skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Facilitating payments between users
When I bounce around startup ideas in my head, there's one class of ideas that seems so daunting that I don't even consider it an option: Facilitating payments between users.

For example, take Google Answers. Someone posts a question and puts up a financial reward and whoever answers it gets the money.

How complicated is it to set up a service like that?

From a distance it seems simple enough: User 1 pays you and then you pay User 2.

However... What big legal hurdles do you need to deal with? What about taxes for the money you pay people? Is there a some line that, once crossed, users become employees? What about money laundering? What about refunds and dealing with fraud and abuse? Is there an easy way to deal with all of this?
Report: iPhone margins are nearly 60%
Thoughts of an admin starting to get old ...
OT:

9oliYQjP: you're one very interesting person but with a bad user name. Do you mind putting a note in your profile with a more pronouncable name? Everytime I read a comment of yours I am distracted by the machine generated name, which I somehow pronounce in my head as "Nine Olly Qiyuu Jay Pee".
It all depends on yor definition of dead. http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
nyt had a great feature analyzing the effect of the "jersey merge" last year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03traffic-t.html
Two seconds is what I learned years ago. (My guess is that I am older than most participants on HN.) In actual practice, if I am more than two seconds behind the car in front of me, some car will pull in from another lane to fill the gap. I'm lucky to keep my desired two seconds most of the time.
The irony (for me) was that I was just having this discussion with someone on HN. In it I was almost sure Apple made more net profit off iTunes because hardware margins have been so historically low. I didn't see how a company could make more off a hardware device than they did off say...software apps.

I guess the answer to that "how" question is to "be Apple" because apparently they're getting the same level of premiums they used to get off of Macs on the iPhone now. No wonder they've shifted their resources to this (and are willing to make blatant attempts to kill of the Pre even though it isn't really that much of a threat)
True but the system is based on the lie that young people today will ever get paid or paid in dollars that aren't inflated into existence.
well, that sounds basically like what the YC company tipjoy tackled, i do believe.

http://tipjoy.com/
I buy insurance knowing that I probably won't need it and hope I won't need it.
I think you are right, but still there is a discipline that openbsd uses that others might find useful. Theo gave a talk about their engineering release process that sounded scalable.
An unpaid developer normally cannot sue for copyright infringement, even when the work has not been paid for (unless the contract explicitly states that the IP rights transfer only upon payment, which few contracts do).

The problem here is that the underlying contract was not done as a work for hire. Because of this, even if the contractor had been fully paid, all the startup would have obtained as a result of the development effort would have been a license to use the work product as contemplated by the contract. Such a license would normally not have included a right to modify the work without the permission of the copyright owner (i.e., the original contractor).

Thus, the startup put itself in a horrible legal bind, not from its failure to pay as such (though this obviously inflamed the situation so as to bring on a lawsuit), but from its failure to have a work-for-hire agreement in place when it commissioned the work.

Even without an immediate lawsuit, the underlying problem would not have gone away. Imagine VCs doing their due diligence for a funding after this work had been done and discovering that a major piece of the IP used in the company's business had been done under a contract that did not give rights in that IP to the company (this would be apparent to a trained lawyer simply from examining the face of the contract). In such a case, unless the startup were able to get a release from the contractor, the startup would still face the threat of an infringement claim whenever it attempted to modify this code without the original developer's consent. Thus, without a release from that developer, funding would still have been impeded and likely blocked.

Even with the lawsuit as filed, it appears that the startup has obtained only a temporary reprieve when the judge denied the application for the preliminary injunction. That denial is based on a judge's assessment of the contractor's likelihood of success on the merits of his claims and on weighing equities of what is fair to do pending a full trial on the merits. Thus, while the company squeaked by this phase, a cloud still hangs over its future depending on what eventually happens at the time this thing comes up for a real trial. This cloud is a clear deterrent to investors putting money into such a company.

In practical terms, this scenario is mutual self-destruct for the contractor and for the startup unless they settle up, which means they likely will.
A little off topic but: Colombia as in the country? It seems the company is based off the New York area but all the names/faces look Colombian. Is the dev team located in Colombia?

Just curious since this is the first time I've heard of a "Colombian startup".
How do they capture travelers? Also, how do they convince travelers to go to a particular place?
I've though of this as a business. Find a rural place in beautiful surroundings, fit it with a bunch of high quality workstations, a fast internet connection, meeting area, lounge area and small but private sleeping quarters. Fill the fridge with good, healthy food and have someone come in and cook dinner. Breakfast and lunch is self-serve.

I'd market it as a place for get-stuff-done-retreats for entire teams (I thought of the name "CramCamp") rather than the semi-luxury-relaxed setting of traditional conference resorts.

