Is Your Dad Unemployed? So is Mine - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140612142358-20747703-is-your-dad-unemployed-so-is-mine <comment><USER3> My father has been a salesman his whole career. A few years ago he was fired from a job where he grew the market for a particular product from $8 million to $25 million. They decided they didn't need him anymore. I figured that given what he did at the company, the numbers would speak for themselves and he'd have no trouble getting a new job. Instead what happened was that he was unemployed for a couple years, then underemployed.

After almost two years jobless, he interviewed for a job that seemed pretty good, and took it really hard when he didn't get it. Watching one's father go through this is traumatic. (Not to mention what it was like for him.) I mean, this is a smart, hardworking guy whose work made money. And none of that made a god damn difference. Why should I expect my future to look different, at all?

I think a lot of us still haven't woken up to the way things are now - <USER2> seems like you just never know what is going to happen, tomorrow your goose may be cooked. And the reason why doesn't have to make sense, at all. It's hard to have hope for the future this way. One day, I'll be considered to be too old to write code. And that will be that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The "new economy" is a much less friendly one, and I am also personally terrified of my coming professional irrelevance. Savings are nice, as is the social safety net, but I've seen them both either fail or get used up. It is a perverse culture where you fear the fate of your father.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have watched my father go through this as well. 2 masters degrees under his belt, +35 years of programming experience, self employed contractor for around 15 years.

He has and will travel across the US for any assignment that made sense. He has worked for a lot of well known large organizations.

He too is unable to find work. It has been hard for me to watch my father give so much of himself for his family and now he is unable to find a source of income to pursue his own hobbies now that his kids are on their own.

I have had to talk with him about settling down and retiring, even though he was not ready. He still loves what he does and he is good at it by all accounts.

It is as if he is giving up a part of himself. I tell him he now has the time to do what he wants, to build what he wants, but to him it's not the same. He wants to be a productive member of society. The rejection is hard.

I too feel that ageism is a live and well.

I am trying to learn as much as I can from this. One thing for sure is to make sure you are prepared for anything. Save as much as you can while your young. I am trying hard to accomplish this while I can. Who knows I may even start my own business or at least grow more of what I have. Nowadays it is hard to rely on just one source of income.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am taking the same steps. I am currently working, but am also looking to stand up a security consulting firm/start-up on the side (I have my employer's permission). Multiple income streams seems to be the only way to mitigate the risk of losing a job in the future. That and building wealth (if Tom Piketty is right).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There always seems to be a lot of discussion about how young people are fairing in the economy but of greater concern in my view is how older people are fairing.

A combination of a lack of preparedness for retirement and long bouts of unemployment when you are in your 50's and 60's seems like a recipe for disaster for a lot of people.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems like home ownership is a huge factor here. Several studies have shown that home ownership correlates with higher unemployment. Owning a home greatly decreases mobility and can cause you to stick to a region far longer than is necessary. I can't help but wonder how things might have been different for the OP's father, if after the first layoff, he had chosen to sell his home and move to another market experiencing growth and extremely low rates of unemployment [0].

My father also struggled for several years after moving back to Brazil, where ageism is alive and well. He had tons of experience, even founding his own company, being its CEO and growing it to 300 people back in the 90s when that was a much harder thing to accomplish. He then ran another company as a CEO. Right now he is just beginning to do reasonably well again as a consultant, but he had to work hard to diversify where he gets work from. In his case it is his aging mother that keeps him in Brazil instead of returning to the US to a market that is more likely to employ him. He doesn't have the luxury of an option that will afford him mobility like people with a home to sell do. For those with that luxury, selling your home makes sense. Wishful thinking that long bouts of unemployment can't happen to you is a naïve and dangerous.

[0] [http://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm](http://www.bls.gov/web/metro/laummtrk.htm)

<comment><USER7> More specifically, I would expect that to be home ownership in an illiquid market. In the OP's example, Michigan, while it didn't suffer a housing driven downturn like Nevada, was nonetheless hard hit in that sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very tough. I've seen my dad struggle through the same. He's been without a stable job since 2010. He'd sent out dozens of resumes daily for the last 4 years. He recently got a contract, and hopes this will turn into a full employment one day. What seemed to change his luck was that he stopped claiming 25+ years of direct relevant experience on his resume, and changed that to 6+ years. He got an offer within a week of doing that. That, and an improving economy seemed to have helped.

</comment><comment><USER9> My father is 80 this year and still works 4-5 days a week. He was a commercial banker until he got a golden handshake at around 60. He retired for about 5 years but got bored and since then has been working as a book keeper / accountant for a small company.

He is probably luckly, because his friend owns the business where he works, but I am impressed nonetheless.</comment>


Jaron Lanier Interview on What Went Wrong with the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/jaron-lanier-interview-on-what-went-wrong-with-the-internet.html <comment><USER2> What he calls "Digital Maoism" is an excellent critique and worth the read. The _loss of voice_ is a substantial problem; the single voice being arbitrated by a for-profit cadre is worse.

I've followed his online works off and on for a while - he had some interesting ideas about coding and adaptive computations about 10+ years ago that I'd like to see followed up on. He seems to specialize in sort of being a public critic now (above interview seems to rehash his usual points well) & advocate for paid everything & DRM.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> While the interview articulates several problems in need of solutions, it's not clear that Netflix-DRM-style TV business models are the answer.

<comment><USER3> It helps to know that Lanier is a part-time musician. He's from the era when musicians were a Big Deal. It bugs him that now they're just content generators for Spotify, SFX, and Ticketmaster.

<comment><USER4> He's managed to keep a high profile for a loooong time. I remember reading an article about him in 1983, about a game he made for the Commodore 64. The article spent more time talking about Lanier than talking about the game. This seemed a bit odd, because at that time, programmers frequently weren't even credited for their work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While reading this article, I imagined an Eternal September writ large across the whole industry. Maybe in the beginning it was a few idealistic visionaries, who attracted other idealists who could get behind the vision. Then it succeeded wildly, and attracted _everyone_ and thus became merely human. A mix of the worst and the best, and probably in proportion closer to 80/20 than 50/50\. The vision became a game, one that need only be stable, but not optimal or humanist in its value system.

<comment><USER6> I would argue that it's even worse than that. The Eternal September scenario would at least let us off the hook, morally speaking -- it's not that the thing we built is bad, it's that _people_ are bad, and so as people piled on to the thing we built it eventually became just as bad as they are. Which would be depressing, but at least not blameworthy.

But while people have their faults, I think it's closer to the truth here to say that we built something that took those bad people and made them worse. Chasing engagement and clicks, we built systems that rewarded bad behavior, with the inevitable result that the people who found the most success in our systems were the ones who behaved the worst. And since everybody wants to be successful in whatever environment they find themselves in, that drove people to be _worse than they otherwise would have been_ as they chased after the same success for themselves.

