ya know, I just don't agree with anyone who posts here and uses the word "customer." Yea, Bob was a customer but he is also a human being. Less we forget this and remember we are working with other people then you don't need to worry about "snowflakes" or whether you're customers are happy or not. Just treat everyone you come in contact with with respect & regardless of how you met (business or otherwise) and this world would just be a much better place.
You're completely right. Too funny -- i had written a comment about how there was probably some bullshit MBA phrase for the process of "correctly valuing passionate customers", but deleted it as overly cynical and offensive to the up and coming masters-of-the-universe on HN. Can't win! :)
I think it's still worthwhile to think about systems of people in terms of their aggregate actions as well as in terms of each being an individual.
I'm all about the "Don't kiss others' booties on the off chance that it will come back to you" because if you're doing it for that reason, you're doing it wrong.
Just treat people well, take everything one step at a time, and look at it from their vantage point. These things in mind and everyone will walk away from the table happy the majority of the time.
If your customer service reps are trained, mature and willing then there's no difference between the experience with them and you.
Sometimes I wonder what it's like to pretend that you aren't affected by the mannerisms and maturity of all living human beings. To believe that there's a good rationalization to finding a short cutoff of helping people.
This article's true evil is this: He puts helping the guy with a technical problem as a favor, not as a simple kind duty.
We don't want to spend everyday as tech support, that's reasonable. But if people were better educated instead of taken care of, perhaps they wouldn't need as much.
The "duty as favor" part of your comment was very insightful. This is a recurring theme in all actions that ultimately cost the person performing them without foreseeable payback. This is, in my experience, displayed by people with shaky moral fundament and questionable values. There's always speak of how e.g. "white lists", the inclusion in which is awarded to persons or companies that act correctly, is detrimental - because they should not be handling incorrectly in the first place, and being normal should not be incentivized.
However, when you're running a business, especially during its infancy, your values need to be questionable and questioned in order for your approach to adapt to the environment. Following questionable values in this case is not only admissible but even required, and you'll need to reinvent yourself quite often. There is no "normal" when you're trying to break the mould.
The thing is though, he went well beyond 'respect', and really went out of his way to help the guy. That's very nice, but doing that for everyone, all the time simply may not be feasible.
It's a question of economics: you simply can't bend over backwards for all customers, in all lines of business, without going bust. Silly example: if I walk into a hardware store and buy a nail, and then proceed to waste an hour of the salesperson's time, that's a loss to them. Perhaps they'll make it back if I come back again and again and buy other things, but it's something that each business has to determine.
Funny, when I was a student and worked at a hardware store that was almost the exact example they gave as encouragement. You want the customer to trust you and the store and so most of the time their projects start with a box of nails. Do they need the tinpenny, concrete, roofing, anchor nails, or tacks? Most people who know what nails they need don't bother you. But the guy/girl starting on their first renovation or garden are practically begging you to take their money. Personally, when I step foot into a hardware store it's a given that I'm leaving with $100 worth of stuff.
Now a better example would be consumer electronics. It's expensive, most people don't know what they really want they read some review in engadget, and the margins on the name brand stuff is extremely low ($5-10, on Sony TVs for example).
I think this is a non sequitur. (IMO) the stuff about "people are colorblind until society teaches them otherwise" is ridiculous, so you put these kids in an environment with no yellow children? Of course they are going to see yellow children as strange- they haven't had the opportunity to interact and learn otherwise. It doesn't have to have anything to do with racist comments from their parents.
Labeling anyone of any color is racicst period. There is only one race called the Human Race!
If everyone recognized this and stopped describing one another in terms of colors, we could end fucking bullshit!
To say a child is black, is understood to mean they are of African descent. That's not a label, that's phylogeny.
As for the rest, it is a simple fact that the different regions of the world are home to communities with distinct differences in phenotype. Combine that with the (very human) tendency to be cautious around unfamiliar peoples, and there you have it.
I'm not saying it is Just, or Right, or any crap like that. I am only observing that there are simple explanations for why children might behave as described, other than "their parents must be hateful bigots".
Yes, trying to be blind of people's traits, such as skin color, is indeed not the way to get beyond racism. We need to recognize that some people are different and that is a good thing, not that we should try to ignore the differences.
