Why prosthetics should be beautiful - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/15/a_talk_with_graham_pullin/ <comment><USER2> I have never liked faux home building materials -- linoleum tiles made to look sort of like stone, Countertops with granite prints, and wood-patterned vinyl windows. There's just something dishonest about them that makes them aesthetically unappealing.

I'm missing a leg, and I don't think I would want a cosmesis (a shell that looks skin-like) for the same reasons. It's much less creepy to have, in my case, a black carbon fiber socket than a sorta skin-like covering. It's not trying to be something that it's not. Perhaps I'd feel different if I was missing an arm, but the quotes from the article implied similar feelings.

What interests me is what designs might emerge if the implicit requirement that a prosthetic foot look like a real foot was removed. Would it be better to have a carbon fiber heel stick out way behind where my real heel should be? Would this allow for a more efficient (note that I didn't say "natural") gait? What if the spring extended outward and up like an elf's foot? The only devices for which these rules have been relaxed are feet worn by amputee athletes (mostly runners). I suppose these rules are in place mostly due to economics; the same foot designs must be used by both those who care about looking like a normal person and those who don't. So, designers work in the space provided by the union of all restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article:

 _"I heard amputees say they sometimes didn't wear a prosthetic hand at all, because what they feared when they did wear one - one that was a very good disguise - was that moment when the people they were speaking to for the first time realized that it was artificial. Some of them said they'd actually like to get that moment over and done with at the very beginning, and would welcome a hand that was obviously not a human hand, but had other good qualities."_

I wonder if Pullin was referring to the repulsion that humans can feel towards something as it approaches a more humanistic state. This is otherwise known as the Uncanny Valley hypothesis

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley>

His assertion towards eyeglasses shortly after seems to reinforce this fact. _(edit: sorry, not fact - concept)_

I'd be keen to see how people's reactions to prosthetics would change if the need to have them look human-like was removed. Get some top industrial design talent onto it... perhaps see if someone can convince some design guys from Apple to do some pro-bono designs.

</comment><comment><USER4> For some examples of high-quality prosthetics, watch the two TED talks of Aimee Mullins:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html)

[http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_on_running....](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aimee_mullins_on_running.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> My brother in law is probably single-handedly introducing a new wave of innovation into the Japanese prosthetics market and he's doing in YC style, living on very little income and iterating quickly on new designs. His work is truly beautiful and he's already come up with one of the most remarkable socket systems to be developed in the last 50 or so years. He's been in business for less than a year.

It's really great to watch a new startup in a country not exactly known for single-founder success stories, especially outside the IT world.</comment>


Is Node.js declining already? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Is-Node-js-declining-already/answer/David-MacDonald-40?srid=hzBO&share=1 <comment><USER2> Node.js (ie server-side Javascript) will live and die with client-side Javascript.

Right now we seem to be in a client-side JS boom. New frameworks are being written, adoption is up, React and friends are getting tons of buzz, build tools like webpack or transpilers like babel are making developer lives easier, NPM is seeing tons of traffic (much of it supporting client-side development, either directly or indirectly), we're starting to routinely prerender SPAs on the server, etc., And it all runs on node.js. (Good luck writing a serious React app without some node.js processes running at some point.)

So I'd say we've yet to see peak node.js; it's still increasing in usage, and will likely do so for some time.

Now, some people made some wild claims about node.js being the BEST EVER SERVER FRAMEWORK, with super amazing webscale performance. That was nonsense and lies. Node.js was never going going to sweep the world and be the One True Framework for writing servers in, and that's becoming increasingly apparent. It's not a terrible choice, but then, neither is Rails. Or C#. Or Python. Or hell, PHP. And people are going to keep writing servers in all of those languages and frameworks.

If you listen to the hype, we went from Node.js being the BEST FOR PERFORMANCE to, I dunno, golang or something. And going from being the BEST to not even being talked about probably feels like a real decline. In the real world, Node.js went from a new and little used niche technology, to a slightly less new and very broadly used niche technology. That's not a decline at all.

