skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last November, BOA forgot to mail my mortgage coupon. Fortunately I realized that I hadn't paid, but when I went online I couldn't find the physical address to which I should send payment, only the option of starting direct withdrawal from my account. So I ended up pulling an old statement and sending payment to the correct address.

Then the next month, I didn't get a statement. So I sent physical payment again through the mail and used the feedback option...twice.

I got two different stories from each customer service representative. One said they sent the coupon, the other said that they hadn't due to software issues. At that point my suspicion was more or less confirmed that they wanted to encourage me to switch to electronic payments - and felt that a missed payment penalty might encourage such a switch.

The way I see it, there's an MBA somewhere who decided that there was more profit in not sending statements through the mail and more profit if they could collect a late fee and more profit if they could accidentally deduct additional money from my account unless I caught it.

ATT did the same thing with my business phone.

Both the local cable companies do it.

It's just the way business works these days.
I would disagree here because of the situation. Microsoft is no longer the dominant force it once was and thus can do what it want to compete against a larger company (ie. Apple). The DOJ would probably not see it as anti-competitive as, in this case, it would be more of a question of trying to crack through a market that is dominated by another player.
I too have had interviews at both these companies for software development positions. Totally different experiences.

With Microsoft (for their Vancouver office, 2007) - the interviews were pretty technical, but not severely challenging. I was unhappy with my job at the time, had prepared very well over a period of months for coding-type problems, and was "in shape". The toughest question they asked was, 1) how to serialize a binary tree, 2) how would you compress the representation given that the tree was not full. They were immediately impressed when I asked then whether they intended me to write the deserialization code as well - the thought had apparently never struck the other interviewees. They asked me to code it up, and I did.

With Google (Bangalore, 2011) - I was way out of shape for this, having not programmed in a while. The phone interview required me to write two programs, one of which was to check whether a sudoku puzzle configuration was in the solved state, and the other to generate all subsets of a given set that had a particular cardinality. I managed to code the programs relatively easily. I was selected for the onsite interview, where they asked me mainly questions on dynamic programming. There was also a question on counting frequencies of letters in a massive corpus of text, and on how I'd implement a certain feature displayed in the search results that Google returns. The outcome: they didn't say outright that I failed the interview, but that there has been some change on their side, blah blah and would I be willing to wait for some more time? Obviously I had not done well enough to clear the bar.

Overall I got the impression that Google's version was more centered on competitive programming-type problems than Microsoft's, which was more software engineering-centric. MS definitely much easier than Google.
Idea of the Day: 
New Iphone App
I have a friend who has a very similar story to yours.
It's not just banks, I've had the same thing happen with my cellphone bill.
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Yargh. Pasted the wrong link...here's the abstract where the PPT link came from:

http://velocityconf.com/velocity2011/public/schedule/detail/...
The Next ticketing system is a good idea for Achatz because it eliminates an obstacle to purchasing tickets: the near total uncertainty as to when you might get a table. A seating for 4 people at Alinea might require a month or two advance notice; a prime date perhaps even more. So it's a win to be able to look at a website and see when you might be able to get a table --- or, with the new Sicily menu, quickly discover that there are no seatings to be had.

Incidentally, if you're hoping for last minute seatings, there's always the strategy of just calling them at the last minute or even just showing up to see if they've had cancellations. I've gotten lucky at least once.
> Then my comment doesn't apply.

You're still going to tax me....

> The level of the tax should be chosen so

In other words, "lump it".

> If you want no interference, you set the tax to zero and forget about it.

You're not going to let me.

> For the average CO_2 emitting person the level of the tax doesn't matter, since the scheme's designed to be cash-flow neutral for them.

That can't be true if the result is lower CO2 emissions.

Also, I'm pretty sure that you're not going to compensate small scale CO2 sequestration. (It would be too costly to do so, but the result is the same - your scheme can't treat all CO2 the same even though your reason for taxing CO2 says that it is.)
Maybe you could elaborate on why you think it is them instead of just claiming..?
Not how many tickets you have bought, but how many shows you have actually shown up to. Scan people's tickets at the door, and keep a database so that you can reward those who attend reliably.
Thanks for the insight. I've been debating that for a while. I do create crop them initially and then do a rescale. Maybe I need to do something different.
You get what you pay for I guess. Their mobile app looks terrible, tries to copy the Path sharing functionality in a completely strange context. When something like this could be created with a far cleaner interface.

In a strange way I understand the position the CEO may be in. They may have thought because they weren't going to use it they shouldn't have to pay. In the past I've paid a designer for work only to change my mind on a product but that isn't the designer's fault. You still have to pay whomever completes work for you, even if you don't use it.

