Stripe Is the New PayPal - <AUTHOR> Dear HN,
I am only writing this post because Stripe are not responding to my emails.
I started using Stripe last month and everything was going smoothly. However, this week they sent me an email saying:
"Stripe provides a service between banks and our users. In order to provide service to our users, we are urged by our banking partners to keep an eye on all accounts that sign up for our services. We've noticed that you have processed charges that seem to be unauthorized--in order to make charges with credit and debit cards, the owner of the card must consent to the charge. Charges on your account do seem to lack this consent, which unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to offer service"
This makes no sense as I have had hundreds of payments and not a single payment has been disputed. So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised? I have sent Stripe emails explaining this and they will not respond.
I am very disappointed. As a member of this community I assumed Stripe would treat developers making a living online with a little more respect. I plan to write a lengthy blog post explaining this in more depth.
Update: I am currently in contact with Stripe CEO over email. He is dealing with the issue. I will keep everyone updated. <comment><USER3> After using Stripe for our subscription service for over 1year with 100'000euro+ monthly transcation we got a 10day notice that they would shut us down. Also the mail was send late on friday before a long weekend, yeah! =)

No warnings, no chance to appeal, no heads up and absolutly no possiblity to call them. Lost around half a million euros before we could get our customers exported to another payment processor. Thanks Stripe!

It's a great service when it works, not so great at customer service.

<comment><USER4> Did you break their rules? Their terms say that they can cancel your agreement, but only with a 2 months notice:

> We can terminate this agreement for any reason on two months' notice and > immediately in certain circumstances

Source: [https://stripe.com/gb/terms](https://stripe.com/gb/terms)

<comment><USER5> >certain circumstances (such as where you breach this Agreement)

It concerns me, as this still gives them full power to terminate the agreement immediately anytime they want. They never define what "certain circumstances" are, rather, they just provide one example.

EDIT: I would just like to say that I was mistaken. See the reply to my comment. That said, the US terms differ in an important way.

<comment><USER6> If you click 'Complete details' just below you will be provided with a full list of the circumstances in which they can terminate with immediate effect (although I acknowledge that the ability to terminate simply because a card network/issuer requests this is not particularly transparent (but understandable)):

\- _we determine in our sole discretion that you are ineligible for the Service because of the risk associated with your use of Stripe, including without limitation significant credit or fraud risk, or for any other reason;_

\- _you do not comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, or_

\- _upon request of a Card Network or a card issuer._

<comment><USER5> I see. I was mistaken. I didn't follow the Details link. I did notice something equally concerning on US one

On the US terms, I see the following sentence:

"We may terminate this Agreement and close your Stripe Account at any time for any reason effective upon providing you notice in accordance with Section A.15 above". It goes on to copy what the UK agreement had, but that one didn't include this sentence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Stripe CEO here. I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm taking a look at what happened here.

OP (disappointeddev), if you could drop me an email, that'd be great: email@example.com.

<comment><USER8> This response alone is why I will always recommend Stripe. The support may need support of its own, but knowing that you can get management's attention fairly easily says a lot of great things about the company and the people working there in my book.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, except not every Stripe customer knows that the real place to get support is (apparently) Hacker News, rather than Stripe support. The fact that the official channels are non responsive but a post on HN gets an immediate response could be construed as a red flag: the company cares more about avoiding bad PR than about having good customer service.

<comment><USER7> Well, the "support" here is just much more visible than everything else that we do. We provide support over as many channels as possible: we employ full- time folks in #stripe on IRC, we monitor Twitter, we send thousands of emails every day, we're rolling out phone support, we chat with customers on IM -- and, yes, we reply on HN. Obviously nobody _should_ have to post here, but we'll certainly respond if they do.

Fraud-related cases are particularly hard, by the way. _Thousands_ of people try to defraud us every day. (I guess it's a consequence of being highly- visible and easy to set up.) And so the support for those cases has to be handled a little differently.

<comment><USER10> Has anyone defrauded you with a bitcoin payment yet? I assume volume is low, but out of that volume has there been any reports of fraud?

<comment><USER10> It was a genuine question?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone else posted last night (I'm on my phone or I would search for the post) about Stripe support. Looking at their Twitter stream it appears they are having a very difficult time managing their support infrastructure and do not have a trouble ticket system. I love Stripe's API and have helped several clients integrate it, but as the developer-friendly, anti-PayPal processor they were once known for, this development is very discouraging. I know Patrick and John are active on here so hopefully they will see this and come up with a solution.

<comment><USER11> We've run into this as well. It's absurd that a company of their size has no support ticketing system. There have been occasions when we've had to rely on personal relationships with staff at Stripe to simply get an email response to our account questions.

Engineering support is great and responsive through IRC but, stripe engineering staff there just shrug if you ask a business question.

<comment><USER8> Their engineering support is incredible, and their API is well-documented and so easy to integrate. It is hard to believe that they can't spend a little more time focusing on customer support, especially as they continue to add new features and countries the problem is only going to increase. At least adding a public-facing ticketing system would pull some pressure off. I don't necessarily mind waiting for support, it is the not knowing if you even received my support request that can be frustrating at times, especially when there are real dollars at stake.

<comment><USER12> I think one thing that is not well understood is that Stripe has a "Freemium" model. Prior to Stripe nearly all other payment processors required a minimum monthly fee. Stripe's lack of any minimum monthly fee is something that makes it very attractive and undoubtedly helped partly fuel their rapid growth. It's a great example of how you can leverage VC funding to build a business. Having said that it must mean a staggering amount of support emails from customers in "production". That developer doing just 1 or 3 transactions a month at $100 each still feels as strongly about getting an issue resolved as someone doing $1 million or $10 million a month. I've always wondered what that was like to manage.

<comment><USER13> I'd argue the processing fees do not make it freemium.

<comment><USER12> Yep. But even then you don't "pay" that fee (it's deducted and you get the net) and you don't have a set monthly fee. So there's no hard cost of setting up and maintaining a site with them.

<comment><USER13> No MRC (monthly reoccurring charge) on a service does not make it free, you're still paying for the service in a pay-per-use context.

<comment><USER12> Yep but you're getting a little hung up on definitions and missing the larger point. Ie by proving that it's not a freemium model you're not really negating the central point which is that the barrier to entry is substantially lower (non existent) than with any/other competing services thus drawing in exponentially more users than similar services resulting in a disproportionate strain on their customer support vs others.

<comment><USER13> Oh, Agreed.

Honestly, right or wrong - I've seen very few 'startups' really grok effective customer service (I realize I'm over generalizing). Yes, a good Knowledge Base/FAQ and ticketing/email system is important - but you need a phone number, you need a call center probably too (even if its only 2-5 people answering the phone) - you need more than email and ticketing - <USER2> technology is complex enough that you need a person to talk to over the phone to hold your customers hands - IMO - this is even doubled for anything that need to integrate with your systems or has a device on your premises, but is also applicable to a complex web service - I strongly believe it drives long term customer retention and eases on boarding.

I'll point out as to why I believe this - outside of the technology hubs, the folks with money are not the 'internet native' generation, they're older and less comfortable with technology then we are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> \-- __PSA regarding Credit Card Validation __\--

Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit card with a fake name. Surprise, it went through. I emailed Stripe support. After half a dozen emails discussing CC authorization I learned that Stripe _does not_ and _can not_ validate Name & Address on credit card.

Stripe told me that Credit Card companies do not disclose this data to Payment Processors like Stripe. Thus, Stripe simply passes on the name & address to the CC API.

Interestingly enough, Name & Address are NOT validated by major credit card companies. You can use junk names on your name & billing address and that will NOT stop your credit card transaction from going through.

Try for yourself next time you order something online. Makes me wonder why they even collect the data in the first place...

 __

<comment><USER15> > _Last year I was testing Stripe integration. I tried using my own credit > card with a fake name._

This sounds like a great way to get your account shut down.

They provide test/mock APIs for a reason.

<comment><USER16> I'm willing to wager that a huge number of Credit Card transactions are submitted with names that don't match the credit card. In 10+ years and hundreds (thousands?) of transactions, I've never submitted a credit card transaction that matched the name on my card (which has my full name, and I just use my first and last name in the fields) - I've never been rejected.

<comment><USER17> It's the "using my own credit card" that sounds like a great way to get your account shut down, not using it with a fake name. Charging your own cards is something payment processors don't like for a number of reasons, like the fact that it can be used to perpetrate all kinds of frauds: giving yourself cash advances the card issuer hasn't approved, gaming credit card reward programs, skewing your volume and reversal metrics the processor uses to evaluate your account risk, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We've been with Stripe going on a year and a half and they've been one of the most responsive and with it service providers I've ever worked with.

Can you tell us how long it has been since you sent the email?

