Crossing into personal attack is not cool on HN and we ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of this site to heart when posting here? We'd be grateful.

This is needlessly aggressive and a bit ridiculous - unless you've worked on Google Docs specifically (and I'll assume you haven't, since most people would disclose in this case if they had), you have no way of knowing the unique challenges for both engineering and scale they'd have dealt with.

I'd bet good money it's nowhere near as simple as "serving a text file".

> You're literally serving a text file with a browser based editor, this doesn't need tremendous amounts of caching.

Serving anything dynamic at thousands of QPS requires a lot of caching.

> Serving anything dynamic at thousands of QPS requires a lot of caching.

QPS = queries per second?

The point is that Docs is a tool for collaboration on writing, sheets for collaboration on spreadsheets, etc. Unless you get a contract with Google to use it as such, these services aren't meant for hotlinking or adding dynamic content to your website or article.

Though they have actually gotten pretty good for these uses now. I imagine they have something that adds a cached layer - I sometimes get a due to high volume reduced functionality message for the open shared popular items (rather than just an access denied).