skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why Doesn't Google Believe in Customer Support?
Background:

I was setting up a Google+ page for my company two days ago and my email was suspended because I used the company founding date as the birthday which is less than 13 years.

More Issues:

Of course the first thing I did was check the Google Support Forums to see what the solution would be. The solution the forums stated was to verify a credit card or to mail or fax scanned legal documents (Passport, Birth Certificate, etc).

Things were looking good until I realized that when I tried to login, I was not redirected to the verification process, it merely stated "Account has been disabled" which is completely different than what was written in the forums.

Horrible Customer Support:

When I emailed the Google Support Team, they merely redirected me back to the same forum posting without offering additional help. Obviously I know about the process to verify my age, however, it was impossible for me to begin the verification steps as that page did not exist for me.

What this means?

I have lost my email account containing thousands of contacts and clients. All the relationships I have established and all the business plans that I was working on are all lost at this point. And Google has done absolutely nothing to fix this.

So my question is why doesn't Google believe in good customer support? And no, it's not a scaling issue because companies like Zappos and Amazon handle it beautifully.

My suspended email is: carlos@ravn.com (email hosted by Google)
Indeed, the problem is that the f-word, in your example, is a purposefully vague adjective to add shock value without working hard to captivate the audience and add meaning. "Lazy" was a great word for that.
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On that note, it sounds like you could make a really good heat ex-changer with this stuff. I wonder if this would make for improvements in fields like refrigeration and energy production.
nice diagnosis, could be pretty likely
This is exactly what he has proven in the article.

He would rather be that much more powerful in communicating his ideas to a smaller group of people and alienating people like you. By you, I mean someone who thinks "what 19 year old wrote this?" or similar.

He outlined this in the article. He gains a deeper engagement with some people at the expense of losing others.

He isn't concerned about losing you, dear reader.
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Indeed. While one can make an argument that the tone of the talk is inappropriate for a professional conference, arguing that these particular examples in some way single out women for denigration is absurd. Do men not engage in sexual acts as well as women? Why should a sexual joke - one which, apparently, implies an act that could involve both genders - be automatically assumed to be harmful to women more than it is for men?

Naturally, I have not heard the entire talk, so it's possible there were segments which would indeed be considered demeaning for women specifically - and if so, then indeed that is another problem. But as a society, is it really healthy to keep around this attitude that women are delicate creatures who would be forever harmed by hearing anything with the slightest hint of sexual connotations? Is it really the case that only men can laugh at and enjoy the occasional sex joke?
I was thinking more of Humph on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

"Samantha has to nip out now with her new gentleman friend. Apparently, they've been working on the restoration of an old chest of drawers. Samantha is in charge of polishing, while he scrapes the varnish and wax off next to her."

"Samantha nearly made it - she's been detained at the last minute in the city's Latin quarter. An Italian gentleman friend has promised to take her out for an ice-cream, and she likes nothing better than to spend an evening licking the nuts off a large Neapolitan."

To the uninitiated, try and imagine these being said by an 83 year old man who doesn't appear to realise that there is any other way to understand them, and that they are perfectly ordinary sentences. Oh yes, and samantha is an entirely fictional person who is constantly alluded to but doesn't exist. There's a moral question for you...
I'm pretty sure banking, as a whole (not just hot-shot traders), has a higher proportion of women than programming does. When I was at First Chicago working on a fed funds trading system, there were plenty of women around, in tech-related positions, including my boss. The proportion of women is even higher in retail consumer-facing banking.

Some traders are certainly gross, especially on Wall St, but that isn't true across the industry.
"Preset" is a red herring, limits are contrary to "unlimited" whether they're set in advance or decided on the fly.

Certainly there's no guaranteed access, but if you're artificially limiting their access, as opposed to just having equipment difficulties or whatever, then that's hardly unlimited. If you're kicking off heavy users, I think that's not at all a fair definition of unlimited.

I appreciate that you were up front about the policy and think that's exactly what you should be doing, but disagree with characterizing this as somehow compatible with "unlimited". If "unlimited" is allowed to have these limits, then what exactly does it mean?
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Sure man, read this: http://books.google.com/books?id=07YnbioeQoAC&dq=behind+....

and stop being a prick
Take the phrase: "This piece of software is fucking useless". What word would you replace "fucking" with that conveys the same emotion, despair and rage that the word has in that sentence?

