Ask HN: What should I do when asked for SOC2? - <AUTHOR> I have a SaaS that is doing quite well, with some very large companies as customers. I do everything myself (have been able to do it by myself until now I guess).
I have now been asked for a SOC2 Type 2 report by a potential customer. I have a vague idea of what it is. Reading about the auditing process feels quite strange when I am the only one in the company. Do you have any ideas on how to proceed? I do not even know were to start.
Thanks <comment><USER2> It might mean that they are not a qualified lead because an SOC2 (whatever that is) is not part of your ordinary service. That means the prospect is not in your existing market segment, and pursuing the company as a client means entering a new market segment.

Sometimes that makes sense. Other times it doesn't. If you're a one person shop and the new market segment is generally served by multi-employee firms, then it is probable that your business structure is unsuitable for the new market segment. If for no other reason, than preparing an SOC2 is an additional _marketing_ expense for you and not baked into previous cost structure.

On the other hand, maybe it is a market segment that you want to enter. However, odds are that the market is relatively efficient and there is a reasonable alignment between market size and the number of people providing services to meet its unique requirements. It is also probable that the customers in that market have existing business relationships with existing providers.

Or to put it another way, entering an established market segment is typically a long term process and requires a meaningful commitment of resources before profits are likely. Often, small shops are used for price comparison and beating down the company that was always going to get the contract. It's worth being cautious when a prospect educates you about your own business because it means the prospect might not have a high opinion of your KSA's in regard to their needs. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do they know you are a small company? An assembled and audited SOC2 report is not inexpensive and is a lot to ask of a small firm to have already. What is reasonable is if they are asking you to produce your processes/procedures of how you feel you meet the requirements of SOC2. Also if you are using something like AWS, that can help you satisfy some of the compliance side too.

I have been in your shoes where I ran a small company and got an opportunity (eventual deal) with a large Fortune 500 firm and they were asking me for SOC and ISO type reports early on. I was up front with them and said I was happy to share all the details why I felt we were meeting those requirements but I couldn't justify the $10's of thousands of dollars to assemble and have audited these standards and reports at the time. Essentially they had their typical vendor checklist they were looking at and just asked because it was on the checklist. Once I went through the details, they were pretty understanding and helped me get them the information they needed to demonstrate compliance without us having to go through the insanity for a small company that some of these standards require.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are hosted on cloud, you can probably ask your cloud provider for it. for instance digital ocean provides it (i was recently asked for the same for one of my services, and you can say no to banks)

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is- digitalo...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/is-digitalocean- hipaa-or-pci-compliant)

> Our NYC2 facility is SSAE16 SOC-2 Type II certified. > Our NYC3 facility is > SSAE16 SOC-2 and SOC-3 compliant.

</comment><comment><USER5> Honestly, say no. You are going to spend a large amount of time, energy, and possibly money, on what amounts to a sales lead.

Instead, tell them that if the SOC2 is required to sign a deal with them, you want to resolve all other due diligence first, and sign a preliminary contract stating that if you then perform a successful audit, they will become a customer. At that point, you aren't putting the money into a sales lead, you are taking on a large step to on-board a new large customer.

<comment><USER6> This here, is a great example of what you think would work. It's diplomatic and reasonable. However, in my experience it reads well, but falls super short in practice.

It's usually a request because someone is following a policy checklist. Either that someone is the same person you're selling to (you're lucky) or it's a paralegal going through due diligence (you're unlucky). In either case, none of what's said here works because if they can't check that box your dropped off the attention list as they know they can't get it past upper approvals.

So, if it's the person your selling to and you've built a product they love, then you _might_ have what a lot of enterprise sales people strive for: "an internal ambassador or cheerleader". But more often I think, that's not the case as it's the paralegal that has 0 connection to your product value at all or what you've built just isn't necessary enough for the contact to work super hard around policy for.

In the likely hood of these scenarios, it just doesn't end with a sale that keeps food on the table for early founder driven startups. It's better to know your target audience and spend time where you need to that results in revenue. If that's a SOC2 cert, go get it done.

 _edit_ apologies for typos. Mobile app isn't the greatest. :/

<comment><USER5> Doing everything needed for every sale can kill a SaaS. There is such a thing as a bad customer, and customers who put burdens on your business that you cannot sustain are bad customers, even if they look tempting because of their size.

You need to know the lifetime value of this sale, and determine whether the cost to land the deal and support them is greater than that value. Saying "No" to a burdensome request covers that - if that kills the sale, that may be the right answer for your business. If not, that also may be the right answer. But you push that effort farther down the calendar, until you know which answer is correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok, so I've read the comments here and from a business perspective, none of them really hit the right answer.

I noticed in your post you mention that your clients are really big companies. Which leads me to wonder how you haven't seen a SOC2 request yet as it's fairly prevalent among larger clientele.

The real answer here lies in what your offering and who your target client is. If they're large clients, going through a SOC2 audit and compliance cert is more than worthwhile as you've likely been lucky so far in not needing it. You're going to need it once you've hit that stage where you aren't just selling demos to team leads anymore and actually negotiating contracts with legal departments.

I have 2 buddies that have built SAAS type solutions for enterprise (both ex enterprise engineers building solutions for the same jobs they left) that are solo and have gone through SOC2 because the clients they're selling to require it.

The real answer to this is more about who your building for and selling to.

At the end of the day, it'll be an annoying process, but not overly complicated for a 1-person company to go through. It's largely documentation based, which most of that is easily c/p from a template all the overpriced consultants use. I don't mean to downplay the integrity of the cert, it's that the experience for just you isn't going to be the compliance nightmare that it is for large teams of people that need to worry about door access control or group policy defaults.

As long as all of the underlining tools and platforms you use are also Compliant, you're audit will be easier. Just plan to have to spend a TON of time in MS Word.

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes. We're undergoing this now, and it's a very involved process that should not be undermined.

We've looked into companies that help with this stuff, and usually it's around 50k to get setup, and a minimum of 20-30k annually to get "re-certified" with a SOC2 report.

There's a newer SaaS company that claims to help with this sort of stuff called Vanta. Haven't looked into them, but I've been meaning to. [https://www.vanta.com/](https://www.vanta.com/)

Please understand that it's almost irrelevant on if your cloud provider has a SOC2 report. SOC2 reports are centered around your internal processes, your organizational procedures, how you store and protect data, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> \- If it is a client you absolutely want to land, say to enter a sector, and if the certification is something you decide you really need because organizations in that sector require that too, could that client pay for the certification out of the amount you'd charge them for your software? Or you could you offer N months of premium support so you don't disturb your cash flow.

\- Take a look at replicated.com, and enterpriseready.io and [https://github.com/enterpriseready/enterpriseready](https://github.com/enterpriseready/enterpriseready)).

</comment><comment><USER9> You'll need to hire an auditor who will do an assessment. Usually pages and pages of questionnaires and high fees, the auditor will do everything remote. I've only dealt with PCI-DSS but I assume it's similar. Questions like who has physical access to your servers, how often you change your wifi password, if you have antivirus software installed on your production servers. It's a huge time sink. I'd wait for at least the second or third request. Having the report is no guarantee that more companies will approach you.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've participated in a number of SOC 2 Type 2 audits. I've been in cybersecurity and IT audit for a long time. You might want to reach out to Vanta.Com. The first SOC report is always a bear. You'll likely have to do one every year. But, they get easier by the second one. If you are going to sell to enterprise customers, it's table stakes. Also see EnterpriseReady.IO for a lot of other interesting requirements!

</comment><comment><USER11> Trust me just say no and move on. It's a huge and expensive headache that only makes sense for companies that are already large and complicated. The red tape, bullshit, bureaucracy, and processes that you will have to add and adhere to ruins any small fast-moving company.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just wanted to say thanks a lot for great answers and perspectives. I would like to clarify that it is more than a potential customer, I am now in the reviewing process and it seems they there are no other contenders. That said I just told them that we can ride along with AWS SOC2 and they seem to be fine with it, at least for now.

</comment><comment><USER12> Depends on the nature of your SAAS. If you are not dealing with very sensitive data, you could try to negotiate that with them and instead, prepare a "Self Assessed Security Questionnaire" and send to their IT/CIO team.

We do this for our SAAS business whenever we are asked by larger prospects but we don't deal with very sensitive data.

</comment><comment><USER13> You probably should just pass unless you have other prospects asking for this. It's going to be quite a bit of time, effort, and money. You could also explain your situation and hope for the best.

</comment><comment><USER14> SOC2 is an industry signal that you are committed to security, and it is table stakes for an enterprise SaaS vendor (deals >$100k). It is not relevant if you are actually committed - it's the signaling that counts. The fact that you got large customers without it means you are either lucky, sold based on prior warm relationships, or the client was negligent bordering on incompetent. Either way, congratulations - it's a good problem to have as long as you charge accordingly.

First, some wrong answers:

1\. "Here is the AWS SOC2 report". Your cloud provider is just a vendor, and sending your vendors' boilerplate is unrelated to your security posture. Saying this will signal that you don't know what SOC2 is, or what they are asking for, and everything you say after this will fall on deaf ears.

