skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's immoral to tempt someone into harming themselves, especially when it also benefits you.

Payday loans tempt the weak with options that help in the (very) short run, but harm in the long run.

The very existence of payday loans encourages self-destructive habits among the poor. Why budget carefully when you can just get a payday loan and kick the can down the road to next month?

And since many payday loan customers get these loans every month, the loans are really just an additional monthly bill for poor people.
hey jaikoo, how can I get in touch with you ? (your profile doesn't have any contact info)
I think Gruber's main point is that it could have been much more complex - people could think of dozens of extras, for both the mac and iPhone. "So where do you draw the line?" he asks. Add everything essential for it to be its basic cool thing, and stop. The features serve one purpose; they aren't an end in themselves. It's a kind of integrity.

Apple went Exupery on the shuffle too, reducing it to the minimal feature-set.
Related: http://www.longbets.org/
Kite language
Getting a reaction from supporters and an apology from the rant-target is gratifying. That's the motivation of this post. Self-gratification.

I've got to admit, I've done this before to a much larger company than GetSatisfaction with a much smaller blog than 37signals' and this was part of my motivation for doing so.

I don't understand why you weren't upmodded more, you were 100% correct on this point.
Is Office Finally Coming To The iPhone?
Personally, I'm more on the side of Get Satisfaction on this one. There are some valid points about how GS is doing things, granted, but Jason at 37Signals seems to have problems with the entire concept of their business/service. I dont. I think its fantastic.

I think it puts the impetus on companies to either really flush out their support processes, or to find a vendor that will do it for them.

That said, I think the 'Unofficial' notification does need to be more obvious.
What is the funding situation like out there and the hacker community ? Also, do most startups serve the UK market, in general ?
Seeing Woods's law play out is always amusing.

"Whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone—in the name of helping the poor—will call for curbing or abolishing it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Woods#Woods.27s_Law
Not everybody here is a compulsive programmer. I'm not a particularly good programmer myself: my focus is more on designing and building things that don't exist already. That's the great thing about the industry: it's so huge that you can focus on one of any number of things and still find success at what you do.
How can you be? I mean GS is making the 37signals page look really official and making their customers mad because 37signals isn't answering their questions. They are clearly in the wrong. This has nothing to do with support processes.
It's pretty easy to circumvent the encryption, but the act of doing so might be a DMCA violation.
Comcast’s OnDemand Reaches 11 Billion Views, Nearly Twice The Number Of iTunes Music Dls
Jupiter's stormy Great Red Spot is shrinking
Well, Rails is focused on this idea of doing things the Rails way. So you lose a lot of that generalization that you'd get by, say, programming everything in Ruby. But in return, you get the ability to develop and iterate extremely quickly, because a lot of the stuff is set up in advance.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, though: could you elaborate a little?
Even if Hanson succeeds in getting betting markets legalized, they will still be regulated into near-uselessness. Censors will preside over them, excluding entire classes of bets. For example, this kind:

http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm
Things my new commute has taught me #1: not all seats are equal
"It looks like any other business exchange to me: if you need the service and nobody will provide it for less, the prevailing rate is that high, even if it feels like a screw."

The argument is to save people from their own poor judgment.

Not too long ago, I would have opposed this philosophy. Now, I'm not so sure. We allowed people to trust their own judgment, particularly people in the finance industry, and they obliterated our entire financial system. On a smaller scale, consumers did similar things with credit card debt and houses they could not afford. Neither side (consumers or the finance industry) could have caused all this damage without the willing consent of the other.

So, the argument that we need to sometimes constrain the choices people have in order to save them from themselves, and ultimately to save people making good choices from the consequences of people making poor ones, seems more reasonable now.
I said previously that I think the 'Unofficial' needs to be more noticeable. Once that is corrected, I dont see it as a huge issue.

People are not idiots, but they are generally frustrated about support options. If there are tons of people using GS's unofficial support forums instead of your own, that tells you that your system is broken, and needs to be repaired.
They should at least take down the page on request.
"I think it puts the impetus on companies to either really flush out their support processes, or to find a vendor that will do it for them."

I have to say, I think you're missing the complaint. It's not against them providing support FOR COMPANIES THAT DON'T ALREADY DO IT. It's another for them to make MY company have to go to their site and look for customers who are expecting answers. Imagine if there were five companies just like GS competing... I would now be competing with them for PageRank on google searches and having to visit EVERY one of their sites to make sure I don't have any confused customers thinking they're going to get answers from us on those sites.

