Toward Rethinking Self-Defense in a Racist Culture - <AUTHOR> https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/toward-rethinking-self-defense-in-a-racist-culture/ <comment><USER2> Cultures are made of people, and all people are racist everywhere and at all times throughout history. Nor could this possibly change.

<comment><USER3> True. May I also add that cultures are indeed fluid, and change over time on account of being made of people. Allow me to give an anecdotal example.

Men used to marry and sleep with very, very young girls this and was seen as culturally acceptable, normal, correct and even healthy. Fast forward a couple of centuries and we've agreed as a whole, regardless of race and culture, that this is a practice we should do away with. Wholesale. As you can see, culture and people, do in fact change.

With this potential for change in mind, we need to tackle the elephant in the room. The reasons for which a practice, regarded by most as a beneath the standards of our global, egalitarian morals, should persist and continue to exist. Something must drive racism, some benefit that outweighs the cost, from a psychological standpoint. What is it?

<comment><USER2> It's the fact that racism is ultimately stereotyping, which you could think of as rapidly gathering information under uncertainty. It's not very different than training an ML model. There's no way to capture _all_ of the complexity of the world, but capturing _some_ of it has immense survival value, and would have been the norm throughout the evolutionary history of animals (at least).

We can be sad about the necessity of this, just as we are sad that most animals (and most of us) will die horribly. But it's an immutable fact of reality.

If it were somehow possible to raise or breed a person that lacked any capability for racism or other forms of bigotry, they would go into the world like a sheep among a society of wolves. They'd die quite quickly.

Better for us to simply acknowledge the truth, and try to rationally limit the fallout. Pretending it's not so simply makes things worse.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A CLI utility to show information and reviews about movies in terminal - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BharatKalluri/MovieScore <comment><AUTHOR> This is my first go lang project, feel free to give feedback about the code!</comment>


Dropbox DMCA takedown in personal folders - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/darrellwhitelaw/statuses/450096476060794880 <comment><USER2> And after looking through a good portion of the thread it appears that the story is: 1) He was storing copyrighted material 2) When you create a share link for a file it checks its hash against a blacklist provided by copyright holders 3) The check failed and he received a message that he couldn't share the file do to a take down request, assumedly on someone else's link to the same content.

Don't really think there is much to see here except people getting worked up over a poorly communicated situation.</comment>


OpenMaps – open-source orienteering maps project [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8qvuy7LCf4 <comment><AUTHOR> _«OpenMaps»_ project initiated by _«Orienteering Time»_ — Orienteering Development Project founded by _Eugenio Trevisan_ & _Tommaso Bari_ [1]:

> _The maps have copyright and are managed by OrienteeringTime.com._

> _The maps have the CC-BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license, so you can't use > them for commercial purposes and you have to mention the project with the > following Quote: Open Maps Project of OrienteeringTime.com + > OrienteeringTime's logo._

> _If you download the maps we would like to receive > email@example.com:_

> _– technical tracks /exercises useful for training/races_

> _– photos and files with cultural-historical information of the area_

> _If you like the project you can make a donation._

> _Our project has no commercial aims._

Grab maps from project folder[1] on _Google Drive_.

For open & edit those map files (.ocd/.omap) recommends use _OpenOrienteering Mapper_ [2] app — FLOSS cross-platform desktop publishing software for cartography, especially designed for creating orienteering maps.

[0] [https://www.orienteeringtime.com/70-ocad-maps-are-now- public...](https://www.orienteeringtime.com/70-ocad-maps-are-now-public-open/)

[1] [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EIK9tiH64UWjy9hMmlLm...](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EIK9tiH64UWjy9hMmlLmRV7ywe8tD4ln?usp=sharing)

[2] [https://www.openorienteering.org/apps/mapper](https://www.openorienteering.org/apps/mapper)</comment>


EBay acquires Hunch for $80m - <AUTHOR> http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/21/ebays-got-a-hunch-for-around-80-million/ <comment><USER2> Could someone experienced breakdown what a transaction like this looks like for everyone involved? I'm super curious. I've never been acquired, so I really have no insight into the process other than what I've read.

Here's the facts as I see them: Crunchbase says Hunch started in September of 2007 and had 23 employees on LinkedIn when they exited. (TechCrunch calls it a 20-person team, so I'm presuming that's all the employees.) They've gotten $19.2m in funding, let's just say $20m. TechCrunch claims the sale was "around" $80m.

So what does the breakdown look like? Who gets what? What are the likely investor terms?

My totally naive guess would be that the investors got at least a 1x liquidation preference, maybe more. I mean, did Hunch have any revenue? So there was at most $40m to go around to the people at the company. Of course, most of that probably went to the founders. Would maybe 20% of that have gone to the 20-ish employees? So naively pretending that each of the 20-ish employees got 1% for four years, did they each end up with an extra $100k/year? What's the likely distribution of shares among employees?

What are the transaction costs (lawyers, taxes, etc.) for this sort of acquisition? How long will the employees have to be at eBay to get their earn- out, and will that earn-out be in addition to their common stock in Hunch? Will they end up being paid less to work for eBay during their earn-out than if they were on the open market?

Of course, their are many other reasons to do a deal like this (passion for improving eBay's recommendations, for example), but let's ignore that for now.

<comment><USER3> Here's a wild, random-ass guess:

\- Let's keep it simple and say that since this is an experienced team, the investors invested $20m at a $60m post, so they have 1/3 of the company. Since it is an experienced team, I'm going to guess no participation or anything else hokey. 1x liquidation preference is likely but won't matter in this scenario b/c preferred will convert to common.

\- With a 20 person team, you've probably given away 5-10% of the company to employees. The later employees probably did not get much, but then again, they weren't around for that long. Let's be very generous and call it 10%.

\- That leaves the founders with 57% of the company.

\- Let's just not count transaction costs, they're probably in the $75-$200k range, and it's not super material to this discussion.

In that scenario, the founders make $11.4 million each pre-tax, or about $8.55m post-tax (assuming all founders are equal, which is probably also unlikely here). The employees make $8m pre-tax total, or ~$350k each pretax, or ~$190k each post-tax, but the distribution is going to be skewed towards earlier employees. Investors make $26.4m, which is a pretty poor return for a 3-year investment -- investors are mostly looking at IRR, which means the longer an exit takes, the higher the outcome needs to be to make it worth it.

This is just a wild ass guess on what a transaction like this _might_ look like, but lots and lots of things are likely way different than I guessed here, and I can guarantee that I've over-estimated the amount of money everybody made, because as a general rule of thumb that always happens.

EDIT: > How long will the employees have to be at eBay to get their earn-out, and will that earn-out be in addition to their common stock in Hunch? Will they end up being paid less to work for eBay during their earn-out than if they were on the open market?

Probably 2-4 years for the earn-out. The employees might get more retention bonuses to stick around, above what they would normally get from the transaction. They will not earn below-market due to the retention package.

<comment><USER4> you are calculating the tax here at around 25%. Wouldn't this count as long term capital gains tax (if you hold the stock for more than 1 year, which it seems likely since the company was incorporated in 2007) that is currently being taxed at 15%?

<comment><USER5> State/City long term capital gains in NY are around 11-12%. In California they are the same as the income tax rate of 9.3%. 25% is the blended Federal/State/City rate.

<comment><USER4> ah forgot about that - thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "It's been a long journey for Hunch."

They were founded in 2008 and sold for $80m 3 years later. That is considered a "long journey" these days? Statements like this give me that "we're in a bubble" feeling.

<comment><USER7> I am somewhat disappointed since Chris Dixon has said Hunch would be in it for the long-term. (I've followed Hunch since it's early days* and always wanted to see it go big.) $80m is a nice pay-out though, the systems they've built have the potential to bring an immense amount of value to eBay's offerings, and a lot of that money will trickle down to other startups via angel investments.

* <http://hassy.posterous.com/my-favorite-startups-hunch>

<comment><USER8>
        Hunch is not for sale. The founders have already sold companies before and have no desire to sell Hunch. We want to build it into a large company.

        hunch responded one year ago

<http://www.formspring.me/hunch/q/1392572735>

<comment><USER9> I've learned that in one year, one's goals can change dramatically.

<comment><USER10> It's also one thing to say something. But the situation changes when a ton of money is actually thrown right in front of you.

<comment><USER11> If the number is right, $80m is not a ton of money for people who have already had big exits and took $20m in VC to start this company.

<comment><USER12> It could also be that the company is doing far worse than the business plan they originally showed out to the VCs : If there's lower growth rates, it's far better for everyone to notch up a quick 3x, rather than see the business dwindle into obscurity (the alternative case, in the minds of the VCs, if they're not going to 'go big').

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, this is like a knight in a white horse for Hunch.. I seriously doubt they were making any profit... This sounds like a talent acquisition. I mean this is ridiculous... but it goes to show you.. you gotta show up for the game (the startup game, I mean) to win it... $80 m for a site that doesn't even get 1 million uniques (per Compete) a month is a STEAL. I mean.. seriously, everyone who has a CS background should just start something on the side if a deal like this is possible.

