skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure why this is shocking to you; these are all the debtor's problem, not the creditor's. The creditor just wants some return on the debt, and a long-term deterrant to other deadbeats.

I don't know you, but you might be surprised how big an issue this is; back in the '90s, I was a key employee at a regional ISPs, and the deadbeat problem was significant.

The standard answer to this problem seems to be having a lawyer draft a letter (hundreds of dollars) threatening a civil suit, and then actually taking the deadbeat to court. If you think a stern letter will get someone to cough up, this is a fine route to take. If you think it'll require an actual court case, forget it. Business civil suits can take years just to get into a courtroom; if your opponent hires their own lawyer, your odds of winning aren't awesome compared to the investment you'll have to make with your counsel; in the end, if your debtor simply goes out of business, you end up with nothing even if you win.
> But if that's why you originally did it, morally speaking, you should at least make an effort to acquire your music through legal means.

While I have some sympathy for the sentiment you're making, I can't help thinking that if an Internet-based service requires an "effort" to use it, it's unlikely to succeed.
You'd be better off actually bringing suit against them to force them into bankruptcy - they will also need to pay you for damages if your paperwork is solid. Collection agencies are highly inefficient.
I understand that you find collection agencies "scary" but at this point I've exhausted all other avenues. My responsibility is to my company, not their company and staff.
These are pretty neat. I glad we are talking about them a bit externally.
> To me it's "sad" in the same way that being able to voice calls from your PC is "sad", if you work for a telco that is. People found a cheaper way to get what they want. Good luck betting against that.

There's a "minor" difference there. The telco competes against an independently developed product, while the game maker competes against his own product.
jgrahamc cites one of their well-reasoned, politely stated arguments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=566824

"It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ....... morons, and that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.
Go fuck yourself."

I suppose this is one of the "responses to legal threats" you refer to.
1) install debian on server, making sure to include openssh-server and privoxy. (ok, ok, maybe you use some other OS, doesn't matter)

2) Run this from your laptop/desktop:

ssh -f -L8118:localhost:8118 my_username@my_remote_server sleep 36000

3) Set firefox's proxy to localhost:8118 for all protocols.

Oh, maybe step 1.5 should have been to turn off privoxy's logging, both because it could log something private, and because log files aren't needed in this case. I also disable privoxy's ad blocking because it breaks the NYTimes.

In addition to "relocating" you, this has the effect of allowing one to use unencrypted wireless APs in cafes and only worry about the same amount of network sniffing one might worry about from one's own ISP. This is why I decided on this set up to begin with, in fact.
Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, said the ruling was “good p.r.” for the music and movie industries:

“There’s a lot of value out of it, even though its value is not going to be a meaningful reduction in file sharing,” he said. “They have to be seen to be doing something, in the same way that customs fights drug trafficking — as a deterrent.”

Because everyone knows how successful the war on drugs has been?
And the title, of course, is dead false. They weren't convicted of violating copyrights, but for "assisting in making copyright content available".
The percentage of $9400 you might be able to recover in small claims court probably exceeds the amount you'd get from anyone who would buy your debt.
Can we have a few more posts on this topic? We are falling way behind Reddit.
I really like The War of Art

http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/04...

Talks about resistance, and how it stops most of us from doing what we were meant to do.

Highly recommend.
Well, there is no way to confirm if the post is really true. Put it sure is funny as hell.

Advice to mike, read up on a little project called Gnu Privacy Guard.
What is this guy supposed to do? Show up with a bouquet of flowers and ask nicely? It sounds like he's already tried the carrot and now it's time for the stick. These people owe almost $10k and basically told him to go piss up a flagpole.

Of course it's going to hurt the other company and its employees, but think about how it's going to affect the submitter's company and small group of employees if they don't get paid for their work. It's a bad situation all around, but it's not the submitter's fault that these people have a employer who doesn't pay bills and he shouldn't have to suffer because of it.

