skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yup, calling every day was the only way I managed to get past due payment I was owed in the past. If they hedge (oh it's in our internal systems) ask for a day to call them back and call back the day before. For my cases it's usually been someone different handling the finances side of things, and the customer who I dealt with is actually embarrassed payment hasn't been made.

You could also start charging interest on the overdue bill, but I believe you have to state this in your invoice. then you have an excuse to call - to update them on the amount they owe.

I've not heard of anyone at startup level resorting to a collections agency but I have heard of the small claims court being involved sometimes. Never had to go that far myself, so I can't really comment.
I don't disagree. My point was that RescueTime was acting as if they were talking to friends rather than customers, which is why there is a disconnect between your comments and their responses.

However, I also reflexively dislike it when people start lecturing (though, lord knows, I'm sometimes guilty of that myself).
Correct. It's like there are an infinite number of insights, but only a set number of ways that something can be insightful. But if we make a list of ways that something can be insightful, then we can still make a list of insights generated in each specific way. And from this list we can probably create a new set of patterns. Perhaps the sum of all human knowledge is infinite and self-similar.
The going out on a limb part is tough as a solution as the testing itself happens pretty quickly--it isn't quite the same as something like web development which may go on for a while. I might switch to demanding half up front for all but the largest customers, though.
We invoice again with a big red OVERDUE stamp and call. Then call again. And again. Then send a letter and another invoice. Call again. If there are enough outstanding accounts we sometimes hire a stern-voiced contractor to call people.

Worst case, we give a collections agency the extremely delinquent (like, years old) accounts. They basically split whatever they can collect with us. They usually don't get much (if people were gonna pay, they'd have paid)

Oh, and of course we don't continue to sell to people who are more than a few months overdue.
From Robin Chase's video:

Luck: When preparation meets opportunity.
Using single letters in a piece of code helps in outlining the structure, instead of the contents.

That is why mathematical formulas are written with x, y, and z instead of long names. The idea is that we are emphasizing the generic relations, not what might be fed to the function.

Similarly, when writing functional code it is good style to use single letters instead of long names.
Yes, the market wasn't ready for a scooter that costs as much as a used car, has no storage capacity, barely has enough range for a short commute, and can only be used on sidewalks. For the cost of a segway I could buy a racing bicycle made entirely out of carbon fiber. Or, for half the price of a segway I could buy a very high quality commuter bike and a motorized scooter that I could drive on the road, I'd have more options, be able to travel faster and farther (with either the bike or the scooter), be able to carry things, get some exercise, and still have enough cash left over for a 40 inch 1080p LCD.

Segways never made sense as a practical means of transportation.
If you go to the link mentioned in the tweet, the page says nothing about a contest or deadline.

Another lesson, any idiot will re-tweet about a free ipod.
I've never liked the Picasa scrollbar either. Hard to tell how long the document is.
Thanks for the updated link. Mine was a cut/paste from the Chrome address bar. A bug maybe.
I thought as a Microsoft employee.. they'd be forbidden from publicly endorsing GMail or Google Docs.
Plenty of stuff got deleted, I think that would have been illustrative why things turned the way they did.

Compared to some of the other YC companies that received feedback here it was immature and unprofessional.

I think meanwhile that coin seems to have dropped.
You do also understand that Fake Steve Jobs doesn't really work at Apple, right?
Right. There problem seems fairly specific to their message, not a general flaw of Twitter.
I'd go collections before a lawsuit, for sure.

Most collections agencies cost you little or nothing up front, they just split whatever they collect. Hiring a lawyer or spending your valuable time deciphering legal forms is almost definitely going to cost you more up front.
In fact, I thought that this list was outdated and useless and I wanted to share with you for the comments, that's why I posted it.
Reminds me of a similar argument in Slate,

http://www.slate.com/id/2226279/

followed by this astonishingly angry reply from an IT guy:

http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2009/08/its_that_time_of_year...
This is more a lesson on how not to run a Twitter contest. Messages are ephemeral, and people don't check your timeline for other messages around the time that may or may not relate to the contest (such as, er, announcing a winner). When we ran a twitter contest we had a canonical blog post about it too, which was linked in every tweet and updated when the contest was over. Mind you, it wasn't a retweet-this-tweet type contest so we didn't track if people were tweeting mindlessly once it was over -- but nobody complained.
I appreciate that you were interested in what people thought about it, but please consider what you're doing: knowingly adding something of no value to the mix. That's noise, not signal.
> For instance many companies and individuals simply can't have their names expressed in the Latin alphabet.