2\. "We don't have this as we focus on innovation and speed". For infosec people, this is the same as an aspiring F1 racer saying they never got a driving license for those reasons.

3\. "We are small, and we don't need this for our operations". This is also a signal: there is no documented knowledge, repeatable processes, backups, worker redundancy, risk management, or any operational planning. "Now, can we have your data?"

If you accept SOC2 as a necessary evil in your new life, you'll need to set aside ~$30k and 100 hours over the next six months to get a Type 2 (there is no "certificate" for SOC2, that's not a thing). The absolute minimum would be four months, and for first-timers, it might take 8-10 months.

But we're talking about a signal here - to show that you take security seriously. One right answer could be something like this - "At StartupCo, we are deeply committed to information security. Our customers trust us with sensitive data because we designed our ISMS based on the industry's best practices and recommendations from CIS and NIST. Our infrastructure is designed around on the principle of the least privilege at every level - firewall rules, network permissions, server configuration (based on CIS Level 2 benchmarks), IT user accounts, and even our internal Wi-Fi routers. We encrypt all data at rest with AES-128, and in motion with TLS. All data access, including admin access, is logged off-site, and our IDS/IPS systems automatically report any unexpected activity. Next on our ISMS priority list is to engage external auditors to obtain 3rd party attestations, starting with SOC2. In our current schedule, we plan to receive the Type1 report in Q1, followed by Type2 in Q3".

Assuming your operations are sound and everything you claim is true, this will give the big company a clear signal that you understand security. You are committed to this. You have a clear pathway to external validation, and they have plausible deniability.

As much as startups boast about scaling, Enterprises do things "at scale" by default. The only way that works if you have clear rules, and your people follow those rules. "Require SOC2" one of those rules. It's not a bug; it's a feature that discloses which players understand the game. Play by their rules, get paid.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good points. Being a European company I guess this still entitles us?

Here we are talking more about iso 27001 but maybe these are more orthogonal than I first thought?

<comment><USER14> SOC2 is for the US as ISO27001 is for EU. The two overlap somewhat, so there are some efficiencies for doing them at the same time when you get into the audit mode. When I ran both for our startup, I found ISO27001 to be easier to get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://www.founderquestpodcast.com/episodes/what-is- penetra...](https://www.founderquestpodcast.com/episodes/what-is-penetration- testing-and-how-does-it-work) talks how they (SaaS) went through the process.</comment>


Is it a good idea to send in multiple submissions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> From YC's current FAQ:

Q:Our group has two ideas. Can we submit two applications?

A: Ok. Just submit them from the YC accounts of different founders.

From a version of the same page from last year on archive.org:

Q: Our group has two ideas. Can we submit two applications?

A: Ok, but no more than two.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> No, 3 separate applications on separate accounts.

I'm already in the launching phase of one of my ideas. While developing it I discovered 2 more ideas & found people who believe in them. We spent last weekend writing the 3 more applications and are working on mockups.

One the one hand I want to keep my focus, but on the other hand I believe each of these three are valuable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do you mean sending in the same application with updates? Or are you talking about sending in two separate ideas on different accounts?

I'm assuming that if they like your initial idea that they would keep tabs on the newer updated versions of your application.

If you have other ideas I'd say that it could only benefit you to send in more than one.</comment>


Node.js Tools 1.0 on GitHub and VMs Available - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2015/04/24/node-js-tools-1-0-on-github-and-vms-available.aspx

<comment><USER2> > With the start of a new season of Game of Thrones, folks are sitting on the > edge of their seats waiting to see what's coming. Unlike the Khaleesi who > seems to be going nowhere fast, Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) has > made some moves recently.

Shots fired!

But really, excellent job on the release! Microsoft has been producing a lot lately, and that's awesome to see!

</comment><comment><USER3> First, thanks so much for this, I love being in Visual Studio!

A few things I've noticed: \- when typing '.then' (for promises) intellisense seems to think I want '.attach' and that means I need to hit Esc and type it out manually. What's up with that?

\- Performance seems to degrade over time, and the IDE just gets sluggish.

\- After I made intellisense -not- use the disk and instead go in-mem (.ntvs_analysis.dat was getting huge!) I have almost no intellisense for any custom modules I loaded. (Things like lodash still seem to work)

Many, many thanks on making Visual Studio once again my place to live in all day!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Dev here, happy to answer any questions.

GitHub link: [https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools](https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools)

<comment><USER4> This is awesome! Congratz on the release! I just watched the video on the home page and I'm really impressed. I'll take a serious look in it! Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> :-)

Let us know if you run into any issues!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Exciting progress, and I'd love to use it, but the thing holding me back is lack of support for ES6 syntax. [https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools/issues/77](https://github.com/Microsoft/nodejstools/issues/77)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. That's definitely high priority. First we'll fix the squiggles in the editor and then we'll add intellisense...

Please comment so we can better prioritize the es6 feature work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what happened with io.js in the end? I can't keep up with the self- destruction of the industry, which should I be using, io.js or node?

<comment><USER7> They forked. There has been talk of reconciliation but it seems to me that many of the iojs folks are not really on-board with the idea. As far as which to use, take it from some guy on the internet, I say use iojs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish more docs/books/tutorials were available for Node.js _with_ TypeScript.

<comment><USER9> Hey, TypeScript dev here, what can we do to make your life easier? Y'know, apart from a million bucks.

What kinds of gaps of knowledge do you feel there are in using the two together?

<comment><USER8> I have an impression that TypeScript (and docs) are somehow separated in its own. E.g. for Windows Store app development there are docs for C#, VB and JS. Also WinJS. So as a someone learning Node.js, it would be great to start directly with TypeScript, be it common patterns, OO, static typing or just plain syntax. Same goes for e.g. Windows app development.</comment></comment></comment>


Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS, DigitalOcean, Which One? - <AUTHOR> When would you use one instead of the other? <comment><AUTHOR> A comparison: [https://goo.gl/nfmknl](https://goo.gl/nfmknl)</comment>


An India-Pakistan nuclear war could kill millions in less than a week - <AUTHOR> https://humanbioscience.org/2019/10/an-india-pakistan-nuclear-war-could-kill-millions-in-less-than-a-week.html <comment><USER2> Direct link to study:

Rapidly expanding nuclear arsenals in Pakistan and India portend regional and global catastrophe

[https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaay5478](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/10/eaay5478)</comment>


50 Shades of NULL - <AUTHOR> http://www.vertabelo.com/blog/technical-articles/50-shades-of-null-or-how-a-billion-dollar-mistake-has-been-stalking-a-whole-industry-for-decades <comment><USER2> _Tony Hoare, who is mostly referred to as the inventor of the NULL reference, now calls it a billion-dollar mistake which pretty much all languages are now "suffering" from, including SQL._

Stop reading right there.

<comment><USER3> You probably have a button for that comment on your keyboard, don't you</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best resources to learn Digital marketing? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> That's a big topic which specific part are you thinking about?</comment>


Tesla Motors to Unveil Home and Utility Batteries April 30 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-21/tesla-motors-to-unveil-home-and-utility-batteries-april-30 <comment><USER2> Hope it'll be available in Europe. I'd like to store some photovoltaics generated energy "because I can" (still get loltastic money for feeding it into the grid, yay subsidies). Less reliance on the grid is good. I'm rooting for decentralized power (I'm envisioning battery stores in communites that form local grids) but there's obvious issues to be solved.

Very interested in the announcement, pricing etc.

<comment><USER3> It will be interesting to see how this works in California. Everyone I know who has Photovoltaics, also has a switch which is required to disable them the instant the mains power goes down. The battery is still quite useful in that scenario, but it would be even more useful if you could supply your house with power from batteries, _after_ an event results in the grid losing power.

<comment><USER4> That requirement (appropriately called "anti-islanding") is to avoid islanding: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islanding)

An alternative is to automatically disconnect your home from the grid in that situation, rather than disabling the PV. This is referred to as intentional islanding. (Although I suppose that could be disallowed in some jurisdictions, for no good reason that I can think of. At the very least though, you should be able to manually disconnect once the anti-islanding has kicked in, and then fire the PV and/or battery-powered inverter back up.) Depending on your equipment you may still have to shut down before reconnecting to the grid, once grid power is back up. (Depends on whether your inverter is capable of re-synchronizing with the grid, and again I suppose based on regulations in your jurisdiction.)

<comment><USER3> This sounds a lot like the ATS (Automatic Transfer Switch) which, is a _massive_ switch that switches from Mains grid to generator during a power outage in some of the buildings I've worked at (And scares the crap out of you if you are in the same room when it switches over - very, very loud).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How feasible will it be to use 60+kWh of home battery storage for time- shifting arbitrage (not pure arbitrage, but close enough)? Is it yet possible for a consumer to get direct exposure to the spot electricity price for both feed-in and feed-out?

It would be interesting a) What the payback period is on a strategy where you charge when the spot price is low, and discharge when high, and b) How much installed battery capacity would be required to eliminate this arbitrage? i.e. what MWh of installed battery capacity would flatten the 24 hour across-grid demand cycle.

