Stench gas - <AUTHOR> https://everything2.com/title/Stench+gas <comment><USER2> _> air allows mines to use a very interesting way to communicate_

This is a very important point to remember about subterranean tunnel systems. It is exactly what came to my mind when I watched the Boring Company video about a huge network of 3D tunnels.[1] The tech press, which had probably never even covered a construction project yet alone tunnels, was basically like "what about earthquakes"? But tunnel collapse is not the primary safety issue.

It's fires. Smoke and toxic gases from fires spread very quickly through tunnels.

I am a huge fan of the concept, by the way, but I want to emphasize that most fatalities from traffic tunnels have been from fires (apart from ordinary traffic accidents).[2][3][4][5] And Elon Musk has stated that what makes this vision feasible from a cost perspective is smaller tunnel diameters. Which makes air "communication" all the more accelerated and safety critical. Thus any vision of tunneling without detailing fire safety, evacuation systems and firefighter access is significantly incomplete, as these can add significant cost and fundamentally constrain designs.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI)

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_coll...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Road_Tunnel#2001_collision_and_fire)

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

[5] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#1999_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel#1999_fire)

<comment><USER3> > Smoke and toxic gases from fires spread very quickly through tunnels

It's not just the confined-space aspect that causes the fire gases to have such high lethality (although it's certainly extremely significant), it's also the rate of gas production.

Most solids and liquids don't actually burn; they emit flammable gases when exposed to heat, and it's _those gases_ which actually undergo combustion. These gases are created by endothermic processes (pyrolysis and evaporation), and the more heat is available to convert unreactive solid/liquid combustibles into reactive gases, the faster the fire will burn. Therefore, less heat loss (to the outside environment or to non-combustibles) will enable a higher combustion rate and the fire will produce more heat.

Tunnels are quite good at retaining heat, so most of the heat produced by a fire will feed back right into heating combustibles -- enabling devastating heat release rates in the tens to hundreds of megawatts. The heat release rate is roughly proportional to the fire's fuel consumption rate; which will be roughly proportional to the rate of lethal gas (CO/HCN/CO2) production and oxygen depletion.

The radiant heat flux _alone_ can make the fire unapproachable by even appropriately-equipped firefighters -- the massive production of superheated, oxygen depleted, CO/HCN-containing gases can kill -- far beyond the range that the heat flux is deadly.

<comment><USER4> The tunnel becomes something like a stone oven right? I imagine you'd have to let it cool off before trying to approach it.

<comment><USER5> From the Wikipedia page of the Mont Blanc tunnel fire:

"Some victims escaped to the fire cubicles. The original fire doors on the cubicles were rated to survive for two hours. Some had been upgraded in the 34 years since the tunnel was built to survive for four hours. The fire burned for 53 hours and reached temperatures of 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), mainly because of the margarine load in the trailer, equivalent to a 23,000-litre (5,100 imp gal; 6,100 US gal) oil tanker, which spread to other cargo vehicles nearby that also carried combustible loads."

It was _days_ before the tunnel cooled enough for recovery crews to enter.

<comment><USER3> With this sort of heat release rate and amount of combustible material, fire doors alone are useless. Even if the fire doors miraculously remain intact and gastight, the walls and doors will eventually conduct enough heat to make the temperature in the fire refuges untenable for human life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 100 years ago, yesterday, was the worst hard rock mining disaster in the US, in Butte, Montana. They didn't have this way of warning the miners back then and 168 miners died due to a fire in one of the shafts. Most died from asphyxia.

Michael Punke, the author of the Revenant, wrote an excellent non-fiction book about it called "Fire and Brimstone: The North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917".

</comment><comment><USER7> _They remain there until an all-clear is given, which may include a distinct all-clear scent such as wintergreen._

If you search for "stench gas" you will find some... interesting photos of the control panel for these systems:

[http://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1686/24201183892_c8a2dffc3b_h.j...](http://c1.staticflickr.com/2/1686/24201183892_c8a2dffc3b_h.jpg)

(Something about buttons marked "release stench gas" and "release anti-stench gas" seem amusing in a rather comical fashion.)

<comment><USER8> Something OCD in me is rather disturbed by the "release stench gas" being located to the right of the "anti-stench gas".

<comment><USER9> It should clearly (or likely) be the other way around, at least in any country with a left-to-right reading order, OCD or not :)

We scan information faster in the preferred reading direction, and flipping the warning gas on half a second earlier will likely, sooner or later save somebody from harm. Not that there aren't other ways to improve safety in mines, but each small part counts, I guess?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just reading about that article triggered an olfactory memory of the related compound 2-mercaptoethanol (or beta-mercaptoethanol as it was labeled in the lab). Used to reduce disulfide links in proteins (edit: see more correct response below) so that they would unravel a bit and separate by size more as they travel through the western blot matrix.

Unlike carbon monoxide this compound had a very "this will kill you" smell to it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Mercaptoethanol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Mercaptoethanol)

<comment><USER11> is that the nasty sour smelling chemical? sort of like sulfur, vinegar, burnt gunpowder, and vodka, mixed together? i used to get a whiff of it at my dad's bench at his workplace.

<comment><USER12> Acetic acid and Butyric acid. Used for those clear tool handles. [1][2] It gets nastier once you realize you are smelling the odor of vomit with hints of vinegar.

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

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

<comment><USER13> No worse then a Hershey's chocolate bar...

<comment><USER14> For anyone unfamiliar with the connection, Hershey's milk chocolate is made with a process that produces butyric acid:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everything2 is still around?!?! Awesome.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, Jay Bonci is still running the damn thing. And people still log in. And nobody seems to have any plans to shut it down.

Dude even still writes root logs:

[https://everything2.com/title/What+is+the+plan%253F+-+March+...](https://everything2.com/title/What+is+the+plan%253F+-+March+2017)

[https://everything2.com/user/jaybonci/writeups/root+log%253A...](https://everything2.com/user/jaybonci/writeups/root+log%253A+May+2017)

Whenever a big event happens, like some big e2 celebrity dies, there's a surge of people logging into the site to pay their respects. Weddings and funerals, they say, but for e2 it seems to be only funerals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If our noses were "sharper", i.e., able to distinguish on a deeper more meaningful level like a dog, could we transmit complex information with olfactory encoding?

Right now the smells are simple signals; I'm curious if a scent could be engineered to contain a language. Like paper and writing.

I'm asking for my story, in which sapient rats struggle against two-legged monsters with opposable thumbs.

<comment><USER18> I've wondered if one could build a device that outputs different combinations of distinct scents for training dogs. Like condition the dog to understand "sit" = "bacon smell" and "shake" = "cat". My theory was that dogs have more cognitive resources dedicated to processing olfactory information and so they could also be trained to understand and perform more complex tasks. Like, "bacon + cat + shoe smell" = "bark while running left"

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if we could tie this to Jenkins for when a build breaks. Would make for a nicer alternative than sirens and flashing lights, although I suspect people would tend to clear the office...

</comment><comment><USER20> It smells absolutely wretched, and is totally unmistakable.

Had it go off on a couple sites I've been on, and it's remarkable how it reaches every corner of the mine.

<comment><USER21> Would love to hear more. What prompted it, and how did everyone respond? Was the wintergreen "all clear" signal used after the problem was resolved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I instinctively hovered my mouse over the link to wintergreen, my brain fully expecting to click and experience the smell - as I would with any image, video, or sound. Took me a few seconds to manage expectations!

</comment><comment><USER23> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanethiol)

And if you want to buy some: [http://www.zacon.ca/stench- gas.asp](http://www.zacon.ca/stench-gas.asp)

<comment><USER24> "Employees of the Union Oil Company of California reported first in 1938 that turkey vultures would gather at the site of any gas leak. After finding that this was caused by traces of ethanethiol in the gas it was decided to boost the amount of ethanethiol in the gas, to make detections of leaks easier"

<comment><AUTHOR> Aw, I thought that story was going to end with them breeding vast flocks of turkey vultures to patrol the pipes.

<comment><USER25> And then stocking the area with extra carrion to sustain all the new vultures? Hmmmm what could go wrong...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Same principle in fire alarm for the deaf:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080310/020944491.shtml](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080310/020944491.shtml)

They use wasabi.

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember seeing this for sale on BOC's website when looking for CO2 a while back ([https://www.boc.co.nz/shop/en/nz/stench- gas](https://www.boc.co.nz/shop/en/nz/stench-gas)). I briefly considered buying some for nefarious purposes, but I think I figured that they probably wouldn't just sell it to any random person.

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminds me of the Friends' episode where Ross goes on and on with the (bored and weirded out) pizza delivery girl about the smelly chemical added to natural gas in order to make it olfactible & safer to use.