There must be some level of fraud prevention in any financial platform. You didn't give many details as to the type of charges you made or evidence past "no one charged back" as to how you made them. This is a public platform and I understand less than full disclosure but your narrative that:

1\. You signed up

2\. You charged people legitimately

3\. You were cut off without notice

4\. No one responded to multiple attempts over more than 1 business day

5\. You were forced to take this action

Seems unlikely to be the full and absolute time line of events.

If it is, ok, post to HN and troll them. If not, is this really the medium? Doesn't stripe get a say on which transactions will and won't process on their own network?

If your expectation is "everything charges all the time period" then use bitcoin. These are credit cards. There are rules. :-)

<comment><USER19> I think you forgot a word:

>Doesn't stripe get a some say on which transactions will and won't their own network?

<comment><USER18> Sorry for the typo, updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Stripe is a Ycombinator company. I got downvoted when I told the CEO of Stripe my troubles with Stripe, he said to email but then never responded creating the public perception that they care, when they don't.

You will just find downvoting brigades of people on HN when it comes to any YC backed company. Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN. You can't get anything truthful on here if YC has backed them.

<comment><USER21> > Which is probably why this will be my last post on HN

It is pretty great that the CEO comes on HN and handles support. That is a skip-level meeting. Usually support requests are handled at the bottom of the heirarchy pyramid, not the top. Yes people openly support and defend YC companies, this community is only possible because of YC, and is comprised of many employees, founders and peers of these companies.

If you don't like being disagreed with though, you can pick up your ball and go home. I suspect that you will get a lot more value from this community than the one time you couldn't get a CEO to directly address your problems.

<comment><USER22> CEO is not handling support, he's handling PR

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work at Stripe, and I'm really very sorry about this. Mind emailing me at firstname.lastname@example.com with details?

<comment><USER14> Does the company have any plans to introduce a ticketing management system?

<comment><USER24> Obviously, no.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can we please all take a look at disapointeddev's account and use just a little bit of salt here? Just one grain maybe?

His account was obviously activated for the purpose of submitting this post and he has provided NO follow up comments at this time. His post has been up for an hour.

I'm not saying anything about the validity of his claim, but we obviously need more information. Please check back and wait for him to respond to the many great questions already on here.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I said, I will be writing a more lengthy blog post about this. The only reason I posted this on HN is because I want Stripe to give me attention and solve the problem. I love Stripe's API which is why I want them to solve the issue.

Also, I made a new account for my privacy.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for replying. I'd like it if you could link to the blog after you've finished writing it, but if you don't want to for privacy purposes I get that.

I just see people running off in a million directions in the comments on HN and it's nice to wait and let things play out a little before we jump on any bandwagons, this is an event that requires a follow up to be a complete story. So please also follow up with your experience with Stripe after coming to this forum (through link to your blog or in the comments or an edit). I'm sure we'd all like to get the complete story.

<comment><USER26> > let things play out a little

Dude will be losing money while you get your popcorn ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > _So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised?_

Stolen cards, for instance, which may be more likely to happen in some industries than others.

While I understand the need for ambiguity with respect to your business operations, this post is too vague to give any understanding as to why Stripe blocked your account.

<comment><USER28> The post talks about unauthorised charges. There is no way to validate the card prior to Stripe capturing payment, so they certainly are not upset about people using stolen cards on your own site, as you have no way of mitigating that. The migration to Stripe that I handled a year or so ago had 5 or 6 stolen cards/people iterating card lists looking for working cards per day and never had a complaint from Stripe.

Once you have a card you can absolutely take arbitrary amounts of money from it, and this appears to be their suggestion. It could well be that they are using (purposely) vague wording that confuses people about their charging structure (in one off payments or subscriptions) which generates complaints to banks and then Stripe have to deal with it. Or it could be a big misunderstanding Stripe side and they have done nothing wrong. I have an opinion on which one I think is most likely.

<comment><USER29> Sort of. Some products are real magnets for stolen card use, for example anything that sells "gift cards" or "stored value card" where the crooks can convert a one time use of a stolen credit card into a 'clean' gift card. Some forms of merchandise are similar.

<comment><USER30> _Some products are real magnets for stolen card use_

Charities also have huge problems with CC fraud, as they're seen as an easy target to test card details against before making the "full" purchase elsewhere:

[http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on- chari...](http://www.bankinfosecurity.com/stolen-cards-tested-on-charity- sites-a-7608/op-1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried to help a business that received the exact same message as you. They had $7.500 on their account.

We eventually gave up, as no one from Stripe answered with other than pre- written answers. I even tried pinging them on IRC, but they couldn't help with these matters.

They had no disputes, and Stripe provided no reason for the cancellation.

</comment><comment><USER31> I recently reached out to Stripe to get their opinion on whether or not I should bother trying to integrate stripe.js with my browser based game. I obviously didn't want to invest the effort if they were just going to shut me down a few weeks later. It says in their TOU that virtual currency sales are allowed so long as it's self contained and can't be traded for real money or across other websites - that was the case with my game.

After over a week of waiting for a reply (PayPal's initial responses are rarely helpful, but at least they tend to respond..), they told me I shouldn't use Stripe because I would almost undoubtably be considered high risk. Why not just say it isn't allowed?

<comment><USER32> They do in their TOS.

<comment><USER31> [https://stripe.com/us/prohibited- businesses](https://stripe.com/us/prohibited-businesses)

>Video game or virtual world credits: Sale of in-game currency unless the merchant is the operator of the virtual world

I am.

>Virtual currency or stored value: Virtual currency that can be monetized, resold, or converted to physical or digital products and services or otherwise exit the virtual world (e.g., Bitcoin); sale of stored value or credits maintained, accepted and issued by anyone other than the seller

It can't and isn't.

Their TOS actually makes no mention of virtual currency whatsoever.

<comment><USER33> Game currency purchases that aren't converted or sold are still disgustingly, ridiculously high risk, bordering internet pharmacy level stuff, especially if a lot of under-18 play your game.

<comment><USER31> Again - then why not just explicitly ban it altogether? Why say it's allowed under certain parameters and then ban users anyway when they meet those parameters exactly as required? They obviously have a list of products/transactions deemed too high-risk by their contract, they need to state what they are explicitly if they want to stop the PR bleeding.

I've been doing this for four years and we've never had a single dispute, but that's really neither here nor there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What were you selling, how and to whom? I feel like there's probably more to this.

<comment><USER34> It is quite likely that certain outrage deflating details were left out. Stripe and Paypal are polar opposites in my experience.

<comment><USER35> "I've had a good experience with Stripe so everyone must have unless it was their fault" is a good example of the Halo Effect. It's entirely possible that Stripe have failed one of their customers without it being the customer's fault.

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

<comment><USER34> I said "quite likely" not "must have" which makes your argument very weak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Update: After speaking with Stripe I have decided to end our dealings. Unfortunately the issue could not be resolved. We are looking at alternate providers.

<comment><USER36> When you are vague and refuse to elaborate, it can only lead us to think that your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out.

<comment><USER37> I believe you meant to say "it proves your business isn't as squeaky clean as you make out". With a response like that, clearly their business was operating in some kind of grey area. It's unfortunate that when this happens, the company (ex: Stripe) can't come back and disclose specific details about the scumbag making a stink on HackerNews over something that the company was perfectly in the right to shut down.

Unfortunately, a lot of businesses want to accept credit cards online with little to no effort in managing the risk. 1-2% doesn't sound like enough wiggle room, but if a company isn't using misleading marketing, is not defrauding users, has a product actually worth what they are charging, and offers instant support for refunds - then staying under 2% is not difficult. Too many businesses want the risk to be handled by external forces. If you want to accept money online, make sure your business is prepared to manage the risks. You can't just drop in the payment processing and wait for the money to roll in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is what happens when you replace business relationships with APIs. APIs should complement a business relationship, not replace it.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's worth noting: if you do 100K+ monthly via PayPal, you get a VIP support team for all business issues, and a Christmas card with their faces printed on the front. No kidding.

<comment><USER40> It's actually quite a bit lower than 100K. My company does about $20K/mo with PayPal and we have an assigned account rep who we contact directly for support. I don't think they've ever sent us a Christmas card, though. Maybe that's the difference between $20K and $100K. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The one thing that surprises me most is why banks don't provide an payment processing API for their customers. I consult at a top bank in Canada ,and I brought this issue up several times in the online banking division and was met with complete indifference. The middle management ( all PMP certified) dont have the vision and the upper management is busy coasting along. My reasoning was that the bank is already doing a lot of business with the business customers and there is trustful relationship and quite a lot of these customers had some form of online presence ,so helping them with online payment processing would be cheaper for the bank ,given their working relationship. and these businesses would not consider taking their business to competition as that would entail switching costs. Also, fraudulent transaction would be less given the relationship history. But what do I know ? I am just an engineer .

<comment><USER17> This is already something every major US and Canadian bank offers. It's called a merchant account. The API for using a merchant account on the web is called a payment gateway. They all offer them.

