We Are All Confident Idiots - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/confident-idiots-92793/ <comment><USER2> I think if you're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble admitting things you don't know.

Here's what I really hate though. When you are around _multiple_ people who are the type to claim knowledge about things they truly have no idea about.

For example in social situations or work situations and you have multiple of these types around. When a conversation comes up and the knowledge of the people involved is put to the test. Maybe your boss is asking who knows how to perform a certain task, or who has experience with certain hardware or software, etc. Or maybe a friend is asking what is the best TV they should buy, etc. There's the people who claim to know about topics XYZ when they really don't, and you, naturally, admit that you don't know. But you might still be the most knowledgeable person about the general topic, and best candidate to offer advice or take on said task. Doesn't matter, you get labeled as the uninformed person while the "idiot" who claims to know everything about XYZ appears to be knowledgable expert. And worst case scenario is when your boss, co-workers, friends, etc. are dumb enough not to catch it.

<comment><USER3> > _I think if you 're truly (1) confident about your knowledge or mastery of a > particular topic and (2) actually are knowledgeable, you don't have trouble > admitting things you don't know._

I don't think that's true in practice. For proof, just watch any academic debate, ever.

<comment><USER4> The parent comment is stating a premise as a conclusion. Not having trouble admitting when you don't know something or understand something very well is actually a third attribute (commonly called humility), not the result of the first two. If more people focused on having it as an attribute then the scenario that the parent comment mentioned (and similar scenarios -- such as disappointing YouTube comments?) would be much rarer in occurrence.

In fact, failing to have the third attribute affects the other two. Your confidence will quickly become overconfidence or pure hubris when faced with something you don't know much about. Also, in relationship to the second attribute, it is hard to convince yourself that you are _not_ actually knowledgeable of something if you are not humble enough to consider that possibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance. I'm not even sure if they are even aware of their lack of knowledge, it is as if they discovered this lump of meat in their skull that emits random verbiage and they assume this must be truth. Like a little tv in their head, power up and go.

So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!

<comment><USER6> Everyone is guilty of this. You, me, and everyone else on earth. Ignorance of your own ignorance is what buoys overconfidence in the first place.

From the article:

"The American author and aphorist William Feather once wrote that being educated means "being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't." As it turns out, this simple ideal is extremely hard to achieve. Although what we know is often perceptible to us, even the broad outlines of what we don't know are all too often completely invisible. To a great degree, we fail to recognize the frequency and scope of our ignorance."

<comment><USER7> Not to the same degree. I made a choice nearly 2 decades ago to say 'I don't know' more often - I was doing on-site networking and tech support for a living, and I was tired of trying to produce on-the-spot explanations for why computers were misbehaving in order to soothe clients, so I stopped doing it. This led to some pushback at first - clients would say 'well what I am I paying you for if you don't know?!' and suchlike, but by explaining that I had a diagnostic process and a fallback position if it didn't work (provide a replacement for a piece of hardware or back up and reinstall the OS or whatever), I could usually get people to agree that an ounce of patience was preferable to a pound of bullshit. This turned out to be a good strategy and I adopted it as a habit in other parts of life, makinh conversation much easier and more interesting - eg if I met someone interesting at a party, instead of trying to maintain intellectual parity I'd say 'I'm ignorant of [your field], could you explain [some basic principle]?' and so on. At the same time I developed a habit of trying to fact-check everything before making positive statements, or if I was conversing in person, citing my sources or qualifying my remarks.

This isn't to say I'm immune to ignorance, as I have assumptions and misapprehensions like everyone else, not to mention being forgetful, so I have approximate knowledge of many things.* But assuming it as the default in both personal learning and social contexts I've saved myself an awful lot of grief. Unfortunately this sometimes leads to equally fallacious overestimates of general competence, which is also part of the Dunning-Krueger effect :-/

* with apologies to Pendleton Ward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "As You Like It" by William Shakespeare

Act 5, Scene 1:

 _[...]The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool[...]_

I try to keep that quote in mind at all times. I believe it holds a great deal of wisdom, especially for me. For I am loud and opinionated. But I still fail when I need it most, at times when I am surrounded by (people who IMHO are extreme) idiots.

<comment><USER9> This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect[1], the cognitive bias that unskilled individuals overestimate their ability and skilled individuals underestimate it.

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in two principal ways: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate, while highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate. In unskilled individuals, this bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment><USER10> I swear this is HN's favourite _bias_ to bring up on any topic relating to intelligence and aptitude.

<comment><USER11> I think the Dunning Kruger effect has been a meme/cultural/conceptual construct long enough (like the measurement of intelligence) that we need to test for a Reverse Dunning Kruger effect, where knowledge of the Dunning Kruger Effect correlates with bias in self evaluation.

<comment><USER12> Knowing about the Dunning Kruger effect makes me more inclined to ask other people how good I am at something instead of relying on my own opinion. Which I think would make my evaluation more accurate.

<comment><USER13> or it might make you more selective about who you ask for feedback?

<comment><USER14> would this be a meta-Dunning-Kruger effect? Chosing to ask only people who you know would give you positive feedback?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I usually accredit the evolution attribution problem to the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's a catchy line, it implies that the better you are the more likely you are to survive, which is kinda true, but leads to the mistaken agency issue. It has the additional benefit of aligning with the ethic of hard work (ie. do better to survive) that we also try to teach kids, which I think is one of the reasons it persists as a meme.

The problem is that "death of the weakest" is a much better way of describing it - although possibly not so PC to teach in the classroom. The reason why people think Cheetahs evolved to be fast is because they equate it with the ethic of hard work, rather than the real reason - slow cheetahs don't eat and therefore die before breeding, fast cheetahs eat and get to breed.

Without meaning to start yet another internet debate/flamewar about evolution, I often wonder whether the strong protestant work ethic in the US is also the reason why evolution is so poorly understood there. Because "death to the weakest" involves no agency, no self-improvement or hard work.

EDIT: Just to avoid to confusion (as there seems to be some!), I'm _not_ talking about the mechanism of evolution, purely the actual phrase "survival" and what it means to people when it's mentioned, the implication of agency that goes along with the word.

<comment><USER16> It is not just a spin? "survival of the fittest" is exactly the same as "death to the weakest".

"survival of the fittest" = "not survival of the not-fit"

And also "fit" it is not the same as "strong"

<comment><USER15> Yes it is spin, but not _just_ spin. "Survive" often implies some sort of agency, that there is some sort of struggle that was overcome and the organism is still alive. We _teach_ survival skills. Whereas if you drop some antibiotics on a bacteria culture, there is no struggle, the bacteria that aren't already resistant just die. That's why I think the inverted phrasing is clearer in meaning (although yes I meant "weakest fit / not fit").

<comment><USER16> There isnt a struggle?. Do the non-resistant bacteria "try" to survive and fail, then die? or it "just die"?

The inverted phrase will be a PR disaster for Darwin ;)

<comment><USER15> My point was that the resistant bacteria didn't suddenly evolve the resistance _because_ the antibiotics were placed in the tray, they were already resistant to begin with. Therefore they didn't "struggle" to become anything, they already had the fit attributes for the situation. Hence why I say survival is a poor word choice as it implies struggle. Death of the non-fit on the other hand, has no such implication.

Obviously this is all very black and white edge cases and most of the time we're not talking about absolute death or survival, but decline or success of certain attributes within a given environment.

And yes, it probably is a terrible way of phrasing evolution from a PR standpoint ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors, and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. "

Yes, and an informed mind is the same, only all the junk is "lined" up to agree with whatever the prevailing wisdom is.

People don't operate on facts. They operate on feelings, flimsly allegories, metaphors, and half-baked truths. This isn't a bug; it's a feature. It allows us to walk into a room we've never visited before, use a chair, and order from a menu without having to spend time verifying a lot of details. The brain is emotional and always wildly guessing and generalizing about things, no matter who we are or what we do.

People wonder why prejudice and stereotyping hasn't gone away in society. Well heck, it's never going away until you replace people with robots. I was attacked by a clown as a kid, I hate and fear clowns. You saw your mom shrink from a tall person, you are afraid of tall people. That's how the brain works, and it's how we're able to function.

At best we learn to deliberately struggle with this. It's never going to go away -- at least while we're still human.

