Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderThis detection process doesn't detect toxic customers, it detects corporate customers at large companies. It's fine for a small startup to cater to small startups, but the big companies have big budgets, and eventually, you'll be making 80% of your money off of them, so learning how to deal with them can be helpful. 1. Big companies often have purchasing departments actually do the purchase. They are trained to expect discounts and the people in the purchasing department know a…
I presume this came up because it was auto-tweeted from swombat.com (this got retweeted today: http://swombat.com/2010/12/9/how-to-detect-a-toxic-customer ). If so, it's worth pointing to Joel Spolsky's response to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1987223 Definitely worth a read alongside this article.
I got one of these recently with LiberWriter. Despite getting a 100% refund, she's even taken to writing nasty comments about us on public forums.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 457
- Total comments
- 179
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010-12-09 | How to detect a toxic customerFirst breakout · Best thread | swombat | 293 | 114 |
| 2012-11-09 | How to Detect a Toxic Customer (2010)Latest 20+ point return | craigkerstiens | 162 | 64 |
| 2014-01-09 | How to detect a toxic customer | davidw | 2 | 1 |