It's unmanageable. 37Signals HAS a support process in place and GS is putting the burden on them to go to their site and fill out their free doohicky that points people there. That's just ridiculous. It's automatically opting you in to a system that you didn't ask to be part of.
Definitely, that seems fair.
the brief discussions I've had with our RDA in Cambridge I got the feeling they didn't want our kind here.
I'm doing this at my current job as well. Jruby is great!
I see your point -- but you dont see it as an issue that there is a place where your own customers are posting complaints instead of your process? Clearly that means your internal support processes are too hard to find, to difficult to use, or too onerous overall. These are YOUR CUSTOMERS -- they should already know how to find you. If they dont, and they find GS instead, that says a lot.
Some things here still don't jive...

37Signals customer support person (Sarah Hatter) just wrote a comment stating that they've known about this for a year and that she's been friends with the founder of GetSatisfaction for a long time. I don't see how that leads to angry blog post to 80k people... What it really sounds like is Jason was in a bad mood and now they're doing damage control
The key dispute here is not about having a forum for individuals to provide support for each other and discuss issues with the company regardless of the company's involvement. I don't think that 37signals would argue over a resource like that. The dispute comes when GS presents themselves as the authoritative source for customer service for a company, especially when that company all ready cares deeply about their customers and tries to provide support elsewhere.

Accountability good, deception bad. It's a tough balance to strike for GS. Obviously they want to appear as the authority thus attracting customers and companies, but they risk alienating companies that have their own methods of triaging support issues.
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I've stayed out this for the most part because neither company are of interest to me, but Tom's comment on this follow up post is interesting. It's almost as if 37signals knew about the site, made an attempt at using it and then couldn't be bothered to continue - instead preferring to wait a while and cause a little controversy (possibly for their own benefit). That's not to say that GS were/are in the right, but why wait nearly a year to start a conversation on this?
I'm british, so especially grateful. I am in your debt for posting this link sir!

Pip pip!
My mom grew her tooth back after it was extracted due to excessive decay. We thought it was just an anomaly.
I used to have a girlfriend who was a recovering alcoholic.
I remember her telling me, "I couldn't pay my tuition; I had to struggle to get enough money to put gas in my car; I could barely pay my share of the rent. But I never had trouble finding money for booze!" Luckily for her she eventually figured out she needed to fix her life and did so.

There's a segment of the population who habitually make bad decisions. I've known enough of them to understand that they usually know they're making bad decisions, but they either don't care or don't have an alternative. Here's the important part:

You can't fix people

Some people will use payday loans to get themselves deeper in debt; most of them will use them as a temporary crutch to get out of a hole. Don't screw the latter over in your fervor to "help" (and I use that term loosely!) the former.
I find it curious that no one is commenting on the craven, cowardly and intellectually dishonest nature of the rejection itself. "It wouldn't do to publish this." "I'm not sure if that is the thing that needs saying now." "It might upset our Russian friends."

Pick up the complete set of Orwell's essays ($20 or so) and enjoy his masterful flames (yes, he reads stylistically like classic Usenet or the best of modern blogging) where he obliterates the castrated, sniveling, power-worshiping pseudointellectuals of his day.
SH in the comments explains just why she was so upset:

We found out because a very, very angry customer posted in a comment on our blog about our lack of reply to his inquiries. Now, we know as a company that years ago, we didn’t offer the same support we offer now. But I also know that I reply to EVERY email for support we receive, and I’ve done so for 2 years now. Two months ago, we hired Michael as our second support person, so we can reply with even more timely and more informative emails.

We scoured our records and found no trace of his email. I had our system administrator manually search our incoming mail logs and found nothing. Finally, the customer himself pointed me to the GS page he had created to ask 37signals a question. I was dumbfounded. Angry. Extremely, beyond belief, upset by this.

Customer support is my job, and I take it very seriously, and I am very, very good at it. To have another website undermine that job which leads to a customer with 1) a bad experience, 2) a bad impression of our company, 3) a bad impression of my work…well, it’s infuriating. Not only was I angry on the customer’s behalf, I was angry on behalf of our company to see our name and logo plastered all over a site we had never known about until then. (After that, there were two identical incidents over the past year.)

So that’s how we found out. Our frustration isn’t new, and it’s not unfounded. It’s based purely on the bad experiences GS has caused for our customers, and the harm it’s caused our brand. I’ve been friends with GS’s co-founder Lane Becker for years, and I don’t think he has sour intentions at all. But I do think perhaps as a company, GS is blinded to the harm their site can cause other companies.
All it says is that your customers could be bad google searchers.