I would probably talk to a lawyer first. For minimal fees you could have a few nastygrams sent out and the threat of a lawsuit might do the trick. If that doesn't work selling the debt to a collection agency for cents on the dollar might be the most cost effective solution.

[edit]
Or you could get creative as boredguy8 suggests. I think it's a fantastic idea. It may or may not work, but it doesn't cost much and there's no PR fallout.
Can anyone comment as to the actual legal issues involved? Is there any reason to think this will be overturned on appeal? The Pirate Bay Four seem to be responding to the moral righteousness of their cause, more so than the reality of Swedish law.
Doesn't the same logic suggest marking "nonstandard" C code with "gotos"?
Can Apache/nginx be configured to not gzip images or files smaller than a certain size?
I bought this book on Merlin Mann's recommendation.

See:

http://www.43folders.com/2009/01/27/creativity-patterns

http://www.43folders.com/2009/01/13/twylas-box

http://www.43folders.com/2008/11/26/twyla-tharp-failing-well

http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/27/book-heuristics

The book is very good and well worth buying. I'd also recommend the War of Art by Pressman. Both of these books are great for cultivating creativity in a systematic way.
I appreciate the technique you are advocating, and I did try something similar based on this link I found on HN a while back:

http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/the_most_effective_de...

Unfortunately I had no success.
You'll have a great time in San Francisco. However, remember the line from Wayne's World, when Wayne is in the sleazy record producer's penthouse in Chicago?

"This is totally the kind of place I'm going to get when I move out of my parents' house."

As someone who grew up in SF and had to struggle and compromise quite a bit to stay here, I've seen this play out over and over. You probably won't roll out of bed to your spectacular view of the bay, Alcatraz and the bridge. Not for the first 20 years, anyway. Nobody rents an apartment on unemployment checks, opens a camera store, and finds his way in life here anymore.

But hey, if you've lived in London, you already know how cost of living can collide with the images swirling in your head. So keeping that in mind, definitely out to SF, and you'll probably love it.
Most small claims courts cap suite sizes at $2-3k.

Thus, I disagree with this statement.
The plight of the front-end web developer today
Go west, young man.
Just installed it. Nice job.

However, it's more weird than I would have anticipated to see what people are twittering about your Google search phrase (even if boolean'd).

And it definitely shows the disparity between Twitter search and Google search. Google's PageRank for relevant results beats Twitter's democratic and/or anarchic search results.

However, since Twitter is real-time - search terms of current, transient topical nature like 'Susan Boyle' would definitely be more relevant and interesting. Also, AVC's article about linking being sent by friends points to a possible shift in Twitter's favor. And makes me wonder when Twitter will allow filtered searching against your follower graph.

"found that among the thousands of 14-24 yos they surveyed, 88% of the links they followed were sent to them by friends. They're not clicking on ads or even using search results as much as older demos."

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/the-power-of-passed-links.ht...
Oracle is a very bad test for virtualization. First, Oracle is very disk-intensive, to the point that they recommended their own file system for many years and still recommend that the database is separate from the application itself. Second, Oracle has an excellent cluster management system as it is and as such, really should be left to do its own virtualization.

The real benefit is:

1. Bunching up low resource systems. We've all seen those applications that are only used lightly, but take up their own server.

2. Failover. A server dies? Get those processes moved to other machines to spread the load in minutes while the server is fixed.
Reading this post requires registration.

I think I will skip it.
People view debt agencies as a last resort. To me, they are no resort: they are just plain mean. A company being a dick to your company doesn't give your company the moral right to be a dick back.

boredguy8 made an excellent suggestion of an alternative approach.
GP is right about advertisers though :-(
I disagree with you. I think collection agencys and legal battles should be saved for a last resort, but it sounds like they have tried all of the "nicer" methods. The amount is a little too high for small claims court, so I think a debt collection agency is a reasonable choice.
> Instead you have an opportunity to solidify a relationship

Who wants a solid relationship with a sleezebag who tries to get out of debts by claiming "yeah, it may be the same corporate entity, but I'm the new CEO, so I'm not paying?".