I'm not a native speaker so my vocabulary is pretty limited, but I don't remember coming across a word that would help me express that feeling.
Usually not a good idea to swear, especially when presenting to a wide audience. Not everyone is cool with profanity and you risk being silently judged and dismissed by those individuals as a result. Moreover, you never know where your presentation will be circulated. Not everyone understands or is fluent with extremely casual American speaking styles and idioms. Swearing just does not translate well.
The full line from that quote you pulled is:

> However, what this experience and other similar encounters I have had in the last three years as a Mac developer have started to suggest is, maybe the Mac community doesn’t want people like me to be comfortable.

The author of the post isn't implying that this singular incident leads to the conclusion that the Mac community is a boy's club. Rather, a series of experiences had while working in the Mac community leads the author to that feeling.

It's been my experience working in computer and programming communities in general that there is a huge blind spot for privilege among members of those communities, esp. given how many professional programmers are white, cisgendered men. The author is stating that her experience has show there to be a problem in the way professionalism and gender is approached by the Mac community, and its up to those of us that do have a lot of privilege to listen, take a step back, and think about that person's experience and examine our role in that community.
hi, swizec, I "cumming" love your comment. What a "dick" argument you're having here. So awesome. Please don't ride on high horse and interpret my message wrongly. Like "very" or "awesome", I'm just "raping" to stress my point. So "cumming" cool, uh? We're so "cumming" alike in our expressions. I raping love you, bro.
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You got modded down, but I don't see why; I think you raise an important point.
It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's moon. Thoughts like "I thought its name was Lunkhod or something, not Mars" filled my head until reading this was a mission to Phobos.
Sexual jokes are naturally divisive if the crowd is gender imbalanced.

It's not an issue of being demeaning. It's an issue of people from a minority group being very uncomfortable when the majority is talking as if they're not there.
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Yes, I understood what you said about W=2 and about safe. Maybe what I wrote wasn't too clear :-)
Lots of things can be an expression of strong emotion...but swearing is often an expression of frustration. It's not professional, it's not cool, and in the wrong context it's childish. I swear every day, in the right contexts.
but the singled out that you will get as being white and male aboard is very different to that that most others, who are female and black for example, experiance. the fact you see both types of 'otherness' as being the same speaks more of the hegemony of your viewpoint.
Are you really equating signing up for a developer conference to signing up for a class on sexual behavior?

If I take a class on human sexual behavior, I don't expect 80% of it to be dick jokes.
"But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store."

I don't actually hear that many people repeating this, but to expand a little bit on this, it's not just apps, it's also media content. The Flash ecosystem provides one of the few forms of DRM that the big movie studios have deemed acceptable. With Flash off of the iOS web platform it makes it just a little bit harder for users to buy content from someone other than Apple. Do you truly believe that there aren't motives beyond providing a better user experience behind what Jobs laid out in that article? The "break even" story about what the app store makes is a bunch of bullshit too. If Apple's operating expenses are truly 33% of every sale, then they are the least efficient company on the planet.

"Not much of a 'full web' experience then."

Compatibility is actually not all that bad. For your standard restaurant web site or photo portfolio, they're still usable even without being updated, the experience is simply not optimal. Still, having it at all is better than having nothing. The full web is about those millions upon millions of flash animations, restaurant web sites, e-brochures, photo galleries, and digital artworks, some of which date back to the late 90s now. A big part of why I'm disappointed by Adobe's decision is that that stuff is going to become inaccessible to a lot of people going forward. It's like the decision not to bring Hypercard over to OS X. Other technologies had already succeeded it, but there was a lot of useful and interesting stuff done in that format that is more or less lost now.
You're right, they're not innately funny. They're incredibly juvenile and that is what could potentially make them funny: the incongruity of reading such sophomoric nonsense in a deadpan manner could potentially be very amusing.

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJKyztJJVdU (although this is something of a reversal of the concept)
I had to look this up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisgender
This is exactly why these types of posts are so common and actually proves her point. A developer expresses her disappointment that a prominent Mac/iOS conference includes a surprising amount of crude and sexual humor? Most of the responses consist of "quit being offended", dismissals, and flat-out ignoring it ("this doesn't represent the community even though it's at a popular convention!"). There's even a guy in these comments suggesting being singled out "doesn't harm [anyone]".[0]

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3217486
The fact that a lot of people like the feature and want to use it for starters. If they can sell enough ads to make the hosting worthwhile, they have a successful company I'd assume.
Just because your app is HTML5 doesn't mean you have to run it in a browser. Just like on phones, drop a WebView in and you're set. IIRC, Spotify actually uses Chromium in some capacity on their native client.
why? you can upload private videos to youtube.