</comment><comment><USER18> Very well written article. Very amusing commentary threads.

But let me suggest something that I have tried. In one of my most intense coding periods in my career, I kept a log of the bugs that I created and had to fix. My bug rate declined measurably. (This is one of the old notebooks that i dearly wish I kept--was left at that job when I moved on.)

There is a relevant quote that I can't locate from someone famous who said that he would keep a list of his mistakes in his wallet and refer to it from time to time. A boss of mine who was adventurous about experimenting with new technology said "I don't know very much about it, but I do know 50 ways that _wont 't_ work". This has led me to asking someone who claims to be an expert "Tell me three (or five) things that won't work" in their field of expertise.

The advice from the article _For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil's advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect_ seems spot on.

<comment><USER19> A coaching tip I always give to developers: you don't know enough about a topic if you can only think of one way to solve a problem. If you only know one way to do it, how do you know it's not the worst one?

Take the time to sit back and enumerate a few ways of solving the problem and figure out which one's best in this situation. Why are you rejecting those other solutions? Are you sure those reasons are sound? Are you sure they don't apply equally to the solution you've selected?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is anecdotal, but as far as I have seen in the Marine Corps, there is a bit of knowledge that is passed down that confidence makes you right, and that you need to be absolutely confident if you make an observation that goes against what a higher up is doing.

Of course this is bad logic (and likely part of why Marines get a bad rep for often being stupid), but there is a bit of wisdom in there - confidence makes things more likely to happen your way, and people also like confidence more than uncertainty. For the Marine Corps, such a bad adage is useful since uncertainty is bad, and it often is better to choose an action, even if sub- optimal, than do nothing at all.

<comment><USER21> I imagine confidence & morale can, in their line of work, tip the scales and make something impossible, eminently possible.

The small troupe of British soldiers who recently repelled a militant attack with only bayonets comes to mind. Outnumbered, outgunned, the subject of an ambush, it seems to me that a combination of resolve and confidence was the deciding factor.

<comment><USER22> Morale is incredibly important in any type of effort. Think about how productive you are working on something that excites you vs grinding for dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "epic housing bubble stoked by the machinations of financiers and the ignorance of consumers"

Isn't he being prey of his own effect?

So the "epic housing bubble"(consecuence) was caused by "the machinations of financiers(cause 1) and the ignorance of consumers (cause 2)"

If this is true, why 2008? Clearly cause 1 & 2 were present waaay before 2008. So maybe the bubble have other causes?

<comment><USER23> The FED artificially kept low interest rates since 2001 till 2008. All that money had to go somewhere. It went to housing. Cause and effect, plain and simple. The same currently nobody seems to understand that we have even lower interest rates today. From 2008 till 2014. And all this money goes to (primarily) US Treasuries. US Treasuries are currently the most expensive in its 300 year history. Mortgage APR fixed for 30 years at 4%. For 15 years at 3.5%. When the real inflation rate felt by consumers is at about 10%. Why nobody sees that? People don't like to think. They prefer imaginary fantasies where everything is just fine to brutal reality of the unproductive economy running from a bubble to bubble sponsored only by the USD being reserve currency of the world.

Once the US Treasuries bubble bursts, the same moment, the bubble in the US Dollar and America will burst too.

We're living in the final stages of the final bubble, mother of all bubbles in the mankind history. So we have house prices in bubble territory, car loans in bubble territory, Wall Street in bubble territory, VCs/startup scene in bubble territory. Enjoy the ride! But you don't want to be there for the bubble burst of the world reserve currency. I'm already on the other side of the pond.

<comment><USER24> Glad to see someone here that understands what is going on.

Did you really move out of the US because of the coming crisis? I'm really curious about this. I understand there will be riots and it will be unstable for a while but how much chaos are you expecting?

<comment><USER25> The smug, self-certain, self-congratulatory attitude seems ironic in the context of the posted article.

<comment><USER23> Reading 0 to 1 by Peter Thiel at the moment. I think we have had too much of uncertainty in the West from economy thinking to social thinking to medicine.

Peter claims in his book that no CEO looks beyond 3 months timeframe running their Company anymore. Why? Because market knows better anyway. Why to plan, when market will determine what the market is going to be? Uncertainty.

Medical: we can't control genes right? They determine everything, so why to care, why to plan?

Social: cultural marxism. Pessimistic culture -- everything is wrong because we are capitalist society. As long as it exists we can't be certain of anything.

If you have debt to gdp ratio of 600%, what do you expect? Flourishing economy? Things will go down south. You are like a six year old pissed of that two and two is four every time. Some things are certain. Like 600% debt to gdp aren't pretty. Not positive. Not uncertain. Fucking shit. OK?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > some familiarity with concepts that are entirely made up, such as the plates > of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. In one study, roughly 90 percent > claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fictitious concepts

Is it possible that this is at least partly down to the phrase "some knowledge"? Knowing what parallax or lipids are might be seen as having some knowledge of the concept.

<comment><USER27> Honestly, even knowing they were made up my brain's first instinct was "yeah, those _sound_ familiar." If they were just asking about "some knowledge" I can see how people might say, "hmm, yeah, that sounds like something I've heard before."

<comment><USER28> And even more so with people's names, at least for me. For every name I know solidly there are probably two that I vaguely sort of know.

For instance, I probably know more about Irish traditional music than 99.9% of the American population. But if you came up with a real-sounding random name for an Irish musician and talked about him like he was real and of course I should know who he was, the odds that I would confuse that with someone I knew a bit about are substantial.

Or (speaking of Irish music) remembering tunes. There are tunes I _own_ , tunes I think I know, tunes that are familiar, and tunes I flat out don't know. In my experience, I have the most trouble playing are some of the tunes I think I know -- more even than playing the tunes that I would just describe as familiar! Most of those I thought I knew I could probably sort out later given time, but in the heat of the moment what comes out can be nonsense.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, when I get in trouble is on the fuzzy boundary between knowing and not knowing. I don't mind saying "I don't know" when I know I don't know. But sometimes I don't know I don't know, and that's when the trouble starts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> In holland, a DJ called Giel Beelen has/had a part of his show called "Gaat ie mee of zegt ie nee.": "Will he join or will he say no." He asked a national politician about terrorist Jael Jablabla ([http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam- stopt-...](http://nos.nl/op3/artikel/359078-pvdakamerlid-leerdam-stopt- vanwege-3fmradiospelletje.html)), about a non-existing band and about the coma of Sharon... The politician bluffed his way through, claiming he knew more about Jablabla than the DJ... and ended his career shortly afterwards.

<comment><USER30> We had a similar thing in the UK with a famous satirist called Chris Morris who convinced a wide array of celebrities, including politicians, to say all sorts of idiotic things in a series of spoof documentaries about things like drugs and, most controversially, pedophilia. For example, he got one of the UK's most famous DJs to say that pedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than other human beings: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEolSjlcqng) .. in this case, the facts were fed to the celebs rather than them making them up though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> "Because it's so easy to judge the idiocy of others, it may be sorely tempting to think this doesn't apply to you. But the problem of unrecognized ignorance is one that visits us all."

This means YOU, person who thinks you see through it all.

You don't.

This applies to you too.

<comment><USER32> I know intellectually it must apply to me as well...

But it's an interesting illusion. I think that philosophically the correct lesson here is that being (slightly?!?) aware of your own mind doesn't actually give you super powers... you can't change it. (Or, at least, you can't change it by shallow awareness... it would require true efforts.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >whether his appearance as a judge on America's Got Talent would damage his legacy. "No," said one woman to this last question. "It will make him even more popular."

Will. As in, this person was not bluffing. They were not talking about a previously aired nonexistent show. They were speculating on a possible future. It doesn't matter if the questioner is trying to lie.

(The 'lie' isn't even something that's disprovable, as a plausible future event.)

Disclaimer: only talking about the quote in the article, if there was more context it shouldn't have been cut

<comment><USER34> 'would' is ambiguous because the author is describing something in the past. For example, you would write 'would' regardless of whether the original question was "Ma'am, do you think Clinton's appearance yesterday on America's Got Talent will damage his legacy?" or if the question had actually been "Miss, do you think Clinton accepting his recent invitation to appear on AGT would damage his legacy?" But either way, the question is false...