<comment><USER7> I think the 2016 election was another Eternal September. Everything feels much more hostile and obnoxious since about the time of the last US presidential conventions.

I'm not sure what to call this phenomenon. Eternal 2016? Eternal November?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you prefer your Jaron Lanier in audio form, this was a very similar interview he did for Ezra Klein's podcast: [https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier- intervie...](https://www.vox.com/2018/1/16/16897738/jaron-lanier-interview)

</comment><comment><USER9> Probably should have been titled " _What Went Wrong with the Web_ ". Aside from NAT, the network itself works as well as it ever did. The clusterfuck we send across it is another story.

<comment><USER10> Layers 8 & 9 are exhibiting troubling symptoms.

<comment><USER11> Thank you [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layer_8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The short-sighted arrogance of the headline really turns me off the article itself. Nothing "went wrong" with the internet. The internet is fine.

The culture of first world nations however, is completely fubar, has been since before all of us were born, and will probably continue to be long after we're all dead. (second and third world nations are also completely broken, but we expect that.)

It's the same kind of nonsense when people say "We've destroyed the planet!" No we haven't, we destroyed our own survivability in our own habitat, but the planet _is fine_, and will shake us all off some day without so much as a thought about it. The internet is equally indifferent and unaffected by our stupid capitalism problems.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious what you mean by "second world nations". The original Cold War definition was countries aligned with the Soviet Union. What's the second world today?

<comment><USER12> Well, third world countries are nations which are significantly behind the "First World" nations in terms of social, economic, and political development or progress. For example, much of the middle east still believes that an imaginary sky-fairy has given them the authority and permission to murder women with rocks anytime the men get upset about something, and they think simply being men gives them the right to rape women. These things basically makes them cave-men.

So "second world" countries are those which are not quite stone-age savage, but are still noticably behind.

So an example of a "Second world" nation would be the United Kingdom, which enjoys many of the modern luxuries of the first world, and much of the social freedoms and progress, and yet still suffers under a completely irrational monarchy and lacks essential freedoms such as the right to self defense. As citizens of the United Kingdom are completely forbidden from keeping arms for the sole purpose of defense of self, family, and property, they are essentially servants of the state. Such a nation cannot then be justly described as "first world", as real first world nations such as the United States have enjoyed these additional freedoms for many generations now.

If my definition is not "official" then I apologize, nobody ever really explained the meaning of the phrases to me and my understanding is simply based on 3 decades of contextual usage. The implication is that there is a single path of progress which all nations are basically following. The first world is setting the example, and the rest are following our lead.

('that we still have such a long way to go is one of the reasons it's so amazing we haven't nuked ourselves to extinction yet :)')

<comment><USER14> This breaks the site guidelines. We don't want ideological, religious, or national flamewar on HN.

Could you please read [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and not post like this again?

<comment><USER12> I apologize for that, I do try to keep my comments in line... however..

Do we not have an _obligation_ as participants in this world society to speak up about horrors? Inaction leads to more suffering. If the discussion is only happening on HN, how can we justify our inaction to ourselves in the name of adhering to some arbitrary guidelines? "First they came for the..."

I understand why the guidelines exist. I even agree with them, mostly. However, I don't see the harm in tolerating necessary discussions about social awareness. _This is where the adult conversations are happening. They aren 't happening anywhere else._ I am genuinely afraid of the social consequences of this policy.

Also, there is some confusion regarding where the violation occurs. Was it my original comment? Because I don't see a violation in my original comment. The comment you replied to was simply trying to clarify my statements for someone who asked for a clarification. Is clarification a violation? If so, this looks like "thought-crime" right? I would be grateful if you can clarify this for me.

<comment><USER14> The problem is that, like flames, they consume everything if you let them. Therefore we can't let them.

Hacker News is just one kind of website, not every kind. To survive, it needs to stay focused on its mandate, the gratification of intellectual curiosity ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). We've learned a lot over the years about what serves that spirit vs. what kills it. Comments like what you've been posting are among the most toxic to it. I'm sure there are many other places where they'd be fine, but here they're off topic, and encourage worse.

People frequently want to use HN for other things, such as political and ideological battle, but that would soon kill the site. Are those matters important? Yes they are. But does a forum dedicated to other, less important things, also have a right to exist? Yes it does.

In terms of the comment I replied to, you crossed into religious flamewar, national flamewar, and ideological battle, all of which are things we don't want here. For this kind of discussion, you need to find another website, or perhaps create one. There is room for many more communities online.

<comment><USER12> I understand everything you're saying and you aren't going to get an argument from me on these points, however I still think there is a dangerous social concern here. HN isn't obligated to save the world, but there's an opportunity for improvement of this model isn't there?

The current system of hell-banning repeat offenders doesn't actually prevent the savvier users from seeing their content. Instead of that, what if comments could be split into two sections, threads about social ramifications and similar humanitarian concerns, and threads about intellectual curiosities and technology specific discussions?

Users could opt-in/out of each type of conversation, perhaps the social threads could be opt-out by default.

I understand what the site is trying to do. I also understand that there aren't really "other websites", because as I said this is where the real adult conversations are happening. HN is the only legitimate major source of news on the planet today in 2018, thanks in no small part to community participation. Everywhere else is garbage news and flame-wars as you've stated. I don't think "flame-wars" are a product of having grown up conversations about important topics, they're a product of having a lot of non-grown-ups participating in grown-up conversations. The up/down voting system does a great job already of filtering worthwhile content, it should not also be necessary to censor people.

_this_ conversation is, in my humble opinion, extremely interesting. What is the social responsibility of a website like HN which starts small but grows into something much larger? Look at what happened with Facebook when they ignored their social responsibilities in favor of their preferred direction. That's a conversation which should probably be had. And if we're being honest, and let's be honest, the best way to have it would be an Ask HN, and you and I both know that'd be flagged right away. My concern is: history has repeatedly taught us the severe consequences of that.

This seems like one of those situations where everyone knows it's broken and everyone wants it to be better, but strict adherence to "regulations" prevents otherwise free-willed people from doing what they know should be done. And then after the inevitable tragedies that result, people look back in hindsight thinking "why were we such fools". Often in the form of hollywood dramatizations ;)

I appreciate you taking time to hear me out, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it's absurd." "But in fact, we're in a period of time of extreme concentration of wealth and power, and it's precisely around those who run the biggest computers. So the truth and the effect is just the opposite of what the rhetoric is and the immediate experience." "My feeling is that if the theory is correct that we got into this by trying to be socialist and libertarian at the same time, and getting the worst of both worlds, then we have to choose." "The other option is to monetize it (facebook). And that's the one that I'm personally more interested in. And what that would look like is, we'd ask those who can afford to — which would be a lot of people in the world, certainly most people in the West — to start paying for it. And then we'd also pay people who provide data into it that's exceptionally valuable to the network, and it would become a source of economic growth. And we would outlaw advertising on it. There would no longer be third parties paying to influence you."