Just sounds like across the board naivety, rather than malice especially with the legal department comment. It's always best to sort problems out immediately and directly or they get in the way.
It's a demographic like any other, even if only aspirational.
I don't understand this, people. They're YC funded, in the worst case they have how much now, 10k? Risk your reputation for a few hundred dollars, having a few thousand in the pocket, why?
Probably cause the screenshot says "Eligible" at the top in big letters.

http://i.imgur.com/0wmVG.png
Then please do :)
In the screenshot, what the heck do those pie and bar graphs represent?

Also, seems strange that he's coy about the name in the text, but seems to show it on the screenshot.
Glad to see you again.

Actually some of your recommendations are pending getting rid of old code (we simply can't move everything to PSGI when we have the mixture of old and new code we have, so it's CGI only for now still). However we are giving hard thought as to the best way to do so and I expect that as we continue that process things will become more PSGI friendly until it is just a matter of changing one sub somewhere.

I should note you have convinced Josh Drake on the merits of DBIx::Class for other projects though.

Finally I think it is worth noting that I think that in the 1.4 tree we've come out (I hope) of the contageous effect of the bad SL code, and so the coding styles which evolved so much during LSMB 1.3 are being formalized and moved to Moose in 1.4.
> Israel maintains the Gaza Strip and West Bank as administrative regions under its domain.

So? Israel doesn't keep anyone from leaving via other borders.

> No, fresh water is not available to the Palestinians in Israels camps.

Thanks for agreeing that your claim that giving them fresh water would solve all problems is wrong.
Compare the screenshot on reddit and their front page.
In the email he sent announcing this ticketing system, Louis CK explained that he's making what he considers plenty of money, so he wants tickets to be inexpensive for his fans. They also have their system set up so that if they can tell that someone is scalping their tickets, they will refund the money and revoke the tickets. I agree with you in general, but Louis CK doesn't give a shit that he's leaving money on the table. He wants it to be easy for his fans to get to his shows.
It's the response that bothers me the most:

>I figured :)

It's hard for me to comprehend how little they value their reputation with such a response. $<1000 apparently. Shameful.
> How the hell do you know what I do or not do in a given situation?

I made a claim about your past behavior. Maybe your future behavior will be different.
If it's them, maybe ask Katelyn Gleason if his version of the story is true:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/katelyngleason
Funnily enough Gumtree is actually owned by Kijiji which is in turn owned by eBay.
The op has, hopefully, learned a valuable lesson: don't work without a signed contract.

That said, the comp should have just paid or, at very least, tried to negotiate the amount thought I don't think that's worth the effort either. This is such a paltry amount as to not be worth the effort to fight.
And it was xxxxxapp.com as the censored name.
Why stress makes you miserable
Uh they literally stole Path's design. Look at the bottom left corner.
Pay the guy his money, but man, that design is pretty bad.
I'm going to go out on a limb and register a slight discomfort with the increasing use of HN as a "court of public opinion" in very fact-bound disputes like this one. I can sort of see resorting to it out of desperation, but I'm afraid the Internet Lynch Mob has a very high ratio of outrage to effort spent actually investigating. This post has 84 upvotes in 21 minutes, which suggests a very quick investigation! So, the potential for erroneous snap judgments in such a Court seems high. The designer here may very well be in the right, but I don't feel qualified to judge or do anything about it based on the available information, any more than I do with the hundreds of other designer-client disputes that happen on a regular basis.
I used to be able to pay mortage online when it was BoA mortgage (it no longer is). Can't you do the same thing?

Back t the story: I am going to switch to a local bank from BoA as result of this. I hope they do treat their customers differently.
Sorry, if this is a dump question, but how I can add some package and then require it in playground?

I'm trying to (require 'http.async.client)
I hope the screenshot is fake data and not violating anyone's HIPPA rights, otherwise this designer is going to be in a lot of very hot water over this.
Actually I agree. That's why small claims court should precede the public shaming.
I don't mean either/or exclusively, I mean could be. You cannot deny that some of the abused don't know they're being abused, especially in the case of children. That's the point I was trying to make and I don't think it's debatable.
> >And, it will never replace Java, C, Python, or even PHP

> It already has.

Oh really? Significantly fewer systems are being developed in those languages? How about some evidence?

What? You meant that a couple of applications have been written in Haskell instead of those applications? That's not "replace".

Which reminds me - if I find an application that was written in Haskell that is being replaced by an implementation written in some other language, would you claim that said other language is "replacing" Haskell? If not, don't make the mirror-argument.
ICS is on less than 10% of devices, and already they're moving on to Jelly Bean? The rumor is that Google will handle OS updates to address the fragmentation problem, but that will be hard to do when you update your OS with less than 10% of devices using ICS, and over 60% of devices STILL using Gingerbread.

http://developer.android.com/about/dashboards/index.html
The real question is who paid for this article - Parallels or VmWare :-) Kidding.
Not handled professionally on the designers part. He could have turned this into a win by being their go-to-guy for future contract work or getting referrals to other YC residents instead.