<comment><USER33> Still not bluffing, because they are only speculating on the self-contained scenario, not bringing in fake details.

<comment><USER34> It is still bluffing because the scenario is not being presented as a hypothetical.

<comment><USER33> If you don't pretend you've heard of it before, it's an abstract scenario that might as well be hypothetical. You're answering based on the question and only the question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees different questions and later edit in a different question that makes the original answer seem funny.

<comment><USER36> > I'm pretty sure that for the Kimmel segments, they ask the interviewees > different questions

So, without evidence, you're _confident_ of this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the curved-tube image, clearly the ball will exit with a clockwise spinning, because it'll be rolling on the external wall of the tube (based on the "Newtonian principle" of inertia). I'll bet if you try it as a experiment (inside the atmosphere) the ball will follow "C"... Am I a confident idiot?

<comment><USER37> That's a standard fallacy I often run into: over estimating second order effects. Yes, unless the ball is perfectly smooth or in a vacuum you will get slight curvature. But it would be so slight that it would look like B.

<comment><USER38> Try it with a ping-pong ball (a natural choice). The curvature coming out of the tube will not be slight.

<comment><USER37> None of the three choices in the diagram are curved, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm probably too late with this comment ... but if the diameter of the tube is significantly larger than the diameter of the ball, and the initial velocity of the ball is large enough, then the trajectory of the ball as it leaves the "curved tube" won't necessarily correlate well with the straightforward textbook answer you'd expect to see. Perhaps the original context for the question made this a bit more clear, but as presented in the article, the "real world" might intervene.

</comment><comment><USER40> One extreme is confident idiot. The other is the ever doubting fool. I keep thinking there is a happier middle ground - I know some things and I can't know some others. I will do my best with what I know.

From personal experience #1 obviously leads to certain failures (unfortunate one if you are even a little wise and honest - you saw this coming and still decided to be a cocky idiot). #2 you lose out on motivation, don't get the credit you deserve and get more stressed than necessary.

The happier middle ground works for me - actually look at everything, find out what you know, what you need to know and equally importantly what you are just not going to know. Then work a plan on the strengths of what you know.

That's work though - heh! The extremes are just easier to acquire :)

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm not confident!

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder where those of us who tend to self depreciating humor, who also in turn confess to not knowing much while being told we get things done, fall. I know some of what I am totally clueless about but revel in being told when I am factually wrong in something I thought otherwise. However there are areas where I just refuse to understand and worse I think I know what some of those are and still won't correct it.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't really mind people not realizing they are idiots, if they could at least stop trying to be in power and stop ruling over others. Most of our leaders/rulers are complete idiots without realizing it, that's the worse problem on this planet; if you try to convince them of their ignorance, they react with power, insolvable..

</comment><comment><USER44> If anyone is curious about the Kimmel clip, it's on youtube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frjaQ17yAww)

The article makes a lot more sense after watching it IMO.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Master, what is knowledge?"

"When you know a thing, to know that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to know that you do not know it -- this is knowledge."

I don't remember where I read that, but I like it.

<comment><USER46> Analects of Confucius, Book II, Chapter XVII.

[https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/1...](https://archive.org/stream/analectsofconfuc00confrich#page/164/mode/2up)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I often reply "I don't know" when asked about things I don't know. It's invariably met with an explicit or implicit questioning of my worth. I can see why people learn never to admit ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER48> It sounds like it's best to be doubtful and unsure about my knowledge. So as long as I can make sure I'm unsure, I'm good. But can I be confident that I'm unsure?

It's turtles all the way down.

</comment><comment><USER49> Anecdotal evidence from a fun show, plus the mandatory reference to Dunning- Kruger.

 _" Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn't show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people."_

[http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the- dunning-k...](http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning- kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/)

<comment><USER50> > plus the mandatory reference to Dunning-Kruger.

Well, the article was written by David Dunning, the one the effect is half- named for, so it is almost literally mandatory that it is mentioned.

<comment><USER31> This is a very literal LOL moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> And this is why software schedules are always off. Any schedule for that matter.

If you're into this type of psychology, check out "Thinking Fast and Slow" by D. Kahnemann.

[http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel- Kahneman/dp/0374533555)

</comment><comment><USER52> I would have liked this article more if they had left out the word "All" in the title

</comment><comment><USER53> > "Often, our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least > to an age when we can procreate."

This is a fantastic line. I guess getting to the age where we can procreate is all that's needed by our genes !

</comment><comment><USER54> "idiot" is well defined medical term, author probably meant "ignorant".

</comment><comment><USER55> This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In 1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee is fired for reporting that a co- worker has been stealing from the company—that were nonetheless legal under the state's 'at-will' employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy to fire employees." I have seen this misconception here on Hacker News many times. (To be sure, here on Hacker News we have participants from many countries, not all of which have the same laws about employment, but I have seen plenty of Americans proclaim "facts" about rights of employees here in the United States that simply are not facts.) Basically, in our thoughtful discussions here, we all have to take care to check our facts. That's why I'm especially glad to upvote comments that ask earlier commenters to explain where they got their information, or to suggest further reading on a topic. I'll link a book here about employment law (mostly related to hiring procedures) as an example of the information I like to see in comments. I need to check my understanding of all issues, all the time, according to the article kindly submitted here, and I appreciate it when other HN participants help me find more information.

[http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment- Backgrou...](http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment- Background/dp/1889150592/)

<comment><USER56> Not at all limited to law - accepting facts/stories/statements that fit one's worldview or even just seem interesting or important, and passing them on without ever checking or even doubting their correctness is a mistake that I see very frequently (and occasionally in myself despite conscious efforts to avoid it).

<comment><USER57> I see this with developers:

The young gun who assumes he understands architectural concepts without reading up on them, and re-invents the wheel (often producing a wheel that's tough to turn).

Then there's the cocky senior who doesn't need the latest and greatest because he already "knows" they do the same thing as his solution from 15 years ago (and when he's fired he can't find work because he's a dinosaur).

I know, I've been guilty of both :D

Edit : Come to think of it, the worst offenders are buzzword spewing managers and sales guys. "Oh the Cloud? Our product can mesh your business objectives with transparent synergies through the Cloud! Trust me, I'm an expert! Ah-hah- hah-haa"

<comment><USER58> Do dinosaur managers just talk slower?

<comment><USER59> No, they also eat leaves that are further up the tree due to their long necks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The REAL problem is that confident incompetence in males is attractive to females.

</comment><comment><USER61> TL;DR go with your gut--it's probably correct.

</comment><comment><USER62> The article makes a few generalizations about evolution that don't really hold up. The idea that evolution does not have agency needs to be re-examined in the light of the fact that animals themselves have far more agency than we realized.

To use the author's example, cheetahs may well have all decided as a group to run faster, in the sort of 'social learning' way that we're just now starting to really get a grip on. I mean, adaptations don't just happen, beings have to use their abilities, and then the cells will respond by getting thicker, stronger, more responsive. Think about lifting weights. If agency isn't responsible for evolutionary advantages, then what is? Random differences? Really?

Evolution is way more complex than we realize. Every year, we come across crazy things that happen _in our own bodies_ that just totally blow our minds. Right now I think our broader understanding of how evolution works is hampered by the fact that we just don't know yet how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. So we assume that every life form is a blank slate, limited to just the same genetic code all their fellow life forms share.

But just because we share the same template in one, specific way doesn't mean there can't be a ton of ways that fertilized zygotes can be different from each other too. And that those differences could result from the things our parents did in their lives.

<comment><USER63> "...we don't know how genomes hold on to experiences and then pass them along to our offspring. "

Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even a shred of evidence towards it.

Sometimes when you don't know how something happens, its because _it isn 't actually happening_

<comment><USER64> > Err they don't. That's Lamarckism theory, and I wasn't aware there was even > a shred of evidence towards it.

There is quite a bit from the last few years. Gene expression in particular is a field we continue to learn a lot about [0] and several studies have suggested Lamarckism might have some merit [1].

Saying there isn't a "shred of evidence" is just scientifically untrue. There is some legitimate evidence that limited information could be passed from mother to child prenatally.

Your post is the classic Dunning–Kruger effect. Few in evolutionary biology would be as "sure" as you are, and you get less and less sure the more you learn.

