Was Microsoft's recent code "donation" forced by the GPL? - <AUTHOR> http://passthesource.org.nz/2009/07/22/donating-code/

<comment><USER2> The GPL can't force them to work on getting the code included in the mainline kernel.

They did this for one reason plain and simple: competitive advantage over VMWare.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes. Question: does it matter? Not really, im sure this happens all over the place - M$ are just high profile.

I dislike the mud slinging paragraph at the end of the post - I dont see the relevance.

<comment><USER4> You're right. It probably does happen all the time. Just last week in one of those GPL vs. BSD threads someone posted a link to a story about how the author of CLISP was more or less coerced into using the GPL license. In any case, through coercion or not, releasing Linux drivers under the GPL is probably the right thing to do. Many users are strongly against loading proprietary binary blobs into their kernel. Still, not all vendors open source drivers so that ones that do could potentially enjoy a competitive advantage.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, the CLISP guy seemed to want to GPL his stuff towards the end of the thread. RMS was, as always, heavy-handed and mentioned legal action before even asking, "hey, do you want to GPL this"? That says nothing about the GPL and a lot about RMS' personality.

The end result is that CLISP is one of the better CL implementations, and seems to have a pretty decent following. I don't know if it was like that before it was GPL'd or not, though.

<comment><USER6> For good or ill, GPL _reflects_ RMS' personality, in much the same way start- ups reflect their founder's personality. GPL is a polemical, political statement, not just a software license. That reflects the fact that RMS is a moral philosopher, not just a programmer.

This is not to say that we should _judge_ GPL by RMS' personality - GPL, just like companies people create, will stand on its own; all I am saying is that GPL is strongly influenced by the personality of its creator.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Stallman strongly believes stuff should be free (not a bad atitude) and so the GPL tends to force things to be free in sequence.

Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)

(disclaimer; Im not personally a fan of Stallman, so I might be a bit biased over it)

<comment><USER7> " _Personally I find the GPL distasteful; because it locks you in. Frustrating (and I cant help feeling causes substantial code duplication for some projects that dont want to use GPL code)_ "

Were there any licenses prior to the GPL that didn't do that? Surely you couldn't just take a piece of IBM or AT&T's code and put it into your programs with no strings attached. That era was before my time, so please educate me if I'm mistaken.

<comment><USER3> well it's before mine too so I have no idea :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Of course not. All the reports I have seen say it is driver code. Therefore it very well could have been a Nvida style Blob driver if they wanted to keep the source buttoned up.

<comment><USER9> And enterprise Linux suppliers/users are going to just certify/install a binary blob from Microsoft into the kernel?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Most enterprises already run binary blobs from Microsoft, as MS distributes nearly all of its software that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They just did another GPL release to integrate their Live tools with Moodle. I think that somebody decided to change policy.

</comment><comment><USER12> freedom that contains coercion is ironic

<comment><USER13> It depends on whose freedom you want to promote. The GPL is for protecting the freedom of software recipients. The BSD license if for protecting the freedom of software developers.</comment></comment>


Your Life in Weeks - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

<comment><USER2> Thank you. This is the most depressing thing I've seen all week.</comment>


Linus Torvalds, Visual Basic Fan (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/linus-torvalds-visual-basic-fan.html Improved title <comment><USER5> I used it a few times.

You could draw a frontend easily. You could glue together fairly high level components trivially. You could connect window/component/widget clicks and actions to code trivially. Want a thing that sits in the systray, scans a directory for new files, reads lines out of them and spews them out somewhere over the network? Easy. Make a test frontend that calls a bunch of scripts and dumps the results in a grid? Done.

It had a bad rep because in a lot of ways it felt like a toy, and because a lot of bad software was written in it by people that didn't really know what they were doing. OTOH that also made it a really accessible first step for some folks.

<comment><USER6> In many ways, Rails is the new VB. A little hyperbolic, perhaps, but I see a similar mindset when people ignore the language Ruby and live only in the world of Rails, eventually leading to shitty code.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't necessarily lead to shitty code. There, it is a question of how good he is a _race car driving_.

(For those that don't want to click the link: (turing-unaware) race car drivers are programmers that know a single high-level technology very well, but are unaware of the things that the technology is based on. Somehow like Formula 1-drivers.)

[https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/age-racecar- driver](https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/age-racecar-driver)

<comment><USER8> Interesting link: David Hansson, creator of Rails, is also a professional race car driver.

[http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver](http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wow, a postcard from the past for me. Mirror of the original full interview:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20080325033938/http://www.stifflo...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080325033938/http://www.stifflog.com/2006/10/16/stiff- asks-great-programmers-answer/#more-9)

<comment><USER10> thanks (for the copy + the original). have to say, i am no great fan of gvr, but he doesn't come across as a jerk to me - strange interpretation from atwood.

<comment><USER11> A guess:

To the question "What do you think makes some programmers 10 or 100 times more productive than others?"

Guido van Rossum answers "Genetic differet brain structure." (sic)

Tim Bray answers "The surprising variability of the human mind."

I think they're basically the same answer, but Tim Bray's is the very American politically correct "hooray to everybody!" version. Given that the title of the blog post refers to "great programmers", Guido's answer could be read as "my brain is super awesome and yours is not". Which, I bet, is not what he meant.

<comment><USER12> Dismissing the difference between those 2 answers as political correctness, while not completely inaccurate, misses a larger point imo. It almost seems to me there is a different attitude toward other people and the world contained in them.

<comment><USER11> i dismiss the difference as culture. If you really directly translate 'the way people say things' to 'the way people think about others' then I doubt you've been much in contact with people from other cultures than your own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Making stuff easier for more people is tremendously important for programming languages.

I hate - really hate - working with it, but I have to acknowledge that PHP has made a lot of things possible that otherwise might not have been because it made it much easier for people to start doing web stuff.

</comment><comment><USER14> In what you might loosely term the golden age of the Windows Desktop - <USER2> say 1995 to 2005, - "custom business application", especially within a large company, was generally done on one of these platforms:

      - <USER3>
      - Visual Basic
      - Lotus Notes
      - Microsoft Access
      - <USER4>

(Your list may vary depending on where you are in the world, etc)

For the company who is modernising their IT, perhaps "moving to the cloud", they have to replace a lot of the functionality that was built on these platforms (especially if the vendor doesn't support them any more, or wants to charge an unviable amount to do so).

What is the modern web equivalent to the "drag and drop programming" paradigm for simple form applications? There are the scaffolding frameworks for proper programming languages (Rails, etc), but they just simplify the process, rather than allowing non-programmers people to design their forms, and then having a little bit of workflow which either they, or their technical colleagues, add on?

Or these things an antique from a time before multiple front-ends were necessary, and when they were safely run on a trusted network alone, and there will never be a place for their return?

<comment><USER15> CLIPPER applications running inside a MS-DOS virtual window, because workers still needed to access Office from their Windows 3.11 for Workgroups environment.

Delphi and C++ Builder, the simplicity of VB for laying out forms, with the performance of native code. These still exist by the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the title is a bit leading calling him a "fan" of VB. I have the exact same views as Linus in that it was a great language to learn programming than teaching OOP to beginners with silly real world examples (Cars, anyone?)

I think what Linus wanted to highlight was that VB was a great environment to quickly get results in the real world, something which I think he highly regards. It might not be the most elegant language to program in but it had an incredible IDE, tons of prebuilt components and looked exactly as it was developed after it was deployed.

</comment><comment><USER17> VB did an incredible amount for the industry, and version 6 is still in use (as are versions of Delphi which I consider very comparable.) Simple interface building, easily comprehensible connections and events, along with an easy build/deployment process. I owned both and they definitely played a role in my personal evolution.

</comment><comment><USER18> And it was Visual Basic that turned me on to Linux. I purchased VB 1.0 for an app I had to build. I paid $120 for it which was a lot of money for me at the time. The app was right in the sweet spot for VB, but being a 1.0 it was unusable. VB 1.1 fixed all the bugs I needed, but they charged $60 for the upgrade. Charging $60 for bug fixes turned me into a Microsoft hater. The next semester I downloaded 386BSD and started my transition away from Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER19> And yet no one is building another Visual Basic today anymore. Purely, In terms of ease of programming. We have't had single improvement since the days of VB6.