Found it... [https://youtu.be/kH5JhYsfNMA?t=1m10s](https://youtu.be/kH5JhYsfNMA?t=1m10s)

<comment><USER5> And if you've ever wondered whose blood those regulations arose from, it's the 300 souls lost in the New London School Explosion:

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

<comment><USER28> Yeah, we lose the collective memory of the "why" behind many of our regulations. Thanks for telling me about this. I certainly did not know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Same compound that is added to propane

</comment><comment><USER30> I think my family went to that exhibit while I was pre adolescent. I got scared so only my mother & sister went, while I stayed topside with my father. We window shopped the souvenir shop

Nowadays my sister suffers claustrophobia & I feel most comfortable shoved into small crooks. But I think I was mostly offset by anxiety related to ventilation

Visited Timmins this May, another northern Ontario city. It was snowing</comment>


HelloFresh's IPO by the Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://mahesh-vc.com/hellofreshs-ipo-by-the-numbers-and-what-it-means-for-other-food-startups/ <comment><USER2> Check out BuyFresco.com ;-)</comment>


Why Cloudflare shut down 8chan - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/technology/8chan-cloudflare-el-paso.html <comment><USER2> Contrast December 2017: [https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-has-a-plan-to-never-censor-hate-speech-again/)

"""

The [Daily] Stormer was a Cloudflare customer. Cloudflare had ample technical resources to battle DDOS attacks. The problem was that other Cloudflare customers started calling and threatening to cancel their service if Cloudflare didn't cut the Daily Stormer off.

"The pressure to take it down just kept building and building," Prince told Ars. "We thought that was the wrong policy. We reached out to various civil libertarian organizations and said we need some air cover here. People said 'we'd rather not stick our necks out on this issue.'"

So, Prince said, "we needed to change the conversation."

"""</comment>


Somebody paid $5.2M to make two Ethereum transactions - <AUTHOR> https://decrypt.co/31956/an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-in-two-massive-mistakes <comment><USER2> An insane mistake to make, but perhaps more surprising than the fact that it could be allowed to happen is that someone who benefited from the mistake is willing to simply hand the ETH back.</comment>


How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build? - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160906-00/?p=94255 <comment><USER2> Heh, sounds much better than my previous employer's way of occasionally sending company-wide emails along the line of "The employee who was responsible for the XXX leak was found and terminated. We remind you that leaks damage our culture and make it difficult to share ideas inside the company."

For some reason such emails made me feel like I was inside a tech cult. Guess my culture fit wasn't good enough...

Well, to be fair, I guess MS also utilizes these emails _in addition to_ reverse psychology...

<comment><USER3> Sounds like standard business practice to me.

If you can't understand basic instructions such as not leaking internal, confidential info, you deserve to be fired.

<comment><USER4> Oh, sure; I think the parent commenter's point was in thinking that _emailing everyone_ about the termination of the leaker served as any sort of deterrence mechanism for people's _use_ of the leaked build.

<comment><USER2> Well, emails are not exactly deterrence against people using the leaked "build": being an internet service company, that part is usually achieved by shutting down the server.

Emails are supposed to be deterrence against further leaks by reinforcing the "company culture". (Whether they work, I have no idea.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Man, I hope whoever thought of that got rewarded accordingly. What a surprising fix. Nice combination of low-tech/low-effort and creative.

I guess this sort of thing wouldn't happen today with the always-connected, always-phoning-home world we live in.

</comment><comment><USER6> >And there are some legal issues that are tied to the date a feature first becomes available to the public. Seeing a feature go public prematurely throws a bunch of scheduling into disarray because you now have to finish those legal documents in less time than you planned.

As someone who's never worked for a company that produces commercial software, I'm curious about what he's referring to.

<comment><USER7> Might be considered a public disclosure for purposes of patenting the feature.

<comment><USER8> This is accurate. A leak still constitutes a public disclosure (I use to help track down leaked builds of Windows)

<comment><USER9> I hope that's not true.

Surely if the "leak" is the result of an employee acting unlawfully, i.e. maliciously leaking their employer's intellectual property in contravention of their employment agreement, then the leak does not constitute a disclosure.

If it did, then IP-based organisations would have an absurd level of exposure to the bad actions of any employee, and would have to impose equally absurd security measures - cavity searches at the exits, anyone? - on every employee with access to IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm so glad that Raymond Chen is writing all of these stories down.

<comment><USER11> Apparently there's a book of his anecdotes available for those who'd like to read more...

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321440307)

<comment><USER12> >Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (January 6, 2007)

Although most of the anecdotes are historical, I hope he releases an updated version one day. There's so much computing history contained in his blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How about: have a really cheesy wallpapers in the pre-release builds which conveys the message (perhaps with explicit text right in the wallpaper image) that this is not a released build. Also, how about making not-released builds simply expire. The build should know that nobody ought to run it past a certain date. (If such operation is needed internally, it can be rigged with an extension mechanism built into the expiry.)

<comment><USER14> Isn't that the thought behind the watermarks they've had since Win7-ish? I remember messing with beta builds and reading about people using them (again, to avoid paying for it for a bit as mentioned in another comment) and jumping through all sorts of hoops to disable or hide the watermark - aside from buying a license of course.

There's probably a point at which any more effort put into carrots (new features or wallpapers on official builds) and sticks (nag screens, watermarks, expirations, etc on old builds) just becomes more trouble than it's worth.

I like trying out leaked builds of programs or OSes as much as the next bored nerd but I can't imagine ever running something as primary OS on any machine I count on for anything. That stuff is for old computers that aren't being used or VMs.

<comment><USER15> Expiration has an additional positive effect in that it prevents use of the buggy builds and is also relatively easy to implement, especially when the prerelease build can phone home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The article mentions none of the evidence this strategy actually worked at all. Is it all just conjecture or are there more articles/evidence supporting this technique?

<comment><USER17> Oh c'mon not everything on this site has to be riddled with statistics, trials, and evidence of something working. The article gave me a chuckle, and plays on our instinct to gravitate to shiny new things. I think all we need to take from this is not every technical problem needs a technical solution. Understanding your audience, in any product, is crucial; use it to your advantage however you can.

<comment><USER18> Where is the empirical evidence of a mother's love? Have you sent a PR for the joy of playing with a puppy in sunshine?

<comment><USER19> > Where is the empirical evidence of a mother's love?

Everywhere? When they care for you when you're sick, drive you to sports practice, clean up after you and what not?

<comment><USER20> But how do you know they're not just doing all that for the old age care and retirement benefits?</snark>

<comment><USER19> Because there are absurdly rich parents who still show love for their children?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like you could've achieved the end-goal by just warning of the danger and coming across like their safety is your primary concern rather than finding the leaks, i.e.:

"Build 97241 contains a potentially fatal bug that could wipe your computer. If you are using Build 97241, please upgrade it to a more recent build or otherwise cease using this build immediately. We do not care how you acquired this build. We simply do not want you bricking your computer."

<comment><USER22> Have you ever taken a support phone call? Many people won't read a simple error message, let alone a message that includes numbers and other "technical mumbo jumbo"

customer: I'm trying print and it just says "error"

me: It just says error?

customer: yes

me: Are there any other words or error numbers?

customer: yeah, it says "No printers are installed. Add a printer and try again"

me: _facepalm_

Their solution works because it communicates a lot while saying very little

<comment><USER23> How many of those types of users stay abreast of the latest preview builds from Microsoft?

<comment><USER24> Those with friends, family, or an IT worker that's a bit too clever with saving money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In this thread: A bunch of people who clearly never installed an operating system in the Time Before Automatic Internet Connections.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't understand the logic here.

1\. Download a preview build because you want "the latest and greatest".

2\. Build is full of horrible bugs.

3\. Microsoft needs to employ psychological tricks to get you to download the next preview build, as you cling to the previous one with both hands.

<comment><AUTHOR> There might be more reasons, but here is the author's answer to a similar question:

 _The imperative is that these machines can screw up the network they are connected to, so they're affecting other machines. Generally, people don't look kindly when a Windows system starts screwing up a network._

[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160906-00/?p=...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160906-00/?p=94255#comment-1263975)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The modern version of this is to add a new emoji. Apple used that to push out a major point fix in Yosemite.

</comment><comment><USER15> The other approach is to use time limited builds, like Google does with many alpha and beta versions in their Android toolchain. After the timeout, force the users to update or fully lock it down. With a nice message why it is happening, of course.

Crackers will bypass any kind of protection or change anyway.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ah, psychology. Must be what the "OneDrive team" is using.

So you have all these people who bought Lumia phones, enjoying 30 GB of cloud storage, 15 of them acquired with the phone purchase.

Cut it down to 5 GB with an announcement in a blog post, and watch the customers leaving in droves.

Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seems like the "real" fix was the Windows Insider program. I'm still not sure why (myself included) people do testing for Microsoft for free, though.

<comment><USER15> Some people like to be the first to try out and talk about upcoming new features and messups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I work with big catalog data, and with lots of human input. We have these internal classifications but people mis-assign items all the time.