[0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK43787/) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inherita...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Epigenetic_inheritance)

<comment><USER65> Macro-scale evolution does not go through epigenetics, but mostly "knob tweaks".

<comment><USER64> Because, why? Why exactly can't large scale evolutionary change by powered by single mother-child genetic signals? That makes just as much or as little sense as claiming that evolution is powered primarily through a single random mutation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: The Winner's Curse. Your startup stories/experiences from failed startups. - <AUTHOR>

There's been a lot of great startup stories on the web, and in book form, (founders at work, code named ginger, etc) but most of them have been about startups that succeeded in one form or another. (money, publicity, etc.) I'm interested in hearing about the other side of the story. Failed startups..
1.) What did the founders learn? 2.) Was it worth it? 3.) would they do it again? what are they up to now? 4.) what was their background before starting the company?<p>Feel free to add more questions that you want answered! <comment><USER2> You might find this useful for more stories also, though it doesn't hurt to ask again: <http://searchyc.com/post+mortem>

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://diffle-history.blogspot.com/></comment>


What Paul Graham got right – and what he missed – about email - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zoho/what-paul-graham-got-right-and-what-he-missed-about-email-9fb5e37f3957#.yfumhhbas <comment><USER2> As I was reading this, I'm thinking 'there's no insights in this, it's just a lot of questions'.

Get to the bottom paragraph, and it's an advert for their product, Zoho SalesInbox.

I think it's now time that large blog platforms like Medium, clearly mark at the beginning if a post is promotional fluff or not (Paper press legally have to do this, so why not Digital?).

Anyway, back to the subject in hand, I think email gets a bad bashing. Yes it's clearly no longer fit for purpose if your company is a fresh startup with great ideas, and a breakneck agile ethos, but for us mere mortals who are basically chained to a corporate desk in a workplace that's been around for decades with such and ingrained culture that a sandstorm couldn't wipe it, it's the cornerstone of how we work. Here's why:

1\. Long form requests and file attachments are still commonly sent over email - it's your copy to do with what you want.

2\. It's easy to sort and search by a defined subject or keyword, and see the threaded conversation in isolation from everything else.

3\. It's a standard protocol - everything can send an email - this is both a blessing and curse really.

4\. It's got a chain of custody (of sorts), once it's been read in your inbox, it's basically immutable - no takey-backseys by deleting that bit of the conversation in IM or a forum post.

5\. In larger organisations it's quite common for people to write full documents in the email body, complete with headers and formatting and even diagrams! Try doing that in Slack :)

However, I'd love to see an overhaul of the system. As someone who recently left a role that had death-by-email every day I do agree that too many things are sent over email, and people need to be more judicious with their use of 'reply all' (or even actively trimming/adding people when required). There also needs to be attempts at presenting emails in a new way - the folder+inbox paradigm is no longer optimal.

As long as the right tool is used for the right job, I think that IM and Email and Phone all should happily co-exist...

After all, you can't build a house with just one hammer.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Email, and making email better, is a topic everyone connected to the internet should care about. I know I do. I'm especially intrigued by how email can be tailored to different needs. Whilst I'm not in sales, I can see the value here. Intrigued to hear others thoughts.</comment>


Paypal froze our funds, then offered us a business loan - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@casey_rosengren/paypal-froze-our-funds-then-offered-us-a-business-loan-49a078310fb#.qk525l23e <comment><USER2> There's very little thought put into a discussion on "why" PayPal froze those funds. PayPal says "based on what we've seen in the past there's a high probability that you'll collect a lot of money for an event and then not execute that event. If that happens, we PayPal will be on the hook to make those payments to those disgruntled end users. So we can either 1) Simply refuse to work with you or 2) risk share with you by keeping enough in your account so that we can reduce our exposure to those types of claims"

If you chose a business model with an elevated level of risk then you'll have extra expenses associated with that.

I really dug that email. It's encouraging that it triggered what sounds like a very real internal discussion amongst multiple people there vs being getting completely ignored.

I know I sound like a PayPal apologist - I'm not! I know there are some very real horror stories out there. It's just that they're probably one of the few payment companies that would enable this business to actually be a business and asking $20K in surety when you're _on the hook too_ isn't as mean spirited as it first appears.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is totally fair. We knew this was something we might have to deal with given the nature of the business.

Still, things change when they then turn around and offer you a business loan. It's hard to argue that they need to freeze your funds for collateral when they then deem you credible enough to lend you money.

It's not so much that our accounts got frozen that makes this interesting. It's the fact that they froze our accounts _and then offered us a loan._

<comment><USER3> See my separate comment -- a hold plus a loan is not the same as just not holding the money, from a risk point of view. Although it would look the same to your bank balance, the two look nothing alike to PayPal's accountants and auditors. If you think there's a potential liability between two parties, it's much better to formalize it as a loan agreement than to just carry it as a risk.

This is why, for example, the cable and cell phone companies show up on your credit reports. When you pay them in arrears for your service each month, you are in effect borrowing money from them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting point. From that perspective, you could argue that giving a loan against the collateral is a way to account for some of the risk on Paypal's side while still giving us some funds.

Still, we've been with Stripe since then and have had no problems.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. To give another example, I was at Lucent in the late 90's, just before the telcom collapse. Ultimately, Lucent stock collapsed by 90% and the company was bought by Alcatel (which was just bought by the remaining parts of Nokia that Microsoft didn't grind into dust, but I digress). A big part of what brought Lucent down was not just that sales of communications equipment plummeted, but also that Lucent _had extended financing to its customers so they could buy more equipment_ , and then those same customers defaulted on their loans.

Ultimately, it's important to make sure that a loan-granting organization is run separately from your core business, to avoid people making poor-quality loans just to goose sales numbers.

 _Still, we 've been with Stripe since then and have had no problems._

yet ...

There was a recent article on how hoverboard sellers have suffered massive fraud losses, that specifically talked about how Stripe is trying to chase people to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars in chargebacks. That can't happen too many times, given the thin margins of payment processing, before they have to do something to protect themselves.

<comment><USER4> I just googled that:

>In one case, hoverboard vendor IO Hawk had a reported $900,000 negative balance. Stripe's documents call it "one of our largest losses ever."

You'd think there'd be some way to delay shipping for a couple of days while someone checks if the card is stolen. Maybe they could have some way of just calling the card owner and asking if they ordered a hoverboard?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm just starting to need a real solution for taking regular payments and Paypal didn't even cross my mind as a serious contender. The business model they've cultivated engenders similar levels of trust to car salesmen and the people who charge lost equipment fees at Comcast.

I'm looking at Paysimple for their integrated invoicing and transaction handling but I'd love to hear what other people use.

<comment><USER6> I'm working at a startup that processes millions of dollars per month in payments. If you don't offer PayPal, you're shooting yourself in the foot. In many countries, PayPal is the defacto way people conduct online transactions. As much love as Stripe gets because of how developer friendly it is, in the real world people use what they know. And what they know is PayPal. I don't see a compelling reason not to offer it as an option.

<comment><USER7> This is what pains me the most: the fact that PayPal is considered the biggest standard, when they are really terrible.

Netherland has proper internet payment infrastructure called iDeal: it goes directly from one bank account to the other, with no sleazy middlemen in between. That's what the rest of the world should be using, but Netherland just doesn't have the weight to push its solutions on the rest of the world, so we're stuck with crap like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard.

(I suspect many other countries also have well-working payment systems within their borders, but none have any international reach. I'd expect that SEPA would lead to a reliable internet payment system on a European scale, but that hasn't happened yet.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is PayPal still around simply because, as one of the earliest and one of the biggest payment facilitators on the Internet, it's become ubiquitous enough to not have to worry about being displaced? I cannot for the life of me understand how it's still a thing since every week there's yet another story of "PayPay did Shady Thing that a bank couldn't do and now I have no money and no way to get my money back."

 _Why is PayPal not dead?_ In all my research I have never been able to come up with a good answer to that question.

[ _edited to add_ ] Aside from consumer ignorance of other options, that is.

<comment><USER9> We've been using PayPal for over 10 years. High volume. No complaints. Their dispute resolution service is better than others we've tried in the past (Braintree, BluePay). Fees are solid. Customer support team are pretty on top of things (if you feel like picking up a phone).