<comment><USER13> > everyone who has a CS background should just start something on the side if > a deal like this is possible

Chris Dixon is a veteran investor and entrepreneur, with _enormous_ visibility in the tech world. Contacts with potential acquirers are a non-issue for him.

A poor CS fellow could have created a version of Hunch that was 100x better and they still would have 1,000x _less_ of an exit opportunity as compared to any startup Dixon founded.

Get real.

<comment><USER14> If this really is true then it's a sad indictment of the state of the startup scene.

Perhaps your hypothetical fellow should focus on building a "lifestyle business" instead of trying to get big and then get acquired...

<comment><USER15> Technically he should be a software developer with a $120-200k salary working at Google, saving money with compound interest and getting company stock. Thats the easiest way as a CS grad to become wealthy - if thats your goal.

<comment><USER16> That's when you don't factor in 'skills'. If you're 'any' CS grad, you're right. Be if your skills are above average (CS and business sense), this skews the return of investment of the startup.

<comment><USER15> Well, not any developer can get $200k at Google. So skill is important in both respects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I never used Hunch much, and I'm not sure if an 80 million exit with 20 million in VC funding is so great for the founders, but I suppose it gives eBay a footing in NYC - that's the part of the article I found most interesting.

<comment><USER18> 15 million a piece. I don't know how long they were working on it but the very top billed actors tend to make, what, 20 million for movies that take ~3 years to make.

<comment><USER19> So you assume the VC's only scored a 1x on this deal and had no special treatment for their preferred shares such as accrued dividends, liquidity preference, participating preferred, etc?

<comment><USER18> I went by what the GP said.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Chris Dixon talked a lot about "going big", growing big companies, etc. He talked a lot about a new "data tier" for the web and how Hunch would be an intelligent filter for all the data. I wonder what changed?

<comment><USER20> A chance to leverage synergies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Something about Hunch's trajectory is utterly predictable and ever-so-slightly depressing. I suppose building to sell is a perfectly valid business model -- if you succeed -- but it makes me feel a little dirty. And if nobody buys you, you're well and truly f#%@$ed.

Although who am I to argue with $80 million.

<comment><USER22> _And if nobody buys you, you're well and truly f#%@$ed._

Really? If you don't have a 'building to sell' roadmap in the first place, why be depressed? If you're building a long-term, stable company with real value and profits, you're not for sale in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "I have a hunch nobody ever meaningfully used Hunch."

<http://twitter.com/#!/rafat/status/138633186300264448>

</comment><comment><USER24> Hunch is like my divorced neighbor who couldn't work it out, so now they're giving up and short selling the house and bringing down the values for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER25> "It's been a long journey for Hunch. The company was founded in 2008."

Knowing how long it can take for a small company with a good idea and product to launch, I wouldn't really call that a long journey.

Still, congratulations to them. I hope eBay is able to make something good out of what they have created so far.

</comment><comment><USER26> I never felt the need to use Hunch on its own. Now that it can be more of a tool to supplement other objectives, it sure might be the right tool after- all.

<comment><USER27> Hunch was always more of an API company than a destination site.

<comment><USER28> Can you name some companies which were using its API? Their developer site doesn't take any names.

<comment><USER27> What I meant was the goal of the company was to build technology and license that via an API, not become a destination site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> did anyone actually use Hunch seriously?

<comment><USER30> No freaking kidding - only thing I saw the founder do was interview people on TC. Never heard anyone mention hunch outside of those interviews. What is ebay thinking?

<comment><USER7> > What is ebay thinking?

Impressive back-end tech (the recommendation engine) that can now process millions and millions of items on eBay to help increase sales (something like a quarter of Amazon's sales come from recommendations).

<comment><USER31> 80 million dollars is a lot to pay for a recommendation engine.

Netflix had their own and paid a million dollars as prize payout for an absolutely state of the art system.

If it really was just a tech acquisition they massively overpaid.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget that Hunch's system is real-time (this is very hard), and is more than just scalable collaborative filtering for items of the same kind. They can ingest a Twitter or Facebook profile, infer your "taste profile", and start recommending things instantly; "things" meaning books, films, music, events, places etc etc.

<comment><USER30> I don't believe real time is very hard. Something that ebay can' already do. And if they can't already do it, how will hunch come in and solve it. It would probably require major changes to db's etc if that is why ebay can't already do it.

<comment><USER7> _> I don't believe real time is very hard._

At scale it is. More here:

[http://www.quora.com/Hunch/Is-Hunch-actually-doing- anything-...](http://www.quora.com/Hunch/Is-Hunch-actually-doing-anything- technically-interesting/answer/Hasan-Veldstra) (this one got a vote from one of the founders)

<http://hassy.posterous.com/my-favorite-startups-hunch>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone have any suggestions about how Hunch would scale to eBay levels?

Seems Hunch has gone the 'Mega Machine' route (1 T RAM, 48 Core [1]), from 700k users (80m Total TTHY / 113THAYs [1]), make 250k API users

How do you scale that out to eBay numbers?

[1][http://blog.hunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/110509-HUNC...](http://blog.hunch.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/05/110509-HUNCH-TASTEGRAPH_800px_v2_small.png)

</comment><comment><USER33> Here's an interview with Chris Dixon on the Ebay purchase.

eBay is an interesting challenge because so many of the listings don't have metadata like product IDs.

The work Hunch has been doing on the open web is a good fit for this kind of unstructured data.

<http://www.betabeat.com/2011/11/21/chris-dixon-ebay-hunch/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Is Arrington rebuilding a proper tech blog as a counterpart to the growing news machine of Techeablecrunchbeat?

<comment><USER34> I think it's just in his blood at this point to blog about tech news. Good for him I say. If you love what you do then do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Whatever Hunch is really good at, we haven't seen it yet. I assume Ebay has, and that it has everything to do with crunching customer browsing & purchase behavior to offer them products they're most likely to purchase.

<comment><USER36> I think their predictions were actually really good. A while ago I tested several movie recommendation engines and hunch was the only one that delivered.

On the downside, they really asked a lot of questions, which made me uncomfortable with using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> There is a great play around the collection of data outside of just social space. Hunch has done a great job aggregating this data via a social means and displaying the data to the masses in an appealing way to drive more people towards their "recommendation" engine. I work for a site called Ranker and we're focused on a similar data play with much greater focus on SEO.

* <http://www.ranker.com/>

</comment><comment><USER38> I like their movie predictor: <http://hunch.com/movies/></comment>


'Moderate' drinking guidelines are too loose, study says - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/moderate-drinking-guidelines-are-too-loose-study-says/2018/04/12/da73d89c-3e64-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html <comment><USER2> This is a good opportunity to point out that alcoholism is much more prevalent in young people than it is generally thought. Especially with students and young employees who like to "party", it must be taken seriously. The fact that alcohol is not frowned upon by society in general, hides the devastating effects it can have.

What starts as drinking on weekends and getting wasted maybe once a week, turns into drinking 3-4 times a week, than maybe 4-5 times a week. When you start to feel alone and "need a drink", when you want to have fun, but you "need a drink", when you are under lots of stress and "you need a drink", those are signs that you are becoming an alcoholic.

Please seek help and talk about it. Alcoholism is dangerous and kills you, makes you an outsider and loner over time. Please don't feel ashamed. Seek help, talk to friends/family.

<comment><USER3> "The fact that alcohol is not frowned upon by society in general, hides the devastating effects it can have." Not only is it not frowned upon, in every single movie or series people grab a bottle when they emotionally have a a bad time, every time. It's so normal and cool. Bad experience: Numb yourself with alcohol! All the cool kids do it!

Exactly how ingrained alcohol is in our culture really only starts to hit you when you know someone with an alcohol problem. Try to not drink for a couple of months, the reactions can be pretty strange, "you must be ill or something"... I really see alcohol as Soma from Brave New World. But unlike with tobacco, we still have our heroes use it on the telly all the time.

Yesterday I had a 16 y/o tell me that she doesn't like to drink and she's a bit of an outcast at school now. In fact she says, many kids don't like it but they do it anyway to be part of the group. Sure, that is normal for kids, but that used to be normal for smoking and that (at least here in the Netherlands) is in my experience quickly losing it's coolness by lack of commercials and government crackdown.

<comment><USER4> In really is incredible how many billions of dollars are spent on marketing alcohol and how pervasive is is.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately the alcohol with the heaviest marketing is also the shittiest. Bland watery beer, sugary swill blended shots that are just meant to be knocked back as quickly as possible, and cheap nasty spirits, which are just meant to be mixed with soda or energy drinks.

There is certainly a drinking culture problem, and it is specifically a lack of culture and taste.

Give me a high quality wine or whisky or even a well-mixed drink made with quality ingredients. Something to savor and enjoy, instead of just chugging it as quickly as possible.

I'm in Malaga on vacation at the moment, and there is definitely something to be said for one glass of good wine with dinner and one glass of good sherry with dessert, and _that 's it_. Not knocking back endless rows of shitty shots.

