qeorge

It makes no sense, but if you don't like it your option is to not accept Visa. They own the customer so they make the rules. It doesn't matter if its PayPal, Stripe, or any other merchant - if your buyer initiates a chargeback, you'll lose the money until its resolved (~6 months, usually).

As such, PayPal/Stripe/any other merchant account will hold your money for a period of time, until they are comfortable that either:

    1) its been long enough that a chargeback is unlikely
    2) they'll be able to get the money back from you if a chargeback occurs later.

Also relevant to this specific case: its against the TOS of Visa/MC/AMEX/etc to charge the buyer before shipment. You're supposed to authorize at time of purchase and capture only when you actually ship the goods. The OP seems to blatantly violate this, and I suspect they'll have to change the practice regardless of their choice of merchant account.

None of this excuses PayPal's lack of customer support. But Stripe et. all may not be the panacea you're hoping for. Credit cards are where these crazy policies originate, and unless you're prepared to stop accepting them, you'll have to play ball.

That's a pretty shitty experience, to be the only one who can't get in and have to walk away alone. A little solidarity would have gone a long way.

Also, their git site has a bit: http://git.wpengine.com/

Problem is, every time it beeps at you and the cashier overrides it, it averages your item's reported weight with the ones its seen before. So if a cashier is overriding it all the time (as tends to happen with constantly beeping things) the weights drift off, and the whole thing is quite useless.

"SETI but paid" is a very tempting idea, but we could never get the back of the envelope math to work out to the point where we could pay the contributors anything compelling (e.g., enough to offset their power cost).

I guess you can get a few people to sign-up for fun, but we could never come up with a reason other than serendipity that would make people donate their CPU time for us to resell. I'll be interested to see how/if they respond to this challenge, or if there's something I'm not seeing that makes this point moot.

Trello makes it easy to see what's getting done by whom, and who is available to work on the next item coming down the pipe. Client work gets done faster, and we have more time for internal projects. We have one board for invoices, one for leads, and one for projects. Its a great system.

So, we owe a huge thanks to the folks at Fog Creek, and I can't understand why we can't pay them. But also to Ryan Carson and Thomas Ptacek, for their strong recommendations of Trello[1] and daily billing[2], respectively.

[1] http://ryancarson.com/post/24884883426/how-i-manage-40-peopl... [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4101802

This is (to my knowledge) the most relevant case regarding facts and copyright. Rural made a local phone book, and Feist made an aggregate phone book which wholesale copied Rural's listings (and presumably others).

In this case Rural did seed their phone book with fake listings as you describe. Feist copied the fake listings along with the legitimate listings and still won the case.

I'll definitely check out your eBook. Thanks again!

Its so much healthier, cheaper, and easier than any other option. She just emails us the menu on Monday morning and we all pick what we want and email it back. Couldn't be easier.

Point being: I think a lot of people want to buy this, and would if only it was easy to connect with local cooks (a friend referred us to Thao, or we'd have never known about her). ZeroCater is a great idea as well, but I really like the aspect of buying home cooked food from a local person vs. a restaurant because its cheaper, usually healthier, and its the closest thing to getting a home-cooked meal from my Mom.

(Sidebar: anyone in Raleigh, do yourself a favor and check out Thao Beck at http://www.lunchboxnmore.com/. Just shoot her an email and say you'd like to get the menu next week and she'll take it from there [or email me and I'll be happy to introduce you]. I can't recommend her highly enough, especially for companies. Here's a couple favs I had to photograph: http://imgur.com/a/v80kd)

Fred's further advice of getting right to the point and giving them honest, clear reasons is spot on. He's not advocating for bullshitting the employee; he's advocating for not being a dick when there's no reason for it.

I get the concept, but I have no idea where to find a good supplier. We'd love to do an e-commerce play but don't have anything (physical) to sell.

All the info I've found online has been spammy (e.g., lists of drop shippers for sale on Digital Point).

Glad to see it worked out. Congrats!

In Firebug, you can ask the :hover state to stay active.

    1. HTML tab
    2. Click on the element
    3. Style menu on the right panel
    4. choose :hover

(Apparently this feature has been there for a long time, but I only found it recently. Changed my Firebug life.)

I want to know about the weird things that happen when you push your PHP stack to really ridiculous limits. I think that's what this book will offer. If it ends up being stuff like "use APC! minimize trips to the DB!" I would be very surprised and disappointed.