<comment><USER6> I think most people would be happy to just charge the thing up via solar during the day and use it at night.

<comment><USER3> It's the opposite though - during the night, you want to _use_ power from the utility, when it's plentiful, and cheap (particularly if you have a TOU contract).

The objective would be charge the battery up at _night_ from the grid, and then use that power during the day + your solar power, when power is expensive.

<comment><USER7> Once solar becomes widespread enough, the dynamic changes. In Germany, electricity spot prices can be _lower_ around noon because of solar energy. A quick Google search brings up this example: [http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/23/german-solar-bringing- do...](http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/23/german-solar-bringing-down-price- of-afternoon-electricity-big-time-more-charts-facts/) (note that this already happened in 2012!)

<comment><USER8> Spot prices could even go negative, depending on the rules of the market. That's certainly a feature of Australia's National Electricity Market (NEM) which covers the eastern states. The price can drop to a floor of around -$1000/MWh, so at these times the large generators are paying the network for the privilege of keeping their running - which they are generally forced to do, since such a period of negative prices doesn't tend to last long... certainly not long enough to justify shutting a coal-fired turbine down and then the expense of spinning it back up again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems like the success of this has to come down to some kind of quality-of- life value-add that is only realizable in homes.

Like how Tesla Model S's get their owners access to luxury, HOV lanes, and public environmental bragging rights (presumably the buyers of a $100k car aren't trying to save money on gas).

Otherwise, like some have noted, why wouldn't the utilities themselves do the storage and avoid the round-trip power transmission losses?

The thing is, in the US, power outages are pretty rare and fixed pretty quickly, so bridging outages doesn't seem like a major selling point. If the customer really is the homeowner, I'm still wondering what the big life-value- add is. It's not like home battery storage market has a luxury segment that can be initially targeted as the Model S is in the car market. And

And I don't think that Elon is targeting geeks who want to set up power arbitrage schemes in their homes.

EDIT: final point added.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm really interested in how much this will cost.

In South Africa we're having rolling blackouts called "load shedding" because we don't have enough power. Exactly why is a long and obviously controversial story, but in short: Mega projects that were supposed to fill in the gaps are being delayed, maintenance on existing infrastructure was delayed in the hope that the new projects would come online in time, but that's now causing cascading failures and maintenance cannot be avoided any longer, causing even more outages..

The blackouts are zoned and 2.5 hours at a time. Here's Cape Town's map, for example: [http://ewn.co.za/assets/loadshedding/capetown.html](http://ewn.co.za/assets/loadshedding/capetown.html)

So we don't have grid power 24/7 anymore and our electricity prices (that used to be some of the cheapest in the world) are now skyrocketing. So I would imagine that many many people here might be in the market for something like this at the right price.

<comment><USER11> 2.5 hours is extremely lucky, in my experience. Normally at least 4 hours and often more like 6 - 8. One of my friends has been without electricity for the past 5 days!

Totally agree that there is a big market here for the Tesla home batteries, depending on the cost vs capacity. I am definitely in the market.

<comment><USER10> I think we're lucky in Cape Town, yes. "Maintenance festival" coming up, though! [http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/79d21000481a5710803fc078423ca9a...](http://www.sabc.co.za/news/a/79d21000481a5710803fc078423ca9af/Eskom- to-implement-maintenance-over-long-weekend-20152204)

I've actually been looking into playing with some LiFePO4 batteries and trying to see how big of a UPS you can build for, say, R5000 or R10000. LiFe batteries have longer lifetimes, are safer (less likely to catch fire or explode), are less finicky about how they get charged (more like lead-acid), seem to be potentially a bit cheaper, easier to use in multi-cell configurations (cell-balancing issue related), etc. You can also source or sink more current, so faster to charge/discharge. Downside is 14% less energy density which is why they don't get used in laptops or smartphones and (in Tesla's case) sometimes also not in cars. But that's not much of a downside for (off-)grid storage..

Pretty sure there's a gap in the market there just waiting for someone to jump into. And once you already have a giant battery it is probably that much easier to convince yourself of covering your roof in solar panels, getting a gas stove and disconnecting yourself from the grid entirely :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many homes have natural gas powered generators that automatically kick in when the power fails, as it often does (trees fall on the wires). Typical outage times are 4 to 8 hours.

A system like this costs 5-10 grand.

I wonder if these home batteries would be a less expensive alternative.

</comment><comment><USER13> We'll have to wait for the numbers. Cost/KWh and lifetime number of charge/discharge cycles are the numbers that matter. For fixed applications, energy density isn't critical, as it is for mobile and cars.

If the big wind power people start buying these, it's real.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was planning on using this year's unexpected tax refund to go solar. However, I've been waiting all month for the announcement specifics/pricing before making a move.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious to see what (if anything) these batteries will do for users that isn't already handled by a UPS.

Not that a cheaper, more energy dense UPS isn't already a win but the article keeps focusing on the fact that the product is a battery, not what it will actually be used for.

<comment><USER16> I'd say yes - a home battery could do what a UPS can, plus it can return power to the grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if these eventually would become be hydrogen based eventually. (or already are..) No matter whether Tesla is actually working on home batteries, i see a need for anyone invested in green energy. They could do greener than LiPo ofcourse.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great innovation in technology and great products. Best combination of human achievements for the world.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder how big of a market this is. I don't even know that many people who owns a Genset.

<comment><USER19> I think there are some advantages. No gas fuel, no noise, maybe less maintenance. Insurance vs. a genset should be different. I'm assuming you hook these up with a bypass switch, so you effectively have a whole home online UPS; this would eliminate brownouts and dirty/noisy power. I wonder if there's a power factor advantage on the utility side as well.

<comment><USER20> Power factor advantage in what way? I would think a large battery charging device would only lower a household's power factor.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but do you think there would be any benefit in it there being less variability? Right now a utility deals with a bunch of random stuff drawing power, presumably at different factors. I don't know what the right language is to describe this, what I was thinking is that if everyone effectively had a big UPS then that variability would be seen by the UPS, and the power company would see a more uniform draw.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How the most massive botnet scam ever made millions for Estonian hackers - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/how-the-most-massive-botnet-scam-ever-made-millions-for-estonian-hackers.ars <comment><USER2> The linked FBI page

[https://forms.fbi.gov/check-to-see-if-your-computer-is- using...](https://forms.fbi.gov/check-to-see-if-your-computer-is-using-rogue- DNS)

in turn links to this FBI hosted document (I've wrapped it in a Google Docs viewer link for convenience):

[http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fbi.gov%2F...](http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fbi.gov%2Fnews%2Fstories%2F2011%2Fnovember%2Fmalware_110911%2Fdns- changer-malware.pdfis-using-rogue-DNS)

The second link is probably the simplest thing to provide you less technical family and friends, that offers both explanation and instructions for checking for compromise -- instructions that don't involve hitting an FBI test page, BTW.

Note also this section from the cited FBI-hosted PDF:

 _Second, it attempts to access devices on the victim's small office/home office (SOHO) network that run a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server (eg. a router or home gateway). The malware attempts to access these devices using common default usernames and passwords and, if successful, changes the DNS servers these devices use from the ISP's good DNS servers to rogue DNS servers operated by the criminals. This is a change that may impact all computers on the SOHO network, even if those computers are not infected with the malware._

P.S. I will add that I am really impressed with the clarity, usefulness, and understanding of the target audience that manifests in the PDF instructions. Every time someone "bitches" about "government workers", I wish to point them to examples like this. While I remain suspicious of "Big Brother" government particularly with respect to selling out to moneyed, entrenched interests and a self-serving political elite, there are plenty of career employees generating lots of good work. (I suppose this document could have been written by a consultant -- if so, at least someone hired a good one. If you look at the PDF's properties, an author name actually shows. I didn't look into this.)</comment>


How Warren Robinett Invented the Console Adventure Game - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/warren-robinett-adventure/ <comment><USER2> Jeremy Parish has a great video retrospective of Adventure, which goes more in-depth into its historical significance and influence. It also helps to see the game in motion: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxDXie_2wck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxDXie_2wck)

</comment><comment><USER3> My wife got me this poster (framed) for Christmas a few years ago - I have to say its one of my favorite pieces of art.

[http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/advnture- illus-150dpi.p...](http://benfry.com/distellamap/150dpi/advnture- illus-150dpi.png)

</comment><comment><USER4> This was in an era when videogame developers received little to no credit for their games. No names on the box, no credits at the end of the game, nothing. His hidden room easter egg was likely the only way he would be able to take any credit at all for his work.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly why those guys left Atari and started Activision. I remember reading the manuals to some of their early games and reading about the developers.

[https://atariage.com/manual_page.html?SystemID=2600&Software...](https://atariage.com/manual_page.html?SystemID=2600&SoftwareLabelID=262&maxPages=8&currentPage=6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pixa! Available on Android or iOS. I also liked Doug Dug by the same author.

