Live data from Hacker News

What being ripped off taught me

belief.horse

131–140 of 247 posts

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#131

The page is actively hostile to me using reader mode on my phone. It keeps resetting my scroll progress to the top of the article. This is the second time I’ve run into this (first was within the last two weeks). I hope this is a bug in my phone’s handling of something and not intentional. Until I know otherwise, I’m treating sites where this happens as deliberately hostile for the same reason as always: ads. I use r…

think you got a bug my friend - this is a static site

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#132

Be paid or don't work. I am so deadly serious - do not continue working if your invoices are late. You don't have to be a jerk about it, just explain to your primary contact that you need to be paid and you pick up tools again when the money has arrived. BUT it is on YOU to properly negotiate reasonable payment terms. And if you don;t know or don't trust the client then require payment in advance until a stronger com…

Your business is getting the money. Your business is not to fly around the world trying to engineer-mog the client. The OP has a bad ego.

"They don't even use version control..." Yeah? Get the money. The client are "carpetbaggers", yeah okay... get the money.

It's implied that they hired you because they need the help. But they also may have hired you because they need the help and you seem like a sucker they can stiff.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#133

We’ve also learned this lesson the hard way. These are now the clauses we require in every project we do: - Payment is due X days after receipt of invoice, or immediately after the consultant has addressed any quality issues, whichever is sooner - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply t…

It seems like none of these terms would have saved OP though

It's worth keeping in mind that the only practical "saving" for the OP will result in not doing the job at all, since this client most likely doesn't actually have the money and never will.

It should be, oh, short-term rush job in a foreign country for a sketchy client? That is most definitely cash up front time. Oh, you can't afford that? Sucks to be you, not going to do it.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#134

I have a friend who retired but still does some contract work. They were on salary their whole career and are not used to sending invoices and tracking down payments. One of their clients was late paying and my friend wasn't concerned, but I encouraged them to be diligent about insisting on being paid on time. I have been a freelancer for over a decade and in my experience, the further away you get from a bill, the l…

Just for my own general curiosity, once a bill is overdue, how often do you nag the customer about it? Or does it look more like an escalation process? (Start out with a polite email, then a phone call, then a phone call to their manager/business partner, etc?) Do you ever "fire" customers who always pay, but always pay late and only after they've been reminded 3 times?

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#135

Sadly every consultant can tell you at least one (hopefully only one) story about clients who refuse to pay. Either outright, or with some excuse about you "not delivering", or they "not liking" what you delivered. I have one of those stories as well. My SO has her own story - she ran into a guy whom she later found out does it as a policy: hires people, never pays, threatens to sue them if they publish their story.…

> If they're out of state, prepare to deal with an expensive legal process > you won in a small claims court - good luck collecting

While these statements are generally true, it shouldn't dissuade anyone from pursuing these remedies.

Years back I took a small programming contract with a 'friend of a friend' that ended with me delivering what was asked and them suddenly not having any money, claiming the company was going under.

They were in another state. I filed small claims by mail and they never responded, so I got a default judgement without ever needing to travel, for under $500 in total fees. The judgement is worthless though, right? Probably...

Fast forward about a month and they had an investor willing to float the company for a while longer, but now my judgement is a giant wrench - the investor won't give them money as long as this is hanging around. I got the cofounders to jointly take on the debt personally (after consulting with a lawyer that this was possible - he didn't even charge for the consult!) and I vacated the judgement against the LLC.

A short while later the LLC went under anyway, but since I had both founders' personal finances under my thumb (which would allow garnishing wages, obtaining leins, etc.) I was able to recoup the entire contract amount from them personally.

I wouldn't have spent more than about $1,000 chasing that money down, but a few hours of paperwork and a few hundred dollars ended up making it easily worth my while.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#136

Actually sort of darkly clever– they turned OP into an unwitting investor. Project goes well, he gets paid and they're best buds, and he doesn't even realize he was scammed (by intent). If not, well there's no point suing a failed company.

If you're in California, even if business goes totally kaput and runs out of money company officers are personally liable for any and all unpaid wages. Labor Commission Office will also include a hefty punitive sum to boot.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#137

I have a friend who retired but still does some contract work. They were on salary their whole career and are not used to sending invoices and tracking down payments. One of their clients was late paying and my friend wasn't concerned, but I encouraged them to be diligent about insisting on being paid on time. I have been a freelancer for over a decade and in my experience, the further away you get from a bill, the l…

Just for my own general curiosity, once a bill is overdue, how often do you nag the customer about it? Or does it look more like an escalation process? (Start out with a polite email, then a phone call, then a phone call to their manager/business partner, etc?) Do you ever "fire" customers who always pay, but always pay late and only after they've been reminded 3 times?

They get 30 days to pay. I used to start sending reminders if they were late by even a day past that, but I quickly learned that can unnecessarily embarrass or annoy some clients, so now everyone gets a two week grace period after the 30 days are up.

I send a gentle reminder just to my immediate point of contact to start. If that doesn't work, I start sending more business-like requests for payment every week, and I CC anyone I think might help make it happen.

I've never fired anyone, and everyone has eventually paid (knock wood), but there have been times when I assumed the money was a lost cause (though never five figures worth like the person who shared this blog post).

But more than once, I've had a client contact me and request new work, and I've had to remind them they still have an unpaid invoice. I'll tell them I can't start anything new until the old work is paid. They almost invariably blame the delay on their billing department, and the money eventually finds its way to me.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#138

The page is actively hostile to me using reader mode on my phone. It keeps resetting my scroll progress to the top of the article. This is the second time I’ve run into this (first was within the last two weeks). I hope this is a bug in my phone’s handling of something and not intentional. Until I know otherwise, I’m treating sites where this happens as deliberately hostile for the same reason as always: ads. I use r…

think you got a bug my friend - this is a static site

Thanks for confirming. I was confident the first time because many websites are hostile to users. Seeing it again within a short window made my spidey-sense tingle.

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#139

We’ve also learned this lesson the hard way. These are now the clauses we require in every project we do: - Payment is due X days after receipt of invoice, or immediately after the consultant has addressed any quality issues, whichever is sooner - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply t…

> - Late payment shall incur interest at 8% above the BoE base rate and a late fee of 100 GBP as per the UK Late Payment Legislation. Partial payments on invoices shall apply to late fees, interest, and then principal, in that order.

Do you mean 8 percent, or 8 percentage points?

Re: What being ripped off taught me

#140
post #22
post #15

What's an "AR bus"? How can augmented reality windows work on a bus unless you are (a) tracking the passenger's head and (b) there's only one passenger?

Screens outside the windows (not on the windows) can provide parallax, no need to track heads. However, in this case: > They were attempting to pull off AR effects on the transparent OLED windows of the bus without accounting for lens distortion, field of view, parallax, occlusion, etc., and were frustrated and mystified when things didn’t appear to line up. They were completely naive to what depth and scale cues are…

Imagine two passengers seating in rows r10 and r11, looking at the target T

A. You need to know where a passager's eyes are to display the POI in the right place. Even if each rows gets their own and only screen you'll need to account for their head vertical position (different people are different height) and movement, hence the eye tracking.

B. If you share a window between multiple people you end us with a POI mess with informations displayed multiplied by as much passengers in the bus.

   |- r9  -|w9
   |       |w9
   |- r10 -|w10   T
   |       |w10
   |- r11 -|w11
   |       |w11
   |- r12 -|w12
IMHO the only practical way is with personal headsets like [0] but then you don't need a bus: just use your foot or any transportation: it's AR and not VR.

0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpoLdQpPcAc

Post reply on HN