Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed <comment><USER2> It seems a little disingenuous to pass all the blame to the credit card companies, when clearly it's possible for these "shady" businesses (porn sites, get rich quick ebooks, preorder campaigns) to work with a merchant account provider other than stripe, and process the same credit cards. If stripe truly had no problem with these businesses, and it was all the credit card companies tying their hands, then no merchant account would be able to support the businesses. Yet there are many merchant accounts, some catering explicitly to "high risk" businesses (with correspondingly higher fees), that have no problem with these businesses. They work with the same credit card companies and yet are not hamstrung by the same regulations.

I can see why stripe wouldn't want to support these businesses, especially those with higher chargeback rates, but don't tell us it's because of the credit card companies. If other merchant account providers can handle it, so can you. It would require more monitoring and possibly tiered fees to accommodate "high risk business," but you could do it if you wanted to.

Don't open the article with "we'd love to not be gatekeepers" and then talk about how you're doing exactly that.

<comment><USER3> We're trying to outline how the restrictions and limitations that exist can affect different businesses. With the right approvals (and often with substantially increased fees), some of these businesses can certainly operate. And we hope to be able to work with as many as possible in the future.

By our nature, we are on the side of people building things. We have been through many of these kinds of struggles ourselves. (Stripe's first application for a corporate bank account was rejected!) So we wanted to make that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of this is coming down to how you're framing it. Most people, some of the commenters on this thread aside, would think you're being generally reasonable given the current environment of the financial services industry. However you're really just asking to get yelled at when you say things like: "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses built on Stripe."

This statement is absurd, all businesses make these decisions whether they want to or not, and being the errand boy for The Powers That Be does not absolve you of these decisions. The continual framing going down that post is something of "We always do the right thing, except when we can't or we don't want to." Which isn't a great way to win people over.

If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would blame you for that. Most reasonable people who will be doing actual business with Stripe have dealt with processors/merchants before and know what goes on with these deals, it's all about hedging risk.

But when you phrase it like you're trying to do the right thing and CYA is just an incidental inconvenience pressed on you by some big corp who's really the bad guy here... well, that's just disingenuous and people know it.

Beyond that people are aware that Stripe is growing, and growing fast. Large companies have inconsistencies with this sort of stuff, PayPal is a prime example. And while I've had amazing experiences as a lone developer with my own projects I've also had some not-so-great experiences with Stripe in my professional life (obviously I don't speak for my employer or any prior ones). Again, this makes sense, a lone developer is a lot less risky than someone who's already funneling funny looking money through your system, but trying to whitewash this clear fact as if you were in fact "doing the right thing" the whole time makes people frustrated and reduces people's ability to predict Stripe's actions. And nobody wants to deal with an unpredictable payment provider.

I realize that a decent amount of the article here talks about risk and how it's hedged, but you continually phrase things like the OMGYes case study as if your hands were tied in some non-moralistic decision, which again rings disingenuous. Same with the "Businesses that pose a brand risk" bullet point.

Last but not least, you guys squirreled away the most important piece of information in this article to a small paragraph. "Contact us first if you're at all worried" should be bolded in 60pt font at the very top. Asking people to do that and being very explicit and upfront about your CYA policy before trying to explain the nuances would go very far with how people _interpret_ the message, even if there's nothing explicitly wrong with how it's done now.

<comment><USER3> > "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses > built on Stripe."

This really is true. All companies will have to apply _some_ criteria -- there are businesses that AWS or mail companies reject. In our case, we would like to avoid editorial and moral stances as much as we can. And as the post hopefully makes clear, we still have a ways to go.

> If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services > company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second > nobody would blame you for that.

We would actually like to be a bit more progressive than that -- rather than supinely CYAing all the time, we want to (and frequently do) take risks and push back on behalf of businesses we believe in. The latter half of the post was intended to lay out some examples of that. But the distinction you're drawing makes sense and I'll look at editing the post with it in mind. Thanks for the feedback.

Separately, I would be very interested to hear about your suboptimal experiences if you'd be willing to share them over email or the phone.

<comment><USER4> Not quite sure I'd be allowed to talk about that stuff anymore, although depending on the records you guys keep my name will probably pop up in some calls/emails if you searched for it.

And look, I entirely get what you're saying, and I know you guys probably mean it, but again, you're missing the perspective of people who have a distinct impression of the financial services industry and who _know_ what happens when you go down this road with PayPal, Braintree, et. al. They don't necessarily care if you guys are making a best effort on a case by case basis if you're still hampered by contractual obligations to play by someone else's game. And when you try to make these moral stands but almost immediately point out where you were contractually obligated to compromise said stands it doesn't give people confidence in the moral stands and makes it look like grandstanding (holy run on batman). This is where the disconnect and (seeming) disingenuousness arises.

This is also why I emphasized that you guys should really just tell people to contact support first, because that clears all confusion and miscommunication without having to make moral pronouncements and before you guys are put in a position that forces you to compromise these bright lines.

Anyway, I really support what you guys are doing and don't want to seem overly critical but I wanted to communicate a disconnect that seemed to get lost in translation.

<comment><USER5> Funny thing is, even PayPal allow sex toys and a lot of sex toy sellers accept PayPal. Have done for quite a while if I remember correctly. I guess from their perspective it must not be that high risk

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some of these, pornography (and other sex-related work) in particular, are sketchy businesses _because_ of the difficulty of operating above-board in those industries. Several of my friends are sex workers of various types, and their ability to get paid is always through shady people and businesses, because legitimate payment services won't allow them to use their services.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, in short. If the law or industry forces something underground, it will breed a dangerous culture. I'm happy to hear Stripe has a desire to be more open to these kinds of business...because the people working in them often suffer due to having to use unscrupulous providers for everything. Models having their payment accounts closed without warning and without receiving moneys owed, horrible rates (cam models often receive only about half of the money their customers send their way), etc.

But, it's also still very frustrating; when I've advised friends in the industry on technical matters I never have a good answer for payments. There just aren't any really good payment processors that will work with people in the adult industry. It's legal in all 50 states (at least in the case of pornography), there's just no reason for it to behave like a grey market, but it does.

<comment><USER7> Working as a dev for a company In the industry I fully agree. This has been an issue forever, companies use high-risk billers like Epoch and pay higher fees due to the huge amount of fraud involved and the lack of competition. Also, there was a case a few years ago when ING decided to close down a company's bank account just for being in the adult business. I wonder what's so shady about just a very big entertainment industry like this one.

<comment><USER8> It's because of the higher than normal charge backs that stripe's sponsoring bank doesn't want on their books. There is also some reputational risk I'd imagine and plenty of shady actors trying to get underwritten

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find it frustrating that private businesses, especially in the various sub- sectors having to do with money and payments, have pretty much been wholesale enlisted to be arms of the state.

The kind of agnosticism described in the first paragraph might mean, in a sane world, that a company like Stripe makes no assessment over whether a company's practices are legal or illegal, leaving this to the government to act upon alone.

<comment><USER10> It is in Stripe's rational self-interest to choose who they partner with; and thus, they chose the constraints related to those partners.

The real message of this blog post is that Stripe's revealed and stated preferences are not aligned. Their stated preference is that they sell to literally anybody. The revealed preference is that they prioritize relationships that facilitate growth over that stated preference.

It's totally rational on their part. They're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market. That's the right division of effort, and it's smart too, because many members of the tiny market will (naively) believe Stripe's stated preferences; even though absolutely all evidence is that Stripe wants, more than anything, to build a big, legal, US-based business. And that's fine.

<comment><USER11> > _They 're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how > sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market. _

Funny. Porn is _far_ from being a small market online. And taking on porn related businesses doesn't mean they have to stop serving other types of businesses.

<comment><USER12> > Funny. Porn is _far_ from being a small market online.

Are you sure about that? The source I've found [1] says it's a ~$5B market, which is what FB makes in one quarter alone (and only one month for Google).

[1]: [http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347252](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347252)

<comment><USER13> You're rebutting someone that merely said that the industry is "far from a small market" which was in response to someone claiming it was a "tiny" market. Pointing to one of the largest companies operating a web business is not really a rebuttal. That just says they are far from being the biggest.

I wouldn't call a $5b market a "tiny, niche market" like the GP post stated.

<comment><USER8> In the overall scheme of payments, $5b _is_ small. You need big volume to make money as a payment processor.

<comment><USER14> There are many markets that are much smaller than that which Stripe doesn't have a problem with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My friend runs a perfectly legitimate business making holsters for firearms, real, airsoft, whatever. Maybe just a step up above what you'd find in your army/navy surplus store.

Stripe's TOS expressedly forbids these, yet all they are is just a hunk of plastic not unlike those old tacky blackberry holsters that people used to have a few years back.

So yes, be in the "wrong business", you can't even sell a bit of plastic or leather because it's shaped wrong.

</comment><comment><USER16> "We don't want to be the moral police, but won't do business with you if you're a brand risk, such as a sex toy store"

It seems like the opening paragraph directly contradicts their policy

<comment><USER17> I don't think they meant brand risk to Stripe. Credit card companies don't like "immoral" businesses and refuse to do business with them.

There are quite a few stories about porn stars having their credit cards closed just because of how they make a living.

There is a portion in there that mentions Stripe sees this regulation as "overly moralistic" and that credit card companies have "old school morals".