Indenture was also nice.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't believe there is no mention of Ready Player One in this article.</comment>


True Zero Net Energy Vermont House - <AUTHOR> http://www.jetsongreen.com/2009/05/passive-solar-zero-net-energy-charlotte-vermont-house.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is the first time I've read of a house that has a documented net export of energy. Anyone have any more examples?</comment>


Publishers threaten to remove millions of papers from ResearchGate - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/news/publishers-threaten-to-remove-millions-of-papers-from-researchgate-1.22793 <comment><USER2> In the past research gate behaved as quite a bad player:

* copying PDFs from web onto their own servers without permission

* adding dummy profiles to appear as people being part of research gate that are not

* sending invites on behalves of people without them knowing what's happening

They really succeeded in being the FB for scientists. Also in the bad parts.</comment>


Ask HN: How to backup HN - <AUTHOR> A question provoked by Github:  what's the best way to maintain a relatively current offline copy of all HN submissions and comments?  How does Algolia get access to recent HN content?<p>Related question, is anyone pushing HN submisssion links to archive.org (or similar) so we have a record of the page at the time it was submitted to HN? <comment><USER2> All HN data is unofficially archived on BigQuery: [https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker- news](https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/public-data/hacker-news)

<comment><USER3> That's good information but I hope others have more complete answers to the OP's questions.

There are a few problems with BigQuery being the only solution (you didn't say that's the case, but one has to wonder). The problems include cost, vulnerability to shutdown, potential rate limiting, to name a few.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Screenshot Saturday - <AUTHOR> If you like the idea, please post a screenshot and a few words of explanation on what you have been working on for the past week. <comment><USER2> Today is Monday? (Tuesday in other timezones already)

There's almost 700 comments in the recent "Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22174828) from 5 days ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes sorry, we can't remove/hide this from the mobile app ? (I made a mistake xD) and thank you for the link</comment></comment>


Has Apple Lost Its Design Mojo? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/12/22/apple-products-design/ <comment><USER2> "The new iMac Pro, which retails for $4,999" ... and no Touch Bar.</comment>


Stripe Atlas is nothing but a bad marriage - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/nguyen/4bf7c8a52c35 <comment><USER2> The initial analogy made me cringe, and to be honest, the rest of the post didn't change that impression too much. Reading past the prose and paeans to loyalty, a couple points stick out to me:

> "we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not > fraudulent charges" "where fulfillment was lagging heavily during the > transition which led to some dissatisfied customers who opted to dispute > charges"

Fulfillment lagging heavily is a fancy of way of saying people paid for orders, never got what they ordered, and so assumed it was a fraud.

> Despite understanding that our Stripe Atlas account was used across a number > of businesses, and that the seemingly fraudulent/chargeback activity took > place in a relatively short span of time through a single eCommerce store > (that was no longer operational)

TBH, the actual percentages Stripe details in later emails would be alarming to me. 23% of charges disputed and 44% of volume are pretty red flags!

<comment><USER3> No kidding. This guy is so vague about his business. What does he actually make / sell? Socks?

Folks with 44% of volume in chargebacks should be shut down! I've found there are always excuses from the scammers, and the whole article is in the mode of I wanted to love stripe but they screwed me.

Reality = this guy is screwing his customers over big time!

As the author says, it pains me to write this.

<comment><USER4> I like to call this "Eddie Haskell Syndrome".

After some quick googling, it appears I'm not the only one to use this term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are > currently 44.82%)

Holy. ANY payment process will drop you after something like this. A botched purchase of another company doesn't relieve you of any of the obligations they had made.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, approaching 1% is enough to get you kicked off any non-high risk payment platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can sympathize because it was just one business unit that he had apparently recently acquired that was responsible for this and the rest of his businesses were ok. The biggest lessons are to be aware of what you are acquiring and the issues they are having, make sure it's very clear to customers how they can contact YOU to get a refund and finally, it's probably a good idea to have separate accounts for different businesses on Stripe.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like the real lesson here: have separate accounts for separate sites.

I haven't used Stripe for years, so I'm not sure: is that totally kosher? And if you enter the same business/tax/ID details for two different accounts, will there be any problems?

It'd be great to hear from someone about Stripe about this, as I know a lot of Stripe people hang around HN.

<comment><USER9> My company uses 3 stripe accounts on the advice of our stripe representative, so I believe they're ok with it.

<comment><USER10> When you're all talking about separate accounts - Are you talking separate login accounts or separate accounts as in the top left on your dashboard switch between these accounts

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Details of fraud and chargebacks aside, I want to point out that this post really doesn't have to do with Stripe Atlas, insomuch as Stripe Atlas doesn't give you carte blanche to commit fraud on the Stripe platform.

FWIW, I'm a pretty happy Stripe Atlas customer, and it's pretty WYSIWYG, for better and for worse.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Stripe Christmas Surprise: destroying your competitor's holiday season earnings by issuing a well-placed chargeback.

<comment><USER7> In all seriousness do they have any way to detect sabotage of this sort?

<comment><USER13> From the article, it appears they can't even detect obvious fraud, so I'm assuming that the answer is no.

The moral of the story was that Stripes REAL concern was to keep good numbers for their upstream provider. (as an agent/ISO). So... targeted chargebacks probably would have the intended effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My business had a 6% chargeback rate at one point because our biggest client's mom didn't recognize us and disputed hundreds of charges. Stripe sent me this same email, but they let me work it out and continue operating.

IMO if this questionable post is the worst story out there about Stripe, it shows that Stripe is doing a great job.

<comment><USER15> "our biggest client's mom"

What are you selling?

<comment><USER14> Relationship coaching. It wasn't a kid though; a lot of people in their 20s aren't financially independent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It sounds like he acquired a business that wasn't actually sending out the products that they were charging customers for. What surprises me is that he only discovered this after the chargebacks started coming in.

If my company stopped providing the service I was charging for, I would have 3,214 missed calls and 23,512 emails within about 36 minutes. Customers generally don't call their banks until multiple attempts to contact the business have failed, and something is deeply broken if the chargebacks are your first sign of trouble.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, this has to be a deliberate fraud outlet.

Back in 2009, I ordered a pair of boots for a Halloween costume online. They sent me an email telling me a window when the boots were supposed to ship, and I specifically ordered two-day shipping. Of course, they charged my card right away, which I didn't know at the time was a red flag.

They missed the shipping window. I thought "no big deal, there's a huge holiday coming up, so they're probably just backlogged, I'll wait another day". Another day passed. I sent an email asking what's wrong. No response. No phone number listed on their website, either; that's a red flag. Another day passed. And another. Another email sent. No response. Another day. By this point, it's been about a week after the boots were supposed to _arrive_ , and they haven't even shipped; it's Friday, so I send them an email telling them that if it doesn't ship by Monday, I'm filing a chargeback. No response either.

Right after I sent that last email, I got curious and googled the name of the store. There were pages on Ripoff Report [0], Reseller Ratings [1], and other sites detailing the fact that they just take people's money and never ship anything. I also discovered that they used to have a phone number listed on their site, but they took it off. The BBB had listed them as an F, but it appears that's since been scrubbed from their website.

Well, fuck.

I contacted Chase and filed a chargeback that day. No way am I waiting till Monday now that I know it's a scam. After going into my whole spiel about how they never responded to my emails and I found all this dirt online about them, the person I spoke to just said "Wait, they said it was going to arrive on [date] and it still hasn't shipped?". I said yes, and she immediately approved my chargeback. I was surprised: I was expecting to have to fight them for it.

Also, according to the websites I found, whenever people issued chargebacks against them, they had a habit of running the charge again, sometimes from a different merchant account, again and again and again. People had to report their credit cards as stolen to get it to stop. I watched my statement like a hawk for months, and thankfully it never happened to me, but I just got lucky.

Also, just out of sheer spite, I filed a BBB complaint against them. A few weeks later, the BBB sent me an email telling me they closed my complaint because every attempt to contact the company failed. They didn't answer their phone or respond to any emails or letters.

Reading Viet's post and your comment, I am reminded of that incident. There is no way in hell the business wouldn't have known they weren't shipping product. People don't just issue chargebacks out of the blue. We call and email and do whatever we can to _get the damn product into our hands_ first and only as a last resort do we light the bridge on fire by issuing a chargeback. And I wonder how many people just gave up and never even bothered to issue chargebacks.

[0] [https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/specific_search/Queen+F...](https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/specific_search/Queen+Fashions)

[1] [https://www.resellerratings.com/store/Queen_Fashions](https://www.resellerratings.com/store/Queen_Fashions)

<comment><USER17> When it gets to that level, I would recommend reaching out to your state's Attorney General Consumer Protection unit. They usually have a form that you can fill out, and (unlike the BBB), they have actual enforcement powers and can take action against businesses like the one you described.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 6.5% chargeback rate.

This entire blog post reads like other posts of its type from people who don't understand credit card processing or how it all works.

"Shortly after sending the above information we discovered that the specific charges flagged as fraudulent were not fraudulent charges. They were, in fact, due to chargebacks related to a recently acquired eCommerce store where fulfillment was lagging heavily during the transition which led to some dissatisfied customers who opted to dispute charges."

