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Ask HN: When a customer contacts support, the battle is already lost. T/F?
Back then, I always felt that whenever a customer contacted us I could show off what good customer service we had -- how quick, effective, or friendly we were. Customer support emails were treated as reasons to be happy, since we got to learn from them and impress them at the same time!

But I was wrong. Now, I always feel that the moment a customer contacts us, there is already some growing, irreversible dissatisfaction. Quick, effective customer support is merely the best apology that we can offer, a weak compromise. The best customer support is customer support that is not needed.

This is completely anecdotal, but whenever we have customers switching away from us we try to look back and see that, despite how quickly or effectively we helped, the fact that said customers had to contact us on anything (especially when it's called a "turn-key" solution) means that they already were unhappy. No amount of quality customer support was going to remedy those situations. Mitigate perhaps, but not remedy.

Anyone else feels the same way?
I think it has something to do with #winning, but I'm not sure yet.
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They use it for their internal finance systems, not to run any external facing systems.

Google does use MySQL for their AdSense/AdWords transactional system (ie, buying AdWords).
Maybe this is what people need. I don't know because I don't know the people involved. I can say that what he's saying resonates and the words have poignancy because I remember times where I wasn't clearly enough focused on the end goal and such a speech might have been the right motivator. On the other hand when I'm really procrastinating it's usually because something is not right on a deeper level, either the goals, or the people, or something else is rubbing me the wrong way. It's not easy. Sometimes deep introspection is necessary. When you're talking about others it's even harder, but that's where the art of management comes in.
You still don't make any sense. Here is activity A: flying. Here is activity B: walking through a Rapiscan machine.

One can do activity A & B independently. One can board a plan and fly ( I just did recently, got into a line that didn't have an x-ray machine and flew). Or one can do B -- keep buying tickets and go through security without flying and just do that all day.

Now the argument was both activities will blast you with x-rays so at least "logically it doesn't make sense to complain about one but not the other". My comment was that it is not the same, there is a difference. I am willing to engage in activity A because that gets me from one place to another faster. I am not willing to engage in activity B because I get nothing for it. You said it yourself it is security theater, so I get nothing but harm from it. Therefore it the two activities are not the same.
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Why don't I like objects?
I have been writing programs for 17 years, a 'professional developer' for 13 years, an academic computer scientist, a hacker, and a systems guy. I have never admitted it, but despite years of professional OO development, I have never really "gotten" the object model, nor do I ever expect to. Am I missing something HN? Is there something wrong with me? Or am I just a wannabe lisper who needs to see the light?
> Everyone is different, and meant to excel at one thing they do well to make a difference

And that one thing is genetically wired? As in their DNA was just 'Ballet Dancing' inclined?

The only reason people excel at something, is because they practice it.
I disagree, as long as they have a consistent system of naming, you can find everything you need. Most of my problem comes from not being able to figure out how to moneypatch it instead of doing it the lazy and brute force way.
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Can possession of the CD really be taken to identify the owner of clear title to the license? What about when someone breaks into my house and steals my CD collection - they can steal the physical media, but the license is intangible - they can't steal that, so I should still own it.
The comments on the post seem to suggest that Interface Builder w/ XcodeCapp is the way of the future.

As a non-OS X user this makes me sad as well, but I'm guessing there are lots of legit reasons for 280 North to decide not to focus on it.
I've been thinking a bit about this and it's more a detriment to the United States than it is to the Internet. Censorship is a losing battle, especially with an educated public. There's just no way that this can work, it's a perpetual cat and mouse at best.

I feel that SOPA will pass, there's no doubt in my mind - it will just be a much watered down version, much like any other bill that passes these days. Even this so-called "anti-SOPA" ad is not really anti-SOPA, it just disagrees with certain aspects of the bill. They're basically asking for a compromise and they'll get it. There will probably be a long and expensive process in order to shut sites down. There will probably be some clauses about staying up if you are compliant with take-down notices. And there will probably be more bureaucrats added to the system, with jobs that are essentially useless and another needless expense. Ultimately, it will be like the War on Drugs, War on Terror, TSA and what have you; some far-fetched, pie in the sky plan that never had a chance of working in the first place.