[http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/bus...](http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/RBC:z7TrmawYUA4BRAAwmCMAAAD8/business/cardprocessing/index.html)

[http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small- busines...](http://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small- business/merchant-services/)

[http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html](http://www.scotiabank.com/ca/en/0,,557,00.html)

[https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small- business/services/merchan...](https://www.bmoharris.com/us/small- business/services/merchant-services)

[https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant- services.htm...](https://www.cibc.com/ca/small-business/merchant- services.html)

<comment><USER41> Actually no they don't : atleast not in the way paypal or Stripe et al do. I have had meetings with some their "small business advisors" and and I ran screaming to Stripe. Getting and using Interac device and connection was simple enough but their solution for online payment processing will set your hair on fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Every time I see a post like this it makes me wonder if other businesses have unfairly gotten a bad reputation because of anecdotes reported by anonymous customers whose version of the story is subjective, biased, possibly exaggerated, etc.

When a company is huge, even one out of 100,000 transactions going badly adds up to a lot of anecdotes.

<comment><USER43> In case of PayPal the bad reputation is deserved

In case of Stripe i sent last week a question in reply to an email from them from last year, there is no ticketing system it seems I got replies from 2 different people today after a week (not the same person one who originally was friendly and talked to me and might not be working there). Both answers were somewhat positive but a bit contradictory.

I do not believe that Stripe are fundamentally "evil" like PayPal, well not yet anyways we will see how turns out with more growth and more staff who might not care about customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Full disclosure, we are still in the implementation stage with Stripe, nothing in production yet, but customer service has been excellent so far. Sure, it's non-traditional, and I think they need a better user facing ticket system especially for important things that need tracking + accountability.

Every time I have had a question about functionality, needed someone to take a look at test cases in my account, etc.., someone from Stripe has ALWAYS been available in IRC and quick to respond.

That said, if they really are canceling accounts on short notice, that's pretty shitty. No reasonable sized application can realistically swap to a completely new payment provider in a week. There should be a bare minimum of a month or two of notice if your account is getting terminated.

</comment><comment><USER45> In all honesty you probably got stuck in some automated loop.

It is kind of sad that the support isn't more expedited for things like this.

Seems like more and more people are turning to HN in order to get visibility and get their Stripe problems resolved. That is quite unfortunate...

I upvoted for visibility, as I know how frustrating it is to deal with payment processors, especially when your living / business depends on it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Something similar happened

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619282)

</comment><comment><USER47> Have you tried tweeting at them? [https://twitter.com/stripe/](https://twitter.com/stripe/) They're way more responsive over twitter than email.

<comment><USER48> You shouldn't have to publicly tweet at a company about an issue regarding your bank accounts/debit cards to get their attention though

<comment><USER47> You don't have to, they accept DMs from people they don't follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Kind of reminds me of doing business with Google. Most times they ban you it is just a robot that has no clue it is wrong. They just set the thresholds ridiculously high and put up with false positives intentionally as a business choice. Throwing out some innocents is worth it to them to throw out anyone faking clicks or whatnot.

</comment><comment><USER50> Fraud is an incredibly difficult problem for payment processors, for both technical and business reasons. It's well worth studying if you're into this sort of thing.

Fraud is a sensitivity/specificity problem. For sensitivity, Stripe wants to detect as many actual fraud cases as possible, because undetected fraud is expensive. For specificity, they want as few false positives as possible, because false positives mean angry customers who feel mistreated.

Generally, there's a sensitivity/specificity tradeoff, and priorities need to be set (which is worse - letting criminals get away, or frustrating honest customers?). But at such a scale, and with so many creative minds working on new mechanisms for fraud, it's impossible to achieve perfect numbers on either side.

</comment><comment><USER51> Pick two:

\- Strongly regulated banks/strong consumer protection in financial services.

\- Good merchant customer service.

\- Cheap credit card processing.

<comment><USER52> Security/Convenience/Price

Security and Convenience are a classic tradeoff. I suppose you could argue that a good implementation of either isn't cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I'm just surprised the handle disappointeddev was still available.

Do you sell cheap virtual goods? They're sometimes used to test stolen cards I heard.

</comment><comment><USER54> I use the MinFraud service from MaxMind to try to avoid unauthorized transactions. Using Braintree, I first do an Authorization, if that goes through, I send details to MinFraud. If that passes a threshold, then I submit the payment for settlement. If not, I void the transaction.

This process has helped to avoid all kinds of scammers using my website to try to validate stolen credit card details.

<comment><USER55> Maybe you should build it. YC RFS Maybe? [https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/](https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> This is pretty useless. You should give some context.

Using a disposable HN account does not help either.

</comment><comment><USER57> If every time a company popular on HN did something that one HN user found inexplicable we had a top-of-the-front-page story about it, the front page would be nothing but complaints. An "Ask HN" would make more sense, since that would (a) generate information instead of just broadcasting a complaint, and (b) reveal whether there was a trend behind it.

I flagged this story, and hope other people will too.

<comment><USER58> With all due respect, take a quick look through the replies, there are a lot of "I experienced this too" comments. If you go further and search HN you'll see that this tends to be a common problem with Stripe support.

I think that this type of post is fine for HN. It's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction.

<comment><USER59> _It 's a YCombinator backed company, with the founders and most of the team commonly browsing the site and people here are usually able to point you in the right direction._

That's understandable.. but this isn't a support forum, and people would stop visiting if it became one.

<comment><USER58> In most circumstances that'd be fine, but as the OP states, he's tried getting in touch with them. This is essentially the last resort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Wouldn't it help in a lot of cases to have an automatic escalation system in place, via SLA rules or other triggers, to raise up the visibility of messages from people whose accounts are being shut down? Have it post to IRC, Slack, PagerDuty, etc. when an email comes in from a customer flagged as "account closing by administrative action" or whatever?

</comment><comment><USER61> >So how could it be true that the payments are unauthorised?

It could be no fault of your own but maybe your customers are using stolen credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER62> As mentioned by many others - there are a number of details missing here that are extremely relevant. What are you selling? Where? To whom? If you had hundreds of charges in your first month, did you migrate over from another payment supplier or are they brand new customers? If you migrated, how did you migrate?

I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into:

* The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system.

* The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure.

* The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true).

* The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this.

===

Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two.

That said, as much as I love what Stripe in general, it is completely unacceptable for them not to have an escalated support/appeals process for fraud complaints. If they have made a mistake (which happens even with the best fraud systems), then they could be destroying a business that might have customers/employees/suppliers that are also relying on them to receive their payments on time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Reminds me of this tangentially-related comment from jwz a few days ago:

[http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how- does-i...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/06/internet-commerce-how-does-it- fucking-work/#comment-162859)

</comment><comment><USER64> Square might be the new PayPal in that they're (finally) big enough to have banks breathing down their neck. Honestly, I think the hate is misplaced (for both Square and PP), and should be directed towards the banks who have pushed the security burden upon these tech providers.

</comment><comment><USER65> Why isn't there a standard way of filing complaints against a company and/or discussing them online? It would be so helpful if a consumer could just go to www.company.com, and click on a "discuss website" or "complain" button in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER66> TLDR - One devs account was shut down. He wants support and is getting it in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER67> Good to know, but is there anyone that's better right now?

</comment><comment><USER68> I've had no problems getting responses back from Stripe. Glad to see the CEO responded. Please please please don't become PayPal!

</comment><comment><USER69> Is it me of posting/commenting on HN has become the default method of resolving a Stripe issue when all normal channels fail?

</comment><comment><USER28> This is pure gamification of the site. So many points for making a baseless statement with a most likely heavily edited version of the events and then get exposure just because _DAE companies hate us entrepreneurs_

Everyone here should know better than this. When I had a problem, I phoned up Stripe and sorted it in minutes. I didn't post on the internet when my business was suffering.

<comment><USER70> I'm curious how you phoned them up, as they're quite adamant and public about not offering any sort of phone based point of contact.[1]

[1] [https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone- num...](https://support.stripe.com/questions/do-you-have-a-phone-number-i-can- call)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Huh, and here I am just finalizing my application for Stripe's "user ops" support crew.

<comment><USER72> Congrats, it's a great company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Scary. I was hoping they'd remain the oasis in the harsh desert of online payment systems.

</comment><comment><USER74> I will not use Stripe's services while I see these support issues cropping up.

</comment><comment><USER75> What was the end result of your discussion with the CEO? Was everything resolved?

</comment><comment><USER76> Have you tweeted to them?

<comment><USER77> The fact that this is a valid reply saddens me...

<comment><USER19> Right? This is the financial industry, you shouldn't have to "publicly shame" a company to get a response.

A ticketing system would give some organization to the chaos

<comment><USER78> Hell, I shouldn't have to register for a twitter account to be able to contact someone in any industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> ..Or the new Google..or the new Amazon.

Both of the above companies have nearly 100% automated responses. With Amazon, if you get your selling account put on hold for any reason (even if it's by mistake through their automated bots), you will not be able to talk to anyone on the phone or through email. Your account is also put on hold for 90 days and your money might get transferred back to you when they feel like it.