Sounds like Jaron has Chosen poorly.</comment>


Tableau Broke Latest CentOS AMI - <AUTHOR> TL;DR Tableau created an AMI which conflicts with the method for obtaining the latest CentOS 7 AMI with Terraform. So much broken...
--- me ---
We have some terraform that creates EC2 from CentOS, and has been working for months. In the last 24 hours this has broken.
``` Error launching source instance: OptInRequired: In order to use this AWS Marketplace product you need to accept terms and subscribe. To do so please visit https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp?sku=f7hh9b6i4gjxl02w2umkoyu5
        status code: 401, request id: 6626612d-a97b-483a-8ccb-9bf9cfbb41e8 ```
What I have found is that the Centos AMI and Tableau from the marketplace have the same product code / id.
CentOS AMI: ami-089ccd342f0be98ab
So what we are seeing is that when Terraform uses this AMI, we get the 401 above.
Please help
--- aws ---
After further internal research, I have found that the Tableau recently created a listing with very similar name as the CentOS AMI.
ami-02eac2c0129f6376b <----This is from CentOS CentOS Linux 7 x86_64 HVM EBS ENA 1901_01-b7ee8a69-ee97-4a49-9e68-afaee216db2e-ami-05713873c6794f575.4
ami-089ccd342f0be98ab <----This is from Tableau CentOS Linux 7 x86_64 HVM EBS ENA 1901_01-0722b432-8459-49b6-9b90-79b42624d25d-ami-05713873c6794f575.4
Would you please let me know if your terraform is configured to use AMI ID or AMI name?
--- me ---
We use the AMI "name" to get the latest version of the image. How is it that Tableau can create an image with the same name?
```<p>data "aws_ami" "centos" {
  owners      = ["679593333241"]
  most_recent = true<p><pre><code>  filter {
    name   = "name"
    values = ["CentOS Linux 7 x86_64 HVM EBS *"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "architecture"
    values = ["x86_64"]
  }

  filter {
    name   = "root-device-type"
    values = ["ebs"]
  }</code></pre> }<p>``` <comment><USER2> Add a filter for `product-code: ["aw0evgkw8e5c1q413zgy5pjce"]`

Ref: [https://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/AWS](https://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/AWS)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, AWS said there is no resolution on their end. They mentioned the product code too.

What you posted is TF though, yes?</comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos' Original Job Ad - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/dailyweekly/2010/12/jeff_bezos_original_job_ad_its_1994_youre_a_unix_programer_would_you_have_got_in_on_amazons_ground_floor.php

<comment><USER2> Original article on ReadWriteWeb: [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/history_job_posting_for...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/history_job_posting_for_amazoncom_before_it_launch.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been reposted 2 or 3 times in the past week from various sources, hasn't it?</comment>


Practical Range Query Filtering with Succinct Tries – SIGMOD BestPaper [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD29hZww-DM <comment><USER2> Github:

[https://github.com/efficient/SuRF](https://github.com/efficient/SuRF)

Graph of RocksDB implementation:

[https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/987020760983199744](https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/987020760983199744)</comment>


Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community - <AUTHOR> http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/ <comment><USER3> From Joyent's blog post [1]:

> But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he > wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a > gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered > would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

For comparison, here is bnoordhuis's comment from the pull request thread [2] that the post is referencing:

> Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.

Honestly, Joyent's post strikes me as a horrible overreaction and attempt at character assassination over what should have been a small matter. Rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments has been standard practice for the Node.js project for a long time now--this isn't the first one to be closed for being too small of a change, a fact that Joyent, as the main driver of the project, should be aware of.

bnoordhuis followed standard procedure, yet Joyent tries to cast him as being intentionally sexist and a terrible person. Seeing such immature behavior coming from their corporate blog--calling him an "asshole", saying he should be fired, insinuating that they wish they could kick him out of the project-- has pretty much destroyed the respect I had for the company.

[1] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a- pronoun](https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun)

[2] [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015)

<comment><USER4> Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)

Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?

<comment><USER5> Well, there you go: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172)

<comment><USER6> Joyent is looking worse and worse as the dust settles.

<comment><USER4> Ben: "If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else."

After this all-smoke-no-flame shitstorm, one big company carrying out a character assassination and publicly wishing they could fire him and his current employer dangling a Damocles' sword over his job...I really can't blame him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums.

But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm".

One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring and firing this person. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat.

What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it.

Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point.

<comment><USER8> Remember how vicious the Node.js "community" were to outsiders who critiqued event loop blocking?

Whatever the technical merits, I think this incident will do significant damage to the perception of Node.js as a serious platform to build on.

<comment><USER6> It already has in my view. Joyent is not coming across as an organisation I'd trust to back an important project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > If Ben can't learn, we'll fire him.

That statement feels a little to intimate for an outsider to the company. Ben made a mistake but to single out and threaten him like that in public would surely alienate him further.

This entire situation has gotten extremely out of hand. It shows how activists can turn into extremists when faced with an adversary. I'm in no way advocating what Ben did but it's despicable how everyone jumped onto the bandwagon to exacerbate and publicize what should have been a minor event dealt with on employer-employee basis, not a public shaming.

<comment><USER10> I wrote that. I didn't mean it literally. It's a response to Bryan saying that failure to be sensitive to gender issues would be a firing offense at his company. We take it really seriously, and I'd like to point out that two of our senior leaders are women and we are proud to employ talented women engineers. If this remained an issue, I'd need to find a way to rectify it with Ben, and that could get as serious as firing. But he understands now. In the rest of my post I make the point that jumping to firing him publicly was not giving him a sufficient chance nor crediting him for his efforts elsewhere.

<comment><USER11> You didn't fire him publicly. You only belittled him in public.

> If Ben can't learn, we'll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not > meant literally.]

Your correction doesn't make the statement much better. This whole debate is about how _words matter_ , and yet your words put him on notice in a public place. All of Ben's friends now know his employer will fire him if he "can't learn." Is he so stubbornly misogynistic that that should be in question?

You could have conveyed the same message by saying "he was following the commit rules, no offense intended, won't happen again" and left it at that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The guy who wrote the initial pull request should get some sort of medal for efficiency in trolling, it's not common that you can make this many alleged professionals look like idiots with a 3 character patch.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sorry, but the entire notion that using masculine pronouns somehow implies sexism is complete bullshit.

That's how the English language works. "He" is used as both neuter and masculine. There is no "it" pronoun.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, stop fighting about this. Unless someone actually did something sexist, this is a linguistic bikeshed to end all bikesheds.

Childish community behavior aside, the entire argument is a moot point. There is NOTHING sexist about using "he".