I was horrified when I learned about the state of our datasets. The only reliable features are the ones that are exposed to the customers on the website, because when they're broken people can actually see them.

</comment><comment><USER29> What if MS made the wallpaper of the internal builds super ugly?

</comment><comment><USER30> haha hats off to you MS.....except now I know your tricks.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since those things are already so riddled with DRM, why not simply make the internal builds phone home to an activation server that only allows IPs assigned to Microsoft?

<comment><USER32> The story, like a lot of stories on the Old New Thing, appears to be from a now faraway time (in Information Technology terms). Think Windows 95 timeframe.

They are practically always worth a read, by the way. I'm a huge fan of the blog.

<comment> slipstream- So, default wallpapers in early Windows 95 builds.

The first Preliminary Development Kit had an "Under Construction" wallpaper. The second one had the same wallpaper but tiled. Beta 1 had a different "Under Construction" wallpaper.

Of course, after PDK1 leaked far and wide, MS implemented some serial protection in PDK2 up to beta 2 (different from the one in the RTM; however the RTM's setup has remnants of it). Given that the leakers were involved with the warez scene, however, the skilled reversers that the builds were passed to easily found the backdoor that had been put in so that those on MS' internal network didn't have to enter the serial, and just patched a few bytes in the setup to abuse that.

The interesting part of this serial was that it was in two parts. One part was the "beta site ID" and half of the "password"; if this was valid, but the second half of the password wasn't, setup would appear to continue... until the point it would copy files, upon which it errored out with a message "General error 57, please contact your beta administrator".

This misdirection was discussed at the time, with some people believing the error at face value. This continued with the foundation of communities to preserve and discuss such builds several years onwards. The last half of the password was the hex form of the first 16 bits of an MD4 hash (this code was written in around autumn 1993!) of the beta site ID, the first half of the password, and... a string inside the setup that was used as the titlebar text for the error message, which would be something like "Microsoft Chicago Preliminary Development Kit 2, November 1993".

This part of the serial algorithm was finally reverse engineered, and a key generator made....in 2014.

Afterwards, some early Internet Explorer 4.0 builds were discovered. They used the exact same serial algorithm as the early Windows 95 builds. And had the exact same "MS internal" backdoor.

(Um, I think I may have just ruined one of Raymond Chen's future blog posts.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Microsoft forced millions to upgrade to Windows 10... it would be trivial to force an upgrade to a different build...

<comment><USER34> Snark is easy but a lot of these stories are from long before the whole Win 10 upgrade and is explicitly from before Windows Insider which puts it at least before 2014.

<comment><USER33> But Windows Update is from way before all those stories... and if they needed help figuring out how to upgrade an OS, they could have looked at Linux (which I'm sure they did)...

<comment><USER34> Automatic updates started in about 2000ish and hard forced updates are even newer iirc. Before that the best they could do is a notification which people running a leaked build would probably ignore or not get at all, who knows what the Windows Update infrastructure is like for internal builds that get leaked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Include a remotely-activated kill switch; and kill with plenty of warning.

What do I mean? I no longer use iPhone because I installed a beta iOS. When the official build came out, I kept "checking for updates" but I never got an update. One day, Apple remotely killed my phone.

Manually updating to the production iOS would be fine; but remotely disabling my phone without warning was not acceptable. This is why I refuse to buy an iPhone.

<comment><USER36> Couldn't you just put it in restore mode and install the latest version from iTunes, or manually download the IPSW from the internet and install it?

<comment><USER37> Once an iOS build expires, you can't take a backup, so you can do that to get the phone working again, but you lose any un-backed up data on the device like photos and app data. In the days before iCloud it was a huge pain.

<comment><USER8> Why didn't you just upgrade to the production build when it was released?

<comment><USER37> Can't speak for the OP, but in my case, I had it happen twice between beta 1 and beta 3 when I tried to skip beta 2 because I didn't care that much. It was also an iPad that left upstairs and was too lazy to carry it downstairs to update. Not a primary device, so all I lost was some progress in a few games, but I can see how someone could have suffered the same fate with their main phone and have lost a lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is such a Windows-person kind of solution. Come to think of it, I bet that this is why its so easy to change the wallpaper in Windows.

<comment><USER7> What would the Mac-person or Linux-person solution look like?

<comment><USER39> The linux solution would provide a new mechanism to configure sound.

<comment><USER40> Apple would issue a release saying "Don't do X. If you do X and it wipes your computer then obviously you are using your computer wrong".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


NPM fired staff for discussing workplace conditions - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/aeschright/8ed09cbc2a4aee00fcb4ad35086d76a6 <comment><USER2> Thread at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724674)

</comment><comment><USER3> That is why it's vital to use vpn to avoid being caught by a crazy opressive boss, fortunately there are a lot of them, cheap and even free ones, like these for example [https://vpn-review.com/](https://vpn-review.com/) So guys, don't be lazy and take care.

<comment><USER4> That would help anonymous discussions on non-work platforms offsite or on personal devices.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found the link via this comment, btw: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302545](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302545)</comment>


The revenge of former employees can close the business - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackingnews.com/cyber-crime/the-revenge-of-former-employees-can-close-the-business/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me or is that article extremely sub-par? Incomplete and dangling sentences, incoherent structure and muddled phrasing. All in that article. Appears to be super amateurish !

<comment><USER3> It's not just you. I found it to be a painful, and ultimately worthless, read.</comment></comment>


The Curious Tale of MS03-007 - <AUTHOR> http://www.stepto.com/2013/03/the-curious-tale-of-ms03-007/ <comment><USER2> >> And in Windows 2000 it had a huge gaping hole. It was enabled by default. On all versions.

Following "it was done this way for a reason, even though it might not make sense", what was the rationale behind some of the defaults/decisions Microsoft made in their NT4/2000 days?

The complete opposite of something like OpenBSD where most everything is disabled by default.

<comment><USER3> 'Twas not just Microsoft.

Back then, "enabled by default" was the rule. I recall Linux distributions of that era also enabling a lot of network-facing stuff by default.

For Microsoft in particular, there's also some path dependence: they began with non-networked (or with local-only networking) desktop operating systems, where the drawbacks of default-enabling many useful services were not as severe.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Having your newly installed linux box connected to the internet after a base install without first enabling a firewall (or configuring the existing one to block a bunch of default allowed items) wasn't as bad as the same thing with a windows box, but it was still bad. Circa 2000/2001 I believe you would likely be infected or hacked by some SSH or Apache worm within a few hours.

Windows around the same time, maybe a few years later, was _much_ worse though. They actually had to patch a bug where the system would boot after install and the firewall might not come on until a second or two after the network, and there were so many exploits and worms that systems were getting exploited in this very short time-frame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm probably being thick, but I can't put together why the patch has anything to do with the war in Iraq.

<comment><USER6> Military (or something in the whole war apparatus) was running networked Windows 2000 in some mission critical role and was worried about being compromised by a cyber counter-attack once they started offensive action.

<comment><USER5> Gotcha, I guess that makes sense.

I'd like to hear the story of how the military deployed these fixes across the board in only a few days to ensure they had complete protection. Back in 2003, even auto-updates tended not to get installed/applied on large systems where there were complex admin rules about how updates should happen.

<comment><USER7> I doubt it required an across-the-board deployment. Rather, specific systems like the one alluded to in the post (the reason that the Suits appeared in Redmond) would need to be hardened in advance of the start of offensive military activities when the secrets housed in the system needed to stay secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The implication is that the government wasn't going to war until they'd updated their computers, which is extraordinary when you think about it.

<comment><USER9> Nah, the implication is just that once the shooting starts, there's no reason not to exploit whatever security holes you've found at the cost of being "provocative".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Of course, doing patches for pre-SP4 Win2000 was a pain, and the issues with this patch were a good example (see actual bulletin at [https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/security/ms03-00...](https://technet.microsoft.com/en- us/library/security/ms03-007.aspx)). This is because Win2000 had no service pack branching.

</comment><comment><USER11> >This was bad enough we would have to consider going with how to block the attack before we actually had an update

ah good old Microsoft, where mere idea of default ingress firewall was a taboo

</comment><comment><USER12> So we might know what is was about in 2053 ?

</comment><comment><USER13> .. And nowadays you can't even trash the "/bin" (latest OSX release) :)

<comment><USER10> To be honest, WFP has existed since Win2000 too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does the design of a programming language includes writing its compiler? - <AUTHOR> Or is topic only related to specifying grammars? Note: I'm novice don't crucify me. :) <comment><USER2> It's often beneficial to the language for its author(s) to write the compiler as well. Without doing this, there's a tendency to cram every feature imaginable into the language (see eg. ANSI Common Lisp, Algol 68, PL/1), which tends to make it too difficult for anyone to learn or program with. The need to write a working implementation is a forcing function that keeps the language design simple and ensures that the language designer deal with any unintended interactions between features.