You're in the middle of nowhere, so physical distractions are few, but in nature, so clear-your-mind/10-mins-of-privacy walks are right out the door.
Good catch, but still. If they knew Sun had a JSR waiting to leave the door that would essentially put their pet project on the map, it makes perfect sense to go with a more cutting-edge vendor who would care for it, maybe negotiating better pay, or even waiting another year before launching your own support-shop.
you could try international search

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5977

Also, google has always struggled with massive duplication of mailing lists/news groups (gmane, nabble, osdir). If there are mirrored/gateway'd lists, you could try the others.
This is Colombia as in the country. Bogota, Colombia. Alex Torrenegra is Colombian but also lives in NY. This was developed in Colombia by Colombians for the rest of the world.

I promise this will not be the last time you hear about a Colombian startup. (Disclosure: I am Colombian too)
VoloMedia Awarded the “Patent for Podcasting”
I don't want to do marketing/sales. I hate people trying to sell to me. I don't want to do it to others. Hard to find a good, non slimy, trustworthy business oriented guy to round me out.

I'd rather code full time, and talk to customers (as in support etc , not sales). This attitude + the lack of a "business" partner stops me from attempting a startup.
Currying Curry Functions in Javascript
Interesting post on implementing currying functions in javascript
Tandoori Chicken
Right, insurance isn't a scam. You buy it hoping that you'll have lost money on it. And for most people, that's the case.
Universal Studio florida orlando
Well 50% success rate isn't too bad.
Ask HN: Great Non-Hackers?
Many people have said that it's impossible to tell a great hacker from a bad one unless you're a hacker yourself (e.g., in PG's "Great Hackers").

As a hacker, however, I feel that this is equally true about non-hackers -- I can't tell the difference between great marketers/salesmen/"business people"/etc. and bad ones. And because some of these people are polished and smooth, I always feel really nervous that I'm going to be smooth-talked into working with someone who's not great.

Is there a way to figure this out?
You've been blinking all your life, I'd think it obvious that on a subconscious level you would learn to time those blinks to come at the most opportune times.
Yes. Intelligence as psychologists define it, or genius as psychologists define it (which Newton certainly had), is not a guarantee against irrationality, as cognitive scientists and behavioral economists define that.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1
Scenario. User Alice pays you $10k and poses a list of 10 questions. Many people come to respond, Alice reads the replies, but consistently approves the answer provided by Bob. As required, you would pay Bob $10k minus your commissions.

Congratulations, you have just facilitated your first money laundering operation.

The major difficulty in e-payment solutions is not technical one, it's legal.
"I don't want to do sales" really shouldn't stop you. I don't want to do sales either, and I haven't had to do much of it yet.

Not having a cofounder is a good reason not to start yet - but it's mostly a good reason to go and look for a cofounder, rather than a reason to cancel your start-up plans altogether.
Which 7?
Looks like the user must have a Paypal account.

From the Tipjoy FAQs:

Click it, and from there you can cash money out of your Tipjoy account into your PayPal account. You can also give your money to another website (a charity, maybe?), or have us turn it into an Amazon gift card for you. For legal reasons, if you're going to cash out to PayPal you'll need to tell us a bit of info about yourself (name and address), which we will keep private in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

Anyone know how they deal with the money laundering problems? And if they're using Paypal to transfer the money, how do they have smaller fees than them?
Why believe a liar that protests he "doesn't give a ____ about his sons"?

Methinks Bernie Maddoff protests too much. I expect to see more attempts to place this idea where it might be picked up and repeated as fact and thereby deflect attention from those of Madoff's children that were in business with him.
Is there a way to figure this out?

Empirically, most forms of human greatness ("expertise") are defined as RELIABLY superior performance in the defined domain. See

http://mit.edu/6.969/www/readings/expertise.pdf

for a discussion of this by scientists who literally wrote the book on the subject of expert performance. Bear in mind that some domains, notably choosing common stocks in which to invest, have no experts, that is no one who is reliably superior in performance over time.
Tricky... what I've gotten weary of over the years is people that approach too aggressively, that's a big red flag for me.

Another one is people that do their best to worm their way into your private live even though your relationship is purely business. That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to know people both privately and professionally but if they're actively trying to gain a foothold in your private affairs that would make me think twice.

Good salespeople are always in 'sales' mode, they can't really help it, whether they're talking about their holidays or the next deal, it is always the biggest thing since sliced bread to them. And in their world that's a good thing.

I've been had once really bad by some guy that approached me online and took more than a year to gain my confidence against strong skepticism but bit by bit he wore it away and then he used one of my associates to get what he wanted. We managed to reverse the whole thing but it cost us dearly and it definitely made me much more careful when strangers approach me out of the blue. Not paranoid, just more careful.
Product management on a shoestring
Sounds like it might be a good idea, however, you would have to prove cost benefits.
we'll be in a great depression soon
I was hoping to refresh the page and have it change entirely.

