inertial

Airbnb says "The safety and privacy of our community -- both online and offline -- is our priority [1]"

[1] Contradicts the experience of the guest : "They still didn't seem to grasp the seriousness of the issue. They were treating it like a canceled booking," Nealie Barker said. Ultimately, Airbnb's trust and safety team promised to conduct an investigation, and it temporarily suspended the listing. ... After she got through to them two weeks later, the company told her that the host had been "exonerated," and the listing reinstated. It was only after she posted about the incident on Facebook and local New Zealand news stations reported her experience that the host was permanently banned, she said.

how to type and do basic math, I did it in clojure using Repl.it

Can you share the repl or add some more detail please on how was it better than traditional methods

How about truecrypt/veracrypt with Dropbox ?

Old smartphones are good as security cameras

They don't get updates and are not secure to be used as network connected security cameras.

What's the trick to be happy & joyous (without any strings attached) ? How does one train the mind to not be achievement driven (especially if you are on HN everyday) ?

Can anyone recommend a course or a book to achieve that ? Something that makes you happy naturally (not forced).

This is a serious issue, especially for small merchants dealing with digital products. A chargeback is too much work to fight and rarely in favor of the merchant.

After all it's "just" software. Besides yourself, nobody really cares how you solved the problem.

More that once I've come across such crossroads, and the answer for me is:

(i) Find a niche in which you can excel, master your domain and then people will "care".

OR

(ii) Don't worry about how others perceive you as long as you are having fun along the journey. Find a way to stay happy.

Sad that it's still not possible to change notification sound for apps at the OS level i.e. for apps that don't offer the functionality to change the sound.

Lots of prior info available

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14974383

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13425728

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249523

Also DIY options :

https://github.com/ttlequals0/autovpn

https://github.com/jlund/streisand

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

https://github.com/Nyr/openvpn-install

https://github.com/robbintt/popup-openvpn

https://github.com/sovereign/sovereign

There are many countries where Stripe etc. aren't available. Starting an LLC in USA is an easy route to get that going albeit at additional compliance cost (e.g. filing informational returns). The article above clarifies that a foreign owned LLC with no income connected with US doesn't have to pay taxes in US. They just have to pay tax in their home country. It makes it more appealing & easier to start an LLC.

Relevant for non-residents / foreign owned LLC :

https://onlinetaxman.com/us-llc-tax-haven-for-foreigners/

If you don’t have a dependent agent that substantially furthers your business in the US and don’t have an office in the US, you are not subject to US tax. Even if the LLC generates income in the US, the income is not taxed in the US.

Furthermore, if you reside in a country with an applicable tax treaty with the US, then you would not be subject to US tax. Since you reside in your tax home, you can claim you operate a “permanent establishment” (e.g., an office or other fixed place of business) in your home country.

The bad part of credit card fraud is that the card network, issuing bank & gateways pass on the liability to the small merchant. There is always a looming risk of losing your account & business due to excessive fraud, something over which you have no control at times. If you become over aggressive with fraud protection, you risk not only losing revenue but pissing off genuine customers.

Your gateway would tell you that as a merchant, it's your job & responsibility to accept a charge & related risk of fraud. Well, if big guys handling billions of payments can't catch fraud, it's quite easy for a small guy to miss it as well.

When you are selling a digital product, it's very difficult to win a chargeback. Some low level bank employee hardly cares about your meticulous documentation & proof that you delivered the product.

3D secure is one way to shift liability to issuing bank but it only works for the first charge (not recurring subscription). There are lots of reasons for getting hit by incorrect chargebacks e.g. mistake on part of a customer because they didn't recognize, customer's card getting stolen midway during a subscription, unhappy customer who wants a refund after using your service for months etc.

I wish the industry would side with the merchant as well at times i.e. maybe a rating system to see how easy is the merchant's cancellation / refund policy etc.

There's was also this article a few months ago on some glaring flaws in Tesla vs i3

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16305520

Awesome job on making it easy to add usage based plans. I've found Stripe's customer service to be a notch above the rest.

Request to folks at Stripe ( @pc / @tarstarr ) : Please do something to protect small business owners against fraudulent payments (i.e. with stolen cards). Even if they follow all recommended practices by Stripe, it's very likely that there are a handful of stolen cards that will fly under the radar and hit them negatively.

I'd say if the merchant is not at fault due to a stolen card being used on their site, they should not get penalized for it. The chargeback fee is one thing, the worse part is the dispute rate going up. This threatens the existence of any business if their account is suspended by Stripe.

