Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims • Hacker News Board

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#61

Post by OGinparadise » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 6:25 AM UTC

incongruity wrote: post #33

kyrra wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing that there is a website/lawfirm[1] threatening legal action, I can bet Heroku/Salesforce lawyers jumped on that ASAP and let all their employees that are allowed to talk publicly not to comment on the issue anymore. The US legal system is setup that if a company admits fault in something like this, it makes defending yourself much more difficult. Meaning if a lawsuit is brought about, it's not about proving in…

In the grand scheme of things, this is why it's always better to defect in the simplified idea game of the prisoner's dilemma. Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S. Given that each possible liability is its own case and stands on its own merits, it pretty much matche…

Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S.

Might, in part, have to do with how lawyers get compensated. A short case or a quick settlement will result in very little compensation for them. Over the course of years and decades that matters so we see everything analyzed to death. At $500+ an hour. Per lawyer.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#62

Post by jrockway » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 6:55 AM UTC

mikeryan wrote: post #54

jrockway wrote: post #51

TLDR: RapGenius (YCS11), in a painful attempt to remain relevant, decides to sue their web host for running their slow code slowly.

If you're going to tldr; an article you should really read it. Rap genius isn't suing. No one, in fact, is actually yet suing.

The first line in the article "Rap Genius founder Tom Lehman says Heroku misled him and cost his company money."

I have to imagine they're involved based on the number of articles I've read about them over the last week. Their own article, tech blogs interviewing them about the article, and now the founder's picture at the top of this article.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#63

Post by manmal » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 7:02 AM UTC

w-ll wrote: post #29

bridgeyman wrote: post #15

In MIT's Mathematics for Computer Scientists course (6.042), I remember learning from Tom Leighton that in certain cases randomly distributing jobs actually IS the optimal solution to load balancing. This technique was somehow associated with Akamai, Professor Leighton's company. Maybe I am misremembering...

I dont know, but I would assume it has to deal with the fact you can't predict how long a job will take to complete, and a random selection would have more resources-more free-more often, verses FIFO where a group of really large tasks could halt everything.

And what if they turned the whole thing into a request queue and workers get the "messages" as they become available? To ensure there are no timeouts, they could define a max time a request may stay in the queue, and then take it out and handle it with emergency workers or kill it?

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#64

Post by res0nat0r » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 7:34 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #48

vertis wrote: post #41

It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Heroku is not perfect, but they give a whole lot more value than they charge for. As unlikely as it is, I hope that Heroku terminates the account of anyone that joins the class action against them.

>It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Really? Because it really disgusts me when a company: * Misrepresents their product (saying it's A when it's actually B) * Privately acknowledges this misrepresentation under the radar * Makes large and ridiculous amounts of bank on this misrepresentation (since you have to throw more dynos at the app to mitigate the lag caused by the misro…

By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engineers.

This lawsuit will go nowhere and it is sad that such a supposedly tech savvy crowd wants to bring out the pitchforks so fast. But I guess since Heroku has a lot of cash they are now the enemy since they've made it and they should be taken down.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#65

Post by swensel » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:09 AM UTC

tomlemon wrote: post #16

eli wrote: post #4

IANAL, but my understanding is that threatening a class action lawsuit is easy, but actually bringing an action to court is extremely difficult. And (at least to me) this seems like an awfully weak case -- I don't see any obvious or intentional fraud. The whole thing seems strange to me. I don't really understand what Rap Genius hopes to gain here. If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regard…

> If Heroku wasn't providing enough performance for their money (regardless of technical cause), then why did they stick around so long? We didn't know how bad the performance was because Heroku's tools (logs and New Relic) reported incorrect performance data (i.e., they said requests weren't queuing when they were actually spending a ton of time queuing) EDIT: > Would Rap Genius still have sued if the documentation…

I don't think the issues with New Relic was necessarily Heroku's problem. Sure, Heroku did have some outdated info on their website and their logs may not be fully accurate, but I personally don't think that they should provide refunds for that. Solving the problems that have been raised would be a better service to their customers. Providing refunds probably doesn't help Heroku create a better service which is what I think will matter long term.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#66

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:26 AM UTC

chc wrote: post #8

citricsquid wrote: post #3

If the decisions made by Heroku to misrepresent the product were made prior to the Salesforce acquisition (December 2010) do the founders of Heroku have any liability? Would this sort of thing be a consideration with an acquisition?

I don't believe any decision was made to misrepresent the product. The product just evolved and the product documentation didn't. The end result is the same — the product was advertised with inaccurate claims — but this appears to be more a case of neglect than a deliberate misrepresentation.

It's not a criminal matter. Mens rea -- "guilty conscience", the intention to act unlawfully -- is a component of crime. But it's not necessary for lots of civil legal matters.

For example, if we both enter into a contract, you can hold me to my end. If I fail to hold up my end without intending to fail, then you can still insist that I make right or seek remedies for my failure.

(IANAL, TINLA).

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#67

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:27 AM UTC

piggity wrote: post #56

Only lawyers think it's a good idea to deploy lawyers into the routing mesh.

But you can bet money will be intelligently routed to their pockets

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#68

Post by raverbashing » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:33 AM UTC

I think the money for this class action lawsuit would be better used if it would go for a sysadmin/devops person to actually deploy the systems involved.

"Bait and switch"? If a couple of Dynos is not enough for your load, you should be moving to self-managed hosts

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#69

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:35 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #64

Karunamon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It really disgusts me how quick people are to bite the hand that feeds them. Really? Because it really disgusts me when a company: * Misrepresents their product (saying it's A when it's actually B) * Privately acknowledges this misrepresentation under the radar * Makes large and ridiculous amounts of bank on this misrepresentation (since you have to throw more dynos at the app to mitigate the lag caused by the misro…

By misrepresents you mean that the end users didn't exactly understand how underlying architecture worked, didn't like the performance, but kept using the service anyway. If every customer I dealt with while working on the EC2 platform could sue because they didn't understand how every technical detail of AWS worked and they couldn't optimize for it...well there would be more lawyers employed by Jeff Bezos than engin…

The problem is that Heroku made claims about their architecture and subsequent performance characteristics that were flatly untrue.

The further problem it looks as if they knew the claims were untrue.

These are not matters of internal consideration. They cut directly to the heart of the Heroku marketing material: "Write for our platform, our expensive secret sauce will make your stuff linearly scalable."

In which case people expect that it will be linearly scalable. Not exponentially anti-scalable.

Re: Coding Cloud Heroku May Face Lawsuit Over Bait-and-Switch Claims

#70

Post by jacques_chester » Sat, Mar 09, 2013, 8:37 AM UTC

OGinparadise wrote: post #61

incongruity wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the grand scheme of things, this is why it's always better to defect in the simplified idea game of the prisoner's dilemma. Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S. Given that each possible liability is its own case and stands on its own merits, it pretty much matche…

Collaboration is rarely rewarded once lawyers get anywhere near an issue and opting to collaborate (i.e.: admit fault and try to fix it) more or less wins you no points in court, in the U.S. Might, in part, have to do with how lawyers get compensated. A short case or a quick settlement will result in very little compensation for them. Over the course of years and decades that matters so we see everything analyzed to…

The careful decomposition of problem domain into solution domain followed by recursive search of the solution domain is the lawyer's job. If they don't analyse to death, they are breaching their fiduciary duty.

Don't like the legal method? Don't hire a lawyer. Try doing it yourself. See how far you get when the other guy's lawyers have done the exhaustive analysis and found the deciding element buried in a logical node on a distant subgraph you didn't even know was there to be explored.