No, the transactions weren't fraudulent. However, selling something and not delivering is grounds for a chargeback and would be labeled as fraud, and to any reasonable person, would be considered fraud.

"Somehow we moved from an issue of fraudulent activity to whether or not we're allowed to sell specific products."

Yes, because with such a high chargeback rate, they are going to reevaluate your entire business. It's called Know Your Customer (KYC), and it's critical.

But seriously, 6.5% chargeback rate. Even when I was still working in an industry know to be high risk, I never had a rate that high.

"Stripe is quick to put all blame and responsibility on us by claiming that it is not their responsibility to prevent fraud."

Because in the end, yes, that's where the fault lies. Don't believe me? Go to a bank and get your own merchant account and see what happens when you just let whatever you want go through your system. Just because it's on a computer doesn't change the fact that you are responsible for the fraud you are swiping through your system.

tl;dr: a legit 6.5% chargeback rate.

<comment><USER19> I would count myself in the category of people who don't know exactly how this all works, but this email[0] makes it sound even worse by the end:

> We calculate the dispute rate a number of ways, but the two most common are:

> 1\. The percentage of charges on your account that have been disputed (you > are currently 23.74%)

> 2\. The percentage of volume on your account that has been disputed (you are > currently 44.82%)

[0]: [https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*8f0gZoASFf20_-lM](https://cdn- images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*8f0gZoASFf20_-lM).

<comment><USER20> These rates are generally dictated by the card companies. We recently had a spike in chargebacks in one of our Stripe accounts, which put us over the warning threshold.

Stripe could have handled it a lot better. They withheld payments from us (over 250k) No notifications, or anything else. They waited until we contacted their support on why our payouts weren't processing before they lectured us on how we should be doing fraud review (we do. We also pay way to much to SiftScience to mitigate that as well)

tl;dr though, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, etc... all have their own hard limits.

<comment><USER21> And for others who aren't aware - the standard Visa threshold is 1%. [1] Supposedly with a warning at 0.75% from Visa and at 0.5% from Mastercard.

If you go above that, Visa reserves the option of "potential disqualification from the payment system" [2]. That is, you can be banned from accepting Visa cards ever again.

[1] [https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/changes-to-visa- charg...](https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/changes-to-visa-chargeback- and-fraud-monitoring-programs/)

[2] (see "Chargeback Compliance Program") [https://www.citibank.com.sg/gcb/credit_cards/pdf/Fraud_Charg...](https://www.citibank.com.sg/gcb/credit_cards/pdf/Fraud_Chargeback_Compliance_Program_May2010.pdf) [PDF]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> TL;DR: OP is using a single stripe account for several, distinct businesses. One had a dispute rate so high that the overall dispute rate of this single stripe account went above some threshold imposed by stripe's upstream financial services partners. Account gets closed. Stripe offers OP to just open a new account. OP spends more time to write a public complaint than it would take to set up a new account.

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like the Paypal horror stories.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well at least they are expensive. So they got that going for them!</comment>


End of the car age: how cities are outgrowing the automobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/28/end-of-the-car-age-how-cities-outgrew-the-automobile <comment><USER2> I live in Hong Kong, where 95% of the population uses public transport daily, and has a very low car ownership rate. Reasons include $7.4 petrol (gal), vehicle registration tax that can exceed 100%, and expensive parking ($400 a month for a single car, and that's just at home)

Private car owners are typically the wealthy and those who live in villages (lower housing and parking costs).

That's probably the future of cities and car ownership imo

The important thing is to have public transport that is cheap, clean, efficient, 99.9% on-time and can handle large amounts of passengers.

<comment><USER3> I was in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago.

You and your numerous fellow residents are fortunate enough to live in a city that has quite possibly the best designed and most ubiquitous public transit system I have ever encountered as well as a city geography where it is economically viable to service virtually everyone.

The vast majority of the world's cities are not quite so lucky. This is especially for cities in the American Midwest. I live in one - Detroit. It would be nigh on impossible to function without a car in this city.

<comment><USER4> Its not luck

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "End of" or "death of" == click bait hyperbole, almost always.

It's the end of the age of car-centric design in large metropolitan areas, but not of the car or "car age" by any stretch of the imagination.

<comment><USER6> The article is about a very specific scenario: dense metropolitan city centers. It has always been the case in those areas that many people do not own cars, and yes you can get by very well by using public transport, taxis, walking/cycling, and the occasional rental when you do need to drive somewhere.

Pretty much everywhere else, cars are almost essential to modern life.

<comment><USER7> It's a little more than that. The internet reduces peoples need to go somewhere, buy stuff, and take it home even outside of cities. This is killing the suburban shopping mall, but it also significantly reduces peoples need to move around with a pile of stuff. Because public transport is mostly focused on moving people and not their stuff this makes public transport more useful to more people. Even if they don't give up both their cars living in a one car household is far easier nowadays.

PS: It's not just about doing less shopping trips; if you only get 1 bag of stuff it's easy to carry around. If you're getting a massive load of junk you really want to drop it off in your car.

<comment><USER8> The internet has largely removed my desire for physical goods. It's probably partially my age, but I suspect it's somewhat true for younger people as well. I'd just as soon read an in-depth review on a new piece of tech rather than buy it and get it configured before putting it on the shelf not to be used.

<comment><USER9> Desktops with their huge CRT's have consolidated into laptops. Your phone consolidates an alarm clock, a landline, a camera, a torch and a calculator. You don't really need a TV or radio. Modern tech is slowly reducing the amount of clutter needed for daily life.

<comment><USER10> I still love my huge desktop monitor and full size keyboard, laptops are too squinty and I make too many typos on the cramped keyboard.

It's true I gave up listening to the radio years ago. The ads drove me away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Cars kill over a million people annually and injure millions more. Let that sink in. Getting rid of cars as we know them will be like curing a dread disease.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's the dawn of the second age of modern cities. There was a period of time in the mid 20th century when cities were being drained of people. Some of that was motivated by a desire to have a nuclear family living in a house in the suburbs with a lawn and a garage. Some of that was motivated by the perception of the cities as an unsafe or unsavory place to live. Some of that was motivated by blatant racism (so-called "white flight"). The population of Manhattan peaked around 1910, as did the population of Paris, the population of Detroit around 1950, the population of San Francisco originally peaked around 1950 as well.

But since around the 1980s or so there's been a revitalization of cities, especially in America. Changes in crime, changes in the economy, and changes in culture have brought people back to the cities. The suburban nuclear family is no longer the ideal for ambitious 20 to 30 somethings. The best paying jobs are no longer factory or industrial jobs outside the city, frequently they are knowledge worker jobs in urban centers. And young professionals seem to prefer the city life in many cases. The crime waves of the late '80s and early '90s (due to innumerable factors, especially the onset of the "crack epidemic") abated by the late '90s, right as the tech boom started. The result of all of these changes has been an influx of population and business back to urban centers.

And that has led to the increasing importance of public transit as well as walkable/bikable cities. Cities are discovering that expecting everyone to drive their car to work every day leads to gridlock, and they are reaping the consequences of low urban populations, low city revenues, and low investment in transportation infrastructure during the mid-20th century. They're also discovering that there are strong benefits to walkable and bikable cities. It leads to generally more appealing downtowns and, at least the perception of, nicer cities to live in. The improvements in telecommunications as well as delivery and other services (smartphones, amazon, uber, etc.) has reduced a lot of the traditional downsides to not owning a car (it's easier to find your way around due to GPS and maps, it's easier to coordinate with friends, it's easier to get important household goods delivered, etc.)

Cars are still relevant, and important, but things are changing in terms of where people want to live and work, and the era of the city designed _solely_ around car transit is finally coming to an end.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's funny when _drivers_ echo the sentiment that their city would be better off with fewer cars. Of course, they mean "my driving experience would be better off with fewer _other cars_ on the road".

<comment><USER14> Or "my life would be better if owning a car and driving it everywhere weren't the least-bad option available to me"

<comment><USER15> Or "My life would be better if driving a car was for road trips, family visits, adventures and special occasions, not everyday life."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "We will still have cars – people need them for carrying goods – but their speeds will be very low and there won't be so many of them."

I wonder how much things like Google Shopping Express, Amazon Fresh and (possibly in future) drone deliveries would help to reduce the need for personally owned cars?

<comment><USER17> It might help in US (I guess?) but in most of Europe this is not the issue. I've lived in several EU countries, never had a car. I always walk to the nearest grocery shop or bike to a bigger one. City design allows me to do that.

<comment><USER18> > City design allows me to do that.

Not having a large family allows you to do that. Good luck carrying home enough groceries for 6 people.

<comment><USER19> If there are six people in this family, surely some of them can help carry the groceries.. but I digress. I think you miss r00fus's point - in a walkable city, you're not forced to haul hundreds of pounds of groceries from one centralized megalocation once a week. The design of a livable city means there are plenty of small shops interspersed in and near residential areas, making it easy to frequently visit them to pick up whatever you may need.

<comment><USER6> I think there are some rose colored glasses in play here. Cities used to be just as you describe. We liked supermarkets better. What's different?

