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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to go out on a limb and register a slight discomfort with the increasing use of HN as a "court of public opinion" in very fact-bound disputes like this one. I can sort of see resorting to it out of desperation, but I'm afraid the Internet Lynch Mob has a very high ratio of outrage to effort spent actually investigating. This post has 84 upvotes in 21 minutes, which suggests a very quick investigation! So, the potential for erroneous snap judgments in such a Court seems high. The designer here may very well be in the right, but I don't feel qualified to judge or do anything about it based on the available information, any more than I do with the hundreds of other designer-client disputes that happen on a regular basis.

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On the other hand, this is a vibrant case study for both inexperienced founders and freelancers about the importance of doing the boring shit right. Sign a contract. Set a price. Get paid. Make sure there is a meeting of the minds, as the lawyers like to say.

This, right here, is exactly why we do these things.

While I agree this is a good learning experience, and so deserves some attention, we disagree on the lesson. The actual lesson, for the founder, is this:

>>Verbal contracts are binding.<<

You cannot legally agree to something on the phone and then change your mind when it comes time to sign the written form of the contract. Period.

There's a lot of grey in the details that were left out. Unless you write it down and come to a crystal-clear agreement, this stuff happens.

Doesn't matter. The founder hired the designer verbally. I imagine that the judge will first determine if there was a verbal agreement, and then, if there is disagreement about the terms, use common sense and vague standards to determine the correct remuneration. It's not actually that complicated.

A judge? Over $1,500 or so? Possibly across state lines? Not gonna happen.

Golly, how dysfunctional do you think our justice system is? Do you think that people have absolutely no recourse to address small disputes like this one? It's true that when you need something other than money and/or money over $10k (in CA) you need a general lawsuit, but small claims court exists for handling stuff like this.

Regarding venue, the rule is that you have to file in the location the offense occurred. Stuff on the internet genrally favors the plaintiff, because they can claim it happened near them, forcing the defendant to travel. Travel costs alone can eclipse the amounts in these cases, so deciding venue is important.

We don't even really know that this is what happened. Even if it were, we don't know the context or the tone of the e-mails leading up to this. You are jumping to a ton of conclusions from a post whose goal is just to induce a lynch mob... even the specific quotations, were they actually 100% accurate, are not things I can easily see having been totally reasonable if (and I personally find this much more likely) the contractor was being belligerent and was doing little more than threatening lawsuits and ownership claims in their side of the correspondence (possibly even /before/ there was the alleged billing dispute).

I would think the written contract becomes a new agreement that supersedes the verbal one. What if there's a dispute in the terms of the written contract that was never brought up verbally?

I actually am looking for clarification b/c I would be interested in knowing if the prior verbal agreement trumps all future written discussions. It just isn't what I guess would be the case, and I can certainly see how someone would interpret being asked to sign a contract a renegotiation of terms, which is what I think happened in this case.

YC also seems discomforted, it's only about half way down the front page with 196 votes in an hour. (Top item has 117 points in 3 hours).

Perhaps this is due to flags from people who don't like the story, or maybe mods have manually down-ranked it.

After 4 hours, this is top of second page with 269 points.

Top of first page has 201 points after 6 hours.

The algorithm takes many things into account, one of which is the url. Self-posts for instance need a lot more upvotes to get high up on the frontpage. So You can't quite know.

It jumped from first to tenth in a few minutes... But yes you can't quite know.

looks like they've assigned a larger weight to this post so it falls faster but there's no way to be sure of course. I don't see why so many regular HNers would flag this post.

Poor guy is hard up for cash and getting it up here might get someone in authority at YC to fix the problem. As for lynch mobs, her twitter profile shows no signs of such a thing. That's 1 for Reddit/HN and 0 for her as far as maturity is concerned.

Lastly, I wouldn't care even if some internet lynch mobbing were going on. Between being broke for no fault of mine because x behaved irresponsibly and making x's life miserable so that I can be slightly better than broke, I would pick the latter.

The problem with mobs is that they don't bother to first check that the complainant has a point. You've only heard one side of the story - why do you assume it's all you need to hear?

If the facts provided on the reddit post were untrue (such as the email replies), they would have been refuted by now.

Not true.