The sad part is that people in Washington don't understand the consequences of what they are doing. They seem to think they have a blank check to play around with. Slowly but surely, they add things like this and the government gets bigger and more expensive to run. You can't just fire bureaucrats, they have a knack for sticking around.

I can't help but feel like I'm watching the slow death of a once great nation. I haven't heard anything lately coming out of Capitol Hill that has any semblance of intelligence.
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No, I didn't need to steal K&R, but it's better than online tutorials. If there's one thing that you should be allowed to steal, it's education.
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For what it's worth, this attitude is valuable in certain positions. Many of the sales reps I work with have this attitude and it works for them. Basically - they will go to hell and back to get something done for a customer. They will dictate engineering schedules, beg and steal equipment, relentlessly war-dial, and make generally unreasonable requests.

What happens with their requests? People find it easier to bend to the will of the determined than convince them otherwise. It gets stuff done. It also wrecks havoc on the 'balance of things' which may or may not have an inflated importance. This is why people hate sales reps.

Conversely - customers generally love this. Customers love making demands, feeling like they're the only customer, and having faith they'll get the best they can get.

The balance is burning those cycles, because there are limits; hell or no hell. If business cards are worth destroying your sleep and weekend to have them by Monday, so be it.
He's the joker.
Essentially, that's our take as well. However, we do have a plan for dealing with conflicts and missed updates soon -- probably after Thoonk.js 1.0 slated for late December. Here's how I replied to this question on the blog comments:

The data in the thoonk feeds are never edited locally on the client. Any user-actions that change data go out as a websocket rpc call, and get placed in a job queue. The workers validate the data, check ACL, and then update the corresponding feeds, which then bubbles back up to the user. This happens nearly instantly, and the feed updates are atomic. If two users edit an object, then the last edit wins. For the data we have, this isn't a problem. However, we've got a plan for dealing with concurrency and conflict resolution in the future so that we can can handle being offline for periods of time, and detecting and dealing with conflicts.
--

For &bang in particular, we'll probably just let the user that owns the task resolve the conflicts. "You queued an update to this task while offline, but Bob edited as well. Which version would you like to keep?" In general, you can't edit eachother's data, but you can add to it, so it isn't much of a problem.

Thoonk 1.0 will have update history and incrementing revision numbers for feeds that will give you enough information to resolve your conflicts (whatever the method you choose is) and will help your app recognize and retrieve missed updates.
what don't you "get" about it? or do you get it but not find it beneficial?
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I had a different take on the article than most of the comments I've read. It's about keeping your word. If You say you're going to do something then DO IT. If you don't want to be seen as a joker then you just have to keep your word.

I see it like this. If you make a timeline yourself and find you won't be able to keep it then you have 2 options. 1) Let the person you promised know right away or 2) "find a way. Or make one" - do what you got to do to get it done.

Sebastian is highlighting the second option because it's already passed deadlines and shit sounds like it's getting serious.

If you want to be respected, loved and an effective leader. Keep your promises. Every single one of them. (Or, in true Machiavellian form, at least make sure it's perceived that way.)
I can't see any connection between what a kernel-level rootkit does and how we should secure DNS. If you lose your kernel, you're done, full stop.
not very huge on the OO way of things myself, so you're not alone ;)
There are protests over everything at all times. That's why the media doesn't cover them. They aren't news. There are crowds of demonstrators in every major city, outside of every abortion clinic, and on the National Mall in DC 24 hours a day.

The Iraq protests were the largest protest movement in decades and lasted for years. It really wasn't difficult to find out about them.

> the first thing I said upon seeing burning towers on the TV at the Indiana University Student Union was "Reichstag", and I wasn't wrong.

Well, there's always someone comparing the current administration to Nazis....
It's more of an analogy like this: You're a group leader for a group assignment due Tuesday morning. You think it's great, they're the top 1% in the class. They promise to do their sections of the topic by Monday meeting so you can work together to compile it. Monday comes around, they said they tried and didn't finish their sections. Now you're stuck all night fixing their sections and compiling it together.

That's simplified analogy, and the author would angrily call them "jokers".
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I'm working on a post for tomorrow that goes into the details of making a feed-driven single-page app and a bit of the philosophy of our design choices and Thoonk itself.
> the value of people understanding the former is minuscule in comparison.

