saikat

It seems like a good case for growing these trees for the lumber industry, both to sequester this carbon for good and to provide a faster timeline for harvesting timber which could decrease lumber costs. A good time for it too given the way lumber costs have been going. Is this something you are considering? Is the wood from the trees you are growing suitable for construction of any form?

I have seen no proposal for a wealth tax that is not a marginal wealth tax, in which case the math in this essay is wrong. The Warren wealth tax, for example, is for wealth over $50 million.

The math on this is incorrect. This is not how a marginal tax works. I have not seen any proposals for wealth taxes that are not marginal after a certain (usually very high) level of wealth.

For example, the Warren wealth tax only kicked in after $50 million.

US manufacturing output has had a boom because we include natural gas and oil as manufacturing output, not just because of automation.

Awesome song! Though I think it's more likely that Coolio got the base melody for Gangsta's Paradise from Stevie Wonder, and Amish Paradise grabbed it from Coolio since Amish Paradise is a parody of Gangsta's Paradise.

Having worked with a lot of Javascript frameworks aimed at creating web applications/SPAs (used Cappuccino to build a wireframing tool, Backbone.js to build a dashboard for a payments provider, React/Relay to build a phone calling tool and events platform, and now React/Apollo to build a peer-to-peer texting tool), I can say that React/Apollo/GraphQL is my new go-to stack for new JS projects. It's a pleasure to work with, and a lot of the pain points of creating large apps with JS in the past are handled very well. Congrats to the Apollo team!

I used Slava's blog to learn about Lisp and went on to build a product with Weblocks, which was a continuations-based web framework that Slava created back in the day (I only recently finally deleted a forgotten 8-year old todo about merging in my refactored Weblocks formview). Random trivia (kind of) - the syntax and concepts in Weblocks actually bear some resemblance to Goat, which is a framework that Patrick had created and used to build the original version of the Stripe dashboard (likely just because both of them come from a Lisp-heavy background).

I had just started a new company using RethinkDB, and it was definitely poised to be my go to database for new projects. Anyway, all this is to say, for someone who I know only through his works, I have great respect for Slava and want to thank him for the work he's done. Here's to hoping that RethinkDB finds a way to continue.

Project Name: Brand New Congress Technology

Project Description: Brand New Congress is an initiative to primary most of the existing incumbents in Congress with a representative group of progressive people who all agree to enact an aggressive progressive platform once they are elected. You can learn more about our goals and what we're trying to do on https://brandnewcongress.org. The tech team at Brand New Congress works on a variety of tools that will help bring about the revolution, and we are currently focusing a lot on expanding our website and making it way more awesome.

What do you hope to build this month? Our main focus this month is to create an awesome events portal like map.berniesanders.com v2.0 (https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/98), update our dashboard to make it the central hub of where all our volunteers are looking everyday to see how BNC is doing (https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/dashboard), and updating our current sign up and donation flow (https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/85). In general, we'd love to use these tasks as a way to find someone that would be willing to take on a leadership role and be able to commit a decent amount of time every week to keep our website updated and think up new ways to use our site/tech stack.

What kind of skills do you need? Our projects are currently largely Javascript/React based. We're starting to play around with Apollo and GraphQL as our data layer, but don't worry if you don't already know about those technologies as they are pretty new and we'll teach you.

Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room. https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/welcome

Greg's not a founder of Stripe. And who asks that question?

The interface builder equivalent these days for Cappuccino is interface builder. You can actually create your Cappuccino UIs in IB.

You actually don't pay for failed auth attempts with Stripe, but you do with most other gateways.

Btw, this has since been changed to: https://github.com/isaacsanders/omniauth-stripe-connect

For anyone looking for a nice subprocess library for Ruby, my friend Greg released one earlier this week - https://github.com/gdb/rubysh

It may be worth noting (though you perhaps already know this) that our fees are all-inclusive. We don't charge extra for amex cards, international cards, qualified vs. non-qualified transactions, etc. These things often add up to make other gateways' fees higher than they seem.

Also, we have volume discounts for people processing more than a million dollars a year, so this may be something you'd be interested in.

Yeah you are right here that it is still possible for our users to mess things up. We do things to try to keep merchants from accidentally sending card numbers to their server (e.g. the default example form makes this hard to do, and most people simply copy and paste this form). It's an explicit decision we've made, though, to leave control in our users' hands as many people seem to like the flexibility to have their checkout experience stay on their site and be designed by them. But we think about where to draw the lines here a decent amount.

To make sure there isn't confusion here, having card details go through your server, even if you aren't saving them, still can lead to certain PCI compliance burdens (e.g. you may need to get an audit from a PCI auditor verifying this).

Having the card never go to your server is the best way to make sure you are PCI compliant, as you mention.

For what it's worth, we don't have a PR company or marketing department currently =).

We try not to post on HN unless we actually think people on HN will like the content (and we've argued internally before and decided not to post stuff to HN because it didn't seem useful enough).

Yup, we have an API to create plans - https://stripe.com/docs/api#plans

We're working on it! We want to make sure we get it right. But I do want to mention https://stripe.com/global for anyone not in the US that wants to be notified when Stripe gets to their country.

> Has Stripe fixed their webhooks so that they re-POST when the endpoint is down? They can't be compared to IPN until they implement it reliably... without that you have to manually reconcile Stripe's data with your own database to be sure you haven't lost a post during brief downtime, network glitch, transient application or proxy error...

We're working on this right now. It's part of a larger redesign of our webhook system that we started right before the break, and we should be able to launch it pretty soon. Our webhooks are the last somewhat legacy part of our product, so I'm pretty happy that it's getting reworked.

I believe PayPal's chargeback fee is $20.

For what it's worth, we don't have a marketing team currently and, no, these articles are definitely not ones that we made.

We basically are trying to abstract away all the pain of creating merchant accounts and setting up with separate payment gateways. On the backend, we are partnering with Wells Fargo and First Data to set up whatever accounts are necessary to both get you started immediately while making sure you get all the benefits of a full-fledged merchant account.

Possibly -- it's something we're still talking about internally.

The amount of time it takes fro the refund to be re-credited usually depends on the issuing bank. When a refund happens, we send the refund over immediately and settle it at the end of the day. There are currently no chargeback or refund thresholds, but we'll have to see how that evolves as we grow.

We don't currently have any partner program, but it's definitely something we're talking about. Lots of things are in the pipeline!

We do plan on doing volume discounts eventually.

Not too hard! We're working on it right now and hope to have international support soon.

You can charge from multiple URLs, but all your data will show up together as if it were for one account. If you want to have multiple accounts for different websites, your best bet currently is to just sign up multiple times (we're working on having subaccounts).

You actually don't need to do anything beyond what we tell you to do for PCI. Check out stripe.js. No need for an auditor.