If HN has trouble with it though, Google is not going to do much better. They are not known for having a masterful grasp of subtleties. Examples? Look at the abysmal quality of their translations, their repetitive and off target ad personalization, their weak and spotty voicemail transcriptions that miss even the name of the caller when it’s in the address book with the number, their dead or dying OSS hosting, their (lack of) care for their own products, their clunky bloat-feel mobile apps, their spam filters that even send Google Alerts to the spam box, their no fucks given customer service, their takedowns... Even their search results which have not seen any innovation for the last decade as far as I can tell. (I mean you can’t filter out or coalesce useless bad copies of stack overflow posts from site scraping copycat sites that appear alongside the original SO search hit? Really? That’s too hard for you, Google?) I don’t think they are any more capable of parsing WHO statements then a crowd of HN posters. Probably worse.
Not a huge Google fan, I've gotten downvoted more times than you can count for criticizing them, but the thread we're talking about isn't genuine criticism, it's a twisting of something easily explainable into something it isn't, which detracts from the conversation.
I agree, if techies at the heart of this can't discusses this rationally, then those that don't do this for a living are going to struggle to, which is why there should be a higher standard for discussion.