If someone wants a UK passport, they have to express their name in the Latin alphabet. Given that there are British people with linguistic backgrounds from all over the world, including many different writing systems, and they all manage to do this, I disagree with your statement that it can't be done. It clearly can be done, and in fact is done on a regular basis.
Combining CSS or JavaScript Files on the Fly with PHP
It's not total bullshit. Did you get to the end of the article before commenting on it? I think Jeff hit the nail on the head; sure regex is generally not very good a parsing HTML, but in certain situations it is the right tool for the job. You seem to have considered your options and chosen the right tool. The point of the article is that often you don't need to teach someone which tool they should be using, but how to recognise that there might be better solutions to the problem they're solving and how to go about finding that solution.
Depends on your location, in plenty of places you can go to small claims court without representation. Especially for an uncontested bill.
I'm getting down-voted like nobody's business, so I post this comment at the risk of losing more karma.

Specifically, you use words like "premature" and "alarmed." More generally, I knew that RescueTime was posting this here in a chummy-chum-chum sort of way, rather than in an ultra-formal, survey-your-customers sort of way.

So, your comment was alarmist (understandable because you were acting as a customer, not as a friend of the company), while RescueTime's responses were too friendly and "unprofessional."

HN used to be all YC, all the time, so posting here was more about getting feedback from your peers, not your customers.

Does that make sense?

I don't think you did anything wrong, and I don't think this thread is evidence of RescueTime's unprofessionalism. If I showed my product to a fellow entrepreneur who wasn't a customer I'd feel comfortable teasing them back when they gave me shit, but I wouldn't ever do that to a customer.
I've never really known who this guy was, only that he was laid-off from MS and was hired immediately from Google. I checked his blog and his most recent post was glorifying Google and their products as things far superior to Microsoft's. In a matter of hours or days?

Questionable. Unless he's resentful, but even still, be honest.
Twitter’s New Headquarters As Shown Off By Employees (Pictures)
FWIW, I contribute to an app that has been on the App Store for ~10 months now, been in the top 100 for its category since release and is open source (under a BSD license). We've had several people tell us that someone could do this very thing - compile the app and post it online for free - but it hasn't been done yet.

That would be because:

- The copied app (unlike on the free internet) couldn't be called "Colloquy" (or reference Colloquy in its tags) because Apple would forbid its distribution, and so discoverability is significantly reduced.

- It costs $99 to acquire an appstore developer certificate to work with Apple's DRM, reducing the chances of opportunistic behavior on behalf of users. I can't just check out your project and put it online.

Of course, the app has been cracked and placed on other sites (and its technically legal since binary modifications/redistributions are allowed). But thats a different issue.

Is it really a different issue? It seems like the only thing protecting you from unrestricted copying is Apple's DRM and control over the AppStore.
Yes, I understand it's satire or at least something similar. I'm not a regular reader, and maybe I'm missing some subtext. In this case it's too subtle for me because there's this huge glass house called iPhone Developer Relations. Fake Steve should at least boast about how well they nailed it. That would be funny.
I find generally that the people who most berate the game for it's dependency on chance are the ones who are losing :)

Of course, if you're winning, it's all skill!
Corporate apps are another real barrier to advancement. How many SAP (and other) apps out there work in IE6 only?
QuickThread: A New C++ Multicore Library
Abstracting out "function(c){return function(){/stuff/}}(this)" seems like overkill to me.

I guess it's a matter of taste etc.
Jaguar Bumps Roadrunner in Supercomputing Top 500
Hadoop ported to R (and it's trivial)
I dont think this blog was accurate and insightful, therefore the internet sucks
Indeed. But if you have limited time to read, better pick up a Pinker book...
Yeah, I realize this. But you understand your business better than I, and it's possible that if you think about the business in terms of "I need to get some earnest money as soon as possible" you'll think of a way to restructure your deals.

The concept of "refundable deposit" may be useful to you, for example.
Black Hat talks are not necessarily "new". Black Hat is not an academic security conference. The exploit was released months before BH09.
Google gets free advertising on hacker news, techcrunch, etc
How?

By hiring Don Dodge.

Look at this – 35,000+ mentions on this story in the last 7 days.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3A*%3AIE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7TSHB&tbo=1&tbs=qdr%3Aw&q=%22don+dodge%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g6

People within MSFT recognized Don’s importance, and I am willing to bet that anybody following this story knew immediately that Google would court Don, and turn this into a PR coup over their major competior.

Hacker News is is one of the premier communities for young developers, and Google just bought advertising space all over the tech web by hiring Don, and looking again like the out of touch GIANT that they’re perceived as.

The butchering of this story calls for a housecleaning by MSFT’s management of their PR department, lots of better ways this could have been handled.
> They're spelled "Foucault"

Oops. Now it's too late to edit my comment.
I don't see how one could possibly sanely think that I would find a copy of, say, Civilization 4 without models, textures, and sound to be useful.

