skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you think this article was scummy? Probably not, it provided some real value and insight. And guess what, it was a piece of content marketing for his new book. I was pleasantly surprised at the end with his CTA (call-to-action).

Marketing is just finding a way to communicate your value proposition to your target market. Yes, there are plenty of scummy ways out there -- but some awesome real-world examples come from our favorite tech startups like 37signals (e.g. their books) and Atlassian (e.g. their git tutorials).

That's the great thing about the inbound/content marketing movement these days -- you are typically not paying people to read it, so you first and have to step back and think, "what can I write about that would grab the genuine interest of people I want to reach?"

Just some thoughts from a product marketing manager at a startup in NYC.
It's true, standing desks are so last year. But why take baby steps with the squat desk?

Keep your eyes open for my kickstarter yoga desk.
I think it was an accident of history in Europe. Something to do with the architecture of castles and ships perhaps.

It is a shame that much of Asia is losing the squat toilet over time. I've found it to be very helpful on occasion. It dramatically reduces apparent constipation.
This is an embarrassingly facile response.

Many religious and cultural minorities avoid alcohol-based gatherings, because their background forbids or strongly disapproves of such behaviour. Most recovering alcoholics avoid environments where drinking is taking place. As other commenters have said, a lot of women aren't comfortable being alone in a room full of drunk guys; Thanks to the tech industry's problems with gender, they probably already have plenty of good reasons to feel uncomfortable at a tech conference. If your conference is boozy, then a whole bunch of people are going to stay at home for that reason.

Do you not see a problem with booth babes at expos, or game companies who in the past have organised launch events at strip clubs? Would you argue that people who feel uncomfortable with the idea of scantily-clad women being used as props should simply avert their gaze? What if we replaced alcohol with a different drug? Would you be fine holding a tech event in a cannabis cafe or a crackhouse?

If you want to throw an after-party at your conference, fine. Most conferences inevitably have plenty of late-night drinking at the hotel bar and I'm not going to argue with that. But if you allow that drinking culture to encroach on the event itself then you're marginalising a large group of people, you're invoking all the dreadful fratboy stereotypes that the tech industry so desperately needs to shake off.
Migen: Program FPGA's in Python
London here, had catered beers and pizza/food on some events (evening meetups, call it). No 'binge drinking' though - maybe a beer or two per person.
A great talk on the topic is this one. The basic argument is that global singletons (and global state generally) is detrimental to maintainability, flexibility, and testability. The talk discusses several strategies for moving away from global-state to a dependency-injected and testable codebase.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKXt9fBDVoY

Slides:
http://www.gostevehoward.com/presentations/20131212-moving-t...
Arguably not a polite way to sit in an Indian office considering this:

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-an-Indian-Bathroom
Build a zen command-line env with tmux, zsh, Mosh, Docker
Spot on bro !
I should clarify. By "mediocre implementation" I didn't mean "the code sucks" I was talking more about "can my grandma use this?". Going from zero to "working cryptocurrency" is a massive leap even if only the relatively geeky can understand and use it.

It does open the door wide for someone to build a "bitcoin for grandma" but that will probably involve a somewhat different skillset to that of Satoshi.
Whereupon you can put tracing in to find out when the state was screwed up.

Singletons aren't bad, they're just misused a lot by bad programmers. It's like saying "Food is bad," and sure, people misuse food and hurt themselves, but that doesn't mean we should ban food.
A book. Preferably one that her parents will enjoy reading over and over again. I like "Anno's magic seeds"

(I have daughters and want them to understand programming, but 1 is really young)

Edit: not clear from the book's title, but "Anno's magic seeds" is a charming story about exponential growth.
User Onboarding: How Major Services Do It
You could try ontrees.com or moneycenter.yodlee.com
Sounds like you are creating a false dichotomy between maintenance and greenfield short-cycle product development. What about the embedded developer at Ford or Boeing for whom product development means taking the code from the previous product and adding/removing features? Where product life cycles are measured in years instead of months? How about the developer writing machine learning code for Bloomberg or Wal-Mart, whose code will never see the light of day and whose "product" is never really finished?

I could go on, but this demonstrates there are many good professional developers who do not fit the SV bubble's concept of a good developer.
I'm not hugely familiar with mobile, but I don't quite understand why Apple/Google can't just immediately kill Snapchat by rolling out an expiring photo message feature in their next update. As far as I can tell, there is nothing keeping users specifically on Snapchat since it pulls from your phone's contacts, and since the content expires it's not like you have a mountain of pictures stored in the application that you don't want to lose, like in Instagram.
The Creators Project Remembers The Father of Video Art
Spoiler alert: he means, to Snapchat's hypothetical profitability.
2 second ads on Snapchat would be a lot less annoying than the 30 second ads you get before short news videos on most news sites nowadays..
As a guy that values earnestness and frankness (perhaps to a fault), I generally agree with you about marketing. However, marketing is simply coordinated public communication.