Seems like people like to pick on PayPal because they want to see the new 'startups' win. But PayPal doesn't have to lose for them to win.

To expand. We thought about switching to Stripe once. Implementation was fairly annoying compared to PayPal's which was surprising considering how loved they are by the dev community. Their fees were much higher. Support couldn't answer some relatively easy questions. Stupid turnaround time for bank deposits.

I can understand how getting setup with a Stripe branded payment form is easy and saves some hassle for a new project. But as an established business they don't bring much to the table. We passed and skipped the obligatory 'X Sucks Because Y' article.

<comment><USER10> We've had pretty much the opposite experience. We've used PayPal for a little less than a year. Setup is magnificently complex and perplexing. They assume that companies are people. There's no way in hell the CEO/owner of a business would spend 1.5 hour on the phone with an account manager, setting up the account. Want PayPal to transfer british pound to an non-british bank-account, then prepare for a world of pain.

Their dispute resolution service is annoying a hell. Not that we don't want to resolve disputes with our customers, but we want to do it using our existing customer support channels. Not via PayPal. Having customers just randomly getting their money back without having contacted the business they bought the product from first isn't acceptable.

It's the most expensive of all the payment solutions we offer our customer. Developer support is okay, but not helpful when their stuff doesn't work. We randomly get 500 errors from their REST api, which doesn't handle any sort of real volume. Black Friday pretty much killed PayPal.

The PayPal web interface is the worst I've ever used. It's slow and almost impossible to search in. Searching using your own order numbers almost never works and you fall back to searching for customers last name, which is pretty much the only search that consistently work.

We wouldn't use PayPal if our German customers didn't expect it.

<comment><USER11> _There 's no way in hell the CEO/owner of a business would spend 1.5 hour on the phone with an account manager, setting up the account._

That's actually a legal requirement in many countries, including the US-- either the CEO or CFO of the company must directly deal with a financial institution when setting up a financial institution account (i.e., bank account--note that Paypal is a registered financial institution in nearly all of the jurisdictions in which it operates). My clients run into this all the time. It's a hassle, but it's one you simply have to accept as the cost of doing business in the big leagues.

 _Want PayPal to transfer british pound to an non-british bank-account, then prepare for a world of pain_

Legally, yes. Because British law has rules about this, and as a financial institution Paypal is required to follow those rules. Those rules are deliberately onerous because the type of transaction you are describing was once widely used in tax evasion and money laundering schemes.

<comment><USER12> > That's actually a legal requirement in many countries, including the US-- > either the CEO or CFO of the company must directly deal with a financial > institution when setting up a financial institution account (i.e., bank > account--note that Paypal is a registered financial institution in nearly > all of the jurisdictions in which it operates). My clients run into this all > the time. It's a hassle, but it's one you simply have to accept as the cost > of doing business in the big leagues.

What U.S. law is this?

<comment><USER11> As we're talking about cross-border bank accounts, the Patriot Act, when applied to foreign persons (individuals or corporations) attempting to open US bank accounts.

Also, FATCA. Though FATCA technically only applies to the financial institutions and not their customers, its information gathering requirements have the same effect as requiring bank customers to disclose certain information.

There are state level laws that may govern US persons attempting to open US bank accounts, both those vary by state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is not surprising to me at all, nor do I see anything nefarious in this. PayPal operates two different business units, a payments processing business and a commercial loan business. Both operate on separate P&L's, and with different risk requirements.

Let's consider two different situations:

1\. PayPal's payments processing group worries about the risk of your account, and thinks about applying a hold on your funds. Just before doing so, they call the loans group, who says that they'd be perfectly happy to give you a loan for the amount of the hold, you're good for it. So, Paypal as a whole decides not to place a hold.

2\. Paypal's payment processing department worries about the risk of your account, so they place a hold on your deposits. In parallel, the loan department decides you're a good credit risk, and so you apply for and receive a loan for the same amount as the hold.

In case 1, if those payments do indeed get charged back, Paypal is forced to try to come after you for the balance. Unfortunately, this debt won't have very strong legal standing, because it's not backed by a loan agreement. They might or might not get their money back. It also puts them in the position of having to chase you for the money.

In case 2, if the payments get charged back, Paypal is sitting on the funds already, and can just claim them. This might cause you to default on the loan, but that's your problem now, not PayPal's. They are also making interest on the amount of the loan.

It's pretty clear that Case 2 is MUCH better for PayPal, and only marginally worse for you, assuming that you are right about the payments all being good -- you are only out the interest cost on the money. What you seem to be arguing is that PayPal should be "nice" to you and go with Case 1.

The other fact that you might be missing is that nearly all traditional payment processors would require some kind of reserve account in situations like this, and even if they weren't holding the money, they require that they have withdrawal privileges on the account into which the funds deposit so that they can claw back money if needed. PayPal is by no means unusual or abusive in holding funds, it just seems that way because they don't pitch this as part of their up-front marketing.

<comment><USER13> Well-put. A parallel here is the pre-approvals for credit cards that people receive in the mail. It's not uncommon for a person to get those who is regularly turned down by offers or even in collections. There's just some algorithm or set of criteria by a certain company that says "send the offer" while others with different information or criteria would refuse it. Simple as that most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The OP of this story was collecting money in the U.S. for events and lodging that had not yet happened in third world countries, and presumably was remitting a healthy amount of money from those transactions to multiple small accounts in said third world countries.

Their business was brand new and had no extensive transaction history with Paypal or anyone else. The customers providing the funds in question were most likely paying with credit cards and would be able to charge back the funds if the events didn't take place or were unsatisfactory.

I find it impressive that Paypal was willing to work with them at all given the above fact pattern. Many, many payment processors simply wouldn't be usable at all.

</comment><comment><USER15> I have a small side business that does < $1000 a month in PayPal transactions, but I regularly withdraw money from my PayPal account to my bank account specifically because I don't trust leaving my money in PayPal.

Why don't larger business do more frequent withdrawals from PayPal to a proper bank?

<comment><USER16> It's happened to me. The issue is, you aren't allowed to withdraw your money. Like you, when I get paid in Paypal, I want it out of Paypal as soon as possible. I've request the transfer to my bank account the same day and as per usual but then found that the funds were frozen.

In my case, I guess I looked sketchy because I had surges of sales (no sales most months, 5k one month).

I did eventually get my money.

<comment><USER7> Did they pay interest over your money? Getting your money late can still be very costly for some businesses.

<comment><USER16> Sorry, just saw this now. Nope, they just released it after a period of time expired (a month?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The fraud department at PayPal has to exercise a large amount of caution because if they make a mistake they lose more money.

The lending department at PayPal can be more opportunistic because they can potentially turn a profit with a successful loan.

I'm not saying that either of those actual departments are correct or that their decisions are sound, but even at a perfectly run organization wouldn't this paradox be somewhat present?

<comment><USER18> I see what you're saying, but I wouldn't expect there to be overlap. I don't know how paypal chooses whose accounts to freeze, but let's say, for the riskiest 5% of accounts.

Now, the lending department can handle a lot more risk than the fraud department (as you note). But I don't think they would be willing to extend that to the riskiest 5% of accounts.

If there _is_ overlap in "too risky to thaw funds" and "trustworthy enough to offer loans", then either their lending department offers loans to some _seriously_ risky clients, or the fraud department freezes a huge % of accounts' funds. Neither seem like an acceptable situation.

<comment><USER17> Sure, no disagreement here.

I'm looking at it slightly from the other direction. Knowing PayPal's history, and how hard fraud is to nail down on the web, I'm assuming that the 5% is actually much larger, and that the fraud department is overcautious.

If that's not the case, then you're right. But if I work in the loans department and I know that the fraud department tends to blow things out of proportion, because that's what's required to prevent fraud at PayPal scale, then I should expect a little overlap.

I guess overlap might not be expected at a "perfect" organization as I mentioned, but I can imagine how it might happen at PayPal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Friends who do a lot of Ebay transactions have always recommended getting a dedicated checking account for Paypal, and then setting up regular transfers out the account, so that one's ability to pay bills and vendors will not be impacted by a Paypal issue.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why use PayPal for credit card payment processing above the petty cash level? If you're up to $30K, you should be getting merchant services from a real bank, not an intermediary. If you're not using eBay, PayPal provides few benefits.