<comment><USER20> Xojo (formerly REALbasic) fits the bill: [http://xojo.com/](http://xojo.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Another thing that Linus says is:

> I have a soft spot for Andrew Tanenbaum's "Operating Systems: Design and > Implementation".

I too liked VB6/VBA. Actually a really productive language and development environment. Joel Spolsky describes his part in designing the language: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html)

<comment><USER22> Hey, it is a good book.

(And I don't think Tanenbaum/Linus have much problems with each others, anyway.)

On the subject: The problem with tools like VB is that they are hard to grow up in; something which both support the first steps ("baby language") and serious development.

Today Linus might argue that the scripting languages (Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc) fill this niche in the FOSS world. But with the web as GUI.

<comment><USER23> Well, Tannenbaum actually talks about the development of Linux and how it relates to Minix on his other book on operating systems.

Linus disagreed on the microkernel stuff of Minix and decided to build its on. So, he surely likes the Tannenbaum book on Minix, otherwise he would not have used it as a forking point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was always jealous of the component catalogs of prebuilt VBX / OCX components. It was amazing how much functionality (aka solving the business problem) you could do by just getting a load of components and writing some glue code / UI.

CPAN comes closest for me or the old NeXTSTEP object catalog, but VB was amazing for it.

</comment><comment><USER25> My first computer program was in VB.

I picked up a book (forgot the name) to learn programming as a hobby. This book had a project based approach to teach. Step by step it helped me write a tic-tac-toe program using Visual Basics. It was easy, it was fun, it was hands on. It helped me quickly relate to basic programming constructs like conditional statements, loops and branching.

It turned out not only a wise choice for someone who was experimenting with programming, but also a natural choice because, as soon as i looked at the books content and illustrations, i knew what i would be able to get out of this exercise and it seemed both interesting and achievable.

</comment><comment><USER26> VB was actually a pretty decent language (not as nice as Python, but better than, well, BASIC).

We used it for doing quick user interfaces and "shell" applications for servers. It was well suited for this; you could use much of the Windows API surface, and VB could host DLLs for doing heavy lifting.

Once you got over the "Ewww, I'm using VB" sensation and turned off the obvious brain damage (ON ERROR NEXT, for instance) it was fine. There have been many absolutely brain-dead and horrible languages in the world, but VB is not automatically one of them.

Doesn't mean I'd use it today though.

<comment><USER27> On Error Next is particularly nasty because somehow it behaves differently in the windows 8 runtime than the windows 7 runtime: some errors inside DLLs escalate into a runtime exception in win8 when they were trapped OK in win7.

I wish I didn't know this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Would be nice to add (2006) to the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> and yet VB hasn't really done much in over a decade. doing what VB did for desktop apps to web/mobile apps is a _huge_ opportunity that nobody has managed to nail.

<comment><USER30> Microsoft effectively killed VB with .NET and replaced it with an alternate syntax for C#. Being familiar with VB6 was more of a hindrance than a help to writing any code in VB.NET, and every VB program had to be ported.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I thought Jeff was active again when I saw this :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Jeff is active a little bit in blogging but not on codinghorror.com, see [http://blog.discourse.org/](http://blog.discourse.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> From the mid 90's to ~2001 for windows development your alternative was complex windows frameworks like MFC, which took hundreds of lines of boilerplate code to get a simple app going. VB by comparison had a reasonable amount of speed, no boilerplate and could still call C/C++ libraries.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was very surprised and fairly dissapointed to see the comment about Guido: "Guido Van Rossum, for example, comes across as kind of a jerk."

This was an unnecessary comment and having read the original interview I don't really agree with it either.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's interesting that Ruby was the name of VB before Microsoft bought it.

</comment><comment><USER35> I needed to track some IP addresses once. Visual Basic came in very useful.

</comment><comment><USER36> Appreciating a system for it's strengths is somewhat different to being a fan. Rather, I would say that using the right tool for the job denotes maturity and breadth of experience.

</comment><comment><USER37> Commas are relevant. Even in the English language.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, have improved the title now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Oh no.

Don't bring back that "Guido Van Rossum, for example, comes across as kind of a jerk" again!

Sad Comment :/

<comment><USER39> I've seen several reactions like yours, but after reading the interview i've got to say it gave me the same feeling about Guido Van Rossum. Most of his answers are slightly-off one-liners, like he doesn't care about the interview at all. Now I guess his main point is, like he says in its answer to the first question (which must have been swapped btw no?) : "Your questions are rather general and hard to answer. :-) I guess being able to cook an egg for breakfast is invaluable", which i would agree with. So I wouldn't say that he is a jerk but compared with the good-will of the other interviewees, I see how he can come across as one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> original link to the series of questions is dead.</comment>


Stripe refunds: fees from the original charge are not returned - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/docs/refunds <comment><USER2> Note: this is different than Braintree and Amazon payments, which either refund in full or simply charge only the $0.30 fee. Stripe is now at or near the most expensive here relative to the competition. The idea that they have been doing customers a favor is not accurate.

I have used stripe for years, but they are a company that has continued to make things worse with every update, versus AWS which has my trust they won't increase rates. If AWS ever offered a true competitor, we would switch.

They invest in publishing books, but they still miss basic features like a way to test credit cards in the production system for QA purposes. It's an easily solved problem (let you generate one time fake card numbers programmatically that stripe "pretends" to charge). I have been trying to test checkout flows with them for years and their official stance is "don't test production checkout flows", which is insane.

I hope stripe changes it's ways here, but they have been a large disappointment over the last 4 years or so after a solid start.

<comment><USER3> (I'm one of Stripe's cofounders.)

Thanks for the candid feedback. A few quick thoughts --

\- This is not a new policy change -- it's been our pricing for all new users since 2017. (The news is that we're now applying this pricing to Stripe's older users, in part as a response to some price increases that the card networks are making.)

\- Our policy on refunds is pretty much the same as Braintree's.

\- We've added a lot of new functionality to Stripe since we launched in 2011. (The Stripe that launched back then did not support any non-card payment methods, non-USD currencies, non-US users, etc.) The vast majority of new features come with no new fees -- the Stripe package just gets better. For improvements that don't represent discrete new features, the changes can be non-obvious. Our goal is to quietly optimize things so that Stripe integrations continually get better without your code having to change. For example, Radar is _far_ more effective at preventing fraud and chargebacks than it's ever been. Or, last year, we built an ML engine to automatically optimize the bitfields of card network requests. This has already generated an incremental $1 billion of revenue for Stripe users (with no additional cost).

\- Testing production flows with fake numbers is tricky. (How should these charges show up for reporting purposes? If we exclude them, that introduces another discrepancy. If we include them, that means you have to then handle the downstream _cash_ discrepancy.) It's not an intrinsically unsolvable problem but we have not yet seen a clean solution that we feel good about. As other commenters point out, making sure they're sufficiently secure is also a challenge.

\- While we're proud of our books, I can assure you that the ratio of people working on improving our payments stack to publishing is about 1000:1.

All that said, it's helpful to hear how it seems from your standpoint. We're acutely aware of how much Stripe has yet to do/build. We'll continue to work hard, and I hope we can support your business for many years to come.

<comment><USER4> If I may make a sincere criticism, as a person who knows nothing about either side of this conversation....

We should all delete "I'm sorry you feel that way" from our mental phrasebooks. It is a phrase that always falls flat, comes across as potentially sarcastic, and is the textbook definition of a non-apology apology.

If you want to clarify something, go for it. If you don't want to apologize, don't feel obligated to do so. But please, for your own benefit, steer clear of this no-good phrase.

<comment><USER5> To be fair, this is the CEO personally reaching out. I think that's beyond awesome.

<comment><USER6> Yeah this is damage control.

I recommended stripe to a friend because a hn (ad?) That mentioned the documentation was great. He struggled and I couldn't help him without a deep dive.

To be fair, my WordPress website has no problem with stripe.

<comment><USER7> I've got to disagree on the stripe documentation. They set the bar for exemplary documentation.

<comment><USER8> > That mentioned the documentation was great

;)

<comment><USER7> Whoops, I completely misunderstood your post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's a vast payments ecosystem beyond Stripe that lets you avoid this.

