I had the same thing happen to me. I wrote about it on my blog http://mattarkin.com/protect-your-azure-linux-vm-aka-how-to-.... Basically I complained to Microsoft, they said they'd waive the charge but since it was for a linux vm they said they couldn't cover it. Then I complained to American Express claiming it was an unauthorized and fraudulent charge. Amex sent the dispute to Microsoft and they never responded so I wont the chargeback.
Yea, I and a couple friends interviewed for S13 (maybe it was S12), and while preparing is definitely helpful there is no way you can have scripted answers to everything. That assumes you know what they are going to ask (and chances are if you know what they are going to ask, you didn't make something clear). We did a couple practice interviews with YC alums and the questions they asked ended up being quite different from what was actually asked in the room. To me at least, the interview seemed much more like a discussion about our idea and its merits and issues than what people may normally think an interview to be (of a VC asking you intense questions and pulling apart every single hole in your financial model).
On the other hand, maybe they saw three college freshman and decided to go easy on us.
One thing is that Stripe's documentation only shows the latest version, not the version of the API you are on. So for instance the API docs will show that the way you create a refund is charge->refunds->create(), but if your first request was before multiple refunds were a thing that api call would error since the api is expecting charge->refund().
Stripe Marketplaces isn't actually a product, there are two products, Stripe Connect and then the Trasnfers API. In the Stripe Connect set up every vendor in the marketplace has their own Stripe account and then each vendor is responsible for things like chargebacks, disputes, etc. The marketplace is just authorized to initiate API calls on behalf of the vendor (so the marketplace can handle the disputes and refunds, but the money comes from the vendor).
With the Transfers API, the marketplace just ACHs funds from their Stripe account to the vendor's bank account, so the Marketplace has to handle all the liability.
As someone who has worked a ton with the Stripe API, whenever I use Braintree's (vZero) API it looks soo much like they are trying to copy Stripe, but fail so so hard. Want to get the subscriptions for a customer? Sure, first get all the cards the customer has, then iterate through that list of cards and combine all the subscriptions for each card. Oh, is that a paypal customer, well credit cards and paypal accounts are separate and each can contain subscriptions.
"All this recent evidence led us to speculate whether Microsoft is simply planning to just use Windows for its brand in the future, and that appears to be the case"
Is speculation really necessary? Microsoft seems to have publicly announced "One Windows." And for those not really following Windows Phone and Threshold (Windows 9), the future seems to be an OS that adapts to the device you're on. If you're on a phone, a Phone app appears, large enough screen, the desktop becomes available, etc.
Visa/Mastercard/Amex all offer systems that can automatically alert merchants that you got a new card. I've just got my American Express card replaced and about half the merchants that I have a subscription with were still able to charge my card without my intervention.
I probably get asked for ID less than 1% of the time. In general it tends to be in odd locations too. In my experience a less than $20 dollar purchase is more likely to have the employee ask for my ID than a $200 purchase.
Like everyone has said, get a credit card and pay it in full. Ideally pay it in full before your statement comes. Many starter credit cards will have a ridiculously low limit, my first discover card was $500. The issue with paying just on-time and not before the statement date is that discover reports your balance as of the day the statement prints so my reported available credit was always dismal.
I also had some American Express charge cards, they don't have a huge affect on your credit but they may help you get an American Express credit card if you have a thin file.
Once you got some credit, you can go for a car loan. I opted for a lease (since they tend to be cheaper then a new car). My current credit score tends to hover around a 720 FICO and I'm a rising junior, will probably go up a decent amount when I remember to pay my discover card in full before the statement date.
Welcome to the banking system. If they're going threw the debit card channels, through Visa, they might charge a fee, Balanced's bank may charge a fee, Balanced has to pay its employees, pay for hosting its servers, make sure they are PCI compliant, etc.
Its my understanding that Visa / Mastercard will protect non pin based debit transactions (since they are really credit transactions). ACH is a different beast, from what it sounded like when reading the article, Balanced is somehow determining account numbers / routing numbers from bank accounts, which would be bad if they got hacked. On the other hand, they could just be issuing refunds to the cards.
Yes, Creditors are people who Mtgox owes money (you've extended a line of credit of X bitcoins or fiat to them). This is really not a what if. The whole purpose of bankruptcy is because the entity can meet all its financial obligations, if the trustee could make enough revenue to pay all the users than company assets (bitcoins in wallet) would equal company liabilities (bitcoins that belong to users).
After all the stuff is sold, and expenses related to the administration of bankruptcy proceeding is paid, the remaining funds is distributed in an order of priority to the creditors (so back wages normally have priority to other liability). Assuming all users are in the same priority level, it would be a safe judgement to assume that each user would get a percentage of the remaining funds = user's number of bitcoins / total number of user bitcoins.
This is how it works in the US at least, I'm not versed with Japanese bankruptcy protection laws but assuming its similar, you'd be lucky to get a portion of the money you're owed. If I recall correctly, they owed about 700,000 in btc and they found 200,000, assuming no other assets / liabilities / expenses you'd get 28% of your btc/fiat back.
Basically what happens under bankruptcy is the trustee sells all the assets of the business. From that revenue, the trustee pays any costs related to the administration of the bankruptcy proceeding, whats left over gets distributed to the creditors.
Gone sounds so permanent, they're somewhere, will you be getting them back? Probably not. At most you might get ((sum of MtGox assets sold at liquidation prices) - (amount owed to non users, past due bills, etc))/(number of bitcoins they owe their users) * 20. Read: Not much
I got an email like 2 weeks ago saying I was auto-enrolled in the two day transfer. I guess I'm just special where I don't have to fill out beta signups?
They do have to pay licensing, its money that goes from one business unit to another within the Microsoft Corp, thus to not destroy the Azure budget, they pass the license costs to you instead of eating it.
Yea, that is a tricky part. Most of the video encoding services can be configured to take a thumbnail at the beginning, at a user determined point, or every X seconds.
In my use case,I don't necessarily have any reason to have the entire video encoded and it adds an unnecessarily complicated structure.
Currently I just take a thumbnail .1 second in (this also allows me to utilize minimal bandwidth since I don't download the entire video), but it should be fairly easy to add a parameter