I am not sure about Stripe terms of service but don't most companies have some hatch-key terms of service to prevent suing. (I am not sure about stripe but there are some products that if you use their service, then you can only sue them for 1$ for example)
My recommendation feels as to get the money as soon as possible and then contact a lawyer and see if they can get enough pay-off from this somewhat, rightful lawsuit.
IANAL, but Maybe if they make even more than 85k$ by suing them right now, then perhaps they can sue them right now but maybe a lawyer here can give more definitive answer as to how they should proceed (and perhaps they shouldn't listen to any of us online people especially about the law)
As I understood it, even in the UK there is the concept of a 'reasonable man' as in, the contract should perform as a 'reasonable man' would expect. If it does not, that is enough to get such terms discarded. So, you cannot just obfuscate the contract with impenetrable legalese that excludes reasonable things and expect to get away with that. Which is not to say that (insurance) companies will not try.
my source for this was an ex career insurance man (retired out)
The Stripe horror stories are adding up, making me think startups will move to different platforms.
A friend in China recently got shut down by Stripe for a perfectly legitimate business. They moved to Creem.
Stripe cares about big business. Startups can't really be moving the needle much for them anymore.
Stripe's APIs have become too confounding for small business anyway. They care about big business shaped entities at the expense of smaller scrappy players. Easy things aren't easy. It sucks.
You have to build your own hooks and logic for upgrades and downgrades. The event types are mismatched yet you have to listen across several semantic classes to capture the right state changes. Absurd, legacy/big biz focused garbage.
It should be click a button and integrate one API and webhook and you're done.
I kinda liked the website, I feel like there are some good features within this website, the more competition the better, Kinda like its referral and split model within co-founders, especially like this for something like a course website/maybe even Patreon alternative, combined with Cloudflare workers/Hetzner. I am seeing a lot of competition within this space, Does anyone have a github awesome-list about these or should I create one?
On personal experience, Just recently, I still have 12$ of my money stuck within Pulsedmedia/their payment provider as I had done a (crypto) payment but their system has failed to recognize it and Pulsedmedia could do nothing about it, not cancel or accept the deal as after 24 hours or at this point close to 48 hours, yet no response by coinpayments or any response at all.
All of this happened because I had accidentally sent them the whole amount but just 60 cents less... let that sink in, Pulsedmedia says that they can't do anything but as a customer, I don't feel like recommend Pulsedmedia anymore because of my experience with their payment provider being so bad and they have said that they have no control over, not even refunding me. Man, a lot of the times, I feel like payment processing should be a solved problem but recent experience indicates otherwise as I felt restlessness from my money being stuck in limbo
Either refund me as soon as possible or allow me to have a service, having to open up mail multiple times and seeing no response feels really frustrating even if the money might be low, I would still like to have it back. I feel like your choice of payment provider matters quite a lot and it can be a differentiating factor even, for the end consumer.
I had heard some good things about pulsedmedia within the forums I browse but when I had raised tickets, they had responded to me with AI too :-/ It felt extremely weird typing everything out taking time only to be responded with I hear you--you are extremely right. I don't want to blame pulsedmedia here but man oh man, some payment processors make me feel so rageful, and I think that I am fairly patient in most cases, but having money stuck no matter how tiny definitely makes me a bit stressed.
If I learn anything from all of this, it's to not have a shit payment provider, heck I might even try becoming a customer and raise issues like payment getting stuck or see their customer support response times before buying them.
Obscurity indeed. This morning shortly after I woke up I read your message and could only think that you were referring to Awk somehow. That didn’t make much sense to me. Now, hours later and after finally eating something, it does make sense! You really do have to have your faculties about you.
That’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.
It's slightly irritating to see Amazon get credit for that, when Bruce Tognazzini used that same solution 40 years ago when working on the classic MacOS interface!
(Apple forgot about it again for OS X, but that's a different story.)