<comment><USER20> By "we", you really mean American suburbanites. Supermarkets are almost nonexistent in Germany, for example, and there aren't very many in Manhattan either.

I live within a 5-8 minute walk of half a dozen different grocery stores. It's great. I've lived in places where you need to drive, and I never want to go back to that.

<comment><USER21> Germany has many supermarkets. Where in Germany would you say they are "almost nonexistent"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > This model of denser, less car-dependent cities is becoming the accepted > wisdom across the developed world. "The height [of buildings] is going up; > density is going up; borough policies and London plan policies are all about > intensification and densification of land uses," [...] People live very > close and they don't travel at all because everything is on their doorstep; > the population in one block is so high, it can support all the amenities you > could ever want.

Densely built cities will be a lot easier to build encasings around, that filter the air on the outside before it circulates around inside the encasing, when they'll need it in 20 or 30 years time, than low density single-house cities fed by cars on freeways. East Asian and some European cities seem better suited for this than most in the U.S.

<comment><USER23> Why will we need to encase our cities and filter the air that comes in from outside the city?

<comment><USER22> If you're asking, then either:

* you've never heard of air pollution and global warming,

* you don't experience air pollution every day for it to register in your thinking, or

* you disagree that polluted air will within decades encompass the globe.

Far more people live in places like Beijing China and Delhi India than Adelaide Australia or Anchorage Alaska, and the only trend they see wrt air pollution is an ongoing increase. A decrease is only talk by people whose other hand is milking the machine.

<comment><USER24> Most of the pollution comes from inside the city, so encasing the city would be rather disastrous. And you can't really protect against the global warming, aka greenhouse effect, by building a _greenhouse_ \- because that's effecticely what encasing a city is. A very large greenhouse which gets very hot inside.

(The impact of encasements to pollution is observable e.g. at public transit: subway/metro stations have significant concentrations of small particles in the air. You know, the kind that people complain automobiles create. The fact is, also trains create them, and in closed spaces, like underground stations, the concentrations of particles grow big.)

<comment><USER22> Perhaps "connected enclosures" would be a better term. The enclosures would be built gradually, incorporating present air-conditioned buildings but with air filtration systems added, and slowly extended to more and more areas. Many subway stations in Asia have a transparent seal between the tracks and waiting area which would be part of the enclosed zone boundary. You probably imagined a dome over a city when you read "encasing".

<comment><USER24> I still don't quite get why cities should be any kind of enclosures. The world as we know it has these huge air filtration and CO₂-to-O₂ conversion systems called "forests", and I do not understand why cities should be disconnected from them (apart from perhaps protecting the forests).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a small theory about cars and low birth rate.

If you look at developed nations with well developed public transportation (which means less need for private cars), you generally see lower birth rate. Really low. Look at Japan. S Korea. Europe.

However developed nations with less developed public transportation (meaning more ownership of private cars), you generally see higher birth rate. Examples are most of US (excluding NYC), Canada, Aus.

I personally think young moms just decide to have less kids if their option of traveling within the city is limited to public transportation. And with young kids, you do have to travel more than usual to get to doctors office, school, activities etc.

When you have a sedan/suv/minivan, traveling with kids is much more tolerable. You don't have to carry everything on your back or in your hands. You can strap them into car seats once and that's just about the only time you have to worry about it.

<comment><USER26> I think you're drawing conclusions from coincidence. If I had to pick a reason for the disparity, it's that public transit and dense city centers make less sense in countries with large, rural areas. Rural areas tend to have lower levels of education, and level of education has been linked with birth rate (specifically, higher female educational achievement leads to lower birth rates).

The three areas you list as "developed nations with well developed public transportation" are all compact and densely populated. The three you listed as "less developed public transit" are much larger, with a significantly higher rural population.

I would bet that if you normalized for education, you would see any disparities between your cohorts disappear.

<comment><USER27> Australia has quite a high urbanization rate (89.2%): [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_by_country)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> can't happen soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER29> In Germany they just seem to replace "owned" cars by "rented" cars in the bigger cities.

I'd love to see what would happen if cars were prohibited in bigger cities and what big money would do to public transport and bikes.

But since Germany is a car country, this will probably never happen.

</comment><comment><USER30> It's not that surprising given that most of them were originally built for horse and cart traffic.

</comment><comment><USER31> No mention of electric bicycles or more powerful two wheeled vehicles such as the 70 million petrol scooters in Vietnam.

How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your shopping home from your local store.

<comment><USER32> > How about an electric shopping cart, like a pallet truck, for taking your > shopping home from your local store.

That requires a handicap-accessible city. There absolutely cannot be stairs between your front door and the aisles of the store (including bus rides). I'm sure some newer cities are like this, but older cities tend to grandfather in older buildings and public transit systems. I don't see this happening anytime soon.

Would love to be wrong, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Coincidentally a new documentary is out in the UK this coming week on the exact same topic: Bikes vs Cars.

</comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr increasing urban density => decreasing car use

Truth is, more cars are being sold than ever before, but even this is levelling out.

Global bicycle production _per capita_ , on the other hand, has halved since the 1970's

</comment><comment><USER35> I hate to be a downer but this "idea" will vanish like morning mist with the first terrorist nuke.

Urban designers for densely-populated countries should plan instead for people and industry to spread out as much as possible to eliminate the effective damage of WMDs. I think there was a sci-fi novel (by Asimov?) where people no longer lived or even met with each other, fearing death through either disease or malfeasance.

And the way drones are progressing, we'll soon have some like those in Dune - "bugs" that fly to their target, identify him/her and kill only that individual. I haven't heard of anyone working on a bug spray yet.

One solace: all the above was brought to us, one way or another, by democratically-elected large powerful national governments. Guess we wanted these things, eh?

<comment><USER11> The reality of terrorist WMDs is one incident, _ever_. That was the Aum cult's sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. That's it.

That was a hell of an effort to achieve a result that a) could easily have been exceeded by a small, simple low-explosive IED; b) Ended up having the opposite effect of the goal of terroism - it highlighted how difficult and relatively ineffective WMDs are.

<comment><USER23> By "reality" do you mean "history"? Or are you predicting the future?</comment></comment></comment>


Smart Dock Lumawake Begins Pre-Orders Today - <AUTHOR> https://lumawake.us/ Lumawake, an innovative iPhone dock designed to work with both 30-pin and lightning dock connectors, today kicks off its own pre-orders in a self-run crowdfunding attempt to bring its product to market. The team faced rejection from Kickstarter just one short week ago, after that crowdfunding platform changed its hardware project rules to minimize their role in the overall platform mix. Now it's back, and the team tells me they're confident that going it alone in the manner of App.net and Lockitron will help make sure that Lumawake makes it to market. <comment><AUTHOR> [http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/iphone-connected-home- smart...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/19/iphone-connected-home-smart-dock- lumawake-regroups-after-kickstarter-rejection-begins-pre-orders-today/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As featured on VentureBeat - [http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/lumawake- crowdfunds-cool-a...](http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/lumawake-crowdfunds- cool-anti-alarm-clock-but-not-on-kickstarter/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As featured on PRWeb - <http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/11/prweb10121697.htm>

</comment><comment><USER2> Good luck to the Lumawake team, but I think the recent Elevation Dock production-delivery fiasco is not going to help with this one.

<comment><USER3> thanks antr, we feel the traditional crowdfunding model is broken. Taking funds upfront and leaving the backers to float delays isn't the right way to engage your consumer. At Lumawake we will not be processing pre-orders until the product ships.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Your TC link at the bottom is broken. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Mike! Appreciate it. Just sent the developer a note. The site was put together at the 11th hour after kickstarter rejected the application</comment></comment>


Lawsuit May Halt Rollout of Facebook's Timeline - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/article/419-lawsuit-seeks-to-halt-roll-out-of-facebooks-timeline/

<comment><USER2> That's what you get for trying to trademark everyday words. And haven't they forfeited their trademark by not defending it against [http://trac.edgewall.org/timeline?from=2003-08-31&daysba...](http://trac.edgewall.org/timeline?from=2003-08-31&daysback=30) ?

[Edit: added date]

</comment><comment><USER3> Why can you even trademark words that can be found in a basic dictionary? Aren't there any limitations on what is trademarkable?

<comment><USER4> Windows. Apple. Nuff said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Good luck with that. If you name your company after a common word, guess what, other people can still use that word. Don't use the court system to make up for your own poor planning.

</comment><comment><USER6> Did they sue the creators of the movie Timeline also?

</comment><comment><USER7> What's troubling is not that another company had a digital scrapbooking service called Timeline, but this allegation:

"Timelines has its own page on Facebook. In its complaint, it alleges that the social networking giant is shifting visitors away from this page and redirecting them instead to Facebook's own timeline page."

I can't see how this would be to Facebook's advantage. ALL of their users are getting the Timeline update, what's the point of trying to steal traffic from this other company?