Say you run a business. Someone posts false allegations about you. Do you:

1. Answer them, and risk: a) inflating the story and keeping it in the press, b) being treated negatively by many bloggers/internet pundits who don't believe you because you're a company vs. an individual, c) risk saying something that will later hurt you in court?

Or:

2. Listen to the advice of your lawyers, who tell you that it's best to keep silent?

If somebody makes a statement of fact saying a certain person sent him an email and gives exact strings from that email, merely saying "That was not in the text of my email" will hardly be a legal problem.

I would have agreed with you if the statement was a subjective one such as "The CEO of the company was being racist or was biased because of my gender". Refuting such a thing is hard and you may inadvertently say something that hurts you later but this is not such a case.

Also, she hasn't quite been silent. She clarified the amount due on this thread (unless you want me to believe that was a part of some grand conspiracy). A similar clarification on the content of the emails could have been made if that guy made those lines up.

I think those votes convey a hope that someone of authority will look into the matter and voting will help bring the issue to their attention. I wouldn't just assume anyone who upvoted instantly agrees with OP and trusts him completely.

Actually I agree. That's why small claims court should precede the public shaming.

Small claims court? How many days outstanding is the invoice? You want to take a guess about the longest it's ever taken us to get paid for an invoice?

Net-30 (meaning, let's just pretend we're going to pay you within 30 days of getting invoiced so we can stop talking about this part of the contract) is a standard term. Is it your expectation that when you don't have a contract, you can expect "Net-1" payment?

Of course not! "Small claims court" doesn't mean now. To even file a claim you must have sent a demand letter. So he's still got some hoops to jump through. That said, I don't think he has to wait 30 days if the client has already indicated that they've decided to breach the contract. What he needs to do now is send a real-life letter demanding an agreement to pay within the week, and if that agreement is not forthcoming, then he should file in small claims court. Really, it's not all that dramatic either.

Nothing that's been published to date indicates that his client has breached contract. Clients are allowed to question invoices.

Well said. I think a good "public shaming" can be appropriate in some cases, but I'd consider it more of a measure of last resort. As we've seen in the past ( cough Duke Lacrosse Case cough ) trying people in the media can lead to some really bad situations.

Honestly, that screen looks like 5 hours work, max. Summoning an internet lynch mob over a dispute like that is incredibly unprofessional.

I disagree. It's impossible to tell from a screenshot how long something took.

I could easily recreate that screenshot in a couple hours in photoshop - but that doesn't mean it TOOK a couple hours in photoshop.

The majority of design is thinking through how the app will be used, researching similar apps, figuring out intended user goals, etc etc. Then theres a long process of experimentation until you get to a point where you're comfortable to send it to the client.

Looking at that design makes me think the designer is fresh out of school. Lack of a real understanding for client management and asking the client real hard questions about strategy and long term goals. A bunch of whiners, get over it learn to handle your clients better.

Sure. 5 hours @ somewhere between $67-20/hour* is $337-$100. Since the post doesn't mention a specific amount, we have no way of knowing if their bill was for more or less... all we can guess is it was > $100 (three $'s used when blanking the price).

*http://www.howdesign.com/design-business/pricing/hourly-rate...

$780.

That seems pretty reasonable to me for a professional freelance design from scratch like that. I normally expect individual pages to cost in the range of $1k from scratch.

Whoa $780 for that design? I personally would not have even charged for that preliminary design. Why are you designing any way. Where are the rough sketches and wireframes? Did you not learn that in school? Wireframes first, then discuss with management to get a better understanding of the underlying goals and objectives. Get them on the phone and ask lots of questions about the company, management, customers and the overall scope of the project.

You should probably take a step back and learn some etiquette. Typical HN replies should be informative and non-abrasive.

Upvotes are not hollowpoints. They are blanks, just making noise "Hey, look! Something might be wrong here!"

Or more generally "something is interesting here."

Agreed. Both parties just look silly.

It is possible that people expect YC funded companies to have high moral integrity and that drives the posts when YC funded companies do things that are against this purposely built-up group of persons moral compasses.

Why? YC does not have an unblemished record of perceiving and rejecting scumbags. pg described airbnb as "among the nicest of the people we've funded" and yet: http://gawker.com/5853754/the-seedy-spammy-past-of-airbnbs-c...

I want to like them, but they aren't perfect, and they haven't made a big deal out of "not evil" in their positioning.

This is not going to be your century.

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