Do you have any quantitative evidence whatsoever to support such a claim?
Well, you've just convinced me to (very) loudly opt-out every time. Thanks!
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i would like to slap the author.
Architecture isn't mutually exclusive with development. I've been in the business for 15 years and while you can sometimes ship version one without doing any architectural analysis and planning, you sure as hell can't do version two without it. The architecture of your solution matters, and if a developer doesn't get it (or plan it appropriately themselves), then your project won't ship.

I've shipped lots of software in my career, and I've always had to think about how and where the adata is flowing in my solutions. That data flow? It's software architecture. If you don't think about your software's architecture, you'll still end up with one—but it may not be to your liking.
If this guy was my friend I would look for a therapist for him. This is the second time I come across this blog and the tone sounds more and more delusional and manic.
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My post for tomorrow as a quick section on scaling beyond a single instance of Redis.

Essentially intelligent sharding (in &bang's case, by team). Each node.js (or other processes) can look-up which Redis server-set owns a team, and can probably just stay connected to most all of the Redis instances. For HA, slave each shard, AOB, and off-server backups every 15m. Along with a gossip protocol for giving up on masters and promoting slaves.

According to our tests, we don't have to worry about it for awhile, but we've got a plan regardless and will start implementing it soon.
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"I’ll work to make this an excellent use of your time." Followed by his life story.
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`(Note: A pre-commit hook can be bypassed by passing the --no-verify argument.)`
They say most successful CEOs score highly on tests for being a sociopath.

I think this guy could be on his way to the Fortune 400!
I actually think this is brilliant. I'm just going to pretend this email was written to me and act accordingly.
I've debated posting this, but here I go:

If you're currently looking for another person, I think that I've got a fairly good claim to being a solid 4-tool of 6, and I've done some stuff with a fifth. I'm also looking for a job since the last one imploded last week. If nothing else, we could have an interesting conversation over your preferred beverage at a coffee shop.
Can someone provide me some concise explanation as to what Sebastian Marshall has actually done - outside of lots of blog posts, Hacker news posts, and travel?
I really want to sympathize with the teachers, but I do feel for the parents.

--

His mother chimed in and told me that it had been a horrible summer for them because of family issues they'd been through in July. I said I was so sorry, but I couldn't help but point out that the assignments were given in May. She quickly added that she was allowing her child some "fun time" during the summer before getting back to work in July and that it wasn't his fault the work wasn't complete.
Can you feel my pain?

--

I don't feel her pain. Summer break isn't a period for extended homework - it's a chance to develop curiosity and self-development. The skills that "No Child Left Behind" leave undeveloped (self-guided learning) can only happen during the summer period.

I was reading fairly advanced books for my age, but I don't recall ever having a strictly enforced "summer reading list". Unless this was an enriched program with the pre-requisite clearly spelled out beforehand, I don't understand the attitude shown by the teacher.

More empathy is needed all around.
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> He's asking his team to stop sweating the small stuff and just get it done. He's pointing out that others are busting their ass (the designer) while the team is trying to figure out something basic like email providers.

If that's all he was asking, he could have written a far less self absorbed paragraph and most of us would have said "duh". Instead, I don't know what the hell I just read, or why I read it for as long as I did.
You could get the warnings and still exit with a 0 status and continue, or override the validations. Pre-commit hooks can still get you valuable information.
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Maybe a little hard to describe, but why should everything be an object? Why should everything I want to operate on have to have methods? Etc.

I actually really see the benefit of inheritance in many OO settings, in that it encourages abstraction. But, what's always baffled me is the insistence on the Nouns as a central point of focus in our programs.

To throw more heresy on the fire, I think the MVC paradigm is absolute crap, and don't want to see it ever again if I can avoid it.
It was agreed upon by the community of the Italian Wikipedia.

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Note: the Wikipedia community does not usually put things to a vote. They discuss and seek consensus. Although they sometimes do use icons to indicate their position and to get a rough sense of where everyone stands.
Wow. EFF taking money from Palantir? That is...confusing.
do you have any code online that shows how you prefer to write? i'm curious to see how you organize things without objects (or mvc) and maybe being able to use your code to explain things may make it clearer.
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Except for the bit where you're doing other schoolwork instead, I presume? Besides, I wasn't talking as much about the content of the letter as the tone--that's what I found off-putting.
I'd like to know this also. I still like reading his stuff now and then though. :)
Some examples of what you mean would help.