Drinking to get "hammered" is the real problem. Drinking a smaller amount of something well-made that tickles your taste buds and intrigues you is so much more fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's important to study the risks associated with alcohol, but it's also important to be pragmatic about how we reduce risk in our lives.

Everything is risky, riding a horse is risky, going sailing is risky, doing a stressful job is risky. Running marathons often causes health problems. Being sedentary causes health problems.

Being lonely is terrible for your health. Having a beer with your friends could be as important as another evening in the gym.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely agreed. The article is very grave-sounding, but they're talking about people who drink 100-200 grams of alcohol per week having a life expectancy 6 months shorter than those who drink 0-100 grams per week. 200-350 grams drops you by 1-2 years. So? It seems like a big fuss over something that isn't expected to reduce the length of your life all that much, whereas there are many other common or even routine activities in life that carry much more risk.

Certainly if someone gets to a point where they're dependent on alcohol, or it's negatively impacting their life, that's a problem. But that's not what we're talking about here.

<comment><USER8> 2 years is more than 2%

if that's not a lot, would you mind sending me 2% of your pay check? I will have to find something to compensate, but first I'd be curious what the relatively huge advantage of loosing 2 years to alcohol is in your mind, for sake of the argument.

<comment><USER9> I already have multiple hobbies that consume more than 2% of my income per year. If you can find something to sell me that I enjoy more than skiing, you're more than welcome to my skiing budget.

<comment><USER8> How about liquor for 2% of your budget? If that's not to our taste, I'd still wonder why alcohol consumption should warrant loosing two years of life.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps because someone enjoys it? It's a bit holier-than-thou to suggest that skiing is a noble way to spend your time and money (and life), while drinking alcohol is not.

And regardless, you've chosen to focus on one of the larger estimates. Six months at the 100-200g level is around 0.7% of life. You're certainly free to think I'm short-sighted by valuing a little drinking more than 0.7% of my life expectancy, but I'm also free to ignore you; it's my life, and I get to decide what makes me happy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was always suspicious of the magical 'one glass of red a day is actually GOOD for you!' \- seemed like a major case of wishful thinking and confirmation bias.

Alcohol is fun to many people - including researchers. This has driven an almost desperate attempt to legitimate drinking in nearly any context. Drinking daily? Good for you! While pregnant? Probably not bad! Breastfeeding? Sure! Just social drinking once a week, but a little bingey? Well that's like an average of 1 drink/day, so it's also good for you basically!

I quote a friend who is a psychiatrist: there is no known safe level of alcohol.

<comment><USER11> Time also. A single 24 hour period of time won't kill you, but string together 80 or 90 years worth and you will be close to death.

<comment><USER12> > but string together 80 or 90 years worth and you will be close to death

I think 80 or 90 years of "life" will bring you close to death!

<comment><USER13> the hardest drug of all is oxygen.. impossible to stop and will kill you most of the time

<comment><USER14> Just look at what it does to metal in a short amount of time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> All of the debate about risk and life expectancy and carcinogens, etc. is fine from a scientific perspective, but don't forget to enjoy your life and to allow others the opportunity to enjoy theirs. For most of us, the "goal" is not to live the longest or to be the healthiest person in the room, but to laugh, play, cry, and to enjoy the journey as best we can given our circumstances. It ends the same way for all of us and is rarely pleasant no matter the route one took to arrive there.

</comment><comment><USER16> One question I have about this paper is that as far as I can tell they don't seem to control for obesity. Drinking is often correlated with increased weight, and fatness causes many of the problems attributed to alcohol. I wonder how much of negative health issues found in this paper could be offset by staying fit and keeping weight under control?

That said, it seems to be quite a rigorous paper in general and it's made me think about how much I should be drinking.

</comment><comment><USER17> >As for the threshold for low-risk drinking, White said, "there's no magic number here. The effects of alcohol on health are very complicated. The effects are influenced by a wide range of factors, like body weight and sex, medications, rate of consumption, so it's very hard to arrive at one single threshold below which everybody's going to be safe from harm."

Yet another reminder that there's often a difference between what the public wants or needs (a magic number), and what reality can deliver (a very complex set of related variables).

If you get all your science from news articles that talk about magic numbers, you're not getting the full picture of the science. The media delivers what readers want to read, not what the most useful info is.

<comment><USER18> I actually think a 'magic number' is pretty useful, as a ballpark figure. Like BMI... nobody is arguing that BMI is a gauge of health for every individual, but it's a reasonable starting point, and if you want to studies of a bunch of people, well, something like BMI is pretty much required.

I mean, weight in kg divided by your height in meters squared is obviously wrong and stupid in a lot of ways, but it's a lot better than nothing, and most importantly, it's super easy to understand.

Having a simple answer is really useful... sometimes a simple answer, assuming that simple answer is still useful, is better than a complex answer, even when the complex answer is more correct. Sort of how bandwidth is charged for on the 95th percentiles (or on total transfer, which is in essence charging for average use)

<comment><USER17> Yes, I actually agree with that! As long as the media doesn't come along a year or two later with articles about "everybody was wrong about BMI! It's much more complicated!"

That type of reporting has tarnished medical research unfairly, IMHO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Imagine if alcohol would be invented today. Drinking strong industrial solvent and carcinogen would be considered batshit crazy even in strongly diluted forms.

When everybody something has existed for few decades, it becomes accepted behaviour.

<comment><USER20> You say this, but it's currently trendy to vaporize and inhale flavored antifreeze (propylene glycol).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the most important finding here is that woman and men are affected alike, and our opinion that men can drink more (safely) are just false preconceptions.

<comment><USER22> That's not really what it says. It's the difference between quantizing by day (one or two drinks per _day_ ) and quantizing by some larger unit (seven or nine drinks per _week_ or some such similar). The existing guidelines are not really all that well informed anyway, as with other U.S. dietary guidelines they are more or less just an expression of the status quo, set just high enough that 80%+ of Americans don't exceed them.

The actual interesting result is that their interpretation of the data suggests that there is no amount of drinkable alcohol which can be said to have a neutral or positive effect on your health, male or female.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A quick search of the list of the "happiest countries" conducted by the UN shows all top 10 countries are from the west with at least a minor drinking culture.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report)

Obviously there are a variety of factors affecting the outcome, but it does seem that in countries where drinking is prevalent, the people in general are happier possibly due to the relationships forged. I'll take slightly shorter and happier over an extra year added to the lifespan.

<comment><USER24> Now if there's ever an occasion to say "correlation isn't causation" it's this one. There are so many factors to consider here that drawing any kind of relation between "drinking culture" (how do you even define this?) and general population happiness sounds preposterous to me. Furthermore in this case the correlation is rather week if you compare it with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption_per_capita)

It reminds me of people who praise smoking saying that they get to meet people during breaks. I'm sure they do but certainly there are other ways to achieve the same result that don't involve hurting one's health? You can definitely go to a pub of your choice and socialize while drinking non-alcoholic beverages if you want.

<comment><USER23> I'm not saying its a simple as: Drink Alcohol=Happy Country.

But I would bet the variable is statistically significant.

And you're right there are plenty of other healthy ways to achieve happiness. But to go to the other extreme and say there are zero positive effects correlated with happiness is an overstatement.

This Is How Happy Alcohol Makes You, Researchers Say [http://time.com/4347687/alcohol-happiness- boost/](http://time.com/4347687/alcohol-happiness-boost/)

<comment><USER24> >But I would bet the variable is statistically significant.

You need to justify this then because it's not at all obvious to me. I've had a few friends who once were alcoholics, they look significantly happier now. Socializing probably makes you happier but you don't have to drink alcohol to do that.

>But to go to the other extreme and say there are zero positive effects correlated with happiness is an overstatement.

I didn't say that, I'm just saying that you're argument is weak. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't but drawing conclusions from this list of happiest countries in the world is disingenuous, I'm sure variations in wealth, education and political climate (and even climate in general) drowns any statistical influence "drinking culture" might have. And while I'm willing to believe that alcohol consumption might has positive effects for some people you have to balance it with the many potential negative effects to see if you end up with a net positive.

The link you posted said people are happier _while they drink_ , which is not frankly surprising to me. It doesn't say that drinkers are happier in general. If you drink to forget your troubles I'm sure you're happier while drunk but I'm not sure it's a net positive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Was it the alcohol that killed the study subjects, or the carbs, or the fats, or the sugar, or the skewered red meats, or the caffeine, or the insanely aggressive competition at work and in life. To me it all seems a Calvinistic effort to lay the blame of anything at peoples' feet, "poor life choices" and taking treatments off insurance coverage.

Hey, on the tune of the conspiracists blaming "big alcohol", I wonder if all these "x kills you" are also sponsored by "big insurance".

<comment><USER26> You realise that insurance is all about calculating the statistical incidence of events right? They don't make life insurance more expensive for alcoholics and smokers because they are evil but because they are more likely to pay out a claim earlier.

<comment><USER27> I am bemused by companies that allegedly pay men more because they are men. Companies pay as little as they can to everyone.