"older versions of MacOS featured a menu designed by NN/g principal Bruce Tognazzini; that menu did not exhibit this behavior, but instead, used a vector-based triangular buffer to allow users to move diagonally. Unfortunately, in the years since, Apple has reverted this excellent bit of interaction design."
But I'm on macOS 15 and the menus seem to behave that way (the good way). Did they re-implement it?
Yes, they did eventually. If I'm understanding correctly, the original design used a simple funnel shape with 45 degree sides (suitable for the resource-limited systems of the day), and when they eventually re-implemented it they used a funnel defined by the left hand corners of the submenu, as per the Amazon design. (See the large animgif halfway down https://thomaspark.co/2011/10/making-menus-escapable/ )
Obviously that older gear wasn’t useless, since real people used it to climb the exact same mountains that people climb today.
It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance. At the start of their project they expected modern gear of similar capabilities to be lighter. What they found was that modern gear’s advantage is primarily that it is simpler to use. Instead of seven carefully–chosen layers of wool and silk, you can wear a single coat. That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
Really this should not be all that surprising, as the expertise required to pick those layers has been condensed by engineers into the design of the coat. The modern climber no longer needs that same expertise, just money to buy the coat.
This is the same story of specialization that has powered our economic growth for centuries. You and I no longer need to know how to grow vegetables, or shoe a horse, or design a circuit. There might still be advantages to knowing how to write a sonnet or plan a battle, but for the most part we can leave these tasks to specialists who can get better results than we can. Those specialists in turn can leave other tasks to us. Everyone gets more efficient as a result.
> It’s pretty clear from the text that they have debunked the idea that modern synthetic materials have outstripped older materials in performance... That single coat is also effective over a much larger temperature range than the older clothes.
It feels like these two statements are in contradiction.
FWIW, I do a lot of hiking / backpacking / snowboarding in various conditions and "effective over a much larger temperature" is the #1 thing I shop for. If I can have 1 jacket that I wear from the time I get up in the morning until lunch, that's worth more than any other feature. I hate having to stop a hike to strip off a layer and I hate having to find a way to carry my jacket while snowboarding.
As measured in mass needed for a given amount of insulation. They expected the modern materials to achieve the same protection from cold while being lighter. That’s not what they found.
> If I can have 1 jacket that I wear from the time I get up in the morning until lunch, that's worth more than any other feature.
Yes, I suspect that many people think adaptability is even better than raw performance. After all, most of us don’t have a sherpa who can carry our jacket while we snowboard.
Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)
But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.
Or at least they were while anti-trust still had some teeth. Trump's DOJ is highly unlikely to go after Starlink for refusing to launch for a competitor, let alone another nation's military.
To be future proof for more administrations you don't want a monopoly at any step. you really want at least three competitors at minimum. Large companies in tech have realized this by now since the 90s. Recently TeraWave was launched by SpaceX due to the inherent risk (and this is a direct competitor to SpaceX. See
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/21/bezos-blue-origin-satellite-...
What's confusing about that is Jeff Bezos is funding TeraWave to also compete with Amazon who is also launching their own Starlink competitor for satellite Internet?
I’m not even sure that anti–trust laws come into it; they just want as many launch customers as possible. Better to earn some money off of a competing constellation rather than earn nothing, right?
Most roads in the US used to be split between neighboring properties like that. in the 1800s the US was surveyed into 1×1 mile sections, with no gaps between them. Homesteaders could improve the land and claim ownership. As they moved in they built their own roads. Most got together with their neighbors to split the cost and built the roads along their shared property lines.
When people got together to found cities, they would usually all donate or sell ownership of the new streets in the city to the city itself. New residents moving into the city would then buy plots of land that were next to roads but didn’t overlap with them. Counties and states that wanted to build larger roads usually bought the land occupied by existing roads along the route.
But scattered all over the countryside there are still huge numbers of private roads maintained by individuals or small neighborhoods. They’re technically private just like those in North Oaks but the residents just don’t care to keep uninvited people out. You have a pretty good chance of finding some just by picking a random spot west of the Appalachian mountains and zooming in.
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