In this case, I'd suspect that lighting the fire should be the first step to burning most of the customer relations department. I'll trust Paypal when I feel the smell of burning corpses from their offices.
996 karma · joined October 11, 2008
All opinions are my own.
This is a fire-fighting attempt from the CEO of a company that snubbed the people they should live off of, prompted by a bigger than average shitstorm created by their persistent crappy handling of accounts.
Think of it this way: suppose Mercedes went around, burning the cars it sells to their customers - much to their chagrin - and one of the customers creates a big enough fuss for the CEO to come and personally give him a new car. Is that an acceptable handling of the situation in your eyes?
As a company that does epic UI, they should figure out that customer support is a form of user interface as well.
I'm not ready to give them any more money at this point.
The grayness is a bit strange... if you have a few moments to help me test out why you can't work it, drop me an e-mail.
The client side is a thin smattering of HTML and jQuery. The server side, though... the server side is pure Haskell. We're using the Snap web framework, Heist templating and a couple of open source libraries to talk to Google and SMTP. Some of the changes we had to implement on open source libraries were already merged upstream.
At the heart of this app is an algorithm that solves the time-constrained traveling salesman problem. The solution is two-fold: for smaller data sets, we run exhaustive searches. For larger data sets we do simulated annealing to deliver an acceptable solution.
The whole thing is still being tweaked, options being added, the user interface is a mess, but hey... it works somewhat, and somebody might actually like it. Launch early, eh?
Thanks for helping us find challenging work HN!
Sincerely, Ivan & David
Edit: if anyone has any questions, I'm here, and my e-mail is in my profile!
Since I most work alone, I've hit upon the same dilemma several times. Unfortunately, I didn't track my effectiveness when I used one or the other approach so I don't have any hard data to contribute :-(
I wonder if we are all getting a bit ADDish nowadays?
The really disturbing thing is that some people don't seem to realize that they have been hellbanned for whatever reason.
However, it doesn't make sense then those who hacked his supposed honeypot would be aware of his oversight ("they are trying to kill him"), while still using the honeypot to perform whatever illegal shenanigans they were up to ("they are currently downloading plentyoffish’s database").
I managed to stumble through the first part of the article, but lost interest when Russo claimed that "he can see what the Russians are doing because they took over his computer." This sounds technologically implausible at best.
Maybe the official post in the morning will make more sense.
The prize is 1m$... now, that is a lot of money, but something doesn't clash. I'm sure that'd come out to about the yearly salary for 10 researchers. No mention of lab costs, testing, publication, blah blah...
I'm not sure, but it smells like the typical Scriptlance (http://www.scriptlance.com/) fare, with a similar cost/reward point.
Meh. My lab will stay dusty :(
In my home country of Croatia, for instance, it is completely normal to ask someone for their seat. If the person doing the asking is older, it's almost a given that the person being asked will give up the seat without much thinking or comments.
I wonder now: can a few thousand miles make such difference in personal interaction?
Frankly, looking at most people I know who want to
work for big companies but don't, these people aren't
cut out for big companies.
Also, since when do the large companies value creativity?
Permission to link to a document is explicitly granted by the act of publication.
- You want indefinite time to test a product which is loosely specified, effectively leaving developers of good solutions screwed if someone posts a better solution in the meanwhile - Yet you want everyone to rush on it because only the first accepted solution gets paid for, and - You actually you want them to invent wheels, hot water and sliced bread (no frameworks)
To add insult to injury, you want to protect yourself from people who want to earn quick money, while treating developers as a potential source of double licensing and nasty gotchas.
Or did I misunderstand you?
When the job is completed and tested it will be open sourced, GPLV2, copyright will be assigned to 'The Modular Company BV' in the Netherlands.
If this is GPLed, then it shouldn't matter much who holds the copyright. If you want the copyright, then it's not much of a sign of your belief in open source.
Ideally you'd accept MIT licensed code.