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(I also work on Stripe's API and dashboard.)

I actually find it more interesting that quite a few of the obviously copied bits aren't even really worthy of copying if you're already going through the effort of building an entirely new product -- they're pieces of our product that could stand to be improved. :)

sheenaon Stripe Checkout

Here's the full list of cards we let you use for testing, including some that trigger specific responses:

https://stripe.com/docs/testing#cards

sheenaon Stripe in Canada

Thanks for the catch. Fixed now!

sheenaon How Stripe thinks about recruiting

I'm a woman and a developer at Stripe. I don't see how welcoming women as well as men into the engineering -- and every other -- team at our company can reasonably be called "lying" or "dishonest." No, we can't singlehandedly change the gender ratios in the valley, but we can and will try to make our hiring process as good and fair as possible.

sheenaon How I Converted My Subscription Site from Paypal to Stripe in 2 Days

We certainly understand that for some specific billing situations, Stripe's subscriptions API may not be a good fit. That said, we've tried to accommodate as many use cases as possible, and I just wanted to make sure you knew we have a prorate => false flag that you can pass when switching subscriptions. We also have a concept of usage-based charges (invoice items). Your larger point of course still stands (that there are always going to be edge cases and custom billing logic).

sheenaon I'm a designer who learned Django and launched her first webapp in 6 weeks

Congratulations from another fairly new programmer. :)

One UI suggestion: I find it clunky when a site forces me to choose from price ranges that don't overlap (e.g. $5 to 10, $10 to $15, etc.). Generally people making purchasing decisions aren't thinking in terms of those kinds of ranges; they simply have a maximum budget in mind. I think it's better to allow users to specify "under $5", "under $10", etc. so that each successive group includes the previous groups. I realize there may be a case for trying to get customers to purchase the most expensive item they're willing to purchase, but more often than not having to click each range separately just annoys me and I leave the page.

sheenaon Cappuccino Apps and the Web Store

Many of the included apps (like NYTimes, Amazon, etc.) have Chrome Web Store apps that are separate from their regular websites. (Of course, it's debatable whether these app versions are preferable to their standard website counterparts.) The Web Store team emphasized to us the discovery aspect of the store. They also seem to be pushing Chrome Web Store payments as a way to increase paid conversions through one-click purchases from users who need only enter their CC details once.

sheenaon Mockingbird goes 1.0, introduces real-time collaboration using OT and Node

Thanks for the feedback. The date mixup was a typo that somehow escaped our notice despite several re-readings, but good point about reminding users what the service is. That you yourself think about your product daily is no reason to entertain the fond hope that users sign up and then immediately frame a screenshot of your site on their desk to gaze at lovingly, just waiting for the next moment they can throw you a pageview.

sheenaon Mockingbird goes 1.0, introduces real-time collaboration using OT and Node

We have plans to expand the available widgets and to let you make your own.

sheenaon Mockingbird goes 1.0, introduces real-time collaboration using OT and Node

The whole app is written in Cappuccino. To be more precise, that canvas is a custom CPView. :)

sheenaon Mockingbird goes 1.0, introduces real-time collaboration using OT and Node

As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.

sheenaon A hell of a time

I'd recommend reading through some of the comments on http://www.metafilter.com/85667/Hi-Whatcha-reading for some perspectives on how men and women experience the world very differently in many cases. While the general tenor of discussion gets a bit strident and I don't agree with a good deal of what's being said, it's very relevant to several comments in this thread. It seems to me always worth trying to understand how the world looks through other people's eyes.

sheenaon Ask HN: Women who've applied to YC?

I'm a female co-founder (Mockingbird - http://www.gomockingbird.com). My co-founder is a guy. We interviewed with YC last year, though we didn't end up getting funded. Best of luck with weddingtype and your application; whatever the outcome, I think the process itself can't help but be useful.

sheenaon The Social Network, Where Women Never Have Ideas

At Harvard at least people didn't like that the male final clubs (which are no longer affiliated with the university) predated all other clubs by many years and came to own prime real estate in Cambridge. It's near impossible for present-day female clubs to afford similar spaces. In part it's that imbalance that rankled, I think, though I'm not sure there's a good solution.

Besides, as pgbovine points out, she didn't say she minded the fact that the clubs are male-only, just the attitudes therein.

sheenaon Staying Healthy and Sane At a Startup

Radiolab's "Stress" episode (http://www.radiolab.org/2007/apr/09/) mentions rat studies in which experimenters made rats sick by subjecting them to extreme physical stressors (cold, treadmills, forcing them to swim for hours until exhaustion, etc.). Other rats merely had their food put out and taken away at the last minute a couple of times. Amazingly, the researchers could make the rats equally sick by simply frustrating them. I thought that was a powerful reminder of the real physical effects of stress.

sheenaon The Secret of Self-control

However, the problem isn't the medium or the message, it's us.