It happened to me a few years back. A customer was ordering merchandise, stealing it, and filing disputes with Amazon. I wasn't able to block the customer, because it's not possible with their current system. Support was unhelpful (automated copy/paste responses) and they pretty much sided with the customer every time and deemed my account a "threat". Before this, 100% feedback.

It's a good lesson to learn: Don't base your business on one companym because they might just pull it out from under you one day.

<comment><USER80> Except Google and Amazon's primary customers are consumers. Amazon's customer support is quite good afaik, at least if you're on the buying end.

Stripe is a B2B business it's also a bit 'lower layer'. You would have to rely on them for your business quite heavily.

<comment><USER81> I guess this is the endpoint of "consumerized" B2B. Slick UI, very easy to use, low pricing, no support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Just my 2¢. I create custom web commerce solutions for a few small/medium businesses in Mexico. Ever since Stripe launched a few years ago I wanted to try them out but, as expected, they were not available yet here.

Still, I subscribed to their 'mailing list' in order to be notified whenever they would launch. Last year, I've heard that they were about to do it and eventually announced the market as 'Beta', whatever that means. Again, I subscribed to their list, this time, in order to be 'invited for their private beta'. I'm pretty sure I was at the top of their list, because back then not many people knew about stripe and further, less people from Mexico were interested with them; tbh, nowadays Stripe is something that you don't hear in the field in Mexico, at all.

To this day I haven't heard from them, and for what I see Stripe here in Mexico operates more like some kind of secret society than a real business. My point is, I'm not doing business with them, and the reason is that it is clear that they're not here to offer a payment solution for developers in general, they are just here to hang out and provide the payment backbone for a few of their friends, and that's it.

Even if I'm later deemed 'worthy of their attention', I won't integrate their payments platform with any kind of serious project that I would develop, and the reason is that they will always look at me as 'just another guy' and whenever I come up with some real problem that would need their attention they would just check out their A-list, realize that my name is not there and pretty much let me fuck up; just like it's doing it with many of the other guys that are posting here.

For the moment I'll stick with PayU which I think is, by the way, a much better payment platform than Stripe if you take out all the 'pay with a single JSON Curl' fanfare.

TL;DR: Ignoring your actual clients is the worst PR ever.

</comment><comment><USER83> All of these payments services are going to die within 5 years anyway. Before people get all pissy and down vote this assertion let me you remind you that a massive(and growing) portion of the world has become completely disillusioned with the global fiat currency system(or perhaps just enlightened as to how it works?), regardless, its days are numbered. I am not however entirely convinced that cryptocurrencies, namely bitcoin, aren't in fact a creation of global financiers anticipating rejection of the fiat currency model, but fuck it we'll see.

<comment><USER84> Hacker News: where some people legitimately believe that the entire world will abandon the current credit/monetary system, because reasons (or alternatively, "just because" \- you know, to see 'how it works', because an entirely new monetary system is like testing on some FiveFinger shoes to be spontaneous).

Also, Bitcoin is totally an invention by the Fed to ween people off fiat, despite the fact the Bitcoin network and its total overall volume are a joke compared to global currency trade, and basically worse, or completely irrelevant, for consumers in pretty much all cases.

If there was any ever proof techno libertarian supernerds are insanely disconnected from reality, stuff like this is it. You have a better chance of actually being The Highlander. But seriously, I could write a comedy novel about this stuff at this point - so do continue to go on.

<comment><USER83> I'm disconnected from reality? So how do you view the global monetary system working 10 years from now? Will the world be using U.S. petro-dollars? Can the fed print off another hundred TRILLION and avoid hyper-inflation. Like it is all well and good to say I have my head up my ass but can you give me some of these answers?

<comment><USER85> Why would the world shift from a currency that is economically and politically entrenched via trade and treaty?

What would Bitcoin solve that the USD doesn't?

Why would the world accept a technological "solution" whose implementation already contains dire technical problems?

What makes you think hyperinflation is a realistic outcome?

If I grant you a world that decides fiat model is Bad, why would they choose a system that is inherently centralized? One whose early adopters and hoarders have been manipulating the crypto-currency market for their advantage for years? One whose transaction history is public to _everyone_? One that only has a handful of gatekeepers, that have been proven to work with governments and have been caught delaying transactions to profit from the change in the price in Bitcoin?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the DoJ, You May Be a Criminal - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/are-you-teenager-who-reads-news-online-according-justice-department-you-may-be <comment><USER3> Minors cannot enter into binding contracts, so the parts of the terms of service that specify a code of conduct, waive liability, etc. are not enforceable. Minors are legally toxic because of this, and no self-interested American business would ever knowingly interact with a minor online.

Conveniently ignored in all the stories about teenage whiz-kids who make money off internet businesses is that they are invariably committing federal felonies. There is not a single payment processor that doesn't require its users to be 18. Apple's developer program also requires its users to be 18. So does AdSense. These services also require users to input a birthday, so the minors using them needn't worry about "hacking" charges - they've committed fraud.

Obviously we need to fix the legal situation that makes this necessary, but that's why. (And because my parents follow rules, I wasn't allowed to do anything vaguely entrepreneurial on the internet until I turned 18).

<comment><USER4> Hang on,so you cannot open a bank account before you are 18 in the US? In most EU countries you need to be 13 to open your own bank account.

<comment><USER3> Nope. You can have access to an account with your name on it, but it needs to be held jointly with an adult (typically a parent) and they have to accompany you to the bank and give permission to open it.

<comment><USER5> We just opened a checking account for our 17 y/o daughter.

To be specific, the account must be opened in the minors name with a legal parent or guardian as a co-signatory.

Either way, you're right. Minors can not, in the United States, enter into a legally binding contract. They can't even legally purchase a car as there is an implied or express purchase contract.

<comment><USER6> Minors can enter into a legally binding contract in the U.S. However, the seller in a purchase contract cannot enforce a contract against the minor if the minor does not pay (though the minor can enforce the contract against the seller if the minor pays but does not receive the purchased item, i.e., the car). The purpose of making the parent a _co-_ signatory to the contract is to enforce the contract against the parent if necessary.

<comment><USER5> Correct. Technically, the contract is voidable by the minor in most cases. There's exceptions, and state rules come into play. For instance, I believe, in CA if a minor misrepresents his/her age, then the contract can not be avoided. In IL, I believe, that's not the case, the contract can still be avoided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How I love crazy interactions between laws and the unintended consequences.

And laws related to children are seemly really prone to that, like the prohibitions in taking photos of naked minors, that had three important results in my view:

One, allow stupid cases, like ones that DO happened in the US, where for example a 15 year old girl was prosecuted for giving photos of herself to her boyfriend (also a minor).

Two, makes illegal to take photos of some real crimes, for example if you take a photo of a guy raping a minor girl in a park and hand to the police, you can still be prosecuted for taking the photo.

Three, meddles with human sexuality in ways that few people understand, although many people now believes that people below 18 are incapable of having sex with responsability, I refuse to believe that my mother (met my father when she was 15, they are still married) or my grandmother (married my grandfather when she was 14, they are still married and VERY happy) were some sort of stupid children that did not knew what they were doing.

<comment><USER8> In this case however, and in two of the examples you mentioned, these are no "unintended consequences".

The laws are deliberately broad to allow the interest groups that lobbied for it to basically lay down the law without pesky democratic interference.

In this case, it's corporations that want to arbitrarily add new restrictions they haven't even thought of yet (or perhaps have already), so they want a broad law they can later redefine and apply as they please. Making breaking the terms of service crime allows them to do that. It basically allows them to write their own laws, including absurd ones.

In two of the examples you've given we're talking about laws that have be devised by people that want to enforce a repressive sexual morality on society. It absolutely is their intention to make any sexually oriented activity by anyone under 18 illegal.

And the sick part of it is, that by making it illegal in practice, they slowly manage to convince the rest of society things that used to be perfectly normal and harmless are now Very Bad Things(TM), which in turn allows them to push even further. See also: the history of copyright.

This currently happens in every Western country. We are considerably less free than the previous generation, and things are getting worse. This is not "unintended", there's a method behind it.

<comment><USER9> >We are considerably less free than the previous generation

This is patently false. The internet and other technologies have opened up massive vistas of freedom. Your bunker siege mentality, exciting as it may be, is an illusion.

<comment><USER10> While the internet has liberated many aspects of humanity (communications, publishing, artistic and scientific collaboration, etc.) there has been diminishment of meatspace freedoms, in some cases as a direct reaction by the former captors.

<comment><USER11> I'm guessing you're not black, are you? Were your Japanese parents placed in an internment camp during WWII? Were you a communist in the McCarthy era?