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct; the brand risk being referred to is _card network_ brand risk. (Which they're very sensitive to.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Patrick is anything being done between Stripe and your underwriting banks to reduce the amount of declined transactions?

I frequently see ~30% of all transactions declined (customers in USA & Australian Stripe/Bank account) and it's a real pain for them having to constantly call their banks asking for transactions to be whitelisted, which often doesn't change anything.

This then leads to customers asking we don't just accept Paypal.

<comment><USER3> That's an abnormally high rate of declines to be seeing. Can you send me an email (firstname.lastname@example.com) and I'll look into it?

One change we're making is giving you better insight to which charges Stripe declines on your behalf (because they look fraudulent; you can override this behavior) and which charges are declined by the cardholder bank (you can't override this).

<comment><USER18> Thanks John, just sent you an email (HN in the subject line).

That would be great to see what the underlying cause or rational behind a declined transaction is.

I was especially surprised by how frequently payments were declined, especially after mandating that a name, address and CVC were required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure, but i feel like what is missing here is "Stripe does some things differently to other payment providers, via our immediate onboarding via a sub merchant account. Prior to Stripe, everyone had to go through pages of paperwork and wait week/s for an approval or non approval. For 80% of the market, that was a terrible waste of time. However, there is a % of the market that does benefit from having someone perform a deep level of due diligence. We've made the trade off whereby we can't address that segment due to restrictions placed on us in return for being able to onboard merchants immediately"

Or maybe the unique approach is not a factor here in these decisions.

</comment><comment><USER20> > #5 Businesses that attract money-laundering or fraud > * Cell phones > * > Drop shipping > * Stored value or gift cards

It's easy to understand stored value/gift cards, but why cellphones and drop shipping?

Anyone care to elaborate?

<comment><USER3> Anything with low traceability and high resale value (like dropshipped goods) tends to become a fraud/money-laundering target.

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't these criteria apply to Shopify? If Shopify is a legitimate business, how can other legitimate businesses overcome the same hurdle?

<comment><USER3> First, let me explain why drop-shipping is a popular vector for fraud. Drop- shipping means selling a product which you don't make or hold in stock; instead, when a purchase comes in you go and buy it somewhere else and have it shipped directly to the buyer. You can think of it as a form of arbitrage. They're remarkably efficient businesses: they need to have no assets or physical presence. The flip side of that is that if you were looking to create a legitimate-looking shell business to, say, cash in on stolen credit cards then drop-shipping would be a very plausible cover story. It's hard for us to disprove.

Since Stripe is on the hook if customers don't get their goods or services, we need to be able to ensure that the businesses are legitimate. It's hard for us to reliably do so with drop-shippers. While dropshipping is not Shopify's primary business, they are more specialized in ecommerce, they have more business-specific data, and there are a handful of other properties which let them support these businesses more readily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am working in an industry that is usually considered more shady than most of the examples given and it's nowhere to be found in that banlist.

That's sweat! Where do I sign up? :D _be right back_

<comment><USER23> Forget Stripe, where do _we_ sign up?

<comment><USER22> Are you asking for our current payment provider? (Adyen)

or are you asking for our website? That I'd rather not associate to "shady", and sadly we're blocked to operate in the USA [and most countries in the world] so that wouldn't help you anyway. Sorry.

<comment><USER23> Don't worry, I was just poorly joking about being intrigued by that product description.. It does sound like an interesting place to work though.

Mind sharing what you do, and/or how you ended up there? :)

<comment><USER22> Well, the "or" is tricky considering I found the job on "HN: Who is Hiring" :D

Let's say we operate an exchange (think: like a financial exchange except it's not).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Well explained and very reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER25> rather then placing blame on your partners, find new ones that allow these types of businesses or have appetite to have more in their portfolio and shuffle your clients accounts into these providers networks.

also, visa reg's change by region, are you in multiple regions and following the rules of each? or are you operating entirely under the US region and forcing all of your clients to do so as well?

</comment><comment><USER26> Several of these -- high end wine / online alcohol sales, travel tickets / private jet rental, high end all-natural pseudo-pharmaceuticals -- amount to little more than "this business is too risky when normal people are buying, but fine when rich people are buying."

Is it just that they can accept more risk when the average ticket price is higher?

</comment><comment><USER27> Dammit. I had an excellent business plan for a multi level marketing based online dildo shop!

<comment><USER28> That just means you need to take it to the next level. How about a crowdfunded alcoholic dildo drop-shipping pyramid scheme?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> "We're building business infrastructure that, like electricity, should be available on tap to use however the world sees fit. While we may personally like some businesses on Stripe and disapprove of others, we want to make as few judgements as possible as a company."

And then the last category is "Brand risk" including pornography.

I once worked for a startup that had an opportunity to boost its revenue by %100 by simply accepting the business of an online porn place (all we were was a recommendation engine). The startup turned them down because "ew porn, yucky!". If its legal, you shouldn't be passing arbitrary moral judgements.

That startup later failed.

And I won't be using stripe, even though I have no interest in doing anything related to porn.

There are too many moralizers (particularly the government "regulating" "money laundering" which is so broadly defined that they could prosecute any one of you successfully for this "crime" if they wanted to. EG: you take money from your checking account to pay a credit card, that's "money laundering" as the law is written.)

The government's bad enough, we don't need companies like Stripe preventing perfectly legal businesses for reasons of political correctness.

And this is a totally slippery slope. If my hosting company ends up accidentally hosting someone who takes advertisements from Torrent sites, is stripe going to cut me off? What if one of the sites I host is a blog that reviews porn sites? Am I now in the porn business?

Here they are signaling that they cannot be trusted.

<comment><USER30> From reading the blog post, I got that they personally want to support those businesses, but financial partners like Visa and Mastercard stop them from doing it.

<comment><USER31> I brought both porn and guns with Visa and Mastercards. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a porn store or a gun shop that doesn't accept at least one type of credit card.

And yet Stripe prohibits both pornography and firearms.

Not just Stripe, all the other major payment processors i.e. Paypal/Braintree, Square, Amazon Payments have similar prohibition clauses.

<comment><USER32> while you were easily able to buy porn and guns, on the flip side the people who sold you the porn and guns had to go through a high-risk payment processor just as if they'd try to sell porn/guns online. you don't notice anything because if you had to deal with that hassle, would you have bought your guns/porn from that shop? no. stores eat the cost of high-risk payment processors because customers want to pay with credit card.

you are mistaking visa: the credit card, with visa: the payment network.

<comment><USER33> You can't buy guns online as such, in the usual case of out of state customers they've got to be shipped to a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) in their state who then does the normal retail song and dance including a NICS background check. But of course the big money part of the transaction will be done before that, and almost certainly as a credit card transaction, as was the case for my last gun purchase (see e.g. [http://www.gunbroker.com/](http://www.gunbroker.com/) where I half-bought that one, and how many _firms_ on it offer payment by credit card (the flip side of course is that if you're an individual selling a gun, or a bare receiver as I did once, you of course are going to have to go the cashier's check/money order/personal check route (no PayPal, of course))).

And I've never heard that firearms and their accessories including ammo being a fraction of financially risky like porn, e.g. no one dancing to the tune Operation Choke Point cites that sort of risk, vs. it being a purely political decision. Plus it's just plain more serious of an industry, e.g. no one needed a Federal background check to buy porn (!).

And there are many merchant banks that have affirmatively decided to provide credit card processing services to such companies at normal rates, for references to one offered in part as a enticement to join, see [http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers- ser...](http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-services-to- nssf-members) from the nation's gun _industry_ association (the NRA is the gun _owner 's_ one).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Would love to see a more in depth callout to the firearm and firearm related services sector in this. This is considered a high risk area for seemingly entirely political reasons, and any body in the industry is constantly afraid of being shut off at a whim for even tangentially related services.

<comment><USER33> _and any body in the industry is constantly afraid of being shut off at a whim for even tangentially related services_

Only by processors like Stripe and of course merchant banks (but the latter is easily dealt with nowadays), politically right now we're _very_ strong in most of the nation, and at the Federal legislative level, and by and large the only companies with political risk are those in our modern slave states ("A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free." (Lincoln) and I believe there will be a resolution to this sooner or later, but that's not something companies like Stripe can make any plans or current polices about.)

Perhaps.... Team Obama are currently trying to land the first major blow they've come up with/dared to try, to shut down most of the nation's gun smiths ([http://www.nssfblog.com/ddtc-says-guidance-is-not-new-but- cl...](http://www.nssfblog.com/ddtc-says-guidance-is-not-new-but- clarification/)), so there's still clearly nationwide political risk.

But Stripe would be viewed very differently by, say, half the nation's population if they were willing to do business with those that do firearms and related stuff, as so many merchant banks are still quite willing to do, in states where that's politically safe, which is on the order of 40 with more than half the nation's population (which is not the same slice as the half I mentioned previously).

(And with regards to that above resolution, if it's in our favor, companies like Stripe that boycotted us will not be gently dealt with. So there's political risk in every direction, but I can't see how picking one side of a cultural currently cold civil war is a good long term strategy, and I seriously doubt its helping them in the short term, vs. staying out of the fray.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sorry, but all of this is simply not true.

I run a business where I regularly do between 50-100k a month. There are many other marketers that I know who are also doing the same.

I was not a good candidate and neither were they. Why? Because we act as middle-men between a product creator and the end user.