- Are there any good (easy to use) payment processors available in Estonia (like Stripe) ?

- Is your startup governed by specific laws for data privacy etc.

- What about legal disputes, arbitration. How does that work for startups based out of Estonia ?

That's a great suggestion and might work well with vmware.

Looks cool, wish the screen was a bit bigger.. around 9"-10"

I've been searching for a light & thin computing device for intermittent travel needs where I can

- use SSH

- edit & run code (i.e. python / JS etc.)

- preferable running Ubuntu

- form factor of iPad or iPad Pro

- multitask with browser, terminal and editor

Your article is the closest thing I've found so far. The list of tools that you use are also useful, thank you !

If it had Ubuntu, it would have been a perfect solution for me.

Porsche had (or has) similar issues with opening the hood without power.

https://perryandcoblog.com/2009/11/17/porsche-carrera-911-99...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss6-8TJYIqE

It sounds fairly reasonable to me. You design a cool app but it evolves into something much more than what you envisioned. You are still passionate about it but it doesn't mean that you have to be a compulsive user. Same story with several employees / key executives. There are there to perform a role, maybe manage engineering, run finance etc. They really don't need to be immersed in the app to do that, neither should they be expected to.

For Dengue fever, aspirin can be fatal:

"infecting organism in dengue affects the platelets which are responsible for clotting (stopping bleeding) increasing the tendency of the person to bleed. Aspirin and Ibuprofen also have similar action. Both of them together could cause the person to bleed excessively pushing the patient into what is called the ‘Dengue Shock syndrome’. And once in this stage, medical treatment is needed in an emergency basis and hospitalization becomes necessary"

http://www.thehealthsite.com/diseases-conditions/dengue-feve...

Similar question but for those who live in a place where legal liability is not a concern and are working solo. Is there any significant advantage to incorporate until you are "big" ? It's just a lot of paperwork & compliance headache IMO.

Ubuntu on Thinkpad T series works well, e.g.

https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201702-25371/

They are rugged and have a good keyboard. You can find a brand new at 70% of a Dell XPS price (at Lenovo's outlet / eBay / BHPhotovideo).

On the "slowdown with old battery" issue, does an old iPhone speed up when it's connected to a charger.

P.S. Just asking out of curiosity, in case someone has an old device and wants to run benchmarks.

Genuinely curious : What's a good alternative to setting a population limit per city ?

Having lived in cities that are crumbling under poor infrastructure, unchecked growth, excessive pollution (from vehicles, stuck in endless traffic jams), shortage of water/electricity, I wonder what can be done to fix this. Everyone from across the country wants to migrate to a few big cities that provide good employment. We shouldn't stop them from seeking opportunities but at the same time the local government has to ensure a minimal quality of life for the existing residents. What would be a short term solution (implementable in 1-3 years) that can balance this ?

There's trash-cli that moves files to "trash". Alias "rm" to display an error message to avoid accidental deletions.

https://github.com/sindresorhus/trash-cli

That's quite interesting. Was the issue specific to any particular browser/platform/country combination ?

Stripe's server log might record/report failures in loading scripts. Perhaps someone from Stripe can chime in on the issue.

Thanks for the tip. It seems that ghostery's issue was fixed in August [1]. The latest version of ghostery does not block Stripe elements. Preventing an extension update isn't straight forward so we are left wondering if there's some other extension that's blocking Stripe.

https://twitter.com/stripe/status/899812679447187456

We are able to capture the error / stack with vanilla JS. Tried sentry too. Wondering how would it help in debugging. What we have is the error message and the user agent but unable to reproduce the same problem unless we no more about the extensions installed or if the user agent is fake.

Slightly OT : With Stripe elements, we noticed an error in about 5% of the requests, something like "Stripe is not defined". Some of these errors were traced to older browsers with JS issues that couldn't execute "https://js.stripe.com/v3/". But some remain unexplained. Unfortunately, it's hard to debug a client side error unless a client reports it.

Just thinking out load about possible issues that could cause this failure:

1) Extension blocking Stripe (as @Artemis2 mentioned below)

2) An older browser that's unable to execute Stripe JS (but uses a fake user agent that confuses us into thinking that a modern browser might be failing).

3) Unreliable internet client connection that is unable to load Stripe script intermittently.

Stripe elements is beautiful & flexible and the team is super helpful. We'd love to use it, but with the above problem, it's a bit scary to lose customers silently. For now, we are sticking with the Checkout flow.

We'd appreciate any tips on how to catch/fix an error like this ?