<comment><USER3> Great comment, and worth noting that many technologies go through this cycle. Those old enough to remember might note that once upon a time, Java was going to "change the world". Anyone who got their start in technology after 2000 really cannot appreciate how head over heels the tech world was over Java. Fast forward to today and the concept seems inconceivable. Java, a game changer? Oh yeah, majorly.

If you stick around long enough, you see this play out over and over again. You learn not to get too worried over a lull in attention paid to your tools of choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's not the cool new thing anymore, but it's definitely not going to go away. Its killer feature is that the same code can run on the client and the server. Not a big deal for most apps, but very important for some.

Also, ES6 & ES7 make callback-heavy Javascript so much more pleasant to program in. That addresses Node's main pain point.

<comment><USER5> > Its killer feature is that the same code can run on the client and the > server.

In the deploys I've worked with, this is never actually done. How many Node.js developers actually ship the exact same code to both locations?

<comment><USER6> We do. It's great—we can have a fast first-page load time while bootstrapping additional client-side functionality and all subsequent pageloads are ridiculously fast.

This way, we are making our web server "just another client."

<comment><USER7> Any directions with this?

<comment><USER6> We use the Rendr library, which is built on Backbone: [https://github.com/rendrjs/rendr](https://github.com/rendrjs/rendr)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In short, NO... Here's the proof:

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs)

<comment><USER9> PHP, on the other hand, seems to have been in a decline which has finally levelled out.

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%2C%20php&cmpt...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%2C%20php&cmpt=q&tz=)

Note that this is on the same scale as node, which is no longer visible hugging the x-axis...

<comment><USER8> Well, not really a fair comparison... Javascript is also going down...

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=php%2C%20javascript&...](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=php%2C%20javascript&cmpt=q&tz=)

But like node, laravel is also _on fire_...

[https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%2C%20laravel](https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%2C%20laravel)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like to use python, flask, gunicorn, and nginx for back end apis.

Now that I've been doing so much front end javascript programming, I'm looking into Node just because I'm way less efficient at writing python and more efficient at writing javascript nowadays.

At least that's my personal decision criteria.

</comment><comment><USER11> Nodejs is an excellent tool for front-end integration testing and asset pipelines that depend on js(LESS,coffeescript,babel and co). On the other, on the server, you can read many stories of startup that started with NodeJs and ended up with Go.

NodeJs doesn't have any concurrency capability. Sure you can fork, but then you need a message queue for interprocess communication. And frankly while javascript's getting better, some people are a bit sick of dynamically typed languages and prefer static typed languages.

How many people can go read a large JS source file and make sense of what is happening quickly? not a lot, in comparison, Go is easy to read,there is no "ninja trick" or metaprogramming stunts that makes code unreadable.

<comment><USER12> > How many people can go read a large JS source file and make sense of what is > happening quickly? not a lot, in comparison, Go is easy to read,there is no > "ninja trick" or metaprogramming stunts that makes code unreadable.

If written correctly, neither of those questions should be an issue.

1) JS devs shouldn't have "large" JavaScript source files, like most good programs, they should be broken into small, concise pieces.

2) JS devs shouldn't use "ninja tricks" or other BS, they should write for the next person that reads the code, again, like any language.

Yes, a lot of people still write bad JavaScript, but that is on them, not the language. It is pretty simple to write bery readable JavaScript if you so choose.

<comment><USER13> The language and the environment are certainly at fault to a high degree due to the lack of standards.

1) Breaking JS up into small files actually makes it less readable because then you have to guess at the context that the JS is running in. Without static typing, it's impossible to reason about certain blocks of code without going to find blocks of code that exist in other files and so on...

2) JS devs have to use ninja tricks because without a strong standard library they have to keep reinventing the wheels that should have been included.

There is _no standard_ for how to write readable Javascript and there is too much flexibility. Isaacs, of Node.js fame, writes horribly unreadable code IMO due to the fact that he does not use semi-colons and he tends to put punctuation on the left. However, he swears by the fact that it's more readable...to him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My favorite line is the last line.

 _A week is a long time in JavaScript._

</comment><comment><USER15> Could someone unpack and explain this answer snippet a bit?

