skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sadly, this is very true. It's also a very hard lesson to learn. Even worse, it's extremely difficult to change the behavior after it happens the first time. If you're having trouble with this, here's a talk that helped us quite a bit: http://vimeo.com/22053820
> on average 380 days late

What? Over a year late? How is this even possible?
As a former vendor to a Fortune 500 Company, even said Company often paid me in excess of their own net 30 payment terms. I can relate to "Company Y" in the article, because my thought was if I complained my orders might shrink or not come at all, plus I could afford it. I did not stay quite entirely I would contact their accounts payable and try to move their hand, but it was clear they were capable of inventing issues to justify their failure to pay (much like I imagine insurance companies always have an excuse for denying a claim) so I found "complaining" actually worked against my goal.
>Today, your social graph lives in a brown box, called Contacts, on your iPhone’s home screen — allowing you to effortlessly connect with your friends on new social networks, in only a tap or two.

Eh, way to generalize from 18% smartphone market share.
I'm in the high-end web consulting biz and there is no shortage of customers looking for fork over millions for an end-to-end solution. Even at the low-end that he is bemoaning, the plethora of off-the-shelf tools is coupled with a massive explosion is the number of businesses requiring a web presence. Now they can all get a decent looking site up for cheap or even just a Facebook page for nothing, but the next frontier will be differentiating themselves from their competitors which will require professional services.
Although I don't have a huge amount of experience with it, GrubHub always seemed like the inferior option. For a long time they didn't even save credit card details.
I used to really enjoy this blog, but it's been sold to a corp and lost some of its appeal. Similar post from the original owner:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/11/11/quitting-the-da...
Does your team use Group Chat at Work?
Hi HN,

My first foray into building a Web Product is my little own me-too team chat app.

Finding the target market is a big goal for me right now. Am I building this solely for distributed teams? Maybe that's too niche and any company could benefit from a group chat application.

For the MVP I want to keep the featureset to a minimum. My focus is building apps that allow teams to communicate with each other. My gut instinct is telling me to focus on text messaging for now and build a platform that does that really really well.

If you're part of a team and you're either using group chat or are thinking of using group chat (eg. IRC, HipChat, Campfire, flowdock, chatter, chatwork, hall.com, talker, etc...), how is your team structured? What are you using the team chat app for - or are thinking of using the team chat app for? And what improvements do you want to see from it?

Thank you so much in advance. And if it is possible please leave your email. I would love to talk to you one on one on this topic.

Anton.
No, that's jQuery 2.0. Also, Zepto is slower.
If it's a selling point, then the payments aren't late.
if I asked traveline to give me the data so that I could measure how late my buses are, they would decline

No they would not. They will give the data to anyone. They didn't even want my name before they gave me test access of up to 1000 API hits a day (which would be sufficient for the personal usage you describe). The data itself is provided under the open government licence which allows you to do pretty much anything you want with it. As far as I can tell, there are no restrictions beyond this on what applications are allowed to use the API. Really, you should email them and ask them. I got a very quick response.
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What do you call "accidental quitting"?
I find offering discounts works extremely well. You write 2/10, net 30 and almost all customers will pay in 10 days.
Tesla's fight with America's car dealers
Interesting article. However, I find it a little difficult to believe that the aforementioned finance professor cared as much about "social justice" as the author says. It's unprofessional and rude to expect someone to complain in order to pay him.
I think this is closer to "1000 enterprise customers", which is quite a feat even today (not entirely accurate I know)
The one secret trick that will get you paid faster: some people LIKE bugging people every few days for late payments. Hire an admin assistant who has some A/R skills and put them to work on your late list. "There's a new sheriff in town..."
You have no evidence for any of that. You literally just made that up. We don't know what people or what computers have this information, how long they are keeping it, or what they are doing with it. See, if the communications network was really secure, we would have an answer for all those questions.
One of my friend's summerjob is to keep eye on heat rates of some electrical engines (web page, as it seems) and he will surely love this.
"If you've ever been hit with that crippling fear ("I'm embarrassed and don't want to send another invoice. I'm afraid they still won't pay!") after a project has reached completion, you need to rethink your workflow."

No, you shouldn't be running a business. Period.
Safety Concerns Threaten the Market for Caffeinated Food and Drink
Machine learning algorithm beats experts in classifying suicide notes [2010]
TL/DR: I had a high stress job that was affecting my family life and I quit to start a blog and signed up for an intensive blog-coaching program that you should purchase even though my blog hasn't even launched so I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Edit: Apologies for the cynicism but the whole thing just feels like a creepy and manipulative advertisement]
I created a jQuery plugin to render subway maps using canvas a few years ago when I was getting into HTML5. Here's a demo http://kalyani.com/subwaymap and a detailed guide http://kalyani.com/2010/10/subway-map-visualization-jquery-p...
They're ill prepared to consume the information in the format its delivered (if it is delivered at all). Notice, the revised S-1 doesn't say the amount of the adjustment, you had to receive that from Facebook via another channel. So, it doesn't really have to do with special analyst job knowledge, it has to do with special treatment.