With companies like Spreedly to provide almost-Stripe-quality APIs and PCI- compliant card vaulting at only a flat cost, and a massive amount of "merchant account providers" a quick Google away that can hook into Authorize.net and then into Spreedly, you can end up at 1.75% or less depending on your industry, and the flexibility to _dynamically_ route transactions to merchant accounts (including Stripe itself) based on anything from geography to your own notion of fraud/return risk.

Stripe has far and away the best developer and administrator experience in the industry - it surprises and delights. But this doesn't make it the right solution for all businesses. Its genius was that it entered the zeitgeist as such.

<comment><USER10> Wow, Stripe is the best developer experience? When I integrated a few months ago their documentation was so confusing I ended up giving up and not using it at all, relying on using a library for laborious guess and check, and watching the JSON responses. I suspect my product can still be purchased for free if you use that EU security feature because nothing could help me figure out when I need to use it or how to do so, so it just looks like the payment succeeded. So much documentation recommends you use a totally different system I felt like I was caught in a loop.

<comment><USER8> Euh, you are talking about EU security features?

So,

if(IsInEurope(Customer.Country) || IpAnalyzer.IsInEurope(visitor.Ip))

{

//Enable something

}

Should do it. But fallback method should be implemented, took me 3 minutes of reading documentation + googling.

Between all those tax regulation differences, I think this one is mostly straightforward for handling global payments.

Ps. Don't forget to encrypt your actual data, I think you will be amazed at what needs to happen for selling in EU ;)

<comment><USER10> Nah there's some credit card security thing in the EU they talk about in the Stripe API. No comprehension of what it is, but I'm not talking about GDPR or anything, just weird credit cards.

<comment><USER8> GDPR, I think, is the root cause for the more complex PSD2 flow.

[https://www.insideprivacy.com/financial- institutions/overlap...](https://www.insideprivacy.com/financial- institutions/overlap-between-the-gdpr-and-psd2/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some more context: this has been around for a couple years (for only new Stripe users). Payments are costing more to process. Card network fees have been gradually increasing over the years.

Stripe has kept this at bay for its longtime users for as long as we could, even as it's been getting more expensive. But with the water rising across the whole pond, we sadly have to start charging for some of these things.

<comment><USER12> Why are payments costing more? Isn't technology lowering costs more and more for these companies? Is this just execs needing another summer home so they raise the prices to whatever they like?

<comment><USER13> Actually - it's mostly because of cost / benefit shifting.

A card can attract USERS by increasing the rewards it offers -> and charging MERCHANTS for the reward.

So visa infinite cards might charge a much higher swipe fee to a merchant, and then make available cash back + first party car insurance + lots of bennies to the holders of these "elite" cards.

They justify this to merchants by claiming that these "elite" users spend big bucks.

The reality - if users of cards were charged the actual swipe fee their card incurred -> they would push for SUPER low fees or switch to debit cards.

Many lucrative business depend on the person picking the service not being the one paying for it or the kickback going to someone other than one paying.

<comment><USER14> Meanwhile it's become the new hot thing locally (Southern USA) to charge credit and debit card users a "convenience fee" sometimes as high as 35 cents a transaction. Everyone went from offering discounts to cash users to simply charging card users more.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly, in 2013 both credit card minimums (up to a maximum of $10) and surcharges (up to a maximum of 4%) became legally federally, although there are 10 states that still prohibit surcharges (including New York, California, and Texas).

So seems like $0.35 is allowable on any transaction of $8.75 or more.

[1] [https://www.thebalance.com/credit-card- surcharges-315423](https://www.thebalance.com/credit-card-surcharges-315423)

<comment><USER16> I think it's also worth noting that many of those states allow cash discounts.

[https://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and- commerc...](https://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and- commerce/credit-or-debit-card-surcharges-statutes.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hasn't this been the case for 4-5 months? I remember getting an email from Stripe about this back in September or October 2019, or was that PayPal?

The only thing that really bugs me a lot about Stripe (to the point where I've considered moving to Braintree for my next project) is how they handle fraud detection.

Stripe has all the power to prevent many forms of fraud and provides this as a service as long as you pay a premium for it in the form of Radar. You have to pay extra on top of the 2.9% + 30c per transaction to get this protection.

But instead of providing Radar as a base service to all customers for the standard rates, they would rather you have fraudulent transactions against your account because they profit from "dispute fees", which is usually $17 or so per dispute that the merchant has to pay out of pocket, where Stripe takes some cut of that and the bank takes the rest of the cut.

It just feels super scammy of Stripe to not offer Radar as a thing you get by default, since it's so beneficial to have and business owners are powerless in preventing fraud on their own because they don't have hundreds of millions of transactions of data to lean against and a way to perform analysis on the transaction before it happens since merchants aren't directly in contact with credit card vendors (that's why we use Stripe).

I actually talked to support about this once in an email a few weeks ago, and the email began with them saying it's the merchant's responsibility to deal with fraud but by the end of the email discussion, support completely switched their position and said Stripe has the power to prevent it and they will pass my feedback to their product team. Which of course really means "ok, you win, Stripe is really responsible for fraud detection and we can totally do it, but we're never going to give it to customers out of the box because we profit from fraud regardless of you paying for Radar".

<comment><USER3> > _Stripe has all the power to prevent many forms of fraud and provides this > as a service as long as you pay a premium for it in the form of Radar. You > have to pay extra on top of the 2.9% + 30c per transaction to get this > protection._

Radar's ML-based shield is free for all accounts on standard pricing. See [https://stripe.com/pricing#radar-pricing](https://stripe.com/pricing#radar- pricing). (We only charge if you want to set custom rules etc.)

<comment><USER17> > (We only charge if you want to set custom rules etc.)

The rules are what really allows merchants to protect themselves against fraud but this information isn't possible to obtain without help from their payment gateway (ie. Stripe).

In other words, merchants have no reasonable options to set up rules like what Radar does while using our own custom logic because there's no API that Stripe provides for us to get things like the risk score before the transaction takes place.

If Stripe had an API endpoint where developers could get the risk level of a transaction before the payment intent was put into motion then we could in theory build our own risk management tool at our app level by saying "if $risk_score > X then deny transaction".

But AFAIK nothing like this is possible, so our only option is to pay the extra transaction cost for Radar or deal with a less than ideal fraud protection even though Stripe can technically do this already. It just feels really dirty. It feels like instead of optimizing for the greater good and making the developer / business experience awesome, Stripe would rather pivot from being a payment gateway to an insurance company and then nickel and dime the businesses that helped build Stripe initially.

It's one of those things where it's like, we've been using you for years (quite happily in fact), but you collected all of this data from us and now instead of helping us by offering fraud detection across the board, you'd rather sell our data back to us in the form of insurance.

<comment><USER18> You're welcome to do your own risk scoring on any signals you want prior to directing us to charge a credit card for you. You're also welcome to do post- charge processing using our risk scores. Some companies will e.g. do post- transaction reviews prior to shipping; some write their own workflow SaaS into their admins to do this.

If you don't choose to write your own software using your own data, that's cool; you can buy that software from us, for two cents a transaction (or less).

We're a software company selling to software developers. We're cool with you writing your own software with your own data if you think your engineers are sufficiently efficient at this to make that the best possible use of their time. (The businessman in me suggests that it is extremely unlikely you can profitably employ engineers to write this software at most likely scales of your business and, contingent on being able to do that, it is quite likely there are a hundred better projects not upper bounded at 2 cents a transaction, but you are a project away from constructively disproving this if you strongly disagree.)

<comment><USER17> > You're also welcome to do post-charge processing using our risk scores.

But if it's a post-charge operation, then the transaction already took place and it's too late.

If I need to refund a transaction after the fact because the transaction looks risky, then I lose out on the non-refundable processing fee that you now take, so I lose there.

Can you lay out a 100% exact work flow of how I can implement what Radar for teams does without losing money to extra transaction fees through either paying insurance on each transaction, or losing refund / dispute fees?

<comment><USER18> I understand that you are contemplating a build-or-buy decision and do not want to purchase the software which we sell. You can ask the engineering teams that you want to dedicate to this to scope out the build option; there are likely tradeoffs you can make which would make this a 3 engineer-year project or 30 engineer-year project. It is implausible that their design document for the build option will conveniently fit into an HN comment. I cannot write that design document for you as I do not have a good understanding of what data you believe you possess at the moment or e.g. the margin characteristics of your business, which would likely determine your tolerances with respect to some tradeoffs to make at design stage.