If you feel otherwise, please, please educate me.

<comment><USER14> There's a bunch of research suggesting that using "he" as a neuter pronoun makes women feel excluded: \- First experiment/study I found: [http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12...](http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288&context=theses) \- Links to more research on the subject: [http://alyx.io/educational- resources/gender.html#generic-mas...](http://alyx.io/educational- resources/gender.html#generic-masculine-pronouns)

Douglas Hofstadter wrote a good piece of satire explaining why it's oppressive by s/man/white, etc: [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html)

Contrary to what you say, "they" was used as the singular neuter pronoun for a long time, until a concentrated effort to force it out of use in the 1800s. Some examples from a previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824352). Some history here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they)

Given it's possibly (likely) ostracizing and there's nothing categorically wrong about using "they" as a singular neuter pronoun, I think you're on the wrong side of this.

People should certainly stop fighting; the answer is to just roll with "they".

<comment><USER13> Thanks for all those links — I wasn't aware of those studies (especially not about the deliberate effort to force the singular "they" out of use) and I think they have definitely influenced my conscious personal writing style (I do tend to avoid gendered pronouns anyway).

I will agree that I was on the wrong side of this in the sense that "he" is more or equally preferable to "they", but I made another point too — that this entire topic is a giant bikeshed.

You say "people should certainly stop fighting", but do you then imply that fighting for "they" is justified? Personally, I don't think it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> From the blog post:

> If Ben can't learn, we'll fire him.

Reforming the use of English pronouns has nothing to do with the employee's professional activities.

No one should be threatened for either supporting or not supporting a political cause or brand of activism.

There is no consensus in society about how pronouns should be used or their cultural significance [1]. No one should have their livelihood threatened for either agreeing or not agreeing with one position or another or not having an opinion on the topic, or applying their professional, technical judgement.

Without commenting on the details of the kerfuffle, from a broader perspective, the workplace should not be a place for political coercion.

One editorial recently suggested that:

"[E]mployers coercing employees to express their employers' political views is "the most undercovered story of the year." [2]

"Already, American employers are increasingly using the captive audience technique to force their employees to learn about the employer's political and religious views. During these sessions, employees may be forced, at the risk of losing their jobs, to listen to their employer's perspective on the latest political and religious issues of the day." [3]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB- onlanguage-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26FOB- onlanguage-t.html)

[2] [http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political- animal-a/2012_12/...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political- animal-a/2012_12/the_most_undercovered_story_of042089.php)

[3] [http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket- part/v...](http://yalelawjournal.org/the-yale-law-journal-pocket- part/volume-120/addressing-political-captive-audience-workplace-meetings-in- the-post%11citizens-united-environment/)

[4] Efforts to keep politics out of the workplace: [http://votesmart.org/bill/1711/](http://votesmart.org/bill/1711/)

<comment><USER16> > No one should be threatened for either supporting or not supporting a > political cause or brand of activism.

You should read before commenting: the problem wasn't his choice of wording but rather how he turned a trivial change into an argument and reverted another committer's action complete with a threat.

If he didn't want to get involved, simply ignoring it was by far the easiest course of action. Instead, he twice chose to escalate to an unnecessary level of confrontation.

<comment><USER17> _You_ should read before commenting. Ben never threatened anyone. Stop spreading this falsehood.

<comment><USER16> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6834047), in particular the IRC comment:

        bnoordhuis> isaacs: ^ don't ever fucking pull a stunt like that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For context, here is the entirety of what Ben Noordhuis has publicly said on the matter thus far:

"Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."

\- [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615)

"@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."

\- [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48)

"Hi all, let me try to clear up a few things.

Why I rejected the pull request. Us maintainers tend to reject tiny doc changes because they're often more trouble than they're worth. You have to collect and check the CLA, it makes git blame less effective, etc.

That's why the usual approach to such pull requests is 'no, unless' \- in this case the 'unless' should probably have applied. To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?

Why I reverted the commit. In hindsight, I should have given Isaac the benefit of the doubt because I don't doubt that he acted with the best of intentions. On the other hand, if another committer jumped the line like that, I would have done the same thing. We have procedures in place and no one is exempt from them.

To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - <USER2> in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?

I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks."

\- [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172)

</comment><comment><USER19> Most of the new guidelines[1] are technical, but the one relevant the events of the last day or two is on line 78:

        +* When documenting APIs and/or source code, don't make assumptions or make
        +  implications about race, gender, religion, political orientation or anything
        +  else that isn't relevant to the project.

[1]: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/39db22594df13e8423af3...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/39db22594df13e8423af3e923ec15b8dc47a5234)

<comment><USER20> That commit was made in response to this incident. No commit process was previously documented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think it was pretty classy of Ben not to comment on some of the hateful comments in the commit that, instead of adding to discussion or trying to prevent future error, simply were personal attacks at him.

<comment><USER22> I can't say I'm surprised though. bnoordhuis lacks tact; poke other people enough and eventually you'll get an angry mob. The parent article talks about learning, but glosses over that bnoordhuis' behaviour that set this all off _isn 't unusual_ for him. Learning? No. Class? No.

That said, this is a tempest in a teacup. bnoordhuis upsets someone again, news at 11.

<comment><USER23> Uhm, Ben lacks tact? Says who? I think you guys are maybe confusing the tough Dutch culture as being insensitive to some hot issues. Ben is an extremely smart, extremely prolific programmer. When you're out and about like him you're bound to get yourself tripped somewhere along the way.

As an aside, while Joyent has exposed itself as being extremely unprofessional and prone to jumping on the gun, I'm saddened that Strongloop is quick to say things like "If Ben can't learn, we'll fire him" too ... and this is just after all of this happened. My goodness people, stop sitting on your high chairs and speculating firings, it's not a fucking game.

<comment><USER24> > I think you guys are maybe confusing the tough Dutch culture as being > insensitive to some hot issues.

I've read that the Netherlands have a racist Santa Claus tradition and even some politicians are defending it against change. :/

Edit: found the article [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/protests- sparked-...](http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/protests-sparked-by- dutch-santas-helper-black-pete/story-e6frg6so-1226761889114)

<comment> X-Istence Way to go making a comment about a culture and tradition you are unfamiliar with based upon a newspaper article that doesn't go into the history behind said tradition!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having recently been considering Node for a major new project in my organization, I'm greatly encouraged to see that the folks in its developer community so thoroughly refuse to let themselves be distracted by irrelevancies from such a laserlike focus on improving their code.

</comment><comment><USER26> Way to throw your people under the bus. I wouldn't work for a company like this -- not to mention Joyent, after that bit of libel they call a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER27> Are these people illiterate? Are they not aware that in the English language masculine pronouns are correct for both gender-specific and gender-neutral uses? Mankind refers to everybody. It may seem awkward, particularly to over- literal types, but so is our spelling, grammar, and pronunciation generally.