        I personally do not believe that Node is a viable platform for building
        multi-user server logic. Node is great for asynchronicity, but that
        shouldn't be confused with concurrency* which is really what you want in
        those scenarios (I can write a list of things Node doesn't do well for
        building safe backend systems, but that's one example).

        The Node platform is very good for single-user applications (games, web
        apps, command line tools, "browserified" apps, Node+browser containers),
        but I think a lot of people will come to regret using it for bigger
        back-ends.

A company I work with occasionally is building a backend and client system in node+mongo, and I wonder if it is a good idea. The backend will be an app catalog of sorts, while the client will run these apps, which will animate stuff in a browser.

I've read lots of warnings about mongo, and now this. I'm torn about these choices, I've tried and liked them, but am a bit out of my element as primarily a python/c developer.

<comment><USER16> These articles on Node unpack the point to some extent:

\- [http://stackoverflow.com/q/22644328/417194](http://stackoverflow.com/q/22644328/417194)

\- [http://www.future-processing.pl/blog/on-problems-with- thread...](http://www.future-processing.pl/blog/on-problems-with-threads-in- node-js/)

\- [http://web.archive.org/web/20120911094357/http://dev.hasenj....](http://web.archive.org/web/20120911094357/http://dev.hasenj.org/post/31042963934/nodejs- hate)

\- [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4495101)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Node.JS's future is intricately tied to JavaScript the language itself and IMO we are still in the early days of Node.JS. The success of a language isn't about excelling individually at expressiveness, type-safety, widespread distribution, performance, tooling or ease-of-use; but about finding that sweet spot. JS is that compromise.

I'll just list the strengths of Node and JS in general, in no particular order:

\- JavaScript was called "Java"Script for marketing. But the funny thing is that it has become the true "Write Once, Run Anywhere" alternative to Java. Including phones without installing additional software. And projects like React Native will take JS outside the browser into native apps.

\- JS has a monopoly in the browser. To build any web-app, you/team need to know JavaScript anyway. Having to use only one language is an advantage for many companies. For larger IT companies, this also dramatically cuts down their training expenses.

\- Very active community, perhaps the most active of any language ecosystem. What's remarkable is that the key people in standards and implementation bodies aren't operating on mailing lists alone, but work closely with product teams in their own companies and interact with the rest of the (very large) community through forums and social media. This has resulted in excellent prioritization of features and an active feedback loop. Also, peaking at a time when collaborating coding (GitHub) matured helped. (1)

\- NPM and Packages. There's a package for everything. We often hear people complaining about hundreds of npm packages downloaded per install. That's also the strength of NPM. Packages range from monolithic to tiny 20-line functions. The fine grained granularity of packages makes it a simple, anytime-revocable decision.

\- JS is a very expressive language like most dynamic languages are, but the years of performance wars by browser vendors have given it a significant lead.

\- Tooling is excellent. There even plenty of academic-style research going on, like FaceBook's Flow.

\- You could compile other languages down to JS. You can compile Doom to JS and play it inside a browser. (However, JS will retain that native-support advantage.)

\- ECMAScript 2015 fixes the big issues with JS. We can treat it like an entirely new language, and in time we can forget the good parts/bad parts discussion.

\- JS isn't trying to shoehorn performance into its expressive style. If you're using JS for performance critical work, you will be forced to use data- structures specifically designed for performance. If you need to operate at native-code levels of performance, you'd have to write code differently from the usual expressive and dynamic style. That's a fine compromise, it doesn't have to tread over the neither-here-nor-there territory. Also, pragmatic parallelism is coming ([https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the- path-to-p...](https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2015/02/26/the-path-to- parallel-javascript/)).

And perhaps the most important one: Wikipedia took off because it made collaboratively editing documents easy and doable with just the browser. If it required downloading and installing additional tools, it may have never achieved the same success. Now, the future will have more people who know programming than ever before. Like writing articles, they might build apps together. The true USP of JS isn't that it runs everywhere, but that browser vendors have shipped billions of debuggers.

(1) Not saying other languages don't have vibrant, active communities.

</comment><comment><USER18> You see waves of technology adoption based a lot on language barriers. We're seeing this with Larval right now in India/SE-Asia, we've seen it with VB6, then .NET into Russia/South-America, and we're just starting to see node.js picking up in China.