It's not that we have _less_ freedom now, it's that freedom is _different_. Now, we torture people and hold them indefinitely in Guantanamo. We spy on our citizens. We still haven't overcome racism or sexism. But there are definitely areas where we've improved greatly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The word "soon" does not appear anywhere in the article. The original title is "Are You A Teenager Who Reads News Online? According to the Justice Department, You May Be a Criminal".

<comment><AUTHOR> I may have misunderstood the article, but hasn't it been determined in courts that the current version of the CFAA doesn't criminalize ToS breaches? I thought the article title was referring to a proposed change to the act.

Edit: when I posted the article, I added the word [Soon] to the title.

<comment><USER13> Yes, to my knowledge so far courts have held that breaching the ToS is not a violation of the CFAA.

The proposed bill, as written, would change that. I think the interjection into the title is accurate, and makes the title less hyperbolic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The idea of having a site's TOS be law is terrible for almost infinite reasons. None of the rigor of law is applied to it.

Thus, I implore you, all webmasters: insert the phrase "And you promise to have sex with a goat" into your TOS as soon as possible. That should make Congress think twice...

</comment><comment><USER15> Seems a bit grasping at straws for arguments against the new laws.

Are news papers tos justicable ie are they enforceable - you can put any kind of crap you want in a tos/contract for example you can sign a contact giving up your righst to a public holiday but its not a valid contract and is unenforceable.

The test woudl be are teenagers restricted from buying the print edition no they are not.

For an organization supposedly all about understanding and lobbying for sane laws I would expect better than this pathetic effort.

</comment><comment><USER16> The underlying problem is the huge liability which websites face when children use those sites and may interact with adults, or view content their parents do not want them to see. This is what drives ToS to include provisions that say children shouldn't view the site. edit: effectively throwing the responsibility back onto the parents to prevent their children from using the site if it matters, which is where the responsibility belongs

</comment><comment><USER4> I am still waiting for a day when Americans are finally going to realize that it's long past the point when they should be completely fed up with this shit and don't accept it anymore. Breaching ToS a criminal offence? Is this land of the free, or the land of the corporations again?

<comment><USER17> I think you're a bit too fixated on corporations. There is nothing magical about being incorporated that suddenly grants you wide control over your elected official. In fact, any legal entity (individual, corporation, or otherwise) that holds sway over a large swath of votes will possess considerable influence over their representatives. This is the way of democracy.

<comment><USER4> Except that EU countries would never pass a law that prioritizes corporations over citizens. Why is US considering a law that would make breaching ToS a criminal offence? Because people want it? I don't think so. And I have no problem with corporations per se. I know this word is thrown a lot nowadays, and sometimes not rightfully. But in this specific case, it's corporations(and other large institutions) which want to have a free hand in establishing their own laws, which were not voted for, which were not discussed with the public,and which cannot be fought. And it's fine as it is right now - <USER2> breach the ToS, they are free to stop doing business with you. But making it a criminal offence? Seriously?

<comment><USER15> I suspect that the poor bastards who have bank acounts in cyprus aren't feeling top happy abotu the 40% haircut they are getting courtesy of the EU

<comment><USER4> The "poor bastards" in Cyprus are(sorry to say this) victims of their own rotten system. For years they were taking all benefits of being in the EU, while giving back very little. For the last decade they were asked repeatedly to impose fair taxes like the rest of the EU. They continuously declined, making Cyprus one of the tax-heavens of the world. Many companies moved to Cyprus purely to avoid taxes in their home countries - which was made possible thanks to EU trade agreements.

And when Cyprus economy could not survive this stupid approach any longer, they want help from the EU. So EU is like, you know Cyprus, you did not collect proper taxes in more than a decade, but now you want us to help you with our tax money? Sure,but this cannot happen again, so either you join everyone in the fair game, or get lost.

<comment><USER15> True but not everyone is as culpable as some and don't forget the central core made bank flogging high value goods to the periphery that realisticaly they could not afford.

I agree with the Guardians finance editor when he described the euro as a bad idea whose time has come.

And the problem is if this goes ahead it sets a precedent as various Eu finance types have said that this will be used elsewhere

For Americans whats proposed for Cyprus its a bit like the Presidential Executive Order 6102 which confiscated private holdings of gold back in the 30's.

<comment><USER4> It's a bit different though. In America the government was taking something you physically owned and you had to give it away under a threat of punishment.

What Cyprus did makes sense if you realize something - and it has completely blown my mind because I was not aware of it too - that once you give money to the bank, it's not yours, you do not own it anymore. If you pay 100 pounds into your account, you are giving the bank a loan for a 100 quid, which the bank obliges to repay on demand - as stated in your contract. So when you go to to the bank to withdraw your 100 pounds, it's the bank repaying its debt to you. Therefore Cyprus uses the bank's money to repay its debts - not yours. Sure, they do owe money to the account holders now, but it's identical to a company going bankrupt - they might owe you something,but they physically do not have any money to give back.

I am not saying this is a good thing, and I am not supporting it. I am saying that once you realize that money paid into the bank is not yours anymore, it all makes sense.

<comment><USER17> I don't disagree with what you said (in fact I upvoted it because it's spot on), but this sort of makes FDIC insurance a sham, right? They're basically claiming they will insure your money in a bank until they need it -- then it's fair game. Even if they never do renege on their promise, we are (through taxation) subsidizing people to give their money away to banks.

<comment><USER4> Well yes, that is basically what happens. It was actually the UK Ministry of Treasury that said in a statement, that after you give money to a banker "that money is for all intentions and purposes owned by the banker. The banker is now in your debt and should repay his debt upon your request. He is, however, free to invest that money however he wishes, as long as he is able to repay all the debts".

But as we all know, sometimes investments(high-risk loans especially) sometimes don't pan out and the banker literally cannot pay you back.

There is a EU law that says that a bank needs to always have enough money to repay the first 100 thousand euros to each of its customers - but there is no such guarantee for any amount above this, so if a bank goes bankrupt you won't get anything above 100k, until the bank regains financial stability or its possessions are sold and debtors payed off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Too bad computer and internet literacy tests are not required to be eligible to run for Congress. Our systems is so messed up because members of Congress are living in the Dark Ages in terms of their knowledge about technology and the internet, and the only ones feeding them any info are "rights holders" (read lobbyists).

Jack Abramoff was on "To the Best of Our Knowledge" on Sunday night, and all I can say is, we're f*&^ed. I think I will start donating more money to EFF.

<comment><USER19> Computer literacy? I don't even care about computer literacy or people learning how to program ... I'd like congress people to be _literate_ and not only that but be in the slightest bit _rational_. We have people in Congress that think CO2 is not a problem because it is in Coke cans and ones that think banning assault rifles leads us on toward a slippery slope of bestiality and oddly enough most of these come from one particular party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If this is truly as described, then it seems like it's ripe for use by privacy advocates. Kind of a robots.txt for data miners and snoops.

New ToS: "You may not view any material on this site if you are in any way affiliated with [irritating corporation or agency]"

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not a fan of hyperbole or stretching the truth, even when it is in service of a noble goal.

In this case the eye-catching headline is directly undercut by the actual state of legal precedent, which is that individuals are explicitly _not_ a criminal just because you violate terms of use.

There are a lot of good arguments to fix the CFAA...why rely on a bad one?

<comment><USER15> yes making wildly stupid statements like this is no way to act for a supposedly professional organization - all this will do is get the EFF treated as "nut jobs" by law makers and politicians.

<comment><USER14> Notice how many of the comments in this topic verge on the hysterical, paranoid, reactionary and ill-informed.

It brings them out. The sheer emotional appeal of the original headline brings out the worst in people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That protection act is one thing, these terms of service is another. Why would sites like Popular Mechanics impose an age limit?

<comment><USER7> I make games for children, so I have to track COPPA.

Among the children product makers, it is known that US government go crazy with COPPA, throwing huge lawsuits even against mom'n'pop shops if they think you are somehow not meeting COPPA fully.

Even my business, that has NOTHING to do with the USA (our dev lab is in Brazil, our headquarters is in Switzerland, and we sell to Russia, Brazil, France, Germany and Korea) we comply with COPPA because we fear USA might find a way to screw us.

When dealing with USA (that I don't know why its citizens still believe is land of the free) it is ALWAYS better to go safe than sorry.

<comment><USER23> Frankly, I found this surprisingly misguided for something from the EFF. CFFA isn't the law that causes such absurd Terms of Service -- COPPA is.

Children have been misrepresenting their ages since well before COPPA was introduced, but I distinctly remember COPPA making the problem much worse amongst my peers.

I remember, a few weeks before one of my birthdays, having to pick between abandoning my Neopets account so that I could create a new one where I pretended to be over thirteen, or asking my parents to sign a printed permission slip for me and each of my sisters and let me fax it to Neopets.

I ended up doing the latter, but only because I knew we had a fax machine in the house, and my parents already knew (and were okay with) me being on Neopets all day long. A bunch of my peers just created new accounts, and eventually devolved into sock-puppeting once they realized that there wasn't necessarily a one-to-one correspondance between people and accounts.

