I was showcasing Routific at that conference when he came to our booth and we talked for a bit. Now I realize that he was showing me a prototype of the Mojio! :)
All companies have hype; entire departments devoted to marketing. And of course there are people who don't want to see flaws in items they purchase; this isn't limited to Apple, as much as its critics want to espouse the idea of a Reality Distortion field. Its a known psychological phenomena that people are less critical of things they have a financial investment in.

But it gets tiresome when HN has an article that shows one users poor experience, and then the boo-birds fly down with their cries of evil Apple. I'm sorry the gent had a poor experience, and Apple should fix/replace the screen or MBP itself.
Egineers .. with family?

I don't quite believe that people with a family are taking a lot of risks, just because it's "the valley". Can you confirm that this is indeed the case, or are we degrading into the age debate (a.k.a. "What? You have kids already, Grandpa?")?

Shooting anyone in the bay area a resume wouldn't make sense. While I said that I'm interested in startups, I also clearly indicated that I'm (for now?) risk averse. And ignoring that, I'd be _mightily_ surprised if any startup would say "Yeah, cool. Join us and just work from Germany". Relocation to the US? That's several levels more insane, given my initial post. Even if I'd be interested to live or travel there (nope!) that is making the situation I described worse.

Wasting their and my time by sending a resume just to see how fast they get back seems .. evil. I cannot accept. They lose time. Why would I do that?
Oh good, you're religion's expanding. Isn't that nice.
Small claims court requires you to be physically present in almost all states.
You also have to sue in the state they reside, not where you reside (there are a few exceptions, none of which are remotely applicable here)

He may be able to pull off filing remotely with a few friends, but at some point he's going to have to fly/drive to ohio and show up, have a place to stay, etc.
FYI--what you describe is not limited to eBay. I sell software through PayPal and I have been defrauded by someone who downloaded, marked it as "Significantly not as described". Once they did that, my money was pulled. I proved the buyer still had my software installed on their site, PayPal refunded my money, the buyer contacted their credit card, PayPal pulled the money again.

PayPal can be gamed in many different ways, but the credit card is the buyer's shield that even PayPal can't defend against. :(
Right on, as a startup founder I had to deal with bizdev co-founder with no clue about programming at all. In my experience it makes it really difficult to work with someone who has not a slight understanding on how things work under the hood. At some point it also became dangerous to see him sell things thinking "it's probably very easy to implement this feature". Would love to hear how others manage the bizdev/engineer founders duo!
OSs are leaving the user out of user interfaces
The Periodical Co. - (Subcompact) Digital Magazines as a Service
Pretty much nobody has an effective tax rate of 50%.
Starting a Blog is Easier Than You Think
Is this behaviour of PayPal possible only in USA, or it also applies to EU countries? Does EU regulations enforce some additional protection mechanisms for both sellers and buyers?
You can get much more on Ebay or Craigslist than Gazelle or Amazon trade-in!!
"Here's a movie studio that actually innovated: Pixar."

If we're not competing with Pixar, and we're not competing with Fohr, then what are you doing implying that they were successful where we failed? You made the association, not me.
There's an excellent post on The Verge forums called "Forget the PS4 and the Xbox 720, build your own Steambox on the cheap"[0]. It will be very exciting to see if a significant number of gamers (many of whom are already familiar with building their own PCs) take the initiative to go down this road.

A nice auxiliary advantage of building a Steambox is that you can use it as a full-featured HTPC as well, since it runs a desktop OS.

0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/30/3706718/forget-the-ps4-an...
I felt like that at first but I think the issue is that the potential employee wanted his normal salary in addition to equity. He would not undertake any risk for that equity and that can definitely lead to problems in company camaraderie.

Having said that, I think that the post has a slightly angry tone which I do not like. People can ask whatever they want in exchange for their work. If they are not worth it, don't hire them. If they are, get them on board. No need to write a blog post about it though.
> The odds of my own actions being able to prevent or interrupt a common criminal are vastly higher than the odds of a single vote affecting the outcome of any but the smallest local election.

I'm not talking about a crime; I'm talking about government rule vs warlord rule. And the issue is which most people prefer, not which allows you a better chance to disobey.

> Again, proportions simply do not matter to the victim of violence. Like I said, if DEA agent busts down my door and shoots me, it is absolutely no consolation or justification that >50% of voters approve of drug prohibition.

It absolutely is consolation and justification for the majority of people who support that policy. You might not like it; but individual liberty is not unlimited and the will of society, right or wrong, beats the pants off any other form of government we've found.

> If you propose the question "is it okay for a robber to take 30% of my paycheck as long as 51% of my community is okay with it?" most people will say "of course not!," but if you propose the exact same question, but with "a robber" to "the government," most people will say "yes of course that's okay."

The robber is taking something without giving something back; the government is taking their share of your wages for services rendered to you as a citizen. Completely different situations.
I'm not a lawyer or a police officer, but doesn't this sound more like fraud?
I didn't say that the violence-based perspective is how things work, I said that it's important to understand how things work and the implication there in my mind was that the violence-based perspective is an important part of that. I thought it was just too obvious to mention that there are many lenses through which to see the world.

For me, the way to refute Assange's point that states depend on violence and are therefore bad is not to say no they don't, or that that's not a useful perspective, but rather, "Look at the wondrous things we can build using our ability to marshal force effectively."

When I first heard about this violence-based perspective, it threw into question the notions of society and in particular human rights that I had from my high school education, because as you say, we have this internalized notion that violence is bad.