People forget, documentation needs to be written, interpreted, then passed down through different channels, like programming communities, schools, person 2 person. This can take 4 years+. As soon as English speakers have mastered it, China is just starting to for example.

Node is here to stay, and it's already at a point with decent enterprise adoption, meaning it's going to take a lot of money and time to reverse the trend.

</comment><comment><USER19> Remember when rails was a fad and no one was going to use it after the hype died down and nodejs became king? Oh those "hipsters"!!!

</comment><comment><USER20> Worth noting this was not the most voted answer. [http://www.quora.com/Is- Node-js-declining-already](http://www.quora.com/Is-Node-js-declining-already)

</comment><comment><USER21> Its nice to see the rise and inevitable fall of languages. It just shows how its good to use the fundamental pr stable languages over the hip ones. The hips ones cause you to pick up, put down, rinse and repeat. The fundamentals only build on top of experience. So I am happy to build up rather than rinse and repeat just because I already have to keep up with the technology space.

<comment><USER22> Absolutely. I sat out the Ruby/Rails hype cycle and am none the worse for it. Life is too short to waste time learning ephemeral tech like Ruby, Node.js, or MongoDB. When considering whether to learn a new language or platform, I ask myself, how long have people been using this, and how long will people likely continue to use it? As a result, I know C, Common Lisp/Elisp, UNIX/POSIX, and a relational database or two very, very well. I suspect I'd be much less happy if I had instead spent time learning how to build single-threaded JavaScript web apps that rely, in 2015, on cooperative multitasking, let alone doing so with other hipster programmers who actually think it's a good idea.

<comment><USER23> I never bothered learning a newfangled, flavor-of-the-week language like C. As a result, I'm an expert in COBOL and Fortran. I suspect I'm much happier not knowing C.

<comment><USER22> You know, you're right; there's no such thing as an ephemeral language or platform. Why, look at all new projects started every day in QBasic, Tcl, or Turbo Pascal.

I'm sure people will be building stuff with Ruby forty years from now.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub and Export Controls – GitHub Help - <AUTHOR> https://help.github.com/en/articles/github-and-export-controls <comment><AUTHOR> Now everyone uses github should observe the laws of US.</comment>


Amazon Inc. Paid Zero in Federal Taxes in 2017, Gets $789M Tax Windfall - <AUTHOR> https://itep.org/amazon-inc-paid-zero-in-federal-taxes-in-2017-gets-789-million-windfall-from-new-tax-law/ <comment><USER2> That's awesome. So Amazon had some back taxes due and by waiting until the new lower rate kicked in, they got to pay the lower rate rather than the old higher rate. Must have some good accountants and negotiators.</comment>


PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word "tardigrade" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ArchieMcPhee/status/1304434532293046272 <comment><AUTHOR> Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter.

As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim _neither_ of these companies have actually solved scale. If they can not properly deal with the issues that arise of scale, they haven't solved it at all. They might be reaping the benefits and dumping the issues on others but they haven't solved anything else at all.

[0] [https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1304564003859918849](https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1304564003859918849)

[1] [https://home.treasury.gov/news/press- releases/sm849](https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm849)

<comment><USER2> PayPal gets a list of banned strings from the Office of Foreign Asset controls.

If any match those strings it's flagged for a review.

This is more or less legally required for any company that moves money in the United States of America. You will probably find the same issues with the same terms on any other banking for financial body.

Technically, these aren't being blocked. They're being audited. The payments will still go through. The way this is taking place is following very specific legally "known good" pathways - so that when paypal does accidentally let a payment through to a sanctioned entity they are able to argue that they took every available precaution and should not have to pay the $250k per transaction fine.

The last time PayPal had to pay these fines - for example - it was ~$7m. That's not including legal fees. [https://fcpablog.com/2015/03/27/ofac-fines- paypal-77-million...](https://fcpablog.com/2015/03/27/ofac-fines- paypal-77-million-for-486-sanctions-violations/)

<comment><AUTHOR> And the strings from this list have to be matched indiscriminately against everything? Names of account holders, text in the reference field of a transaction (if such a thing exists in the US), whatever?