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a problem with the fact that users and pages can take facebook.com/xxx urls, it's not future proof. Although the overview page resides at /about/timeline, it's understandable that they want to redirect the /timeline path there too.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that was pretty poor future planning on facebook's part, they should have made user pages have an extra path variable like facebook.com/u/timeline</comment></comment></comment>


Clinkle Implodes as Employees Quit in Protest of CEO - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/15/clunk/ <comment><USER2> How did the founder manage to build a company of 70 employees without a product and securing 30 million fundings after 2 years of not really showing anything? And to top that of, it didn't look like the founder has any track record before this company.

I'm not interested in mocking or bashing the company, I just wanted to know the possible mechanism that would result in such ... unexpected scenario. Is hustling really that effective and I have been underestimated that all along?

<comment><USER3> Can't speak with authority about Clinkle, but I strongly suspect that the founders have an "extreme alpha" personality type.

I have seen people with that personality type be able to just basically tell people what they want and get it. It's really a sight to behold.

"I need 50 million." "Okay boss.

I think there's two mechanisms at work. One is what you might call the "reptile brain," which reads such signals and simply interprets them as "this is my pack leader." The other mechanism is I think a cargo cultish belief in the power of those personality types to just always succeed no matter what. "Man, he seems like a winner." (This personality type seems to almost always be male, at least in my experience. Definitely not trying to be sexist. Might be being a bit reverse sexist though, since I do not find this trait redeeming.)

You would think that VCs would be inoculated against this kind of thing. You would think. But I personally know of two examples of people with off the charts alpha personalities who were sort of serial killers of wealth. Raise, burn, raise again. Their alpha personality trumped any notion of merit or track record.

<comment><USER4> _One is what you might call the "reptile brain," which reads such signals and simply interprets them as "this is my pack leader."_

I'm curious to know, which reptiles live in packs?

<comment><USER5> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain)

<comment><USER4> From the first paragraph of the article:

 _However, this hypothesis is no longer espoused by the majority of comparative neuroscientists in the post-2000 era._

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's probably BS. It seems to be a commonly espoused belief in MRA circles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like this needs to be incorporated into an episode of Silicon Valley.

The bit about not actually having a real product in production reminded me of a recent episode of the show where it was mentioned that sometimes it is better to not have a real product and revenue because then valuations can be blown way out of proportion in the frenzy without any real revenue benchmarks to base them on.

<comment><USER7> I believe that derives directly from what people like Fred Wilson or Mike Arrington have been saying:

 _" As I was reading Josh Kopelman's excellent post on the seed boom and Series A bust, I got thinking of some words of wisdom Mike Arrington once shared with me. He said "numbers always ruin a good story."

What Mike meant by this is you can raise a seed (or Series A) on a story. But at some point, you will have numbers; users, user growth, revenues, and revenue growth. You will also have a burn rate. And those numbers will become the thing you are judged on and your nice story will be "ruined" by the numbers."_

[http://avc.com/2015/03/numbers-can-ruin-a-good- story/](http://avc.com/2015/03/numbers-can-ruin-a-good-story/)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, as usual, when I watched that episode, I'm turning to my wife and muttering "This is true." The writers may be story-driven, but it seems like Bad Money was introduced just to have an outsider who was in-the-know to be able to draw light on the VC machinery.

<comment><USER6> The number of times I've turned to my wife and muttered "This is true" while watching is pretty startling.

In talking to people at work about it, there is a general sentiment of "haha, this is really funn....errhmm...that's a little to close to reality..."

Mike Judge is an absolute creative genius.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9>
        After four years of work and ridicule, early employees at the company
        are said to have been actively encouraging a sale, even if it didn't
        come with a massive acquisition price. Sources say that many employees
        didn't have much to gain anyways. Duplan had offered only tiny shreds
        of equity, convincing hires that Clinkle could be a billion-dollar
        company and their share could turn into tons of money.

A lesson I've learned the hard way is to never let your sense of greed impair your judgment, especially around the relative certainty of success of a startup. A stupendously well-funded startup indicates only that the founders are good at fundraising, not that they're good at building a product or a company.

</comment><comment><USER10> _" Yet suddenly, the startup was the talk of the town when it managed to raise $25 million in seed funding in June 2013 from top investors including Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Benioff, Jim Bryer, Accel Ventures and Index Partners."_

These guys are all supposed to be amazing predictors of the future. Who really cares whether payment data is transmitted via ultrasound, bluetooth, NFC, or over the wifi/cellular data connection? How does adding ultrasound to the mix shape the future, as all of these guys claim they want to do?

I blame the investors in this case more than Duplan. There are 70 people that wouldn't have been hired and fired if those investors hadn't written this apparently very immature 21 year old kid a $25M check for some hokey technology. Duplan clearly had a knack for communicating a believable grand vision, but little ability to deliver on it. Investors at this level - allegedly some of the most sophisticated VC's on the planet - are supposed to be able to identify people like this.

<comment><USER11> I'm genuinely curious. Let's say things had turned out slightly different, he'd been able to negotiate the deals with the banks that he needed (let's say he had a Board Member who helped open a few doors, or perhaps a Sr. Executive who had deep experience with the banking industry/regulations, and could expedite) - and let's say that clinkle had taken off, and was generated sufficient revenue to be a $10B company. Would you still blame the investors, or would you be impressed by their willingness to take risk?

From the New Yorker article on Marc:

 _Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a "warm intro" from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might soar to be worth more than a billion dollars—a "unicorn," in the local parlance. With great luck, once a decade that unicorn will become a Google or a Facebook and return the V.C.'s money a thousand times over: the storied 1,000x._

A16Z invests in 15 companies/year, knowing ahead of time that ten of them will fold. Being able to predict the future is hard.

<comment><USER12> A16Z invests in a lot more then 15 companies/year, that article is way off in that regard

here is a tweet from dec 2014 where Chris Dixon (General Partner) said they did 30 seed deals last year adding up A, B, C, etc. they do closer to 50-100

[https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/544570097465954304](https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/544570097465954304)

crunchbase shows they have done 31 publicly known ones in 2015 so far

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/andreessen- horowitz/...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/andreessen- horowitz/investments)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I worked for a company where this happened twice in three years.

I joined the company only to discover that the entire development team (sans one guy) had quit. We built up a new team, put up with an amazing amount of mismanagement, gas lighting, etc. For example: not only would they not make a spec, they wouldn't give us details about the features they wanted. We'd ask questions and they would be ignored. Then months later they'd chew us out for not building things they had never even mentioned wanting. And they installed an ex-navy seal who had 20 years in the military, a couple months n the business world and no understanding of (nor respect for) technology. He started finding people to hound out of the company and get fired-- because he always needed a scapegoat.

We put up with this for a year, and then all of us, quit again. (well the one guy who was there from the beginning is still there, and a couple people who don't have easy mobility are still there, moistly because they had been on the job only a month or two.)

And now they have a new team. Things have not improved at all... but so long as they can continue to hire people they will.

Management has decided that the engineering teams that quit "sucked" and that they're the reason there are "problems" today (like not implementing features that were never requested, etc.)

So long as they can keep hiring people, they're doing so.,

This while the glass door reviews are really terrible.

Most people don't read glass door.

So that's a lesson: Read glass door. Don't expect that even you and a bunch of others leaving will end the company.

<comment><USER14> _Read glass door._

Beyond that, read the whole history on glass door. If the ratio of reviews to employees is high, something is fishy.

A friend of mine worked at a company. He pointed out they had terrible reviews on glass door. So they started asking new hires to review the company. I think the ratio is now something crazy like 1 review for every employee who currently works there.

The company was comically evil. Among a sea of terrible stories, one of the worst I can think of is at a company party the CEO told the whole staff they didn't care about them and want to just get rich off their hard work.

<comment><USER15> That's a good one. I've also seen HR departments that make their team members write 5 star reviews every week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of this... [https://twitter.com/mrgan/status/384780273721696256](https://twitter.com/mrgan/status/384780273721696256)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad seven employees decided to quit a rude/poor boss. Although I'm only basing 'rude/poor' based on quotes from the article, not from personal experience, I think it might have some merit. Props to them.

<comment><USER18> There have been lots of rather funny articles on Valleywag about how truly awful a boss we're talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For those who want a little more information about Clinkle's corporate culture, check out their hackathon music video. (yes, you read that right)

[https://vimeo.com/99884205](https://vimeo.com/99884205)

</comment><comment><USER18> "After approaching Google about a potential deal, a team of Clinkle's top engineers visited Google to go through rigorous testing to see if the startup was worth acquiring. Sources say Google declined to issue an offer." I have a mental issue of a line of engineers on tables undergoing colonoscopies.

</comment><comment><USER20> On a slightly (un)related note, clinkle.com doesn't even appear for me (based in SF) in the first page for a Google search on 'clinkle' [https://www.google.com/search?q=clinkle](https://www.google.com/search?q=clinkle)

</comment><comment><USER21> So what _is_ Clinkle? Digital wallet? "Treats"? Can someone pin it down for me?

<comment><USER22> A bank that you could sign up for and use on your phone. You got a debit card with ATM access and rewards without a credit check. The app showed your payment history and let you send money to and request money from other Clinkle users.

<comment><USER23> Plus merchant terminals + payment system?

