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Actually, I do that all the time (tell people it will be easier to do this via email). Most of my calls are support, and it's generally MUCH quicker and more efficient doing it via email than over the phone.

I actually removed the phone number from our website 6 months ago and we just have email sales/support now. If someone prefers to talk on the phone (or in the rare case where it would be more efficient to do a phone call), I just call them back.

The problem is that I'm thinking we might be losing some customers who prefer to see a phone number they can call, so I'm considering putting our phone number back on the website. I just wish I could educate people to consider sending a 30 second email versus having a 30 minute phone call to sort out problems...

The other issue is that many of my good customers have done some of the things on the 'difficult customer' list. You can't easily pigeon hole customers as 'bad'. I have only had one REALLY bad customer - he tended to swear in his email (and his password was "fuckyou"), he used various aliases, and lots of people on forums said he basically scammed them. Also he was very rude and dumb. Anyways, I decided to charge him about 5x the normal rate (and he was too dumb to notice). This is the only time I've ever done this. Anyway, he paid for a year or two and then (thankfully) went out of business.

However even my best (and nicest) customers do some of the things here...sometimes they give me a big long list of questions at their first contact, or persistently call if they have what they think is an urgent problem or question. Usually as long as they're not rude I don't have a problem with it, and they're normally pretty happy if I send an email saying I'll reply after the weekend or whatever.

Actually, I only have a vague understanding of this and I'm probably what you would call an expert. I have used many of these features in JS, but like the author says it's unintuitive and "wrong" the way javascript does it. Basically OOP is a horrible hack in JS, and this is a very good article explaining various gotchas that I wasn't aware of.

More details here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/15/us-britain-starbuc...

It looks like it boils down to the fact that in the UK companies are allowed to make tax-free 'royalty' and 'interest' payments to their offshore parents, resulting in tax avoidance. Surely there is a simple solution: treat all such payments as simple transfers rather than expenses. I'm not allowed to avoid tax by siphoning half my pre-tax income into a swiss bank account, so why should large companies be allowed to do this?

I guess the 16-hour workday thing didn't work out.

Interesting, but I can't submit because I'm based in Canada.

I think it's only the small-time dealers that hate carwoo. Have a look at the comment by Scott Salzman on that forum, which fits with my own experience. I bought my car through carcostcanada.com, and my local dealer couldn't even match the no-haggle quote I got through the site (their best offer was 1k more).

The dealer I went with was a high-volume dealership in the city. Not only was their price low, but they also were very friendly and helpful. It makes sense to use sites such as this - it's a huge time saving for both the customer and the dealer.

I've written my own programming language and VM, and I mostly use php for web development because it's quick, easy and gets the job done. Your theory that php developers are lazy and stupid is just nuts. You can write bad code in any language if you want to.

I think you've perhaps gotten into the trap of assuming that if a programmer doesn't use the latest cool language (Ruby, Coffeescript, etc.) they are dumb.

I think you're right. I mostly use OSX these days, but I also test my stuff on Windows a lot. Virtualbox makes it easy.

On Mac Chrome is working fine, but on Windows it seems to be completely screwed up these days. If you open multiple youtube windows, for example, it screws up pretty much every time you switch between windows - you have to minimize the window and uniconify it for it to render properly. This is pretty basic stuff.

Oh, if you knew me you'd know that I'm not afraid of a few lines of code, and I'm not afraid of low-level stuff :)

My point is that when you compare OCI to the C API for mysql, it takes a lot less code to use the mysql C API, and it is much less error prone. And it doesn't make sense to either use a wrapper or figure out some framework when it's a one-time project that I'm charging at an hour or two of my time.

Very good book about the tech industry: "rework" by the 37 signals guys.

Other very good non-tech book I've read recently: Walk the Amazon.

After using Oracle 15 years ago, then mostly using mysql, I had to use Oracle again last year and you know what? It's crap! OCI is a ridiculous, error-prone API that takes a bunch of code to do anything at all.

I guess Apple must have changed things recently. My Apple password is a 6-letter dictionary word with a '1' at the end (the same insecure password I use for all sites I don't really give a shit about). They haven't asked me to change it yet.