To someone like stripe, we are scammers. We supposedly put up sites which lie about products, we mark-up pricing and we take the money and not ship out the products. Yes, that is the brush that is tarred amongst all of us.

This could not be further from the truth, as it if was, then we'd be getting charge-backs up the wazzoo and our current merchant providers wouldnt be working with us.

I have yet to recieve a single charge back and I have many many repeat sales. So much so, that I an creating a brand by selling other manufacturers products under my own white-label brand. Which incidentally is against stripes terms and conditions.

What is laughable, is that stripe had no idea about my business model. In fact what they offered was stripe connect and having the manufacturer owning the stripe account. Which would actually confuse my clients even more.

Here is the deal. A lot of manufacturers don't know how to market. They don't know how to setup a sales funnel, market for clients, generate sales, make products go viral and generate 100k of sales. They have tried themselves spending $10k in marketing stacks and spending $1000s on facebook ads and getting nowhere.

But no, Stripe does not want to work with me or others like me. So guess what. We tell everyone one can, DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH STRIPE.

I don't be doing business with them and I will be telling all my clients and be sure to tell everyone they know as well not to do business with Stripe either. I hope this has a knock on effect that 1000+ individuals who thought about using stripe, use someone else as well.

If only stripe had actual controls where they did reputation testing against IP, actually sided with the seller on charge backs instead of bending over and making the seller the bad guy, or do more fraud analysis.

I choose other vendors who do exactly this and I have had no problems so far.

Here's something. I'm not a scammer. I would rather lose a sale rather than trying to get that money and have someone have buyers remorse and do a charge back or demand refund.

Not all of us want to make a quick buck at all costs. There are other ways of doing this, believe me and STRIPE wouldn't be a way of doing it. That;s just laughable.

TL;DR. SCREW STRIPE.

<comment><USER35> If a merchant type has 90% good merchants and 10% bad merchants, then that's too many bad merchants - this means that you either have to treat all of them as very risky; or adopt pain-in-the-ass filtering to make it more like 99+% good / <1% bad if it can be done; or charge a totally uncompetitive 10% extra fee from each payment to cover your risks.

It's not enough for you to be good. If an unreasonably large proportion of merchants in your segment are bad, then you can't be trusted to be good unless there are easily distinguishable factors that differentiate you, or the volumes are high enough to warrant the expense of doing a proper audit of your business, as the some examples Stripe describes.

<comment><USER25> or learn to do proper due diligence and stop blanket blocking what could be very profitable clients.

<comment><USER35> Proper due diligence is expensive, it may easily be a smart business decision to choose a blanket ban on a minority of segments and leave the due diligence to businesses who can specialize on doing that cheaply and accurately.

The article explicitly gives multiple examples where they have accepted businesses from those risky categories after proper due diligence. However, it's quite likely that for Stripe it makes sense to do so only for businesses above a certain size or influence, not for everyone in the category who applies.

<comment><USER36> If proper due diligence is expensive, let the merchant pay the fee for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Setting aside illegal businesses, whole segments of the market seem to have been ignored by stripe.

An opportunity to serve these markets exists

<comment><USER35> There exists an opportunity to lose a lot of money serving these markets. All those other categories are very financially risky to serve due to reasons listed out in the nice article, as the acquiring institution will lose money on that.

If you accept a merchant that has a lot of fraudulent transactions and after some months get a lot of chargebacks, then you're out of that money if you've paid that money to the merchant already and they (usually) go insolvent at that point instead of returning the funds. If a particular market segment has even a small portion (depending on how high your fees are) of merchants doing this, the whole segment will make a loss for you.

<comment><USER29> The way you lose money in credit cards is via chargeback.

The more government and companies like stripe push those businesses out of credit cards, the more mainstream the use of bitcoin will become.

<comment><USER35> The reason customers are eager to use credit cards online is because they actually can do chargebacks, so they don't really have to verify if every merchant is trustworthy.

The only place where irreversible transactions (i.e. bitcoin without escrow) make sense are those services that have almost no risk of needing a chargeback.

There are many businesses that I trust to pay them with bitcoin, but if chargebacks are a problem for a particular type of business, if they're getting a significant amount of chargebacks then _those_ are the exact businesses for which the protection that chargebacks give me is useful, _those_ are the businesses whom I would pay only with a creditcard but not with bitcoin, because paying them with an irreversible instrument and no easy dispute resolution likely to end in my favor means I'm likely to be taken for a ride.

Competitive merchants with good reputation will accept credit cards (because for them chargebacks aren't as big a problem), and if a merchant is explicitly telling that they won't accept credit cards because they don't like chargebacks, then they're de facto admitting that they're likely to screw their customers, that their other customers are not satisfied and request chargebacks.

<comment><USER38> I own a small web hosting company, and I'd like to tell you that it's more complicated than that. Nearly all of our chargebacks are the result of criminals paying with stolen credit cards, and then using the accounts as a platform for illegal activity. My company is the victim here, it has nothing to do with unsatisfied customers, but we're still punished by the payment processing industry.

We, like much of the hosting industry, fight back by denying new accounts to certain high-risk countries -- like most of Eastern Europe. The fraud rate from some of those countries is probably 75% or more! But that sucks, too -- it's not fair to honest people in Latvia that they're banned from the services of many small online businesses. That's where Bitcoin comes in, and it's actually been a Godsend to us!

<comment><USER8> Hmm, there are also some pretty sophisticated fraud detection tools available. Have you explored them at all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here come the down votes from developers who hold Stripe into such esteem. That's right, if a business does not fit your view of a "business" then they must be a scammer.

Go live outside of your SF/SV bubble and see how it works in the real world!

<comment><USER39> It's legit for you to factually describe your situation and raise questions about it. And it's legit to use a throwaway account to do so, since there are sensitive business matters involved.

It's not legit for you to break the HN guidelines by yelling, calling names, hounding, and going on about downvoting. Those things aren't allowed on HN. They also aren't in your interest, since doing them reflects badly on your credibility. I know it's hard to resist the temptation to lash out at something you perceive as restricting you unfairly, but if you want to comment here, that's what we need you to do.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278660) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stripe is one of the Bay Area companies that clearly discriminated against me based on membership in a protected class. Of course as a white male, it's "ok" to do so by the standards of California political correctness. (The discrimination was based on age. I'm grateful it happened when it did, rather than, say, after taking an offer.)

Given the number of "support hell" horror stories that have been coming out about stripe in recent years, there really is not much point in you hanging out here spinning to try and put your company in a good light, you would be better off digging into why you are failing these people.

<comment><USER39> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278723) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> TL;DR, we are beholden to a cartel.

<comment><USER40> I'm not blaming them. Their policy is rational. But if it weren't for the credit card cartel and their rules, my hunch is they wouldn't have this page.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you posit some examples of civil discourse? - <AUTHOR> I understand this is not a political forum and am not looking for your political opinion rather examples of effective communication.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DvmLMUfGss Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Vietnam and the Intellectuals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_discourse
I am aware that: "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Ideological or political battle or talking points."
and also: "We ban accounts that use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle, regardless of which politics they favor. "
But would be interested in what makes effective dialog in your opinion.
other discussions (Buckley): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=William%20F.%20Buckley&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story
(Chomsky) https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Chomsky&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story
I am not interested in your opinions on the specific speakers or their point of view. Rather examples where each speaker is able to communicate their point of view to the best of their ability within a context that allowed for a dialog. <comment> wu-ikkyu There are various intellectuals who have recorded debates and lectures on youtube. It just depends on who you're interested in. If you look up any of these names on youtube or elsewhere you'll find some interesting and eloquent discourse (at least it is to me) with considerable political implications:

-Marshall McLuhan (media and communications theory)

[https://youtu.be/ImaH51F4HBw](https://youtu.be/ImaH51F4HBw)

-Buckminster Fuller (futurism and socioeconomics)

[https://youtu.be/elVGz_VR3eU](https://youtu.be/elVGz_VR3eU)

-Alan Watts (psychology and religion)

[https://youtu.be/eV7FLlRmuf0](https://youtu.be/eV7FLlRmuf0)

-Joseph Campbell (mythology and culture)

[https://youtu.be/aGx4IlppSgU](https://youtu.be/aGx4IlppSgU)

-MLK (sociology and human rights)

[https://youtu.be/9SfH2uMayks](https://youtu.be/9SfH2uMayks)

<comment><AUTHOR> just wanted to say before this gets lost... all heroes, had not seen all of these, i think i am also interested in implicit animosity but at the same time coherent dialog¿? that said whom ever you are i lov u. in the truest sense of the world.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Where can I read the transcripts of the Marc Andreessen Zuckerberg case? - <AUTHOR> The case: <comment><AUTHOR> The case: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/marc-andreessen- fa...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/marc-andreessen-facebook- texts-to-zuckerberg-shareholders/)

(deleted and resubmitted because it detected the URL in the body and converted it into a link post instead of an Ask HN)</comment>


Open sourced my code that gets updated stock quotes for stocks - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/csti/Pull-Stock-Market-Data-Cron-Job

<comment><USER2> Looking into this. This API is free to use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah it uses a Yahoo Finance Community table (YQL). I'd check the license for exactly where/how you can use it but it's essentially free yes. [http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=show%20tables&...](http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/?q=show%20tables&env=store://datatables.org/alltableswithkeys)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking for something like this.</comment>