Jason pointed out that depending on what you search for GS is the 3rd hit on google. It's not fair that I should have to compete with other people for my own product on Google. It would be just as slimy if a competitor was using my product name to generate business for them (which is exactly what is happening)
Wikipedia founder abandons Google search challenge
> when he ran a business whose entire model is to rip off poor people.

I don't have any good data to back this up, but my guess is that Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc., rip off way more poor people than this company.

$2 atm fees, $35 overdraft fees, monthly fees unless you have high minimum balances, all the "0%" interest credit cards you can handle (until bankruptcy), and my personal favorite---"keep the change", a debit card card that deposits the change into a savings account to help you save more! What they don't mention is that the savings account pays significantly less interest than the inflation rate and that the average consumer spends over 10% more when using a card than cash holding all else equal. You get to "keep the change" while bank of America keeps the 2% merchant fees on debit card transactions...

If your poor, the big banks don't care about you at all. They'd rather take all you have then kick you to the curb. Now if you have money, the banks are great. But I wouldn't attack this business because even if may be an expensive deal, at least they care about the low income market.
Interesting that you mention that given that dental health is already directly linked to cardiovascular health, via incidence of inflammation and gum disease.
Another problem not mentioned is this business model doesn't scale well for the companies it targets. It isn't just Get Satisfaction's pages you have to check... it's UserVoice's as well, and I'm sure there are others.

If people have a problem or a feature request and I don't choose to use those businesses, shouldn't it be the burden of those business (and not me) to make that clear to my customers if they inadvertantly end up there? Otherwise I have to sign up with them, or at least check their sites regularly...
I think Gatto's heart is in the right place, because he (a winner of the teacher of the year award in New York State more than a decade ago) wants children to avoid the worst effects of industrialized schooling. I'm more than a little put off by some of his sketchy, amateur historical research, which I think leaves him with too much credence for conspiracy theories. I have met Gatto in person something like eight times at various conferences on education reform (my field of occupation and research) and he is an interesting raconteur with more than a little ability to adapt his speeches to differing audiences. His central thesis on the bleak effects of industrialized schooling is worth a read for hackers who have never considered such issues before.
Do you always follow such a logical path to everything you do? I know I've gotten in situations where I've reacted to bad things way after it might have been necessary, because things build up to a bottleneck. And 37signals prides itself on being a small company where the individual people matter. They aren't professional in the smooth-and-polished-and-impregnable sense, and while that leads to some immaturity, it makes their company seem more human. So I doubt there's conscious scandal-making effort here: they don't strike me as cynical enough to work like that.

http://getsatisfaction.com/37signals/topics/customer_service...

That's from 10 months ago. The guy's mad, they respond (on GetSatisfaction, mind you), and the guy gets happier. But they don't keep using GS, because they do have their own support forum for this. Apparently they got more upset responses over the past year. So the first one wasn't terrible, but when you keep getting people hating you for poor customer service, eventually you hit a point where you flip and yell at GS for not providing a good intuitive solution.
1) spam.

2) spam for a website that isn't even up.
This follow-up by Rundle gives a good dissection of the GS page design. He doesn't even mention the "Popular products & services from 37signals", where GS uses 37S's product logos as category links. Nor does he mention the fact that one of the two bits of GS branding on the page is a "Powered by" icon that an unfamiliar person would mistake for server software - or a service. Go to that page, and the word "Unofficial" and a small-print disclaimer are your only tip-offs that this is a "community".

The bad part of it all is that there's no need or justification at all for designing a customer support page that looks that official and target-company-branded if it isn't. There's no call for using another company's product logos as category links. As much as GS supporters laud that company as being a great bunch of people, I have trouble coming up for an honest purpose for these details.

I do note that they appear to have pulled down 37S's logo from the heading, though they've conspicuously left it up for other companies that don't use their support ( http://getsatisfaction.com/ups ).
Well, this particular article (I refuse to call it a paper) was last updated in 2000, according to a note at the bottom, so it's certainly nowhere near the state of the art.

Last I heard, there were some concrete space elevator projects being put together. See the last paragraph under "21st century" at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator
Nvidia cuts out reviewers for the GTS250
The problem is that morality comes into competition with money in this situation. The more legitimate and official and connected to the company Get Satisfaction makes their pages look, the more customers are going to use them as a way to try to get official-ish support. The more users use them as a way to get support, the more pressure there is on the company to use it as a support mechanism - whether they want to or not.