That is to say that marketing happens naturally when someone places a classified ad or discusses their project with friends and strangers casually.

Taking out a series of ads saying a new product launched and describing its features is surely ethical. Taking out ads lying about the qualities of your product (or omitting important side effects) is unethical. Quietly hiring journalists to write "stories" on you product and its features is likewise dishonest.

so I'd say ethical marketing is honest and forthright. Being considerate about intrusions doesn't hurt either, though being annoying isn't always the same as being unethical.

Then again, I'm not a marketing guy, so maybe I'm missing something.
How about while reading? Or thinking? It's not like "using a computer" is a monolithic activity. Electric desk frames allow you to change position throughout the day. The latest one I got (3 segment legs from geek desk) can go so low I can sit lotus in front of it.
normloman: Spot on ~!

I was extra-careful and zoomed the page to make sure I was clicking the upvote arrow on your comment.
They are, if the column being indexed is an attribute of the entity represented that itself is 0-based.

Otherwise they generally aren't, because of what a database is.
True, but that doesn't make "something" the correct answer.
Is it a programming/math class? Tell them verbally it's their ID * 2, or something easy like that. You will not be breaking the rules and they can still see their grade. Ex: R589390 => R1178780
I can't seem to balance as I squat with feet flat on the ground. This is hard. My kids (esp. baby) can do it just fine though. And I won't be outdone by a bunch of tiny humans!
Fluid Radio
Well, the setup is pretty normal. I'm in a "normal" cubicle, using a standard keyboard, and a couple of 21" monitors that have been raised a few inches. When I squat, my arms are raised higher than there are when I am seated, but they are still at an angle that is reasonable to maintain for 15-20 minutes at a time. The monitor height is actually better when I'm squatting.

I will note that in 15 years in the industry, I've not had any major ergonomic issues (some of that I attribute to rock climbing), so I'm certainly not suggesting this particular setup for everyone.
What's not anti-social about that picture?
That's because 1=1

If I'm not mistaken.
We should utilize the self-similarity much more often.
you are probably doing the western squat. If you watch the video in the blog, asian squat is considerable more comfortable and do not cause knee pains.
$50/month for a side project that I want to grow and nurture isn't a lot by any stretch, even on a gTA stipend. Given that you could subsidize it through your program, it becomes even cheaper
What Apple/Google app? iMessage? Plenty of people on Snapchat don't have each other's numbers. One of the biggest issues would be that Apple never opened up iMessage (and Google hasn't opened up Hangouts) so there would be no cross platform snaps.
Mostly because you don't squat properly and/or aren't used to squatting...

In China, until recently, all toilets were basically squatting toilets, yet octogenarians had no issue squatting to use them... how old are you that you can't do for 5 minutes what an 80 year old can do several times a day?
For me, the key is not keeping in one position for the whole day. That's why I chose to go with an arrangement that allows me to either sit or stand. I find myself using the standing option for about 4 hours a day. I'll use it less (sometimes not at all) if I happen to be more active during working hours. You can see details of my build here:

http://planiverse.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/building-a-sit-st...

I think adding squatting to my set of postures should just be a matter of getting a rigid chair and squatting on that.

Finally, if you do sit, I recommend getting a seat pad designed for wheelchairs. People who can't walk must do a LOT of sitting, so wheelchair seats must be comfortable.
Fascinating! (coming back to this late). What would the consider an electric heat pump, or what would they call it?
Something like a simple wooden train set (http://www.amazon.com/Melissa-Doug-Wooden-Farm-Train/dp/B004...) or a balls-and-chutes toy (http://www.fatbraintoys.com/toy_companies/edushape/rollipop_...). All you'd be looking for at that age is things that help develop their spatial reasoning.

Alternatively, find out what the kid's currently into and just get her that. 1 is a great age for being happy.
I don't disagree with the OP's overall point...my favorite developers are "not normal" at least in the sense that, yes, they have an opinionated drive for perfection that I admire, particularly because it benefits so many of us who rely on their work.

What I do object to is this zero-sum attitude, that it's either "do cool technical stuff" or "MAKE MONEY", and wanting the latter implies a direct reduction of the former. To one extent, that's true...because our time is finite. But on the other hand "MAKE MONEY" gets in the way of technological innovations that could leap frog the market?

Why not think of technical innovation/investment as a loss leader? In the same way that it'd be questionable for a gas station to say, "fuck selling gas, let's just focus on selling coffee! (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/23904590/), realize that tech innovation can be the underlying reason for profit, even if it doesn't have a direct contribution on the balance sheet
The same is true for iMessage. You can contact someone via Apple ID e-mail address rather than their phone number.
Do they have less back problems or just less reporting of back problems?