Mapped: How every part of the world has warmed – and could continue to warm - <AUTHOR> https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-every-part-of-the-world-has-warmed-and-could-continue-to-warm <comment> tony-allan Getting error for the content part of the page... AccessDeniedAccess DeniedB0E46C75A8861AB9BwG1ruvHy+Eu1LweUgZ2ydwVUOXxwRrOMT5gsdZqPlbSqFFmjbuAm0gFG3V2iT+1DV5UHcHleBg=</comment>


Ask HN: Becoming T-shaped - <AUTHOR>

I'm 6 years into my software engineer career (first 3 as a consultant and the next 3 at a startup). From that experience, I can basically take any idea (or startup) from day 1 to around year 3. I can: register the (sub)domains, setup email, setup all servers on almost any provider (aws, rackspace, linode, digitalocean), setup git on github/bitbucket and manage deploys/versioning and continuous integration with jenkins, manage bugs and teams in jira across multiple projects, take an app from nothing in most languages (java/dropwizard, groovy/grails, ruby/rails/sinatra, node/express) to an app/api that meets almost all business requirements, write data heavy frontends for admin panels (backbone, angular, react more recently), setup and administer databases (postgres, mysql, elasticsearch), setup and implement caching strategies in redis, and setup queues/background jobs.
Despite feeling confident about my experience, I feel like it would be easier to interview right now if I had just stuck to java for the past 6 years and practiced algos/data structures slowly over that time period. Now that I'm more mature and I've seen the landscape, I want to do two things: 1) Gain a deep understanding of a single language/ecosystem.
2) Get deep expertise in a particular domain. Things that innately interest me include graph problems (vehicle routing), distributed computing (things like kafka), and machine learning. I really want to dig deep and get good at one of these longer term.
Beyond personal interest in these domains, I want to be in a better career position in 4-5 years, so perceived future demand for the skills would weigh in to my decision as well. Any advice on any of this would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> > I want to be in a better career position in 4-5 years...

It's impossible to know what the tech landscape will be like in 5 years. It's also very likely your indivual career aspirations may evolve and change.

But if you're trying to make yourself more marketable in the long run-- build- up needed skills that won't change. Tech leadership desparately needs individuals with good people skills. Study Psychology, Business Management, and take a Dale Carnegie course. The ability to sell ideas is also a skill always in demand. Read up on marketing by Seth Godin.

Relative to what's emerging in tech-- an interesting benchmark to note, this 2012 survey by Forrester>[http://blogs.forrester.com/brian_hopkins/13-02-07-forresters...](http://blogs.forrester.com/brian_hopkins/13-02-07-forresters_top_15_emerging_technologies_to_watch_now_to_2018)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the biggest thing is that you grok the idea of being "t-shaped" and are taking the initiative to do something. Now, the hardest part is - I think - deciding what to make the vertical bar of your "T". It can probably be almost anything, but some things are going to be more valuable from a career standpoint than others. I chose "java" for that about 2000, after having been focused on C++ for a few years before that. That decision turned out well, but I feel like Java has largely run it's course now. I mean, it'll still be around for a while, but it's not "sexy" anymore.

So, what would I make the new "vertical bar" of my own "T"? I'm leaning towards two somewhat parallel tracks: And both of these involve things that were on my "horizontal bar" going back sometime anyway, it's just time to start emphasizing them more. One, is Semantic Web / Artificial Intelligence / Cognitive Computing stuff. And related, but not necessarily exactly the same is Big Data / Machine Learning / Analytics / BI stuff.

I expect skills in those areas are going to be valuable for some time to come. I started digging into the SemWeb stuff several years ago, actually, but I wish now that I'd started investing more into machine learning a few years earlier.

As far as how to do that? Well, read and experiment and build sample projects for yourself... the same things you'd do to learn any new skill. There are a number of good books and websites out there. I'm reading _Machine Learning for Hackers_ now, and also playing around with things like Mahout, OpenNLP, Giraph, and Spark with GraphX and MLib. I'm also looking into learning R, as it's widely used in that analytics / machine learning world.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, thanks!</comment></comment>


Forbes misses the point of the 4-day work week - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1209-forbes-misses-the-point-of-the-4-day-work-week <comment><USER2> Well, that's not really a fair criticism of Forbes, in this case.

Yes, Forbes "misses the point" of the "4-day workweek" as preached by 37-signals... but there's a good reason for that: they weren't talking about that version of the 4-day workweek.

The Forbes article clearly refers to a 4-day-workweek scheme instituted by Chrysler, not 37-signals - and their analysis of why it's a load of bollocks is pretty much spot on. Forbes hasn't missed the point - Chrysler has.. assuming they were even aware of the existence of that point in the first place, which I doubt.

Here we have a case of two things called by the same terms but referring to very different initiatives.

Ironically, I think 37-signals missed the point that the article wasn't about them!

<comment><USER3> So, the article is 37signals missing the point about Forbes not actually missing the point of Chrysler missing the point of the 4-day workweek?

<comment><USER2> I think you hit the point on the head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> At this last RailsConf we were introduced to the concept of the 4-day workweek by DHH, and the audience snickered. Many of us are working small companies and startups. The 4-day workweek is definitely a luxury I never could enjoy during my times in small startups.

Not only that, but a little bird inside 37s told me that the true 4-day work week works for only a few people at 37s while a few other people put in long, hard hours getting a lot of the tedious work of maintaining a body of software done.

If they keep playing at this, DHH is going to exemplify a new icon of the Pointy Haired Boss. The thing that's most frustrating about that is that DHH is actually pretty good at what he does (meaning framework capture), and if he focused more he'd be a lot better and we'd see a lot more good features out of products of 37s.

<comment><USER5> _the true 4-day work week works for only a few people at 37s while a few other people put in long, hard hours getting a lot of the tedious work of maintaining a body of software done_

If that's true, it's significant. It would mean that what they're saying is bullshit, no?

<comment><USER4> No.

What it means is that its not axiomatic. Sometimes you need to roll the hard 8 (or more appropriately work the hard 80) to get things done. Other times when there isn't quite so much on the line it makes sense to keep your workload lower.

Our profession is very subject to burnout and requires a _lot_ of education to keep up. Taking time off is valuable for peak cognitive function.

That said, DHH may take it too far. And I know it would frustrate the hell out of me if I heard DHH talking about the 4-day work week while I was working on the things he is almost unconsciously refusing to do.

<comment><USER5> _Sometimes you need to roll the hard 8 (or more appropriately work the hard 80) to get things done. Other times when there isn't quite so much on the line it makes sense to keep your workload lower._

But that's not at all what they're saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It'd be nice to move away from obsessive hour counting. It's like measuring a programmers worth in terms of lines of code produced. Give people the freedom to work when they like, and have good measurements in place to ensure they are achieving what they should be.

<comment><USER7> A problem is that there are many of us who work by the billable hour for companies that are legally liable if hours reporting is found not to be accurate.

<comment><USER8> I think accurate measurement of _time spent_ and accurate measurement of _results achieved_ are two separate issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of factories have 12 hour swing shifts.

What I've done in the past is have a 6-day workweek, with Friday and Saturday being 1/2 days. I really liked it, but most people don't have a pleasant walk to work like I do, so the commute is a net loss.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wow. This got posted to HN 20 minutes after the original Forbes story. Impressive

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281512>

</comment><comment><USER11> forget 4-day work week - think about the sub-culture of 4-Hour workweek...

read the book "The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich"

<comment><USER12> Ah yes, yet another "Get Rich Quick Without Working" scheme. The world needs that.</comment></comment>


Startup 129: Term Sheet – Board of Directors - <AUTHOR> http://www.ansanelli.com/blog/?p=1170

<comment><AUTHOR> This post about a startup Board of Directors is a continuation of the series about venture capital term sheets. When thinking about the board there are lots of things to consider and this post will cover the Board's role, who should be on it, and how to best work with the board.</comment>


Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia - <AUTHOR> https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/booting-the-multia/ <comment><USER2> In ~1997 I bought a Multia off some online auction site pre-Ebay. My local PC supplier had to special order 64MB ECC RAM for me as they didn't carry it. For a teenager at my first IT job it took me a few months to afford the RAM and was a bit before I had it running. I mainly used it beta testing Redhat Rawhide and experimenting with Linux. It was my first non-x86 system.

I did try WindowsNT 4.0 on it for a week, but it was slow and almost nothing was compatible with it.

Later I got some Alphastations but they were almost the same spec as a Multia, just better form factor.

My main PC around this time was a Sun Sparcstation 20 with a ROSS Dual Hypersparc module and 2GB RAM. I remember paying around $2000 for it in 1998, probably too much! Unfortunately the magic smoke escaped from the CPU one morning in 2000 :(

<comment><USER3> Not bad for the SPARC considering it was introduced at around $25,000. Of course, by 1998 it was only as powerful as a dual processor Pentium Pro. I think the RAM maxed out at 512MB though.

<comment><USER4> I did my thesis (and wrote code on) a sparcstation lx running an (very) early version of openbsd/sparc.