Are you serious? It's a drop-in game engine. You could create a variation on Civilization 4 for the cost of your artists.
I don't see much in the way of inconsistencies. In _2006_, Don notes:

"Google knows that on a feature comparison basis there is no contest. Microsoft Office wins."

And, in the SAME blog posting also says:

"Feature comparisons aside, I think the real story is free online collaboration, which is the next battlefield."

Now that he's left MSFT, he says:

"I can’t think of a single feature missing from what I need every day. There may be some edge cases, but I haven’t bumped into any yet."

I haven't used Google Docs much, but haven't they improved significantly in the past three years? Furthermore, he noted while at MSFT that the killer feature is collaboration, not the number of unique word count statistics. I see little in the way of inconsistency here. Doesn't Ballmer change his arguments at least twice a year when it comes to dissing competitive offerings?
Such a trick only works if the code doesn't matter. For something as important as Android, Google would just remove the offending code. Also, all code coming into important projects like Android has to have someone to vouch for it, so perhaps Google could shift the blame to the submitter (who would have had to remove the GPLv3 notice before submitting the code).
I'm not sure that's something that most home connections could handle (at least not video, or high-quality video). And I doubt that someone would be willing to setup hosting for you for $10/month that allows you to stream your music/movies/tv shows to you over the internet.
Wait... I thought that cycling was the new golf in Silicon Valley. Something about how it's easier for good cyclists to accommodate not-so-good cyclists than it is for good golfers to not completely upstage bad golfers.

Cycling is great for doing business. Pretty much everybody around there has a bike. The roads and trails around there are amazing. It's easy enough to carry on a conversation if you take a relaxed pace. Also, the weekend warriors get to show off their $3000 carbon-fiber rides that have only 150 miles on them. (Sort of like gearheads in golf, in a way.)
Samba on top of Linux for network file sharing success
Settlers is light enough (and hopefully the group you play with as well) to allow for constant conversation. While you do need to use your mind, it is not close to the level required by Chess/Go/etc.

Settlers is also reliant upon trading and player interaction, which helps to at least get you comfortable with the other players in the game, if not conversing with them.
Huh? You mean other than the fact that if they don't they're violating their agreement with the copyright holder of the GPL'd code?
Clicking through to the cited posts:

1. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/12/optio... - Most of this post is praising Google for their TSO program. Microsoft is mentioned almost as an afterthought, to show that they also have good employee benefits (not exactly a secret).

2. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2005/11/googl... - This was written in 2005, and is pretty much exactly in line with the predominant sentiment of that time. It's hard to make the case even today that Google has yet really attacked MS directly (no desktop OS, a much lighter office suite, etc).

3. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/10/offic... - Again, mostly in praise of Google, talking specifically about how online office suites are a potentially disruptive technology that MS is scrambling to get a slice of like everyone else. And, feature-for-feature, um, of course MS Office wins. But if you don't care about feature count, so what?

4. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/12/googl... - He specifically says Google is to today's MS as Toyota was to Ford or MS was to IBM 30 years ago. The whimper about MS having smart folks who have played disruptor themselves doesn't exactly equate to "Google won't disrupt MS".

5. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/02/googl... - Alright, Fake Steve has this one pretty spot on.

6. http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/05/windo... - It's a product blurb, followed by the drooling endorsement of pointing out that people usually don't completely abandon their old email addresses even if they move on to something else.
Six Steps to Managing Project Risk
Doesn't matter who they blame. Once the GPL3 code is in your hand, on the phone, they are stuck. Removing the code is fine, just like how they fix security holes that let you get root.
Instead of downmodding, why not explain why you disagree with the facts I present above?
Uh, Google?
Hmm, so I can give away copies of MS Office so long as I stop when someone points out it's copyright violation?
It's worth noting that every single quote is from 2005, 2006 or 2007. A lot has changed in the past 2 to 4 years.
Sorry no. At best it's the end of the beginning. If you look at any job board and look at web dev jobs you'll notice that nearly all of the listings are for plain old-fashioned non-mvc development, in php no less. Rails, ASP.NET MVC, Django, etc. have all grown into respectable, practical ways of building top-tier web sites but the MVC revolution is only just starting (as are the TDD revolution and the functional renaissance).

Judging by the time it took the OOP revolution to play out (i.e. get to the state where it is the accepted norm rather than the exception), the MVC revolution probably has another decade or so before it gets to that stage.
Or only on 32-bit machines... (SAP being another offender here. Apparently their calendars are stuck on 2005.)
The reason is that the entity (IT department) making the technology decision is optimizing for themselves. They will choose the product that minimizes work for them. They are not accountable nor do they care about the user's productivity.