I wish your teams the best of luck and skill in this project. If in the alternative you would like to dedicate their time and attention to more pressing concerns in your business, our software is available for 2 cents a transaction.

<comment><USER17> > I wish your teams the best of luck and skill in this project. If in the > alternative you would like to dedicate their time and attention to more > pressing concerns in your business, our software is available for 2 cents a > transaction.

Do you happen to work for Stripe support?

I'm just asking because your response reminds me of how they addressed my questions in email. It's very dismissive of my original questions, and then tries to guide the conversation away from my question into some type of "hey, good luck with whatever you do" response.

I'm not asking for an evaluation of whether or not it's a good use of engineering time for me to implement this feature. I'm just asking how I can do risk score assessment on my own without paying your extra transaction fees, or be forced into doing a post-transaction refund (and then lose the transaction fee on the refund).

You mentioned I'm free to do my own risk assessment, but I'm trying to say that's not possible to do in such a way that doesn't involve me paying extra money to Stripe since your API purposely goes out of its way to remove critical information unless you pay extra for Radar for teams (in which case using your API for this info wouldn't be necessary since your platform would provide that functionality in your dashboard).

<comment><USER19> > Do you happen to work for Stripe support?

He does work for Stripe. There are at least 4 Stripe employees in this discussion performing damage control: pc, patio11, nkohari, edwinwee, and anyone who has not yet self-disclosed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> With more competition coming into marketplace the costs of transactions inevitably goes down.

Charging more for transactions (in either direction) has nothing to do with "payments are costing more to process" lie.

This has everything to do with hook-and-charge business approach relying on majority of customers swallowing the arbitrary higher costs because it's more hassles to switch provider, especially for non-technical business owners.

<comment><USER21> I think you don't understand the card ecosystem particularly well.

My impression (ex Stripe with no inside knowledge) is that Visa has been raising rates. Stripe are doing their best to avoid passing it on. This is one place where it surely became egregious not to.

I've never seen a company as averse to squeezing users as I had when I was there. The finance guy I worked with produced analysis for the team showing ways to reduce pricing more often than ways to increase it.

Your skepticism is warranted against most businesses. From my experience as a PM at Stripe, it is unwarranted in this case.

Disclosure: ex Stripe, own stock. No inside knowledge.

<comment><USER19> > Stripe are doing their best to avoid passing it on. This is one place where > it surely became egregious not to.

According to the rest of the discussion on this page, Visa and other payment networks refund the interchange fee to payment processors (including Stripe) on refunded transactions.

There is no evidence that Stripe is any more charitable to their users than other payment processors. Stripe offers a commodity service, and increased the cost of using their service. Perhaps Stripe is "doing their best", but their competitors (e.g. Square and Amazon Pay) are doing even better by refunding the processing fee for refunded transactions.

<comment><USER22> > According to the rest of the discussion on this page, Visa and other payment > networks refund the interchange fee to payment processors (including Stripe) > on refunded transactions.

So far said that the refund fees on the brand side specifically increased or came into existence. I don't know if they did or not. I imagine though that transaction fees rising (which people do mention in the discussion) has an effect here. If you were able to make a given margin before while still allowing refund fees to be returned. Now transaction fees increase. As a PSP you can either choose to increase your processing fees or find other ways to make even. If you can achieve that by not returning fees on refunds (and make a bit more money along the way) that makes sense to me.

My main point is that rising fees in general can be a reason here even if the card brands didn't specifically add a new cost to refunds per se.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Recently got hit with this with QuickBooks. They actually charged me a fee to refund that was higher than the original fee charged. They think they deserve 3.5% on top of the initial 2.9% to send money back.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is pretty standard for flat pricing nowadays, but hits certain types of merchants really hard.

It's a double whammy when you have a cancellation and have to refund and then lose 3% on top of that. Stripe should keep the fixed fee, sure, but keeping interchange doesn't seem right.

Why doesn't Stripe offer the option to do simple interchange+ pricing to all instead of restricting that option to 6 figure volume accounts with negotiated agreements?

That would cleanly solve the issue and be fair on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER25> We are doing 200k+ in MRR and looking to move from Stripe because the cost is starting to hurt, and this change feels unfair. Our use-case is pretty simple (capture card and manage subscriptions) and we don't need all the features they have built in the last 5 years or are planing to build.

We are looking into Spreedly. Does anyone have other suggestions of Stripe alternatives that are not so expensive?

<comment><USER26> Have you negotiated with Stripe? Pretty much all of their pricing is negotiable.

Particularly if most of your customers are in the EU where interchange fees are capped at something like 0.3%, so their cost base is much lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are multiple little things that make me feel less trusting of stripe and that it's shifting away to be more profit focused instead of customer oriented. One change that was unannounced (to my knowledge — maybe I missed something) was the payout schedule. It's still two days technically, but at some point last year they started delaying the payout in their end if it was a weekend or holiday.

It used to be like this: income from Thursday, Friday and Saturday all arrived Monday, so Monday was a big payout day and this was good since it was often a higher expense day as well due to weekend charges being delayed to Monday.

Now, Thursday's sales arrive Monday (same), Friday's Tuesday (a day later), and Saturday's arrive on Wednesday (two days later), and any holidays further delay it.

This could be ok, but the unexpected change from what I had come to expect, and noting that it seems to be intentional design change on their end make it feel like they're trying to delay the payout schedule while still claiming the same rolling 2-day, and in the end not really putting the customer first.

<comment><USER3> We're actually working on speeding up payouts, for free. They're currently faster than they've ever been and will continue to get faster.

<comment><USER27> That sounds great! But they're currently faster than they've ever been? I don't see how that reconciles with my experience I just described...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> They are doing a Paypal. How long have they been doing this?

Louis Rossmann won't be happy - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WPDVjXDj0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1WPDVjXDj0)

<comment><USER29> I'm a long-time Stripe user who processes ~$40k per month, and I think you're being too harsh. From a business owner's perspective, PayPal is the kind of company that would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months if their shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to contact them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing. PayPal just doesn't care, and it shows.

That's what "doing a PayPal" means to me.

But this fee increase? I'm actually grandfathered in so it doesn't apply to me, but if it did, it would amount to a 0.6% price increase in my typical monthly Stripe fees. So for example, if I paid $1000/mo in Stripe fees before this change, it would be $1006/mo now.

<comment><USER30> > _From a business owner 's perspective, PayPal is the kind of company that > would shut down your account and steal the balance for 6 months if their > shitty algorithm detects anything "suspicious." Your attempts to contact > them can be ignored or given generic responses that tell you nothing._

Heh, PayPal just this month asked me to provide _charity_ information for my personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who's interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

<comment><USER31> What do you mean by charity information? What charities he likes to give to? I have never heard that phrase before.

<comment><USER30> For my case, their Resolution Centre asked me to provide "DD Business Information" — which I obviously won't have.

A quick search suggests that this incident isn't uncommon:

[1] Paypal Thinks I am a Charity Organisation: [https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/Paypal-Thinks-I-am-a-Charity- Organisation/td-p/1672496)

[2] Provide charity info - DD Business Inormation: [https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/Provide-charity-info-DD-Business- Inormation/td-p/1789263)

[3] What's DD Business Information: [https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations...](https://www.paypal- community.com/t5/Disputes-and-Limitations/What-s-DD-Business- Information/td-p/1893921)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My expectation has long been for Stripe to bring in more and higher fees. They offer a lot of top shelf free tooling that either brings their models into your code or moves the bookkeeping up to their system entirely, ex subscriptions.

Smart companies have their own bookkeeping system in house and thus can potentially negotiate better terms with Stripe, assuming they are big enough Stripe cares to retain them. Plenty of other places are looking at massive costs to move off Stripe and I am sure someone at Stripe is aware of that.

The first hit is always free.

<comment><USER33> You're right about everything, but I disagree with your characterization of 'the first hit is always free'.

The lock-in features you describe are Stripe doing development work for your business.

With an addictive substance, the addiction gains control orthogonally to the 'benefit' it provides. When Stripe writes your recurring billing and bookkeeping system, they're straight up doing your work for you. Thats the desired effect– not a side-effect!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just clarifying. If I refund a $2,000 charge it costs me the seller approx. $58?