<comment><USER28> Mankind is gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also.

<comment><USER27> > gender neutral, it's highly debatable whether he, him or his are also

Not in the English language. It's debated by some whether this might have a subliminal effect and reinforce social gender stereotypes (though no evidence for that hypothesis as far as I'm aware) and therefore whether masculine prepositions _should_ be treated as neutral but that's in the same category as [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling_reform).

There's nothing wrong with that of course and it can be an interesting hypothesis to pursue - but I find it depressing that a self-proclaimed educated and science-based open source tech community so easily engages on a witch hunt based on pure speculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the community would do better without these corporate fingers poking on it.

<comment><USER30> Put node in neutral territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I love this post. I work with engineers on a daily basis and the one thing I find so foreign is an unhealthy attachment to perfection, as if such a thing existed. The easy thing to do is deride someone. The hard thing is to reach out. Nice article written in support of a hard working guy. Upvote.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's just me or there are some (a lot of) tension between Joyent and StrongLoop about the management of the project?

</comment><comment><USER33> The vindictive reaction from Joyent on this was just atrocious. Perhaps it's time for node to find a new home.

</comment><comment><USER34> As poorly as Joyent may have responded, and as badly they might have misunderstood this entire situation, I am convinced that everyone involved here (on both sides) had nothing but good intentions, and that until we acknowledge these things and make up, this is going to become needlessly harmful to the community at large.

Pause, reflect, forgive... nobody here is a monster.

<comment><USER35> I would dearly love to agree (see my other comments if you don't believe me).

But Bryan Cantrill's, and Joyent's behaviour seems very cynical, manipulative, and childish. He used deliberately inflammatory language, and would have, at the very least, been aware of the fact that it might not be so black and white. He will have known that he started a witch-hunt and did nothing, as far as I can tell, to try and quell it.

No-one is a monster, but some people are either playing games or have spectacularly poor judgment. Not the kind of company you want to work with either way.

Joyent has severely blotted its copy-book. For that reason if I'm ever in a position to make purchasing decisions I will exclude Joyent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Are there any pieces anywhere about comment gendering being an issue to female programmers? (My short googling failed me)

<comment><USER37> It's not an "issue" so much as a pervasive problem. Presuming default-male is bad form, and it has a subtle excluding effect.

Replacing "him" with "the user" might seem inconsequential, but it's a tiny step in the right direction. A few million more like that and we'll be getting somewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great response from StrongLoop, it was ridiculous over-react from Joyent to publicly pull out the pitchforks.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think the article is missing a lot of context. What was the offending issue?

<comment><USER19> The original issue was a pull request[1] made to the libuv code base to change "him" to "them". It was rejected[2] by one of the committers, Ben Noordhuis, as being too trivial.

That decision was reversed by Isaac Schlueter (another committer) and committed[3]. Noordhuis reverted that commit[4], chiding Schlueter for not following procedure, but that revert was quickly reverted itself.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, one of the sponsors of the project and Schleuter's employer, wrote a blog post[5] indicating that had Noordhuis been a Joyent employee, he would've been fired. This post here is a response to that post. Strongloop is Noordhuis's employer.

[1]: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015)

[2]: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538615)

[3]: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/47d98b64c45db8335bf7e...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/47d98b64c45db8335bf7e065351e385cae32323d)

[4]: [https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48)

[5]: [http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a- pronoun](http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun)

<comment><USER40> Not exactly. There are two Isaacs. Isaac Roth at StrongLoop, author of the OP, he didn't come into the story until today. Isaac Schlueter works for Joyent, and originally committed the requested change.

<comment><USER41> Roth is actually Issac, not Isaac.

<comment><USER40> Duly noted. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> THIS IS GREAT! There goes the reputation of Joyet.

Wait a min. I remember something about Lifelong Free Hosting drama not long ago. ( Correct me if i am wrong. )

A Company to look at what NOT to do and how NOT to run.

</comment><comment><USER43> > But if he can, we'll get Node v0.12 delivered a lot faster and have a > stronger community.

And of course, Strongloop could not help but make another half way claim that they are the ones "in charge" of node. This current stuff aside, I just cannot believe their lack of shame when trying to take commercial credit for a community project.

</comment><comment><USER44> It is interesting following this particular discussion about gender pronouns in Node.js. I am curious how other, more mature, products have handled similar. GitHub and easily viewed pull requests make some of this much more visible than say in the old days of sites like sourceforge.

</comment><comment><USER45> What would it take for Node to be taken out from under Joyent's arm to be setup as its own project?

<comment><USER46> Joyent has izs, that's mainly it. Strongloop does biggest part of development, and before Strongloop it was Cloud9.

I guess putting node in a foundation would make the most sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Great to see that someone took the time to create a well thought-out, positive response to this situation.

[https://gist.github.com/creationix/5fb9e94fd8d80268c047](https://gist.github.com/creationix/5fb9e94fd8d80268c047)

</comment><comment><USER48> Did you send this as a private teaching moment first?

<comment><USER10> I actually did.

<comment><USER48> That is good of you. No more questions. Generally I agree with your assessment, however when confronting systemic biases sometimes it's necessary to speak out publicly. However, that can be done outside the context of a particular person-to-person encounter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This story is getting annoying.

<comment><USER35> Not quite as annoying as having hundreds of raging angry people name-calling and character-assassinating you over a mistake.</comment></comment>


Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://talsraviv.com/2012/07/26/being-a-developer-makes-you-valuable.-learning-how-to-market-makes-you-dangerous/ <comment><USER2> I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

<comment><USER3> >c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

Yeah. I think, in fact, it's overvalued by the market right now. Many people are bidding for ad words as if the google adword is what brought you the customer.

The thing is, at least in my case, this simply isn't true. Nobody buys a VPS on the first click; if someone clicks through a google ad for my company, yeah, google should get some credit, but most of the credit should go to the blog the customer saw a month ago.

That's the thing; because the adwords are the first hits and are super convenient for the customer, they pick up a lot of people that would have clicked on the organic result.

Now, this is okay if they are taking a very small cut, but the way many people use google adwords? the price is bid up to a very large cut of the profit you are going to earn from that customer. I mean, yeah, sure, if google really is bringing me brand new customers that had never heard of me; people I would not otherwise have a chance with, yeah, I can see paying 90% of the profit. But if google is bringing me customers that were very likely to come to me anyhow? eh, I'm not going to want to pay google nearly that much.

I think this is also why facebook is so highly valued; people believe that facebook has enough tracking data to see that blog that my customer read last week that actually caused the customer to sign up through the adword this week. And maybe they do... but it's a dang difficult problem, and I haven't seen facebook make much progress. Even then, they are going to have a hard time integrating the people that heard of me because of the checkout-line advertisements I bought in Mountain View Safeways.

