skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have $200k sitting in your paypal account? Don't you have a bank account? What country are you in? What exactly did they say to you? How you mean you 'don't know how' you made $200k - you didn't expect to sell so much, or you sold $200k in one go with no idea who gave it to you? This seriously needs more information.
Intentionally creating a pocket of herd immunity around an outbreak.
It's a process where you contain outbreaks by identifying them and vaccinating everyone who might come in contact with an infected person. You create a "ring" of vaccinated people around the infected, which prevents the infection from spreading.
You could bid more than them.
Yes, the nightmare scenario they scared Swartz with was 6-7 years. Which clearly does qualify as a nightmare. Aaron's last lawyer did not believe that was a realistic threat.

Either way: my understanding is that 35 years is an overt misstatement of how sentencing for repeated counts under CFAA works. I stand by the word "lie", both in its technical and moral senses.
Hi Emmanuel, I'm sorry for your troubles. Sounds like Paypal is being unreasonable - hardly the first time. I would suggest a two-pronged approach:

1. Find a lawyer who can advise you, definitely based in the US, and almost certainly based on CA, the home state of PayPal. As you (potentially) have $200k in cash, you'll have no problem finding excellent representation. Hopefully you can get away with spending only a few thousand.

2. Select a different payment processor. You can do this immediately. Stripe has a good reputation, but there are others as well.

3. (Optionally) Post your progress. Especially if the lawyer can give you good advice that is applicable to others in your same situation, you are potentially saving other innovators many thousands of dollars not to mention headaches.

Good luck.
I'll volunteer a few more:

Amazing ecosystem + package manager.

The problems you get to work on tend to be less soul-crushing.
In this world, one must be born rich...
> if you don't do proofs you won't get any better at understanding mathematics

There is a vast world of mathematical understanding available to programmers who don't like proofs. I think there is some miscommunication here about what constitutes mathematics. Mathematicians tend to think of the art of proving things, whereas engineers (and programmers, and scientists) think of equations and how to solve them. I think mathematicians actually do a disservice to engineers by trying to beat them over the head with real analysis and set theory (which is why most physics and engineering departments end up having to teach their own mathematical methods courses).

The "foundational" knowledge of mathematics -- epsilons, deltas, Cantor sets, Banach spaces, etc. -- is irrelevant to almost all practitioners. Newton, Taylor, Euler, Gauss, Laplace, Bessel, Maxwell and the gang got pretty far without it. When programmers say they want to learn math, they mean they want practical knowledge: interesting functions, how to compute them, and their properties that can be applied with utility. They don't want -- or need -- to spend time poring over proofs.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox

"In the early 1950s an estimated 50 million cases of smallpox occurred in the world each year.[5] To eradicate smallpox, each outbreak had to be stopped from spreading, by isolation of cases and vaccination of everyone who lived close by. This process is known as "ring vaccination". The key to this strategy was monitoring of cases in a community (known as surveillance) and containment."
If you'd like to go from "wrong" to "militantly wrong", that is your right.
I'm flabbergasted by how 200k can be reached within six months with that product.
Replace him with "an experienced early adopter." How would the article be different?

Would he have been able to get where he wanted to go, or would he have not tried to go as far as the car said he could go?
"there aren't enough cars/scooters to meet demand" because nowadays, a car needs a driver who isn't busy doing anything else. They will be far less rare when unoccupied cars can go in search of fares.
The problem with all fiat currencies is they have no inherent value; it is all in the eye of the beholder.

Apart from the claim on a country's treasury which is implicitly backed by a country's resources. Sure, this isn't always reliable, as in the case of countries like Zimbabwe, but they're very much the exception rather than the rule. Bitcoin's fiat value is posited on the artificial scarcity of something that doesn't have any particular utility in the first place. Gold at least has the virtue of looking nice and having useful physical properties (malleability, non-reactivity, high conductivity).
Never Rely on Third-Party Libraries in Your Code
There is no seller protection, nor buyer protection for intangibles with PayPal. Typically if you write "non-tangible/service" in the shipping info boxes in a dispute it'll be closed in your favor -- the only reason you get to that point is that the buyer claimed the product was a tangible when it wasn't. Sometimes, through deliberate miscategorization by the customer and unlucky assignment of customer service reps to your case, you'll lose anyway.

You'll take some losses no matter how you take payment, unless you get people to start mailing in cash. It's a cost of doing business, factor it into your pricing. Your situation would have been no better had you been paid with Stripe or anyone else.