<comment><USER26> Not an extra $58. By the time you refund you've already paid the fee, stripe just don't refund your fee to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This has been the case since early 2018.

Accounts created before that were grandfathered in for fee refunds, but I don't have a grandfathered account, and therefore can't verify if that's still the case.

<comment><USER35> I created my account before 2018, but my domain/product was registered with Stripe in 2018. Which side do I fall in?

Alternatively, how do I check this myself?

<comment><USER11> Email email@example.com (feel free to CC email@example.com) and we can check.

<comment><USER35> Sent an email!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Here is our response to this ruthless and disrespectful decision by Stripe:

Hello,

We have just read your price changes to the grandfathered accounts and wanted to pass our discontent with Stripe's decision. Currently, we are weighing our options to move our business to other partners; however, as a small business that mainly operates in non-US currencies, the changes to your refund policies AND the non-US bank policies will effectively kill our partnership with Stripe.

We do not have tens of thousands of dollars per month worth of processing capabilities; however, we are a growing company as can be seen from our all time graphs on Stripe. We have used Stripe since the beginning and never considered alternatives. Your support team have always been helpful and your capabilities satisfied our needs. Until now.

The price hike to a grandfathered account is utterly unacceptable and looks/smells like a cheap attempt to make more money for the company. Stripe is also a rapidly growing company and grandfathered accounts could not have been hurting its business model. "Grandfathering" has an implied meaning that these people/companies/parties have been together since the beginning and a one-sided breach of this understanding is deeply damaging and distasteful.

In any way, unless Stripe can take steps to show sincerity towards our partnership from early on and rescind the changes to its fee policies, we will move our business out of Stripe before March 15th, 2020.

Thanks for the ride and have a great day.

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the least expensive payment gateway these days for a SaaS business? My stripe costs keep going up, happy to write the code to switch... what's the lowest rate processor?

</comment><comment><USER38> I haven't actively used stripe more than half a year, and I've really enjoyed it so far, except for some translation issues on stripe's checkout page. This change makes me somewhat uncomfortable using stripe.

Nordic countries has really good consumer protection laws and users can ask to cancel the purchase for any or no reason. Its also not allowed to charge the customer the fee, so this can become a issue.

It also sucks that the pricing for Norway is 1 % higher than our neighbours.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is a disaster. Simply put, this change makes Stripe a nonviable option as an e-commerce payment processor. The modern consumer expects easy, no questions asked refunds. How many people buy a few shirts/shoes of different sizes knowing that they will return the ones that do not fit? How can a retailer provide that when there is now a 2.9% (in our case 3.5%) charge added on every item refunded?

This change directly hurts smaller retailers/e-commerce sites who are not big enough to negotiate smaller processing fees with Stripe.

I run a niche e-commerce site in Canada where the majority of my customers are located in the US. This puts my processing rate at 3.5%. My products are priced anywhere from $1k to $6k. So now with this change, I could pay up to $210 for when a customer simply changes their mind. I guess I could enact a strict NO REFUNDS policy but that will put me at a severe disadvantage vs the bigger retailers.

As things stand I would only recommend Stripe for recurring subscription billing.

</comment><comment><USER40> I honestly didn't understand why they did in the first place. Doesn't really bother me.

</comment><comment><USER41> A few companies do charge fees on the end user now. I did a refund on a plane ticket within the 24h grace period (basically refunded no question asked) but I had to pay the credit cards fee anyway. I don't do refund often, but it might become more common.

</comment><comment><USER42> The power of lock in. They know this from analytics.

</comment><comment><USER43> Seems reasonable to me. The payment was successful, which is the service Stripe provides. Is this out of step with the industry at large?

<comment><USER44> It's not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is _not_ the cost to process the transaction.

It's three things, in order of their share of the total cost;

1) Rewards programs

2) Fraud risk

3) Interest expense

The rewards are negated, because a refunded transaction earns no points. The fraud risk is zero, because the merchant has returned the funds. This leaves only a portion of the interest expense, assuming the transaction balance was even paid into the merchant account at that point, but then the refund acts to reduce the card balance so that might even cancel out too.

Basically it's justifiable to hold into the flat fee (e.g. $0.20) but to hold onto the 3% is an absolute scam.

<comment><USER43> > It's not reasonable because the cost which the fee is covering is not the > cost to process the transaction.

Who says it has to be? Businesses have all kinds of costs not directly related to the day to day transactions with customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Makes me pine for FeeFighter's card processor comparator that GroupOn bought and killed.

But in reality, even with their high charges, Stripe makes it easy to get started, but startups can and should change vendors when the need arises. If other processors with lower fees for the particular volume a startup is doing and better APIs, it's worth considering them too.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have one really annoying complaint with stripe connect. Its authentication work flow using oauth is conflicting with aws amplify authentication for social providers. Both of these are pretty much essential nowadays. I hope someone picks up on this comment and considers finding a solution

</comment><comment><USER47> Looks similar? [https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund- fe...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20876570/paypal-refund-fee-policy- change-sellers-controversy)

</comment><comment><USER48> Stripe has the ability to negotiate with their upstream processors that we end users do not. Instead of trying to reduce their costs by pressuring their providers, they're passing along the fees to their customers.

<comment><USER30> Some of the other comments in this very post [1][2][3] suggest that Stripe isn't being charged the full fee by other parts of the network.

If they're intent on working with the customer to keep prices down, they should only charge a fixed fee for refunds (to pay for overheads), and not the interchange fee.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371571)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371746)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371626](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371626)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> i dont really see the value in stripe compared to any other payment processor... they still do all the dirty tricks that everyone else does, like hold your money, cancel your account, hold your money.

</comment><comment><USER50> In an industry where costs have been amortized for a long time, fees should normally decrease...

DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is coming for you guys.

It might take some time, but we'll get there.

</comment><comment><USER51> See [https://stripe.com/docs/refunds](https://stripe.com/docs/refunds)

</comment><comment><USER52> Can we get a clarification? Are they keeping the 2.9% and the 30 cents or what?

</comment><comment><USER53> Just a price increase. Time for some competition for these people.

</comment><comment><USER54> The struggle is real. Small fees add up for smaller startups and that used to be their bread and butter--it was so much easier to get payments up and running. We eventually switched to paypal and never looked back.

<comment><USER55> I sell a lot on eBay and thought the fees were going to hurt - but really it's been a non issue. It sucks especially on a high ticket item but end of the day it ends up on my taxes and I recoup some of it. Cost of business.</comment></comment>


The 30 year old 'mad genius' who keeps winning Jeopardy - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2550177/The-30-year-old-mad-genius-keeps-winning-Jeopardy-causes-uproar-fans-unorthodox-game-tactics.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7164619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7164619)</comment>


The International Obfuscated C Code Contest - <AUTHOR> https://www.ioccc.org/ <comment><USER2> [https://www.ioccc.org/2018/guidelines.txt](https://www.ioccc.org/2018/guidelines.txt)

>We do not recommend submitting systemd source code to the IOCCC, if nothing else because that code is likely to exceed the source code size limit. This isn't to say that another highly compact and obfuscated replacement of init would not be an interesting submission.

<comment><USER3> I love it

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite is [https://www.ioccc.org/1998/banks.c](https://www.ioccc.org/1998/banks.c) a flight simulator! So cool, the imports worked out nicely too.

<comment><USER5> One of the coolest entries I saw was the square root calculator which was shaped like a square box and had white spaces inside the box in a shape of square root symbol.

That one was preaty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Discussion of the last update: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17011699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17011699).</comment>


Ask HN: Switching from full-stack to embedded - <AUTHOR> So what's your tips on switching to working with C++ / Embedded programming for a person that has worked mainly with Java, JS, SQL. I'm inspired by working with hardware and assume that I'd have to learn more about electronics and such?<p>I'm a CS major, done some C++ programming (not professionally) so I got much of the theory but not applied it tbh. <comment><USER2> I have exactly the same background as yours. To recover from a CRUD boreout I plan to play with some RaspberryPI and a bunch of Arduinos for home/building automation and monitoring coupled with an autonomic solar power supply. No futher plans about making career out of that yet but who knows - such bundle may be an interesting business in remote/rural applications.