You want nothing to do with a person like that.
The notion of an inventor is over-generalized in this article. There is a continuum of complexity in invention.

If you invent clever, non-complex products like the Chop-o-matic, or the Sham-wow, then sure, sell it yourself. Hopefully this product concept came from a well identified, easily sellable customer problem to start with, and you became resourceful enough to engineer the thing because you already had a sales channel in mind. This makes you a resourceful salesman, and you better be because that is the only competitive advantage.

However, if your invention is more complex, say an algorithm for linking pages together, or a peer-peer communication protocol, you had better find someone that actually knows how to commercialize technology. Because competitive advantage relies on being the best innovation or engineer, this version of inventor is solely focused on the innovation and invention of technology and needs to find the sales expertise elsewhere.
I'm not actually trying to say that programming is the same as typesetting. I just wanted it as an example of a 'profession' that came and went purely because of technology.

That's why I went on to describe a model that could minimize programming and heavily reuse any earlier efforts. It is the possibility that the model is implementable that could cause a major reduction in the need for skilled programmers. Typesetting just lays out a historic pattern.
You should also be aware that many large companies have tools to see what you have surfed, and for how often you do so.

If you can ssh out, just forward a port to a Squid proxy on a machine at home or use one of the low cost VPS providers. Then setup your browser to use said proxy on the local port.

You can forward ports on Windows using Putty, and of course you can use Linux/OS X to do this easily.
Pngcrush
PNG is often not well compressed unless you've gone out of your way to do so with PNGCRUSH (http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/) or something similar
In other words, sometimes a Steve Wozniak needs a Steve jobs.
Debt collectors are a reasonable approach, but take one more step before you do that.

1) find a lawyer who you can hire for an hour or two for $200-$400. You're paying for his letterhead, not his skills.

2) Get him to write a letter saying "you have 14 days to pay 2/3 of the amount. If we receive that, the debt is discharged in full. IF we don't receive that by 14 days from today, we're going to court, and we're asking for the full amount of the debt, lawyer fees, and damages. Please pay now."

I've collected LOTS of debts in my time, 95% successfully.

This technique works.
I second the war of art.. excellent book.

The classic book on creativity is "A Whack on the Side of the Head" by Roger Von Oech (http://www.amazon.com/Whack-Side-Head-More-Creative/dp/04464...). It is the book to read on creativity, along with his other book "A Kick in the Seat of the Pants"

His card decks (Creative Whack Pack, Innovative Whack Pack and Ancient Whacks of Heraclitus) are also very useful for breaking bad habits, generating ideas, divergent thinking etc. somewhat like Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies cards,which I recommend (http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/)

For more practical examples, exercises and inspiration, I like Creative Sparks (http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Sparks-Concepts-Exercises-Ing...) and Caffeine for the Creative Mind (http://www.amazon.com/Caffeine-Creative-Mind-Exercises-Brain...)

EDIT: I'd also recommend Organizing from the Right Side of the Brain "http://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Right-Side-Brain-Organized/... for tips on how creative types organize their workspaces. Handy if you're right brained, a pack rat, like "messy" workspaces or dislike the anal-retentiveness of Getting Things Done.
This isn't about moral rights to be a dick. This is about business and how you handle companies that owe you large sums of money and have made it clear they have no intention of paying.

Boredguy8's suggestion seems odd to me, in that it's unlikely to work too often, and even if it does, the attitude of the other company in the OP is such that I would want nothing to do with them going forward.
django-compress does this very well (integrates with YUI Compressor, and several other compression filters). I use it on all my django sites.
So the record companies are paying off more politicians than the telcos! How things have changed.
I understand well what is said here. With that said, if you are at work, you do your work. Also, you should not be using corporate bandwith to catch up on your own reading agenda. Do that at home.
Mibbit uses a custom webserver... Instead of gzipping things on the fly, I decided to just look for a .gz version on the filesystem, and use that if it's there.

eg a request for 'index.html' looks for 'index.html' and 'index.html.gz'. If the gz is there it uses that and sets headers accordingly.

