I ran the find command suggested by the OP, and it came up with a long list of files -- all names that I had intentionally and manually deleted. It seems when one of my "other" machines booted up, it put 0 byte files back in their place. A review of the file's history, by clicking Dropbox -> Browse on Dropbox Website shows the original file, the day I deleted it, then a few minutes later, a 0 byte file added back.

I would wager you are not a parent. I could be wrong, but...

That's not my point. I've raised two. The youngest is 11. There are problems with your suggested approach- it teaches the child that all it takes is a cry and poof mom gives in (we call parents that are suckered in by the crying "well-trained" by their children); it doesn't solve the problem. In this case The Problem is "OMG THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE AND IT HURT AND NOW I'M FREAKED OUT" - at this point it's not about the pain, it's about being freaked out. Mom appears to have tried treating and comforting and it just didn't work. Mom figuring out that a state reset was necessary is brilliant. It's not like she put the kid in the crib and walked away for an hour (which, btw, is perfectly acceptable when the child Just Won't Quit.)

This is parenting genius. It's really not much different than the approach my friend took: kid gets hurt (bump, bruise, scrape, cut, etc), cries ... so dad gives a hug, does his Magical Wave over the injury, blathers some incomprehensible Magic Words and poof kid stops crying. Psychology, plain and simple.

If the child was actually injured would they stop crying just out of habit? IMO one of the main reasons for performing some sort of redirection, kissing the boo-boo, etc is to find out if they are actually injured. In my experience my son may still indicate that his boo boo hurts a bit but he remains calm and verbalizes that fact. I've seen some parents freak out and dwell on the incident and go on and on while the child is sobbing. I think it is better to not make a big out of it, get the child calm by taking their mind off the incident, then attend to the injury if needed. What is worse... A child crying their head off for minutes while you hold them or bringing them to a state of calm in the matter of seconds?

My parents had a rule "no blood no bandaid." Which, in practice, was more metaphorical than anything. Basically it meant suck it up and walk it off. Good lesson.

'Injured' is not well defined. I know a 4 y/o who, when he falls and hurts something (and that happens often enough), simply gets up, cleans it (if necessary) and goes on. He may cry/shout for a moment, like you would go 'Ouch, !!$%#&$&^', but that's the end of it. That makes another that cries and stays down until mommy comes to get him look as if he was raised pretty badly. Those are the extremes and you seem to be placing each other on opposite ends of it.

Seems like he screwed up royally then, seeing how the previous president's plan was to make sure the son of his business associates stayed alive.

I believe they simply paid someone enough to give up the goods.

That's not exactly true. You'll get torched on a chargeback if you didn't match the CVV code.

You are making an assumption that PSN is not storing the CVV code, and may be incorrect. Though PCI guidelines explicitly forbid storing this field, there are some who flout the guidelines.

To answer your question, it is similar to places like Starbucks, that do not require a signature when you make a purchase. In such cases, the merchant has cut a deal where they agree in advance to accept all chargebacks without dispute.

Dude has a much better attitude about it than some other guys who ended up in a similar situation. (The Konfabulator tantrum comes to mind)

I think he's got a little math problem. Many browsers will open up to 4 connections (possibly more, if config tweaked) to overlap requests for content, so you might want to consider this when configuring your worker_connections.

This is not a math problem. It's a perception problem. In fact, even your assumption is wrong, on the number of connections a browser will open. Modern browsers will be found opening 6 to 8 connections, by default.

http://stevesouders.com/ua/report.php

Each worker can handle many thousands of concurrent connections so this isn't really an issue. This is where nginx and Apache differ. Generally you want one worker per CPU core.

I know how nginx works, I use it all the time. He is saying if you have 1024 woker_connections, at 2 per connections per user, you'll get 512 users per worker process. But the truth with most modern browsers is it is 4 connections per user, woker_connections = 1024, that is more like 256 users. So if you really want to service 512 users, you need to set woker_connections to 2048. This is the math problem I was highlighting, a simple division problem.

I believe you are talking about worker_processes

Oops -- you're right I misread your comment. Sorry about that.

> After about two weeks, I received no response to either email. I decided to start operating the site, thinking they wanted to see something working before spending time on a response.

I don't follow the logic here... no response != assume whatever the hell you feel like.

What "the hell" should he have done?

There's only 2 possibilities here - 1. They didn't see the emails or 2. They saw them, but chose to ignore them. Either way, his choice boils down to killing his idea or launching it and seeing what happens.

It would be utterly moronic of him to kill his idea simply because they didn't respond. Might as well leave that decision to them by launching it and seeing how they respond. If they don't shut him down, then his service isn't breaking their rules. If they do, he's no worse off than not launching in the first place.

He did the right thing.

EDIT: HN is not letting me respond to wmf below, so I'm responding here - Where does he say he knew paypal would freeze the account sooner or later? In fact, the whole point of his emails to them was to specifically ask if his service was compliant with their TOS.

Let's stick to facts and not get into subjective arguments. Your idea of 'ordinary' can be completely different from his or anyone else's idea of 'ordinary'. This is why TOSs, FAQs etc exist in the first place. But since he couldn't find an exact answer anywhere, he emailed them.

Hacker News has a timeout for responding to nested comment threads. The idea is to prevent long and drawn-out reply bickering between two people. If you can't reply to one of your comment's children, calm down, take a breath, and wait 5-20 minutes.

Thanks for the explanation, had no idea. You really shouldn't get so angry tho.

> What "the hell" should he have done?

There are numerous forms of communication available. Send the email again 3 times asking for escalation to a supervisor. Call them. Send them a letter. Send them a certified letter with return receipt. This is how grown ups conduct business.

Everyone knows or should know that PayPal freezes all accounts that are doing anything out of the ordinary.

Never used PayPal to begin with, knowing that they'd freeze the account sooner or later.

I can certainly understand not wanting to abandon a project simply because somebody was lax on responding, but with something like this (large amounts of customer money involved (60,858 BTC), legal issues), he really put a lot at risk here.

The customer's money was not at risk as delivery of the purchased bitcoins is nearly instantaneous (e.g., 5 minutes or less on average).

Yes, basically that's the unwritten rule. For example in Spanish we've a saying "quien calla, otorga" that translates directly to "silence implies/gives consent".