skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[The attorney who set up this site] has spoken with one customer, who has since backed off. “That being said, I am in the process of drafting a complaint, in case their feet warm up,” he told us."
1) From my understanding, the purchases were made en masse using stolen credit card info, and the game keys were then sold (maybe several times?) until they ended up in front of everyday customers looking to save a bit of money by buying one from a shady website.

The people who requested chargebacks are people who had their credit card info stolen and didn't make the purchase. From their point of view, it's completely legitimate to ask for a refund.

2) Chargebacks are in the $15-30 range I think. PayPal and similar services will fight a chargeback for you against the bank, but digital purchases are not protected so you end up loosing every time.

The big issue is that the merchant is the one bearing the risk. I recently learned that some banks allow customers to request a chargeback months or even up to a year after purchase. I had a customer do that more than 60 days after purchase. One can buy a digital good, use it until they don't want it anymore and then get their money back... and the merchant ends up loosing money on it, in addition to giving them their money back.

From my point of view, the merchants shouldn't have to pay for fraud in the banking system. The banks don't even have an incentive to secure credit card transactions if they make money on it (or at least break even)!
If you build your app in the correct way

That's interesting terminology to use, "the correct way". Heroku's own devcenter article on deploying Rails apps to Heroku [1] still recommends the thin webserver, which isn't concurrent, and therefore causes all the issues being discussed for any rails app. In other words, if you're using thin, it doesn't matter how you architected your app, it's not going to run in concurrent processes on one dyno. So I'll assume by "the correct way", you're referring to both building your app for concurrency and using unicorn as your webserver. Doing only one of those things will not work, both are necessary.

But their article only mentions unicorn only as an alternative, and up until recently their documentation actually said "We recommend thin" [2] over unicorn and that unicorn was possible but wasn't officially supported (EDIT: actually the most recent version of the article in wayback machine doesn't even mention unicorn on the page).

I wouldn't call using thin "naive", given that it's what Heroku's docs have recommended for a long time. I don't think it's fair to call customers of Heroku naive for not knowing that when Heroku says "easily scale" and "use thin", they are talking about two mutually exclusive possibilites.

[1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/rails3

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120801214821/https://devcenter....

EDIT: Added quotes with references.
Honestly I have not looked into it so far and hope you're right. We also use a number of addons, though I don't think any would be too difficult to replicate.

Regardless, it's a significant amount of work for a startup with just a few engineers, perhaps a week of two of distraction. I expect a bunch of "how to migrate off of heroku" blog posts will be out there shortly.
The Halo Car is an interesting parallel, but one that I believe to be fundamentally flawed.

Here's the problem: Apple isn't building a Corvette, or a Viper, or even an LFA. It's building the world's fastest steam locomotive.

Is it impressive? By Jove, yes. Is it fast? Ridiculously so. Is it powerful? Let me count the ways.

Does it do something people want?

...

The problem with the Mac Pro is that it's a solution to a problem almost no one has. It uses server hardware to solve consumer problems. Great, but ... why? Is there any consumer app out there that really takes advantage of 12 cores? Seriously, what applications have been parallelized to that degree? Anything that benefits from 12 cores will benefit more from CUDA and massive GPU parallelization.

I like the idea of the Mac Pro. I like going balls out just for the hell of it. I just don't think it's a computer that anyone can really use.
Isn't this fraud? If you have evidence that customers are ripping you off, why not report to law enforcement?
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I'm not a doctor, but from this article it seems to me like the professor has Asperger's or another ASD. The way he fixates on data, attempts to quantify qualitative things like ego, and one sided verbosity expressed in the article seem similar to behaviors I've observed in people with AS. Any psychiatrists on HN today?
I'm pretty sure that I'm using the same definition of 2D acceleration as the original poster. We're not talking about compositing.
Stack Overflow should realize that they're actually the perfect platform for asking open-ended why questions. Not having a definitive answer is what makes many of these questions so interesting.

Who would be harmed if those questions were left open (other than the anally-retentive)?
Where do credit card companies NOT make money? The businesses who use them pay a fee on each transaction. Their cardholders pay them interest on the balance of their account and apparently businesses are charged for fraudulent charges, even though it was the credit card company that authorized said charges. How is no one fixing this industry?
If you can provide evidence that the charge was legitimate, the CC processor will undo the reversal of the charge (which means the charge will be placed back on the customer's bill). YMMV outside of the US, but the CC processors have lost enough court cases in the US on this point to settle the issue.
That's also the sign of a bs'r

You know, the person who knows nothing about a topic, but will talk for hours on it?