I mean, "actively disseminated" seems a bit generous. They call 3 institutions to let them know meanwhile individual (notice i'm intentionally not saying "retail" because thats become some sort of in-crowd, brow beating, bullshit term for shaming regular, non-hedge fund investors) are left to read smoke signals. Its not that the institutional investors "had analysts at their disposal" its that the systems is built to make sure institutional investors and hedge funds get information others don't.

You can say what you want, but the quote from the hedge fund manager seems much more clear then your opinion, and he's a domain expert who took part in the situation.

>"There's "no way" a retail investor could have known about the lowered projections, unless he or she "had a friend at a multi-billion dollar institution," he added."
An interview with one of the authors: http://www.npr.org/2013/05/15/184232472/analyzing-the-langua...
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. If I had $4MM, I'd spend a small chunk up-front, and then I'd have enough left such that - if I invested wisely - I would most likely not have to work again, while being able to do some traveling. I'm not talking about exotic vacations to Monte Carlo to go gamble away $500,000 a night or anything, mind you. I'm talking about flying to $SOMEWHERE_COOL, and spend a week or two mostly lying on the beach reading and people watching.

And at worst, that would be enough that if I did want to work again, I could be extremely picky about what kind of work I'd take on, and when, and where. That's a kind of independence in its own right.

You also have to keep in mind that I'm an older guy (relative to this crowd) so barring major breakthroughs in medical technology, I don't have to stretch my money out as long as somebody who's in their 20's or whatever.
Aside from your argumentum ad antiquitatem, I think it is rather presumptuous to speak for "society" this way. For starters, I think both left- and right-libertarians, as well as most journalists, would disagree with you. I would also guess that society in general would be outraged if a journalist was jailed for that particular offense, so what you claim is clearly not universally true.

I also disagree that this person is a reasonable suspect, any more than the pizza restaurant, who probably either gave it to a customer as change, used it to pay a vendor, or deposited it.

Although the orwellian term "justice system" is undoubtedly convenient for such an argument, I'm going to suggest thhat your statement be read with a substitution of "legal framework" in its place. It's important to remember that law and justice are not synonymous. In fact, a founding father of our "society" himself (Thomas Jefferson) made this distinction: "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."

So we must ask, was justice served? An honest man unwittingly committed a minor crime of minimal or no public harm (at worst, someone was out $20 or so) and returned to correct his error, making all parties whole. In return, his life is ruined and he is sent to prison, which cost him and the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, at least. The answer is unequivocally no, justice was not served.

Edit: It also seems like you're conflating refusing to testify with being an accessory. Your claim was the latter, which is much more serious than contempt of court. Passive concealment by non-participation after the fact is in no way "assisting", by definition, because the crime already happened. If that was the claim, it's absolutely an abuse of the spirit of the law.
There is something, however, that keeps us from engaging online in non-anonymous contexts due to this perceived (and I would argue Western/American) creepyness factor.

It may have something to do with the fact that most personal violations (criminal or not) are by people known to the victim. The media likes to play up stranger-danger, but I think people realize that's pretty much BS and know where the real danger lies. Couple this with the predilection of many on social networks to amass friendlists and make connections with anybody even remotely familiar or proximal (classmates, sports club, etc.), it's explainable as simple self-preservation.
Nano is my preference for a linux editor. It is simple, it stays out of my way, there's nothing to memorize, there's no Java, and the syntax highlighting is decent.

When I worked at Google, I did all my coding in a custom version of nano which I'd hacked up to show an 80-column marker.
"Anyone that pays $1.1B for a company with $14M in revenue is either stupid, or they have a plan"

There is a third option, of course: that they have a stupid plan.
I think that's probably useful to have in your default contract, but IMHO the people who are adamantly refusing to pay you $5,000 are very unlikely to have a change of heart when you inform them it's $5,100. Consider that debt collectors typically offer to settle for potentially far less than the original amount owed.

One of the most surprising things I found when I started working in B2B is the percentage of clients who simply don't pay their bills.

Like tptacek said, I think that's just the way it is and, at least at a certain scale, the only reasonable approach to hire people to do collections.
What advantage do you gain by always paying them late? Just hanging on to the money a little longer so you can earn a little more interest on it or something?

I've worked with a company that always pays me late. I've told others to be wary about working with them because of it.