<comment><USER3> I've had an order of "Aleppo pepper" blocked from a small online retailer because it contained the word "Aleppo".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_pepper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_pepper)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Same for the word "Bitcoin". If you try to send something with this word to somebody it will block their and your account. For me this is an (kamikaze) attack vector.

<comment><USER5> I mean, why stop at just "Bitcoin". Might as well put a bunch of the words in there to increase your chances (eg. iran, nuclear, uranium enrichment, north korea, isis etc.), kind of like [https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=tiananm...](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-e&q=tiananmen+square+copypasta)

<comment><USER6> Or just use "Cuba" somewher. It will have more effect than the rest all combined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I work europe based ecommerce company. paypal was blocking orders for any product that had "cuba" as pat of the name/description due to us cuban sanctions. although after talking with account manager, they have removed this filter for us.

<comment><USER8> Based on my experiences helping a client with Paypal, even though we had written approval from one of their executives in Paypal risk management, we got shut down weeks later for violating the thing we explicitly got permission for.

If I were you, I would expect something to trigger a blockage again (and ultimately decide, like many companies, that Paypal just isn't reliable).

<comment><USER7> that's proven by all other problems we have working with. but you cannot simply turn it off since it has huge payment share vs other payment methods

<comment><USER6> Just curious, why is allowing cuba in the description so important to you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Farther down the thread:

      A few people mentioned OFAC sanctions, so I investigated a bit more. In Dec 2019, US Dept of Treasury sanctioned companies linked to Serbian arms dealer Slobodan Tesic, including Cyprus-based Tardigrade Ltd. So PayPal flags tardigrade ornaments by mistake.

<comment><USER10> Part of this is no doubt Paypal's fault, but part of it is also the fault of the US's over-the-top trade sanctions laws. The penalties for getting it wrong are so severe, it creates a strong incentive for companies to err on the side of caution even when doing so produces idiotic outcomes like this one.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it has to do with err on the side of caution. I don't think PayPal has the technology to implement better blocking.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that if you make a false negative error, there is the risk of severe legal sanctions, if you make a false positive error, there are zero negative legal consequences. Hence the law encourages everyone to prefer false positive errors to false negative errors, and this is the result. If the legal incentives were different, the outcome would be different.

The law could provide an efficient recourse in case of false positives – e.g. a legislated right to appeal, legislated SLAs for considering appeals (and penalties for failing to meet them), indemnification for the provider if they grant an appeal in good faith, an expedited process for judicial review of denied appeals, etc – but the law doesn't, and since there is no incentive for an efficient recourse, nobody provides one

<comment><USER11> I understand the legal issue for PayPal, but then they got really lucky in this case. Tardigrade isn't really a widely used word, so just blocking the word completely is "fine", but what if the arms dealer in question operated under the name "Arts and crafts ltd"? Would PayPal have used another blocking system?

I don't blame PayPal for their reaction, but I also doubt that they actually have better solutions than keyword blocking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I forgot what happened once to my PayPal account but I remember calling them because I knew the issue I had couldn't be resolved over the phone. The person on the other end had a canned response to my problem that didn't answer why my account was the way it was. I just remember saying that I wanted to buy things, I have money to spend, why do you not want me to spend money with your service. Brief pause and then she said my account would be active again in a few minutes.

Don't even get me started on eBay. Support is non-existent for my issue so I had to lie in a different support request to get my issue looked at. Even then what they need me to verify transactions on my account is impossible.

</comment><comment><USER13> The solution paypal gave "don't use word tardigrade" is wrong from product point of view

<comment><USER14> paypal considers that a better solution than the alternative one "don't use paypal"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The obvious workaround is to move from edges to facets.

Instead of Tardigrade (A) shipping arms to $TERRORISTS (B) and (B) sending money to (A) by paypal in a bilateral pattern AB, they should move to the next topological level.

A ships arms to $EMBARGOED_PARTY (B), (B) sends money to $FREEDOM_FIGHTERS (C), and (C) sends drugs with street value to (A), making a triangular pattern ABC.