I'm not sure what the right answer is, though. The moment that a child turns 16, 18, or 21 (depending on jurisdiction) they're inundated with peers who want to go on Facebook, offers for loyalty programs and credit cards from every store they visit IRL, and tracking cookies from Ad networks online. If a kid has $20, and wants to buy something from the local Wal-Mart, no one will stop him/her from doing so. But if a kid wants to spend that $20 on Amazon.com, COPPA prevents them from even creating an account in the first place.

As a kid, I felt like COPPA simply prevented me from participating in the world in a way that nobody would have ever experienced before dial-up became mainstream, and I seriously think that harmed my ability and that of my peers to handle the privacy concerns that plague barely-legal adults today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seriously, America - What's with the complete 3rd world acting?

<comment><USER16> Did you understand the article? The issue is all our "think of the children" wailing has forced websites to bar minors from viewing in order to avoid very serious liability.

<comment><USER24> I feel that your comment actually validates my point.

Your "think of the children" wailing makes me, and I fear, a lot of other people / countries step away from you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ever since the SOPA 2.0 stuff from the EFF, I can't take them seriously anymore.

</comment><comment><USER26> Which court case decided that browsing a website is a form of contractual agreement with whatever happens to be posted?

</comment><comment><USER27> I love the EFF but they've got to stop this misleading, sensationalized crap if they want any money or support from me. They didn't nail Aaron because he violated the terms of service, they nailed him for STEALING FROM JSTOR. Just because the charges were related to a violation of TOS doesn't mean anything aside from the fact that a TOS violation may be a criminal offense. So say that!

<comment><USER28> "They didn't nail Aaron because he violated the terms of service, they nailed him for STEALING FROM JSTOR"

Nothing was stolen, he destroyed or returned all copies of the scientific articles he downloaded, and JSTOR decline to press charges. He was then charged with computer crime for violating MIT's terms of service, which is a dubious legal standard that was already shot down by the courts years ago.

Aaron Swartz was the victim of an overzealous prosecutor with a history of civil rights abuses and who had previously driven another alleged hacker to suicide. The CFAA is shockingly broad and puts the public in legal danger _by its very existence_. There is no defense of the government's actions in the Aaron Swartz case.

<comment><USER27> Sorry, I should have made this clear: the reason he was focused on by the attorneys general is because of the theft, not the TOS violation. I am perfectly aware Aaron resolved the case with JSTOR amicably. And I agree with everything you said.</comment></comment></comment>


As much Stack Overflow as possible in 4096 bytes (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://danlec.com/blog/stackoverflow-in-4096-bytes <comment><AUTHOR> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253710](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253710)</comment>


Microsoft's TikTok buyout would cover every Five Eyes nation other than the UK - <AUTHOR> https://tech.newstatesman.com/business/microsoft-tiktok-uk-headquarters <comment><USER2> Why exclude the UK? Is the UK ready to force another local company to acquire TikTok?

<comment><USER3> As mentioned in the article, TikTok is currently considering locating its international HQ in London ( = investment + jobs for the UK ).

Siding with the US on this would mean no TikTok HQ.

Therefore TikTok obviously wants to be able to exist in the UK and the UK government is still considering whether it should be welcoming or hostile.

I'm sure that companies would be happy to buy TikTok on the cheap. What is happening is rather forcing Bytedance to sell.</comment></comment>


Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.swmonkey.com/blog/cease_desist/ <comment><USER2> Calling it Southwest monkey is clearly a mistake.

You have little argument there, and you should change that because to a 3rd party it could look like a service offered by Southwest itself.

The part about scraping, etc, is more complicated and you may want to fight that.

See: [http://blog.icreon.us/advise/web-scraping- legality](http://blog.icreon.us/advise/web-scraping-legality) and [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects- li...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin- claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is-hacking/) as two quick examples I found on previous cases that have gone to court.

<comment><USER3> Really? It's bad enough when common words get trademarked, but they didn't even call themselves "Southwest Monkey". They called it "SWMonkey".

Without extra context (knowing what the website is for by reading the description), I'd have no clue that "swmonkey" has anything to do with airlines.

Anyhow, that's a separate issue. Southwest was clearly less concerned about trademark infringement than they were with the business model. The contents of the email clearly indicate that they want to disallow scraping with their ToS, and want to enforce that.

<comment><USER2> > but they didn't even call themselves "Southwest Monkey".

Yes they did, and I quote their FAQ:

"How long does Southwest Monkey track flights?"

> They called it "SWMonkey".

I think they changed their name after the letters (and presumably forgot to change it there).

<comment><USER3> Oopsie then, "Southwest Monkey" does look like a trademark issue on top of the scraping issue. Certainly doesn't help.

That said, the guy with the skiplagged website (same idea: use publicly available flight pricing to produce tickets that the airlines see as undesirable) prevailed against the pressure from the airlines, so the situation doesn't look too bleak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Craigslist has litigated the scraping issue heavily, and precedents are bad for SWMonkey.

[https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2017/04/17/craigslist- garn...](https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2017/04/17/craigslist- garners-60-million-judgment-against-radpad-in-scraping-dispute/)

Edit: But the LinkedIn case seems favorable: [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin-claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is- hacking/)

<comment><USER5> I know of a company that scrapes craigslist in bulk. The owner insisted that he's had no problems. Importantly, his company is not based in the US. Maybe he just ignores their c&d letters.

<comment><USER6> > Importantly, his company is not based in the US.

Guessing it's in Ukraine, or somewhere in Eastern Europe :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Everyone has a right to access public data. And we believe that whether you are accessing that data by typing in a URL in a web browser, through a CURL request, an RSS feed, a cached copy, or having someone read it to you aloud, does not change your right to access public data. "

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I believe this is, sadly, dead wrong. The infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act contains a provision barring not just unauthorized access to computer systems but also accessing such systems in a manner that exceeds _authorized access._ In other words, if you break terms of service on a website, you may be in violation of the CFAA.

The ACLU last year filed suit to overturn this provision of CFAA, on the grounds that it chills research into civil rights violations, as well as academic research and journalism. [https://www.aclu.org/cases/sandvig-v- sessions-challenge-cfaa...](https://www.aclu.org/cases/sandvig-v-sessions- challenge-cfaa-prohibition-uncovering-racial-discrimination-online)

<comment><USER8> The law is often wrong and written by the more fortunate in society.

The data is publicly available. The reasons this should not be an issue are self evident.

Google scrapes trillions of sites every second of every day. Where's the outrage in that sir? Or the legalities. Oh right the law doesn't apply to them. Just small indie devs.

I don't hide behind legal speak and lawyers. I stand behind the truth of the matter. I'd say any legal argument against non-malicious scraping is dead wrong on moral and ethical grounds. Lawyers and powerful corporations will always try to stamp out the little guy to protect their precious trademark or data because their intellects are too dull and mediocre to compete with new entrants or innovations, so they call and cry about it to their lawyer instead. It's easier.

<comment><USER7> Ya, I think the site should be perfectly legal (at least in terms of the scraping).

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure if you demand Google to stop indexing your site, it will comply. With robots.txt you can even ask them in an automated fashion.

"Legal speak and lawyers" are how we hold our society together in a relatively peaceful and just fashion. Yes, we end up with bad laws, like CFAA, and some days I think the U.S. will just collapse in on itself. But it beats all the alternatives that have been seriously tried. Please remember, lawyers not only try and enforce the CFAA, but are the ones challenging it as well!

PS Also I think this provision of CFAA is already being rolled back - though I assume there will be appeals - [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/08/court-rejects-li...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin-claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is- hacking/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I made an open source version of this. [https://github.com/scott113341/southwest-price-drop- bot](https://github.com/scott113341/southwest-price-drop-bot)

<comment><USER10> Nice work, it even has a deploy to Heroku button!

Honestly, I think it's pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage on SW prices like that. $3 per alert? Really?

Great job making an OSS implementation.

<comment><USER6> > pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage

Lame? Possibly. Profitable? Probably.

<comment><USER11> > pretty lame trying to profit from arbitrage

It's actually quite stupid. If they did not ask Southwest for permission, they are asking to be sued, especially when you charge people money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, the Southwest TOS state that you can't scrape or programmatically access their data. Isn't that the end of the argument unless they find a way to manually access it for customers?

<comment><USER13> Is visiting a website now some sort of contract? I have no contractual relationship with Southwest, what do I care for their TOS?

In the EU all TOS are basically just a reiteration of standard consumer law, you can put into yours whatever you want but none of that nonsense survives a legal challenge.

<comment><USER14> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

<comment><USER13> How does a TOS relate to this? Now that you've found the Wikipedia article, you might as well read it.