Culture is a complex thing, so is health. The intersection of them I wouldn't trust in the hands of laymen or self-proclaimed experts.
But what we've seen many times is that many programmers do not have an undergrad CS degree. More, many programmers claim that formal education is a complete waste of time, and that they can quite happily program capably and competently without having gone to college or university.

Some of them will have been autodidacts who have taught themselves this sort of thing already. Some will be autodidacts who have enough foundations to be ready to understand this.

But some will not. Some will have picked things up here and there and become useful programmers, but find this sort of thing hard going and mind-blowing. The question was to wonder what proportion of HN readers fall in each category.
Yeah, apparently according to him it's not enough to have a github account with quality software, it also has to be used by hundreds of developers.
Just bake it into the camera application. Select recipient from your contacts, select the time limit, and go.
Actually, from what I heard, squatting is better for the bowels.
Well, if you really want to turn her away from computers, why not try teaching her to program when she's 1 year old?
Far side of the Moon
coding win.

Edit: I actually disagree with this method (although it's hilariously awesome), because having an item is not the same as having zero items. It might be the zero-th item, but it is not zero items.
yeah it's a question of whether the university would still consider posting these altered IDs as private information... after all each student can still decrypt all IDs by dividing them by 2 (since the same encryption rule applies to all students).

I'm thinking the only way to do this is to have a student-specific password, either symmetric or public/private key pair
>"For me the rule of thumb is if there's some class requiring lots of work to test, I've been lazy."

Unit tests are great, but when they get in the way I always look it as a chicken and egg paradox. Is my simple and easy to maintain code inferior because it is not test friendly? Or is the test friendly alternative inferior because is more complex and harder to maintain?

And this haven't happened to me just with singletons, sometimes unit tests just like to get in your way.
Agreed. A lot of the interactions shown matches previous Push Pop work (some almost exactly -- page to image to full screen). But I do find it odd that it'll take them close to four years (from acquisition) to get this to market.
Why are you trying to influence a child who isn't even yours...thats the job of the parents...
If I understand correctly, you suggest that a parasite would sacrifice "long term survival" or "offspring adulthood probability" to achieve increased reproductive success!?

Hmm, the host could for example go on a "raping spree" but it unsure how this would lead to _significantly_ increased reproduction (I suppose this is an energetically costly enterprise) and why the raping spree wouldn't be already an "integrated" behavior if it were so successful.
Something that would quickly come to mind is something like dim-sum or high-tea adapted to evenings and crowds of varying size.

Probably just changing the focal point from the bar to the buffet and encouraging seating instead of standing would create a completely different atmosphere.

Another variable you could consider playing with is moving from self-service to being served; where the waiters are instructed to dial down the frequency when guests get too far along.

Ironically enough unlimited drinks is something that could work fairly well in this context, as long as the implication that excessive boozing is discouraged and will not be enabled by the waiting staff.
Scala has objects and case objects.
Maybe I'm just too cynical a person but I thought his CTA was awkward and couldn't help thinking about how giving his readers 'homework' was a great marketing technique to automatically place him in a mentor position in the minds of his readers, helping his readers justify buying his book.

But I get your point. This wasn't a scummy piece of marketing and I found it through a very neutral channel.
Except it's nothing like saying "food is bad". If you don't ever eat food, you die. If you don't ever use singletons, some of your code has an additional parameter uglily threaded through it.
Nice and simple, i hope they'll work on the design. Right now it looks a bit on a rough side. Also, sidebar chapters block works funny in Firefox.
Yes, changing positions is really the key. That's why I have an Ergotron sit/stand mount for my monitor, and I use it in both modes. I also tend to pace a lot when I don't need to be looking at the monitor. (One of the nice things about working at home is that nobody complains about that.) I'm sure squatting is fine and even good exercise once in a while, but this article is presenting it as a primary position for extended periods and that's just crazy.
Does treating fever spread influenza?
Python Idioms [pdf]
I'm not actually sure how valuable that is. What am I supposed to do with a list of supposedly influential names and cell phone numbers? Match them to addresses and send them direct mail? Sounds like a lot of work.
> building things that people enjoy

Knowing what people will enjoy is part of marketing. "Marketing" is commonly thought of as "advertising", but the full meaning includes choosing what to build - what do people need? What will help them?

Now, a favoured open source technique for doing this is to scratch your own itch... the thinking is that if it annoys you, it probably annoys lots of other people. A kind of marketing that requires a lot of faith! But is sometimes very effective.

We can go a step further, and ask now that we have solved this problem, it's not doing much good if the people who need it don't have it! How will they find out about it? This is getting pretty close to advertising... but the least-scummy way to do it is rely on word-of-mouth. This is actually how people find out about stuff in general. You can assist this process by just articulating just what it is you have, and what problem it solves, in a pithy, easy-to-remember, easy-to-pass-on phrase. You might have a little story (or joke) that helps carry it along. But the non-scummy part about this is that people problem won't pass it on if they don't think it's any good. They aren't getting paid to shill.