<comment><USER3> Common Lisp is not the all-feature Lisp. It's basically a slightly simplified and improved version of Maclisp successor projects (NIL, S-1 Lisp, Lisp Machine Lisp / Zetalisp, Spice Lisp). Thus Common Lisp basically of similar complexity of prior Lisps.

Common Lisp does inherit very very little from other Lisps like Interlisp, Standard Lisp, etc.

Common Lisp was designed by implementors. If it is 'hard' to program in it, it probably is more BECAUSE it was developed by implementors:

       Gabriel: NIL (New Implementation of Lisp) -> Lucid Common Lisp
       Steele: NIL
       Moon: Lisp Machine Lisp -> Symbolics CL
       Weinreb: Lisp Machine Lisp -> Symbolics CL
       Fahlman: Spice Lisp -> CMUCL

Even the later ANSI Common Lisp was designed with implementations of its new features. For example CLOS was designed mostly by people from Xerox PARC. CLOS was at the same time implemented by them in a portable implementation called PCL, where the designed was explored and feedback was assembled from a group of users. The very people who wrote the spec for CLOS and a book about it, they also implemented it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Writing an interpreter or compiler isn't necessary, but can help because it allows people to write real programs in the language, and that can tell you whether that great idea that you put in your grammar actually has value in the real world.

And you do need more than a grammar; you also have to specify semantics. For example the grammar may state that you can write _" x = y"_ at some place in your language, but what what does it mean?

Does it copy y to x, copy x to y, make x and y refer to the same object (with choices of x, y, a new thing that has the same value as x, etc.), test whether x and y are the same object, have the same value, ascertain that x and y have the same value, ensures that they have the same value by replacing their values by their average, or is y an implicit string, and do you have to write `y or $y to reference variables in expressions? Is there any side effect? For example, does the new value of x get printed to the console by default?

(Some of the options I give are 'unconventional', but you have to specify your choice)

</comment><comment><USER5> The design does not /have/ to involve writing a compiler. For instance, the X3J13 committee designed the ANSI Common Lisp standard, but left writing implementations up to third parties. On the other hand, the team of Julia language developers both design and write the compiler.

I guess it depends on your motivations for creating the language. Programmers will often design a language and write the compiler/interpreter themselves as a learning experience.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3J13](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3J13)

[http://julialang.org/](http://julialang.org/)</comment>


Dropping Netflix and Spotify or: my modern media meal plan for 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://kyefox.com/dropping-netflix-and-spotify-or-my-modern-media-meal-plan-for-2019/ <comment><USER2> So for anyone who doesn't want to read this and is jumping to the comments:

It's basically a list content recommendations and the standard mix of complaints that things cost money and there's tons of free content available.

To Kye, while it's true that Bandcamp is free a single stream there does little to support an artist. You make no mention of spending money to support these artists. The people who like Spotify over Bandcamp pages tend to be the ones that also like things like Spotify radio feature or actually want to listen to artists who don't have a Bandcamp account. Bandcamp also does not say, work with my media keys.

Youtube is not a direct replacement for Netflix. The content type is different. I'd never watch a vlog on Netflix, I'd struggle to find something approaching a TV show in plot on Youtube (other then I guess VGHS).

You probably could have more accurately titled this "Against the Grain: A Modern Furry Musicians Media Picks" or something of the like.</comment>


"301's are the new pamphlets" - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/3eg75i

<comment><USER2> Unless you don't realize it is case sensitive. In that case 404s are the new pamphlets.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why don't people realize that they could create custom URL's on Bit.ly?</comment>


Stuyvesant Senior Made $72M Trading Stocks on His Lunch Break - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/news/articles/reasonstoloveny/2014/mohammed-islam-stock-trading/

<comment><USER2> What would it take to make $72M?

If you start with $1000 and make a profit of 6% per day for a full year, you're there. Or start with $100 and make 7% per day. But if you can only generate a piddly 1% per day (which itself would be a mind-blowing achievement for any fund manager), you'll need $10M to start.

The article is very, very short on details of what has actually happened here, apart from "Rich people like to hang out with other rich people."

<comment><USER3> There's so much that doesn't quite gel about this story. He was trading penny stocks when he was 9? He went off to read high finance books as a result, and then successfully and consistently applied them? What on earth (and who) was he tutoring at 9? And as you say, the returns to do that would be pretty phenomenal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would love to read more details about this, there is something not quite right here.

Let's try to imagine a possible scenario:

Kid makes $1M from trading penny stocks by age 15(let's say starting with 10,000k at 12).

Then takes that $1M into $72M trading more serious securities(not enough liquidity in penny stocks to make $72M).

I could believe $5M figure (Lebed was 15 when he made around a million in late 90s from his penny stock antics) and I could believe he found some inefficiencies in thinly traded stocks such as penny stocks and even figured a way to painlessly exit penny stock trades.

I have a hard time believing he found a way to trade to $72M in regular securities without Other People's Money. (There is only that Japanese guy who has done something similar)

What I mean that the big money is generally made when OPM is involved. Paul Tudor Jones (and Buffett earlier in 1950s) and many others have made their money by taking a cut from successfully managing OPM.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://observer.com/2014/12/exclusive-new-york-mags-boy- geni...](http://observer.com/2014/12/exclusive-new-york-mags-boy-genius- investor-made-it-all-up/)

Whoops.</comment>


Doctor accused of selling false hope to families - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/15/stanislaw-burzynski-cancer-controversy/2994561/ <comment><USER2> This says it all:

      "He has also prescribed them as a treatment for AIDS, lupus and other conditions."

There is little chance these treatments are effective for a single disease. For such a broad set of diseases there is no chance at all. Claims like this are common in alternative medicine, and are red flags.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have heard of him before, knowing a few people who had gone to him hoping to be cured from cancer. Obviously, they did not get the results they were hoping for (many thousands of dollars later).

Thank G-d he is being taken care of.</comment>


Life on the Internet Is Hard When Your Last Name Is 'Butts' - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmp9v/life-on-the-internet-is-hard-when-your-last-name-is-butts <comment><USER2> Probably not as bad as if your last name is Null. [https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/](https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/)

In the early 80s I worked with a guy who wanted an unlisted phone number (back in the days of paper telephone directories). He was really miffed at the idea that the phone company would charge him an extra $10 (or similar) per year for this "service". ("Ten dollars to NOT do something?!? That's extortion!") He couldn't believe this so he asked for a list of service charges which they mailed to his home. Apparently changing your name was free. So, for several years you could call "Kirk, James T., Capt." I guess he showed them. Bonus: saved $10 per year. Extra bonus: frequent crank calls at all hours, for free.

Funny thing is I can't remember his real name.

<comment><USER3> Was it Leonard Nimoy?

<comment><USER4> Wow that was downvoted. I guess these people aren't aware of Nimoys extensive practical jokes with Shatner.

But even so, why would anyone downvote this?

<comment><USER5> Because jokes are generally frowned upon.

<comment><USER6> Unoriginal or not funny ones; if they're unique and not some lame meme, they'll often get upvoted

<comment><USER3> The mods discourage humor because it tends to metastasize into tedious offtopic threads, which I guess is true enough.

Readers think they punish bad jokes and reward good ones, but the stupid Butts pun is doing great while the absurdist gem about Leonard Nimoy secretly wanting to be Kirk and living it out for a year in the white pages (and then someone working with him forgetting his name!) was nuked from orbit.

<comment> xkcd-sucks The humor just has to be dry enough to maintain plausible deniability. Kind of like flirting in a corporate setting

<comment><USER7> Or rubbing your eyes with sandpaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A similar problem happens when the name itself is only considered offensive in certain cultures, but is completely benign in the culture of the person with the name. I remember two gaming related incidents where people were blocked from making accounts; one was a south american using "negro" as his username being prevented from creating an account, even though english speakers with the username "black" are fine; the other was a muslim with the first name "Jihad" who couldn't create a playstation account. A muslim coworker told me that "jihad" being synonymous with "holy war" is pretty much just a western thing, it could also be referring to an internal struggle, so it's similar to christians naming a child "Chastity".

<comment><USER9> I think the real problem that is totally overlooked is the whole authoritarian nature of this paternalism of monitoring people as to their "offensiveness". It's pure and unadulterated authoritarianism and controlling to declare yourself as the moral arbiter of what is and isn't offensive and what should and shouldn't be allowed. And no, it's not a matter of whether you CAN legally do so, it's a matter of whether you SHOULD be an authoritarian dictator.

How about giving people a choice instead of playing Little Lord Fauntleroy and controlling everyone's actions. How about just giving users the option to block "offensive" or even just possibly "offensive" names and terms and words, instead of going all paternalistic jerk.

It is something that has bothered me for a long while now, especially in places like Reddit, where the whole fundamental concept of the site was totally and utterly undermined by the authoritarian mod squad that makes the whole community voting/self-regulation a facade when it's not being used by the angry mob to metaphorically burn the witch that dared to say something that wasn't their favorite thing to hear.