<comment><USER3> I'd often sit down and write papers at a SPARC IPX in the computer lab because nobody else knew what they were doing. It was a pretty slow computer, but the windows PCs were all on Win 3.1 at the time and that was pretty annoying. You had to boot the PC from scratch each time, while the IPX was ready to go. Anyone else remember Pitt's computing evironment around 1996?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "My understanding of this procedure is that I would mount the hard drive on another computer and match the Administrator password hash to a known password"

For future reference, all you need to do is temporarily replace services.exe with an exe that runs "net user administrator xyz123" (to change the password to xyz123), then reboot. Then put the original services.exe back, of course.

<comment><USER6> ... which would require getting your hands on a toolchain able to compile for this decades-old Windows on a pretty rare architecture.

<comment><USER5> Not really. This is pre-ASLR, so all you need to do is push a string pointer on the stack and call an address. Probably less than 15 bytes of machine code you'd need to hex-edit into an existing exe.

<comment><USER7> If you have hard drive access you can replace the logon.scr screensaver executable with the command prompt executable, then a few minutes after boot up a command prompt with system privileges will appear by magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> NT 4 prepared Win32 for synchronization with Windows 95. I hated it for that: they moved the presentation layer into the kernel (to allow features like "Active Desktop" widgets) which negatively impacted reliability and security for years to come.

Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 were much more reliable. The CD-ROM's containing the OS from MSDN came with the Microsoft C/C++ compiler on it, somewhere they even added Visual Studio 1.0.

There was hardly any client software for MIPS and Alpha, but the i386 versions ran 16 bit versions of Ami Pro, Excel and Mosaic well. Which is probably why MIPS and Alpha NT versions never became popular, despite the fact that they were very fast for the time.

<comment><USER9> NT 3.x was mainly pushed as a server OS targeting Novell Netware. On the PC side it never made sense unless you bought one of these discount surplus Multias.

I worked at a F500 and two times DEC reps came into sell NT/Alpha, and both occasions, they couldn't get the machines to boot. I wonder how much of that NT/Alpha just for marketing, because DEC was selling a lot of x86 servers in those days.

The Pentium Pro 200Mhz was better than or close-enough to RISC processors in most standard benchmarks that most businesses seem to decide "good enough", and that was the beginning of the end of the end of the server processor wars.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had a pet Pentium Pro server in about 1999, and it was a fantastic machine. Excellent CPU performance and a fast IO system to match.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Finding software written for Win32 /Alpha, though, is likely to be a > challenge._

As someone who actually had one of these at work[1] back in the early 90s, there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current product. Lack of software support, was one of the reasons that WinNT Alpha never gained a foothold. Which was a shame as the Alpha hardware was pretty great.

\--

[1] It was the only one we had, I think we got it as a freebie as the rest of the computer room was choca full of DEC VAXs.

<comment><USER11> _there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current product_

I ran SQL Server on NT on Alpha in the 90s, it was actually very good, but you had to treat it as a dedicated appliance rather than a general-purpose computer because as you say, there was very little software available.

Then the industry took a weird meander through DEC StrongARM and now Microsoft is looking at Windows on ARM seriously again...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember seeing NT3.5 running on an Alpha at a trade show around the same time period. A higher end model than the one the author posts here. The reason why it never found "consumer success" is that in late 1993 dollars it cost $7800 , equivalent to about $13,600 today. When at the same time it was possible to buy a 486DX/33 for just under $2000 in a pretty decent, though not nearly as capable configuration. That is what consumers could afford.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember playing with a MSDN copy of Win NT 3.51 in my cousin's cubical back at AMI in the late 90s. We had NT4 on a Pentium Pro I got to admin back in high school. I even tried to see if I could get the library computers to login off a Samba PDC instead of the NT4 Server. A lot of stuff didn't work, and group policies were pretty janky.

I like how the author also has an SGI and two Sun machines next to this one. We got a hold of some old Sun Stations in University back in 2001; paid like $12 for a crate of them. They were made in the 80s and had dual 100MB SCSI hard drives, tons of ram slots (I want to say 32 or 64MB of potential ram), and those crazy optical mice that needed the grid based mouse pads. I think I got RedHat running on mine and didn't do much with it.

I'd love to collect and work on old stuff like this, but I started to do some hard core backpacking in my 30s and my parents threw out nearly everything while I was over seas for a few years. I'd really like to stay minimal with a room full or less of stuff, so I don't see myself getting into old computing any time soon. I'll just read posts like this and read The 8-Bit guy to get that nostalgia fix.

Oh and if you're ever in Seattle and love old machines, check out The Living Computer Museum. They have actual Altos, HP UX, TIs, Apples, and DEC Alpha machines you can log into and play with. It's pretty amazing.

<comment><USER14> Group policies were introduced with Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

<comment><USER13> Sorry, I meant System Policies, the predecessors to Group Policies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article mentions Service Pack 6. You needed to install 6a which fixed up many faults of 6, like e.g. not being able to disable Nagle's algorithm for TCP (not funny when you wanted to send around short TCP messages).

</comment><comment><USER16> As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts in the 80s and 90s, I'd love to go back in time and experience the competing tech that was being built in my back yard before the west coast totally won out. I had friends whose parents worked for both DEC and Wang Laboratories, and had those companies' gear in their homes. At the time I only cared about what games you could put on or write for them, but it would be awesome to poke around on them again as an adult.

</comment><comment><USER17> This brings back so many fond memories from the late 90ies. I dual booted Windows NT 4 and Red Hat Linux for many years on an old Pentium 166 with an Adaptec scsi controller (remember that?). It was wonderful. Could never afford an Alpha machine though. WinNT was good stuff, miss the good old blue boot screen.

<comment><USER18> Yeah I remember having a server with an Adaptec SCSI controller. It only booted with Linux 2.4. When we attempted to boot Linux 2.6 I had to drive 300 km to the datacenter to fix it. "trying harder", it printed. Fun stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I ran NT4 on a MIPS Magnum R4000 for a while. It worked okay. Could run 16bit x86 Windows/DOS stuff in a weird sort of translation/emulation.

All my Multias (I owned 2-3 over the years) usually ended up with RHEL on them; nobody in the nerd crowd I was in wanted to run Windows on them. They ran so hot that if you sat it horizontal it would keep your coffee cup warm if close enough.

I believe someone got VMS running on one after some hackery with the firmware/BIOS.

<comment><USER20> I bought an Acer PICA ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_PICA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_PICA)) back in the early 2000s, obsolete by then, just to play with it and Windows NT 4. MIPS still seemed exotic, and there was little free software to use on the platform. I think a port of Office existed, and maybe an early Internet Explorer.

I'm not sure what the point of the ARC ports of NT even were, except Microsoft's attempt to keep its fingers in as many pies as possible and crowd out competitors.

<comment><USER19> They weren't sure if x86 was going to be competitive in the long run at that point, so they were porting to all the major architectures. I even heard rumors of a SPARC port of NT 3.51 but I've never seen it in the flesh.

Solaris even ported to PPC (specific RS6K boxes) for Solaris 2.5.1; I've got a copy of that ISO image around somewhere but never had the right hardware to run it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had an Alpha Multia back in '98. I remember having to scour eBay for the appropriate SCSI adapters since DEC used something proprietary. And even with the adapter, I never got the Linuxes of the time to recognize the HDs.

The key to running NT4 for Alpha was DEC's FX!32. It crosscompiled x86 code to AXP. Thanks to Alpha's better design this made my 233mhz 21066 a lot faster running x86 code the my Pentium MMX 233.

</comment><comment><USER22> I realized the only other time I'd heard of the Multia was from Slashdot posts from nearly 20 years ago.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/99/08/02/0219235/free- multia...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/99/08/02/0219235/free-multias-pay- shipping-only)

<comment><USER23> PSA: don't click the link to the linux store in the Slashdot article. Someone super dodgy owns that domain name now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had an alpha (miata, AKA Personal Workstation 500au, I think) running NT on my desk for a while, while we waited for space to open up in a rack..(1) The NT on it seemed quite usable, thanks to the FX!32 emulator. When running x86 compiled stuff, it felt mostly as fast as contemporary high-end PCs, once you'd opened the x86 program and used it for a while.

(1) We used FreeBSD/alpha, so we always bought the "NT" version of machines to save $$$ on the DEC UNIX license fee. Eg, just like today, the Windows version of a machine was cheaper.. FreeBSD did not support the ARC firmware needed by NT, but you could easily switch the machines to SRM in order to load FreeBSD.

</comment><comment><USER25> I miss the simplicity of the NT / 2003 era of servers. You could make setup as simple or as complex as you now. Now you have to have a BSA to configure so many arbitrary standards just to connect to a NAS.

</comment><comment><USER26> I knew someone who had a DEC running Windows NT around 2000. They admitted it didn't work as well as they would have liked.

</comment><comment><USER27> I have Windows 2000 RC2 running on an Alpha :) It's really neat, you can even execute x86 programs.

</comment><comment><USER28> So at the time, to compile software for Windows NT Alpha, was there an Alpha IDE and compiler available (something like VC++) such that developers were writing and debugging locally, or would developers usually cross-compile from an x86 machine?

<comment><USER28> To answer my own question, now that I'm not on my mobile: it looks like there was an Alpha version of Visual C++ 2.0, as well as a cross-compiler for the 68k Macintosh! [1] I was firmly in VB land at the time (as a ~10 year old) so this bit of history eluded me.

