aroon

I think the difference is sales tax was paid when the toys were purchased. I don't think Regretsy was claimin to add value. They were just organizing a donation of toys. It's just like a bunch of friends getting together, all giving two dollars to one person who goes to target, buys a bunch of toys and then gives them to needy kids. I don't see how the law is broken in that situation. All taxes were paid.

The most damning evidence against PP in my opinion is that they specifically stated (accordion to the author) that the same scheme was acceptable when raising money for a sick cat but not for needy kids. Unless the Regretsy folks were purchasing toys with a business account and skipping sales tax I don't understand the logic. The PP reps subsequent attitude seals the deal: eff PayPal. If he isn't authorized I dole out financial or legal advice regarding the use of the donation button or wrt raising money for needy kids he should just say that instead of being an obstinate jerk.

tldr: tax presumably was paid, PayPal rep is a scumbag, screw PayPal.

How much something costs is not the same as how much it is worth.

Being such a skilled programmer, one would think he could get a loan for a measly 10k and be able to easily pay it back with the kind of salaries we're paid these days...

At some level I'm sure they are reading them, but it gives everyone involved in your communication a central place to track your issue. Always, always, always file a radar and let your DTS/WWDR rep know the bug number.

You should really post your bug number. You did file a radar, right? Bugreport.apple.com...

How does a machine taking advantage of small arbitrage opportunities that last fractions of a second represent an "investors assessment of economic conditions"?

That was easily the most misinformed article I have ever read on tc. I'm not even sure where to begin. About the only thing that is right is that services will be moving to the application layer in the long run because there are benefits the abstracting the network. But the idea that the people providing the data link upon which every service you care about depends on are becoming irrelevant is so absurd it makes me laugh. Where would apple and google be and where are they going without them?

I'm amazed at how many words can come out of Ballmer's mouth without him having actually said anything...

This is super old news. Why isn't this modded off the front page?

Have you filed a bug? Please do and reply with a bug number.

In the time it took to act smart you could have just read the code and seen that his intuition was mostly right. The code is extremely simple. It reads like a half day project just for fun that happened to get picked up on HN. It doesn't seem to be at all related to his line of study either.

For you interest and information, he has a defined set of bounding boxes in the world for each of the user pickable regions. He generates random lat lons until one lands in an enabled region's bounding box and then makes a request for street view data to google. If google returns a 200 he sets the street view display to the lat Lon and otherwise tries to find another lat Lon. If he ever gets a 500 from Google he quits.

To be fair, my first cell phone only displayed one line of text which was only numbers, didn't have a phone book, had terrible call quality, in addition to all the listed missing features. So the Kin is actually a great phone. Should have sold millions.

I'm not sure why people are so offended by what Facebook has done. They've just made the information people made publicly available already easy to parse for computers. Full disclosure: I had no way to prepare for Facebook's new features and I haven't change a single privacy settings since it launched. I just used this site to check what was publicly available for the first time and none of it was a surprise except my events and I don't feel invaded in any way. Feel free to browse around my profile.

http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/aroon

Yes, why is HN driving traffic to an ad?

BTW, I know this idea is kind of out of left field but its the first thing I thought when I saw the box. It really looks like it would be a pleasure to take a shower in it while being in the garden.

I think this would be so much better and useful if it was a solar powered shower that sat in your garden. It could catch rain water when available and use tap water (from the hose) otherwise. It's pretty simple to stick a water tank in a solar oven to heat the water too. And you don't need a water pump if the water tank is on the roof, you get plenty of water pressure from gravity.

The water could also then drain into the garden if you used the right soaps in the shower.

A nice design like this could really bring grey water to people who don't want to build their own outdoor showers.

I tried a low res and high res picture of some Gill Sans here and it failed too. And they have Gill Sans in their db. The results list had fonts that were kind of close but different in some significant ways.

I ran through it providing answers for Gill Sans and I got back 30 possible fonts. Gil Sans was near the bottom. I guess this is pretty useful if you're working from a picture of something.

please don't forget Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Greatest news quiz show ever.

There are only 10 questions, you can't review your questions before final submission of the test, some of the questions are pretty silly, and some of the terminology is questionable.

I think these kinds of "standardized" tests only make sense when the results are normalized against the population of test takers. That most embedded software developers received a D- only tells us that a combination of the performance of the test and the performance of the test taker was poor.

BUG ALERT!

The contact sync feature has an option to replace your existing photos in your contacts and is disabled by default.

Unfortunately, it seems to have gone ahead and replaced many of the photos I have set for contacts. It hasn't done it for all of them but it has for many of them. I'm not sure about all the details of the bug but be aware that it's likely your pictures will be replaced whether you want them to or not.

You also may have to sync a couple times before photos are synced to all the relevant contacts. Their photo download protocol looks pretty chatty and I guess some of the requests fail and they aren't re-trying until the next sync session.

"if you can’t get fired for missing a deadline then you aren’t a real programmer working in the real world"

I thought the essay was pretty good until I hit that line. I feel like mastering something kind of requires rising above the daily grind. In order to master programming wouldn't one have to be a programmer simply by existence? I, for one, don't consider myself a programmer because I write code for Apple or because I have a degree that says I'm a certified computer scientist. I'm a programmer because I write programs.

Did that line bother anyone else?

and the response to Randall: http://www.tsa.gov/blog/2009/10/response-to-bag-check-cartoo...

I like the idea but it could use a little sprucing up to become actionable:

1) Let me enter conversation topics. Or just ice breaker topics. In my head the table headings would read: Hi, I'm | @ | on | for | interested in |. Interested in would then be the place for me to dump some suggestion for breaking into a conversation. I could say "Ponies and Unicorns" so that someone would just have something comfortable to say to me other than "uh...hi, i saw your on this website". Or i could put "Communism and the fall of the USSR" to ward of small talkers.

2) I know you probably want to avoid having people log in and junk like that but it would be nice to (optionally) let people log in to their favorite social service (facebook, twitter) so you could pull their profile image and display it in the table. It helps with identifying people.

Sounds like a great idea.

the app looks great. as a hiker the topo maps excited me more than anything else. paper maps are expensive!

only other thing is i wonder why you don't use mapkit for regular maps instead of another map source. with mapkit you get the same great user experience user's expect and all the mapkit improvements coming for free.

Have you considered using Facebook connect to make the page more relevant? Local comments can be fun to read once in a while but if a friend has left a comment I definitely want to see it. Just make people log into facebook to leave a comment. You can also tell me what other friends have "been interested in" the weather at the location I'm looking at.

It also gives you a clear method of expansion (ie. into facebook through mini-feed stories and stuff).

I like the page. It's very simple and to the point.

Love the page. It's very simple and nice.

That's pretty much right. I'd call it de-glorified if anything since you can't do anything after you "pick" a color. But the only other free alternative to this app was to take photos of stuff, somehow (email, iPhone sync, etc) get them on my computer, and then use some desktop image editing software to check out the colors in the image.

The app is much more on demand and I think it'll be fun to use when I'm doing non-brainy stuff like grocery shopping or sitting in a train.

More importantly, it's been really fun to write since I didn't really understand CoreGraphics before I started. I thought the app would be really easy to write since the idea is so simple but it's actually taken quite a bit of grunt work and a considerable amount of crawling through Apple developer docs.

I plan on sticking the app in the app store just for fun. I couldn't find an app that does what mine does for free. I think there were two alternatives, one that cost 10 bucks and was pretty sweet and one that was 5 bucks and sucked. If mine sucks, at least it'll be free! And if even 100 people download it I'll probably extend it to be able to email color swatches to people and save favorite colors.