<comment><USER22> yup, but that was dropped late 2012 in favor of debit cards for backwards compatibility, with plans to re-introduce merchant terminals once there was user adoption

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> [http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of- clinkle-2014-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-story-of- clinkle-2014-4)

> "It's not the kid's fault," McCarthy said, defending his flustered boss. > McCarthy sometimes took over for Duplan during the weekly all-hands meetings > on Fridays, correcting him and referring to him as "kid."

Its a bad play to join any company whose founder and chief executive is at his first leadership post (first real job?).

<comment><USER25> I'd be careful to generalise, Faceboook was Mark's first job.

<comment><USER24> With what successes, either personal or for the company?

A couple years at FB does not a leader make.

<comment><USER25> Both. It's been a decade now. Mark, and others, have built one of the most valuable technology companies of all time. In my option that's a great leader.

<comment><USER24> > Mark, and others, have built one of the most valuable technology companies > of all time.

Clinkle?

I am genuinely interested in the measure of value here. Multiple rounds of layoffs (and apparent mutiny), experienced management hires departing in days or hours, millions in investment resulting in what? An exit strategy?

<comment><USER25> No. I was referring to other Facebook employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > While Clinkle's brand had been tarnished by reports of its internal > troubles, the companies were said to eye the variable reward system as a way > to differentiate their mobile wallets and get users to demand merchants get > on board.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung and Visa can't develop their own variable rewards systems?

<comment><USER27> I wonder if there's intellectual property at play that would prevent others from doing so. If it's even possible to end up in court it may be cheaper to acqui-purchase the intellectual property via the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Hasn't the company 'imploded' like twice already?

</comment><comment><USER29> Going to sound a bit cynical here, but really isn't $30 million just spare change to a VC?

To us we see $30 million and think "that's a ton of money!! how could he get that funding?" but to the VC it's like "Here's a bit of spare change, maybe you'll make something out of this, maybe not".

From that viewpoint alone I could understand why a VC would fund this. I mean, could you guarantee that it's NOT going to be some breakout hit? What if you did pass on that $30 million investment and the company did actually turn out to be valuable? It's easy to say post-hoc once the company has been stupid that the VCs ought to have known about it, but it looks different if you think back to what the VCs must have known when they were approached.

</comment><comment><USER30> The canonical example of funding!=success.

</comment><comment><USER31> GOD, so much schadenfreude here...

<comment><USER32> Alas, because we've been seduced by the promise of sweet sweet VC money + IPO's.

I'm a weird case, but maybe not _that_ weird. I realized recently that I don't really even _like_ programming. I mean, not as much as I like sitting on the beach, or hiking, or talking to a friend at a party. I'm in it for the money. I'd rather see the better technology/least sleazy company win, but if I had ten trillion dollars I'd go sit on the beach, not keep programming. I'm here for the money, I'm just determined to not be corrupted along the way.

So when I hear about the demise of Clinkle, I must admit I rejoice somewhat. Because their product was dumb, or at least unimaginative, and I know that funding is limited.

But I think technology used to have people more like Steve Wozniak, who really cared about the technology for its own sake. And someone like that would have no particular feelings about Clinkle, because they already got their wish of being able to hack around on tech all day.

So, yeah, an apology for schadenfreude.

<comment><USER31> Sorry, my comment was poorly worded—I mean that I am experiencing schadenfreude, not criticizing people who are also experiencing it.

Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ok, I might be an ass for saying this but I find the fact that on their careers page literally everything is open now is funny is a righteous sort of way.

<comment><USER34> Not everything, just a lot in the Engineering area and some in Design and Operations (Growth, Business, and Product don't have anything.)

<comment><USER35> I guess they aren't really planning on growth, having a business nor a product...

<comment><USER34> From the TC article it seems to be largely the tech team that left so it's not too odd that that would be where the openings are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I knew this was going to be a grand failure by simple indications. Their "app" was a total waste of bytes on my phone, even for something as simple, it was buggy and wasteful. Also, their verification system was broken. Never got an SMS and I exceeded their limit of 3 (cheap bastards). I've sent numerous emails, never got a response. A real startup never does this!

</comment><comment><USER37> Amazing that you can raise that kind of seed money without a working prototype. They must have been claiming some serious IP assets.

Also, $25 million seems like a lot for convertible notes. Each one probably didn't exceed a few hundred thousand a piece. This is an excellent example of how once you convince a couple key investors to join, there are dozens waiting behind to follow.

<comment><USER22> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9554656)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> what's obvious to me is that

capital is available and flowing towards people who shouldn't really have it.

but overall it is working for the smart investors.

but really, people are throwing money around for crazy returns.

<comment><USER39> unintended consequences of artificially low rates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> 24 year old CEO?

I don't care if he went to Stanford. I went to Caltech. I didn't have the first clue when I was 24.

<comment><USER41> Oh, original. "Kids these days". Look around you, the "millenials" you are ridiculing are taking the tech world by storm, graduating at record rates with more advanced degrees than ever.

Who do you think you are debating with on HN? I would guess the average user here is under 30 and making twice your inflation-adjusted salary at 35.

<comment><USER42> Doubtful. Most millennials are graduating with unserviceable levels of debt, working jobs that pay wages that barely keep up with inflation.

For the small minority in the tech industry, the situation is much brighter, as long as the VC money keeps flowing. Those older have seen what happens when the music stops and not everyone has a seat.

I hope you have a sufficient emergency fund and something besides $tech_flavor_of_the_week under your belt. Enterprises that provide safe havens during tech bust periods hire a bit differently than tech startups.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Maybe those VCs had their beer goggles on.</comment>


Report of an Instagram account deletion - <AUTHOR> http://justhugo.com/2015/10/16/freedom/ <comment><USER2> I hope someone from Instagram sees this, that's just insane.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you say 'no'? - <AUTHOR>

There's a close acquaintance that repeatedly invites me to go to one of his religious meetings.
I don't want to go because I don't have the adequate time nor interest to engage with extraneous religious activities. For the record, I'm not one of those fedora-wearing know-it-all atheists, I'm just really not interested and I think that going there will be just a waste for both of us' time.
I haven't found a way to no to him. I know that the only and inevitable solution is to firmly say no to him and that should be enough if we were living on an utopical world; on the real world, however, people have feelings and sometimes expect things from others and saying 'no' will probably put you in the position of 'the asshole' and damage your relationship with that person, which is something that I'm trying to avoid.
How do you usually deal with these kind of issues? <comment><USER2> "It's really not for me, and I'd while I'm happy that you want my participation I'd appreciate it if you would stop continue inviting me because I hate having to say no to you"

</comment><comment><USER3> Just say "Not really my sort of thing, thanks." but sound like you mean it. Don't give off the impression you are embarrassed to turn him down, that makes it seem like it is a big deal and it isn't. Just say it like it isn't a problem. If he keeps asking--although I'm willing to bet he won't--keep responding in that same way. After a while he's the one being rude, not you.

</comment><comment><USER4> "Thanks for inviting me, but I'm really not interested. I do appreciate the offer though. Hey, have you asked Bob?" (where Bob is some other random acquaintance.)

People with visible scaring learn a few techniques to stop inquisitive people from asking too much. So, you acknowledge the request. You then quickly, clearly, firmly, decline the invitation. And then you move on.

For scars the format is something like "Oh, I was in an accident. It was traumatic, and I don't like talking about it. Thanks for the concern! But I'm fine now. Hey, what's that?"

Evangelists have a lot of rejection, some of it quite rude, and so this firm but polite rejection should be fine.

</comment><comment><USER5> Use "don't" instead of "can't". Works wonders, trust me. There was actually an article on Lifehacker regarding this.

"Sorry, I don't do x."

Doesn't fit all situations, but for a lot of invitations it works wonders: restaurants/movies/concerts/meetings etc.

You can get creative: "I don't do x with friends" if it's a business project. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> My suggestion is to simply tell the complete and honest truth, in a kind and caring manner (if you value the friendship, you could let him know that).

Every choice has a cost.

</comment><comment><USER7> I would say (and have said), "No that's just not for me. But appreciate the offer."

</comment><comment><USER8> You want the polite version or the version i normally give to these?

<comment><AUTHOR> Give me both!

<comment><USER8> Polite: Sorry, but I have more important things to do.

Bro: Oh!, come on XXXXXX! You know I don't give a fuck about religion. Don't invite me anymore to go there. Tonite I will play with my PS4, you're invited! (bring beers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just say him "No", true friends should understand it ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> \- "Thanks for the invite but I don't want to go".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks everyone!</comment>


Open Source Ajax IM (using PHP) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ajaxim.com/

<comment><USER2> What did we say about PHP? "Never use it for new projects unless you absolutely have to"

Ridiculous looking code too.</comment>


Type Theory and Functional Programming  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TTFP/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link! I've been accumulating a library of PDF books, articles and cheat-sheets that I can carry around on my development laptop and always welcome another resource.

You may find it funny now, but 5 years ago I almost always carried a couple of paper books in my suitcase when I traveled on business. My back is much happier now!</comment>