It didn't, and my hopes & dreams were once again crushed.
What's interesting is, I see a lot of people saying, "I don't have a very good idea."

For the record, my first swing was an awful idea -- social networking mumbo-jumbo. Half-baked, totally impossible to monetize. Four of us worked on it for about four months before the whole thing melted down and everyone but me (including my wife!) quit one at a time.

When I finally gave up and let it die, I became deeply depressed. I didn't even want to get out of bed. I felt like a total failure. But the truth was, we discovered a bunch of really important things during the total-failure startup. Those things stewed in my mind, and when the opportunity showed itself, I tried again. Now all those important things that I learned are contributing to my new company.

So, "I have a bad idea" is not much of an excuse. Take your free time and start working on it. Put up a reality distortion field and make yourself believe in it. Failing is also progress.
On the other hand, you cannot compress all messages into 140 characters.
Recently, we had to setup some buildfiles in this university project and after a while, things grew pretty weird, so we started to exchange informations about what I had done, what I thought that meant and so on. There is no way this information would be transmitted better via 28 140-character-twitter messages or something else.
In this case, a nice well-formatted email with each step in a paragraph was the best way to communicate this and it worked very well.
Anyone know how they deal with the money laundering problems?

I do not, but this is the Internet, so I can speculate wildly :)

Tipjoy seems to be focused on micropayments. Unless you are only trying to launder $5 or $10, it would take a metric fuckload of "tips" to launder any significant amount of money. I would presume (which sounds so much more highbrow than assume) that it would be simple to look to filter out and flag potential laundering schemes. Either the average amount of tip, or the average # of tips between two users would be obvious outliers.
Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research
It looks like this
http://imgur.com/EkUmj.png
on FF 3.0/Win Vista
just use S3.
Organic has no health benefits
That strikes me as an obvious and not particularly noteworthy solution.

Disclaimer: I have a Physics degree.
That's fair. I don't like doing sales either. I have a technical call with a new prospective customer this afternoon, and I'm terrified.

You need to find a business partner who thrives on this stuff. My suggestion: don't worry too much about your idea. Find a salesman partner who has experience in a field unrelated to yours, a solid network and an interesting idea.
Is This Your Brain On God?
If you every have a chance to visit fermilab, I highly recommend it. The 20-story pendulum is only one of many cool science geek things unrelated to the accelerators you can see.
Being broke from the last one? Usually spend a year or more catching up financially. Its getting harder to do this.

Regarding insurance - If I didn't have a cheap policy I kept since I was 18, a startup wouldn't even be an option - I'm uninsurable on an individual plan.
Humans 'damaging the oceans': research
As a climber, who sport[1] climbs in really popular areas such as Rumney[2] in NH, I have run across this situation and rappelled rather than lowered many times (the idea that the rappel is less strenuous on the anchor due to less friction heat).

This information is awesome, but it's alternating between "Whoa" and the eternal climber question: "Do I trust my life with this?"

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_climbing

[2]http://www.rockclimbing.com/routes/North_America/United_Stat...
I don't understand what you're getting at. Why did you emphasize "only" above? Are you trying to imply the JRuby guys are leveraging some kind of inside knowledge? You know this JSR's been in the works since early 2006, right?
Well, I see it like this. If your content stood on it's own two feet it would find it's way here on it's own. Call it the HN peer review process.

Instead you submit your own posts here, and refer to it as " one of the most interesting news agregator at this moment."

Like you don't give a shit about the community but instead think of it only as a tool for your own needs and will be gone as soon as the next most interesting agregator appears.
In reality, you can just throw away code and the debt disappears.

Technical debt is closer to this than you might think. This would be "going bankrupt" on that code. It's like having a loan secured on the value of some object. If you want to default on the loan, you lose the object, nothing more. (Although you don't lose your good credit rating as you would with real debt!)
I'm not sure this is ethical or sane. In Europe we have working time regulations and that is for a good reason.

Seems to be another attempt to justify start-up whipping tactics to cash in quick rather than build a well-backed product with staff who won't hate you.
It's a temporary warp in userspace. Text is like going backward from broadband to a 1400 baud modem. Voice communicates so much more. So that will change as the user base ages. Seen many skateboards lately?
Most useful eclipse keyboard shortcuts
What you describe (large amounts of small payments to one user) is called smurfing, and both banks and paypal have something in place to guard against it. One "benefit" of requiring Paypal is that you're offloading the responsibility of final delivery to them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smurfing_(crime)
But they have a landing page explaining what they are, and they're obviously already doing their PR push. How many eyeballs are they getting that, instead of saying "I'll have to come back and check it out when it goes live", are saying "Uh, what?" and won't go back?
Model validation should have been there from day one. Well thats what us Domain-Driven-Design advocates push.