There should never be shame in admitting "I don't know" and then following it up with, "but if faced with that I would..."
As per the bottom of the post persistent connections have already been committed for Django 1.6 - https://github.com/django/django/commit/2ee21d
On graphics: I use a GeForce 670 in mine. Works great! No boot screen, but I have an older card for that.
It is a real pity banks are externalizing the fraud risk to merchants, who are not in the position to improve security in a meaningful way.

This can really be only possible in a monopolistic environment...
In other terms: "Damn, the hallways in this building are getting too crowded, lets add some more hallways and shit and lets add new rooms... Later: damn, this is getting complicated. Peopke are piling up in doorways, theyre losing patience and leaving (or being forced to leave to ease the congestion)... Wish there was something we could do!"

Wmf: "Build another building, geeez!"
I encourage all users with enough karma to start flagging stories like this.

Politics, rights, religion, and "social outrage of the day" are not the type of stories I want to see on Hacker News. They have nothing to do with computers, hacker culture, startups, or anything even remotely similar to the spirit of this web site. These stories are important, but they aren't meant for Hackers News. There are hundreds of others sites to view and discuss stories of this nature, and I come to Hacker News to get AWAY from all these stories but more and more they seem to be creeping onto the front page.

If you have the karma, use the Flag link the near story or else Hacker News is going to slowly turn into another general purpose karma free-for-all news aggregator.
This isn't true. Their main "how it works" page claimed intelligent routing with no mention of which stack. This has been changed since the uproar. There are other places the same.

This is only part of the whole story as well.
Mr Frisby, I presume.
1. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW

2. Everything you listed there is a FREE as in beer product. Note that "iOS" is not on the list of non-warranted products.
1) There are a couple of protection for sellers. a) a floor limit - where visa/mc/etc cover the chargeback if it's under a certain amount ($5-20 is common)... if it is in your contract at all, it's limited to physical stores. Ecommerce/card-not-present is explicitly excluded.

b) if they can prove the keys were delivered to the card holder, and the cardholder is not claiming fraud/misrepresented goods/etc, then you can usually dispute the chargeback. This is harder than it sounds, because you need to ship to the billing address via a trackable service and obtain a signature from the cardholder when it is delivered. If you've ever shipped via UPS/FedEx then you know they will often not collect the signature, or they will collect it from another person at the address, or leave the package at the door, or the signature is illegible, etc, etc, etc.

2) I've seen chargeback fees between 10 and 50$ (25-30 is common). This is a fee from the bank that provides your merchant account.. so it varies. It's a fee for handling the chargeback.. keep in mind the bank must receive the chargeback, forward it to you, accept your response, send it to the customer's bank, etc. Does that cost $22? Definitely not.

Merchants are responsible for verifying the card is not fraudulent, and they accept the risk of fraud when they accept the order. If the merchant does not control the level of fraud, they'll see their merchant account terminated. The threshold varies by merchant bank.. I've seen as low as 0.2% up to 1%... but merchants usually don't get to see this number.
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I don't think you'll pry linux developers away with this. But for people adding distributed backend workers to existing OS X apps it makes great sense, even if you don't end up at the same speed as a tweaked out Linux implementation.

Likewise, you probably won't beat a good Linux network stack for jamming bits through, but lots of people just need to be up and running, and if the code is shared with the client, that's great.

I think its a case of "showing up", they can worry about being best later, if it makes sense, but showing up at all is important. Apple just lost a premier video production house run by a friend of mine over the Mac Pro lifecycle. They'd have stocked up on render machines and waited out the front ends if they could, but that wasn't an option.

(Apple will beat my last round of 100% Intel motherboards in Linux servers which have a years old, unresolved flaw in one of their two ethernet controllers that make them reset whenever you push them too hard. They also have a good chance of beating Linux in GPU computation because the vendors actually care a bit about Macs. I've got a lot of GPU power laying around that I can't use at all in Linux.)
I agree. If I am asked a question outside of my domain of expertise, I'm not going to BS around it. I will say that I don't know and start asking questions so that I can learn the topic.

If you want someone to BS answers all day long, then you're hiring for a CEO.
Petitioners' lawyers are forbidden from entering small claims court. They have to send a representative, or no-show.

no-show -> default judgement -> refund, worst case.
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What does Apple use for their in-house compute heavy tasks?

If there's an internal user base doing important work, then I think the professional line is safe. The whole "eat your own dog food" phenomenon.

Knowing no one, I can't guess what that situation is.
At least PayPal doesn't cover digital purchases at all for sellers.