Extension to tetrahedral trade is left as an exercise for the reader.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's some context: [https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/n7wg3w/paypal- tardigr...](https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/n7wg3w/paypal-tardigrade- error)

Likely not due to the Scunthorpe problem like one might expect, but due to an arms dealer having sold weapons through a shell company named Tardigrade.

<comment><USER17> Non Amp - [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wg3w/paypal- tardigrade-...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/n7wg3w/paypal-tardigrade- error)

<comment><USER18> Non-Vice: [https://www.geekwire.com/2020/weird-seattle-retailer- archie-...](https://www.geekwire.com/2020/weird-seattle-retailer-archie- mcphee-hit-even-weirder-paypal-security-glitch/)

<comment><USER19> What's wrong with Vice?

<comment><USER20> There's many things wrong with Vice. In addition to the story in the sibling comment, they have a consistent track record of misrepresenting their reporting to sources, heavily editing interview responses to change the meaning of what the interviewee said, and in at least one case I directly witnessed inventing the entire content of an interview that never happened and publishing it. I would simply consider anything they write at least misrepresented and possibly entirely fictional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You have to thank the OFAC regulations for that - they have created issues for both businesses and customers in the name of political goals that don't have any relation to them.

</comment><comment><USER22> GDPR has a separate, less-known article that bans fully automated decision making without an appeals process: [https://gdpr- info.eu/art-22-gdpr/](https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/)

It's unlikely you'll be able to get Paypal to actually comply with it, but going through a path that will hit someone familiar with GDPR and mentioning this article, and escalating via the DPA, is probably the most promising option

Obviously doesn't help if you need something done quickly, because especially if you need to get the DPA involved, this process will take months.

<comment><USER23> That's actually a good (if slow) solution, given that payment processing is important enough to hit the filter (significant recourse or something).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Don't use Paypal, or you risk randomly losing your money.

<comment><USER25> Pretty much. I'll refer to something that happened to me a few years back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783724](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18783724)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This must be rough for the band "Tartigrade Inferno"..

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm246J_436dbUOIHpra7J8A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm246J_436dbUOIHpra7J8A)

</comment><comment><USER27> Thanks to PayPal I just learned a lot about Tardigrades. Interesting creatures.

<comment><USER28> Unpopular opinion but I think we have a civic responsibility to put them on probes and crash them into every planet in the solar system. Those cute little water bears are nature's survivors.

<comment><USER29> Why specifically a civic responsibility?

<comment><USER28> There's probably a better word but it resonates with some people.

The desire to preserve other planets for the remote chance that there's life there and we can study it before turning up anyway and ruining things is misguided. We are the only known life in the universe, it's incredibly irresponsible to not propagate such things (just in case)

<comment><USER30> Unless we end up killing life that already exists there.

<comment><USER31> The aliens can make a movie about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Based on my experience as a developer and user I can't understand how PayPal got so big and ubiquitous.

I had the worst experience ever in trying to set up our recurring billing system with them, wasting several days of work, to the point that I simply gave up, switched to Stripe, and got everything up and running, in production, in hours.

Even as a consumer I had a terrible experience when trying to send money abroad, for my rent, with Xoom, a PayPal service. They initially took the money from my PayPal account, told me that the money was on its way to the recipient, only to block it some days later for non specified reasons (refunded in my account). On top of that, I lost the option to use my PayPal account to send money, for what appeared to be a technical issue. Even if the system appeared to give me the option to use my PayPal account as a source of funds, telling me that the accounts were indeed connected, then when actually sending the money the option disappeared.

To solve the issue I called Xoom, they told me that there was no way of reconnecting my account and that I had to contact PayPal. So I did and they told me that they couldn't do anything and that I had to contact Xoom. After few exchanges back and forth like these, I simply asked to close my Xoom account so I could open a new one and restore the link between my Xoom and PayPal accounts, but they told me that that was not possible and that to cancel Xoom I had to cancel also PayPal.

So I gave up, used another service and got my money to my recipient.

<comment><USER33> I'm not from the US and to me PayPal was always only a way to avoid filling in credit cards details on (random) websites.

it always feels a bit weird to see people elsewhere rely on it for much more.