The S2Member website says they support Google Checkout and Authorize.net. You should set up at least one of those as a backup. It won't prevent you from losing money to lying customers, but you shouldn't let PayPal be a single point of failure for your business anyway.
Do you guys plan on integrating with any of the existing ecommerce platforms?
I was always wondering, if PayPal locks a 200k$ account, where does that money go?
Mars Rover Spots Metallic "Arm"
It's almost fixed. I think out of 46 startups in the current batch, we asked for less than 7% from maybe 2 of them.
I'm really confused right now. Over half of that money 18.5 billion, was donated to the "male circumcision consortium" so they can circumcise people in Africa. Is that really such an important issue that it became the recipient of one of the largest donations in the history of the world?

I'm certain that I must be missing something.
First, before you do anything else, find a reputable payment provider and switch your payment mechanisms over to that, so you don't keep getting money sent into a locked account. And with your new payment provider, make sure you sweep all money you receive out of any account they have access to as soon as possible, up to whatever limits they have on how much you have to leave around for chargebacks and similar.

I'd guess that PayPal wants an SSN so they can report your revenue to the IRS for taxes. If so, they might accept an EIN or TIN instead, which you can obtain as a business (which you probably want anyway if you plan on doing that much business).

Alternatively, if you are not actually in the U.S. (you didn't say explicitly), you may need the local equivalent instead, though good luck getting PayPal to accept anything that doesn't follow their script.

In any case, the instant you get access to your PayPal account again, get all the money out of it before they change their mind, which they frequently do, and switch over to the reputable payment provider you picked in step 1.

Finally, next time you start doing business with a service, even a popular one, search for negative experiences with that service and take them seriously. You now know not to use PayPal ever again, but that still leaves quite a few other services out there to get burned by.
Wow, that's just...mind-numbingly awful. If that's true, the Emmanuel just forfeits all that money?

I suspect that a good lawyer will be able to recover most of it for him, especially since his presence in the US was not material to the earning of that income.
These sort of things generally revolve around tax reporting. As an international student, you should be able to get an ITIN or TCN which, I believe, they also accept.
Sigh. Stop rationalizing your pet Google peeves.

> The software/AI is secondary to the ability of the solution to work in hundreds of millions of cars in hundreds of countries (all with varying regulations) under an infinite array of conditions.

No it doesn't. It's perfectly fine if it works even with one car model if that spurs demand and further development. It's perfectly fine if the self-driving system initially only works in "good" conditions, since a driver should always be prepared to take over. It's perfectly fine if the system detects ice or snow and sets off a shit-ton of alarms warning the driver to take over. No initial offering of a brand new technology ever deals with every imaginable scenario.

> The car companies have decades of experience at this.

The car companies have decades of experience designing mechanical and electromechanical systems. Their software expertise sucks. Other than the Tesla, have you seen the dismal state of modern car software? Even BMW uses a system of rotary dials, and "apps" are just now becoming commonplace.

Robust self-driving cars involve an unimaginable amount of software complexity. There are machine vision algorithms, sensor fusion algorithms, estimation and planning algorithms, learning algorithms, and probably a bevy of common-sense heuristics. There needs to be extensive testing of these algorithms, and careful bounds on their latency and reliability. These are computer science problems, not automotive problems.

> Google has none.

Google has cash. They can acquire people and expertise. See [1]

> And even worse they have a penchant for beta software and a concerning inability to ship products properly.

May I be bold enough to presume that the vast array of smart people they've hired might have realized that Gmail and self-driving cars require different approaches to software development....

[1] http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/11/ron-medford-google-nhts...
Finding Interesting Patterns in Decision Trees
Why do people keep using Paypal ? Paypal is always taking money from people. Always! It's interesting what's going to happen here. If he can't get his money, is Paypal going to have it ? Why is there the assumption this guy is in the US ? Even if this guy was not legally in the US, this is still his money.

If you are young and don't have a national insurance number yet, ask them to change your account holder to one of your parents and give them the NI.

I'd basically create a website reporting this issue to the general public and attach all emails and information you can get from them. Also, I'd change the payment method in your website to something else LIKE RIGHT NOW! You should never, ever trust Paypal! Like NEVER!

You should also report this to the media, they will love it! $200K is a lot hell of money!
I wouldn't call this a flaw, it happens to batteries when they are exposed to temperatures like this. The gauge for the battery is accurately trying to show you your usage in real-time.

I bet he probably could have gauged it by jumping in the car turning it on and then starting the heater as well. His mileage would have declined before he even started driving.