<comment><USER14> mapgrep has detailed that below: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15715971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15715971)

"I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I believe this is, sadly, dead wrong. The infamous Computer Fraud and Abuse Act contains a provision barring not just unauthorized access to computer systems but also accessing such systems in a manner that exceeds authorized access. In other words, if you break terms of service on a website, you may be in violation of the CFAA."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Given they're charging for this service, maybe there's a way to make it work economically by having low cost workers (e.g. Mechanical Turk or even a bank of workers in certain countries) perform the checks manually (you could even create a browser extension that automates the form filling, but leaves a human to push the button and parse the results). At least by offering it as a paid service, they have some sums they can run to see if manual would work.

<comment><USER16> Set it up so the user's browser scrapes it when a button is pressed, and send a reminder every X days as chosen by the user....

User comes to your site, clicks a button, and Southwest's page loads in an iframe, where js does the lifting.

<comment><USER15> That's a neat idea. I imagine a service worker could also be used to do checks in the background, and unless SW wants to ban every IP that hits their site.. :-D

<comment><USER16> Amazon mechanical turk?

Using that you could not only have real people doing this work but also support (for low cost) people in developing nations who need money to survive.

Because of cookie policies they'd need to clear their cookies every time they query.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My brother-in-law sunk a million dollars of his own money into a similar real- time airline pricing service, all of which was thrown away when his now defunct company got banned for scraping.

There are only a few blessed companies that are allowed to scrape airline data (not surprisingly, big players in the market). If you haven't been granted permission and don't comply with their cease and desist you'll be sued and/or have your scraper IPs blacklisted.

It's a tough business to get into.

</comment><comment><USER18> "The problem I see with their argument is that they are making this information public."

I love this idea! However, I think that unfortunately this argument doesn't hold up, and wouldn't in court. The information is available via their site, but that does not make it public.

<comment><USER19> If the information is available to any member of the public that requests it with no conditions at all, why is the information not considered public?

<comment><USER20> But it doesn't make it available with "no conditions at all", their robots.txt implies the condition that you aren't scraping it with a bot.

<comment><USER19> So there would be a material difference between me using the data when a bot scrapes it, versus a human doing it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Might be worth to check out the recent LinkedIn vs. startup scraping case: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin- ruling...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-linkedin-ruling/u-s- judge-says-linkedin-cannot-block-startup-from-public-profile-data- idUSKCN1AU2BV)

<comment><USER22> This is mis-reported. This isn't a general ruling on whether scraping sites in violation of the explicit instructions of the site owners is allowed.

The judge granted an injunction prior to the trial proper, permitting HiQ to continue scraping LinkedIn in the lead up to the trial. He did this because HiQ credibly argued that if it couldn't scrape LinkedIn it would go out of business before the court had even determined whether what it was doing was legal. These sorts of injunctions are a procedural matter and quite normal.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_injunction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preliminary_injunction) has more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> _it was a public domain image, licensed under creative commons._

Unless it was CC0 (which is not what was linked), Creative Commons licenses are not public domain licenses. Someone still holds the copyright and you have to abide by the license terms. Secondly, CC and "public domain" are about copyright, not trademarks. It's totally possible to infringe someone's trademark even with a public domain image.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good for you. I completely agree with your sentiment re: scraping. It's ok if Google or another big company does it but god help you if you do as an indie dev. Thank you for sharing this. I commend you.

I've scraped millions of records from all kinds of companies big and small, politely of course, and I will definitely continue to do so at my discretion for ideas. In your case I would've scraped southwest without hesitation.

I'd make sure to distance yourself from the trademark as much as possible. Maybe even remove "sw" from the domain name but otherwise I don't see how they have a case.

TOS trying to enforce anti-scraping measures is a joke and makes a mockery of the judicial system.

</comment><comment><USER24> Flightmonkey might be a better name. Apps like Hopper appear to be monitoring flight prices just fine, not sure if they include SW, though.

Doing flight searches via other travel platforms/apis may also be legal.

</comment><comment><USER25> "And we believe that whether you are accessing that data by typing in a URL in a web browser, through a CURL request, an RSS feed, a cached copy, or having someone read it to you aloud, does not change your right to access public data."

I absolutely do have the right to access the data. However, it's not clear why _you_ should have the right to access the data and then monetize redistributing it to me.

</comment><comment><USER26> The landing page ([https://www.swmonkey.com/](https://www.swmonkey.com/)) still has the workd "Southwest" used several times, and the picture of what is obviously a Southwest plane. I wish common sense prevails and this (obviously very useful) service doesn't die because the founder can't control his ego.

<comment><AUTHOR> Founder here: There is one case where I use the name SouthwestMonkey instead of swmonkey. I realize that that was a bad naming decision. All the other references to southwest are to the Airline and not this service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe you can crowdsource pricing info. That way, you're not scraping, and users are voluntarily sharing what they've searched.

<comment><USER28> That would be one way to comply with the letter of the TOS. There will be some issue of getting enough traction from users that obey the TOS to make the site useful, though.

I think crowdsourcing would open up SWmonkey to 'attack' from SW, where SW would flood the channel with conflicting info at a rate that would make the SWmonkey site useless to legitimate customers.

Also, most of the companies that offer fare comparisons do not show SW flights... Some of those companies have the tech chops to implement 'fixes' that would comply with the SW site TOS and the massive legal departments to defend their position/approach in any and all courts in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Make it an app not a website. Users can download and install it, enter flight data and click to start monitoring.

<comment><USER30> And support more airlines and not call yourself southwest monkey. Plenty of airlines have policies about lower prices so there is a market for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Does putting a human in the loop make scraping okay? Can there be a button on the web page : "please click here to run a price check for one of your fellow travelers" that initiates a web page being fetched, attached to a round-robin queue of fares that are being monitored?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think so. All they would have to do is change their terms in conditions to prohibit round robin schemes and then send me a new cease and desist...

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google flights doesnt show SW pricing. That itself should have been a red flag for the creators.

<comment><USER11> Seriously! It is almost as if they thought there was no reason why it didn't appear on Google....

Remember ignorance is bliss

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> We are giving up on free speech to avoid people been offended, of course lawyers in big companies will find a way to use that to their advantage.

</comment><comment><USER8> Lost faith in the crowd here after reading these comments, against web scraping. Isn't this HACKERnews!? This is the same witch hunt mentality that ultimately lead to the prosecution of Aaron Swartz and look how that turned out.

The anti-scrapers: You should all be ashamed of yourselves. Where's that spirit of innovation and naughty-ness that PG always talks about in his posts?

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're not in the US, what could a company do to stop you from scraping?

<comment><USER34> Realistically they would sue you in your country. Worst-case, they have you prosecuted for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and demand extradition (most countries have extradition treaties with the US)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a shame. CFAA and the TOS are clearly being used to restrict competing.

</comment><comment><USER5> In the blog post, the link to their product page is broken...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Please use the original title ("Southwest Airlines is intimidating our startup").

<comment><USER37> We've updated the title from "Southwest sent me a cease and desist letter".

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you distribute the scraping load to a browser plugin you could probably avoid the tos violation. And aren't there apis that would give you this data, I love counter gaming tech like this. I hope you rebrand and keep going.

</comment><comment><USER39> price discovery is a "b __ __"...

</comment><comment><USER40> The issue is not the scrapping, but the use of "Southwest" inside your own name!

<comment><USER41> For the first letter, yes, but the 2nd is clearly against the scraping.</comment></comment>


LLVM Meets the Truly Alien: Mill CPU Architecture [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI <comment><USER2> It's so unusual to find projects like this. I have so much respect for these guys. It's always fun to see what they're working on. Lots of the technical specifics are over my head, but I really appreciate their tone and approach.

<comment><USER3> Previous discussion (with a member of their team chiming in): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9856334](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9856334)

Seems like a _fascinating_ architecture. I don't get the double program counter bit, also seems like too much cognitive overhead to me. The belt (queue of un-named slots) idea and function call for free with multiple return results, such that regular ops and user defined functions work the same way, that sure is clever.

Godard mentions that the CPU space has seen little to no innovation. But what about Transmeta? They were doing some cool stuff, no? And the DEC Alpha, that was super interesting. Probably lots more besides. I'm sure if I bothered to check that Wikipedia would have a CPU graveyard page :) Thing is, x86 has been the only game in town for a long time with Motorola challenging in the past and ARM challenging now. Maybe time for a three horse race?

<comment><USER4> Alpha was amazing, and the DEC chip people were best-in-the-world talented. If DEC had made some smarter choices about personal computing we might have had 10 or 20GHz desktops now.

Otherwise, CPU design is almost the poster-child for technical debt. The problems are more social and economic than technical. Once an architecture dominates the market it's almost impossible to replace it with something better. The best hope is to do what ARM are doing and sneak up on the market sideways, starting from a segment with much less competition.

<comment><USER5> DEC would be able able to violate the laws of physics?

The GHz barrier isn't caused by lack of talent, it's caused by basic thermal limits of silicon chips.

<comment><USER6> maybe they were focused on fabbing from germanium ingots?