<comment><USER34> >I'm not from the US and to me PayPal was always only a way to avoid filling in credit cards details on (random) websites.

And this is the answer.

Paypal's existence comes down to the fact that they are the sole "legitimate" vector into the US financial system for a vast majority of the rest of the world. Because that's such a massive financial incentive, they can basically treat users however they wish and get away with it.

<comment><USER35> Brewing up space for that next startup who respects their users and works in the same marketplace ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So I guess it's nice to have an alternative payment method like cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER37> Such arbitrary prohibition is caused by "Know Your Customer" regulations. And it is anything but.

Clear indication for regulatory audit, since the methodology is at fault here.

</comment><comment><USER38> The financial reforms following 9-11, introduced reporting requirements. This could be under this umbrella? One example is suspicious deposits must be reported by those in the financial services industry to the federal government. Once reported your broker is prohibited by law from informing you of the report. We lost a lot of financial freedom following 911. Paypal is just following US law.

</comment><comment><USER39> Anyone care to guess as to why? At face value it seems like a very odd word to censor, I have absolutely no clue what the motivation might be.

<comment><USER27> cause it contains (starts with) "tard"

<comment><USER29> What would be wrong with 'tard'?

<comment><USER40> It's a shortened version of the slur "retard".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Poor little fellas.

</comment><comment><USER42> I had a horrible experience with PayPal earlier this year. I needed to send $500 to an individual buying our house, they were paying cash and on such a tight timeline for closing that the closing docs were written up before they got back their inspection report and asked for an allowance.

Paypal kept blocking the transaction even though it was just a simple person to person transfer. I was on chat with their support for nearly an hour. The person kept describing some black box of a security system that, for security purposes, no one manages or can see why transactions get flagged. I asked multiple times to speak to a manager or someone on the security team and was told consistently that managers won't have more info and there literally isn't a security team...

Needless to say I haven't used them since and will do everything I can to avoid it. I have no problem if a flag is errantly raised on a normal transaction, but to say they literally don't have a security team is mind boggling.

<comment><USER43> NO security team?!

So they literally admitted that they don't have anyone actively monitoring transactions? Working to watch for fraud? Theft? Hacking?

Wow, I may stop using them as well.

<comment><USER43> All I can say, to all the comments, is "whoosh".

<comment><USER44> Communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness.

— [https://xkcd.com/169/](https://xkcd.com/169/)

<comment><USER43> Hey, great info. Unfortunately, you assert several things with your statement, which really are not true.

Try again? Do you have a better jab?

Maybe one that doesn't rely upon a comic, as your main argument?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py 'this is an arbitrary + stupid mistake by a company known for drawing lines in the sand over stupid rules' is the _less_ scary answer here

we know tardigrades can travel through space. what if the aliens are _already here_

tardigrades founded paypal to demoralize us with arbitrary + stupid rules, and their only weakness is the streisand effect

<comment><USER45> The only thing that would improve this comment is an embedded image of a tardigrade. Mods?

<comment><USER46> an upvote to you my good sir

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So this "internal security system" takes over the company even if they don't want this. This is so wrong I don't even know where to start.

<comment><USER48> It's a trade sanctions issue. PayPal could end up in _deep shit_ with the Treasury Department if they let their front-line support techs override an OFAC match.

There is almost certainly a way to handle this, but it involves talking to PayPal's legal department, and it will take time.

<comment><USER49> OFAC match? The entities aren't matching just the product. It's like blocking someone from buying food at Joe's Cuban Resturaunt in Miami. Not what OFAC actually requires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> why is paypal and other payment processors getting caught out with this braindead text filter stuff? slam a grep somewhere instead of real effort?

</comment><comment><USER51> Wait until they ban you for life for a similarly random reason, then tell you "it cannot be appealed" lol.

</comment><comment><USER52> I bet the folks at tardigrade.io are not happy.

</comment><comment><USER53> I hope the EU will come up with a central bank backed alternative soon.

<comment><USER54> The whole problem with PayPal is exactly that it isn't a bank so they can get away with all kinds of stuff a bank cannot. I doubt a bank backed competitor could survive against a business that can just lock an account with money in it and never pay them back. Not really a level playing field.