<comment><USER28> Assuming you're actually serious: Companies don't pay men more, they pay women less — _because_ they pay everyone as little as they can: it's well established that women systematically under-estimate their own value, compared to equally-qualified men (and they're also underestimated by their peers). This has a huge impact on salary negotiations: Women tend to negotiate less, and if they negotiate at all, they tend to ask for less than their male peers.

And to get this out of the way: Most companies nowadays don't do this _intentionally_. It just happens. The outcome is the same though.

<comment><USER27> If women are being paid less for the same contribution, then there is an enormous market opportunity for women to start companies, hire away those women by offering better pay, and undercut the male run companies.

I.e. if women are paid 80% of men for equal work, the women run company can offer 90%, and have labor costs 10% below the other company. This should translate to offering their product/service at 5% less, which is a huge deal.

<comment><USER28> If you're refusing to hire men this would be illegal. If you hire men but pay them only 90% of their market value, then your company will be known as not paying competitive salaries and won't attract candidates (not just men — _any_ job applicants).

But the situation is mostly hypothetical anyway because the real pay gap between men and women in the same position with same qualification is much smaller in junior positions (they only become bigger in senior positions, and, yes, companies actively try to fill these with women; which is hard because there are fewer applicants). In junior positions, the gap is too small to build a company on this business model.

That said, of course some companies predominantly hire women to cut personnel cost and consequently lower product prices. Most sweatshops are based on this premise.

<comment><USER29> >If you're refusing to hire men this would be illegal. If you hire men but pay them only 90% of their market value, then your company will be known as not paying competitive salaries and won't attract candidates (not just men — any job applicants).

You can just make your company seem unattractive to men. I once talked to a recruiting company that boasted that they were a company founded and run by women. This already seemed like a huge red flag to me as a man that I might not want to work with them.

<comment><USER30> Why was that a huge red flag to you?

<comment><USER27> If you were the ambitious sort wanting a leadership position, would you want to join a company that boasted about being family-run?

<comment><USER29> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Nutrition Facts' Michael Greger covered the misinterpretation of data that led people to believe in health benefits of moderate drinking in this video: [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/Is-It-Better-to-Drink- Littl...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/Is-It-Better-to-Drink-Little- Alcohol-Than-None-at-All)

There are reasons to drink moderately besides health, but best not to decide based on misinterpretations.

</comment><comment><USER32> 7 beers a week sounds like alcoholism to me but that's maybe because of "a week" and "7" parts.

<comment><USER33> If you ever hang out with some actual alcoholics, you'll see how ludicrous that statement looks fairly quickly.

Many of them report regularly consuming over _30 drinks a day_. There is a huge spectrum.

I've been mulling this study over since it hit the news a few days ago, and I haven't dug into the actual paper enough yet, but I'm wondering if they adequately controlled for under-reporting. A lot of people who say "one drink a day" really mean "3 or more drinks a day" and are either too ashamed or too self-deluded to be able to admit it-- whereas I suspect most people who say "less than one drink a day" are being more accurate because they can actually remember multiple 24-hour periods when they didn't drink (unlike a drinker who has or is developing a problem).

Source: Have alcoholic tendencies myself, recently brought it down to 4-6 drinks a day but getting it lower is proving very difficult.

<comment><USER32> You are right. I'm very biased. If I drink two beers I'm drunk. So 7 beers a week means for me being drunk every other day. Which sounds absolutely horrible.

I never drunk two days in a row. Although I've been drunk two days in a row by drinking 6 beers one day and not managing to sober up during sleep.

I had alcoholic uncle but I never noticed how much he actually drinks only that he needs alcohol regularly so I equate any drinking regularly with alcoholism.

<comment><USER34> It should be noted that "beer" in this context refers to 12oz of 5% ABV beer, not 7.5% IPAs (or worse).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like we plain do not have a good set of studies on alcohol (or coffee, or...).

You can examine that alcohol has been consumed by many cultures for centuries and evaluate whether the associated outcomes are acceptable to you.

<comment><USER36> Epidemiology does not work that way. Too many confounders and very low predictive power.

<comment><USER35> Well, I'm not talking about epidemiology, just personal choice. People had to use incomplete information for personal choices for centuries, I'm afraid. I'm not sure what to do about that, the alternative seems to be chasing after the conclusion of the latest study and a lot of said latest studies are very poor, often in very insidious ways that are hard to identify.

If something was literally poisonous and was consumed by lots of people, we'd be seeing drastic effects. Like drastically slashed life expectancy.

If something was literally hyper-beneficial and extended your life by 20 years, we'd be seeing some cohort expressing that, as well.

If there are lots of confounders, it just means it's not the only problem, which I think is already frequently true for many of these things (i.e., smoking and weight gain associated with lots of root issues).

The effects of a lot of things taken in vacuum often seem less significant than their very confounders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Alcohol in the absence of polyunsaturated fats is fairly benign. In the context of fried foods and margarine and vegetable oils it's very damaging. On a very low fat diet you could probably down a six pack daily with minimal harm.

<comment><USER38> > _Alcohol in the absence of polyunsaturated fats is fairly benign._

This isn't true. Sorry to inform you but Ethanol is a IARC Group 1 Carcinogen. There is no safe amount of consumption of ethanol. When Ethanol enters the body, it is metabolized into Acetaldehyde, which enters the bloodstream, and later another enzyme metabolizes Acetaldehyde into harmless Aceitc Acid.

Acetaldehyde also a Group 1 Carcinogen. Acetaldehyde is a tiny molecule and when in the bloodstream, Acetaldehyde can pass through any cell membrane unregulated, and when it enters the cell nucleus it causes irreparable DNA damage [https://www.sciencealert.com/alcohol-damages-dna-stem- cells-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/alcohol-damages-dna-stem-cells-cancer- acetaldehyde) .

When cells accumulate too much damage to their DNA, they either die or (very rarely) start replicating uncontrollably, leading to a situation known as cancer.

I reccomend you read how Ethanol is processed by the body here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism) . You can see that the process by which the human body metabolizes Ethanol _always_ produces carcinogens, no matter the presence of fried foods, margarine, vegetable oils.

<comment><USER39> So glad to see this stated so clearly

will take one exception which is to: ~Acetaldehyde causes irreparable DNA damage~

This is not 100% we all repair this damage all the time (usually) however not needing to repair excess damage is preferable.

Note: ethanol is not the only source of aldehydes in our diet even if it is a potent one, paraphrasing a medical researcher friend "anything that tastes good will metabolize through an aldehyde phase"

Our genetics, the dose and blind luck will determine if the damage is repairable.

For an example of genetics and ethanol mediated DNA damage/repair see Asian Flushing syndrome [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_flush_reaction)

Yeast produced ethanol as a toxin to inhibit other things from eating what they were eating, it was only ~10M years ago something was hungry enough to eat the poison and lucky enough to have mutated to derive nutrition from the toxin.

but hey, oxygen use to be a toxin too.

<comment><USER28> > but hey, oxygen use to be a toxin too.

It still is. Oxidative stress is a major threat to cells. There's a lot of expensive machinery to keep the damage in check but it's not foolproof.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Dock+ The first charging dock for iPhone 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dockplus/charging-dock-for-iphone-5

<comment><USER2> The kickstarter pledges are probably more interesting than the product itself. The limited editions, DIY power kit, are all pretty standard, but offering a bag of rare moon dust and a 101 course in kickstarter is a great tactic.</comment>


Fire your bad customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.preetamnath.com/blog/fire-your-bad-customers <comment><USER2> In the past, being an independent consultant for around a decade, I let 2-3 clients go.

One of those, letting the client go turned out to be a huge mistake, since the reasons turned out to be a temporary blip. In so many words, the great executive later returned, some things that were concerning/unacceptable while the exec was away were presumably reversed, but I'd already moved on.

Another, they just had an unsalvagable massive mess of a code base that an undergrad made, and they didn't appreciate how bad it was, and that it needed more than incremental work.

Before and after the regretted cut-loose client, I also didn't take on at least a few clients who I had misgivings about. Some of those were probably due to once-bitten, twice-shy.

Some problems I've learned to avoid, and I'll phrase them here as positives (I've found both the negative and positive examples):

* Clients who realize they need more than a low-end programmer. Like many people, I have a lot of experience working higher-end than that,

* Client respects you as an expert or competent professional. That doesn't mean they defer to you automatically. What you want to avoid are situations like someone key at the client thinking they always know better, on all topics. Which is a not-unusual phenomenon. One version to avoid is when they are the expert on all things, and they think they're only hiring worker drones to save time on things they know better on.

* Client is intelligent and constructive. If they're saying technical things that don't make sense, and when you attempt to discuss, to understand and possibly inform, you hit a brick wall, then you might have a lot of brick walls in your future if you take them on as a client.

* Client has enough money, is willing to spend it on you, and looks like they'll have enough money for a while. Complementary to this, I of course wouldn't take a contract like, say, someone self-funding a startup, and no matter what I did for them, it didn't look like they'd be viable.