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=1...
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The odds are much higher that they have some in-house web developers.
I agree, this functionality is not required to make the product succeed. The product is already useful in itself.

I was merely referring to a use case of someone learning to program / think like a programmer by watching replays of real programmers doing their job. e.g. similar to pair programming / training with a mentor, but be distributional across the internet.

As far as 'training' / 'learning':

- If the student looks at some finished code, they can understand how to do something for a specific use case once, but maybe not know how the original programmer got to that solution.

- If the student watches someone write that code, they can understand how to write something similar again themselves and know roughly the process of thought that was used.

- If however, the student can not only watch someone write that code, but also 'understand' why they wrote certain code in places or why they changed the code throughout the process, then they will not only learn how to write for this particular use case, but become a more competent programmer and be able to apply what they learnt to many situations, in context of what is required.
Indeed, that's why it is best to hold the swearing unless you _really_ need to use it. It can be powerful rhetoric in the right context. But used too often, it loses its sting and merely lowers expectations for whatever comes out of the speaker's mouth.
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Well, I believe the Industrial Revolution started in a similar way. Deep coal and iron mines needed steam engines to pump water out, steam engines required iron and coal to make and operate.
Not really apropos to the discussion, but, no, the biggest exception to warrant requirements isn't "plain view"; it's search incident to arrest. If you're placed under arrest for any reason, you can be searched, your person can be searched, any belongings you're holding can be searched, and your immediate vicinity (ie, the passenger compartment of your car) can be searched.

But we're not talking about search. We're talking about using technology to capture information in plain view that is explicitly made available to law enforcement.

The differences between GPS transponders and lie detector tests are numerous, including how invasive they are (having devices hooked up to your actual body), the fact that they require detaining you, and the fact that the police have absolutely no business attempting to ascertain your private thoughts, but are explicitly entitled to track your car.

(Lie detector tests are also a psychological ploy; they don't actually do anything.)
Very interesting post. If a VC stepping in to save the ship is what's needed, I'd be all for it. I wonder how many Fred Wilsons there are out there though...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3216029
I think a better analogy is struggling to understand odd (spoken) english dialects: yes, they are speaking english, but not the variant(s) you know.
It would probably have been appropriate to start off with a warning that the content would deal in off-color double-entendres, giving attendees with different sensibilities a few moments to leave and go to another session.

And maybe a warning in the program beyond the name of the session.
It might be interesting to have different levels of abstraction, especially for code. Many times, I'm more interested in looking at how the overall design/interfaces of a module change rather than the code inside a method. I might think of analogies to text in terms of organizing thoughts as sections.
I have 9 siblings and my mom had at least one box for each of us with stuff. When I got married my mom gave the box to my wife. :/
> Ask yourself this: if the law was created in 1994, why didn't the bubble take off then?

We were running another bubble then.

Note that W also encouraged home ownership, so I'm not blaming Clinton alone.

> The CRA had nothing to do with the crisis as most of the subprime loans were made by non-CRA governed companies.

The posted link wasn't the CRA, but a policy that applied to every company that made/makes home loans.

Also, you're ignoring the role of Fannie/Freddie. A large fraction of loans are made to be sold. As the largest buyer, Fannie/Freddie have a huge effect.
thanks suhail! :)
I don't really understand why the whole issue is being blown so much out of proportions. A good developer has used "objectionable" words in his presentation to drive his point home. But really, who are we to decide if those words were indeed "objectionable"? He is the one who knows his audience best, and I think that is where we should leave it. If you found slides distasteful, just don't read them. It is that simple. You don't like the developer's style of communication? Dont follow his blog. Again really simple. But don't go around telling people how they should or should not write their presentations, let them be a judge of that.
Whoosh. That's the sound of the point flying over your head.

The article, and the OP, aren't saying throw in all the swear words you can find into what you say. Yours were just deragatory and purposefully put there as some out of context hyperbole.

Nice try but you didn't provide a very good argument.

The point here is that people have opinions on this. Which is great. OPINIONS are great people. The simple fact that you're discussing this is because you have an opinion on it.

When someone goes out of their way to provide emotion in a speech that should reflect that the person cares a lot about what they're talking about. He uses swearing because he has an opinion and strong opinions that he feels necessitate using strong words.