SQLAlchemy is way more powerful and flexible. Scan the SQLAlchemy documentation for examples. Particularly storing nested structures and support for inheritance (which is broken in Django).

SQLAlchemy is basically Hibernate in Python.
I think you would be surprised. If all you have is spare time and part time availability - do it anyway - many have (I'm one of them) and some are successful (I'm just starting). What was the old saying about doing something as a hobby, out of interest, and if it turns into a business - great! The thing is to be as committed to it as a full time startup.
It was hard to read the article, as I concentrated so hard on my own blinking.
Well, if you look carefully, I try to submit content which is both HN compliant and personal development (which is what I do) compliant. Meaning I'm not just hijacking the HN momentum (if this is what you suggest).

It's not just a tool for my own needs, as I do submit what I think it would interest people and help maintain the same level of accuracy and usefulness. I use HN for my own research and this is why I call it "one of the best news agregators". I'm here talking to you, I'm not blindly shooting randomly...
You have some well thought out reasoning, but I have to respectfully disagree with a couple of points. (Obligatory IANAL.)

An unpaid developer normally cannot sue for copyright infringement, even when the work has not been paid for

Again, IANAL but I do not believe this is true. First, in America anyone can sue for just about anything even if the basis is flimsy in the extreme. So the developer could potentially sue no matter what the circumstances. Now, if he was unpaid he can sue with a real chance of winning. Even if the contract states that the IP belongs to the company, they break the contract by not paying him in the time specified by the contract, and since they broke it he can argue that it is invalid and that he therefore owns the product of his work, even if they paid for most of it. It is similar to the fact that a mortgage company can repossess even if you are down the last payment if you fail to make that payment.

As to the VC and their due dilligence, you are completely correct, but there is a caveat. Most developers (remember he has a reputation on the line as well as stock or options in the company to think about) would be quite willing to formally sign over the IP after the fact if they had been treated well. This becomes doubly true if that developer talks to his attorney and is told that the company probably has implied ownership (or at least full rights to modify) under Numbers Licensing, LLC v. bVisual USA, Inc as is pointed out in the original article.

And finally:
In practical terms, this scenario is mutual self-destruct for the contractor and for the startup unless they settle up, which means they likely will.

This is probably what he is looking for. I am guessing here, but he is probably hoping for a combination of more equity and some secured bonds. The first will give him a big (or bigger) payoff later if the company does well, and the second will give him first (or at least very early if others also hold secured bonds) shot at the scraps if the company folds.
Maybe your question is a bit too generic.

Because you're posting this in HN, I guess you're interested in startups. Then you should go to the Startup School next year.
I just had a look at news.arc and found that articles have a nokill field. I didn't see any code to integrate the jobs feature with news. I'm going to assume that's absent from the public release, and that it automatically sets the nokill flag.
Declaring a date and numerical measure for a goal so much beyond your control strikes me a little weird. Sure, it leads to productive and joyful action, so that's good. But large-scale market acceptance depends on finding an opportunity for fast growth and capitalizing on it, not (merely) on hard work or even focused work. If you are barking up the wrong tree, you will get nothing no matter how loud and long you bark.
The JSR will certainly improve JRuby's speed and simplify development, but I don't think it will affect adoption (and actually I'd say JRuby was already on the map, given that it can run Rails and handily beats Ruby 1.8 performance-wise).

JRuby's real problem is that the Ruby community is wary of anything with a J in the name that's sponsored by Sun. Hopefully this will help out with that.
Did that too :-)
Slight catch. if you suspend a rope pendulum from a horizontal string, if the string flexes at all, it will essentially act like a longer pendulum perpendicular to the string (where the string moves) than it does along the string. The result is that the pendulum's swing has a different period along either axis, and it will trace out a lissajous pattern, not a straight line in its swing. And that sort of wrecks the idea of a focault pendulum.

Oops!

Better make sure your cable is REALLY tight.
The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide universal health care like every other industrialized country on earth.

Fixed.
This is correct. They also manage the core of the OS without all the nasty package interdependencies you get with Debian.

Debian does too much. That is the issue if you ask me.
Exactly. The OP may want to look into what happened to E-Gold.
That's a little gem in there 'we design for ourselves'. If you build stuff that you yourself would not use then you're on the wrong track, because you will be your own most critical customer and when you are happy then chances are that lots of other people will also be happy with what you have created.
Seems like Vista doesn't recognize the default font and uses something else, that's not my font. On Mac and other Windows installations looks fine.

Thanks for the heads-on though :-)
A suprising benefit of time pressure at work