[1] [https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1771](https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1771)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I messed around with one of these I got in college at an off lease / salvage type place... The boot loader on those was really cool and because it was an alpha, you had a license for digital UNIX...</comment>


The bank lent me $2m so I spent it on strippers and cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38308842 <comment><USER2> A potentially smarter thing would have been to take all you could, invest and hope for the fast short term gains, then come clean to the bank and pay it back - keeping the proceeds.

<comment><USER3> Twice I've taken credit card companies up on their 0% interest balance transfer deals. Specifically, the ones where you can write a check drawn on the credit account in lieu of a balance transfer.

The effective cost for me each time was 2.5% up front (the "transaction fee"), but with even conservative investments that's trivial to cover by the end of the interest-free, 18- or 20-month period.

Alas, with today's interest rate hike, I'm not sure how long those offers will continue. With bonds prices increasing, the "transaction fee" will rise, and there'll also be less money in the stock markets reducing the upside.

Those deals aren't a sure thing. If the stock market crashed you could maybe lose a quarter to half. But as these things go it was pretty easy money. I'm not rich enough to be able to leverage debt like the big guys, but I didn't mind taking the opportunities afforded me. Paying $500 for the privilege of investing $20,000 of someone else's money, reaping all the rewards, was well worth the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "...and wasted the rest" to quote the late George Best.</comment>


Canvas-based online dungeon map maker - <AUTHOR> http://www.dwarvenforge.com/mapmaker/

<comment><USER2> It seems to die entirely if custom fonts aren't available, and blocking the font resource doesn't seem to help. This is on Chrome 26.</comment>


If your pay is not yours to keep, then neither is the tax - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/if-your-pay-is-not-yours-to-keep-then-neither-is-the-tax <comment><USER2> It's totally fine to think of taxation as theft, so long as you think of using public roads as trespassing.

<comment><USER3> When I say taxation is theft, I mean federal income taxes. I'd rather pay more to my state and local governments. I interact with those more local levels way more often and receive more benefits from them than from the federal government. States maintain their own roads.

<comment><USER4> All states accept federal highway funds. Source: [http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-state-budgets- fe...](http://www.governing.com/topics/finance/gov-state-budgets-federal- funding-2015-2018-trump.html)

<comment><USER5> That is true but why the level of bureaucracy in the middle? Why not just give the states the money directly and bypass the federal government?

Just because it is that way doesn't mean it should be.

An obvious answer, though not satisfying, is that some states are too poor for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The far right says "taxation is theft" and the far left says "capitalism is theft" or "property is theft".

They're both about equally correct -- there's a core nugget in the argument that's somewhat logical, but as a bald statement they're a massive over generalization and patently ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish that there would be an option to say how I want my taxes spent. For example, give 10 categories, like education, military, health, infrastructure, government etc. Require a minimum for each, say 2%. Then its up to me to allot the rest of my taxes. So if I am a hawk, I can dump 80% of it in the military. Or education if I have kids.

I think technically this could be done, but it would be interesting to see what the result would be, and if a country could run on this principle.

<comment><USER3> I think it really comes down to what roles you assign to each level of government. For example, I think one of the main roles of the federal government is to maintain the military. I think a role of state and local governments is to maintain the infrastructure and education. I'd rather send more tax money to state and local governments, because I'd see the results. A lot of the money that states use to build and maintain their roads comes from the federal government anyway, so why not cut out the middleman and have the taxpayer give it directly to the state.

Obviously there are some places where you will have overlap between the different levels. For example, I don't think the federal government should be completely, 100% out of education, but rather should have a reduced role so the teachers can do their jobs and educate.

Obviously these ideas would be difficult to implement and are also idealistic. For example, some states are poorer than others so their tax revenue may not be enough. But even given that, I think state and local governments having more power would be better for the people. And no, this isn't some states' rights dog whistle or whatever (I doubt any of you would accuse me of that, but people have).

<comment><USER7> Good points.

Side note: I am a US citizen, but I live in the Czech Republic at the moment, so I would be interested to see a system which would be flexible enough to allow any government to utilize.

This actually seems like an interesting enough problem that I may try to code up a website where people can anonymously enter how much tax they pay (in currency amounts) and how they would allocate it (in %). Then try to do some aggregates to see how countries would compare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Richard Murphy has written a book called The Joy of Tax, where one of the central arguments is that the generally accepted view of tax playing the role of funding government expenditure is incorrect, or at the very least, undesirable.

Instead we ought to view tax as being a tool which acts as a force of contraction in the economy, taking money out of circulation that has been put there as a result of government spending.

Both of these (fiscal) mechanisms - spending and taxing - ideally act as a mechanism to democratise the economy. 'Ideally' in the sense that the mechanisms for choosing and applying such policies are democratic, rather than authoritarian, subject to capture, etc. 'Democratise' in the sense that without this intervention, the 'market' has free reign - with ensuing consequences that influence over it is not in the hands of the many.

Libertarians (especially of the free-market ilk) may see this as a positive, however, I think it is plainly obvious that a market is never free, and has a tendency to concentrate wealth (and thus power). In my opinion, decisions over our collective efforts and available resources ought not to be in the hands of the few, but rather, in the many - via truly democratic mechanisms and institutions.

Some interesting, related vids that discuss boom/bust, QE and the like:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY)

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk)

</comment><comment><USER9> The article false apart early because it is based on this premise: "There is no serious political theory according to which my pre-tax income is 'mine' in any morally significant sense."

Stated in Paragraph 2. That's false, there's lots of solid arguments to suggest that your income belongs to you. To pretend that those arguments don't exist so that you can write a 3 page essay amounts to dishonesty.

</comment><comment><USER10> Let's set aside questions of what a particular person's labor is worth for a moment. One may have all sorts of opinions as to whether someone deserves the wage they earn, and such arguments are beside the point.

Let us also set aside the questions of taxation. One may likewise have all sorts of opinions on this subject, but again, they are a distraction from the central argument.

And finally let us set aside the questions of the exploitation of workers. Again, this is important, but it is still a distraction.

The central concept behind a wage is this: It is a contractual exchange of X for Y. I am giving you something, and you are giving me something in exchange. The "something" I am giving you is my labor. You consider this a thing of value to yourself or your company. You feel a need for my labor, so you make an agreement with me to give me something of equal value in exchange. "Equal value" in this case is determined by negotiation. If I do not agree that what you are offering me in exchange for my labor is of sufficient value, I can choose to accept the agreement and gain a more limited benefit, or I can reject it.

The thing you give me in this case is money. It could be room and board. It could be many things. But unless the thing you give me in exchange for what I give you becomes "mine," the entire exchange is a fraud that no rational person would agree to.

To say that the benefit I receive for the benefit I provide is not "mine" in any moral sense is completely irrational. And if it is true that my wages are not "mine" then it must also be true that my labor is not "yours," and you have no right to keep the fruits of my labor.

What this article assumes is equivalent to saying that there is no such thing as personal property of _any_ kind, and that includes your own life and energies. If your wages are not yours, then neither is your labor, and thus your labor can be coerced from you just as surely as your money can be stolen. Your life does not belong to you. It belongs "something other." That something other, as near as I can tell from the article, is the collective whole. You are only of value so much as you benefit the collective, and as such you are disposable as soon as you, in the estimation of the ruling authority, cease to benefit the collective.

If you want to make a legitimate argument in favor of taxation (and I believe in just and mutually-beneficial taxation, just to be clear), you cannot do so by denying the fundamental and moral nature of labor and wages. Deny that moral principle, and you are ultimately denying the value and dignity of human life itself.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only person that would write something like this is a university professor whose income solely depends on the taxation of others.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Outside of academia, almost everyone assumes that the money I get in my pay- packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, 'mine'."

Oh so you mean like, in the real world?

</comment><comment><USER11> "Your gross, or pre-tax income, is the money the market delivers to you"

I'm going to sit at home and wait for my delivery of money from the market for the next few months and contemplate the logic of this article.</comment>


Nashorn Architecture and Performance Improvements in Upcoming Release - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.oracle.com/nashorn/entry/nashorn_performance_work_in_the

<comment><USER2> >Conservatively, when implementing a JavaScript runtime in Java, anything known to be a number can be represented in Java as a double, and everything else can be represented as an Object.

sounds like beginning of a horror story.

>and that's where optimistic type system comes in. Our optimistic type system works by assuming that any statically unprovable type is an int, the narrowest possible of all types. If this turns out to be wrong at runtime, e.g. we load a field from memory/scope that turned out to be an Object or a double instead, or if we perform a 32-bit addition that overflows, we will replace the executing code with a more conservative version, that is regenerated on the fly.

i hope all that heroism and effort has a good reason for it beside just being a great/interesting engineering endeavor.

<comment><USER3> I read that and wondered why they don't default to a double, instead of an int? Double is javascripts internal type so the effort seems wasted.

>>i hope all that heroism and effort has a good reason for it beside just being a great/interesting engineering endeavor.

Indeed, the amount effort put into optimizing dynamic languages boggles the mind, particularly on the jvm (including all the work on invoke dynamic).

<comment><USER4> "I read that and wondered why they don't default to a double, instead of an int? Double is javascripts internal type so the effort seems wasted."

Ints take up less space and often take less cycles to perform arithmetic on - so if you can use an int rather than a double it's generally going to be faster.

I can't immediately prove it, but I would imagine that if you modify the source of a JS implementation like Nashorn or V8 to remove int from the type lattice, you will find many programs run dramatically slower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One day nashorn on jvm would be faster then V8.