<comment><USER21> I can't comment on the OP, but in addition to the "normal paypal stuff" that paypal does and that we are all familiar with, paypal _also_ has a standard bank-style card processing unit called "payflow".

Rates and policies and fees are very, very good with payflow - they are very competitive - and it made very good sense for us to move from a traditional card processing setup at wells fargo to paypal for this.

We made that switch three years ago and it's all worked out very well - and it saved us a _lot_ vs. wells fargo, who was doing all of the "normal" merchant/bank/processor tricks that distort the costs a lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've avoided having to trust PayPal with any sum of money since I first heard of their freezing practices years ago. Back then (not sure if this has changed) they weren't regulated like a bank so they could get away with some pretty shady behaviors.

I always suspected that they were taking the collateral and making short-term investments, this is the first time I've ever seen them try to do both with the same company at the same time...

</comment><comment><USER23> Speaking from a nightmarish personal experience moving hundreds of thousands with PayPal over the years, it is astounding to me that it took so long for someone like Stripe to come along.

It is not astounding they have quickly blossomed into a valuable company.

Why did it take so long?

And what about eBay? Someone should consider taking that on.

Letting a huge business being an incumbent without competition for 15+ years in the web world seems so absurd.

<comment><USER24> My understanding is there are epic regulatory and bureaucratic blocks involved in setting up international payment services - ironic given PP's reputation, but so it goes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am in a position to hear a lot of comments on Paypal from freelance artists, and I often hear of them freezing someone's account over some transaction or for no expressed reason at all. I often wonder how they can get away with this, I would imagine if a bank did this they would be in hot water quickly with a regulator. It all seems a bit shady.

<comment><USER3> Merchant account banks do this ALL THE TIME. It's standard business. See here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/320bbd/my_me...](https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/320bbd/my_merchant_account_provider_is_holding_over/)

or here: [https://chargebacks911.com/knowledge-base/what-is-a- merchant...](https://chargebacks911.com/knowledge-base/what-is-a-merchant- account-reserve/)

or here: [http://www.cardfellow.com/merchant-account- holds/](http://www.cardfellow.com/merchant-account-holds/)

<comment><USER26> This is the key point: PayPal is not your checking account. PayPal is more like a merchant account which voluntarily takes on _much_ more risk than most banks are willing to in their merchant accounts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nice of them to loan you your money with interest... if they were an honest company, maybe they'd offer to use the business LOC as collateral and free up your funds, dipping into the credit should the risk become real and your funds get charged back...

... if they were an honest company ...

</comment><comment><USER28> Generally good advice when considering PayPal is to recite to yourself "PayPal is not a bank, PayPal is not a bank, ..."

But they do like money, and they like to move it around creatively and create ways to use other people's money to make money for them.

One of the reasons they aren't a bank is they don't do (and are not allowed to do AFAICT) fractional reserve lending. In that sort of scenario this story makes a lot of sense, you freeze(or seize) assets from your customers, and then loan them out to other customers who pay you interest on repaying that loan, and if they default you presumably keep the other customer's money to cover that "loss". Sort of 100% reserve banking.

<comment><USER29> Do you have any evidence that freezing funds is related to lending? Because that's a pretty massive claim, particularly since they are supposedly two completely separate business units on separate budgets and P&Ls (fraud prevention and lending).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is frustrating, but not necessarily a conflict of interest.

Any type of events business carries a significant risk to a payment processor. Funds are paid up front before services are delivered. If the event doesn't happen there will be a demand for refunds.

This isn't necessarily due to malfeasance on the part of the promoter. Imagine there was a conference booked in the World Trade Center for September 12th.

Boil it all down and what PayPal is doing is charging a higher percentage fee (aka the base fees plus the interest on the loan) for a business they deem to be more risky. Entirely fair.

Now for the way they presented those fees - absolutely unacceptable customer service.

<comment><USER30> To clarify the comment about refunds. Participants would first go to the promoter. But if they were unable to resolve the dispute, they could then go to their bank and dispute the charge. My understanding of this is murky, but in the end PayPal does carry a liability for those funds as a participant in the transaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Think OP is assuming Paypal has departments that understand how eachothers decisions affect the other, PP is a huge company and I doubt malice was actually intended, but nonetheless pointing it out to them was necessary.

</comment><comment><USER32> regardless of what division is making the determination, either the company is risky or they're not. charging them interest to access the money that is rightfully theirs is extortion, plain and simple

</comment><comment><USER33> I am considering on using Paypal in my startup business. How do you feel about it? I attended a startup conference 6 months ago. Paypal was also there claiming that there will be solutions for startup business. I don't know if this is a special case. How can I avoid my capital from being frozen? Singing "Let it go"?

<comment><USER34> Will you have delivered the product/service at issue at the time you charge the card or within a short period of time thereafter? If so, it is highly likely you will not have any issue with Paypal. If you are accepting pre- payment for something which cannot be delivered in full shortly after payment, it is likely that you'll have to become conversant with Paypal's published guidelines about this.

Spoiler alert: if you are in an events business, "We emailed a ticket" does not constitute delivery of the purchase. Successful conclusion of the event constitutes delivery. Most events businesses structurally need to pre-sell tickets. They will, virtually inevitably, have more issues with collecting payments than e.g. a software company which says "You give us a credit card we give you a working download link." This is not a result of caprice by Paypal -- more than 1% of scheduled events fail to actually happen; when that happens, Paypal gets hit with hundreds of chargebacks.

More details: [https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/presale-policy-and- re...](https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/presale-policy-and-reserves)

Events businesses: [https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/account-reserves- tick...](https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/brc/account-reserves-tickets-and- reserves)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Since we were a risky account, they said they needed to hold on to the > remaining $20,000 for up to six months.

I would think just about any new business is some flavor of "risky." I don't see why any new business would use paypal knowing that.

</comment><comment><USER36> Partially off topic but what would you recommend for transactions in the 1 to 10 Euros range in Europe? PayPal and Stripe have fixed costs per transactions that are quite substantials on the amounts at lower bound of that range. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER37> Clearly the used car sales department forgot to check with the customer service department whether the customer is actually happy with the ongoing relationship.

</comment><comment><USER38> Honestly, I just went stealth and operate numerous accounts.

If PayPal wants to freeze my funds, let them. Play with fire, your going to get burned.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this is more common than people might realize. In fact, I think it's fundamental to how the predatory lending industry(READ: banking industry) operates. David Graeber's DEBT is a good read: [http://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf](http://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf)</comment>


Show HN: Travel Butler – Recommends what to pack, where to eat and what to see - <AUTHOR> http://travelbutler.net

<comment><USER2> Saw a loading animation for 5 seconds and almost left. There's no reason for a static/informational landing page to have a loading animation. Your assets aren't massive except for this one: [http://travelbutler.net/images/bg-2.png](http://travelbutler.net/images/bg-2.png)

You should make that a JPEG and play with the quality level. You could probably get that down to a few hundred KB.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks, you're totally right. The image assets were a mess. Just fixed it, should load a lot faster now.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Sebastian. This is my third iOS app and something I've used as a prototype myself for a while. I found it useful and therefore finished and published the app now - hope you like it as well. Let me know if you have any questions!

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the direct App Store link to skip the landing page: [https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906336042/](https://itunes.apple.com/app/id906336042/)</comment></comment>


Sidejack Prevention - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/blog/737-sidejack-prevention

<comment><USER3> The chrome extension I wrote today both redirects to HTTPS for the sites you specify in options, but also re-writes all the cookies to set the secure flag.

Works perfectly on Facebook and Twitter without your session cookies every leaking (including the initial HTTP request) and including like buttons, etc.

Add any other site in options (Twitter and Facebook are on by default - <USER2> added github.com to mine and it works perfect, you may just need to re-login)

See: <http://github.com/nikcub/Fidelio>

</comment><comment><USER4> We do exactly the same thing -- data-sensitive requests sent over HTTPS with a secure cookie, normal browsing over HTTP. At this point it seems difficult to implement site-wide SSL (CDN issues, browser bugs, overhead in SSL).

It seems like an important area of development for the web community to improve the tools and services available to make SSL on regular sites easier to implement. Yes, it's easy to turn on SSL, but there's a lot of nuance in a good implementation.