<comment><USER10> There is also this idea in the US that typing somewhere fuck or shit is unacceptable.

I am French and we have our dirty words which can be pit to good use or misused. An adult using them judiciously may help their message going through. It must not be overused, there is a specific balance to find.

Nobody will, however, type m....e because it means that the word should not have been there in the first place.

Bleeping such words looks like fake puritanism to me. Either use them and face the music or say _crotte_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure Caterina Fake[1] has talked about problems with signing up for everything from Facebook to buying plane tickets.

These names need to be on those "things programmers believe about names that are false" lists closer to the top[2].

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake) [2] - [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER12> I actually wrote a full-stack web service to handle people's names, specifically to help avoid situations like this. My best advice: treat people's names as a potentially very long and entirely arbitrary text field. Don't assume anything without their confirmation, even if it seems obvious, because somewhere out there someone's name will violate that assumption. My research did conclude that nearly all names are below 500 characters, so that's a reasonable upper bound, though I would at least double it to be safe.

[https://www.alphanym.com/demo](https://www.alphanym.com/demo)

<comment> crooked-v [http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the- longest-...](http://www.historyrundown.com/top-5-people-with-the-longest- names/)

There's a couple of people for you with legal names well past 500 characters, and that's just of Western European descent, where German-style compound words are rare.

<comment><USER12> Most certainly, percentile wise, they're the 99th. Nearly every case where I encountered a name that long though, there was a shorter form. Generally really long names are either patronymic/matronymic (listing ancestors) like many Arabic names, or names following Hispanic conventions. Hawaiian names can also sometimes be rather impressive.

For instance Pablo Picasso's full name is 103 characters (without whitespace): Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

<comment><USER13> Is a thing of the past. In Spain is currently illegal to register a baby with more than two first names, except if she/he belongs to the royal family.

The last name's list on the other hand can be technically infinite but only the first two (from both: father and mother) are used normally.

You can have also as many pseudonyms as you want of course, but they aren't official names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Native Americans have the fun problem of taking a lot of grief (and some Facebook deletions[3]) for last names like "Yellow Bird", "Good Iron", "Walking Eagle", and "Has No Horses". In fact, I was a little disappointed with a thread on this and some of the logic[1][2].

1) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364933](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7364933)

2) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367657)

3) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025246](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9025246)

<comment><USER3> To me the weirdest part is how apparently important it is to some people that the world fit into their expectations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article mentions human moderators as a solution. Maybe, unless they're part of a pathologically awful system like Wikipedia.

You have a username policy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy)

You have a notice board for blatant violations of policy (although it gets used for a lot of other stuff): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention)

You have a holding pen for usernames that have been reported but not yet blocked, for further monitoring: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_admini...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usernames_for_administrator_attention/Holding_pen)

Because the username policy isn't enough policy the UAA and UAA Holding pen have their own instructions: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/User_names)

And because two different pages to report usernames to isn't enough there's yet another for things that aren't as blatant as UAA: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/User_names)

It's actively hostile to people with names like those mentioned in the article.

<comment><USER16> Hmmm, I mean, on Wikipedia, does anyone want to see user names that aren't pseudonymous?

I think the policy is more likely to favor names that are not identifiable in the real world.

So nonsense like " _Snarf_Yorble_ " is preferred to " _Danny_DeVito_ " even if Danny DeVito himself is trying to help write an article about the TV show, Taxi, by citing some good sources to fill in blanks and rectify some subtle errors via the talk page.

Favoring handles and nicknames keeps attention focused on the content or data, and not the authors, to retain a degree of objectivity. Merit badges are there, not to promote credit, but credible accuracy and reliable behavior.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I worked at an ISP in the '90s, and our first paid customer was John Blank. On several occasions, a well-meaning biller would delete his account because it was "obvious a test".

<comment><USER18> Seems 'Schmoe' is a real, or at least adopted, last name. Linked in lists a few Schmoes, including Joe and John. Must be hillarious.

<comment> crooked-v The only safe thing to assume about the validity of family names is that people may or may not have one, and that if they do, it is probably (but not guaranteed to be) composed of a series of Unicode-space characters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The name I was born with, Burkimsher, is always misspelled when people type it.

I had a chance to choose my own Chinese name. I had friends with amusing names: Yi-ting was eating, Wei-ting was waiting, and let's not mention Shi- ting. Those are all quite normal names there! I laughed at first, but realised that I remembered their names much better than other friends.

So I chose my name to be 台平, Tai-ping. Because I'm typing. This is now my legal name on my ID card there!

<comment><USER20> I would choose tri-ing or sli-ping for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As George Carlin pointed out[1], it's the context of the use of language that determines whether it's good or bad. So machine learning just sucks at determining context. Trying to get people to stop being offended by the utterance of arbitrary sounds probably will never happen, but at least we can make computers less stupid.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUvdXxhLPa8) (trigger warning: comedy)

<comment><USER22> This sparked a memory of sprinter Tyson Gay's last name being automatically edited[0] to be "less offensive"(?) by a religious org's news website. Simply searching for and replacing certain words is bound to fail.

[0] [http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=294)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's only going to get worse - more and more systems are replaced with "AI" which in return produces the worst case of "computer says no" \- with the older systems, customer service could at least override the system, with the newer ones it becomes increasingly difficult to do so. Even simpler technologies like voice recognition are incredibly shit if you have an accent or a surname that's not recognised by English "speaking" voice recogniser(support lines where you have to say your surname to get connected to someone are the worst).

<comment><USER24> On the topic of voice recognition systems, my old flip phone had a voice recognition system where you had to first record yourself saying the name of your contact before being able to call said contact.

Once you got past that initial step it was much much more reliable than today's voice recognition systems on Android phones, especially for "foreign" names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Obligatory link to Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names: [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER14> I wish that was a list like that could be added to because I would add:

41\. Full adjectives and adverbs can appear in names. Some folks didn't get fancy and add prefixes and suffixes like the Europeans. You might even encounter a family name that is a whole phrase.

<comment><USER26> Puritan names actually followed this pattern, with names like "If-Christ-had- not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst- been-damned".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have an ø in my name. It is especially annoying when entering payment details and I have to input my name as it appears on my credit card. It is surprisingly often that only ascii is accepted. I would guess the anglo- internet is hell if you're from Asia.

<comment><USER28> In Germany, transliterations are widespread and officially accepted. Ö=OE, Ä=AE, Ü=UE, ß=SS makes it fine to write Hübner as Huebner even in the passport and other official documents. I wonder why other countries do not allow transliterations as a legal way to deal with anglo-centric character sets?

<comment><USER29> Not sure what the _official_ stance is, but people with Turkish names seem to (often?) transliterate ü = u, ö => o, as seen for example at [https://twitter.com/mesutozil1088](https://twitter.com/mesutozil1088) and [https://twitter.com/ismail_kupeli](https://twitter.com/ismail_kupeli) \- not sure about Swedes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Also: two letter surnames

You wouldn't think a lot of sites check for a minimum name length, but they do.

<comment><USER31> Those sites must not have a lot of exposure to Asians --- where transliterated 2-letter surnames are very common.

<comment><USER32> I use some software that requires 6 characters to be inputted before it'll search for a name. At least that includes the comma and space.

A pain since I have a lot of people with short Asian surnames (and a "first" name which isn't always the one they go by).

<comment><USER33> A 6-char limit excludes "Smith", "Brown", and "Jones". Perhaps that coding decision should be revisited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have dealt with this specific problem before and it is a quite difficult problem. I actually use it as an interview question often for prospective programmers and it is a decent gauge of someone's general problem solving abilities. If you ask this problem of any programmer generally the people who come up with the common "gotchas" and some suggested solutions quickly are the kind of people that are likely to be able to quickly solve problems in a pragmatic way generically.

The two most difficult parts of this problem are the _subset_ problem and the _localization_ problem.

The subset problem is highlighted by Scunthorpe. When looking for bad words, how do you whitelist the places like Scunthorpe where the subset can contain a bad word? I.E. how can we allow Scunthorpe while also disallowing .:)(B.adw0r3d ?

The localization problem is easily described in this thread as well. In French, ass might mean a completely beningn word that's completely different from the meaning in English.

In the end the current solutions aren't great and involve a shit ton of heuristics with a lot of human intervention. I don't see that changing in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER35> I haven't run into this problem yet, but I certainly expect to at some point. Especially since my last name is even a bit more suggestive than simply 'butts' or 'weiner'.

</comment><comment><USER36> I used to work on the project, where we had a filter like this on people's names, to prevent abuse.

We quickly learned that showing message like "Name cannot contain profanity" is a bad idea, because we'd show this due to names that happen to be "questionable in some contexts". People get pissed off real quick, if you tell them they have "profanity" in their name.

We changed it to something like "you're using a word we don't allow" (avoiding mentioning of "profanity" altogether), PLUS, we added a way for users to quickly contact support, if they're in this pickle.