<comment><USER6> Why?</comment></comment>


John Baez on Research Tactics - <AUTHOR> https://intelligence.org/2014/02/21/john-baez-on-research-tactics/ <comment><USER2> a lot is covered here, I found myself at the Azimuth project [0], hard to believe this guy started blogging in 1993. pretty cool!

I find his bio more interesting than the chat but in any case thanks for sharing!

[0] [http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage](http://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage)</comment>


Two scientists meeting on a bus leads to discovery in the lab - <AUTHOR> http://www.hhmi.org/bulletin/spring-2015/merging-minds-and-molecules <comment><USER2> I think Universities need to actively promote common spaces where researchers and graduate students from different faculties could meet and talk about different ideas.

These common and fertile space would allow for collision of ideas to take place and help new innovations emerge.

Much like the english tea houses of the renaissance, Universities need these spaces to help transform ideas and research work into commercial success stories that would have a global and positive impact on humanity.

Author Steven Johnson: 'Where good ideas come from' \- [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_com...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en)

Note: For the sake of innovation, I very much support Beer Gardens and I hope it gets funded centrally in every University ~_~

<comment><USER3> Few places in the world are as poor in terms of lack of public spaces as the US. Roadside cafes, town squares, etc. are the norm in Europe. In the US, very few cities have such features. They are increasingly common these days in the form of 'suburban town squares', but they are almost always in some shopping mall or similar commercial enterprise, rather than in truly public spaces. To further complicate matters, even in college towns, faculty and researchers prefer driving to work than riding public transport. Nowhere is this more common than in the American Midwest, with its combination of vast sprawls and severe winters.

<comment><USER4> > but they are almost always in some shopping mall or similar commercial > enterprise, rather than in truly public spaces.

why would that matter at all?

<comment><USER5> Malls will throw you out if you clearly have no intent of buying anything.

<comment><USER6> Needs citation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure where i read it, but it kinda reminds me of how a math professor walked past a room where a presentation on some problem (not sure if it was biology, physics, or something else) was held.

One glance at the formula on display, and he recognized it as something that had long been solved in mathematics.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've often thought about how difficult it is to find people with the information and insight you need in universities / cities. I'm not even talking about people who can provide profound insight, which is more complicated, merely someone with domain expertise. Generally speaking, I rarely know what most people in my lab are working on, let alone what people in other labs on the same floor have expertise in. This service may already exist, but it would be interesting if there was a utility which allowed you to enter you research interests and expertise / have your published papers be parsed and have that information extracted from them; prompt you to enter what skill sets you had questions about or problems you were looking to solve; and have you matched with someone looking for complementary skills.

<comment><USER9> This is why I enjoy going to random talks advertised by your department/other departments - you are exposed to ideas outside of your specialization, you have a chance to meet other researchers etc. Sadly most universities (in my experience) don't have a central newsletter for these, usually only for generic talks that are more designed around a "science is interesting!" theme for the public layman.

Some people at the the University of Queensland used to run the COMBIO seminars, small seminars with sponsored pizza & beers afterwards. Two scientists would present anything related to computational biology, didn't matter what exactly, or what their specialization was. These were a great starting point for networking.

If you're working at a university and would like to see something similar I strongly suggest you set it up yourself, it's a lot of unpaid work but "if you build it, they will come".

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a feel good story but the path do a drug is anything but linear like this portrays. The vast majority of compounds, even when there is a molecule targeting it; fail in Phase I, II, or III trials; or fail to improve upon existing therapies. The truth is, there are about ~5K genes in yeast, and about ~8K yeast geneticists. A lot of stuff that works in the lab doesn't work on actual people or the drug has side effects due to lack of specificity. Selection bias will make a bunch of them look like they're ahead of the curve. A bit like star mutual fund managers.

</comment><comment><USER11> > palbociclib

That looks an awful lot like an anagram of placibo...

</comment><comment><USER12> I think a better title would be:

"Two scientists meeting on a bus leads to discovery in the lab of a breakthrough cancer drug"

</comment><comment><USER13> The title is so bad. I thought one of the scientists pointed out the other one had cancer...

<comment><USER2> That is what I thought ... ahah</comment></comment>


Scala vs. Node.js as a RESTful back end server (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2015/04/22/scala-vs-node-js-as-a-restful-backend-server/ <comment><USER2> > JVM provides a great deal more APIs for creating and handling threads and > processes. Not something you would typically do directly in many webapp > backends but there if you need it.

You might not need it _directly_ , but under the hood it allows each request to run in its own thread, which eliminates the need for asynchronous callbacks that pollute any node.js code. The absence of async callbacks not only makes the code cleaner, but also means that when you're debugging and hit a breakpoint, you can follow the call stack all the way back to the request entrypoint.

"Asynchronous Libraries" is listed as a pro for Node, but unless you're doing something very IO-intensive at 10K req/sec, asynchronicity is not going to matter one bit on the JVM since it's multithreaded. Going from sync to async at 10K req/s will save you a few MB of RAM, that's all. Assuming you've got that few MB to spare, it won't change your throughput or responsiveness at all. It's a premature optimization that makes coding and debugging more difficult. I'd rather state this as "Needs Async Libraries" as a con for Node.

<comment><USER3> > _" It's a premature optimization that makes coding and debugging more > difficult."_

Going multi-threaded and dealing with semaphores and mutexes also makes coding and debugging more difficult. It's all about trade-offs.

<comment><USER4> Generally true. Though, in context of webapps, each thread usually works on one request. If your threads share (mutable) states in that case then something is VERY broken.

<comment><USER2> Kind of, but consider logging. In node you can just console.log. In JVM you have to use a multi threaded logging library or your logs could be jumbled. Lots of things like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work with Play Framework ([https://playframework.com](https://playframework.com)) which is probably most well known scala MVC framework out there. Now I don't know about node.js based backends, but apparently Play can do 60K requests per second out of the box ([https://playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Highlights25#p...](https://playframework.com/documentation/2.5.x/Highlights25#performance- improvements)) which is pretty good scalability.

<comment><USER6> I've also been working with Play Framework and I'm pretty impressed at how awesome and easy to use everything is. The documentation is great, the performance is great.

I'm using it for just a web API, and I've had several scala developers tell me to use akka-http instead because it is simpler. I tried, but the route api is quite horrid in comparison to a simple file-based routing description, and the utilities (like the web service client) were a nightmare to work with and debug. And to top it off, the performance was still worse than play. Maybe all of that will get better, but as of right now, Play is hard to beat.

My only complaints so far:

1) Slick is bloated and kludgy and still produces bad SQL queries...I've resorted to using the plain SQL interface which is nice, but not great.

2) It could use some support for API description languages like swagger.

3) Testing your code using the dependency injection framework has been very unintuitive (I'm pretty new to dependency injection frameworks though, so maybe it's just me).

4) Action composition has been a lot harder than expected (for example: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36683676/play-action- comp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/36683676/play-action-composition- hardcoding-parameterized-parser))

5) I wish I didn't have to deal with an opaque SBT plugin, and that the project just used a regular SBT project structure. I realize there are reasons for needing a plugin (like codegen for routes, etc.), but at least document how to work with the plugin better. SBT is like working with a black box as it is, no need to make it worse.

<comment><USER7> > " _I 'm using it for just a web API, and I've had several scala developers > tell me to use akka-http instead because it is simpler_"

Have you tried Spray? It still uses akka for actors, but I consider it easier to use than akka-http.

[http://spray.io/](http://spray.io/)

<comment><USER8> For some reason I've been thinking that Akka HTTP is basically Spray 2.0. Is that not right?

<comment><USER7> You're correct. Spray is being deprecated for akka-http and is really "spray 2.0."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I like the storm of Scala.js comments on the article. It's definitely game- changing for the Scala ecosystem. You can run Scala on node.js now, and by extension you can package desktop apps written 100% in Scala.js using Electron.

I'm just starting to fiddle with it, but Scala.js on both the backend and frontend seems like a great combination – lets you use the same language _and packages_ throughout your application, and frees you from the JVM.

<comment><USER10> Wow that's a lot of code delegacy there: scala => scala.js => node.js => electron => desktop.

<comment><USER9> Building cross-platform apps with the same codebase is gonna be ugly one way or another. This particular method is interesting to me personally because I'd rather depend on node.js than Oracle's JVM.

It's worth mentioning that Scala might get a native backend soon, partly built on the same infrastructure as Scala.js – that could give you a migration path from node.js/Electron to a truly native app with a simple WebView for UI. See [https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/4ftcx4/scala_native_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/4ftcx4/scala_native_coming_soon/)

<comment><USER11> I am not sure what makes you trust node.js (V8) more than the JVM. The JVM has been in solid for a long time, has higher performance, and more stable. The JVM GC is very good and highly-tunable.

<comment><USER9> Either of those technologies is good enough technically for my purposes.

However, I have much more confidence in node's new governance (and therefore its bright future) than in Oracle. Oracle essentially has a monopoly on Java. And they're not nice guys. I don't feel comfortable building a cross platform application on Java no matter how much momentum it has gained historically.

