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Comment by switz | Hacker News Reader

I downvoted you because your first comment was "Hellosign is a joke." solely due to the aforementioned bug. Then you edited your comment.

You ran into a bug in some web software. It happens. Sounds like it was already fixed.

Meanwhile, the above blog post is a pretty amazing technical breakdown that is extremely detailed and well constructed. To reduce the entire company down to "a joke" because you ran into a bug once is just rude and dismissive. You might even agree because you changed your comment, although you still found a way to insult the blog post and the author.

And no, I don't work for Hellosign. I'm just a software engineer with some empathy for the hard work that has clearly gone into this. This is great knowledge sharing. Time and place.

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Their job is not to make a best effort.

Their job is to provide an authoritative and trustworthy record.

This is quite serious if these documents are to be used in litigation. Generally I'm happy with best effort, but in the case of this situation where a reliable record is required, they've dropped the ball.

If you expect 100% bug free software, expect to pay literally hundreds of millions of dollars for it. It does exist but for some reason people prefer the mostly good stuff that costs $10.

What more effort can one give but best?

Maybe "best effort" is a misnomer, but it's often used to signify a general attempt without guarantee, rather than the absolute best effort possible. Like a delivery service making a "best effort" to complete delivery in 2 days, but there are no guarantees compared to the more expensive overnight service, or UDP vs TCP as far as packet guarantees.

In this case it seems they make a "best effort"(not guarantee) to offer uniform document display across browsers and OSes, which suggests they may only test the most popular browsers and OSes, and edge cases like Firefox on macOS may not get much love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best-effort_delivery

Just be perfect everytime.

>> To reduce the entire company down to "a joke" because you ran into a bug once is just rude and dismissive.

It depends on the software and its purpose. Signatures are very serious business. They carry with them enormous legal weight and not getting them 100% right can have massive repercussions. Therefore, it’s all about trust. So then the question becomes, if trivial bugs like this were not caught during QA, what else must have slipped through?

> You might even agree because you changed your comment

Yes. I changed it like 5 seconds after posting. Even tried to create a new document to show how it failed, but it was on a different computer and I couldn't reproduce it here. It's probably a browser/OS combination.

> And no, I don't work for Hellosign.

Well, alright then. But you aren't the only one. The score on it has had many ups and downs today.

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