</comment><comment><USER37> Its entirely possible to be profane without the use of profane words. I am surprised this didnt get a mention from Vice:

[http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history- of-t...](http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns- speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/)

TL;DR "We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words – the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world."

"We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he'd created the following sentence:

I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.

</comment><comment><USER38> I think it's interesting that the article mentions that they "haven't solved the Scunthorpe problem". I always thought of the Scunthorpe problem less as something to be solved and more as a cautionary tale about the folly of attempting to implement censorship software.

It's like the DRM problem. It's incredibly difficult if not impossible, and the goal itself is dubious.

<comment><USER39> Like validating email addresses with a regular expression. There's an edge case to break every assumption.

<comment><USER40> They only proper way to validate an email address is to send an email to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> When I was in elementary school, the Vice Principal's name was Mr. Butts. That was uproariously funny to my young self. Now I kind of feel bad for the guy, being the brunt of an endless stream potty humor from "clever" pre-teens..

<comment><USER26> If your surname is Butts and you chose a career path in elementary education, you know what you're signing up for.

<comment><USER42> True although that doesn't mean they're getting what they deserve. If you want to be an educator, or have any normal occupation, you shouldn't be forced to change your identity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've known families with surnames like Weiner and Skanky (who had a bunch of girls, I always felt sorry for them with a last name of Skanky). I imagine they must have this same issue.

<comment><USER44> I was good friends with a daughterful Skanky family growing up - almost wonder if it was the same one.

Much in the same way that the pronunciation of harassment over-corrected to "hare-es-ment" for a while in the 90s (avoiding "her-ass-ment"), they led the pronunciation of their name towards Skanchy, like Scrunchy, or Crunchy before relenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I had John Fread write in last year. His whole family had learned to be careful picking usernames, and more careful as WAFs and such grew popular.

<comment><USER46> I'm normally pretty good at this, but I don't get either part of this. What's potentially offensive about a Mr or Mrs Fread? And what's WAF here?

<comment><USER47> I'm guessing fread looks like an attempt at code injection (fread() is a POSIX C function to read from a file handle, but also present in e.g. PHP), and WAF stands for Web Application Firewall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I had the same issue with Facebook. I could not write by birth first name (in a language other than English). It was considered "offensive" by the filters in that specific language.

I ended up including some non-printable unicode characters in my first name, and after a few tries, it worked :). At least my name is now shown properly, even though the bits are not correct.

</comment><comment><USER49> The creator of the well-known board game Scrabble, which a significant portion of my life revolves around, was named Alfred Butts.

</comment><comment><USER50> I must admit this article brought forth my inner 5 year old. This reminds me of James Mickens' USENIX keynote about the hazards of security and AI. We are deploying poorly reasoned and poorly tested technologies that are harming individuals. When will we take a step back and think about the consequences of the technology we are developing?

</comment><comment><USER51> It's really amazing how often I meet people today who think world filters are in any way, shape or form effective against abuse and trolling.

And this isn't niche software either, this happens in AAA game releases, all the time. I've encountered this in software that had been developed for millions of dollars.

<comment><USER52> I always assumed it was just to filter usernames in an aesthetic sense...less so about behavior.

Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

<comment><USER51> >Sadly most lists of unpleasant words are pretty aggressive.

Either that or they contain words that look like someone was sitting in front of the screen and making a scrunched face trying to remember any more offensive words.

They're also usually very US-centric and completely ignore other cultures, languages or societies.

<comment><USER52> I think the it is more that they cross cultural boundaries. As someone looking through a list I feel like I see a lot of odd...non US centeric words and slang.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> An interesting project would be to consult with cultural anthropologists and create a localization library for names. That way once a person selects the appropriate country we can just consult the localization for name formatting and cultural taboos then validate based on that.

</comment><comment><USER54> Related: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic)

</comment><comment><USER55> I used to know a guy whose name (really) was Michael Hunt.

<comment><USER56> I had an actual comp sci textbook in college written by Harold Beaver.

<comment><USER57> One of my college professors was Thor Hogan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wonder if there is John Doe around facing these problems.

</comment><comment><USER59> The name "Dick van Dyke" would often get censored by filters in online forums in the 90s.

</comment><comment><USER60> A boy named Sue Drop Database Null. _Johnny Cash strums_

<comment><USER19> Or Little Bobby Tables from XKCD.

[https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Relevant: [https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/9a0wuc/my_name_is_ligma_and_this_is_my_story/)

</comment><comment><USER62> First name Seymour?

</comment><comment><USER63> I had a linear algebra professor named doctor buttcane.

</comment><comment><USER64> Must be even harder on real life. :)

</comment><comment><USER65> As much of a chuckle as I got from this article... It's actually not hard.

<comment><USER65> Ahhh, I'm being down voted for saying this isn't actually hard.

Maybe having the last name Butts on the internet IS hard after all.

(In case it's not clear, this is my last name)

The only trouble I have ever had was Facebook locking me out of my account in 2011 and making me send them a photo of my ID before being let back in. Took a month.

The funny thing is I have a random Facebook account with a totally fake city and name for a character in a game I play, and never had any trouble with that!

Never had a registration problem on any site, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Vice is getting their articles from imgur now?

[https://imgur.com/gallery/MeMGmx4](https://imgur.com/gallery/MeMGmx4)

</comment><comment><USER67> > Take the case of Jennifer Null, for instance, whose name was frequently > rejected in input fields because the program treated her last name as a form > of code, rather than text

For all those who say javascript the language is fine: ^^

<comment> crooked-v The value `null` and the value `"null"` are not the same thing in Javascript, and `null == 'null'` is `false`.

<comment><USER68> And if we set x=[0], then x==x is true and x!=x is also true...

And []+[] = "" And []+{} = [object Object] And {}+[] = 0 And {}+{} = NaN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm a programmer named Sam Goto, and this is my story :)

[https://twitter.com/samuelgoto/status/1034898489447047168](https://twitter.com/samuelgoto/status/1034898489447047168)

</comment><comment><USER70> I believe this is a dying problem. The next social media will be based around a real life user.

First name, last name, photo, home address(or similar). Everything verified or at least enough for people to feel like they are talking to real people.

Given how easily reddit is astroturfed by Aldi, Tmobile, Samsung, Tesla, Donald Trump, and more, the next gen social media will revolve around real people rather than usernames and corporate accounts.

<comment><USER71> Even accepting your premise as as true (which I don't necessarily), social media isn't the only space in which this problem appears.

The article itself mentions "members of British Parliament [being] blocked from viewing the Sexual Offences Bill they had proposed by a government spam filter"[0] and "the London Horniman museum's emails [being] flagged because systems thought they meant 'horny man'"[1].

[0] [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2723851.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_politics/2723851.stm) [1] [http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/533121.Name_of_museum_is_c...](http://www.newsshopper.co.uk/news/533121.Name_of_museum_is_confused_with_porn/)</comment></comment>


OSS Will Kill Your Startup - <AUTHOR> https://jbminn.com/posts/oss-will-kill-your-startup/ <comment><USER2> I would recommend the following.

1\. Don't use OSS model if there is no good reason.

2\. If there is a reason, use GNU AGPLv3. Dual licensing is great if you make living from selling the code. Be ready to go after those who violate the copyright.

I agree on MIT licenses. If the value comes from the code and not from services, its insane to use MIT. You are just giving value to competitors for free.</comment>


Stripe: Marketplaces - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/us/marketplaces <comment><USER3> Here's my question on this: is it better to have your marketplace collect all the payments and then ACH out funds to sellers? OR is it better to have each seller create their own Stripe account via Stripe connect and have the payments go directly to their Stripe account?

I ask because I've done both in different projects and I'm still not convinced which is better. Having all the payments come into your account means you'll definitely be dealing with more Fraud. Plus the accounting is more of a PITA in my opinion. But the user-experience is smoother and you can allow for purchases from multiple sellers (on a site like Etsy).

<comment><USER4> I think it depends a lot on your target audience.

\- If your users are "in control" of their own business -- if they handle refunds and customer service issues themselves, if they'd like to log in to their own dashboard, etc. -- I think Connect[1] makes more sense. This is what, say, Squarespace uses.

\- If your sellers are providing a service to another company, and expect that the company will take care of everything (a la Lyft and Postmates), I think the transfers API is a better fit.

Does that make any sense?

[1] [https://stripe.com/connect](https://stripe.com/connect)

<comment><USER5> To add on this, I would advocate you to think more in terms of user experience (which pc addressed very well) rather than fraud liability when making your decision.

Of course it depends how big your customers are, how well-educated about fraud your users are, and your own tolerance for risk, but in my experience transferring the risk liability onto your customers is a very bad idea if you can avoid it.

Even if you're not technically liable, your users _will_ blame you and hold you responsible if they end up losing money to fraud, even more so if their online stores are hosted on your website (which is probably the case if you're referring to your product as a marketplace).