Works incredibly well, and the deploy scripts just gzip things when they're pushed out to production.
Deterrent? Why would collecting one debt discourage other debtors? (whoops, I've taken a wrong turn into Alliteration Central).

What I'm getting at is that using a debt collection agency is an exceptionally nasty way to recover money. There are other avenues to explore, one of which was suggested by boredguy8 and another by tjic.
I agree. Though game theory predates the 60's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory#History
Way to just make shit up there, guy.

http://bit.ly/V9Zg8

The mean limit for all the 50 states is $5964 (more than he'd get from a collections agency). The median is $5000 (also more than he'd get). In particular, in some major tech business jurisdictions:

NY: $5000

WA: $5000

CA: $7500

IL: $10,000

GA: $15,000

(MA is $2k. That sucks, lots of tech companies in MA. On the other hand, PA is $8k.)

Note also that typical fees for collections agencies appear to exceed 50%, and that's a contingency fee.
I was really hoping I'd get asked to sign-in before I could read that article.

More to the point though, twitter's issues tend not to be the kind of thing you're looking for in beta testing. You can't test scale with a limited number of users by defintion. A service which still loses data in corner cases, exposes private information unintentionally and so on is better off in an acknowledged private beta than suffering the incredibly bad press and resentment of users which will arise in these scenarios.

Also, not all software is built equal. Twitter is strongly affected by network effects, the more people using it, the more valuable it becomes, so getting people signed up is more important than ironing out every bug. However the likes of gmail is weakly affected as you can still email all of your mates whether they use gmail or not. Spotify's value doesn't particularly increase when new users join it, but it does when it's catalogue is expanded.
Why the Best Ideas Don't Come When You Try to Force Them
Are your download/upload speeds affected much by using a VPN?

I'm not that far from Witopia's servers (Toronto>NY being the closest), but from my experiance the added latency can be killer.
"Progressive Financial" was excellent at getting money out of me when the City of Philadelphia decided to put a lien on my house.
The delinquency letter you send out to deadbeat clients that says you work with XXX debt collection agency to recover fees is likely to get a better response rate than the one that says you'll "pursue all options".

Note also: a good corporate collections agency might know tricks you wouldn't think of to spur repayment. For instance, you can ding people's D&B reports with collections issues (who knew?), which can cause problems for some companies with their other B2B transactions.

Some unrelated case-in-point: I'll pay parking tickets in jurisdictions where they're handled by collections. I won't bother paying parking tickets elsewhere, even when they have hard-and-fast "3 tickets and then we boot you" rules. The collections agency is just a bigger headache than getting a boot off.
I hope you've got meaningful experience. Now switching back should be easier.
You know, they say the best way to do something right is to do it twice :)
So the best bands/musicians are their own best fans and agent? The best artists? No. That's silly.

But this is, for startup, obnoxious reality. Those who raise funding are not the ones with the best technology -- but instead the ones who play the "raising funds" game the best. Which is why you see businesses raise seed rounds and Series B rounds who simply have no reason for existence. Anyone outside of Silicon Valley rolls their eyes at them, while the next Google sits idle, unfunded.
I installed Webmynd about a month ago, and I'm still enjoying it. Great product.
But it seems to me like an unkind ("dickish") way of getting the money back.

Other people have made suggestions for alternatives: tptacek (small claims court), tjic (scary lawyer letter), boredguy8 (a social engineering approach).
http://comentariobovino.com/
In some sense, business is war, according to pre-determined rules; all kinds of saber rattling is acceptable.
> If it were up to the recording companies, would they refund me my money if I didn't like a CD I legally bought? Currently, the answer is no.

Is it? I have previously returned music to a store within my stautory rights period.

Besides even if you do make a fair point lets reverse the situation: is it right to nick a CD from the store if you go back later to either put it on the shelf if you dont like it or pay for it if you do?