Play. Publish. Get an offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hehe I got myself an Arduino and Raspberry PI. Maybe we could share projects and the like?

<comment><USER2> Great start. Unfortunately my electronics are piling on the desk and their priority is still a bit low, so not much to share at the moment :( But I promise a Show HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Generically, it's possible to get jobs with technology stacks you don't know. E.g.

1\. Find company that does both what you do now and what you'd like to do. Get job you're more qualified for, then switch internally to company.

2\. Apply for jobs that interest you even if you don't know the stack, give compelling story about wanting to learn new things, and give evidence you can learn new things.

Longer version here: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/23/job-with- technology-...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/23/job-with-technology- you-dont-know/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Buy a raspbi/beaglebone/etc, think of a cool project you want to make, and build it! Before long you'll be down the electronics rabbit hole and you'll figure out what to do as you go.

I've never gotten the point of reading before doing. Just get your tools out and build something. It's no different than learning to code by shipping.

</comment><comment><USER5> Embedded is a BIG area - and even bigger now with IoT - so there are a lot of things you _could_ learn - but what specifically are you interested in? You could for example take a look at some of the newer OSs like ARM Mbed OS, or Google Fuchsia.

Anyway, I'm sure you will fit in somewhere. Good luck!</comment>


ZEHST the world's first hypersonic plane unveiled, travels at 5029km/h - <AUTHOR> http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/zehst-the-worlds-first-hypersonic-plane-unveiled/story-fn5izo02-1226078383182

<comment><USER2> 40 years until the first passeger flight?! That's eons in terms of transport and energy technology development

<comment><USER3> Funny that - Concorde from drawing board to maiden voyage was what - 12 years ? JFK's speech to moon landing - 8 or 9 years ?

Seems that despite all the advances in computer modelling etc we're going backwards.</comment></comment>


Advanced Run-Time Reflection - <AUTHOR> https://thepharo.dev/2020/05/27/pharo-features-advanced-run-time-reflection/ <comment><USER2> I have been using Pharo as the backend for my turn-based game. It is such a relief to have the always ready live environment. Together with Flutter (another live env) I can create new backend services in a matter of minutes. For example: in Pharo I just add new field to the response. In Flutter app, without any restarts, I debug the REST call, check the response, modify my inner objects to accept this new field and boom, client and server can talk to each other again! Plus in Inspector I can watch the data changes after each REST calls. I do not have to issue an sql query or stop server in debug mode and recall the REST in order to catch breakpoint. The Inspector window is always there!

All this is done without any restarts of the server/client app. I have even created a smalltalk-to-dart code generator:

[https://github.com/gladimdim/smalltalk-to- dart](https://github.com/gladimdim/smalltalk-to-dart). It serializes Pharo objects into the Dart class definitions with all fields and even with the fromJson methods!</comment>


What business or strategy books do you read to keep you on course - <AUTHOR>

Every yr, I spend one day or so, re-read the classics-  Sunzi's (Sun Tzu) Art of War, Laozi (Lao Tzu)"Tao Te Ching",   Chinese Seven Strategy Classics, Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, Niccolo Machiavelli "The Art of War" and "The Prince", Niccolo Machiavelli "The Art of War", Marcus Aurelius "Meditations", Karl von Clausewitz "On War"and so forth.    What books do you read to get your strategic bearings going? <comment><USER2> I've read most of the ones you mention but I find that the best input for strategy is being around people. So to get my strategic bearings going I am on the board of the local yacht club, and a foundation for leisure sailors. The intrigues, back-stabbing and talking behind backs is worse than any boardroom. The great thing about these places is that if I get kicked out for backing the wrong horse or back-stabbing the wrong person it doesn't matter much. It's just a great exercise in political and strategic maneovering.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Information Rules" by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian "Getting to Yes" by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

</comment><comment><USER4> I've summarized a lot of my favorites at <http://www.squeezedbooks.com> \- a site I created for the very purpose of sharing the "meat" of good business books.

</comment><comment><USER5> In addition to what you list above, Sun Pin - Military Methods (Sun Tzu's great grandson iirc).</comment>


VT100 Terminal Art: old text-based animations you can run in your terminal - <AUTHOR> http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/ <comment><USER2>
        clear; curl -s http://artscene.textfiles.com/vt100/twilightzone.vt | ruby -e 'STDIN.read.split("").each{|c|print c;sleep 0.001}'

This one is my favorite so far. Some of these are NSFW!</comment>


Ask HN: Is General purpose AI going to sneak up on us? - <AUTHOR> I have been following the ai space for a few years now and everyday there seems to be a breakthrough in fields people believed  impossible to solve by AI systems. Although the general consensus is that good AI is quite a bit far away ,could it be we are vastly underestimating the capabilities of self learning systems. from my view all the basic ingredients for some form of AGI already exist.So i fear that we might create AGI as in spontaneous combustion of gas in a hot day. <comment><USER2> Nope. There's no single algorithm that will lead to General intelligence. As long as the apex of our ML techniques is parameter optimization via gradient decent, there will be no critical mass point. Currently, it's possible for someone to take a modular approach to general intelligence. And someone may very well be working on that and will spring such a system on the world but because each subsystem is only as good as the state of the art, and if the systems were that good the developers would try to capitalize on such a system immediately rather than waiting for all the other subsystems to surpass the state of the art, we would have some warning that the field was advancing; hence no surprise general intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's pretty hard to say if it _will_ or not, but I don't think there's any question that it _could_. What's even harder to guess is when that might happen if it did.

All of that said, there are enough people working on AGI on a day-in / day-out basis who would probably recognize the incipient stages of a real AGI, that I don't worry a tremendous amount about being surprised by the emergence of AGI. But on the flip-side, some "kid in a garage" operating outside of the mainstream of industry and academia could be the one who makes The Big Breakthrough, so there's no way to be totally sure...</comment>


The hitchhiker's guide to solving problems - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashie.org/articles/the-hitchhikers-guide-to-solving-problems/

<comment><USER2> Points from the post:

1.) If you get used to be a consumer of solutions (via rote memorization or by always googling the answers or asking someone else) you will never become a problem solver.

2.) Math is useful.

In my humble opinion, the real problem with education is that we usually give credits only to correct answers and mainly to the number of correct solutions, but this should'nt be so.

To get to the point here is an advice for heart care that can be applied with much success to the goal of becoming a problem solver:

If you are out of shape and you daily walk 20 minutes you will be rewarded with a great benefit for you heart, and it will be much greater that the effect on others with strong hearts.

So my advice for becomming a good problem solver is: It doesn't matter that you are out of shape, that you feel dumb or stupid. Try to solve one small problem, it doesn't matter whether you succeed or not, that exercise will produce in you an excellent result and if you persevere you will become a good problem solver. So that is, close your ears to any other solution to your problem and put yourself at working at it. (Sorry for the English)

</comment><comment><USER3> The article talks about models, to solve problems. I immensely enjoyed Coursera's Model Thinking course because of the variety of models and applications of them, all wrapped in what I thought was good delivery. Here's a link to the course: [https://.coursera.org%2Fcourse%2Fmodelthinking](https://.coursera.org%2Fcourse%2Fmodelthinking)

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting read. As with all things, absolute extremes must be avoided. If we stop and work out solutions to problems already worked out every time, when would we find time to build upon the solutions? Transfer of knowledge is one way, we as a species succeed even with the limited lives we have.

In programming, for example, while it is important to learn how basics work, if I try to write everything from scratch instead of using a library, I am doing it at the expense of furthering human capability. I mean, I just need to know, that I _could_ whip something up, if it didn't exist. Since it does, my time would be better spent on using it to create something even more functional.

</comment><comment><USER5> I liked it but what does it have to do with hitchhiking?

<comment><USER4> "Don't Panic."</comment></comment>


Ask HN: should I live my corporate job? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working in controlling finance for 3 years. It has been up and downs and now it's definitely a down moment. I kept learning web development (python, js, css, html) those 3 years, but I do not have a real portfolio besides my website and some scratchy apps. I am not a professional programmer, but I can talk to programmers easily. Definitely I lack experience, but I think I can put that in if I can do some junior work.
I am also willing to learn new technologies, in fact, I was looking into angularjs lately and I think it would be cool to build something in it.
Given this, would you think I have any chance to start in the remote web developer world? Or do I lack too much experience? Any suggestion to start fast? <comment><USER2> Do it NOW. Stop procrastinating. Unless you're not sure, then you probably have no business taking any risks. You WILL get butt hurt. Freelancing and remote work is that roller coaster ride that will make you want to barf.