I'm against this. They are trying to impose rules (threading concepts) into the C++ language where it ought not to be. Threads are platform specific (ARM, Intel) albeit with the same idea but underpinnings are different. They are arguing about thread local variables and concurrency issues in the context of the C++ language or standard libraries when really these things are dependent upon the application being written. We don't need all this garbage in the language and there are plenty of class libraries out there to deal with common hardware platforms already that do quite well. Trying to drive a design pattern from high atop ivory towers is stupid and you would think these people would have learned this by now.
Do you feel the same way about, say, garbage collection? The point of high-level languages is to eliminate the need to know about the underlying platform. Automatically dealing with the details of parallelism is not different from automatically dealing with the details of memory management.
Of course, there are some things that are going to always be application-specific (not platform specific), and you should be able to get around the abstraction to fiddle with those. And one of the strong selling points of C and C++ is that they do expose the underlying platform so you can do "bare-metal" programming and platform-specific tricks. But if you need to do that, just don't using this part of the standard library! Adding more, better abstractions does not hurt anybody who doesn't want to use them, and helps everybody who does.
> Obviously garbage collection would be even worse than the introduction of threading concepts into C++.
Unavoidable, all-the-time, no-manual-option-available garbage collection would be a terrible idea, because that goes against the point of C++ as a high-level language that still allows low-level access. Similarly, introducing fully automatic, unavoidable parallelism implemented One True Way a la Fortress into C++ would be a bad idea.
But nobody complains about the fact that C++ gives you the option to use auto pointers, or that it will call destructors on object members for you so you don't have to think about the internals when you delete a complex object. It's nice to have the option to let the language do a lot of stuff for you in a standard way so that you don't have to think about it.
I don't see how this is any different. It would be nice to have a standard implementation that makes a lot of parallelism decisions for you, so that you don't have to think about it in situations where it's not really relevant. Having that available will not prevent you from rolling your own and making your own implementation decisions appropriate to the circumstances when it is relevant. So how can that possibly be a bad thing, any more than C++'s memory management facilities are?
Garbage collection is completely different from these concurrency tools because these concurrency tools can be avoided by you while used by a library that you use, without you having to care. Garbage collection is like exceptions in that if a library expects garbage collection, you can't use it if you're not using that feature. Now you have to worry about the details of the library you use. That's why garbage collection is worse.
Also it's much more contrary to the spirit of the language. People already use threading libraries all the time, so having a standard one is not altogether absurd. The same is not the case with garbage collection.
The fact that you don't understand this, that you thought it was convincing to begin your post with "Do you feel the same way about, say, garbage collection?" makes it clear you don't have the C++ worldview to talk with Blunt about this issue.
The reason languages want threading as part of the language is for the memory model. The Boehm paper covers this in-depth. Libraries also need to be thread-aware to some degree, for example reentrant functions and thread-local storage issues.
It would have been nice if instead of presumptuously demanding the parent read a long article (assuming without evidence that he knows nothing about such issues) you had briefly explained why the existing state of affairs with respect to C++ concurrency is inadequate and why these features are actually helpful.
I don't see the problem with defining a standard API for some common problems. This doesn't pollute the language, simply makes portability better - if you need it.
I second your Superbly put. I cannot upvote this enough too. I've been doing C and C++ for over 17 years from embedded up to CRUD accounting type apps.... Spot on my friend, spot on!
I'd pledge the full $200K if they would take on C++ immediately. I am so sick and tired of IDEs that suck at delivering solid C++ coding environment. The best tool I've found for the job, to date, is Source Insight.
Maybe there's value in the fact that this was an Onion service that was targeted specifically -- are the Feds trying to send a message about Tor? Was this whole operation hinged on the PR or was there some strategic value to taking out the group (assuming your analogy to a local pharmacy holds true, which I don't necessarily believe)? Perhaps the Feds were scared because Tor was involved and wanted to strike before the defendants wised up and went totally dark with more anonymous payment schemes (anyone using PayPal obviously has no reasonable expectation of anonymity), knowing that PayPal et al only keep records so long?
The real hero of the story is the guy or organized the surprise flash mob! Most people would say that was cute and move on, but this guy stopped and took an interest in this kid and in making him feel good about himself. We need more people like that guy!
oh no it's not worth discussing. The discussion is pointless including Yegge's diatribe. Great software is written by great software engineers. (period) end of story. And there is no amount of management that can be thrown in that can make sucky programmers better at their job.