Think of it this way, batteries always improve in 2nd / 3rd gen devices (look at apple) and I am sure that is what Tesla will start to address.
I'm Canadian, and receive some payments from Americans. Paypal asked me for a Tax ID number of SSN in order to report to the IRS.
The article seemed totally fair to me. I'm not sure how you can conclude that the author is not an experienced early adopter and am also not sure how relevant that is when discussing a new automobile on the market. What was mis-represented? How is the article irresponsible?

nb: I am a huge Tesla fan.
Yes! But I also really wanted to work for a large technology company (i.e. Apple, MS, Amazon, Facebook, or Google) but only Amazon and Microsoft recruit on my campus so I reached out to them out of access.
Lets start using it. I'm going to start calling it the "bread font" anyway. Maybe it'll catch on ;)
Sorry, but that's simply not true. I think the real truth is that developing major applications / games on Linux is still sucktastic. No universal package management system, no universal set of dependencies, no guaranteed binary runtime environment, no unified platform API for the desktop, etc.

Windows developers would also like a debugger and IDE equivalent to Visual Studio.

The sad fact of the matter is that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, and I think Valve has decided to gamble that if they motivate developers to come to the platform, it will become ready.
People rarely click ads on searches. Even less often when they search for the domain they're looking for.

The only solution is to figure out which keywords they're bidding on and outbid them. Only 170 people search for that domain each month. You probably already have near 100% click through on it. Is it worth the trouble?
That's actually a good sign in a startup. Ideally you want to start by solving a small number of people's problems very thoroughly, and then expand the number of people whose problems you solve.
Sorry to hear about the troubles :(

If this wasn't the umpteenth time I've heard this story, I wouldn't say this so pesteringly:

To everyone: Stop stop stop stop stop using PayPal. This happens over and over again. For once, thankfully, there are viable alternatives out there -- Stripe & WePay to name two (both of which I've had excellent experiences with).

Not saying they're panaceas or that there won't be security/freezing issues from the new guys, but PayPal has a documented, extensive, and repeated history of freezing accounts with large amounts of money in them over short(ish) periods of time.
TBH, I feel so blessed! I never would have expected to receive such an offer.
You can already post your articles yourself, the Authorizer just helps you plug into the DL bookkeeping. And what's the point? What value do we realy get from the Digital Library these days? Its a feature that requires critical mass to be useful, and the fact that it is exclusive means it will never have critical mass.

Check out the latest CACM article on the open access issue:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-...

I think the ACM is pretty much in denial at this point.
Emmanuel,

I can't help you get back the money that PayPal has frozen, but I can help you keep selling it and ensure you keep what's yours.

Email me - tyler [at] simplegoods.co
I believe this is correct. I got a similar notice, even though I'm Canadian and charge mainly for services rendered in Canada.

OP, it takes a little while to get a TIN, but it's pretty straightforward to do so. You can get this as a foreigner, even if you're not in the US.

I recommend contacting the IRS to see how to do this. They have a competent international division. A phone call to paypal to see what they require probably couldn't hurt, but you can never be sure with them.
I think there is a problem here. If you are saying you do not how how you made it then there might be truly something wrong with your account. It is rare for any open source project that is a js widget essentially to pull in 200k in six months. I think there is a bit more information at work here and you are leaving it out. I think what Paypal did was justified while they investigate what is going on.
While better than not having the agreement (which terminates when their share falls below 34% of voting power), the new share structure is not shareholder friendly. Class C shares can now be issued to employees or used for acquisitions, which would dilute the economic interest of shareholders without diluting their voting interest.
Do you have a cousin in Nigeria?
Get a taxpayer ID and give them that?

http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxpa...
Sorry, they stole your money. This is a big advantage of theirs, they aren't regulated like a bank so they have no trouble taking money from marginalized people.
I highly recommend contacting executiveoffice@paypal.com. I've had many problems with PayPal in the past, but they were the only group able to make corrections to my account and release funds.
An Amazing SXSW Finalist Startup
You should contact David Marcus, Paypal's relatively new CEO. At least one other HN thread shows his willingness to help: http://ndy.gd/JJgB
Find a person with your name in US, use his SSN and pay him 10% of your earnings.
As a guy, i'm finding these analogies to be... poorly chosen and highly offensive to the extreme. Do we really need to analogize programming languages this way? You may not like Ruby or Python as first languages but I first learnt qbasic. Do I miss it, somedays yeah, but learning one is just like learning real languages. We can learn more than one. They aren't mutually exclusive.

That and can we move beyond high school analogies like this? It is getting tiring and I'm sure to outside observers it isn't helping a curious woman's impression of our corner of humanity.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. The "negative" possibility is a reemergence of old-style landed gentry, where wealth passes down from generation to generation with relatively little perturbation or erosion, interrupted only in the case of the "bad apple" bone-headed heir who actively blows the family fortune. It's interesting that both Gates and Buffett pretty consciously opted out of finding out how that would play out.