(because of this, my advertising dollars go into cost per impression advertising, rather than cost per click.)

<comment><USER2> While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices), that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.

There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.)

\+ You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a _lot_ of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)

<comment><USER3> >Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.

This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were usually mediocre programmers.

> (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, > consider banging this out.)

so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over? Clearly you are good at this sort of thing, you are a reasonable programmer, and on top of that, you are a good writer, and have a bit of fame. (I am convinced that being able to write well is one of those skills that, while nearly useless on it's own, dramatically multiplies the value of any other skills you obtain.)

I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong... just that it's more complicated than that. Marketing fluff, I mean, selling something for money that is pure marketing and nothing else is harder than it looks. And actually providing a service to a large number of users is also harder than it looks.

There is always that choice of "do I spend my time improving the product?" or "do I spend my time on marketing?" - the more time you spend on the latter, the harder the former becomes. The more time you spend on the former, the easier the latter becomes.

This is my current problem; I can't add users much faster than I am without degrading the service for existing customers. Marketing, right now, is mostly a 'for fun' thing.

<comment><USER2> _This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were usually mediocre programmers._

You're mostly right. SWAG numbers: 50% of SEM/SEO professionals are FizzBuzz- level efficient in Excel, 10% of them know what a pivot table is, 5% of them know enough scripting to do their jobs. Against that expertise curve, the least accomplish programmer in e.g. an entire class of YC startups is a programming god among men. If you can ship products, you're so far ahead of the curve it isn't even funny.

 _so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over?_

The things I'm really good at tend to scale with the size of whatever line-of- business I'm allowed to work on. A 10% improvement in BCC's numbers is worth, ballpark, $5k a year or so. (Or it was before I doubled conversions recently -- guess it would be worth $10k a year now? Ask me in December for a better guess, summer throws things off.) A 10% improvement in $CONSULTING_CLIENT's $PRODUCT is worth, ballpark, a lot more. The large majority of that upside will accrue to whomever beneficially owns $CONSULTING_CLIENT.

 _marketing fluff_

You don't need to have a product of your own to sell to monetize an engineering/marketing skillset if you (or someone in the audience) hypothetically has it. Many companies already have things to sell, and they will pay handsomely, in a variety of ways, for your expertise in making that happen.

 _This is my current problem:_

I'd tell a client in your circumstance to focus on the hardware provisioning or CS bottleneck or whatever which is apparently making it infeasible to service VPS customers acquired at scale. In the meanwhile, continue experimenting with marketing channels. After solving the bottleneck, double down on whatever marketing channels seemed to work in microscale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of my favorite sayings: _Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything._

If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold.

Those 10 are the dangerous ones.

Great post.

<comment><USER5> While I agree that it is a good post, isn't it kinda obvious that if you are an idea person, can execute on that idea to make a product and also sell it, you are king of the world? I mean, you have everything except finding a way to repair your brain and body towards immortality (which I am still not quite sure if desirable)...

<comment><USER4> I agree its obvious. But the reality is a shocking number of people (990 of 1000?) never leave the building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous_

I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an _interest_ in marketing, but never really _studied_ marketing. Now, I'm one of three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and understand marketing (and sales).

OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had.

Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff... _Positioning_ , _Re-positioning_ , _The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing_ , etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of _The Ultimate Sales Machine_ fame).

Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more good startup marketing related links on HN!

<comment><USER7> Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions, that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have actionable steps and are not just high level talk.

a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; - __Only print, no audio

d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

<comment><USER6> Heh, I own 4 of those 5 books (not the Gene Bedell one). All are on my "to read" list but other than Spin Selling (which I've browsed through a bit), I haven't read them yet.

I've heard a lot of good things about _Made To Stick_ though, so I think it's time to bump that up the list a little.

Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning $cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective.

Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east.

$cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills, design, writing ....}

$positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate, extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... }

mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles.

Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit.

Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru!

Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn. Feel free to ignore me.

OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low quality.

<comment><USER9> you're not alone. It's harder than they make it seem.. much harder. As an example, landing pages for SEO is trivial.. stupid trivial. How to get those pages to rank for your desired keywords though is challenging, but no growth hacker wants to do that, or tell u how to do that.

<comment><USER10> In some sectors it can be as easy as it looks. It's just when the playing field is really competitive that it gets a bit tough. Ranking #1 for 'dentist in irlam' will be levels upon levels easier than ranking for 'dentist in london' in terms of SEO. Similarly the cost-per-click in paid search will probably be orders of magnitude apart and optimising your campaigns will be much harder. Choosing the best keywords for what you'd like to achieve is tricky and figuring that out only happened after I dived in - it's likely a lot of what I've learned there is niche specific too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Plain old marketing is simple. You gotta reach your audience. You gotta figure out what they look at, and you gotta get their attention. If your audience is searching Google, you hit them with SEO and Adwords. If they are watching TV, you gotta get on the shows they are watching. Once you get their attention, they know about you, and then it is matter of sales if they buy.

For good branding, it helps to have a good name, logo, etc. Although, in the end it helps if they like your product.

If you're in a crowded space, marketing is going to be harder. Although, I've never really found marketing to be that complicated. If you are in a crowded space, it can be harder to market, because your message gets crowded out.

Who is struggling with marketing? Let me know. I don't really think it is that hard.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer.

The answer is yes, yes you do!

The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News.

I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.

<comment><USER13> Good comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Agreed.

I own <http://drivingtests101.com/> . It is a free driving test prep website covering ~400 tests across 11 countries, all states/provinces and vehicle types. It was not until we spent time on SEO and pushed to get into the media a few months later before we truly began to realize the fruits of our labor. A product or service can often lead to no monetization without a push from marketing, aside from the true viral one-off hits. Do not count on this!

Marketing is key and I would encourage all business owners, not just developers, to learn this invaluable skill.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the Balsamiq blog: [http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup- marketi...](http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing- advice-from-balsamiq-studios/). I will definitely check out some of the recommendations here.

Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS stuff online.

<comment><USER16> Every single blog post under the SaaS tag on this site - <http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/>

<comment><USER15> Thanks! I'm starting my journey of learning marketing, and going to be writing about it if you're interested ([http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit- you-have-a-market...](http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a- marketing-problem/))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I would really extend this to the following qualities that people in the field of building products should try, to the best of their abilities, to be good at. They might not become the best at each one, but enough to become potent and in the very least better than they were before trying:

-Understand technology. What it takes to build, scale, maintain and fix things. What are the affordances and benefits of one approach over the other.

-Understand design. Not just pretty pixels (in fact that is the least important part, IMHO). But the WHY. How it affects people, what the goals are, why the current system is broken or why it does not exist.