Either way, good luck to you. Hurricane strength winds ahead!</comment>


Mathematics Made Difficult – A Handbook for the Perplexed (1971) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://i7-dungeon.sourceforge.net/math_hard.pdf <comment><USER2> Is this publication approved by Dr. Linderholm?

I love this book, but my gratitude to the author means I'd like his wishes honored.

</comment><comment><USER3> If one is into this kind of thing, one should really read these books: [1]

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

<comment><USER4> Your suggestion is nonsensical to me. The two books have significantly, if not entirely, different airs, purposes, domains, styles, and audiences.</comment></comment>


The Unraveling of America - <AUTHOR> https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-american-era-wade-davis-1038206/ <comment><USER2> > The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very > idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone.

This crisis has really made me ponder the extent to which individualism has taken its toll on the American society. Really, large parts of the country don't seem to care about the collective good and are just turning a blind eye toward their fellow citizens in this moment of crisis.

<comment><USER3> Let me ask you and the HN crowd this: Would it honestly be incorrect to blame secularism for this? If it inconveniences me, why should I care at all if my actions negatively affect absolutley anyone given my belief is that my existence has no purpose outside of what I conveniently define, life is meaningless outside of my self-defined meaning and there is no authority that can define what is a correct or incorrect way of living.

In other words, like you observed I also think the moral foundations are failing. Why should groups of people accept each other as equally created and endowed with equal rights? Why should young people be inconvenienced to maybe save lives of older people by wearing masks? Empathy? Life has no meaning, they're gonna die anyway. Why emphatize with others at all? Why not focus on whatever leads to the best experience in this life for each individual, where there are conflicts let the strongest win. Nature has no mercy on the weak.

Of course I don't believe any of that but am I wrong to think secularism plays a big role in the lack of empathy?

Now before anyone reaches for their pitchforks, I am not saying religion is the solution or somehow all those religious people supporting terrible people to advance their agenda don't exist. I am saying, what a society finds correct and acceptable sets the tone. Even religious people act secular when it is convenient because society is secular and the ones that want popularity over authenticity will always be mallable enough to adopt to what society thinks is normal (consider how the nazis claimed to be Christians and killed jews, their actions override their claims).

Let me rephrase a bit, foudnationally the social majority in america,despite all the terrible things that went on believed there is a purpose to life and you have to seek it. They also believed people have an origin and destination and that correct behavior in this life is critical, living incorrectly means failure in realizing the purpose of your existence or worse , regardless of popularity humans have limited and finite authority over other humans, that morality was not a suggestion but an implicit realization of the creator's will (or of the "universe" or whatever intelligent origin people believed in) ,a human's life is precious because it has meaning and purpose, and others' experience of pain morally bounds all other humans to apply emphatetic reasoning in their reaction.

I am not neccesarily saying lack of religion is the cause. I am asking, given the facts, is it far fetched to consider embracing of secular individualism as the root cause? And I don't mean by any end of the political spectrum(left/right). I mean across the board,anyone that effectively beliefs they define their own morality as they see it fit to benefit themselves. And as the saying goes "a thief thinks everyone else is also a thief", they have all these conspiracies that the media or the deepstate is out to get them because that's exactly what they would do to advance their self-centered ideology.

I am emploring you to critically consider that perhaps effective secualrim (even among those that don't claim to be secular) that puts individuals at the center of their own universe might be the cause.

Humans are interesting creatures, weirdly with the exception of the vocal minority, people that are secular by default have in my experience been very emphatetic, I am not sure if they will remain the same but I think initially most mentally healthy people want to stop the pain of others because they experienced pain themselves and they wanted someone to help them, therefore doing to others what you would want done to you is implicitly a correct way of living. I suspect secular-individualism contradicts that reasoning when helping others entails inconvenience or having to pay a sacrifice.

This is an important question because much of democracy and america assume the majority will have empathy for the minority (which is how slavery ended and civil rights laws that benefited the minority were passed).

Another contributor might be how rapid advance of technology might be the driver of self-centered ideologies that lack empathy. But I hope people continue to appreciate peace and be open to any truth.

<comment><USER4> _> am I wrong to think secularism plays a big role in the lack of empathy_

America is by far the most religious country in the first world.

<comment><USER5> More specifically, if you compare America to every other western country (all of which seem to be doing better in this regard - i.e. citizens looking out for each other), what stands out is that American is far more religious.

It seems more likely that America's current level of religiousness is toxic, allowing people to be ass-holes as long as they pay lip service to a professed religious ideal.

You only have to look at western Europe to see that it is the secularists, who judge themselves by their actions rather than their words, who are the more decent people.

<comment><USER6> >It seems more likely that America's current level of religiousness is toxic, allowing people to be ass-holes as long as they pay lip service to a professed religious ideal.

It's literally the religious freedom people colonized America to practice. People who considered being told to stop being assholes and imposing their religious ideal onto everyone else was religious oppression.

The level of toxicity hasn't increased, they just have internet access now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> America has entered into a strange category of it's own. It's looking similar to Brazil in some measures (inequality) and similar to Europe in other measures (average wealth, some levels of development) and it's somewhat to Turkey or India in yet other ways (dominated by ruthless religious parties that haven't, yet, eliminated Democratic processes entirely).

I suspect that in every third world nation, and now here, people ask themselves "how does a nation so filled with competent, intelligent people allow itself to be dominated by corrupt, delusional people." Especially here in the nation that once and maybe still does have more competent people than anywhere else in the world. The answer is that the corruptly delusional ideologues and the competent technocrats are mixed together with no way of unraveling them. Look at Dr. Ben Carson, brilliant surgeon.

</comment><comment><USER8> I can't honestly make it through an article where every sentence is so optimized for maximum pessimism, fear mongering and politicality.

I actually love the United States and would like to see articles like this stop trying to "unravel" it.

<comment><USER9> For me, it looks rather realistic. If you love the US, shouldn't you embrace such articles in order to have some intellectual food to reflect on? If you don't think so, the current admin provides more than enough good news anyway.

<comment><USER10> If you love the US, you should embrace thoughtful articles that bring up neglected but valid points in insightful ways. This article is not that. This article is yet another "orange man bad" lamenting that America now isn't as great as it was from WWII through 1970.

The problem with articles like this is that the people who already agree with the author will think the article is insightful and focus on the parts that are obviously correct (social cohesion genuinely has decreased), and the people who disagree will focus on the parts that are obviously wrong (oh look it's that misleading statistic again about the top X Americans having more wealth than the combined wealth of the bottom 50% because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists).

The article gets shared by people who agree, who think everyone should read it for the author's "deep insight", and shared by people who disagree who say "look what the brainwashed people believe", and the article gets lots of clicks and ad impressions and everyone hates each other a little bit more.

<comment><USER4> _> because the bottom 50% have a combined wealth of about $0 because debt exists)._

I find that to be a relevant metric.

<comment><USER10> It absolutely is. My problem is that that is the maximally controversy- inducing framing for that particular statistic. A breakdown of net worth by quintile will show the same effect in a clearer way. "The top 3 people have the same combined wealth as the bottom 140M" _sounds like_ "the typical member of the top 3 people has almost 50 million times as much wealth as the typical member of the bottom 140M" when in practice the bottom 140M is mostly composed of people with substantial-ish negative net worth (e.g. a car loan) or substantial-ish positive net worth (e.g. a paid off car or a small retirement account).

The disparity exists and is large, but a misleading representation of it doesn't help anyone except those who profit off controversy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While there is some significant loss of "value" of holdings, the main thing is to understand where the jobs and money are going, not where they were.

Take a water balloon, and squeeze one end of it. It does not lose water, instead, the water goes to the other end of the balloon. That illustrates where the "money" is going.

I've said elsewhere there is a sea-change in education happening right under our noses. I believe that a lot of the education money may very well flow to more vocational training, distance learning, tech and lessons for home school and smaller classes. Old-school group classes were inefficient anyway -- and people are just beginning to realize that.