<comment><USER5> That's basically what we are going to have to do. There will be trade offs (carving time out of our roadmap, etc) and it's going to be a pita, but our space is one where some moron is going to sniff out a bunch of logins at a conference and pull some epic trolling and we'll have to spend time deleting the crap.

It's a shame that we can't go all SSL, but that's just the way it will have to be. The best we can do is make it difficult to hijack access to our tools that require elevated permissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to diss the OP but most of the proposed solutions to FireSheep I've seen display a distinct lack of knowledge of security. And that's one of those fields where enthusiastic amateurs tend to get things badly wrong.

The solution to FireSheep is something akin to SSL (robust, fast encryption with authentication). Could be SSL, or a VPN, or an SSH tunnel doing SOCKS.

Beware the MITM attack if you think all you need is encryption without authentication.

<comment><USER7> What's wrong with GitHubs solution? As I understand it, only insensitive stuff is available in the unencrypted session, while writes and sensitive stuff goes via unsidejackable HTTPS. Stealing a read-only Facebook/Twitter session is much less critical, and allows for CDNs etc.

<comment><USER8> Can someone still sidejack a session and view a private repo?

<comment> brown9-2 The secure cookie is meant to prevent this.

<comment><USER8> Yes, I see this right in the post now. I completely overlooked that SSL was used for browsing private repositories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a basic proof-of-concept workaround to prevent Firesheep and other HTTP Sniffers from seeing data sent from Client -> Server and Server -> Client. I will announce it here when I get enough time to get it to properly work.

Since the concept is so ridiculously simple, I'm sure anyone can trivially implement it. The only issue is that it needs HTML5 Local Storage to work.

        1. HTML rendered by the server has a small piece of code to generate an RSA Key Pair on the client using Javascript.
        2. The randomly generated keypair is stored on the Client using the HTML5 Local storage mechanism.
        3. For every request that the client sends the server, it sends the RSA Public key along with it. Also, the Server's Public Key is known by the client, and all outgoing data is encrypted.

The heavy work is already done, but by leveraging Local Storage and enhanced Javascript Capabilities, it is trivial to create a pseudo SSL functionality. This also deals with the issue of requirement of Static IPs, and other limitations of SSL.

Of course, this won't mean that the entire Website will be secure. It'll be quite trivial to create a small script to force all Form Data to get encrypted with the Server's public key - thus making sure that atleast your Passwords aren't transmitted in Plaintext.

In fact, with my current startup's application, the user's Password would never even _leave_ the client machine. Javascript would perform an MD5 hash, and the server treats that as the client's password. The issue with this is that you'll need JS active on all browsers for it to work.

<comment><USER10> >In fact, with my current startup's application, the user's Password would never even _leave_ the client machine. Javascript would perform an MD5 hash, and the server treats that as the client's password.

In some respects it makes you wonder why browsers never had this natively in the first place - why should a third-party need to know my password when it could just send a hash instead?

<comment><USER11> Because if you just send the MD5, others can log in as you when they know the MD5, which they can just sniff. It doesn't gain anything in security, except for not knowing your actual password.

<comment><USER12> You can send `nonce + MD5(nonce MD5(username realm pass))`, and then it's not sniffable.

<comment><USER11> At that point, the server will have to have received the MD5(username realm pass) at least once in order to verify the hash. You're better off not building your own schemes and instead trust existing solutions like SSL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell So basically, Firesheeps existance has directly lead to Github becoming more secure. Excellent.

If you use a vulnerable service, just write a Firesheep handler for it, publish it, and then let the provider of that service know.</comment>


Introducing Windows Terminal - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/introducing-windows-terminal/ <comment><USER3> I have to hand it to Microsoft. WSL 2, Windows Terminal, and Edge based on Chromium. Microsoft really is doing some fantastic work for their users.

Meanwhile, macOS will get new emojis in 10.15.

<comment><USER4> macOS already has a great terminal app. Microsoft is just playing catch up on really old features.

<comment><USER5> Hardly playing catch up here. They've much surpassed anything Apple has done in recent years, in both software AND hardware.

Also, I don't recall macOS terminal being open source.

[https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

<comment><USER6> Surpassed in every way huh? How's that preloaded bejeweled app treating you? Still loving all that telemetry?

MacOS + brew + iterm2 and ZSH make it the best developer setup

<comment><USER7> Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

(To be quite honest I agree - but Apple doesn't make any hardware of interest to me to run MacOS on).

<comment><USER6> Yeah I will give you that. The apple keyboard that comes with the Macs is a cluster __ __for sure. But... while Apple has done more for the industry in my opinion to force the other manufacturers to move their hardware to a higher build quality profile etc., the OS is still what I find the most compelling -- mostly because I am all in on Apple services (iMessage, iCloud, keychain, etc.) and things often look more appealing on the Mac (yeah I spend most of my time in the terminal but I do like things that look good -- high DPI on linux is almost there just not quite there yet imo). Basically it comes down to productivity and for me it 's on a Mac, that keyboard be damned.*

I use an external Magic Keyboard 2 without the 10-key as it fits on top of the keyboard of my MacBook as if it should have been the keyboard all this time. But it was an expensive keyboard and not a suggestion I would give many people -- the keyboard should just work.

<comment><USER7> Fair enough. I didn't want to live with the loss of the Fn keys as much as anything. But my decision to jump the Apple ship was also partly economic, and if not for that additional pressure I'm not sure what I would have done.

So after a long time having been OS X-exclusive, for the past year I've used both Windows 10 and Linux. I've really been equally happy and frustrated with each - all 3 of the majors have their strengths and weaknesses. I think OS X overall has the balance I prefer, but it's by a far smaller margin than I would have thought, say, 5 years ago.

<comment><USER6> And there I agree with you, too. Laptops really have come a long way in build quality and usability.

I want a new MacBook but will likely wait until my late model top-of-the-line 2013 MacBook Pro dies and buy the Arm based ones they're rumored to release because I simply can't afford a 3k+ laptop now.

<comment><USER8> Even if some folks do not care about absolute monetary price, there can be other hurdles. For example, for corporate purchases, there are countries where you have per item limit, up until which you can expense your purchases into given year, or above which you must depreciate the item.

In my country, Apple computers moved into the _must depreciate for 4 years_ territory, which is simply unacceptable to corporate buyers there (as depreciated asset, it the paperwork is more involved, and therefore needs additional time and expenses). Meanwhile, Lenovo or Dell sales know how to make the price right, so everybody is satisfied.

My 2015 rMBP was 1 EUR below this limit. I don't know what to replace it with, if needed.

<comment><USER9> Amortisation burocracy is not that complicated. 4 book records and one additional document per year, well under £1 in labour and paper. Source:my dad is a former accountant

<comment><USER8> Here, it is 2 records at purchase (purchase+asset creation) per item, 1 every month (depreciation) per item, plus 1 yearly (accounting for deferred tax assets). Then some at the end of the period (reconciliation of the deferred tax, asset retirement). The period has to be tracked per each item. Each asset has to have its asset card and a tag.

For machinery and buildings, OK. But for a laptop, that maybe barely survives it's depreciation period? Well, no. Folks have other things to do than paperwork for laptops.

The entire point of the asset depreciation is, that the state wants the tax money as soon as possible, and shift your deductibles into future. What you want, is to shift as much as possible of your deductibles into the current year (and it is cash out in this year, after all). I and many others don't see why small, relatively quickly consumable items like laptops should be handled the way big assets are, and the sales at other vendors understand that very well.

If you are a small company with external accountant, it will be significantly more than 1 EUR in labor and paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If someone wants an app idea (which might now be possible since Windows Terminal is open source & DirectX based)...

I've been looking for a Windows replacement to Cathode [1], a macOS app that makes the terminal look like a CRT monitor. Not just the colour scheme & font, but with screen jitter, image persistence & glow, static, scanlines and even sound effects sampled from old computers. For the times I have to use a terminal, it really makes me smile & enjoy the work.

Linux has Cool Retro Term which is similar, and there have been efforts to port that to Windows that have failed. I could probably run Cool Retro Term under WSL2, but Windows deserves something native.

It seems more likely that an indie developer might be able to fork Terminal & create their own than Microsoft building this in. (As much as I like the idea of Windows having a Fruity IIe terminal theme built-in.)