But now that I understand that rights really are just agreements between people that are brought into existence by violence, it actually makes me glad to have this violence around, and I don't see it as a universally bad thing. Nevertheless, I would prefer a society in which there is as little violence as possible, but I'm not by any means convinced that the answer there is "less state".
Staggering $150,000 salary for IIT graudate questions national value of IIT.
Iron Giant: Up close with Kuratas, the $1.4 million, 4-ton mech robot
This is pretty cool. Any thoughts on packaging this and putting it up on Github for others to play with?
I'm making a service targeted to seniors. My very limited testing shows that they always assume it's a .com .
I've had the same experience with my own family. I tried to fix their tv only to get yelled at because I was wasting the space on the screen with the black bars. They'd rather see distorted faces than black bars, over saturated colors over calibrated.. there are many in HN who put faith in customer satisfaction surveys. I don't. There are way too many people who are satisfied with their shiny pile of turds for me to put credit in their happiness with a brand.

Who would trust the average customer over an issue like screen ghosting ? Even if 99% of rMBP's owners said that they had no screen issue it still wouldn't mean anything at all. Many could actually have the issue but lack the level of perception required to notice anything.

To speak about a competitor in a different market, Samsung has been pushing their amoled crap for a long time now in the smartphone sector, and it's still the most popular brand to this day. The S3 cost as much as something like the One X, except that the S3 has a screen that is dimmer, less sharp, worse, unnatural colors and worst of all, is that amoled screens tend to severely suffer from burn in over time. People still chose the S3 over the competition in the android market, no matter how cheap its body feels (flimsy plastic vs harder plastics), no matter how bad the screen is.. I could understand the choice if the S3 was cheaper than the competition, but it's not.
Vice leaves EXIF location in Guatemala on photo of McAfee
metadata can easily be faked
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/ndtv-special-ndtv-24x7/iit-...
The scammer had it sent General Delivery. For those not familiar with the term (it's not used commonly these days), it's possible to have something shipped General Delivery to any post office, then walk in and pick it up. See https://www.usps.com/manage/forward-mail.htm for more info. This seems like one of those arcane system hacks that's ripe for abuse.

He/she presumably had to show some ID and sign something to get the package, but I'm betting that the ID was fake.
Yeah, that's one you're kind of screwed on.
You're right, although in practice it was largely the same thing. Huge database contains home listings, computer spits out which are due for foreclosure, a bunch of ex-fast-fooders sign them as quickly as possible. There was a human in the loop but 0% of their judgement was employed - their job was to sign stuff, and that's what they did.
Concept to MVP. Anyone looking for an internship?
Those are flags you can set in your sale, regarding feedback at least. If someone has negative feedback, or lives outside of a list of countries, or has unpaid item strikes, the user won't even see your sale.

Confirmed address is a paypal policy you can also turn on, which forces the seller to use their paypal confirmed address when checking out or none at all. If someone wins and they ask you to ship elsewhere, you say no. Which sucks because the buyer might ding your DSRs (detailed seller ratings), which determine your ebay privileges, search ranking position, fees...

(Whoever decided that buyers should be exempt from negative feedback needs their fucking head examined)

Signature confirmation is an option you set with your shipper.
I think you're being a little unfair.

At best, it was somebody who doesn't know what it's like to know that your partner and kid(s) are depending on you to make things work - somebody who doesn't know what it's like to see your disposal income cease to exist and be basically happy about that fact.

At best, it was somebody who doesn't understand that 'choosing between something for yourself and savings' and 'choosing between something for your family and savings' are a very, very different thing.

He's 24. He hit an emotional button. But the button is yours, and you shouldn't expect him to've been able to tell it was there; I wasn't particularly surprised by your response once I'd read it but I really didn't expect you to jump up and down on his head like that either.

He was asking whether you could support your family and, slowly, put away enough money to take a startup shot as well. The answer is apparently 'no'. You could just have said that.
This is a hacker community. We make things. It's what we do.
It's not a PO Box, it's General Delivery (https://www.usps.com/manage/forward-mail.htm). There is no owner, but you may be able to get the info they recorded when the person showed up (undoubtedly fake).
Good think people like Isaac Newton (standing on the shoulders of giants) did not know about IP, or the humankind would still live in caves.
While it's true that eBay pivoted to a more profitable niche, their original niche was still quite profitable: they were a successful IPO and pulling down cash back in the days when most sellers were regular people. So if they're abandoning that market to focus on a more lucrative one, it might [1] leave an opening for someone else to focus on it, and make good, even if not eBay-sized, profits.

[1] With all sorts of uncertainties I haven't properly investigated, such as whether there's been a significant shift that would make old-ebay-style auctions much less profitable today than they were 10 years ago.
Nope, as lame as it is, I didn't read them and I find this rule very surprising.
Considering the guy is is/was a computer security researcher, I wouldn't put it past them to have planted this.
What is your suggested reading list for the homework you mention?
ACH chargebacks are even worse than CC chargebacks, from the perspective of being able to fight them.

As soon as a payment touches any of the existing networks, it's at risk. The only way to fix it completely (or at least significantly improve the situation) is to have a system that's completely isolated and properly secured; i.e. every payment authorization requires true multi-factor authentication.
This config variable doesn't exist on my FF.
Google should just completely censor all MAFIAA content. Let's see how long it takes for these fuckers to back down. One week? Two weeks? I bet they'll never submit another DMCA complaint agian, legit or not.
"Item not as described" is the secret passphrase. Seller has absolutely no recourse. I've never tried it as a buyer, but as a seller it's been 100% effective in the scammer getting their money back from me.
OpenRA launches fine and plays multiplayer fine except for a persistent synchronization bug that will occasionally crash large multiplayer games. The developers are currently vigorously hunting that bug.