Even beyond that, Get Satisfaction is essentially operating an unofficial forum that a company can pay to co-opt. Their paid plans specifically say that you get to shape the conversation. How Orwellian! So, you'll let users post bad things about my company on your service unless I start paying you in which case I get to decide what gets posted? That's just gross on both sides. And, of course, the more official it looks, the more it matters when people are posting bad things. Plus, once a company starts endorsing it, more customers will use it meaning that they can never stop paying.

There's a huge moral hazard there. If their business plan were to offer an unofficial support system for all companies, that would be great. If their business plan were to offer a product companies could sign up for to outsource their support IT infrastructure, that would be great. But their business plan is to offer the first in the hopes that companies will feel pressure to do the second.

EDIT: I want to clarify that I don't think Get Satisfaction is maliciously plotting in this way. I'm guessing that their plotting is to give customers the best support channels possible - in cases that they can be official, that means being official, but in other cases, it means giving customers the chance to unofficially talk about the company/products. However, it also means that their profits become tied to whether companies feel pressure to make Get Satisfaction an official support mechanism and the more people that use it because it looks official-ish, the more their profits are likely to be.
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What Every Entrepreneur Should Read
The frustrating thing about this for me is that I liked Get Satisfaction. It's a really well-done site, for the most part, and it was easy and convenient. I had never used it deeply, and only for services that were actually using it as their primary support channel, so I didn't even realize that they had pages for companies that hadn't signed up with them.

All the GS pages look pretty much identical, save for a few logos. After a while, you blow past the repeated boilerplate on each page, and you just use the functionality. I was one of the people who would never have noticed the small distinctions between official and unofficial; I would have thought any GS page was sanctioned by the company, because frankly, it never would have even entered my mind that GS would so brazenly try to unilaterally pose as a company's support channel.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trademarks are intended to protect against. I hate to say it, but all the hand-wringing over whether 37s was being rude by dropping a bomb of a blog post, is kind of silly. It could have very legitimately been a bomb of a lawsuit.
That's the blackmail aspect for this niche, if not properly and ethically handled. "Hey, we've set up a page to catch unhappy customers. Better pay us time and/or money or we'll get them good and pissed-off at you."
> 2. Gracenote's CDDB

Gracenote. Probably the first community-sourced data store (take that, Wikipedia)

Also, Tim O'Reilly fails to mention (or maybe deems it not important) that Gracenote ripped off the work of thousands of dedicated users who manually typed in song information by selling it to Sony et al.
Oh dear. From the one lecture of his that I attended, I knew that Charlie Nesson had some unconventional ideas, but this is a bit excessive. (You know you should be worried when Lawrence Lessig dismisses your fair use argument.)

The student he is representing should be worried that all this showmanship is angering the judge, who would then give less credence to legitimate arguments.
I don't think anyone said there was a scandal in the works here, but in the realm of much ado about nothing... some things dont seem to add up and they're seemingly less human and honest when they start having stories that don't match for pr and damage control purposes... thats big corporation stuff just as much as it is small company with personality (especially now that that personality is turning towards full of themselves)
Art of scalability (1) - Scalability principles
I remember reading this when it was originally posted to DI's site a couple years ago. Pretty cool stuff, I'm sure some folks here who haven't read this will appreciate it. DI truly has some Damn Interesting articles!
D-Pad Hero, Guitar Hero for the Nintendo Entertainment System
Christ, I got buried. -2 in 5 minutes for something I didn't think offended people is a record for me.

they're seeming less human and honest when they start having stories that don't match for pr and damage control purposes...

But their stories don't contradict. Or are you saying they seem less human when they're not glossing over everything with PR? That's kind of an odd way to look at things. I also doubt this is damage control, considering their first post said there would be a follow-up in a few days. They're just writing about this experience for the sake of people who might learn a lesson from it.

(They've always been full of themselves. Look at DHH's famous "fuck you" slide regarding his critics a few years ago. They're cocky and think they know best, but people read them because very often they're right.)
Graphene Nanotechnology (and TEAM Microscopes)
ASP.NET MVC source code released under MS-PL
And that's if you're making generic "support" searches. What if customers Google something related to a problem they're having and the best match is someone's similar question on a GS page? You have customers wandering around a page that impersonates your support service!
Geez, I hope I can hire a support person that committed and thorough.
I gave up on bread, so I now eat cake :~).
I wondered why Jason didn't just contact GS directly with his concerns. Even if his customers might be confused by GS, Jason knows who/what they are and could of raised his grievances with them directly. Instead he published some serious accusations on his widely-read blog knowing it'd get a lot of buzz. I imagine this whole story could've played out a little better if instead of jumping the gun and shouting 'malice' he'd've taken some extra time to work things out directly with GS.