It would basically be your word against the credit card holder anyway since there is no physical proof so I can understand why they can't. Anyone could make up some proof. The root problem is with the banks: it's their system that is being used fraudulently and they should be the ones paying for it so that they have an incentive to improve it.
> What? Ruby and Java aren't even comparable -- not to say one is "better", only to say that they aren't on the same gradient or even the same dimension.

This assertion is false. One could, with enough resources, for instance, perform experiments to determine which is better. E.g., you could come up with a million different software development projects, and then set a thousand different development teams on each different project, half of the teams using Java and half using Ruby, and then once the projects had all been completed you could crunch the data on productivity of the development teams and on robustness and efficiency of the products. For all we know, if this experiment were done, it might turn out that one of the languages is better than the other.

Now of course, no one is going to have the funds to do this experiment, though perhaps a dent might me made at a much smaller scale. Also, it is likely to turn out that neither is better simpliciter, but rather that each language is better for a certain type of project.

If we did this, we are likely to discover that each language is better for the types of problem that each language is already typically used for. Though in the realm of web development, both languages are often used to tackle similar problems. So, we may want to start our grand experiment with, Which language is better for large web development projects?
10 Days Coding. I’m Hooked.
This is why you would use a service like Paypal: the contract with PP does include digital goods, and in fact Paypal is very good about backing the merchant in situations like this, so long as you can provide evidence of the purchase (including, for example, evidence that the customer used the purchased digital good after the challenged transaction).
To add to your point, Jobs even dropped the word 'Computer' from the company's name in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#2007.E2.8...
IIUC, programmers.stackexchange.com is where "why?" questions should be asked. And IMO this sucks. I hate the SO fragmentation problem.
Having just finished a large Backbone.js app, I wouldn't pick that either. UNLESS, you're prepared to figure out going in a wide range of other libraries and add-ons you're prepared to mate with it in order to get a solution that really covers a variety of needs.

Backbone.js by itself is just missing so many pieces that the name is a real misnomer. I don't know anybody who could stand up if their real backbone was missing that many vertebrae.
It's bizarre that you can think something is "the expected standard for the language" but also not worth pointing out. How are people supposed to learn it?

There are incompetent programmers that no effort can reach, sure, but there are also junior programmers who are just innocent and haven't yet learned all the implications of what they're doing. I think it's important to teach these people, whether re Ruby or C or Clojure or whatever. That people treat such teaching with disdain makes me think they are misled by their defensiveness. It's not an insult of Clojure to say that (as in any language) there is stuff worth warning people about.
People should be looking at this as an opportunity. Start a game company that has a sane distribution model.
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> While I have no interest in recovering money through a class action lawsuit

I note that there are zero words devoted to what fraction of the money will leave the coffers of the lawyers and actually make it to the customers.
Feel free to propose edits to such answers with constructive criticism. In practice, there aren't many of these on SO.
Building applications with Scala, Play and Angular
I don't know. I've moved at least 10 times in the past 5 years, so I've been forced to reduce the amount of things I own. For a long time, I would think very hard for every item I bought, whether I'd use it or not. But there comes a time when you want some nice stuff for a change. Some nice furniture, a big screen TV with a console, some equipment for your interests etc. The minimalist lifestyle is only fun in your early twenties and when you have no interests that require physical stuff. I've gone back from reading books only on my Kindle to buying dead tree books again, because there's just something about real books and a book shelf that feels good.
22$ for a 25$ game? So they lose out on the 25$ sale and get charged 22$. I feel like this amount is a little excessive.
Plugging a projector or TV as well.
Paypal does cover digital purchases for US sellers. I know this for a fact because I have used Paypal as a merchant of digital goods and been in this situation. Paypal's service was exemplary; I simply provided a receipt of the transaction, the customer's IP address, and logs showing that the same IP address downloaded the software. Paypal never charged back the transaction and handled the dispute for me with the customer's bank. If the customer's bank refused to undo the chargeback, then Paypal swalled the loss on my behalf.

Anyone could make up some proof.

Well, yes. But people generally don't go through the trouble of making up proof for relatively small transactions (<$100, from the merchant's perspective). It's simply not worth the time and effort to fake up proof for something less than a $100 unless the work would take a minute or two more than simply collecting the evidence supporting the transaction.
As bad as the latency-creating bottlenecks with random-routing and single-threaded apps can get, it is always the case that "twisting the magic knob" of adding more dynos would help. It just wouldn't help as much as people expected it to. Further, the amount of paid-for capacity left idle (while other dynos were backed-up) offends many sensibilities about how a system "ought to" work.

