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sleighboyon Ask HN: How do you process payments?

They could really use someone who gives a damn to focus on their official libraries. They seem to have tried to make them function similar no matter which language you use. Not the smartest move, they end up being sort of convoluted in languages like Python. Which lead to many people starting a client library, but probably moving on from using them and the libs go unmaintained.

sleighboyon Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

Thank you!

sleighboyon Ask HN: What are some interesting projects to reuse your old devices?

What software do you use?

sleighboyon Front (YC S14) raises $59M round led by other tech CEOs

Use it with a team of about 10, for almost a year now. Interface with customers via email, SMS and chat. It is universally liked in our group. The internal discussion on different communication channels is wonderful. The API is well documented and quite permissive as to what you can do. Keyboard shortcuts galore. No direct IMAP connection now, but if you have GApps it works well. UI seems snappy, and I've seen no issue leaving the tab open for weeks straight.

I have been the most impressed with their response to feature suggestions. I raised a few points for improvment using the general help chat in the interface and to my surprise saw my suggestions released as a feature a few weeks later. Granted, they were minor interface items, but the fact someone actually took the time to consider it and slot it in for dev time means something to me, being on the other side of that usually.

sleighboyon Magento Marketplace Breached?

That email is so vague that it makes me think the situation is far worse and they're just feeding a "nothing to see here" story just before a holiday weekend in the US. A compromised marketplace would be a great means of sprinkling nefarious code into packages during deployment. I hope my suspicious are proven to not be the case, but only because of all the people locked into Magento relying on some dev shop to keep their business going.

sleighboyon Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection

It needs some tweaking to work now, but here is what I was using (in Python):

https://gist.github.com/danielatdattrixdotcom/bd6a05e3d8c499...

Executed via cron every day at a time before I would make a potential grocery run meant the coupons were already waiting on my account when I went to the store.

sleighboyon Ask HN: Where do you find new music to listen to online?

I like the plain Spotify artist suggestion based on the one you're viewing, but mix it up a bit by first seeking out bands in a genre in another country then follow the suggestions from there. Example, there will virtually be no paths for people in the US to Russian artists like Mumiy Troll, Leningrad, Monetochka or Mashina Vremeni from artists popular in the US via "Fans also like".

sleighboyon Ask HN: US government funds a lot of tech research, why don't startups use it?

You're being too kind on point #2

sleighboyon Ask HN: US government funds a lot of tech research, why don't startups use it?

After years of inside experience with SBIR applicants and the various agencies I can say confidently that is largely a sham to funnel money to those who make friendships and scratch the backs of the various agency heads and their underlings. Also, the things I saw regarding how the agencies and their contacts exchange private data were frightening. People talk about the "deep state" of unelected bureaucrats. It doesn't have to be some grand plan to exert great power. These programs are robbing taxpayers to enrich a small clique with self-serving goals, returning little of value. The Idaho company of "solar freaking roadways" fame is an SBIR boondoggle, that should tell you something, and I think they made it to Phase II.

sleighboyon Lobbyists rewrote Washington state’s privacy law

Re: "Think of the children". If you consider the two questions after what you quoted to reply to, I think what was intended was to allude to a regulatory capture situation. The article specifically states certain carve-outs being suggested.

sleighboyon Chart shows cause of the gender wage gap

From the methodology of the cited Danish study where the data comes from it includes those who left work outright and this represents a wage of 0. That is going to be quite the reduction in wages no matter where you start, to drop to 0. The charts don't seem so dramatic considering that. And the conclusion is no surprise either if you factor that in, of course wages drop when you are not working. No mention of that in the article though, doesn't fit the narrative I guess.

sleighboyon Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

Nothing comes to mind, but take this quote from A Scanner Darkly: "Activity does not necessarily mean life, and motion that is circular is the deadest form of the universe."

sleighboyon Adobe to Acquire Magento

eBay/PayPal bought and sold Magento before this. When a payment processor that could embed and make its' offerings the optimal experience within a heavily-used ecomm platform decides to ditch it, I think you have a dud.

