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Comment by screwt | Hacker News Reader

Apologies for nit-picking at punctuation, but occasionally it matters :-)

"Twilio is over-billing ..." = Twilio is charging more than they should.

"Twillio is over billing ..." = Twilio has given up on billing. It's so over.

Just my personal bugbear - but sometimes it's worth getting this sort of thing correct. Apologies if this is just a US/UK difference, also (I'm in the UK).

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I'm from the US and I also originally thought the headline was saying something along the lines of "Trilio [has ended the practice of] billing and suspending accounts". When I clicked on the article I realized that they were "over-billing" instead of "over billing".

Since we're already nitpicking, "overbilling" (without the hyphen) is probably better.

https://www.google.com/search?q="overbilling" vs. https://www.google.com/search?q="over-billing"

Not a single person was confused by this, including me, a British dude sitting in the middle of London.

Now you got me confused. You are saying that no one was confused, not even you. Or you say that it was confusing not only for a single person, but for you too?

I'm happy to take the karma hit I'll get for this, but IMO this is emblematic of a large problem with HN, i.e. asinine bike-shedding. I address an unhelpful nitpicking comment and get a nitpicking reply. It's turtles all the way down.

The fact that two of your sibling comments are from people who were confused by this is just hilarious.

My apologies, I clearly underestimated how many pedants comment on HN.

agreed. I was excited to see how they were getting around that pesky issue of billing people.

same here. I was hoping the story introduced a new paradigm of charging that eliminated 'suspending' accounts all together, such as pre-paid.

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