Cathode charges $5 which is much too cheap - I'd pay $20 easily (maybe more) for something that brightens up my work day the way Cathode does.

[1] [http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/](http://www.secretgeometry.com/apps/cathode/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Good on them for making CMD more modern.

But I'm not a fan of the ligatures they've shown in the video / screenshots. This was discussed on HN recently after this article got posted: [https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming- fon...](https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell- no.html)

Luckily, the font seems to just be an option and not something forced on you.

<comment><USER12> CMD hasn't really been touched, though the console subsystem has, and now terminal-esq functionality debuts.

<comment><USER3> I noticed DOSKey seems to be default in recent versions of command.com.

<comment><USER12> Cmd.exe you mean? Believe that functionality has been around for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> And here is MIT-licensed source code for it [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal)

</comment><comment><USER14> Given that the existing terminals for Windows range from archaic (Console, PowerShell) to mediocre (ConEmu, Cmder), this move makes total sense.

I'm excited to use the new terminal with WSL2 - maybe it will come close to iTerm2 with Docker.

<comment><USER15> Hyper, Terminus, Alacritty, and Fluent Terminal are all excellent.

Also Powershell is a shell not a terminal and it's awesome.

<comment><USER16> I'm a huge fan of Terminus for Windows (and I use Hyper on Mac) -- great alternatives to the usual: [https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/](https://eugeny.github.io/terminus/)

<comment><USER15> Hyper 3 Canary works a lot better on Windows than 2 did if you feel like trying it.

<comment><USER16> Thanks! I've been away from my Windows machine for 2 months; I'm eager to try Hyper 3 when I'm back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I haven't seen Alacritty mentioned yet as an existing alternative for built-in terminals. It's modern, configurable and really fast (thanks to GPU acceleration and possibly Rust). I've enjoyed using it with W10 native OpenSSH.

[https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty](https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty)

<comment><USER15> No tabs though (deliberately). You'll need to add a tabbing window manager to add them.

<comment><USER18> What tabbing Window managers are there for Windows? In terms of desktop replacements I only know Cairo (but that doesn't touch windows).

<comment><USER19> There's Groupy from Stardock

[https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/](https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Happy to see it's not another Electron based terminal

</comment><comment><USER21> its interesting how long its taking for MS to do command-line well and linux to do the gui well. after decades you would think each could be considered a solved problem, at least given that they are solved by their respective OSes, yet there has not been the convergence you might expect

</comment><comment><USER22> This looks great. I've tried many of the other terminal options on Windows (ConEmu, Cmdr, Hyper, etc) and none have been great and always found myself resorting back to the plain old command prompt.

<comment><USER23> I've used ConEmu a lot, now I use ConsoleZ on Windows. It's simple and it just works.

[https://github.com/cbucher/console](https://github.com/cbucher/console)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Trying to build from it requires VS + 16GB of build tools... what in the world.

<comment><USER7> I think you can install msbuild + tools without VS. No doubt still pretty big though. More than I can be arsed with just for this purpose. Will have to wait for the release.

<comment><USER18> They really need to step up their VS-less developer tools (which mostly means packaging & documentation).

<comment><USER25> Also requires WIN10 SDK to build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Will content in the terminal re-render when the window is resized or will it be like Putty where only new content fills the whole window (annoying)?

<comment><USER27> From a quick search on the repository, the answer seems to be yes, it does support reflow: [https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...](https://github.com/microsoft/Terminal/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=reflow)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everyone who wants this but prefers not downloading 16 Gigabytes of Visual Studio to build this should have a look at Fluent Terminal [1], which can be installed through chocolatey and in my opinion even looks a little better (might not have all of the features, though).

I've been using it for a while and have been very happy with it and have for all that time wished that they would just adopt it as a default app. Oh look :-)

[1]: [https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal](https://github.com/felixse/FluentTerminal)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this different to the thread earlier today?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19840447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19840447)

<comment><USER29> This is the original source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know if the default cut/copy/paste key equivalents in Windows Terminal are ctrl-x/ctrl-c/ctrl-v like everything else in Windows, or is it still that weird system from CMD.EXE which is an abomination unto Nuggan?

I haven't been able to find this out. I even tweeted at someone on the Windows Terminal team and didn't get a response.

EDIT: I looked through the github repo and it _does_ appear to support sane key equivalents. Nuggan be praised!

</comment><comment><USER31> This is great. I recently shifted to woking more with windows/WSL after much frustration with mac. However the terminal experience was not great. The electron based options where not fast enough, default WSL shell was comparably fast to iTerm but did not even have basic tabs. Microsoft is really doing a lot of good and exciting stuff nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER32> How long till somebody goes through and ports it to Linux I wonder. Then Microsoft maintains the port turning it into the most powerful cross platform terminal emulator somehow. Also Mac please. But I am likely getting ahead of myself.

<comment><USER33> Who on earth would want that? People who have only ever used Microsoft products?

<comment><USER32> People who want cross platform tooling like a cross platform editor

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The real question is - can it display videos using sixel?

</comment><comment><USER35> So, UTF-8 support?

<comment><USER36> Presumably. They announced they are working on UTF-8 support last year while building a new TTY-ish subsystem. [1] So their work will likely land to the new terminal.

[1]: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows- command-l...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line- unicode-and-utf-8-output-text-buffer/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> transparency at last -- i hope its customizable

</comment><comment><USER38> So the main differentiator is a prettier terminal window relative to microsoft console?

<comment><USER39> And apparently being able to add new features without "breaking the world"

<comment><USER40> Raymond Chen had a good explanation for why the've been very hesitant to modernise cmd.exe but I can't seem to find it.

<comment><USER41> I'm interested in case you or someone else finds it. :)

<comment><USER11> In this blogpost I found a possible reference to it: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060427-21/?p=31383)

Saying "shipping a new command shell". Unfortunately the URL gives me a 403.

<comment><USER42> Is it me or does that last bit seem weirdly passive aggressive

<comment><USER11> The last part of my comment? :O surely wasn't intentional if do :)

<comment><USER43> They probably meant the last line of the post you linked.

> So good luck with your replacement command shell. I hope you figure out how > to run batch files.

Yep, seems passive aggressive

<comment><USER11> Yup, that makes more sense :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Great! Now if we could just switch the path separator over to /

<comment><USER15> You can type / and it works in Powershell.

I've been using Unix for 20 years, switch to pwsh 2 years ago, never typed backslash ever.

<comment><USER24> Powershell is considerably slower than cmd. Does that not bother you?

<comment><USER45> It starts under 1s without modules. That is enough fast and still infinitely distant feature-wise of cmd.exe. You can make it go over 1m+ if you have a lot of modules to load, particularly with method of writing modules where you put functions into separate files (and no SSD) and/or some specific cmdlets in the profile. It can even be worst then that in particular environment - <USER2> instance within VSCode some of my scripts can take several minutes loading (while being otherwise instant).

In other words, you can balance your environment for speed vs features.

I believe Pwsh will get considerably faster in the future given that optimizing it will pay out on nano server which currently boots faster then PowerShell is loaded in it afterwards (which rly sux).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> FFS, why didn't they also provide a binary download? I don't want to download it and build it...

<comment><USER47> Because it isn't ready for general consumption, yet.

Case in point: I compiled it quite easily and it crashes on launch. Not ready for widespread use, yet.

<comment><USER48> Make sure you enable developer mode in the Windows Store settings, and then deploy the CascadiaPackage app (set as start-up project + F5 in VS, not sure off-hand how to do it from the command prompt.) That fixed it for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow, so much marketing voodoo for a text terminal!

<comment><USER50> That's because the understand the value of developer mindshare. Billions on Github and they haven't wrecked it (yet), Linux layers on Windows, .Net open sourced. The lack of nice terminal options (please don't say ConEmu is nice, it's functional, not the same thing) was certainly a factor.

They're chipping away at each little thing that holds devs away and making sure the world knows it.

<comment><USER51> > They're chipping away at each little thing that holds devs away and making > sure the world knows it.

It's worth keeping in mind why, it's to get developers interested in their proprietary platforms. These are the embrace and extend steps.

Let me know when they switch to GPL licenses and can't pull the extinguish step.</comment></comment></comment>