\- Understand Marketing. How do you convince others that your product (idea or finished) is THE one they should vouch for. Why should they invest time and money into it. How can you make them believe that you know what you are doing and better than any bad experiences they have had with products of that kind. Selling/Marketing is not evil. It is a necessary (evil). Many humble and smart people fail to understand that.

I totally understand it is very hard for one person to be great or even good at all three. But hey most don't even try, so you are already better then them the first day you try.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker.

You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells. Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why?

You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate?

Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are your price points too high? Too low?

There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and use it. It really is completely fascinating.

<comment><USER9> I think you're talking about conversion optimization rather than pure marketing.

Tracking numbers for a mobile app is fruitless if you don't have a way to get tons of people to use it in the first place. A/B testing design, colors etc of a mobile app is only useful once you users.

Similarly, for an e-commerce site, it doesn't make sense to A/B test different things like price if you got a measly number of visitors.

Now, how is one supposed to get all those visitors/customers/users in the first place, so we can then tinker/test the various variables? That is marketing, and a lot of it isn't "hacker" oriented. It's actually messy, and geared more towards people who are sales oriented, even some of SEO. SEO is actually one of the few remaining hacker-friendly methods of marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own.

That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is that by that time you can afford to do this).

</comment><comment><USER19> Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS without being negatively impacted by existing software out there.

As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits your ability to even give it a second try.

<comment><USER2> I'd tend to disagree: everything old is new again. Sears Roebuck beat me to A/B testing by, what, _eighty years_?

<comment><USER20> There is nothing new under the sun, but people are forgetful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take up marketing but gave up.

So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours.

So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material?

0\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010>

<comment><USER6> _With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours._

I'm sure it's far more than that. Especially if "a little searching" includes bittorrent trackers. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but there's one tracker I know of, that specializes in business related topics, with a healthy dose of sales and marketing material. There is so much material (books, videos, reports, articles, podcasts, etc.) to watch, listen to, read, etc. that you could probably spend tens of thousands of hours on it.

 _, is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material?_

OK, I'm not marketing guru, just another "developer trying to take up marketing." But based on a lot of reading, watching, asking questions, etc., I get the sense that material from Chet Holmes, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham is usually regarded as pretty good. I'm watching some Chet Holmes videos now, and finding a ton of value in them, FWIW. YMMV, of course.

Also, the works of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Steve Rifkin, et al, are usually regarded as pretty important. Trout and crew basically created positioning theory.

And then there's a whole separate world of material for people who are interested in the spammy(er), get rich quick, "Internet Marketing" stuff. I haven't studied any of his marketing materials, but Eben Pagan seems to be one of the more popular guys in that world. Whether or not his material would be of use to the typical HN reader is left as an exercise for the reader. Or, if somebody here is familiar with his work and could chime in, I'd be really curious to hear your take.

<comment><USER22> So what are these trackers? What material should you look for?

It's no good saying "There's this cool little news site all the smart people hang out on (HN)" without telling us how to find it.

<comment><USER6> _So what are these trackers?_

I didn't name it explicitly because I don't really know if pg has any policy of frowning on encouraging piracy here at HN (and most of the content on the tracker I'm thinking of is pirated).

But if you're really curious, my email is in my profile. Just sayin...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I've always thought the person running the development team should understand marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop. The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc

</comment><comment><USER24> Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam measures to subscribe to your posts via email.

 _Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..."_ huh?

<comment><USER25> for the "uncultured": Blame Canada! <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo>

<comment><USER24> Thanks for that. Maybe he doesn't want uncultured people subscribing via email. If so, it's working :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Although having great marketing skills is invaluable, I have come to the conclusion that having a deeper understanding of design is crucial to modern developers; it seems to me that more and more developers are cropping up and the demand has shifted from them to people with great design capabilities.

I guess the morale of the story is to learn everything you can!

</comment><comment><USER27> So true. Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'. From my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun) than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and start embarrassing yourself (literally).

</comment><comment><USER28> Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning how to develop the past 3-4 months.

Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible skill

Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.

<comment><USER30> In my experience, non-tech B2B audiences respond very well to 'traditional' marketing - postcard mailings, magazine ads, etc.

IMO there are 2 aspects to doing this well:

(1) USE IT AS PART OF AN INCREMENTAL CAMPAIGN. Use the traditional stuff as the first element to get them involved with you. Sending them a well-designed, relevant postcard invitation = you have their attention (whereas they are 'banner ad blind' and 'email blind'). Use that attention to push them to the next step (which isn't the sale - it's just another incremental commitment like attending a webinar, or downloading a whitepaper, or using an online calculator to spec something out, etc).

Incremental commitment is the name of the game in B2B sales and marketing, and traditional marketing can be a great start to the chain.

(2) LINK OFFLINE STUFF TO ONLINE STUFF. As you can see even from my examples above, it's important to get them into online channels as soon as possible (where they can be tracked and interacted with more efficiently). You want to have tons of relevant content you can offer them, lots of places for them to explore the problem/solution, etc.

The real joy (and pain) of B2B marketing is that you have to do the 'strategic' campaign planning well while also nailing the 'tactical' messaging / design / etc execution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How to market on HN:

        - Write an interesting blog post and post it to HN
        - Include a link to something you're selling
          somewhere near the end of the post

There are so many people doing this it's unreal.

<comment><USER32> Certainly one of the stranger aspects of this site. It's almost a sort of meta-game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead the team. This what makes a great founder.

<comment><USER23> You're describing a great CEO, not necessarily a great StartUp founder. In the beginning the founder's job is not to hire people (you're not ready for that yet). It's to execute and demonstrate some sort of traction--the traction you can use to hire great people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to hire great people, you need to show that idea can be executed before you can hire "the best people in every field"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I support this message as a Marketing/Finance major turned software engineer.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.

<comment><USER36> Dear god, please stop abusing that word.

If we don't it will lose all meaning, in some ways it already has.

<comment><USER35> Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments. Dear god, stop abusing that privilege. First of all, don't tell someone to stop abusing "that word" without mentioning what word you're talking about. Second, if you're making a point, be prepared to back it up. What is "losing all meaning"? In what ways has it already? What the heck are you talking about anyway?? How is your comment benefiting the original poster at all?

<comment><USER36> >Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments.

I'm not. But since it came off that way I will apologize. First for lashing out at you, and second for not being more specific.

The word "Hacker" is being applied to everything and everyone, and it's annoying. As an example, a search for "Hacker" in my RSS feed produces the following headlines (Among others, but I list these as egregious examples.):

 _Mobile hackers: The future scares us, change it at Everyme_

 _The Distribution Hacker's Mission: Create an Unfair Advantage_

 _ShowHN: Hacker Tourist - opinionated ecommerce for photographers_

 _Reinvent Retail. Growth Hacker at YC Mobile Startup._

 _Ask HN Teachers and Edu Hackers : How do you prepare educational materials?_

When you start talking about "Hacker photographers" and "Growth hackers" and "Distribution hackers" I have to ask, do you mean "People who are hackers who happen to know marketing/photography/whatever a distribution hacker is supposed to do/etc too." or are we just applying this term to everything so that everyone can feel like they're part of some elite club?