That's the same emotion and strong opinions that people like you have towards this particular topic of swearing in a talk.

It isn't any different. He chooses to communicate how he does because it shows emotion. Why does everything tech related have to be so dry? Many people love their Apple products (just an example) because they relate to it in a way. They have strong opinions and strong emotions about them.

This is no different.
I know, completely irrelevant, but coltran is not a supercondctor.
That's...a shame. And jarringly arrogant and naive. What a weird sentiment for you/him to have. Ye aren't political activists or anything...
Ultimately it comes down to the relativity of profanity as evil or not.
Is he, really, a much more powerful communicator thanks to his use of obscenities? Would he, really, connect less with the same smaller group if he didn't? Is the price of the loss, really, lower than the value of the gain?

(ETA: Interesting, HN won't let me reply to a downvoted reply to my post.) Verbose defenders & detractors of the practice aside, methinks many who murmur support do so from social pressures, and in fact dislike the practice but won't or can't articulate their opposition.
I consider myself part of his audience (as a github customer) and didn't find it notable until this whole thing got blown out of proportion.
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All routers that I interact with support port forwarding via UPnP so applications can open ports themselves. For example, BitTorrent clients like Transmission use this to set up port forwarding automatically.
I sure hope it doesn't crash. Hydrazine is not nice stuff.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hydrazine
You mean that guys don't usually tell these jokes when women are around, and therefore just the fact that a guy told this joke was dismissive of the women in attendance?

If so, would the exact same jokes be dismissive of men, if the gender of the speaker and audience were reversed? Or is there something about the jokes which have an anti-women bias?
This is a good quote:

"I tried to go after cold money and make it warm. Instead, I should have gone after warm money and made it hot."
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The point I'm trying to make is that not many people interpret F bombs the way you do. Some people get excited. Some people don't care. Some people have some images flash through their head. Some people get offended. Some people get uncomfortable.The world is big. There are many different people with different cultural, religious values and social norms. Something you think is no big deal can be an offense or distraction for others. Show some respect for diversity.
I can't answer for jsavimbi, but I think it insults the audience because it takes the easy way out. It would be like not proofreading your slides and showing up with typos or txt abbrs rather than well-thought out phrases.

Swearing works in private conversation for the same reason that other slang and spoken shortcuts work, and it works in casual written conversation for the same reason that abbreviations, shorthand, and inattention to capitalization, spelling, and punctuation work: there's no real expectation of quality. Sure it's lazy and shows a lack of caring, but if a friend is shooting me an email to ask if I'm up for Thai tonight, I don't expect her to proofread and capitalize before sending. That's an appropriate amount of effort for the situation.

If you're putting that much effort into a presentation to someone you hope will give you money, however, that's just plain rude.

(Some folks, and I suspect this is true for HN commenters at a much higher proportion than it is true for the general population, prefer to spend the time on all communication, regardless of formality or venue, to make it decent. I believe this is a good habit to cultivate, but I don't insist upon it in others).
Yes, this font is a terrible choice for white-on-black. And as for the dark-dark-dark-suede-on-black portions, forget about it.
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I recently picked up a fastmail.fm account and am forwarding gmail to that, in case gmail effs up.
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> It would clarify headlines like this if there was a different name for Earth's moon.

What about Luna?
I have a good friend who is a medical anthropologist. She attends both medical conferences, and anthropology conferences. And no, this stuff doesn't not happen there.

The only places I can see this as being acceptable is in places which were a) male dominated/homogenous, and/or b) lacking in professionalism.

So I can understand this happening at banking conferences because of (a), and unfortunately, hacker scenes have a problem with both (a) and (b), but I would strongly disagree that this happens in most other communities.
Regardless of how it is often used (and I would disagree with your assertion in this case), if you're not using it as an expression of frustration in the presentation, it's completely fine.
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It's an insult to pepper your audience with profanity when they took the time out of their day to pay attention to what you had to share. It shows that you did not take the time to properly prepare and present your arguments. It shows that you are immature. It shows that you have a complete and total disregard for even the most basic of social forums. And it shows that Mr. Holman is so self-absorbed that when confronted with what in polite society is considered ill-mannered and poorly timed swearing in a presentation, he doubled down and bereft of supervision decided to lecture the audience even further as to why he was entitled to swear at them.

In a time of crisis, some swearing is appropriate to convey urgency to the listener. At a nerd meetup? Hardly.