* If client is a CS-ish professor (which I bump into probably more than most, since I have a fondness for some aspects/ideals of universities, and live in university neighborhoods)... Only take the client if you can find a situation close to that of a colleague of mine: works with a PI who respects him as both skilled and as a collaborator. It's not uncommon for a CS-ish professor to think they know more about practice than practitioners, and they get some (misleading, incestuous) validation from others in academia. I respect professors by default, and some are close friends, but egos and inaccurate perceptions about the world outside academia seem not-unusual. Also, universities are accustomed to cheap, captive labor (except for select higher-ups, and sometimes endowment hedge fund managers).

* Watch out for the casual oracle (I don't know whether there's an existing term?), and also be careful not to be the casual oracle. By which I mean a decision-maker has a friend or someone who they keep going to to check things you tell them, and this person overrules you. Normally, this would be fine, especially as a discussion, but what I'm talking about is like a rogue doctor, who diagnoses patients without ever having examined them, talked with a doctor who has, or even glanced at their ED chart, yet ends up overriding the actual doctors of the patients. I've seen this a few times firsthand (in tech, not with doctors), so it seems to be a thing, and I also had a friend once quit over it. If it's a thing, I don't know whether it's only an artifact of not respecting the person doing the work, or something else. A few times, I've also realized that I was being asked to be the casual oracle, and I tried to be humble and qualify, but now that I recognize this thing, I'll be even more careful.

<comment><USER3> This really applies to all relationships. Every relationship has a pros and cons, and if the cons outweigh the pros = dump that person.

I have a filter on new employees such that if they cannot fill out the application on the website, they don't get an interview. Same with customers - I deliberately channel them to the website because if they cannot figure out how to use our brainlessly easy website, I don't want to spend the next year walking them through.

There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs.

The same is true for romantic relationships - some are just not worth it.

<comment><USER4> > There is a multiplicative hidden cost working with uneducated/lazy people > people. It's like the locked doors theory of crime. The most criminal 0.1% > of society costs society a 100x increase in security costs.

This is probably a lesson that is endlessly learned by new junior consultants. When new consultants get into consulting through the fluent practitioner route (as opposed to the "warm body contract job shop" route), they tend to make the common assumption everyone is as excited as they are about the field, and the only difference between them and their clients' staff is time-on-keyboard, and perhaps some perspective.

There is a distinct category of staff that the new consultant will encounter who immediately glom onto the convenience of treating the consultant as a personal Google service, with the added bonus of not even having to sift through the search results and handed the answer. Kind of a value add when the check-signing manager witnesses this happening first-hand; many appreciate getting confirmation they bought the services of an expert.

However, the trap is the new consultant assumes the staff member will leverage these answers to find their own new lessons to learn. Or even remember the answer. This becomes a significant time sink, so different consultants develop different ways with different clients to mitigate this anti-pattern. Nothing to fire a client over (to bring us back to the original topic), but definitely an issue you want to keep tactics to employ in your back pocket for.

<comment><USER5> I would like to discuss this subthread at length, this specific pathology is playing out at my current engagement right now.

For context, I have been in consulting roles for most of my career, probably because of my proclivity to be "unsolicited advice guy". I see something amiss and I tell people about it. My delivery has changed and matured over the years, but I still cannot correct flaw.

An epiphany I had a couple months ago, and this is after 20+ years of this work, is that consultants are primarily organizational psychologists. They bring a lot to the project and the org, but it isn't the technical that takes the highest position. And in the case of the repeat-help-desk-can't-fish customer there are a lot of different issues at play. Some of the charitable ones are

\- lack of confidence

\- risk of getting blamed

\- over worked, too much responsibility compared to the skills

\- unrealistic deadlines by their managers

\- personal issues prevent a lack of focus and inability to do deep work

If you deliver the n-th answer like you delivered the zeroth answer, they will think you have an infinite capacity for taking their burden. There are signals you can use to push back, explain how busy you are, frame you answer relative to a previous answer, answer the question with 3 questions and some tasks that if completed will solve their problem (Socratic help desk).

Consultants should make their customers and all of their customers look like rock stars, but we shouldn't let folks within the org use your knowledge and skills to make themselves look better. This particular pattern is damaging because while to the rest of the org they look amazing, their ego erodes and they keep coming back to the oracle for more answers and at some point they are only a mindless conduit.

In the case of an employee who is using you as a 2nd brain, one technique is do a pomo of the issue, give them mad props for the debugging, development, patience, etc while outlining the problem and how it solved. Make a group effort while giving them some praise but don't allow them to consistently take center stage.

On the flip side, one can find the staff members how share knowledge within the org, and synthesize new solutions from previous ones. These folks need to be protected, cultivated and propped up, they will save projects and your ass if handled with care.

<comment><USER4> Great explication of some of the nuances encountered with this pathology. This is one of many areas where the art of consulting (that is, sufficient experience to start pattern-matching new clients' behaviors) steps into the picture.

The delicate balance to effect here is employing the techniques you outlined, against the deliverables and maintaining good working relationships with staff you depend upon to deliver to you information you need to accomplish what you were brought in for. Unless you correctly read your client organization and staff who you will be interacting with, and correspondingly pad your estimates, carrying out these techniques become mostly or all unbillable work.

The technique of doing a pomo works really well for issues above a certain complexity level. Often I can get a manager to enthusiastically sign off on incrementally adding to the engagement on a time and materials basis on top of the outcome-based fee I bill for such knowledge transfers, typically as one or a series of lunch and learns.

Below a complexity level (for example, "how do I enable tracing in <foo>?"), and it rapidly becomes nonsensical, and I use a lightweight (to the consultant) version of what you recommended. Depending upon the personalities involved, and facilities available, I usually ask for the request be re-framed as a ticket "so the entire team can learn now from the answer, and datamine the knowledge base in the future", and I suggest to the manager that the requester be officially tasked with documenting the answer into the team's official documentation repository with an official documentation template, that a project manager will then start chasing down. I also recommend someone else on the team "QA" the documentation by performing the procedure as documented.

The documentation doesn't have to be fancy, even a single paragraph suffices in some cases, but usually there is a _lot_ of red tape involved. This delivers genuine benefits from the leadership's perspective, and for genuine "the organization didn't know how to do this", it does advance the organization's capabilities. The bonus for the consultant is it puts you back in the consulting seat, where you point towards how it is done in sufficient detail so someone can put together the steps (you might call out one or more particularly tricky steps, but usually just pointing in the right direction is enough), but the person doing the asking becomes responsible for proving and documenting the steps to their peers, project manager and manager. This cuts down on the frivolous requests to pretty much trivial amounts in my personal experience, without compromising on leadership's nor staff's desires.

<comment><USER5> Great advice on forcing the documentation as both a gating function and an optics advantage to management.

I have been trying to re-route RTFM queries to inside the org by putting in support structures where there were previously none, as well as working on some training sessions that are basically "how to avoid RTFM queries" but in a respectful way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had fun replying honestly to bad customers. I run a service where you pay once for a lifetime upgrade, and it doesn't make much money so I don't care very much about dissatisfying bad customers.

One of them emailed me with a subject line of "my account is broken! FIX IT!!!" and no body, to which I replied "how rude, do you think I'm your slave?". He replied in the same vein, saying that if I didn't fix it he'd go to a competitor, to which I said "it's a one-time payment and you've already paid me, if you leave you're just basically saving me time in support".

He replied a few hours later apologizing for his rudeness and detailing what the problem was, which I helped him fix, but it was fun to see how much customers expect to be able to walk all over customer service and how surprised they are when you don't take their shit.

To be fair, 99% of support emails are very kind and polite.

<comment><USER7> Your pricing model is broken and it's bad for you and customers. Do yourself a favor and put a limit on support after the upgrade and then offer an ongoing maintenance package.

I used to have a similarly bad attitude when I had low metered pricing. Once I insisted on monthly account minimums I could afford to hire a nice customer service person and not be so touchy all of the time.

<comment><USER6> This is literally one instance in ten years. That's pretty far from "all the time", which is a conclusion I don't even hint at anywhere. I'm pretty happy to provide the service at this price point, and every customer is too. Besides, I would call out this kind of entitled rudeness at any price point.

<comment><USER8> I quite often throw out the "raise your prices" viewpoint in casual conversation, based on my time (12ish years) as a contractor. When I do it, I'm aware it's not always the best option, but I don't have a catalog of personal experience to draw on for more nuanced advice.

This was a nice example of when not to. Thanks.

<comment><USER9> My example is not completely applicable because it's not a business per se, nor do I want to make it one, it's more of a "I made this for myself but you can use it if you chip in to pay for costs". Even so, I recently raised the price from $20/ever (where it was since 2008) to $50/ever.

The way I handle most support requests is to make the UI easy enough so that people don't have that problem in the first place, though many still do, partly because of the unorthodox "email token to log in" system I switched to recently. Many people weren't used to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the perspective of a mobile app/game developer, I'd say developers who sell apps on the app stores aren't so lucky. You need to respond, and resolve issues of each and every customer, otherwise get bombarded with a bunch of negative reviews from accounts of everyone they know. Just like the recent fate of TikTok app, but in a smaller scale. One time a single customer nearly took our business down by writing 1 star reviews every day for weeks about how we fucked him over with a paid app (that was $4.99) and that we were scamming because we didn't fully refund him for the service he used for a month. The review highlights would only show his reviews so download and sale dropped, competitor ranked #1 from #2 .. and it was one hell of an experience.