I don't think it was worth resorting to public shaming for a few grand. I guess Eligible got some free press out of this now. Well done!
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It's just 3 days of work. Did she seriously point to her lawyers to fight 3 days worth of wages? Not only is the CEO irresponsible, she sounds pretentious. Does Eligible have a legal team?
Based on the screenshot currently gracing the eligibleapp.com home page, perhaps the CEO specifically requested a Path knock-off. ("We really love the Path app, can you make it look like that?")
I've also been in the equally unenviable position of having to pay for someone who completed work according to a scope that was too vaguely defined. The guy I contracted to do the work did the work according to the broad outline I originally set out.

Being young & stupid at the time, I blamed him for thinking he took shortcuts and refused to pay him all of what he was owed at first. But it was my fault for not being more specific in the original job. I eventually apologized and paid him the rest of the money. Lesson learned.

I believe design work is especially prone to this. But none of this is an excuse. If you have a signed contract, you honor it. Period.
If what the designer saying is true, then Eligible breached contract. Verbal contracts are binding in CA. And he is within his rights to get paid for his work. It should not damage his reputation at all.
looks cool, i suppose it could work for some stuff. but not for dyanamic octopus web code.
Well. Your design looks nicer at least, and you're probably getting more than $XXX exposure now (Their current one.. doesn't - but it could be worked on as a first revision - hopefully their current designer iterates hard!)
Yes, spinning the heatsink is the whole point, to take advantage of the reduced boundary effect from the centrifugal force. I imagine the force of the air pressing against the fins in this case is considerable at such high RPMS. The other clever aspects of the design like the air bearing are simply to overcome problems that result from having a heatsink that's moving with respect to the heat source.
They didn't sign anything, and the "CEO" of any YC startup early enough to need to outsource product development isn't promising anything despite their words.
> Stop drinking the kool aid. It was never true.

It was always true, and it was a tangible benefit. Your arguments rely on it being considered "genuine" security or an effective defensive measure. It's not. That doesn't make it false, or not a benefit to end users.

> and it only became necessary for them to do it when it started to become an issue because people were getting owned.

What were people getting "owned" (ffs, I thought this was HN?) by in Snow Leopard. Care to provide a real world example, because I know you're full of shit. There was no well known dangerous trojan/malware/virus for SL that had any notable number of infections. The anti-malware in SL was a preventative measure.

> Don't even bother comparing it to Microsoft.

Watch me. I don't care about the reasons behind it, the long and short of it is Apple introduced an anti-malware system in OS X before it was a big issue and Microsoft pushed it until 2012, long after they've had countless brutally utilized exploits.

> If MS releases a good enough AV product the AV industry jumps up and down because MS just stole their lunch.

So MS sold out their customers to please their partners? Yeah keep trying to spin that one. And I'M the one drinking the kool-aid.

> Apple is not helping users to have a more secure experience.

Yes they are. FFS, you don't even understand what Gatekeeper is. FYI, it's not just the Mac App Store. Do some research before you continue to run your mouth.

> Do you really think that an App in the Mac App Store has no way of being malicious?

Of course not. Does it have a much, much, much smaller chance? Absolutely. Is it far and away the most effective measure against malware besides not installing anything? Also true.

> Have you not seen what can be done by an app in iOS?

An App Store app? No I haven't, care to demonstrate?
A little off-topic, but why is your xkcd link using ssl? Really curious, since I didn't think xkcd ever exposed https links, can't see any reason for it, and not sure how you got it.

Did you add the "s" manually, for, I dunno, the sake of art ;) ?
I see you're a new user: this type of comment is, by consensus and executive decree, not welcome on Hacker News. If you don't have something genuinely novel to contribute to the conversation, please do your part to keep the noise low.
The one on Reddit is fairly generic. The real one on the site is downright ugly: http://eligibleapp.com/
Yep, we tried it and switched away from it because it simply didn't work; some messages failed to get through and it didn't seem to click with the team at all. I can't fathom what about it could be worth over a billion dollars.
Seriously? Please learn how to properly freelance before publicly flaming a bootstrapped startup. Always get your task/rate in writing before continuing..
We moved to Moose only in the last year, and the reason was that at the time we started LedgerSMB 1.3, Moose was still relatively immature at least in the versions shipping with supported Linux distros. We felt it was an immature technology with too many dependencies to build our software on at that time (2007). After the 4 year development cycle and a release that happened only slightly after Duke Nukem Forever, we had cleaned up a significant part of the codebase, and Moose had changed.

Moose is a bit heavyweight. It may not be what you want in some applications. However, it strikes me as an inspiring example of design done right, and for that reason it's worth learning.