sleighboyon Stuff in Space – realtime 3D map of objects in Earth's orbit

This site has an Android app to do just that. http://www.heavens-above.com/

sleighboyon The Great American Share – Sam Altman Interview on Basic Income

When did a fiat currency win out over gold? It requires government manipulation by price fixing, outright debasement and mechanisms like legal tender laws for worthless tokens to win out over a precious metal such as gold.

sleighboyon Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

Planning on using OpenCV to look for the "rare" items on the next go-round and not have to actually scan over all the game pieces manually. The most I can expect is to have some fun writing the code because I'm quite unlikely to win any cash or prizes.

sleighboyon Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

https://gist.github.com/danielatdattrixdotcom/bd6a05e3d8c499...

Edit Update: Gist is fixed and working 100%

sleighboyon Ask HN: What non-work task have you automated?

The grocery chain I shop at has a component of their loyalty card that lets you add certain coupons to your card and they change constantly. All told there may be a few hundred of items offered up daily, most of which I don't buy anyhow. So instead of wasting my time sifting through them to save $10 a month I just wrote a script to add all of them to my card every day at the same time. So long as I go shopping after that time I may have discounts for items I actually purchase deducted at checkout.

sleighboyon 42-inch yacht still hoping to become the smallest boat to cross the Atlantic

https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:48...

sleighboyon Venezuela Extends Use of 100-Bolivar Bill Following Protests

According to this it is in use: http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/28/the-secret-dangerous-w...

sleighboyon How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

From the summary: "The authors were surprised by the small amount of work identified. In particular, there were very few studies that followed the same individuals longitudinally, there was lack of analysis of confounding variables and there was failure to undertake appropriate statistical analysis."

The whole report has a tone of being the best they could conclude with poor data which is stressed repeatedly. Those numbers put in context of the opinions of the source data makes them not so impressive.

sleighboyon How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

I would not say that is dramatic or even meaningful. The findings are full of statements on how the the studies they considered were "of moderate quality, but of limited quantity". And they conclude with saying basically that they have no conclusion.

sleighboyon Paranoid Android: The Divine Madness of Philip K Dick

For those who prefer an audiobook, the reading of A Scanner Darkly by Paul Giamatti is excellent.

sleighboyon Elwha: Roaring back to life

An amusing event during the removal, person takes wagon wheel from old lakebed and is fined by park. http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20120706/NEWS/1207...

sleighboyon If you're one of millions using Magento – stop what you're doing and patch now

Tip for those unlucky souls on 1.4.1.x who have the bundled ZFW 1.9.6. You need to patch in the XmlRpc from 1.10.0 or your API is not going to work.

sleighboyon Qwerkywriter: Typewriter-Inspired Mechanical Keyboard

Evoluent Vertical Mouse. They edited out its' bright glowing logo from that shot which is at the bottom on the rear of it.

sleighboyon California Coastal Records: Aerial photographic survey of California Coastline

Washington state has this, with a historical option as well. https://fortress.wa.gov/ecy/coastalatlas/tools/ShorePhotos.a...

sleighboyon Richard Stallman Inducted Into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame

If anyone takes the time to read that whole thread it may change their opinion of the man. He contradicts himself and makes assertions about OpenBSD that even the casual observer would know are false. I stopped taking him seriously after reading it back in 2007.

sleighboyon Ask HN: What is a good open source mail server for Linux?

Exim (SMTP) & Dovecot (IMAP/POP) work well together. Run them locally first to get comfortable since it sounds like you're a bit new to this. Read the docs and don't hesitate to search and post over at Serverfault ( http://serverfault.com/ ).

sleighboyon Does anyone use Magento in production?

1. Resource hog

2. Bad code structure rooted in Zend Framework

3. Has fostered a community of developers that create poor-quality extensions or dev. shops that will bleed you dry.

4. Not built to work well out-of-the-box with the various caches you'll need to make it usable.

5. Horrible docs

It's not worth the headache.