One day that guy stopped rating our app, and things started getting better. Yeah, it's a bad idea to put the fate of your business in a single app, but we were just starting out.

This happened because we kinda fired our one customer. From that day, everyone who asks for a refund even after using up the services gets a refund. Feature requests go to a voting arena; so far so good. We're not sinking now.

<comment><USER11> This matches with what I've learned as well with digital B2C products. You should fully refund with a very low bar. No questions asked, even.

Assume the customer has a point, even if you don't fully get what the point is. If they are not happy for whatever reason, promptly give them their money back, apologise for the bad experience, and move on.

Furthermore, your customer support should never be defensive; their job is not to protect your company but really side with the customer. Early on, when every dollar counts, it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to argue with the customer to keep their money. Just don't do that, it will annoy the customer and you'll have to refund them anyway.

Yes, some people will take advantage of this, especially with refunds. That's the cost of doing B2C business, perhaps with digital products in particular where it's hard to prove the customer "received value".

When they say "the customer is always right", as cheesy as it sounds, they have a point. And it's not that the customer is always technically correct, but assuming that stance will be better for your business.

<comment><USER12> Just as in mobile gaming you're mainly catering to whales, this kind of customer service is catering to sharks (or snarks?). It's a bad equilibrium to be in since bad customers do exist and the platforms act like they don't. Wisdom of the crowds is in averages, not in catering to the bottom .1%.

I'm in old school insurance and we even have legitimised platforms to catch cheaters, liers and those that would threaten our staff. They don't get insurance anywhere after things like that. I would say that on average that leads to better premiums and better customer service, having procedures to remove the bottom .1% from service.

A transaction shouldn't be based on received value (ex post), but on perceived value (ex ante). Two parties commit to a contract and follow through. We (EU) have laws about how to deal with problems after a legal commitment is made even for online. I think the US has less of that leading to the concept of (ex post) service as being free returns, unlimited refunds etc. It makes business harder, in a way. You can't guarantee happiness but you can guarantee delivering your part of the deal. It's a different mindset based partly on different legalities.

<comment><USER13> > I'm in old school insurance and we even have legitimised platforms to catch > cheaters, liers and those that would threaten our staff. They don't get > insurance anywhere after things like that.

Interesting. Are you saying that insurance firms share info about bad customers?

<comment><USER12> In the Netherlands, after a customer acts with the intention to defraud and a limited list of other abuses, yes. There are procedures in place for appeal and one could go to the courts for appeal as well. It truly is the <.1%. Health insurance is not in this scheme.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alternatively, charge them appropriately. I billed at double rate with an one hour minimum for unscheduled phone inquiries. Nothing makes you rich or stops their misbehavior faster than sending a $200 bill for a 2-minute call that was essentially "did you see my email?"

Special feature requests were tied to minimum spend contracts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was afraid to try this, because as someone else pointed out, what if they agree and now I'm stuck with a high-paying toxic customer. Yikes!

<comment><USER15> @200 an hour, billed by the hour and counting from the first minute they have to be particularly toxic. Still I guess you should have your terms and conditions carefully though out.

<comment><USER16> Irritation factor is an important billing metric. I very rarely say no to a job, I just price so that I'll be happy if they accept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Once you decide to "fire a customer", it may not be easy to get thru that process. It can be tricky if the cancellation started on the side of the software provider.

We run an enterprise saas business and at one point decided we can't work with a particular customer anymore. We informed the customer that we will terminate his service and cancel all his outstanding (unpaid) invoices.

Soon after that, the customer started to take legal action against our company. It was quite an ordeal for about 12 months. At least it helped us improve our contracts and legal processes going forward.

However, since than we are careful to vet new potential customers _before_ we offer our software. If we feel the software isn't a good fit, we will tell the customer and work thru our concerns before signing a contract. Even if we may lose some potential customers in the process, it builds a more healthy and sustainable business.

"Avoid toxic customers." Is now part of our handbook.

<comment><USER18> This works if your business model allows you to be selective, but for many companies (big and small) you don't get to choose your customers. Even worse, a lot of times it's not fully bad customers, it's a bad customer attached to an otherwise benign entity that refuses to acknowledge the behavior of the bad customer.

This is exacerbated for big businesses because typically the sales team and the product team are not working directly together except for POCs, and the discussions that a Sales team has and a Product Team has are very different. It's not even about technical competency most of the time from the Sales Team (my experience is they usually know just about what they should for the role, and smart Sales folk know when to stop and ask instead of making promises they can't keep), but rather that typically who the Sales team talks with is not the bad customer, but higher decision makers who just get a generalized feedback from the actual bad customer within their company. The nit-picky and vicious activities are abstracted out into some more generalized and calmer statements when delivered to decision-makers/Sales, and it can be very difficult to get any traction on such bad customers.

I deal with these situations exclusively and it's time consuming and exhausting. Cheap legal threats aren't even the worst part (fun trick when you get a compensation request, just ask for detailed documentation on how they arrived at such a number; most times this is enough to shut down such requests as the number is just something they've pulled out of the air because "it sounded good" during a meeting), but instead that most of the time what you're dealing with "family problems" from these customers, and these are problems they just don't want to deal with personally.

Business is weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> A startup I know was basically killed by this (COVID was the main cause, but this was a large straw that absorbed a ton of time just before the pandemic).

Over a month was spent caving to every inane request of this one customer and the only reason they did it was because the customer was willing to pay $250 and they were the first non-institutional paying customer so they were obsessed with getting it right.

5 figure a month contracts that were soon to start but paused due to the pandemic went unserviced so that large parts of the product could be rewritten to serve this one person as though they were the expert on what non institutional customers wanted. And in the end they wanted nothing more than a custom Craigslist type of ad, just with their own custom style and everything.

Could have spent that month protecting the large contracts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ouch! That must have hurt. I totally get that when someone has 0 or only a handful of customers, trying to service one that's showing interest (but being demanding) feels like the natural thing to do.

But more often than not, the end outcome isn't favourable.

A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't. Toxic.

<comment><USER19> How did that all end with your friend? Was he able to fire him?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I had this conversation 2 days ago and haven't heard back since. That combined with my own experiences prompted me to write the blog post.

I'm going to follow up and report back.

Update: His reply - "Fired politely!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA.

Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same.

The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum"

Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero.

Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF.

Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.

<comment><USER21> _Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA._

Reporting bugs doesn't make someone a bad customer.

<comment><USER22> I don't think he's saying that.

But there's a certain kind of nitpicky person you can never make happy.

When your company is young and immature, there's still a decent concentration of actionable feedback in the nitpicks. Eventually it gets harder to mine gems out of it.

<comment><USER23> If I was starting a company, I'd prefer to have at least a few nitpicky customers. You might not solve all of their problems, but their over- communication might highlight insightful decisions you could make, that would otherwise be opaque from customers who don't ever talk to you. Emotional, verbose feedback is better than no feedback.

<comment><USER24> I think everyone is agreeing with each other. Early on these kind of customers can be a benefit. Later on it may not be.

<comment><USER25> The ability to quickly find bugs does not make you a bad customer - the way you treat the company determines that.

I'm not at all convinced that tolerating bad behaviour towards your company is ever a good strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the important lessons I learned when I was building websites/doing digital strategy consulting (and this was over a decade ago) was to charge more. I was hesitant to do this because starting out, you want to attract customers and you think being competitive and having low prices is the answer. That can work to an extent, but what I found was that all of my clients who I was charging low rates were demanding, needy, and wanted far more than they were paying for. They were terrible. When I raised my rates, the clients I got were much better. No more insane calls at all hours. No more requests for stuff never in the initial SOW. No more threats of finding someone else even cheaper to do it.

It's often hard to know who is a bad customer at the beginning, but once you figure it out, unless the customer is legitimately responsible for a massive part of your business, I agree, fire them. And if the bad customer is responsible for so much of your business you can't fire them, start looking for a replacement set of customers so that you can work to do that.

<comment><USER21> The bottom end of any market is a cesspit, both for buyers and sellers. I suspect it's the same at the top as well although I have little experience there.

I've done quite a few projects for distribution companies, these are intermediaries selling stuff on very low margins, basically warehouses with a call centre. To survive they have to become obsessive over costs. They can't turn that cost cutting mentality off even when they are buying services rather than 10 million transistors or whatever they need. This makes them thoroughly miserable places to work. Amazon is an example but on a massive scale.

<comment><USER27> I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end.

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream.

One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)

<comment><USER28> _One exception is if your business accepts payments which can 't be reversed_

I do sometimes wonder how much global loss in economic productivity is caused by the various payment methods that allow customers to retrospectively reverse purchases or payments with a high or certain likelihood of taking their money back and possibly also costing the merchant a fee, whether or not the customer has any legitimate basis for doing so.