Doctors will do more old-timey house calls. Even to just survive!

The restaurants and businesses that you frequent during your commute, like diners, etc, will also adapt. More deliveries instead.

It will be easier to schedule a haircut from your barber for your home or office. I don't really want to go to a salon and sit in a chair there.

Store owners will have to start doing more list building and email marketing, you can no longer just watch a customer walk-in and walk-out without trying to build your email or contact list.

Yes, America is unravelling, but we are humans and we always adapt. It's just the stubborn ones or the hard to change industries that will suffer the longest and the slowest.

I do not believe that things are just going to go back to "normal" as they were. There will be some significant change in the way how we conduct business, education, entertainment and living.

The people who adapt to that change will be the winners.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a brit, so speaking from the outside.

I'm getting sick of this downtalking of everything. People have various fuels, and optimism is one (cautious, realistic, measured optimism, together with appropriate self-belief). This is not reflection, it's putting a hole in that tank to drain it out.

It was incompetence that got the US into the mess it is, but if the US is sick, I have full confidence it will get well again. USA'ians putting down the US unrealistically will hurt your country as much as any other factor, draining your confidence - and to be clear, there are sate actors out there who are happy to chip in.

This is bad and it's going to get worse. Consider yourself in a war and now try to see how to survive it and contribute to it instead of wallowing in apathy and fear. Of course the faults in the US are there and they are deep and must be acknowledged before they can be fixed, but they will be fixed and the US will be stronger (and just maybe smarter) for it afterwards.

Destroy a person's hope is the most effective way of destroying them, and you're doing it to yourselves (with, I'm sure, a little help from others who want the US shrunken).

(I'm normally on the negative side of things but watching people sink themselves into blackness over it all isn't realistic, as much as believing that 'hope is enough' or 'god will fix it' isn't realistic).

</comment><comment><USER13> Never have I seen a post go from page 2 to page 7 so quickly. Particularly one so insightful.

Edit: But maybe it'll get back to where it belongs, so I'll add this. Davis' insights only go skin deep. I've been around long enough to see a slow but steady movement in the US toward more positive values and appreciation and respect for individual differences. While our leadership has become more addled and directionless, real and affirming values have been on the rise, displacing those created by institutions.

I could spend an hour disputing much of what Davis says, but I just hope this page isn't buried even further. We _really_ need to have this discussion.

<comment><USER14> This kind of column's a venerable cliché in left-leaning political writing in the US. Very good instances of it are still valuable, but this isn't really one of those and doesn't add much that anyone who pays attention to political writing hasn't already seen many times over. Better-argued and better-framed versions of the more historical and contextual bits of this are essentially the air that much of the left breathes. I've (repeatedly) seen forum posts cover the recent-events portions of this better, over the last few months, let alone professional writing.

(for the record, I'm writing this _from_ a pretty damn "left" perspective, having read just... so many of these sorts of columns, or whole books, over the years. This ain't a notable or particularly good one.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nodding Brit nods

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh for god's sake. "Failed state"? Seriously?

Rolling stone has done great reporting on serious problems, but this is just insane. If the US is a 'failed state' then so is every other state.

<comment><USER17> What points in the article do you specifically disagree with?

<comment><USER14> I agree things are fairly bad in a lot of ways, and very bad in some ways, but "failed state" does have a specific meaning and applying it to the US is pretty hyperbolic. It's fuzzy like anything that describes human stuff, but the US is definitely on the not-failed side of that fuzzy line. _Heading_ toward it? I dunno. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. There now? Certainly not.

Our Federal government might be doing a piss-poor job but it has not stopped being able to assert sovereignty in meaningful ways, domestically and internationally, or to continue to deliver government services to a significant extent. If those things had happened we'd know it. "Governing very poorly"—even somewhat maliciously—is not what it means for a state to have failed. Maybe it's being used... I dunno, poetically? But that doesn't seem to be the case, in context.

Some of the stuff in the article's interesting but a lot of the rest is similarly overblown. Declaring China's ascendance (it sometimes explicitly says China but then other times seems to use Asia to mean "Asia, but mostly China") is fashionable and _might_ end up being true but is far from settled history, to pick on another part, and I'm guessing the "D-Day versus gun deaths in 2019" stat is mostly suicides, which seems disingenuous to me, in this context—while of course it is interesting and meaningful in others, I think they're trying to mislead with it here.

I'm left-wing as hell and probably agree with most policy positions and general opinions the writer holds, so this should be right up my alley, but the piece isn't great. A better-written version of this with exactly the thesis and overall journey might even be something I'd really like!

It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building. I hate these kinds of articles when the right does them, but I almost hate them more when "my" side does them. I know that's bad politics because people respond to this sort of thing, but I just can't stand writing this transparently manipulative, at great cost to honesty and accuracy.

The best parts are when the writer's focusing directly on the COVID response. Those are alright. A few other bits are OK for a few sentences in a row and could form the seed of good, if thoroughly unoriginal, articles on their own.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It's a mix of a pretty good cataloguing of disparate bad-sounding stats and figures about the US, many bad/misleading instances of same (any time there's a bad-sounding—or good-sounding, for that matter—stat missing any frame of reference, I get twitchy, and this has plenty), some dull and overstated predictions about the future, and some lazy narrative-building."

I see what you're saying. To me, this article is not about building a case for America's failed state. It's an argument for the perceived loss of American leadership around the world. Given that conclusion, the stats he chooses are exactly the ones on people's minds around the world.

Talking to my friends in China and Singapore, the George Floyd protests often come up as the US descending into chaos. There are comparisons to Hong Kong. Regardless of the faulty perception outside of the US, that perception shapes our leadership abilities. This article perfectly reflects what I've been hearing from overseas.

<comment><USER16> That's fair, but I personally lived for more than 30 years overseas before moving to the US, and am in contact with plenty of people outside the US.

My experience has been that people's perceptions are mostly reflective of what they read in the press.

They were grossly inaccurate and misleading when the US was perceived as a magnificent success - most of the problems we have now were already apparent then.

But they are also grossly misleading when representing the US relative to other states now.

There are 'failed states' inside the European Union for example, and pretty much every one of the problems the US has are reflected elsewhere too.

It is obvious that things are a lot worse, and that serious problems have gone unresolved, etc.

I live in the East Bay and stores were looted only a few blocks from here. Similar things happened during the riots over Oscar grant at when I lived in another part of the East Bay.

There is no descent into chaos. It's not surprising that it seems like that if you live in China or Singapore, where the penalties for rioting are draconian. You can make argument either way as to whether the riots represent something healthy or unhealthy.

But it is simply not true that US is descending into chaos. It's not even true that this is some new thing.

But of course if the media present it that way, then people will think that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Picking a language for general purpose or hacking(most diverse) - <AUTHOR>

what is a good scripting/programming for general purpose or hacking to master.used C/C++,C#, Php, Python,Obj-C,Javascript,Java,python and ruby a bit.but i seem to be feel like there's something always missing. i am looking for a batteries include,good community and flexible to code with. any idea? <comment><USER2> Python. Really, it has everything you probably need for whatever scripting you're doing, and plenty of stdlib and community to go around. If you're looking for something different try a Lisp or maybe Haskell but nothing really beats Python for simple scripting (except shell, of course, which has easy access to everything on your computer…)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello Again added a form [http://goo.gl/forms/2VZAXFOigk](http://goo.gl/forms/2VZAXFOigk) for votes

Please pass the word, it would be nice to get a real world vote base on the internet and not some one sided community of organization

</comment><comment><USER3> Common Lisp. [http://cliki.net/Getting+Started](http://cliki.net/Getting+Started) Scheme. [http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm Lisp, I will give That a try while I study python. Doesn't hurt to try. thanks @informatimago also a question do you think clojure is a good alternative? huge lib for the language because of all the jars out thier

<comment><USER3> You can have access to jar libs from Common Lisp with ABCL too. [http://abcl.org/](http://abcl.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> cool i will check it out,thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I do like the language a lot, maybe I will do that.it just a lot of the people liked it. I'm not the following the coward type. maybe I will master this. it just sometimes it's hard and crazy out there trying to find one for you :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> also any thoughts on lua or ruby lua: lightweight ruby: joy of coding</comment>