<comment><USER53> It's really hard to identify sarcasm on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Duplicate submission from several hours ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24445174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24445174)

<comment><AUTHOR> I check for popular sources (Quanta Magazine, Nautilus, Ars Technica, ...) but Twitter threads I usually just submit - if it's not someone super-duper well- known or popular here on HN. Foone's latest shenanigans would warrant a check for earlier submissions for example. My apologies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> With "tard" you can block any Spaniard or Latin American with any transaction setting the time after the afternoon...</comment>


The viral spread of my privacy check app for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rabidgremlin.com/2010/06/01/the-viral-spread-of-my-privacy-check-app-for-facebook/

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops looks like all the traffic blew up my blog. lol.</comment>


Ask HN: What will a Facebook empire look like? - <AUTHOR>

So there's been speculation about FB possibly going into search in the future- I feel a bit dubious about that, I don't quite understand what social search will look like- but I'm pretty sure that FB already is a nascent Google, in the sense that Google has its hands in everything. It does make sense- Google perfected search engines, at least for now, search engines are invaluable to navigating the internet, ergo Google mastered a large degree of the net experience.
Facebook, on the other hand, is coming in with a 'perfected' social network, the biggest in the world. So how will they use that to create an empire beyond social networking? <comment><USER2> Search would probably be based on likes and submissions by people in your friends group.

Personally, I think Facebook has peaked and is headed downward, so hopefully we don't have to find out what the Facebook empire would look like.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Looks like we've just seen the first act of imperialism, the first shots across Google's bow everybody!</comment>


Ask YC: Microsoft Software Licensing for consulting? - <AUTHOR>

I've been consulting for a few years and always used the company's licenses for work purposes.
Now I'm on my own and need legit licenses for VS.NET and SQL Server.
Basically I'm finding I either have got MSDN ($1,200) or Empower ($375/year for 2 years).  Technet is eval only and Action Pack doesn't have VS.NET.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?  I think I'm going to go with the Empower for a couple years and then hopefully one of my side projects will have taken off so I won't have to sweat the $$$ :)
PS: and for those "VIM FTW" or whatever, please don't bother, I dual boot like the rest of you, but Uncle Bill pays the bills really well while I work on other stuff. <comment><USER2> > Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Uncle Bill only pays the bills if you're a paid-up member of the fan club. This is a cost that you've been externalising. So, now would be a good time to re-evaluate open source alternatives. You can decrease your costs and increase your margins. You can also migrate legacy applications and data to more contemporary systems. This brings considerable value to clients.

<comment><AUTHOR> My clients have already sunk the cost of MSFT, Oracle and SAP in their enterprise. I am not in the position to push them either way.

Plus, like a good handyman, I have lots of tools in my toolbox :)</comment></comment>


Comments on Comments on Zeldman's XHTML WTF - <AUTHOR> http://stoneship.org/journal/2009/comments-on-comments-on-zeldmans-xhtml-wtf/

<comment><USER2> To be fair, while the people he quotes are nutters, the overall thread isn't totally terrible.

Most of the complaints seem to be from people with some kind of OCD-style distaste for non-XML tag languages because they view them as sloppy, no matter how well specified.

<comment><USER3> I've been following Zeldman for 10 years now, and I got on the standards bandwagon early (IE4/NS4-era). It's funny because the whole standards movement was born out the "Best viewed in browser X", font tag soup, 10-level deep table insanity of the late 90s.

However some time around 2002, 2003 what started out as a very pragmatic movement, slowly started to become a religion for a small set of web designers who became increasingly focused on the minutiae of markup. To these people XHTML 2.0 has some sort of mythic status as prophet and savior of the web.

Actually XHTML 2.0 is pretty cool, but with no vendor buy-in it's been dead in the water for forever... a w3c recommendation does not a standard make. Having been through the whole standards gauntlet before, I really don't give two rats titties about XHTML2 or HTML5, although I'd be happy for either to be viable before I retire from web development. I'm not gonna hold my breath though, too much work right _now_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is a comment here a Comment on Comments on Comments on Zeldman's XHTML WTF?</comment>