I basically have 2 passwords: secure (for bank accounts) and insecure (for everything else) that I use for all sites except the root password of my server (which I have a set of random chars that I have memorized). I agree it's ridiculous forcing people to have a convoluted password, as they'll need to write it down to remember it. And if your site is properly designed, having a dictionary/short word as a password shouldn't matter. Apple seem to have gone from ridulously lax security to ridiculously over-the-top after their recent gongshow.

And before anyone flames me I do know wtf I'm talking about. I wrote brute force passwd file crackers 20 years ago, and got all the root passwords at school/university by writing packet sniffers.

I think you've pretty much nailed it, although I would disagree with the ordering. I'd put Islam and healthcare at the top (not sure which is more controversial).

That doesn't seem like a sensible solution. You're basically hurting performance on all other platforms just to work around one of Apple's bugs.

The random query value is probably the best solution. We have had this in our app for years, because it has been an issue in both java and IE for a long time.

I think you might be wrong here :)

I've no idea why Quora does that, but I'm pretty sure it's not a standard thing. You really should only being doing one long poll at a time, so it should never be an issue.

No worries, you seem like a decent guy too. Nice site btw.

I tend to agree with most of what you are saying. I have a Galaxy Note phone now, and it's a pretty amazing device (much better than the Galaxy and earlier Samsung devices). However it still has it's annoyances, and you can't really use it properly unless you're a geek.

Yes, I'm mostly just bitching about iOS 6, it's not really too big a deal. Apple tends to shit on developers with their new releases, giving them a week to work around iOS bugs and get their apps approved. Users generally don't notice any issues because the developers like me bust their asses each time there is a new iOS release (we don't have a fucking choice, because users love their iphones/ipads :)

I agree that the ipad/iphone is a much slicker product in general than anything else out there. The Galaxy Note comes close, but is too difficult to set up and use for the average user (by default you can't even copy files to it from your mac, which is a major fuckup).

My main gripe is with OSX 10.8. Even after a couple of updates, it still completely hangs about once a week due to a bug - only solution is to hold the power button and force reset. I'm hoping the last update a few days ago will fix it, but we'll see.

As for tabbars, there are 3 bugs you need to workaround:

- can't click on some tabs on iphone 5 unless you set self.window.frame (https://devforums.apple.com/thread/166444?tstart=0)

- orientation changes screw everything up unless you set window.rootViewController to the tab bar controller.

- your app will crash if it's a landscape only app and you use a portrait-only view controller such as UIImagePickerController.

TabBarController is now highly buggy. I had to put multiple workarounds into our app to get around them (figured out mostly myself and from forums).

There's no info on Apple's dev site about how to actually support iphone 5's new resolution. You have to figure it out from the forums.

It's less useful because they have removed google maps, youtube, podcasts from itunes (you now have to download a separate app), etc.

So are there any retail stores still selling kindles?

While I don't like those 'ly' names myself either, I wouldn't necessarily say it's bad. There are still a lot of startups with 'ly' names appearing and getting funded. We (people on HN) aren't typical users, and sometimes we're not the best people to advise on how to build a site that will get millions of users (I mean, how many people here would have thought instagram would be worth a billion dollars, or even USE instagram :)

Seeing all these dubious me-too startups appearing on techcrunch every day, this doesn't exactly surprise me.

Yes, I tend to agree. Both Mountain Lion and OS 6 are pretty buggy and overall less useful than their predecessors.

Haha. dailymail - say no more. Basically it is crap science with a shock value, which is the only science that dailymail understands (remember MMR?)

Yes, me too. I've used google adwords quite a few times, and I always end up spending more than I make back from it. The problem is that it just costs too much to grab each new customer that it usually isn't worthwhile. Facebook is the only one that is actually useful, but it only works for certain types of campaigns.

I think you really need some traction from the very beginning, otherwise it is unlikely to be successful.

I used carcostcanada.com to buy my Ford Edge 5 years ago - it works in the way you describe. Our local dealer wouldn't even match the lowest quote I got from the site. Even with a bunch of haggling, his best price was $1k more than the no-haggle price I got from the internet!

The point is: these sites already exist, and you really should use them to buy your next car. Haggling is so inefficient.

Oops, I meant moodgym. www.moodgym.anu.edu.au.