Of people currently in the list of top-20 richest people, the ones to observe (successfully into multigenerational territory) seem to be the Waltons, Kochs, and Bettencourt. But probably more, since the cutoff for top-20 is $22 billion, and you hardly need that much to start a multigenerational fortune, especially if people aren't having a lot of kids anymore.

I wonder if there's enough data to put together a graph of how previous American fortunes fared, actually. What did the trajectory of the Rockefeller estate look like as it was split among heirs and invested in various forms?
Well, that could have gone better.
No, I had an old U.S. account and I wasn't able to change the country. I created a venezuelan account later on, but I saw that the U.S. account provided some features, so I stupidly thought that was ok to then transfer the money to the Venezuelan account. I started to sell licenses while I was outside the U.S.
Lawyer up. This is ridiculous.
As of 2011, all payment processors must report the gross receipts of all merchants earning over $20,000 in a year (like Emmanuel) on a Form 1099-K. This form requires a taxpayer identification number. PayPal has to ask for it to file the form. They've also always asked for it as part of their underwriting of accounts that trip their fraud detection systems in some way -- which a sudden jump in payments like this would also do.
Shameless plug for my own solution, curmudgeon: https://github.com/lharding/Curmudgeon

So, yes. :)
See my response to jmillikin. Your comment about the study's findings is semantic, because it does claim that its more likely to happen:

"These findings support the hypothesis that managers with greater control rights in excess of cash-flow rights are prone to waste corporate resources to pursue private benefits at the expense of shareholders."
Sad to hear this, I've used and appreciated turn.js. Hopefully the tax situation works itself out as other commenters have described.
Yes! We're planning on Shopify and Esty apps. Any other requests?

( jarrett at easypost dot co -- if you prefer)
Sure. Bitcoin is a fiat currency that has, so far, generally appreciated.
Like, we couldn't use a chunk of that 200K here in the US to fix our bulging deficit. This is why we have it.
Actually, I got a very good feedback. Google saw the new turn.js and wanted to promote the next release by the way.
As a fan of Tesla's efforts, it pains me to read this; no matter where the blame lies (physics, bad planning, poorly tested diagnostics software) this article will haunt the company for years. Every oil lobbyist will eat this up, and it should become the foundation of any EV-haters argument.

And that sucks.

However, I'm annoyed that Tesla's UX people let a car with this much design intelligence leave without connecting range estimations to a simple thermometer.

I understand that to HN readers batteries in the cold is "simple physics" but if the battery indicator jumps around like a BitTorrent download time estimation, people will quickly learn to not trust what the car tells them.

Consumers that are highly neurotic about the road trip problem are much more likely to remember these sorts of horror stories when making a purchasing decision.
Typically, to the account holder either (a) after they submit the requested documentation or (b) after 180 days if their account was terminated in order to cover future chargebacks. You just don't read that part of the story because people write about it on day one, not after they understand and have resolved the problem.
It says it's $11.94.
I think one of the issues is how different languages are taught. My first experience with Java was in an awful CS AP class in high school that was an unrewarding grind and I eventually dropped it. My next experience was in an intro CS course at liberal arts school and the assignments were largely start with an empty screen of code and write some interesting computations from scratch.

What I suppose I didn't realize at the time is that those classes weren't designed to teach me to build things with code, which is what I really wanted to do. I don't even want to be overly critical of the college level course because the academic CS stuff really helped me frame some of my thinking about code in the type of real world applications I build now. We also touched on some Haskell, automata theory, circuits, turing machines and assembly in that class. Still it left me feeling like building programs people use was impossible.

When I first started writing a rails app in ruby it was an "aha!" moment about how people actually get things done. Most people learning ruby learn it in the context of trying to build something others will use.
The flaw (and it is a very major flaw) is in the reporting system, which is unable to give drivers planning their drives reliable information with which to plan their drives. That is flawed almost by definition. The reasons why are utterly irrelevant. A flawed fuel reading is a fundemental flaw in a product that is essentially useless without fuel.
Use PayPal - get screwed. Rinse, wash, repeat.
Thanks, i have called paypal 1000 times today.
IANAL (which is why the OP should definitely talk to one).

If the work that generated the income was done while he was physically in the US, then the immigration folks will definitely have an opinion on if it was legal under his visa terms. This may or may not have an impact on any potential legal remedies that are available wrt Paypal.
Why does someone always write this? PayPal is regulated to exactly the same degree a merchant account from a bank is. Their contracts are essentially identical, mirroring PayPal's own agreements with the banks that underwrite their accounts (Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase). Banks suspend merchant accounts and freeze their money for the same reasons and for the same periods of time, and no regulation stops them from doing so. In many countries, PayPal is considered a bank. In the US, it is licensed and regulated as a money transmitter in all 50 states.