But at least at the margin, the "magic knob" still worked a little. I think that's why the problem festered: there was always a default recommendation -- "more dynos!" -- that helped, which also just happened to fit the mental model Heroku promotes (while also boosting its revenue). In one of the older support logs RapGenius posted, it was evident that while RapGenius was suspicious about so many dynos being necessary, they let the ticket close once that expensive-but-temporarily-suitable 'fix' was in place. They (and Heroku) turned the magic knob and then let their attention move on to other things.
My experience here is from running an ecommerce store.. so we actually ship the product to the customer.

I believe banks would accept digital proof as long as it established: 1) the cardholder made the purchase; 2) the cardholder received and/or used the digital goods.

But that is really only useful if the cardholder says they did not receive the license key/digital goods. If they say you misrepresented the item, or they did not make the purchase (because their card was stolen), then I can't imagine how you would dispute the chargeback.

And in that regard, PayPal is the same. If the PayPal user says their PayPal account was hacked, and they didn't make a number of transfers.. PayPal will undo the transactions.
Referly CEO here - We've been headed in this direction for awhile, but just crossed over (with the new tagline) about a week ago. An in-depth blog post from me about the change and our new direction, plus a ton of stuff we learned, is forthcoming - probably this weekend if I can sit down for a few hours and knock it out. I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on the new experience, both as a reader and as a contributor (if you decide to go that far).
There's a middle ground; it is better to fess up and try to square things with your customers in a situation where you've done wrong, but at the same time you don't want to be exploited by unscrupulous plaintiffs in turn. Most of those customers just want what they paid for or to recover their actual losses (what are called economic damages in law) but a few may see a lawsuit as an opportunity to enrich themselves. The court system is supposed to prevent that, and overall it works moderately well, but once papers are filed it's better for the arguments to take place in court rather than outside.
One challenge is to load balance programs that are not written in MPI, but instead written in your favorite language. i.e. to load balance a web app.

RAMCloud is a way to bring back Moore's law at this time:

https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/display/ramcloud/RAMCloud
I agree, but these guys have had a lot of practice inventing silly metaphors [0] to defend their stance. It's a pretty big part of the culture.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4273374
Discovery of a microscopic world shook the foundations of theology
Could you please elaborate about DRM in ChromeOS?
I'm not saying something like that will hold forever. It might take 2 months to figure out that sites check for that, and 2 weeks (/days) to code it up. If you make the information on your heuristic public, those 2 months just drop out straight.
The community doesn't really agree with that. It's a little more subtle:

http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/171/what...
When material damages happen as a result of fraud or breaking an agreement, then the party shares liability for those damages.

This is the right thing to do. Heroku made their bed and now they must lie in it.
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I don't disagree with either of you. :) What I was trying to say was that there are lots of operations that are hardware accelerated in OS X for quite a while.
Agreed. I'm more excited about Vostok than just about anything. Even just the development of the technology to get in there, explore, it, etc. has been thrilling. Not to mention the politics and international intrigue. This is a phenomenal bit of early news on what they'll hopefully find.
Heroku is owned by SalesForce, a publicly-traded multi-billion dollar company. It has annual revenues in the hundreds of billions.

They have the resources to handle the suit and fix the "damn problems" at the same time.
You say that as if you know that for a fact, I've seen them over + over again (anecdote, but still), as well as many other such passive-aggressive responses. I often do take action on them, however the prevalence makes me think that not enough is done about the standard developer issue of people not knowing how to behave civilly to one another.

Frustrating to be so downvoted for raising something that is so rotten by the way, presumably it's ok to talk down to somebody simply because you feel they haven't put in enough effort in asking a question?

Or perhaps it was the language? That stems from being frustrated with the nasty culture that seems to be seeping in to so many corners of our development communities.
HTML 5 video?
Why? The only core components you can expect Apple to innovate on are the display and the form factor. They're not going to be shipping any CPUs that aren't already on the market.
Should be closed as not a real question and too localized.
> How are people supposed to learn it?

By understanding the halting problem and the implications thereof? This is not Clojure-specific, it's part of any dynamic eval tool.

> It's not an insult of Clojure to say that (as in any language) there is stuff worth warning people about.

This argument might hold some water if the presentation of the information was not couched in a different way. It is clearly not that. And you are clearly more concerned with being right than teaching people, from the words you are choosing to use.
Actually, it's unlikely it could ruin them. They are owned by SalesForce who can afford it. (likely part of the motivation for the class-action)

I think Heroku has done a tremendous amount of good, especially in the Ruby community. This needs to be considered with the bad.
Hell will surely descend upon me, but I'd vote for having it be syntactic sugar for => in general.