<comment><USER11> The Java ecosystem is fairly complex and it's hard to understand. Your statement of "Oracle essentially has a monopoly on Java" is not true, considering Java language is used to built Android apps, runs on diff VM and uses different bytecode -- outside the control of Oracle (about 2M andorid apps and 1.6B phone sold). Another thing to consider, the JVM is an open spec and most of it is open sourced, see OpenJDK. There is also many implementations of the JVM, see; [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines)

<comment><USER9> Indeed, I don't have a good understanding of the JVM ecosystem. However:

Google is tentatively on the hook for $9B for... essentially implementing its own JVM... or something. Doesn't matter to me, end result is that the future of Java on Android is far from clear. They're allegedly looking into using Swift as the next generation Android language.

RoboVM, one of the better / more popular ways to write iOS apps in Java was close-sourced, then acquired by Xamarin, then Microsoft, then shut down.

Oracle charges licensing fees for using JVM in embedded devices and kiosks.

To summarize, there's an incredible amount of tools and libraries for Java, but I don't like where Java's mobile story is going in general.

As far as I know the number of viable JVM machines you could build a business on is maybe... 5 at most? They're all experimental and/or abandoned.

Meanwhile, node / JS / ASM.js / Emscripten and friends are only getting better, faster and more widespread outside of the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can remember when Git began to replace Subversion, but a lot of companies resisted the trend, because Git was so radically different. Subversion was comfortable: everything was centralized, and the revision numbers went up in an orderly fashion: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6... You always knew where you were in history, with Subversion. It was clear that Git was better in some fundamental way, and yet it took effort to understand it, conceptually, at first.

I feel like the same thing is happening now with GraphQL versus REST. On some level it seems like GraphQL is altogether better than REST, but we don't see a mad rush to adopt GraphQL, because it represents a big shift in thinking, and those of us who just spent the last 10 years creating RESTful interfaces, we are a bit slow to throw out all of our work and start over with GraphQL. Also, the frontend needs to change as much as the backend, so it requires a full re- write of everything.

All the same, a title like "Scale vs. Node.js as a RESTful back end server" does strike me as an anachronism in 2016. Who cares? I doubt I will ever again build a RESTful interface. Rather, on the project I'm working on right now, we are getting rid of the RESTful interface and we are looking at our GraphQL options:

[https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome- graphql](https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-graphql)

Is Scala or Node.js the best option for building a GraphQL server? That would be an interesting article.

<comment><USER13> I have a question I have been trying to figure out for a while. All the examples of clients that use GraphQL seem to be javascript; is there any support for writing, for example, a Java client to talk to a GraphQL backend? This would really help make it easier to port infrastructure over piece by piece.

<comment><USER14> GraphQL defines the query language, but uses simple HTTP as the transport. It's not like like redis or mysql - those use custom protocols and so require special clients to use them. GraphQL backends are like Elasticsearch backends - you access them by hitting the exposed HTTP endpoint with your query in plain text. You could do this with any HTTP client library in any language, or even with curl.

<comment><USER13> Thats true, but in a typed, structured language, you generally build some kind of data structure to deserialize responses into. With REST endpoints, each response can be translated to a specific predefined object in a client library. GraphQL seems to, by design, ignore this kind of usage in favor of the "heterogenus untyped dictionary responses"... do I really have to write custom data types for every single different query?

<comment><USER14> I think get this now - with SOAP/RPC/REST we can establish the interaction contract by explicitly defining inputs and outputs. With that contract, we can draw clearly defined system boundaries, give better assurances to the developer that they are doing the right thing, and improve testing.

You're right - in the scale of app-level problems, GraphQL is just a low-level protocol. It requires language-specific libs to address these higher-level problems (provide interfaces, structs, query typing, etc). As a very basic example, programatically building a GraphQL query is unnecessary complex outside of JS because many languages don't yet have a QueryBuilder for the GraphQL syntax. There are some community efforts, but as of yet no heavy corporate players to drive GraphQL-specific dev (e.g. like Pivotal/Sensio/Sencha did for their respective fields).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comparing a web framework with a JVM language is completely pointless.

A better comparison would have been: Vert.x vs. Node.js

</comment><comment><USER16> The section describing strong typing is pretty weak/vague, and seems to actually be referring to static typing

</comment><comment><USER17> I mostly agree. Should almost always be a project specific decision in my opinion. If you know that you will not scale to size XYZ than maintaining a backend based on Scala is just not worth it.

<comment><USER18> I agree on best tool for the task at hand, however can you elaborate on your second comment?

Why do you think a Scala backend can be more trouble than it's worth?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Javascript eco system is so funny overnight its become a kind of compiled language :-)

Now you can choose the language you like and transpile to Javascript.

I like it though. Especially as Scala and Scala.js are phenomenal :)</comment>


Chromium proposal for browser-level infinite scrolling lists: Lazy Block Layout - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/a/chromium.org/document/d/1-tbcMJV8wNbX2g5ehNIcE_1W7Kj_B3g9w1BrUgHnh3U/edit

<comment><USER2> I can't be the only one that absolutely despises infinitely scrolling lists, right?

<comment><USER3> Depends, infinite scrolling can be and has been done right [0], but it's really not the focus of the feature -- it's a product.

[0] <http://warpspire.com/experiments/history-api/>

<comment><USER4> Having a linkable infinite scroll is only solving one of the issues in infinite scroll.

Have you ever tried to click the links in Facebook below your news feed?

Why is it that everyone who implements automatic infinite scroll shoves it into a context where there's stuff beneath it on the page, making that content completely inaccessible?

<comment><USER3> No, because FB puts the same links and content under the right-hand side. Can you enumerate the issues that need to be addressed? I have ready of research on the lack-luster implementations (eg. Twitter) that many assume is the status quo.

<comment><USER5> My biggest problem is how to get back to where I was. I was reading a funny tumblr on my phone and got to the point where the page was incredibly slow, so I wanted to start reading again from where I currently was in the page... how do I do that?

<comment><USER6> The great-grandparent of your reply details such a solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I encountered a similar issue awhile back with a Chrome-based terminal emulator, which this would also solve. Every time it outputs a line, it scrolls to the bottom, which forces a reflow; and if the scrollback is long, the reflows get slow, and performance ended up being really pathetic. The solution ended up being a hack to prevent the per-line reflows (Javascript scrolling and bottom-relative positioning), but this would be a better fix.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been working on a problem that this browser extension would solve really well. I've got a photo gallery with a hundred thousand photos in it where I implemented near-infinite scroll by creating a really tall div and then drawing about 2x as many thumbnails as are needed to fit in the current viewport, which is updated when the user scrolls. They are square thumbnails so it is easy to calculate exactly where to position each of them.

The advantage of this over infinite scroll is that the scrollbar is always there and always accurate, so coming back to the page after following a link works properly. Also, I don't have to send the information about all 100k photos on page load (I can load it with AJAX).

A demo of how it works is at <http://beta.hypercheese.com/search>, and the code is at <http://github.com/jewel/hypercheese/>.

It sounds like having this in the browser will allow for much more complex layouts.

<comment><USER9> Cool, but seems like with your implementation, you can scroll too fast and get lost in the "white". Not sure how fix it, possible showing somekind of grid before loading the images could help.

There is a good talk from Netflix team about the problem, specially with low- performance machines. They slowed scrolling so you couldn't get lost. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=x...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xuMWhto62Eo)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the feedback. Rendering a grid would be easy to do and would help a lot.

I am debouncing the scroll events right now and haven't tried making the timing more aggressive so that it doesn't sit at white for as long as it does. Right now the long pause is just because of a timer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't tell if this would help rendering large lists of dom elements that are loaded all at once... eg what things like infinity.js, ember tables, etc do. I wish there was a UITableView for the web that was more native than any of those solutions.

<comment><USER11> Mozilla's XUL had a native treeview element, and I remember it being horrible to work with.

<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XUL/tree>

<comment><USER10> I can't imagine XML anything being pleasant to work with to be honest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The web (and WebKit in particular) is on track to catch up w/ native frameworks in terms of tools at the disposal of developers. Albeit in a slightly more rough form.

The next 5-10 years are going to be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER13> Things I'd like to see on browser native engine:

* markdown renderer

* jQuery core

* crypto

* gzip/deflate/xz/zip compression/decompression

<comment><USER14> What do you need compression for that you can't just use content-encoding?

<comment><USER15> Think about the places where the average application uses compression codecs.

Now, think about the kinds of applications people are trying to build in web browsers.

If you were to represent these two groups as a venn diagram, you would have one giant honkin' circle.

(A few examples for the lazy: On-the-fly content compression/decompression for games; caching large amounts of application data in compressed form in order to reduce disk space usage; using compression codecs that are faster or produce better compression ratios than gzip.)</comment></comment></comment>


Bloomberg's guide to success: "Don't take a lunch break or go to the bathroom" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ZaidJilani/status/1227664578659717120 <comment><USER2> Now I see why Jeff Bezos called him to run for president. Jeff also doesn't believe in employees having bathroom breaks.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full quote because it was too long for the title:

Michael Bloomberg's guide to success.

"Make sure you're the first one in there every day and the last one to leave. Don't ever take a lunch break or go to the bathroom. You keep working."

<comment><USER3> Honestly, if you want to be up for raises and promotions in a corporate environment, this isn't bad advice at all. All other things being equal, someone who comes in earlier will be seen as a harder worker than someone who comes in later. It's a pretty easy win.

(Myself, I'm more of a slacker...)</comment></comment>