Anyway; Im not so much talking music you dont like actually (sorry, my fault). My point was focused on music you find acceptable and still would listen to occasionally but dont think is worth £9.99 or however much an album purchase is near you. I know several people with HUGE illegal music collections that would cost them thousands of pounds to purchase - how do they choose what to pay for, what to keep and what they should delete. Answer (for all of them) is they pay nothing and delete nothing....
I am not disputing the efficacy of debt collection agencies at recovering money, in the same way as I would not dispute the destructive power of a bomb.
DUI Lawyer Arizona
Criminal defense representation in Scottsdale, Arizona and throughout the East Valley, Mesa, Phoenix, Tempe, Tucson, Prescott, Flagstaff, Glendale, Peoria, Chandler, Gilbert, and the state of Arizona. Vladimir Gagic offers experience and aggressiveness in helping his clients achieve just representation when accused of felonies and misdemeanors."
I was in the DePaul M.S.C.S. program for a while. I found it reasonably good overall but decided, after taking all the core courses and a couple electives, that I could learn whatever I needed on my own. With any accredited distance degree program there is often a requirement to have a proctored exams (midterms, finals) taken in person somewhere (I did mine through the UC Berkeley Extension School), so be aware of that as that will be something you will need to schedule time for.

You might also look into the Stanford Center for Professional Development http://scpd.stanford.edu/ .

Good Luck!
For AJAX-based web applications, following is what I'd suggest in making things very zippy for the user:

1. Concatenate your JS and CSS files. Don't send out several files over the wire to the browser - the browser can only make 2 connections at a time. Be careful about JS dependencies - order is imp. in JS.

2. Minify and then compress the JS and CSS. Use Dojo's Shrinksafe or the YUI Compressor to do this. It will strip out whitespace, etc - make the code smaller in size (In JS, every byte counts) and compress.

3. Now gzip the above. (Paul's article talks only about gzipping - if you do the above 2 steps as well, you'd improve the performance a lot more).

Write an Ant script to automate all the above on code commit and you are done. Try other methods like loading other elements in the background or after a tab etc is clicked - important to show something to the user almost instantly. Did this for Alertle.com, which was a 100% AJAX web app (no page refresh at all), and the initial size of the code being sent to the browser went from 700k to about 20k using the steps above :)
Dude, You’ve Got Problems
Thanks! :-)

If you have a moment, I'd really love to know which sources you find yourself using most, which ones you wish were there and what other features you use (sharing links, visual history). Care to post about it?
You just disputed the idea that a relationship with a collections agency would deter future debt collectors. I responded to that. I'm not arguing about any other problems you might have with them.
Augmented Reality with Flash
Eclipse should be split into two languages
How weird that you'd call out B2B collections as "dickish", but say nothing about the idea of one company screwing another (small) company out of a receivable.
This happen with any community that grows large... but there's no solution to keep quality?
IMHO, COLLECTION AGENCIES DON'T WORK

At a previous company, we hired United Mercantile and they never collected a cent from either of the two accounts we sent them.

They made things up like saying the one guy's corporation was surrendered when it wasn't and on the other one, I later reconciled with customer and he said he NEVER received a single call or letter from them.

Both were relatively small amounts (about $5k and $10k) and it would appear that they never lifted a finger to get their 30% or whatever it was.

I like the lawyer approach -- the more names on their letterhead, the better! :) No company likes the threat of legal action.

Good luck!
IPhone RFID: object-based media [video]
If you stay in the UK you will have access to literally hundreds of £ of VC funding
Have you ever taken someone to court successfully?

Have you ever used a collections agency?

(Not challenging you; you just said you've collected lots of debts, and I'm interested in your experience. I've been a witness to a couple incidents, but I don't have a lot of experience.)
Thanks i didn't get the point
Okay, but it's actually every bank in Belgium that offers this, it's not exclusive to these two. Sorry, not very helpful as such.