One interesting advertising approach is Dropbox's referral program (where you get extra storage by introducing someone to a free Dropbox account). It's hard to see this as scummy, but it's extremely effective "advertising". Even having a free version in the first place is an aspect of marketing.

Finally, consider the problems of a charity, whose only goal is to help people. What help is needed? How to get it to the people who need it? That is "marketing". And pg argues for it as a model for a startup: http://paulgraham.com/good.html
Remember how dumb people used to look walking around with bluetooth headsets? Especially weird when they were holding a conversations and looked like they were talking to themselves? Has the taboo really faded with that?
Not necessarily. My son has had a set of duplos since his first birthday. He has an easier time taking them apart than putting them together; putting them together requires more dexterity.
> xxx->getInstance()->yyy->getInstance()

That is weird... wouldn't you just do yyy::getInstance() directly? The whole point of singletons is being global right?
Asana introduces Calendars
Perhaps their budget (both in terms of time and money) doesn't allow for it...? Don't default to the web developer incapable or disregarding scalability.
mainly I use plain text editors like sublime text, emacs, etc

if I happen to use something with a spell checker I usually don't even notice it, and if I do I turn it off

now it's not that I never make typos, or I never make spelling mistakes. These happen all the time. The point is that I correct them when I read, and re-read, edit, and re-edit whatever I am working on (even a "simple" email)... using the spellchecker between my ears

It has the desirable side effect that I also am 'forced' to re-read what I've written, and inevitably, I change something, I hope to make it better

I think a lot of people have a workflow that goes something like this:

- hammer out some text
- correct errors in real time based on spell checker flags
- at the end, scan the document for spell checker colors; if none, then I am done!

I am a huge proponent of reading and re-reading whatever I am writing at least 5 times, and editing/changing as I go. I spot typos and spelling mistakes via this process.
Surprisingly, just heard a song that I loved on it, http://open.spotify.com/track/6cZ1tXMm5BaYQzddgcY7W9
It's fun to see a rule bypass or two, but almost of those were hacks and not technically very impressive.

Kudos to the Whitespace one though, pretty cool.
Apparently its almost unheard of in some cultures to have any sort of back problems, even after decades of physical labor etc. The premise of the book is that the reason for this is that these people are using their spines and posture in a more natural fashion, which leverages the structure of the spine better, but we don't do it in the West as the result of a kind of cultural revolt against victorian era posture norms that took place in the 1920's
Eastern Europeans have been always doing it already http://slavsquat.com/
Cellular data is often metered and frequently unreliable, making it a bad fit for always-on connectivity. The original ChromeOS plan was a variety of form factors:

http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/user-experience/form-fac...

Which is why Android (or rather Google Play and its attendant apps) were kept off tablets for the longest time -- Google wanted ChromeOS to be its tablet OS. Android tablets were a reaction to the iPad's success and players like Amazon and B&N making successful inroads into the tablet markets using their own spins on Android. Google seems to rather consistently give off the impression that Android is viewed as a strategic detour away from their long-term ChromeOS plans, though, not as their future.
The point is that human nature rarely changes. But people always want something to blame.
I had thought most of the squatting talk on this was about more weightlifting type squatting and not just being able to rest in a squatting position.

Unless a deep squat = squatting restfully. Which is hard to argue that it's not due to lack of flexibility.
If you own the product to-be-built and it is your startup, then you need to think like a businessman and that includes listening to customers.

But if you work as a salaried employee or contractor - lets face it - you really in a position to care more about your personal income and care less about customers who will be buying the product you don't directly benefit from.
You better realize that you can and will be let go on a minute's notice and no one is going to drop a tear that you're no longer there.

And hence your survival depends on convincing the management to build the product using technologies that you can benefit from by knowing them, just in case you decided to quit or will be let go.

Even though above may sounds selfish - this does not mean your personal interests are not aligned with the company you're working for.

Quite often the opposite - and quite often it's win win for everyone.
The importance of time (not samples) when A/B testing
What about using a harness to support yourself upright, but without the stress on your legs. Or, one of Honda's Exoskeleton devices http://www.gizmag.com/honda-leasing-walking-assist-device-ex....
> There's nothing special about snapchat that a company like Facebook can't create in a couple months.

Technically, yes, it's easy. The hard part is getting people to use your app, even when you're FB. They tried, and failed. [1]

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/facebook-poke/id588594730?mt...
"Push her into a career"?? Who said anything about that?

I'm just trying to counter the natural tendency the world will have to push her away from that career through millions of little cues like toy selection, teacher and peer attitudes, etc.
> I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing.

What do you do to get paid?
Is the future of blogging social?