Why is it that Google gets a free pass on customer support?

We somehow implicitly trust that they're doing good in all other areas, but there is absolutely no circumstance in the entire company where a customer can reach a person and receive true support.

Why do they get to do this, and no other company can?

Bitcoin: a currency for which capability to buy pizza is noteworthy, required custom programming, comes with a 10% novelty tax, and is incapable of maintaining a single price for 24 hours.

Sorry, but this misses the point entirely.

The White House does in fact owe a response to the petition. That's the deal they set up themselves. They owe it to the people to live up to it.

Thank you for raising this issue. We try to make our terms of service as fair as possible—we are not looking to censor any information or content on our customers' droplets.

As you have raised this issue, to make the situation clearer, the phrase referring to obscenity and profanity has been removed from our terms of service.

Thanks,

Etel

Author of the original rant here, funny it became viral and translated to Chinese (and back to English) :)

The rant was made as a comment here: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s...

Picked up by a Tilo Mitra: http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/

And as discussed here in HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226990

The point of it was actually: it's impossible to always keep up anyway so take something you like or already good at and move with it otherwise you'll never get your project done. It's nice to learn new frameworks, and you should, but it's mandatory that by the time you pick up something there will be something else that is considered better / more popular.

(I'm not saying "use Java Applets / Flash / XML+XSLT" just because "you are already good at it", sometimes you must let go of what you know and adapt to change, just don't over-kill it by learning EVERY new technology as it comes out, taking 1 step back is always a good thing)

I think the spirit of it was a bit lost in translation so here is the original text:

> I agree, I can't keep up, I just finished learning backbone.js and now I've found out on HN that it's old news, and I should use ember.js, cross that, it has opinions, I should use Meteor, no, AngularJS, no, Tower.js (on node.js), and for html templates I need handlebars, no mustache, wait, DoT.js is better, hang on, why do I need an HTML parser inside the browser? isn't that what the browser for? so no HTML templates? ok, DOM snippets, fine, Web Components you say? W3C are in the game too? you mean write REGULAR JavaScript like the Google guys? yuck, oh, I just should write it with CofeeScript and it will look ok, not Coffee? Coco? LiveScript? DART? GWT? ok, let me just go back to Ruby on Rails, oh it doesn't scale? Grails? Groovy? Roo? too "Springy?" ok, what about node.js? doesn't scale either?? but I can write client side, server side and mongodb side code in the same language? (but does it have to be JavaScript?) ok, what about PHP, you say it's not really thread safe? they lie?? ok, let me go back to server coding, it's still Java right? no? Lisp? oh it's called Clojure? well, it has a Bridge / protocol buffers / thrift implementation so we can be language agnostic, so we can support our Haskell developers. Or just go with Scala/Lift/Play it's the BEST framework (Foresquare use it, so it has to be good). of course we won't do SOAP and will use only JSON RESTful services cause it's only for banks and Walmart, and god forbid to use a SQL database it will never scale I've had it, I'm going to outsource this project... they will probably use a wordpress template and copy paste jQuery to get me the same exact result without the headache and in <del>half</del>quarter the price

p.s. it would have been a longer rant today, I have lot of new things to add to it, sadly things didn't get any better: Now I'm trying to choose between yeoman and brunch, coffeescript vs livescript vs typescript, LESS vs Sass vs Scss vs stylus, Haml vs Jasmine vs that weird language called HTML, testacular vs mocha, fixtures vs mocks, RequireJS vs CommonJS, with almonds or without, I started using underscore then figured out it's already "old school" and I need to actually use lo-dash. So I think I'm going to take your advice ;).

Here in post-collapse Argentina, I semi-regularly attend a free bike repair workshop run by a bunch of anarchists who occupied a pizzeria abandoned in the collapse, twelve years ago. They turned it into a library, a community garden, a clothing workshop, and a bike kitchen. So I have some insights to offer:

1. It's remarkable how quickly bicycles can break down, especially when they're not made to be ridden (US department-store bikes, all Argentine bikes) and when you repair them with improvised tools and improvised or substandard components.

2. There are a fair number of specialized tools that you need for bike repair that are pretty hard to do without. You can maybe cut a cone wrench from a flattened spoon, and you can "press" out chavetas (cotters) with a hammer and chunk of steel instead of a cotter press, and you can true your rims on the bike if you have to, but how are you going to unscrew your freewheel without the right shape of freewheel extractor? Or break your chain without a chain breaker?

3. A bit further afield, you have to patch or replace your inner tubes when they spring leaks. But it's increasingly difficult to get working vulcanizing fluid for patching after the economy collapses; that shit doesn't have an indefinite shelf life. Ultimately you need to put together some kind of chemistry lab, using chemicals of unknown quality, in order to renew your supply of bike patch kits.

4. More generally, bicycles, like other industrial machinery, are allergic to entropy. The crucial resource needed to repack your wheel bearing balls isn't the steel to make the balls or the dead cow to grease them with; it's the knowledge about which balls are the right size, and which ones are already subtly cracked. Buy them in bulk and they cost a fraction of a cent. Install a ball of the wrong size and you could wreck your cones or your hub or even your body.

