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Comment by TheCapn | Hacker News Reader

>These guys are extraordinarily [...] professional.

I think part of OP's complaint is they are not coming across as professional. It is entirely reasonable to take those stances but their tact is way off and definitely portrays their company in an unprofessional manner.

They might be good at what they do, I wouldn't know personally, but they come off as edgy/abrasive/unprofessional and those two quotes alone would have me second guessing if I wanted to work with people who communicate in that manner.

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The only difference between them and others is that they're plain in their language rather than obfuscating it behind lawyer speak. All providers have similar provisions hidden in their TOS, it's just buried behind layers of legalese and addendums. Personally although it might not look "professional" I wish more companies would use plain language that states what they actually mean plainly without forcing you to higher a lawyer to go through the TOS with a fine tooth comb.

There's plenty of room for technical writing between the colloquialism-riddled, informal mess that that is and legalese.

If you use that sort of rude plain language, and make a mistake, good luck.

People have such a strange idea of "professionalism". It's about your principles and what you do, not the semantics and aesthetics.

"What you do?" You mean like breaking a customer's domain name for the next year if EasyDNS thinks they brought a DoS attack "on their heels?"

I take professionalism to mean you know your craft. Like for example setting the TTL on a DNS server to a year won't cause downstream services to cache the record for a year but instead something on the order of a few hours to a few days in practice.

To quote RFC 2181: "Implementations are always free to place an upper bound on any TTL received, and treat any larger values as if they were that upper bound. The TTL specifies a maximum time to live, not a mandatory time to live."

Professionalism, at least to me, implies both competence and tact. Its nice knowing that they're capable of offering services but its also nice knowing that if/when things go wrong whether by my own mistake or not, I will be treated respectfully. What those quotes of their ToS tell me is that they're willing to belittle clients on their perceived take on events.

The short explanation is that if shit goes wrong I don't want to deal with people who figure communication among clients should be handled that way.

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