Contrast this with an individual or startup, where the technology decision maker has a vested interested in its usability.
Plus, why does twitterpose no threat to News Corp? it still sends readers directly to the article without losing time on the homepage. So, in what really is it different from Google?
After reading Atwood's "Parsing Html The Cthulhu Way" article (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001311.html), I'd like to add one more thought after reading the following section. "What we have here is an ongoing education problem. The real enemy isn't regular expressions (or, for that matter, goto), but ignorance. The only crime being perpetrated is not knowing what the alternatives are. "

The article is lamenting a possible loss of knowledge over the accumulation of information where knowledge is the obvious preference. And I think that's the point I was originally trying to make with the "before radio" comment. People had less information to work with and yet possibly KNEW more with respect to the amount of information they had available to them.
Agreed on all counts. Never heard of him until the news he was fired from MS, read his goodbye blog post that was pretty Microsoft-friendly, and threw up in my mouth a little when I saw this new one. I'm sure Don's done some good work, but based on the exposure I have to him (the two aforementioned blog posts) I find it hard to respect the guy.
While I quite enjoy ruby I truly cannot stand the attitudes of the "revolutionaries".
What I was trying to say had nothing to do with the exact content of the document. The diversity in database implementations is so large that everyone has their two cents to contribute. A wiki provides such an environment.

I totally agree with your points on query optimization, and since you wrote it here, probably no one but me would ever read what you said. On his wiki, more people would read and perhaps refine your statement. As you'd notice, there's already a large incentive for one to go look there to know very specific details of a DB.

The documentation about databases out there are very high level and don't really give very specific details. This page seemed like an excellent start to that.
World Out of Balance
Website Thumbnails Generators With APIs
I thought his comments were more directed at the advantages of web based Google Documents over Office 2007.

I use both Google Docs and Office 2007 on my PC, depending on my needs for a particular document, eg. if I want to access it from multiple computers - Google Docs is great.
'Even Microsoft’s online version of Outlook called Outlook Web Access is far better than Gmail'

Even according to the standards of marketers/evengelists, this is so overboard.
I was at a geek gathering once where another person observed that the startup people were all playing poker (bluffing, gambling), and employees of the big companies were playing Settlers (resource management, slow and steady gains).

Anyway, "X is the new Y" articles are always garbage.
Beautiful effect, but I had to look up Zalgo: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Zalgo
Atlanta Startup Weekend Company List
It does seem more like C is Algol with some features cut out.
tl;dr: "We don't know how to use twitter, so we're blaming twitter rather than our own incompetence."
Announcing prosper (php dbal)
I've also responded to 'worse is better" numerous times on HN. I don't think people are aware that what they want is satisficing in most of their design so that they can spend more effort on the the most important 20%.
Don't forget social networks - I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to host our own profiles along the wordpress/email/xmpp model.

Imagine Facebook and Myspace were just two clients to some form of decentralised social network - then they'd be true competition, no need to go only where your friends are.
15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid
A Simulation Game: Cutting Your Losses
Salted, unless you want people to use you as a rainbow table --- I would salt it with the content type.

Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography) and come back once you understand what a salt is.
Network Forensics and Digital Time Travel
Ask HN: Recommendations for an online service that prints and mails postcards?
I'm trying to find an online service that can print and mail semi-customized postcards as part of a direct-mail marketing campaign.

This is all within the United States.

I have a database of several thousand recipients. I also have a program to automatically generate globally unique coupon codes.

Can anyone recommend a webservice, preferably with an API, that I could use to automate the printing and mailing of these postcards?

Thank you!
This is a new database abstraction layer I wrote for PHP
http://www.eopl3.com/
VC Sourcing: Active vs. Passive
A deadline costs 20% of your characters.
Little Benefit Seen, So Far, in Electronic Patient Records
In most places, representation isn't even allowed in small claims court.
Debt, Equity and a Third (and Fourth) Option that Might Work Better
I offer a 12.5% discount for customers who use 'express service' which basically means that they agree to pay within 7 days of invoice and agree to use my simple NDA/contract and not use up my time doing contract negotiation.

If they don't pay on time, they lose the discount.

I've been lucky: only one no-pay in 12 years, and that was for about an hour of work on what was originally a half day estimate (the "customer" sincerely thanked, but said that it was not worth his trouble to pay a tiny one hour invoice). I just let it slide, but in retrospect, I wish that I had re-submitted the invoice.
> I do believe it was the mortgage interest tax deduction that helped create the real estate bubble.

I believe that pants helped create the real estate bubble. After all, almost everyone involved wore them at one time or another.

What? People wore pants before the bubble? That's no more relevant than the fact that mortgage interest was deductible before the bubble.

> Not even aware of where the money was going and that they were spending two dollars to save one.

If you're paying the mortage, you're aware.

Of course, you're only "spending two dollars to save one" if your marginal rate is 50%. If you want to reduce the value of deductions, lower marginal rates....