Because they are potentially much smaller than you are (if you are offering a self-service platform, this is the kind of users you'll tend to get), they are extremely sensitive to risk and they are at high risk of incurring a catastrophic (to them) loss. If that happens, leaving them to their own device will be extremely bad PR and will potentially cost you more business than if you had absorbed the loss. I was talking to a friend who works on the fraud team at Square (who use Stripe Connect), and I recall they reached this same conclusion after one of their merchants on SquareSpace was attacked by fraudsters. We don't use Stripe at Eventbrite but I can guarantee we could even never suggest passing the fraud losses onto the event organizers without losing a lot of business.

So don't imagine that by having your users register their own Stripe account you will be cleared of fraud issues (at least for buyer fraud -- merchant risk is another issue). Instead, just pick the solution that makes the most sense in terms of product and ease of accounting.

Also, because as the owner of the marketplace you have much more data than any individual merchant, you are better equipped to detect and fight fraud than they are -- if you have the capability and are able to assume the risk I would highly encourage you to do so, even if it means increasing fees for your users to cover your costs. As a nice side-effect, you'll even be able to advertise a "no fraud liability" policy for your users which may sway potential customers that were hesitant with trusting some online platform to handle their money.

<comment><USER3> The type of fraud that is endemic to many marketplaces is exactly what can be prevented by going with the Stripe Connect approach. In a nutshell, what happens is (a) fraudster creates a fake "store" in your marketplace, (b) they run purchases through that store with stolen credit cards, (c) they attempt to have the funds transferred to a bank account. Your own founder even talked about it [1] and I've had to deal with this quite a bit at [http://nextproof.com](http://nextproof.com)

Actual merchants in the marketplace are rarely affected other than the user experience. But when all the chargebacks come back to you, it severely affects the bottom-line. I also think the user-experience has improved quite a bit (with Stripe Connect, you can have users provision their own Stripe account during signup).

I would also argue, given how how "lean" many startups and MVPs are, many marketplaces are actually smaller and more at risk than the sellers they serve. Most marketplaces don't have $200M in funding and data scientists like EventBrite ;)

[1] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/founder-stories- eventbrite-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/16/founder-stories-eventbrite- go-after-incumbents/)

<comment><USER6> How does Stripe Connect prevent the fake store, stolen card numbers scam? I'm genuinely curious here.

<comment><USER7> The chargebacks go to the fake store, rather than to the marketplace operator.

<comment><USER6> Ah, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really wish a payment processor other than Amazon could offer a separate microtransaction rate[0]. For anything under $10, Amazon reduces their regular rate of 2.9% + $.30 to 5% + $.05.

[0] [https://payments.amazon.com/help/Checkout-by- Amazon/Creating...](https://payments.amazon.com/help/Checkout-by- Amazon/Creating-Managing-Your-Account/Amazon-Payments-Fees)

<comment><USER9> PayPal has a lower rate for small transactions too.

<comment><USER10> Is that still around? I thought they were removing micro transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this new? Anyone know if Stripe supports transactional escrow yet? E.g. when a credit card charge clears, are those funds available immediately in my account balance, for payout or withdrawal? Balanced does this and it's one of the most valuable features IMO.

<comment><USER12> I've used the Stripe Transfers API, and am considering using it on another project soon, but I've also been looking at Balanced.

One of the pain points for me was that funds are only available to be transferred 7-ish days after the charge is cleared, same as when Stripe would normally transfer it to the bank account of the Stripe account owner. I ended up having a table of "scheduled" transfers that would be queried each time the balance.available webhook was run. Any transfers that were scheduled 7 days prior would then be sent to Stripe. If I messed up, transfers would fail because there wouldn't be enough to cover them in the Stripe balance.

It would have been much nicer if the balance.available event could tell you which associated charges had been cleared and made available. Also, Stripe has no way to pre-fund your account to provide a buffer for possible overages.

Also, you can't turn on the Transfers API until you associate a bank account, which I don't want to do with the account I use just for development/testing.

<comment><USER4> This is good feedback -- thanks.

(The 7 day transfer delay is going away.)

<comment><USER13> For connect as well? -- our users (via connect) have been tugging at us to replace Stripe with something that transfers sooner

edit: made into a question

<comment><USER4> Yep, for Connect as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Stripe was always going to release this. Balanced however, has more advanced tools to deal with marketplaces (i.e: you need to write less code to power a marketplace on Balanced than Stripe).

This is not a big deal though, the battle will end up being who can scale globally faster.

<comment><USER15> > _..the battle will end up being who can scale globally faster._

I think there's more to it than this. The cost of switching from one payments provider to another is decreasing all the time. Competition appears to have driven costs (i.e. the fee/commission per payment) down to roughly the same level for everyone. There's some room for differentiation on the product (not so much ease of set-up - which is a one-off thing - as the admin UI and featureset), quality of customer service (I know someone here in the UK who switched from Paypoint to SagePay for precisely this reason) and the accuracy of fraud detection (i.e. minimising both chargebacks due to the use of stolen cards _and_ erroneous rejections of legit payers).

However, I think that there's a strategic competitive advantage to be gained through operational efficiency (i.e. reducing the cost per transaction to as close to zero as possible) and generating revenue from sources other than the fee/commission (for an example of this, see my blog post on how Paypal makes money on cross-currency payments: [http://jackgavigan.com/2013/03/12/how- paypal-makes-money-on-...](http://jackgavigan.com/2013/03/12/how-paypal-makes- money-on-cross-currency-payments/) ).

<comment><USER14> The uncontrollable part of the cost come from Visa/Mastercard/Amex. Until these are decreased, fees will not drop significantly.

<comment><USER15> That's actually irrelevant to the question of who will be the winners in payments processing.

<comment><USER14> I believe you were pointing out that winner is the one that will have the lowest fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Spent 15 minutes playing with the background on this page: you can push circles around by moving your mouse nearby, if you push circles apart connections break, if you push them together they forge new connections. Rather fun little piece of interactivity.

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting move by Stripe, given that WePay (YC S09) decided to focus on the marketplace market. [http://blog.wepay.com/post/73503019884/wepay- in-2014](http://blog.wepay.com/post/73503019884/wepay-in-2014)

<comment><USER17> (bill from wepay here) competition in payments is a good thing for the market & I believe that Stripe has had these APIs for some time.

I believe that our model (which removes marketplaces from the flow of funds & shields them from risk) is a better fit for some folks, but not all - <USER2> are tradeoffs. I have a ton of respect for the guys at stripe and would consider us good friends. (We were actually both in YC S09 when Stripe was called /dev/payments)

[Edit/addition: Marketplaces are an especially valuable segment for payment companies because they touch a lot of payment volume relative to their company size. i.e. a software company selling $100m of revenue is usually a relatively large & established company, but a marketplace processing $100m of GMV can be quite small.]

<comment><USER18> Hi there, I hadn't seen wepay before and it looks really interesting. Do you have a page that sets out exactly what risks there are when building a marketplace with your system? I see that you guys say you protect from fraud with an anti-fraud system but presumably fraud will happen sometimes and I'm wondering who gets the bill when it does.

<comment><USER17> Sure, there are a lot of unique risks involved with building a marketplace. My cofounder Rich wrote a pretty extensive overview here: [https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101](https://www.wepay.com/api/payments-101)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stripe needs to incorporate being able to remove bank accounts from their recipients. Right now if a recipient wants to change their bank account, all their past transfers get erased.

<comment><USER20> Hi! I work on product at Stripe. We're currently working on better API for managing recipients.

However, I can't seem to reproduce the issue you're seeing--could you provide a bit more context? If you change a recipient's bank account, their past transfers will still appear on their page in your Stripe dashboard and when listing transfers via the API and filtering by recipient ID.

Edit: Feel free to PM me as well :). I'm email@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't see any new features being launched here, but it's a nice landing page that sets out the value proposition and use cases for marketplaces more clearly. Yet again making me wish that the Transfers API was available in Europe!

<comment><USER22> I'm frequently trying to explain to people that Stripe has all the features to run one's marketplace on but folks somehow think that they should be using another product merely because of the marketing. Good to have a centralized marketing experience targeted toward marketplaces, even if the feature set didn't change. It is very smart -- PC and the whole Stripe team did a great job here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Any timeline on when we can use the transfers API to send to bank accounts outside the US?

</comment><comment><USER24> I love Stripe, I love the continuous improvements, but since Stripe also accepts different currencies, I'm still waiting for a way to localize all that standard stuff Stripe comes with, e. g. "Stripe checkout". Can't use it, since labels are not in German and not all of my users speak English and not all labels can be customized/translated yet.

<comment><USER25> I agree. The rate of innovation is very impressive and I'm sure with the engineering talent they already have, these improvements are more feasible than say expanding from country to country. But I would love to see increases in the rate of adaption of existing features for international users as my company (and many others) would greatly benefit from Stripe in LatAm for example.