So I think bicycles are an important part of post-apocalyptic transportation, but keeping bicycles running without an economy populated with specialized equipment, materials brought from far away, and people with specialized knowledge could be quite challenging indeed.

I see this guest blog post was kindly submitted here today after making the rounds of my Facebook friends yesterday. What I have to say about this is that ill prepared college freshmen are a well known phenomenon in the United States. But I think the author of the guest blog post submitted here has not correctly identified the underlying cause of that problem.

I have read some of the curriculum standards adopted in various states over the last decade and have examined the item content of some of the No Child Left Behind Act state tests implemented during the same period. The curricula were often quite lousy, and the tests rather poorly constructed. But neither so constrained teachers that we can conclude that they made things WORSE for teachers than before the Act and the associated tests. Teachers are in the classroom to help pupils and students learn something. Defining part of what that something is by no means prevents teachers from teaching more. A teacher who self-educates about good quality research on human learning

http://www.danielwillingham.com/articles.html

and about effective teaching

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/united-states/Pages/measures-...

can help learners learn better even if the surrounding pattern of school regulation is less than ideal.

I am a teacher of prealgebra-level mathematics in private practice. (In earlier years I was a classroom teacher of English as a second language or of Chinese as a second language.) My elementary-age pupils come to me for lessons after attending their regular school lessons each week. All my clients have to pay me (my nonprofit program also offers financial aid, up to a full fee waiver, for families with financial need) after already paying their taxes for my state's friendly public schools, and some of my clients come to my program after paying out of pocket for a privately operated classroom school or as a supplement to family homeschooling. I don't give my pupils letter grades, and tests I offer to the pupils are from national voluntary participation mathematics contests, which they take (or not) as one of several reality checks on how they are learning the course material. Parents from a wide variety of school districts have told me that their children do much better on various kinds of school tests after taking my course, even though my course is explicitly NOT test-prep, and even though I don't align my curriculum to the curriculum presupposed by any testing program.

Children who learn how to use their brains to think

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/ProblemsversusExercises.php

http://www.epsiloncamp.org/LearningMathematics.php

can handle novel problems and are not afraid of tests. Children who are overprotected in school from learning challenges outside the standard curriculum often get scared and shut down when tested, even when tested on the curriculum content they have studied over and over. I'm all about helping young learners be unafraid to take on challenges. If a teacher is not doing that, what is the teacher doing?

It's probably worth noting for other HN participants that the blog from which this guest post was submitted has had guest posts before that many Hacker News readers caught omitting many of the key facts of the described situation,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3314676

until that hiding the ball was outed by more thorough bloggers who checked the facts.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3327847

AFTER EDIT: btilly kindly asks, in the first reply to this comment, what class size I teach. The class size I teach is lower than the typical class size at the schools of regular enrollment of the pupils I teach, and more to btilly's point, my total enrollment of students at a given time is less than the typical student load of a full-time teacher in the local public schools. That's a fair contrast between my situation and theirs. On the other hand, for the first several years of my program I was writing the whole curriculum from the ground up (as no suitable textbooks were avaiable from United States publishers) and sometimes gathering materials from three different countries just to put a lesson plan together.

More to the point of teaching large classes, it has been done and done well in many parts of the world. When my wife was growing up in Taiwan, the typical elementary school class size was sixty (60) pupils. An unusually small class would have only fifty (50) pupils enrolled. The differences in school staffing practices and teacher training to make that possible are described in book-length works

http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...

http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...

but boil down to letting classes be extra large, so that teachers can be scheduled to have joint prep time together each day in which new teachers learn from master teachers and plan lessons together. My teaching would be better if my program were big enough that I had a colleague to confer with each week, or especially each day.

Hi (I'm Stripe's lawyer). Litigation discovery is something that any company needs to think about when crafting its email policy. But whether an email goes to a few individual recipients or to a broader list won't impact whether it needs to be disclosed in discovery. The seemingly private email between two or three co-workers will almost always persist in someone's inbox for a very long time, and ultimately be discovered.

In most cases, the kinds of emails you are talking about -- where someone says something that can be mischaracterized or otherwise damaging to the company in the future -- are a result of poor judgment. And that's where I think Stripe's policy has a distinct advantage. When people know they're sending things to a broader group of recipients they tend to be more thoughtful in how they communicate and just avoid saying many of the imprudent things that would be troublesome in future discovery.

From the section of the iOS HIG about writing alert copy:

> Avoid using “you,” “your,” “me,” and “my” as much as possible. Sometimes, text that identifies people directly can be ambiguous and can even be interpreted as an insult.

"STOP! WebKit is required here. The Comix Editor was tested under Chrome. It uses some webkit-specific tricks."

WebKit - the new IE.

"Detected" or "indexed"?

I think the real point the author is trying to make is: use modular, layered designs of composable components, instead of monolithic APIs that only have a single entry point. The single-entry-point model imposes costs and decisions onto the application that are hard to work around.

I think this is a good point. I think that it's hard to get from there to "more classes are always better" though. More classes don't always make a design more flexible. You have to consciously design for flexibility and reusability, and even then it takes a lot of deep thought and hard work to get your interfaces right, such that they are truly reusable in practice.