I don't see how this is a good thing since it makes you seem extremely unprofessional.
This sounds very misleading, Riemann was no lesser genius than Einstein, what in the end became this mentioned lecture was certainly not done in a "lazy afternoon" and in fact the paper of his based on this lecture started a major revolution in geometry and is considered to be one of the most important papers ever in this branch of mathematics. What more would you expect? Riemann wasn't a physicist...

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Riemann#Euclidean_geom...

In 1853 Gauss asked his student Riemann to prepare a Habilitationsschrift on the foundations of geometry. Over many months, Riemann developed his theory of higher dimensions and delivered his lecture at Göttingen in 1854 entitled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen ("On the hypotheses which underlie geometry"). When it was finally published in 1868, two years after his death, the mathematical public received it with enthusiasm and it is now recognized as one of the most important works in geometry.

By the way, read this paper of his. It has very little formalism, doesn't presume a lot of background knowledge and contains many brilliant insights.

http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~misha/ReadingSeminar/Papers/Riemann54...
"Inconvenience" or how about "cons" or "disadvantages?"
Quicksand (the physical fault testing environment) doesn't find our bugs because our simulation-based testing finds them first!

Our deterministic simulations cover all of the failure cases that quicksand can test and many more. The main reason we built quicksand is precisely to find out if our assumptions about the layers below us are wrong, since the simulator can't test its own assumptions. For example, there are hardware/software combinations out there where fsync() can't be trusted...
Might I suggest, re the name collision, to simplify the name to Siv? Sieve is prone to misspellings, and "Siv" has more of a brand feel to it.
Wefunder (YC W13) is looking for a visual designer (interview in Greece)
Good design is incredibly important to us. We believe beautiful software is the sum of thousands of small details, done just right.

We want someone obsessed with nailing those details. Someone that will not only "make it pretty", but who will take the time to understand our customers, and then solve their problems with solutions that are beautiful and functional. You will help guard the "soul" of our product. It's an important job.

We're a close-knit team, and we're hiring someone that will "join the family", so to speak. So, we're going to do things a bit differently. We'll fly out one final candiate to "interview" in a mansion in Greece from June 10-19 during Startup Workaway (http://startupworkaway.com). We'll pay your normal consulting rates, and we'll work together on a short-term design project near the beach. If it's a good fit, a full-time job will follow, based in SF (we'd help relocate).

If interested, please send your portfolio to nick@wefunder.com.
Ha, I guess you're right! I must say it's become more interesting than I expected.
Siv. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5739784
Grade school level name calling is not appropriate for HN. We expect better discussion here.
For large companies paying as late as possible is part of their cash flow management. Why pay if it does not cost you? its like a free 30 day loan. So if the terms say 30 days to pay on day 34. If your company is large enough you, just the carry trade on income you have and expenses you have not paid yet can make a difference on your balance sheet.

If some one is kind enough to extend it to 60 days without complaining, then its more free money for the customer.
Why do you need a cerebral solution? Isn't trial by fire good enough?

Everyone looked like an idiot as a child learning to socialize. Enough exposure, criticism, praise, etc will curb your actions away from looking like an idiot. You just need to adjust your self image and realize that looking like an idiot at that specific time does not mean that you can't learn adapt and look like a socially adept human at a future time.
The GIMP includes an "Optimize (for GIF)" command (it might be in gimp-gap) that deletes all pixels in subsequent frames that are equal to the most recent value for that pixel. Unfortunately, GIMP doesn't support per-frame/per-layer colormaps.
In my experience RDS has been amazing, and I am a MySQL guy. I say it like that because as a MySQL guy I would much prefer to setup my own server and use a third party engine like Percona or Maria, but RDS(MySQL) performance has been incredible.

The only thing I would complain about is the lack of a proxy or load balancer in front of their Multi-AZ setup. With any failover you are forced to have a downtime of 3-5 minutes while DNS propagates.
> He does a disservice to other "older" developers and technology buffs, as not all of us want to regale you with tales of the old days...

Once upon a time, we enjoyed exchanging stories as a way of sharing and building on the wisdom learned from hard knocks, bootstrapping one another. Pretty sure that's how civilization progresses.
Information product system review
"The device is powered by Jolla’s Sailfish OS but can also run Android apps, giving it something of a leg up."

Did you even read the article.
"colluding?"
Show HN: What does your Internet footprint look like?
A truism of life:

If you drive an R8 around, eat the best pizza you can and dress as Da Vinci, people will call you crazy and lock you up.

If you drive an R8 around, eat the best pizza you can and dress as Da Vinci when you $35,000,000 in the bank, people pleasantly refer to you as eccentric and like having you around.
https://github.com/FellowTraveler/Open-Transactions/wiki
Cool, thanks for answering. I wonder how many languages Yahoo currently uses. Given how many acquisitions they have done over the years.
Funny video and interesting app, although it's kind of misleading. It doesn't actually send files faster, you still have to wait the full upload time. What it does do is allow you to forget about the upload... it will automatically send once it's ready.

