tsetse-fly

Your hyperbole is akin to Malcolm Gladwell's style. See how this works?

What's wrong with "ls -l (which cmd)"?

You shouldn't have any issues changing your default shell via chsh. SHELL is, by default, set to /bin/sh by cron—you can also define this yourself.

http://www.gnu.org/software/mcron/manual/html_node/Crontab-f...

programming is hard, let's go shopping!

Yes, there are plenty of companies out there that very much depend on a network effect and aren't Y Combinator-funded: Digg, Facebook, Quora or Stack Overflow, to name a few.

Yes, I rather dislike the tone of their post. If anything, these sorts of childish insults makes me want to avoid using Posterous.

You must be terrified by copy/paste.

Swiping is not obsolete. I don't know why you're trying to compare a virtual retailer like Amazon to shops that have an actual physical presence. The way they process payments is entirely different.

Not everyone has a smartphone. Why would Starbucks want to deal with accepting payments via mobile-geolocation and plastic for everyone else? It would just confuse the cashier. Swiping is uniform and only takes a few seconds.

Square fills the mobile payments processing niche where you need to be able to accept plastic when you're not in front of a register. Plumbers, repairmen of all sorts, traveling salesmen, people selling items at fairs/festivals, etc. These people aren't currently able to accept credit cards with real-time processing. That's the problem Square solves.

Chip and PIN is a standard. They wouldn't have to reverse engineer it or implement from scratch.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_and_PIN

Is it not obvious? Why don't retail stores type in your credit card information instead of swiping it?

Chip and PIN doesn't seem to exist in the US so I'd imagine they're not targeting it immediately. I don't see why they couldn't expand the hardware to support it though.

Perhaps you should look past the author to the content. There are some interesting ideas in there and it seems to have spawned some good discussion.

Sorry, you're right.

I don't think that paragraph and the proceeding one was there when I originally read the post. Seems it's been edited since it was submitted.

Coder's block is a good way to describe it.

I've had phone interviews where I've been asked to solve a logic puzzle with pen/paper while explaining my approach. Solving a problem you've never thought about while being put on the spot turns out to be incredibly difficult. These sorts of problems require deep concentration and quiet yet it tends to be awkward to have silence between strangers. The situation really inhibits serious problem solving.

That's the second time you've posted that link on HN. Do you have something against Aaron?

No, he said that he would ask for a code sample or demo. There doesn't seem to be any programming involved during the interview.

What sort of programming problems are you giving them? Did these candidates have experience with other projects and were they able to fluidly explain their involvement with them?

It must be pretty rare to find a person who can describe a complex project in detail but is unable to write any code during an interview.

In the case of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O3b_Networks,_Ltd.

HN does it wrong. There are exceptions either way, I wouldn't say that one is more correct.

Why would it be technically difficult for Apple to remove apps from your phone? Implementing a backdoor in your own software is fairly trivial.

No need to sensationalize, he's still around: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=sah

Codepad is meant for simple snippets. I don't see anything wrong with the versions that he's currently providing.

Any insults that Ted Dziuba receives are well-deserved.

He's written dozens of trollish articles on how useless other startups are or how he hopes they'll fail. It seems fair to me that people are insulting his failure to produce a successful startup when he's spent so long being a hypocrite. You can't expect to be the Glenn Beck of startups and not be on the receiving end of the trolling.

Here are some of his headlines from Uncov, incase you've forgotten his work:

    "Fanboy Driven Development with Arc"
    "Paul Graham, Just Shut Your Face Already"
    "RockYou Dominates The Fake Business World"
    "Surprise, Mahalo Still Blows"
    "Mahalo Is Hawaiian for Useless"
    "Guy Kawasaki Should Stick To Contentless Blog Posts"
    "Web 2.0: So easy a 14 year old can do it"
    "Middio: Another Marginally Useful Feature As A Product"
    "WriteWith: Everybody Point and Laugh"
    "YouOS: YouHave To Be Kidding Me"
    "Wellsphere's Fail Tale, Part 2"
    "Firefox Fanboys: The Only People More Dangerous and Less Competent Than ..."
    "Did Enron Cause Web 2.0?"
    "Web 2.0 Amateur Hour: Sputtr"
    "VoSnap: An Overnight Delivery Of Fail"

http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncov.com

Can anyone that hasn't enabled tethering confirm that their visual voicemail hasn't been working?

There were a slew of people on the MacRumors forums that were tethering and didn't realize that their visual voicemail had been broken for days.

Most of what you're saying also applies to the other carriers in the US.

Verizon has a history of crippling its phones. Sprint has horrible customer service. T-Mobile has very little coverage. There are no good carriers.

news.arc is open source. Go see for yourself: http://arclanguage.org/install

The new version of Arc was released 31 days ago.

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9700

Why are you submitting summaries from Slashdot?

The title is sensationalist and articles on these ToS issues have already been posted here.

I referred to skimmers to point out that the types of cards that came before and after this scheme pale in comparison. There wasn't any skimming involved here.

I outlined how I think it happened in a couple of other posts.[1][2] It wasn't organized drug-gang style where you have people go out and come back to you with money because there's no such structure in online fraud. 99% of the time, online, accounts are sold and whatever happens after is at the buyer's discretion. In my experience, there's never a high-level of collaboration. You can't form teams just by asking people if they want to steal money with you.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479205

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479326

We don't know what the limit was or even if there was one. I'm sure that's why payroll cards were picked for this particular scheme. I think people are too caught in thinking about how their cards work. The same rules that apply to credit/debit may not apply here.

No, it couldn't have been the promise of more money. This scheme was a first, it'd be impossible to know the outcome of the next card. There were 49+ cities involved, you'd need a call center to coordinate that. This organization, which would cross multiple countries, timezones, and languages, would be much more elaborate than the mafia. It's very unlikely.

Also, cashing out ATMs is very hard work. You need to use a skimmer to capture someone else's card then copy it to your blank plastic. It won't work if there's an electronic chip in it, like many countries (mostly in Europe) already have. Then you have to work within the usual transaction/account limits. You'd be lucky to get $2,000 off of one card. Basically, the next card seems like nothing when you have a fist worth $70,000.

I think the key to all of this is in the payroll card. It might not be bound to the traditional credit/debit card limits. Perhaps it's throttled at a central point and the guy who already has access to the RBS WorldPay systems was able to lift it.

No, "cashier" is the proper term used by fraudsters. It refers to people who receive and disburse cash, like someone in a retail store. "casher" is a word made-up by an English major.

Also, correcting people for minor mistakes on forums is very annoying.