I think this exemplary aspect is why Moose has had the impact it has, not only being somewhat widely used, but also defining approaches that many other object approaches have borrowed. The fact that things are declarative is very helpful.
Just out of curiosity, what does air travel have to do with your argument? If you're going to go down the well-worn path of "babies do not belong on my airplane", we parents are well rehearsed in that song.
Oh this isn't me by the way I just saw it on Reddit.
This happened to me as well with a YC company. I then found out that YC companies are known for this kind of thing since they're so early-stage. Always get a contract.
How much does it really matter in these situations whether or not you have a "signed contract"? My understanding is that any agreement to do work for compensation is a contract, and these days even a "signed" contract is likely to just be a PDF which is as easily faked as an emailed "$65/hr? Sounds good, go ahead and get started."

Is it just one of those things where someone's less likely to try to rip you off if they put their signature on something? Or is it more to make sure you get the words in front of a couple of lawyers who are much less likely to lie than the involved parties?
Can I ask what specifically you have used successfully and with what results have come of applying the Lean Startup methodology?

It's early to say, as we're still in the first phase of Customer Development at the moment. But we've been following the methodology fairly closely to "by the book" and feel pretty good about what we've learned as we've gone. As we're starting to ask customers to prioritize the problems we're discussing in the Problem Presentation phase, we're expecting that will help us start to prioritize feature development. Also, some of the stuff from the problem hypothesis brief will probably transfer fairly directly into marketing collateral.

It also scares me regarding the community of entrepreneurs out there when someone questions the mindset of someone taking a contrarian view to the Lean Startup.

Sure, that makes sense. I'm a contrarian by nature myself, and I always advocate questioning orthodoxy. That said, I'm a big fan of the Customer Development methodology so far.

Putting shit out in the consumer space especially can be an instant death, and that's fact not opinion. If I was working for a B2B startup I would be much more likely to agree with you.

Yeah, we're doing B2B, so my take may be a bit different than somebody who's doing a consumer app.
Thanks again for explaining and great work. Looks like a very exciting project!
Same here. I am not taking sides, but just for drama reasons I would always prefer having these things go away for a few hundred bucks than go trying to argue with the interwebs.
I don't understand what happened here. The CEO told him to submit his invoice to legal@. Did he do that? What did their legal say? Did the company formally decline to pay the invoice? Or did he just assume he wasn't going to get paid and jump the gun?

But anyways: LESSON LEARNED for startup CEOs. Here it is, it's very simple:

If you want to question or slowroll an invoice, direct it to finance@, not legal@.

You have exactly the same set of options with finance@, and your legal can still review the invoice, ping the vendor, or what-have-you, but you haven't escalated the situation.
Fair 'nuff, and in general I don't like using analogies, precisely because they are imprecise or break down, as mine did. My main goal was to show that just because you can, in theory, overlay an infinite number of channels, doesn't mean there won't be very real limits on performance.

At first glance, I though OAM sounded like circular polarization with different angular velocities. Now your comment makes me think there's more to it. Maybe someday I'll get back on track for a physics degree, and I'll be able to think through it properly.
Is this how PR disaster look like ?
Eric Schmidt on Israel and its high-tech industry
LOL this bitch Katelyn Gleason is going to get some serious hatin if she doesn't cough up this guys $$ LOL
Agreed. Both parties just look silly.
It's hard to judge any case without seeing the full information. But based on the post, the company agreed to pay him to do design work, which he then did. If they change their mind a few days later, that's their issue - they are still legally bound to pay. I would never not pay a freelancer I hired, unless they literally didn't do the work.
Honestly, that screen looks like 5 hours work, max. Summoning an internet lynch mob over a dispute like that is incredibly unprofessional.
I think those votes convey a hope that someone of authority will look into the matter and voting will help bring the issue to their attention. I wouldn't just assume anyone who upvoted instantly agrees with OP and trusts him completely.
I I edited to say "public shaming" instead. You're right. His reputation I can't predict, but it might creep up somewhere on Google and potential hires may consider it a liability.

Don't scare away the future prospects by making yourself untouchable.
Skyscrapers and business cycles
Specifically say you want an application which is both highly concurrent and also binds to some C libraries. How does that actually compare in terms of complexity, ease of adaption for someone with a traditional imperative background, tedium and performance to C/C++ or Haskell/CL?

http://golang.org/doc/articles/c_go_cgo.html

I would also argue that although Haskell and Common Lisp are higher level, they have other issues with complexity, syntax and possibly the actual paradigm, libraries, etc.
If Eligible sent confidential data to a contract designer for the purposes of a mockup then they deserve everything they get. I don't- for a second- think that they did.
Almost every startup dies. Those that succeed are those that refuse to stay dead. Failure is but a stage on the road to success.
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