Good job overall, I might get it when it's available on windows.
Probably a huge client. Millions a month in revenue, but slow to pay.
http://imgur.com/BkeZuKI.jpg

If you're gonna piss off your readers to make a few extra sales at least do it right.
Ride Cow, Find Horse
Author here.. happy to take feedback. Also check out the Roadmap at https://github.com/smicallef/spiderfoot/wiki/Roadmap
Kind of, but I guess what you are trying to convey is "yes", which means the $<=500k option goes from being "comfortable" to being "a negative amount if I want to continue living in London".
What does that mean? Someone else above wrote "5% net 7" also and I have no idea how to interpret this.
This definitely looks cool, but some of the wording on the marketing page comes off as a bit cocky to me.
My salt states are public[1] and include among other things setup for nginx/redis/postgresql/uwsgi which powers a few Django and Flask sites.

[1]: https://github.com/uggedal/states
> One of the most surprising things I found when I started working in B2B is the percentage of clients who simply don't pay their bills.

What scale of company was this?!?
I used to get an error page any time I would enter my address on Grubhub with no other options, but Seamless/Delivery.com/etc worked great.
If you where having all your data deleted when you restarted your EC2 server, then something was VERY wrong. I'm not an expert, but I've used EC2 a little bit and I think I hit that exact problem.

The thing is that for whatever reason, data wasn't being written to the EBS (the virtual hard disks for use with EC2 instances) and was instead being written to the "ephemeral storage", a really big local data store that every EC2 instance has that is basically a `/tmp` directory. If the server restarts, everything in the ephemeral storage is destroyed.
ExpressionEngine is quite nice and packs a punch for $300. Much more elegant than WP, Drupal, or Joomla in my experience. The CodeIgniter PHP framework was extracted from it years back and got quite popular.
I get that this is an issue that bothers PG. I also get that this particular comment you're singling out might be an example of it, but I'm not sure. However, I'm not convinced that every instance that looks like the alleged problem is really a problem in itself and, perhaps I am in a minority, do not believe this sort of thing is the downfall of HN.

For me, I think the issues that make discussions go "downhill" are less to do with criticism and much more to do with prevalence of group-think. I don't think the prevailing wisdom that pointing out fundamental errors of facts of faulty arguments is a bad thing, even if they are not the main point of the article. I think there is edifying value in such criticism. Now, it is true that an article may have value beyond it's minor or major inherent fallacies and errors. Criticism is not censorship and it does not prevent others from reading and discussing other parts of an article if they are interesting and fodder for good conversation. Nevertheless, I don't think being overly generous or charitable necessarily the best method or should be enforced via an algorithm or community brow beating. No one wants inane Reddit conversations but I don't think most want sterile group-think or hug sessions either.

HN has all kinds of users with different backgrounds and some users are very knowledgeable and critical and we can learn a lot of have great discussion regarding the criticism as the more traditionally positive style conversations. If we eliminated this sort of discussion from HN, I think it would make things much worse than better, Valley group-think would rule the day. One thing I think users that come to HN expect is good information either in the articles or to find the proper information in the comments. If we let erroneous information stand because of we want to be nice or follow Atwood's "ruthlessly civil" or whatever the hell his ideology is, I think we would less a great benefit of HN discussions and users, particularly less experienced ones, would be worse off. If I'm new, and I see an HN submission that says eBay and Netflix are startups and that clearly is a significant part of the article and as well there are many comments on HN, but with no contention of that issue anywhere to be found, I may well think that the community consensus is that eBay is a startup.

On other articles that get submitted, I may conclude that the smart people on HN think all manner of pseudoscience and homeopathy are generally accepted, if I wasn't aware of there being new a impetus to avoid criticism.

I personally don't want what is suggested by this random author:
http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/03/mrs-feynmans-advic...

>Is your problem that the hearty self congratulation mutual admiration society on Hacker News (now there's a middlebrow dismissal!) thinks that something you like isn't as new and shiny as something you don't care about?

(oddly enough I think that article is relevant to the original topic)
I think that comment is somewhat unfair to HN but if we are not careful and are to act to hastily toward criticism we may just end up with a "mutual admiration society." Let's no do that. :)
Interesting point: what is Twilio's addressable market in your opinion?
It may be "good business" but she's still a bad person who is fueled by greed.
It's fair to expect to write a document in Microsoft Word on the Desktop and then view the file, or a PDF copy, when it is in tablet mode.

A good file chooser enables that scenario and generally, maximizes the benefit that Windows 8 brings to a tablet OS, which is the Windows desktop. If Metro can stream, read from memory cards, view files from Desktop apps, etc. the high purchase price of these systems would be justified.