Even with an extremely low chargeback rate, the amount of hassle the occasional chargeback does cause to one of my little businesses is wildly disproportionate. We are generally very keen on looking after our customers and in practice we tend to refund liberally in cases where for example there seems to have been a genuine misunderstanding on the customer's part, even if legally we have no obligation to do so. Consequently, we have a generally very positive reputation, and sometimes even people who didn't find our product was right for them turn out to be good ambassadors. I would gladly decline the probably tiny number of customers who wouldn't buy our stuff without the option to make us give their money back involuntarily in exchange for the certainty we would get, and I don't think our reputation would suffer in the slightest for it.

I can only imagine how annoying this sort of issue must be at a much larger scale, like running a fashion store in the current circumstances where most sales are online, and then encountering Rita Returner who wants to buy five new dresses every month but then always returns four of them (one or two now slightly marked and not able to be sold as new) because the law says she can and there's no way to prove she caused the marks. A friend-of-a-friend apparently saw a _huge_ cost to their business from a situation not unlike this in recent months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it so poorly and didn't really share the full details and as a result the migration blew and lead to downtime of about 20 minutes. The client hated me for that. Over the course of the next 3 months, I went over the board to win them back, provided them WhatsApp support and made sure things are re- architected to be more cost efficient and stable. Since then, they've been able to handle 10x the traffic since my engagement with them for the same flat cost. Their competitors are paying easily 5-6x the cost in 1000s of dollars per month. A few weeks ago, the client even offered me to become a CTO in their company. Obviously, as a consultant I value loyalty and so I politely declined. I even handle all their technology side of things, short of being an official CTO. It's one of my greatest success stories and at the same time, it helped me understand that behind all those angry calls, texts, etc. is a frustrated PERSON who needs just emotional confrontation. It's not possible to do this at scale, but, if you only have 1 or 2 bad apples, you can use them to your advantage to gather feedback to improve your product or service.

From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff, that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.

<comment><USER30> > you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a > small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's > probably useful for other customers as well.

This defense against attempts at subordination is sensible and professional, but I think it is far from common thinking, in my opinion, among the non- entrepreneurial types that go into Engineering or CS. It is understanding gained for them only after decades of painful experience - if at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Telling a bad customer they are sucking up too much support time may make them even angrier. In our support system we have a little flag for such customers (we use it rarely): instead of telling them outright they are too needy we wait a day before replying to them.

<comment><USER32> Exponential back off, use this technique all the time

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've used this trick in the past. More than a few times the bad customer tries to quickly do a 180 and be superficially apologetic to prolong the relationship. Unfortunately, behaving in this way, at least in their minds, represents an effective strategy for getting what they want. I'd be curious to hear what others have done in these cases? Raise prices even more? Refer to competitors?

<comment><USER26> Raising prices on the customer can sometimes be a passive aggressive way out — you're trying to force them to leave, but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you're stuck with a high paying toxic customer; that's the nightmare, a customer who sucks but brings in too much money to shitcan. I'd be in favor of a referral.

I'm a direct person, so I might say something to someone like, "I recognize that you might think that you need to do [x-behavior] in order to get attention and support; you have probably had to do that in the past to get service. I need you to understand that this won't be successful in our working relationship and that my business will not be beholden to [x,y,z]. If we are to continue working together, we need to have very clear communication about what services are in and out of scope that we can both agree to. If we can do that, I'm happy to keep working with you and will do my best to support your needs. If we can't, I'm happy to refer you to some places that might be a better fit."

<comment><AUTHOR> "but the downside is some people will pay and continue to be toxic and now you're stuck with a high paying toxic customer"

I totally hear you and this fear stopped us from charging extra from a toxic customer. "What if they said yes?"

<comment><USER34> I think the answer is that your number wasn't high enough. The number should be such that you are ok with them saying yes regardless of how unlikely that may be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it, that makes sense. So high that if they say yes, I should be happy to do the service for that $$

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A _" bad customer"_ is generally just a client who annoys you... in many cases it's a misunderstanding of how easy things are, or how much effort you're going to for them.

Simply conveying the effort and time you're expending for them (very politely), helps them appreciate your business and temper their expectations...

<comment><USER36> "A "bad customer" is generally just a client who annoys you"

Nonsense. A bad customer is one that costs your company more to service than it earns back in revenue. It's simple arithmetic.

Maybe they don't bother to pay their bills. Maybe they run you ragged with endless change requests. Maybe they repeatedly start new projects then, just as you've done all the prep work, put them "on hold". Maybe they string you along with promises of "big projects" coming down the pipeline that never actually arrive. Whatever it is, every hour you sink on them is an hour not spent on a customer that is profitable.

The article may be thin, but it's absolutely right: get rid of those assholes ASAP, and then fix your own damn processes so you don't get screwed again. Otherwise they'll drag you down and drain your business for you.

<comment><USER36> I find it slightly amusing that somebody downvoted this, considering I speak from hard-learned experience here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> These articles are like women's magazine articles for entrepreneurs. No substance. Just a simple story and obvious suggestion from some influencer. No real substance.

How is this top in HN?

<comment><USER2> I think I know what you mean, that, historically, there's been a stereotype of "women's magazines", and you were using it as a familiar illustration. I propose that we figure out different illustrations.

We can see similar, if less-recognized, patterns in many publications labeled as for "men", "lifetyle", "health", "technology", "news", etc.

We've been calling them "women's magazines" so long, and I assume that, before I was born, society let magazine publishers frame how we call and think of the magazine, and its implied assertions about women.

Today, with publishing opened up more, and even literal children posturing as broadcast "influencers", that some of the dynamics of publisher as often posturer, manipulator, and exploiter are more transparent to us.

I don't know how to solve this, and it seems to be many different problems. But I'm thinking that one thing we can do about it (and certainly this is far from a novel idea, including in this particular space), is to reject manipulative terms and labels that self-interested parties try to force on us.

<comment><USER37> I think 'lifestyle magazine' would have been better but It didn't come to my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've had terrible customers when I ran my old company. I tried to ignore their behavior and focus upon being a worthwhile group for them to deal with.

They tended to share a number of features.

1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on.

2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting.

3) POCs on your kit, demonstrating your performance and cost superiority to other solutions, with again, promises of if the POC went well, they would purchase from you. They refused to sign a contract indicating this. And later the bought very expensive gear from a competitor (about 5x our price) which purportedly did the same thing (it didn't) at the same performance (it didn't). Later reaching out to us to ask us to help re-engineer their purchased solution (we didn't).

4) RFPs that you responded to, and according to the non-purchasing folks, you dominated and won. Later changed by the purchasing people. In one case, a university called me up on my vacation asking me to teach our competitors how to do what we did. Because they didn't want to buy our solution from us. But they wanted our solution.

Fire your bad customers. In the case of the university, we simply stopped responding them them after they pulled that crap. I'd get occasional complaints from them and others that they needed me to respond to RFPs so they could get their minimum of 3 offers to compare.

We had a non-US government purchasing entity literally change a contract on us because they could, and told us they could, without us agreeing to it.

Every single negative interaction wound up being represented in our T&Cs. After a while, some of the larger groups we dealt with complained about our T&Cs. Which weren't one sided, but they were fair to both parties. I am thankful that this provided signals of problematic customers. I'd sit down with the entities lawyers and explain every single clause and why it was there. I helped them understand what were lines what was non-negotiable.

Most reasonable entities adapted. The unreasonable ones would insist upon their own terms, which were tremendously risky for us.

Almost 4 years since the company was killed, and it's getting a bit easier to write and talk about this.

<comment><USER39> >1) great promises of future business if you helped them now. Business which not only never materialized, but later on as you learned from other sources, they never had any intent to work with you on.

I've heard this too many times from our existing customers too. This sounds like the "do it for exposure!" line of reasoning for artists.

>2) eager to engage your team due to their recognized expertise in solving problems, and scoping out solutions. Again, usually with a promise of working together on an RFP, or a future contract. The reality was they wanted free consulting.

We had this one customer who always called into our support line (and for some reason got ahold of my personal cell!), and every call ended up being a 2 hour-long consulting session on how to get his business set up for e-commerce and his business strategy. He's went through lots of arrogant Wordpress/website developers that I couldn't stand working with, and still hasn't had a site up after two years.

I was so relieved when he decided not to renew his service contact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I learned that there are two types of bad customers:

\- rude customers

\- customers which are not market/product fit

For rude customers, please give them benefit of the doubt: maybe they are just in a bad mood that day. Your support team needs to understand that their job is to help customers to achieve their goal (not to talk about bugs). If you get a multiple rude answers after you try to help them, just cut them (refund and ban). Do not worry about twitter and social media things: only 3% of world population reads it. Do not worry if that customer thinks they are vip (like CEO of some random 'ycombinator' company). The successful people are amazingly polite.

For bad market/product fit, you need to explain how your product does not fit. Sometimes it is mistake of your sales giving them impression that you can do certain things. This is a hard problem.

