Good question - I was the original submitter and didn't change it, so must have been one of the mod's. I preferred TNW's version as there is more context in it.
Also TNW had the story first - Mike Butcher was late on stage after Patrick's announcement because he was furiously writing up the story for TC :)
It seems to make more sense to post the TC article and let them "battle it out" with votes. With no justification what's been done here certainly does seem odd and, frankly, smacks of some kind of ulterior motive...
... That TC pays YC for promoting articles? Wouldn't be surprising given the ycombinator-centric posts. But it's also possible that mods think readers give more credence to TC.
I already thought editing titles was uncalled for, so seeing them edit links seems way over the line. Without any explanation, we can only guess at what the reasoning behind such edits are.
However, if mods are going to continue such aggressive edits, it would be really nice if they had to write a quick reason/summary of the edit, or at least show what changed. Since I doubt that will happen, I wish PG would at least add an "edited" label to stories that have been changed.
As things stand now, I no longer know which stories are actually community-approved and which have been silently placed there by the powers that be.
EDIT: Interesting that this thread is suddenly at the bottom of the page...
Which is fine, but then that should be disclosed, not because they have to, but out of good faith. Most of the tech community, myself included, has high regards for PG and YC. If secret pay-to-play relationships exist, they erode that trust.
To be clear, I don't think that there are pay-to-play relationships between YC and TC, at least not any that would lead them to actively edit HN submissions to be from TC. However, a secret group of mods are leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I hope PG will take this opportunity to clear up exactly what the mods' roles are, and what permissions/oversight they have.
This thread has, without doubt, been pinned to the bottom ( it was sitting at the top a couple of hours ago and has received as many votes since then).
Editing the title is one thing (which I largely condone), editing a URL is another thing entirely and then to blatantly attempt to hide the discussion is boardering on outrageous! The HN "mod community" has gone well down in my estimations.
I thought for a long time that TC was paying YC for flow (always suspicious that of all the articles on a given topic, it's always the TC ones that make it to the top of the front page), and the actions of this story convinced me that there is truth to the claim.
And TC is better? All these blogs do is repeat press releases/each other and link to more of their own articles. Mods shouldn't be deciding which tech blog is best especially when there was nothing wrong with the information in TNW.
Stripe is a service I'd love to use, however I'm not yet at a stage(small revenues) where it would be worth bothering you to be part of the 'closed beta'.
Will launches in new countries start happening faster after the first one? I have no idea which part of the process is the major blocker for this kind of service, but I would imagine that if it's laws, then every extra country will take a lot of extra work.
I ask this as an Israeli that would love to have a good service, but seeing as we're a tiny country I doubt we're high up on the list :)
Have sent an email ("Can you help us?")! We were using Stripe in the US but are having to switch to Braintree in the UK for legal and accountancy reasons. I'd love to be able to continue using Stripe.
I've sent an email too. I'd say "You have no idea how much this would mean to the English folk", but you do, so I can only sit and hope you accept me! ukjbrooks [at] gmail [dot] com :)
This is the most excited I've ever been about a product launch. They've done a fantastic job keeping everyone in the dark and silently hoping. The thought of being able to easily charge credit cards on my sites has given me renewed faith in new business ventures.
What you see as complaining maybe Stripe sees as valuable feedback that they can use in their business strategy. Imagine if there were 0 "complaints" - couldn't that be interpreted as a meaningful signal that interest in Stripe outside of the US is low?
Yeah, you're right. Though I can see how it'd be kinda annoying for others, we definitely find it really useful to hear about the things people wish Stripe did differently.
Oh don't get me wrong, I know if I was in any sort of leadership role at Stripe I'd love reading all the comments.
Where I'm coming from is (a) I'm sure the folks at Stripe know that there is a high demand for them outside of the North America (and now the UK), and (b) Is another comment on an HN thread saying "please come to [my country of residence]" going to change the pace or manner in which Stripe is rolled out internationally? I doubt it, but I've been wrong before.
"Article 49 of the Treaty on the functioning of the EU (the freedom of establishment principle) allows entrepreneurs to set up a company in any EU country."
Also, "Any business legally established in an EU country may open a secondary establishment (office, agency, branch or subsidiary) in another EU country."
Today is a watershed moment for UK developers. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that. In a few years, we will look back on our lives before this day and wonder
a) Why the hell we put up with all that crap for so long.
b) Why didn't we build Stripe ourselves.
Does it support Verified by Visa or Mastercard SecureCode? Not that I like them much, but they provide some protection for merchants against chargebacks.
I think if they're going to be a serious card payment service in Europe, that will need to change reasonably quickly. With the issue of transferring liability for chargebacks, saying "Well, US banks don't do it, and European banks understand that" isn't going to cut it for long with an international client base. After all, US banks don't do a lot of things, which is why we all have to use these Palaeolithic era card schemes to accept payments from US customers in the first place.