[Note: I literally just downloaded it, upgraded, and had this experience.]

(about:config, network.http.spdy.enabled = true)

You can't just (quickly) query any key in the document - you have to define indexes anyway or you'll be doing the equivalent of a table scan or Map/Reduce.

Document databases shine when you're just not doing that kind of query anyway, and you've got a ton of data to store. If you need to do e.g., fulltext and/or geospatial search you should probably use a search server anyway (I like Sphinx), and then just lookup by PK in whatever datastore you're using.

Its been mentioned elsewhere on this thread, but I'm also quite fond of the old FriendFeed method: serialize your arbitrary data into a (MySQL) BLOB, and then run a background process to build "indexes" (really tables) when you find out you need them.

Its ridiculously simple to start doing that, and there's no new tech to learn.

Mobile: http://i.imgur.com/kQlmh.png

Desktop: http://i.imgur.com/ZiOqX.png

This appeared in my news feed last night, and is still there now. It moves like a normal item (i.e., its not 'sitckied' to the top or anything like that).

On mobile its pretty jarring. Bigger than any other posts.

http://beluga.grooveshark.com/artist_report.php?artist_name=...

100% male?

Think about Mailgun: obviously I'm capable of running a mail server and parsing incoming mail. But they can do it better, at a price that's cheaper than my time, and give me high availability without my paying a sysadmin.

Its an easy sell.

Some immediate concerns:

Is this really a problem that most people have? (i.e., do most people think Kayak sucks that much?)

Even if they do, how often is this a problem? Once a year?

Are you cooked if Google finally makes a decent flight search engine?

Do the most frequent/valuable flyers even care? (business flyers who aren't paying the fare anyway)

Your solution is full of friction and extremely slow (paying, waiting for results, administering a contest, etc). This model works for 99designs because hiring designers is even more annoying and unpredictable than running an auction. Is flight search the same kind of problem?

The angle, of course, is that you can "resell" the surfaced deals. i.e., when a good deal is surfaced you can promote it on your homepage, sell it to others, and hopefully make a nice commission from the airline. I get that. I just don't see enough people using the service to surface enough deals for this kind of serendipity, and there's nothing to stop Kayak/Orbitz/etc from scraping the deals you do find.

That said maybe you'll learn enough about 'why flight search sucks' that you'll invent a killer new engine and get rich. But I don't think crowdsourced deal finding for flights is a viable idea.

Mint.com does a great job with this, if you need inspiration.

To me, that's absurd on its face. Such persons are beyond reason. Don't forget, amongst this group are suicide bombers.

In the U.S. at least, its widely accepted that the death penalty is not a deterrent for murder, much less terrorism.[1]

[1]http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/files/DeterrenceStudy2009.pd...)

You basically just need to clone from git, setup a VirtualHost, and restart Apache/nginx. I don't have experience setting up Scala, Ruby, etc, but I've done this for PHP and its trivial.

Start by writing a list of commands you issue to start a new project on your dev server. Then add variables, a web form, and you're done.

1) Ability to play without signing up. When I finally did sign-up, they asked for few permissions from Facebook (only name and email, IIRC).

2) Trolls don't ruin the game. The community is great, and will just play through. Example: http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/564/doodleordiecomce5t8eyus...

Its addicting.

"In 1996, I had a little record label, so I got a UPC barcode account, so I could put unique UPC barcodes on my CDs. I had to pay $750 to the Universal Code Council to get a company account, but that meant I was allowed to create 100,000 products under my account. Musician friends asked how, so I showed them how, but also said they could use one of my product IDs.

At first, I did this for free, as a favor, until friends started sending strangers my way. Because it took a little work to generate the number, create their EPS/TIFF graphic barcode, and keep track of their unique IDs forever, I charged $20.

Over the next 12 years, this made me almost $2 million."

http://sivers.org/sharing

If you use multiple computers it gets worse - if you send the message from your laptop it won't go through until the laptop and your friend are online again.

Its not a huge problem with a 1 on 1 chat, but with groups its frustrating.

We benefit greatly from having the chat room as sort of a canonical log of what's happening. Its nice to be able to leave a message for coworkers before you sign off for the night, and know that everyone will see it. With Skype we didn't have that guarantee.

Glad to know it was just a mistake though, as opposed to an attack or failure. Much less worried about recurrence.