</comment></comment><comment> j-rom Spent a bit of time playing with the background.....a lot of time

</comment><comment><USER26> Have any of you had experience with user Credit accounts - in the fashion of Fanduel.com. In this system, users use Credit/Debit cards or Paypal to pre- fill up their accounts. They can then use this money to make purchases/bets on the website.

Are there any drawbacks to using this system? It seems like a much simpler model than Stripe if it could be implemented to a marketplace, especially in cases of fraud. Transactions could be held in escrow until they were sufficiently completed.

Similarly, wouldn't this help avoid transaction fees? Maybe Fanduel is saying all account credits are essentially payments and then they allocate the money to its correct place on the site as credit? So the website is still using Paypal/Stripe, for all payments.

Forgive my ignorance about this stuff.

<comment><USER27> That could definitely save on transaction fees, but my observation is that customers want their spending money in their most liquid account possible, which for many is their bank account.

Even something ubiquitous like PayPal isn't usually available at retail locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if I could do the following... Any help would be appreciated.

Here's the scenario: a seller is selling something expensive. Some buyers may prefer purchasing by credit card (simple) but others may prefer to wire money to the seller. To guarantee the transaction, we would take an authorization on a credit card for, let's say 10 days and if the buyer transfers the amount during that time, we remove the hold on the credit card. If he hasn't transferred the money after the elapsed time, then we would charge the card.

Would Stripe or Balanced support such a scenario and if so, what would be the fees? Is there any impact of having a lot of CC holds that don't go through?

<comment><USER29> (I work at Stripe)

You can't currently accept payments with Stripe via wire, but you can accept payments via ACH-in (currently in beta: email firstname.lastname@example.com for access) as well as debit/credit card. You could certainly do exactly what you describe with ACH-in and a separate authorization/capture process via credit/debit card, however authorizations expire in 7 days, so you may want to keep that in mind.

I suggest doing a separate authorization and capture via credit card ([https://stripe.com/blog/auth-capture](https://stripe.com/blog/auth-capture)) OR accepting payments via ACH-in, rather than attempting to do both at the same time which can lead to customer confusion.

Stripe only charges upon a successful transaction ([https://stripe.com/pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing)), so the uncaptured authorizations will not cost you money.

<comment><USER28> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting idea. As a middle man you don't have to handle the money.

One thing though...I hate the website. I had no idea I needed to scroll down. I know its web 3.0ish but it's stupid.

</comment><comment><USER31> We are in the process of launching a service that would utilize a marketplace feature and currently looking into options available. I am wondering how is Stripe Marketplace different compared to Balanced marketplace with the escrow feature. I believe the escrow functionality is pretty much the same with what Stripe has to offer as "Dashboard?

<comment><USER4> Yes; the timing of payouts is entirely up to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not really impressed, why would you want to put your marketplace at the whims of Stripe or credit card companies?

I am currently working on a bitcoin marketplace, while it would restrict the ease of use for users, it would also cut out alot of fraud and chargebacks crap

I would rather have a large part of a rapidly growing pie than fighting ebay or amazon on their turf

<comment><USER33> Because depending on your industry the vast majority of people have never used bitcoin and have no intention of working the whole thing out. Most of everyone interested in buying online though can use one of a credit card, PayPal or a bank transfer.

Maybe there are niches where it is feasible to operate in bitcoin at this time. For almost everyone though this isn't an option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any plans to enable ACH payments? My industry deals with very large sized payments (>$1000), and people currently use paper checks - $30+ is too high for the convenience. Having stripe offer ACH would enable some fantastic stuff.

<comment><USER35> It appears they use ACH for payments, but not debits (credit card only it appears). We run a marketplace with 5-6 figure transactions and use Balanced Payments. Their documentation is fairly terrible, but they cap ACH fees at $5, which is key, because we are passing the money through and would go out of business if we had to give 3% or whatever to a 3rd party.

<comment><USER34> Oh that's nice. $5 still might be a barrier for the use case I have in mind, though. I wonder if there's any higher level of identity verification that one could do to reduce it further.

<comment><USER36> Hey ericd! I work at Balanced.

The price of ACH debits is 1% + 30¢, _capped_ at $5. So a $10 debit would cost you 40¢. I know you've said you're doing high-dollar transactions, just wanted to make sure that it was super clear, as we try to be with all of our pricing.

[https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing](https://www.balancedpayments.com/pricing)

<comment><USER34> Hey Steve, thanks for the clarification. I understood, but it's probably useful for others. My transactions would all be maxing out that cap, just not sure if users will be willing to replace their paper checks if they have to pay $5 more.

<comment><USER36> Totally. Our experience around checks has been interesting: basically, there are some customers who absolutely do not want anything but a check. They've been using checks their entire life, and they don't want to change. Fair enough.

Some other people just simply don't understand how _quickly_ they can get money via ACH. It's a matter of venturing into the unknown vs. what's tried and true. So when we say "You'll get your money today, in your bank account, if you use Wells Fargo, and tomorrow otherwise," they say "really?" And decide ACH is good enough for the cost. Then again, that's on the payout side rather than the pay-in side, though I guess if your website accepted payment via check, it'd be much faster there, too.

There are also all kinds of other complications in dealing with paper checks that may make it worth the $5. Here's the issue where we talk about Balanced and paper checks, and this comment in particular is very insightful: [https://github.com/balanced/balanced- api/issues/69#issuecomm...](https://github.com/balanced/balanced- api/issues/69#issuecomment-15808089) Checks are also not reversible, which we feel is a significant drawback.

Anyway, no matter what you do, feel free to ping me if you have any questions payments related: I've really enjoyed learning this domain, there's so many details, and they're all so important...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is a way to ACH money from my bank using Stripe so that I can pay people via ACH? I am looking for a simple solution for outbound ACH payments via an API. If Stripe doesn't have this does anyone else?

<comment><USER38> (I work at Balanced)

Balanced does: [https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach- debits](https://www.balancedpayments.com/ach-debits)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm building a marketplace just now... this could be very useful but 2.9% fee is too high(I take 4%), anyone know fee if process more of $80000/month?

<comment><USER4> We do custom pricing at scale; the fees depend on the breakdown of card types used with your service (and hence the underlying costs). Want to drop us an email at email@example.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Pretty sweet landing page. I think having lower rates for microtransactions would be nice, as many have pointed out.

</comment><comment><USER41> Basically, all this does it make it so each "seller" doesn't have to create a whole Stripe setup. It introduces a middleman who collects a fee. Useful for some applications, I guess so.

I can see this mostly used on smaller-scale projects or businesses. Otherwise it just makes too much sense to set up your own Stripe, especially considering how easy it is to set up Checkout.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does stripe ever plan to release more advanced/streamlined analytics?

<comment><USER4> They'll get better, but there are now some cool integrations built on top of Stripe, like baremetrics.io and linelytics.com.

We list more at [https://stripe.com/docs/integrations](https://stripe.com/docs/integrations).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> the background of this page is moving around aaaah

</comment><comment><USER44> Is this available in Australia?

<comment><USER4> Not yet, I'm afraid. We're working on launching it across Europe, Canada, and Australia. (You can use Connect in those countries, though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> No Escrow?

<comment><USER29> When you process payments with Stripe, they roll into a balance, which the marketplace can use to make transfers from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What is the value proposition you can build on top of this? create marketplaces but for what? is it common to use a business model to skim percentage for each transaction?

<comment><USER47> Yes it is a common business model, and great work if you can get it.

To be successful at it you need to be more than just a middle man; you provide value by solving an impedance mismatch between sets of buyers and sellers.

For example: eBay provides a reputation system, a search engine, and a payments processor (PayPal). Those are all arguably difficult things for individual buyers and sellers to provide. As a result eBay attracts a large audience of both, making the marketplace for goods more efficient, and extracts a small cut of _lots_ of transactions.

Stripe is providing a way to make the payment provider part of the marketplace equation more easily available to developers. In theory you can focus more on the other hard parts of making a successful market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anxiously awaiting Aaron Greenspan's inevitable troll-sesh on this thread :D</comment>


Dictionary of Numbers, Putting numbers in human terms. - <AUTHOR> http://dictionaryofnumbers.com

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. Know what would make it even cooler? Some sort of user input into what's shown. For instance, I'd like to filter out small money values, say under $1,000. Tends to clog up certain sites.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice work.</comment>


Inexpensive Dynamic DNS over IRC - <AUTHOR> https://purpleidea.com/blog/2020/09/01/inexpensive-dns-over-irc/ <comment><AUTHOR> I built this, and I hope you find it interesting and useful! Let me know if you like the idea please =D

As per [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) it's:

> "On topic: things people can run on their computers or hold in their hands"

but also:

> "Off topic: blog posts"

So who knows where the right place to post is. LMK</comment>