Absolutely; just to expand on the point - 3D secure is now prevenalant, if you just check for enrolment with 3D Secure - as a vendor you're generally no longer liable to chargebacks (there are a few edge cases around pre-paid and commercial cards). It doesn't matter if the issuing bank is signed up or not.
Paymill already support 3D secure - so I would have to imagine that stripe's 3D secure support can't be far behind.
Is it possible to use Stripe to handle third party payments? E.g. A site owner (A) creates a website. A user (B) of that site wants to sell a product. (B) creates a product page and accept payments from their own customers (C). Ideally (C) would pay (B) using Stripe, and (A) would receive a percentage of the revenue received from (C).
stripe should launch in India, I'm more than ready to help out with that. The market here, for stripe is huge! A lot of alternatives exist, but all of them frankly su%k!
I don't think Stripe have any technical problems launching in India, it's pretty much all about navigating the regulatory hurdles.
They'd quickly get bashed into submission by the Reserve Bank of India guidelines, which is what happened to Paypal. The RBI will force all payment processors to be regulated as banks, or conduct business entirely through banks.
no, what happened to paypal was post 26/11 revelation that the splinter cells had used paypal to transfer money.
RBI is just another central bank.
Stripe is way different than Paypal. And yes, paypal is still running, the loss of business is due to the fact that they still haven't worked out the tax technicalities, and their UI has become complex.
EDIT: Just want to add, that right now is the right time to invest in India, because of the market conditions in general, organised retail is picking up, credit/debit card usage is increasing again, mobile payments has been introduced, taxation policy would become unified starting April 1 under GST& other singular taxes, and the economic potential of India.
India is 3rd on Purchasing Power Parity, yet it is only the barely top 10 in terms of GDP, and it all points to a under-saturated market. Really! Entering India, can make stripe into a multi-billion dollar company, if done right
Out of interest what makes Stripe compelling over other alternatives such as Sagepay?
This seemed to be an already solved problem ([company like sagepay] -> merchant account -> bank account) but there's a lot of fanfair here so I must not be understanding what makes Stripe different.
Well, yes and no - we have all the normal options that involve a merchant account and so on. What we don't have yet is the simple-to-setup solution that Stripe offers (unless https://www.paymill.com/ offers that solution - I'm not sure).
We /might/ be able to use the UK version - let's hope that's the case. But then there's currency conversion issues (the UK uses pounds, some EU countries use the Euro, the Scandinavian countries use their own currency, etc.). On top of that there will probably be extra fees for transferring funds from a UK bank/entity to a Danish one, etc.
You really need Dankort support in Denmark. A lot of people have a MasterCard and a large number of Dankorts are combination Dankort and VISA, but most prefer the Dankort. The fees are also a lot low (free I think) on the Dankort, for the customers at least.
With all the pains of getting a merchant account running I think incorporating in the UK, getting a strip account setup and using transferwise to ship money home isn't such a bad option.
I was happy to give paymill a try as Stripe was not available in Europe. I even fixed their Java API (The pull request was accepted pretty swiftly)
However they lost me when they introduced a breaking change to the API without notification. We were still in the testing phase, but this is just a big NONO.
Also they did not react to request about getting a new contract because of a changed Bank account.
You'll love how stripe handles breaking changes. Each time they make a breaking change, they create a new version of the API, and keep all customers pinned on the current one. Then, in the UI I can choose to switch to a new version of the API, and see a list of what's changed. Of the 10 API versions since I started, 2 might have broken something for me, but I can just ignore that until I find time to upgrade.
Why does it have a monthly fee? What are the differences between the US and AUS markets that require Australian users to pay three different fees to use a payment gateway?
I was part of the beta and wondered that too. It's almost like they don't expect to cover their internal costs with their (reasonably pricy) cut of each transaction.
At $work we use EWay and have been pretty happy with them as far as I know. Their API looks decent (it was integrated way before my time) and it just works. No idea about the costs though.
The card number never hits the merchant's web server, so currently they do not have to be compliant.
There is talk in the industry that this will be changing actually; as the card number is still vulnerable to javascript that run's in the merchant's web page. So if the merchant is hacked and their website is compromised then CC numbers are vulnerable. So it is likely at least some of the applicable PCI DSS requirements (and auditing of them) will eventually be required.
I'd like to give a shout out to the guys from Paymill (www.paymill.com) - they sponsor the HNLondon events and when Patrick from Stripe turned up a few nights ago they were the ones that asked him to get on stage and give a quick talk, despite the obvious overlap of their products.
I'm not sure if that would be to their detriment. Demand in other EU countries is likely to go down, since it's plausible to incorporate (or incorporate a subsidiary) in the UK to get Stripe now :)
It's not really important, just curious if this is some kind of mod preference for TC? :)