Anything can be overused; I've seen "object models" that almost make me cry from their unnecessary complexity. Maybe you've just seen too many examples that took OO to an extreme, and those soured your taste for the whole style of programming.

Objects can be used judiciously and combined with other programming styles to do very powerful things. Even in 2011 it's not shameful to fall back on a plain C function or data structure in cases where objects don't really add anything of value (not that many programmers seem to, but I digress).

It also depends on the language and what the code does. In C++ for instance, if you happen to be working in code that relies on the C++ exceptions model (ignoring for the moment that some argue quite correctly to avoid C++ exceptions), you must use objects in order for cleanup code to be executed in every possible case. So although object-oriented programming is often just a matter of convenience or clean design or whatever, it can also be a requirement for correct behavior.
>> And there will probably be more bureaucrats added to the system, with jobs that are essentially useless and another needless expense.

This is really twisted. The industry is taking something it wants to do -- draconian copyright enforcement -- and passing that activity (plus the cost) to taxpayers. The system is broken. You can clearly see that when special interest groups that represent a small minority can get taxpayer money and spend it against the majority while at the same time getting the majority to pay.
Yea, the fundamental flaws of artificial scarcity.
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Maybe this says more about me than about the author of that blog post, but if I got an email like this from my "friend and boss", I'd be thinking hard about my future with this "company".
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This isn't how most client side email apps work. For example, on both the Mail app for mac and ios, the UI for sending is dismissed immediately. You know when it's sent when you hear the whoosh sound (or when you look to see that there is nothing left in your outbox).

Bottom line: you can have a non-blocking UI while still communicating to the user when there are problems.
The insightful part is this:
"What’s a joker? A joker is someone who says they’re going to do something, and then doesn’t. A joker always has excuses. “Oh well, I tried…” -> No, I don’t give a fuck that you tried. Did you do it or not?

DID YOU DO WHAT YOU SAID YOU’D DO OR NOT?

If not, you’re a fucking joker and we’ve got problems."

To summarize: don't talk about it, be about it.
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That's pretty cool. I've been using something a bit similar for a while too, just to run my changes through PEP8 (http://tech.myemma.com/python-pep8-git-hooks/). Mine uses the output of `git status --porcelain` to get the changed files, and writes them to a temporary directory with `git show`. Similar result to yours, but I think I like your `git diff` way better.
Without knowing anything about your product, I have to disagree -- especially for "turn-key" solutions.

The turn-key solutions that I've had the pleasure (sic) of delivering depend in no small part on post-implementation support (disclaimer: I manage telecom infrastructure deployments). This seems to be the case (and yes, I'm generalizing here) for complex software solutions that have either many components, or are sold as a single complex point product.

Quick, effective customer support in the form of P1 issue resolution would be the second highest praise one aims to receive from a customer. Your point about the "best customer support is customer support that is not needed" is the highest praise of all (especially in an infrastructure play).

Quality customer support undoubtedly helps with customer satisfaction and often is one of the underlying factors to sales' ability to up(sell|grade) existing customers.

Your unhappy customers may be a marketing or sales issue; not necessarily a customer support problem.

As such, without additional information, my answer is "F", qualified with "you may have framed this question incorrectly."

Customer support can be considered a last line of defense to help resolve deeper issues, such as fundamental dissatisfaction with the product. The feedback that you hopefully take back from disgruntled customers should be fed back to your sales and marketing organizations to understand if the problems are indicative of a larger trend (i.e. product/solution not meeting needs of key customers), or if the lost customers were one-offs with specific circumstances unlikely to 'spread' to other customers.

EDIT: Added last paragraph.
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Makes some good points, but finishes badly. The best part is where he is going to reward his best employee with an all-expenses paid vacation with....Sebastian Marshall!
The repetition is obviously intentional (I'm surprised this wasn't evident to you). It's written more as a speech rather then a pamphlet. Have you listened to for instance Obama, or any other politician? Usually they have very little to say(you could probably summarize in 5 sentences), but to get the point across they use repetition. It's an effective communication tool.
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maybe you're biased?
Was she having sex with you? She might be disclosing it to her partners, just not every random guys she knows, understandably.
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