In short, your customers will eventually define your company: in same way as in bar/restaurant business customers eventually define type of a bar/restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER41> Maybe I'm just showing my age but this is a rehash of a very old idea. I'm pretty sure it's in the 4 hour work week, which while largely a fantasy still had some decent ideas.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is some serious and good advice for doing business and also managing personal relationships.

Do not fear to say 'No!' and do not try to be everyone's darling.

I had to learn this the hard way because of exactly the same eagerness to do business and take up on all opportunities.

My advice is to regularly reflect on your (business) relationships and evaluate them (good, ok, bad) and sort out everyone who just gives you more pain than value.

Of course 'value' in business is not only profit but also a good relationship to your customer and wanting to do the job rather than wanting to do another one. In personal life 'value' can be that someone accepts you as you are and/or tells you their honest opinion even if you do not like what you hear.

You will have to define your own meaning of 'value' to evaluate these relationships.

</comment><comment><USER43> When I had an ERP & CRM Reseller business, most customers were reasonable but a significant few were bullies. I found the best way to deal with them is to be tough back, to say no to unreasonable requests, to charge even more than to other customers and remind them that they are always free to go elsewhere, I had several screaming swearing calls as a result, but the strange thing is, they rarely left and they paid in full.

</comment><comment><USER27> I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.

</comment><comment><USER44> I am deeply concerned when I hear the phrase in the title. Good customers are a unit test our professionalism, our entrepreneurial capabilities as founders and the effectiveness of the processes we implement, whereas bad customers are merely a test our humanity. Ultimately, we know which of those two tests we least want to fail.

</comment><comment><USER7> Explain very nicely how you can achieve what your bad customer would like for fee or upgraded plan. In fact, tell them that you'd love to do it but you would need to direct new resources toward that effort.

Make sure that fee is a healthy one that will either make them go away or make the effort worth it for you.

Win/win.

</comment><comment><USER45> >"A friend of mine serviced an early user of his app during the early days with free customisations. That same user came back asking for more custom features, while being on the FREE plan, and threatened to write a 1 star review if they didn't."

Reminds me of Aesop's _" Please all and you please none" _ moral (but applied in a modern-day context to a customer base):

[https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man- the-...](https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/35/aesops-fables/648/the-man-the-boy-and- the-donkey/)

</comment><comment><USER46> My worst customers pay the highest rates. I continually increase the bill until an equilibrium is reached between the aggravation they cause and the happiness from my increased profits.

</comment><comment><USER47> Internal IT support for a government agency here: there are times when I wish I could "fire" some customers, but it's not really possible. On the other hand, being part of the same organisation means that I can be (and have been) quite free with communication to the effect of: "That email tone is not appropriate. We are colleagues in the same organisation with our own set of priorities and demands, and we require to be treated with the same respect as you would."

</comment><comment><USER48> This article implies that you should fire customers who are bad as in demanding, annoying, toxic, high maintenance. But I don't think it's so straightforward. If the customer is faang and they pay a multimillion recurring contract, this guy will most likely swallow his discomforts and keep serving. That customer is not so "bad."

So the title should really be "get rid of customers who are bad for the business," which is self evident.

<comment><USER49> I think a better way to word this would be to assess if you are happy with the deal you are getting from your customers.

If you are willing to work like crazy to keep someone happy for whatever reason go for it but it might be that you are putting out a fire that is not worth putting out. Weigh up the opportunity cost and see what you want to do then.

<comment><USER50> Yes, and an entity that is not diametrically opposed to the needs of your other customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think it was Seth Godin who coined the term, 'Choose your customers, choose your life.' It has stuck with me as good advice to follow since then...

</comment><comment><USER52> If you have the "nice guy" problem like I did, my rule of thumb is: phrase things in terms of your personal needs.

\- "I do not have the time to do XYZ, sorry"

\- "It would cost me too much to do XYZ, sorry"

\- "This framework does not support XYZ, sorry"

These are conversation stoppers. As opposed to:

\- "I think this goes beyond the scope of our agreement"

\- "What you are asking is very difficult"

</comment><comment><USER53> ISP perspective: _Always_ have an ironclad definition in your service contracts and terms of service where the demarcation point is between your CPE at a customer's premises, and their LAN. Problems on one side of that demarc are your problem. Problems on the other side are _not_.

</comment><comment><USER54> Some customers are rude because they dont understand much about software development. If they can listen and learning and have money to pay for you then you can Try continue working with then

</comment><comment><USER55> Very good advice.

However it is very easy for your employees to misinterpret outraged customer behaviour after firing some of the bad ones. When they think it is a bad customer, they always handle them well, communicate professionally and nicely, and THEN they come to YOU that YOU DECIDE and do something about it. Not them. These occasions are perfect to show them how to distinguish between relevant outrage and a bad client who has a tantrum. If you miss this, your guys can become demotivated by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER56> These "fire the bad customers" blog entries regurgitate on here with regularity, and it reads like a fan fiction more than an actual description of events.

Further some of the examples are terrible. If, for instance, you've made multiple product changes for a free customer, the problem isn't that the free customer exists, it's that you didn't have any check early on against doing that.

"Can you change this for me?" "No." Alternately, "Sure, that would be $2750 up front"

Etc.

Customers bothering you on WhatsApp? Again, maybe the customer isn't the problem...

</comment><comment><USER57> Man if only you could become a capitalist through some other means than being a capitalist to begin with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't hate the player hate the game :D</comment></comment>


High-priced prostitute arrested in death of a Google executive - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/07/09/high-priced-prostitute-arrested-for-murder-of-a-google-executive/?tid=trending_strip_2

<comment><USER2> >Tichleman brought the heroin, injected Hayes with a lethal dose and simply watched as he slipped into unconsciousness and suffered an overdose The article doesn't cite a motive for this crime. Does it mean they are still trying to figure it out?

It's a sad story overall. This could probably have been avoided in a country where prostitution is legal.

<comment><USER3> > This could probably have been avoided in a country where prostitution is > legal.

How so? I didn't see anything about this that appeared to have been enabled or amplified by the illegality of prostitution. A legal prostitute could still bring heroin and purposefully cause an overdose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it, why would she off one of her money maker clients? I can only speculate that either she is a serial killer and this isn't her first rodeo or she was contracted and the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper.</comment>


Introducing Kickoff - a lightweight, responsive front-end framework - <AUTHOR> http://labs.tmw.co.uk/2013/12/introducing-kickoff/

<comment><USER2> Some weird icon overlap happening here on Chrome: [http://tmwagency.github.io/kickoff/demos/](http://tmwagency.github.io/kickoff/demos/)

Does it not support breakpoint-aware grids like Bootstrap and Foundation?</comment>


Ask HN: How to recover domains from squatters? - <AUTHOR>

I run a startup that has over the last few years been aggressively targeted by domain squatters.  We do reasonable traffic (~500K uniques/day) and seem to be a juicy target for typo squatters.  We have owned the trademark to our name since before most of these domains were registered, approximately 4 years.  There is no ambiguity as to our name and the squatters intent -- all are transpositions, extra letters, etc. that lead to ad pages running ads for competing/confusing services.  Our name is very unlikely to be confused with other services and is non-generic.
I'm seeking advice on how best to recover dozens of domains from ~5 to 10 squatters.  Actual experience in this process is most helpful, I can speculate about what might work with the best of you.
We could drum up funds to go through an arbitration process, but we're frugal and I'm curious if anyone has experience with direct or third-party negotiation with squatters.  What do you offer?  Do you try and hide your relationship to the actual company?  Do threats of legal action or arbitration work at all?  Is there a letter-from-a-lawyer option that would be less expensive than arbitration?
NB: this is a throwaway account.  My real HN account is approximately 1k days old and > 1k karma.  I don't want to reveal the domain name in question and potentially encourage even more squatters.  It's a nasty business. <comment><USER2> I'd just let it go. I've had domain typo-squatters target us explicitly but they never ever could make a go of it.

The only time when it is important to go after them is when the public really has a hard time to remember your domain name and mistypes it consistently.

If that's the case, and the typo-squatters actively funnel traffic to your competition you have a case, if they don't or if they operate a completely unrelated business on that domain you will have a very hard time making it stick.

So, weigh the money and time invested versus the damage they do, a lawsuit of this kind, especially if it is international will set you back between 25 and 50K easily, if you perceive the damage to be (well) in excess of that sort of money you might consider to go after them, keep in mind that you can also lose a lawsuit.

good luck!

<comment><USER3> I second the "let it go" idea, unless you know for a fact that people are getting confused (AND, it's a large enough N that your most important next task is to recapture those people). Most of the time, it's a wiser use of your time to go and get new customers as opposed to worrying about folks who mistype the domain.

Also, most (consumers) find websites through google. Focus your efforts on SEO there -- I bet your ROI is MUCH higher in optimizing google cmp to worrying about bottom feeders like these squatters.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As far as past HN threads go there's some good information here, but mostly related to buying a new domain from a squatter:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=853228>

</comment><comment><USER4> If the domains are in the standard TLDs and are obviously typosquatting, you can go after them using the UDRP. It's not cheap (low end is $1300), but you can go after multiple domains at once if they're all owned by the same defendant.</comment>