>germanium ingots

100ghz vs ~3ghz limit on silicon

(which is the reason why we sometimes use Strained-Silicon-Gemanium

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As to finding instruction boundaries with a variable-length instruction format: you could use the trick they use to start two instruction streams from a single address by using it for a stream of fixed-length instruction sizes running down that can be used to find the border in the stream of variable- length instructions running in the 'normal' direction.

You could have:

      offset  : -----000000000111111
      offset  : 54321012345678901234
      contents: 64212iijkkllllmmmmmm (digits are instruction lengths, letters are instructions)

So, reading offsets -1, -2, -3, etc. you read off the sizes of the instructions you can read in offsets 1, 2, 3, etc. If you have 4 decode units, you can replace the sizes of the instructions by their offsets, resetting the offset every 4th instruction.

With instruction sizes of 1-4 bytes, you could store instruction sizes in 2 bits per instruction. That would lower the pressure on your cache for the extra information you store. There also would be more space in your instruction set because you no longer would have to worry about creating an instruction that has a prefix that also is a valid instruction. For example, you could use 0x01 both for INC and ADD IMMEDIATE VALUE, where it means the former if the instruction length is 1, the latter if it is longer, with the size of the immediate determined by the size of the instruction.

Would that be a net win? I wouldn't know, but it seems simpler (but 'simpler' looks like a negative in their worldview) than creating those two streams that somehow must work together to do what a single statement sequence in the source code does.

<comment><USER3> I don't really understand your solution, but then again I did not understand the Mill's solution. Can you explain it again?

All I will say is that they seem to have really tried to simplify and regularize the Mill _except_ in the opcode stream / decode step where they say that two streams is optimal! Seems like it would be a nightmare and introduce all sorts of complexities. Was the only bit of the talk I didn't grok, whereas most others bits had me nodding my head and thinking "oh, neat".

<comment><USER8> (Mill team) The streams are not streams of instruction; they are streams of half-instructions. The Mill is a wide-issue machine, like a VLIW or EPIC; each instruction can contain many operations, which all issue together. Each instruction is split roughly in half, with some of the ops in one half and some in the other. On the Mill, the split is based on the kind of operation and the info that ikt needs to encode: all memory and control flow ops on one side, all arithmetic on the other, although other divisions are possible.

Each half is grouped with the same half of other instructions to make a stream, and the two streams decode together, step by step, so each cycle one instruction, comprising both halves, decodes and issues.

The result is to double the available top level instruction cache, and cut in half the work that has to be handled by each of the two decoders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anybody know The Mill's plan for commercialization?

<comment><USER10> Generate buzz, get bought, never produce anything.

<comment><USER11> You forgot "have a legion of sycophants/sockpuppets that systematically downmod any post that's less than a furious jerkoff over how amazing Mill is".

<comment><USER12> It's a middlebrow dismissal. It _should_ be downvoted. That's not sycophancy, it's just Hacker News' losing battle to keep the conversation stimulating and worthwhile.

<comment><USER11> I guess if your definition of "stimulating and worthwhile" is "uncritical fawning", then I can understand your support of downmodding anything critical. Thanks for the confirmation of my original suspicion.

<comment><USER10> I agree - an entirely new architecture with nothing to speak for it (no FPGA code to try it out, no production chips, just paper this, paper that). I'm much more impressed by Risc-V - it exists in a format you can actually use.

<comment><USER11> Yup...the RISC-V folks have a working, open source, ~1GHz processor. That runs real software. Today.

But what do they know?

Mill has...videos. And patent applications. A strong social media presence. And a simulator that they really, really promise you'll be able to use _real soon now_ and is going to _totally_ own everything. And they're going to fab the chips themselves, long after everyone but Intel figured out that was stupid. Or something.

Because that sort of "we have the off-the-wall architecture that will change _fucking everything_ in computing forever" attitude worked so well for the iAPX432, Transputer, Rekursiv, i860, everything Chuck Moore has ever done, TI9900, most (not all) things called VLIW, etc." Right?

Best of all? A completely uncritical, fawning audience on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The Mill CPU is going on and on as going to be awesome some day. I spoke with one their guys at Greg Chesson's wake, it seemed open ended.

Yup, you have good ideas. How about you ship? Then we can see if the ideas meet reality and work.

I'm friends with one the guys who did the P6. Which became the basis for pretty much any x86 chip. He shipped stuff.

Ideas are easy, execution is hard, I have yet to see the Mill people execute.

I'd be crazy happy if they stepped up and made me look stupid because they shipped a kick ass chip.

<comment><USER14> As I understand, they aren't seeking venture capital backing, so progress is slow. I know they have (had) plans to implement a Mill on an FPGA, but even going to a usable ASIC will probably be a challenge.

It's a major architectural change as well. Most existing systems rely on virtual memory, which the Mill doesn't support.

<comment><USER15> > _Most existing systems rely on virtual memory, which the Mill doesn 't > support._

I believe you're mistaken. The Mill _does_ support virtual memory; the main differences to most systems are that its caches use virtual addresses (the TLB is between the L2 cache and the DRAM), and that it's a single-address-space architecture.

<comment><USER9> ARM did that with L1 cache in the '90s and it was _terrible_ for targeting a VM OS to. Cache aliasing is a nightmare and a never-ending source of bugs for e.g. shared memory.

<comment><USER16> It's very likely that they will need to write their own OS from scratch for the Mill. They might be able to reuse a lot of code from Linux, but it won't _be_ Linux, as the whole ethos of the Mill is to rethink everything.

In particular the Mill does not have the same notion of a process, the CPU itself is aware of threading, it has its own security design that isn't anything like user/supervisor mode, there are no syscalls, and programs have to be specialised before they can be run, a la ART on Android.

I suspect once they have LLVM up and running, one of the next biggest wins they'll want to go for is porting HotSpot. The only other company I'm aware of that was able to actually make money selling a really crazy custom CPU architecture is Azul with their Vega arch, and they did it by making Java bytecode their exposed bytecode. The actual CPU opcodes were an implementation detail and everything compiled on the fly.

The nice thing about porting the JVM is tons of business-critical, performance sensitive code would Just Work™. And then you have a ready made market for companies with huge Java (e.g. Hadoop) jobs that are very power/performance tradeoff sensitive.

<comment><USER17> Is VEGA an actual discrete CPU architecture or something they've licensed/copied from existing chips?

Azul made their money from selling high performance JVM's they have their "VEGA" compute appliances for Java applications but I've never actually seen their ISA documentation for the hardware which would be a very interesting thing to see....

<comment><USER16> It's apparently entirely custom. There are some tech talks about it online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a little confused about how the "pointerness" of pointers is getting lost in LLVM. The mill can't be the only architecture that encodes extra data in the high bits of pointers right? The 64 bit objective-C runtime and Xbox 360 come to mind as systems where this is done. Clearly LLVM can generate good code 64 bit Objective-C... Am I missing something?

</comment><comment><USER19> Linking to a 2.3 GB file on HN is perhaps not the best move.

<comment> iso8859-1 I put it on YouTube: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI)

EDIT: Updated with complete video link

<comment><USER19> Why is it 7 minutes short?

<comment> iso8859-1 Seems my download was truncated at 2485374429 bytes, a mere 137934 over the 2 GB mark for some reason. I'll fix it and post the new link. EDIT: The link was updated.

<comment><USER20> Please do. If there's a complete copy on YouTube we'll change the post to that URL.

Edit: I've changed the URL to the truncated one temporarily, because even a truncated most-of is probably better than a large file download. [http://llvm.org/devmtg/2015-04/Videos/SD/day%202/Ivan_1.mp4](http://llvm.org/devmtg/2015-04/Videos/SD/day%202/Ivan_1.mp4) is a URL for the whole thing.

<comment> iso8859-1 Here it is, dang: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyzlEYspqTI)

<comment><USER20> Yay! Thanks, updated. I hope to watch this later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Those CPUs look like having a huge potential, but there is no really working compiler for them. In my opinion, they could try to engage Fabrice Bellard, the genious behind QEMU and TCC. Or people with experience on Mali GPU architecture, which shares many points with the Mill CPU approach.

<comment><USER22> They'll get there. They aren't burning through money, they don't have any: they're not a properly formed company, just volunteers. It'll get done when it gets done.

<comment><USER23> > they're not a properly formed company

They aren't? Really?

<comment><USER24> For a long time the founders didn't have employees and didn't draw a paycheck.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should we develop a creative-commons based alternative to Crunchbase? - <AUTHOR> I am sick of the fact that Crunchbase is locked down and yet people still happily contribute to it.
Why not create an always-free alternative to Crunchbase and just commoditize the "wikipedia for companies" once and for all?
P.S. I was one of the creators of the SNC Finder (https://finder.startupnationcentral.org/) so I know what it means to build an open alternative for a company database. <comment><USER2> How is it locked down? The website is free to use... They have some paid products but they don't seem to put any of the contributed data behind a pay wall so not sure what you mean.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really searchable unless you pay for it.</comment></comment>