Unless you're claiming that people themselves have fundamentally changed, I don't see how the medium gets absolved of responsibility. The medium influences us, doesn't it? We're trained daily by the things we do and how we do them.

sheenaon Regrets of the Dying

Heh, I was talking about my 17-year-old self, not my 17-year-old child (a terrifying thought). My point was more that a lot of advice has a catch-22-ish quality in that only experience makes its truth sink in, by which time it's often too late.

sheenaon What happens when you give homeless people a prepaid credit card.

If you wouldn't recommend Lehrer, what would you recommend?

sheenaon Regrets of the Dying

I wonder if there is a way to bring realizations born of other people's experiences home in any meaningful way. I sometimes think about what advice I'd give my 17-year-old self if I had to attend college again, but I admit that the younger me likely wouldn't have listened. It's hard to know what to value in the moment, and I find it's equally hard to absorb what others with the benefit of hindsight tell you. I'd bet that none of these expressed regrets really surprises any of us, but chances are we'll all have the same ones on our own deathbeds -- despite knowing better.

sheenaon What I wish I knew before starting a business

He's saying it's better than the first option: pursuing a business that requires a very high percentage of quality employees in order to have any chance of succeeding.

sheenaon Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants

Have you employed this tactic?

sheenaon Ask HN: Rate a StartUp Zatista.com

Extremely well executed. My only quibble is the name, which makes me think of Batista or Zapatistas. I could be the only one, though.

sheenaon Boxee Box (Media Center)

You may be right about the target market, but it's not fair to say it's just a cube. It's had its corner lobbed off, and it's off-kilter. Those changes aren't simple; the result completely lacks the self-contained stability of the cubes and grids that minimalists revere.

sheenaon Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient

Yes, for all the emphasis about separating structure and style, I think the piece misses the bigger problem: the difficulty of changing that structure while you're writing. The author says "first one types one's text and gets its logical structure right" -- but isn't getting the logical structure right actually the crux of most writing efforts? This is quite apart from the typesetting or formatting of the end result. Most word processors fail at making restructuring simple, but it's not like plaintext fares any better, especially as your project gets longer and more complex.

That's where a tool like Scrivener or Ulysses comes in, one that gives you the ability to rearrange the constituent units of your piece (paragraphs, chapters, scenes, arguments, whatever) to shape and reshape the overarching structure and logical flow. (Besides, both Scrivener and Ulysses allow you to use markup and export to LaTeX, etc., so you're not necessarily losing out on the formatting benefits.)

sheenaon On Testosterone: Driving a Porsche vs. Camry

Or it could be fast driving, not fast cars, that increases testosterone levels (the difference between highway and downtown driving in both the Porsche and the Camry group seems to suggest that possibility) -- and people driving Porsches just tend to drive faster, just like people in red cars tend to drive faster.

sheenaon Failed founders don't learn much (show some studies)

I don't see how you can ever get a properly controlled test for this. The power of luck aside, it seems inevitable that the population of people who never get around to a second venture because of the success of a first venture is fundamentally different from the population of second-time founders. I'd bet that all things equal the previous experience does help, but there is just no way of controlling for the differing ability of the two populations.

sheenaon How To Price Software Without Just Rolling The Dice

True. I didn't mean that some markets don't support price discrimination, just that customers' perception of it -- if they know it's going on -- is terrible. With airline tickets, people see prices fluctuating over time: lots of bumps but also some apparent connection between the time/effort involved with buying early and a generally better price. Customers seem to be more infuriated if they can easily tell that someone else is getting a better price on the same exact seat at the same exact time. Given the fluctuations and the expectation of fluctuations in airline pricing, there's not much direct comparison going on among airline ticket consumers.

sheenaon How To Price Software Without Just Rolling The Dice

It might be a better way in theory, but do you know of anyone who's actually employed the technique without severely alienating customers? You mention Amazon as a general A/B tester, but Amazon's price testing is the most prominent example I can think of and it ended with a public apology. Price discrimination (even if it's only a testing phase) only seems to fly if it's not obvious, and it'd be obvious for most webapps.

sheenaon Do you understand this first-grade child's homework?

Agreed. The visual placement of the grid is a large part of the problem. You'd be able to discern the flow (and logic) of the assignment far better if the grid were placed in between the two sums, for example.

sheenaon Your looks and your inbox

Or she doesn't want to wax eloquent about the attractiveness of other guys to her boyfriend?