And that's not even getting into the whole "Well you can't just say you're a hacker and expect everyone to go with it." argument.

EDIT: Which, in certain views on that latter point, the word "Hacker" _is_ about an elite club, which only makes the appending of the word to everything just feel like some sort of envy.

(Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a hacker.)

<comment><USER35> When I mean "hacker", I mean someone who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. This can be in the field of software, marketing, photography, or any other field. This doesn't mean that they're part of any "elite club", and it definitely doesn't have to be something that annoys you so much. It's just a term used, that's all!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Note: I am not a developer. My experience is in e-commerce marketing and my degree (est. May 2013) is in Statistics.

I've loved the field of human persuasion for years, and I think I can add something that I have written in the past to this conversation. I essentially made a list of marketing "truths", based on my research and experience, and have tested it against others. What remains of the list is what no one has been able to refute, so I think it's decently close to a list of universal irrefutable "rules of marketing."

The Truths of Marketing

1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important.

2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring.

3) People process information best from stories.

4) People are foremost interested in things that affect them.

5) Breaking patterns gets attention.

6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions.

7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset. The converse is also true.

8) People handle one idea at a time best.

9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer.

10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with something, they will like it more over time.

11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily.

* Keep in mind that this should not necessarily be used a checklist; see what the director of a large creative agency says on the subject:

"I think that in broad strokes these truisms are accurate, but they aren't really how I personally get to the bottom of the marketing equation when working on a brand.

Of them, I think 1 and 4 are probably the closest, but I think the biggest problem is the same problem you find in how any analysis of consumers, or what is usually called "consumer behavior" is used -- it is, by definition, one step removed from what you're trying to analyze, yet it's treated like the consumers themselves.

Because consumers are often perceived as black boxes to marketers, there's a temptation to analyze their behavior and then market to that analysis instead of to them. Maybe this is because I'm on the creative side, but for me the most useful role of research is to inform and guide what is a form of for our consumer. To not just analyze what drives them, but to genuinely it yourself.

Reading research about twelve-year-old girls' purchase decisions and focus group transcripts is not the same thing as thinking like one. I have a client in that market, and I read everything when I'm working on something -- research, web sites, fan magazines, television -- but none of it is a substitute for sitting in a dark room and genuinely trying to imagine the trials of what it must be like to actually be a twelve-year-old girl from a first person perspective.

It sounds absurd, but that's how you come up with great ideas -- to do your best to become a twelve-year-old girl, and then develop things that you would enjoy.

So I think truisms like yours are useful as long as they remain a means to an end, and not, as they so often do, a checklist, or worse, the end itself."

<comment><AUTHOR> Amazing summary. I've bookmarked this comment. Thank you. It would be great if you'd elaborate on each one in a post with one story that may have led you to realize this - to make it more memorable. Heck this could probably be a textbook but a short post would get the most eyeballs. And when you post it, i'd like to be the first to know.

It's [almost] like a checklist when working on any marketing project to get inspiration from and make sure you're doing a complete job.

<comment><USER37> Thank you. I intend to make and have sketched out a simple website that shows the list, but each item links to a separate page with sources, and also allows for comments. Alas for a lack of spare time!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review My App - Popling.net, Learning without studying - <AUTHOR>

It's a website + AIR app for people who want to learn, but lack motivation. I built it because I wanted to learn Spanish but I'm too lazy to study.
The desktop app shows you a flash card every few minutes (you decide how often) through an unobtrusive Growl-like notification window. If you aren't busy, click the notification to answer the question on the flash card.  If you are busy, ignore it and it goes away.  It works especially well for getting started with a new language.
Help me make this thing better! <comment><AUTHOR> So far from looking at my Mint stats after putting the site up here 5 hours ago, I've gotten only 50 uniques, 3 new user accounts, but only 1 person actually using the app through the AIR install.

That looks like a 2% conversion to user rate, with a 66% falloff rate between signing up and using the service.

Dismal!

To fix this, I'm thinking I'll try to simplify so the user only has to download the app. The app will ask for user/pass, or will generate a unique APP id from the server, which the user can use to subscribe to flash card sets.

This is the path of least resistance for the user, but I'm worried about problems with this approach. Anyone?

</comment><comment><USER2> Neat idea, but I think the execution needs some work. You have definitely done something cool here, but take it a step further. I haven't checked it out too much but I imagine you can make your own packs as well?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you can create your own flash card sets through a batch sytax or simple form.

Curious, did you install the AIR app? If not, I'd love to hear your reason, as I'm worried most people won't install or will fall off during the lengthy air install process.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Bad idea? Don't want to install? Website doesn't get the idea across? Help me out here! :D

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the site down right now?

<comment><AUTHOR> shouldn't be, oooh how cool is this micro service...

<http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/popling.net>

Got the right url?

<http://www.popling.net></comment></comment>


Apparently HN gives you great advice and then 1536 users in 4 hours. - <AUTHOR>

Last Monday, I was just finishing up work on Wolfpacktales – an app that lets you break your social network into groups and have instant interactions, share files and bookmark things you find. The idea is simple, you have all these people you are friends with or connected to, you don't discuss the same things with all of them, so by grouping them, you can say what you want to say to each group. I firmly believe that in the next year or two, rather than paying $0.25 (or whatever you pay) for a text message over phones, you'll be texting over this app across your social network using people's usernames.
Anyway, I wrote a post on here and it somehow found its way to the front-page. It only stayed there for 2 hours but it spent another 2 hrs on the 2nd and 3rd pages. I tracked the signups that came in on that day, and in 4 hours, there were 1536 new sign-ups from HN (directly and indirectly). Directly in the sense that they clicked on from here and signed up, and indirectly if the person signed up having been invited by someone who signed up from HN in that time. Of that number, 61% are active have have returned to the site more than 3 times and have created groups and 80% have invited people to their groups.
To any new apps/startups launching, HN is a great place to get that initial traction and the best part about it – for me atleast – is the number of criticisms, advise and feedback I got. That was much more important to me than signups.
App url: http://wolfpacktal.es <comment><USER2> I tried it out.

Ran into some problems that hopefully you'll shake out. Surprised by the choice of web stack (.net and asp).

I didn't see an option to delete accounts, did I miss it?

<comment><USER3> Honest question: what's surprising about .net and asp?

<comment><USER4> I usually see this view explained that due to the .Net stack's higher up front cost than free alternatives, and (debatably) higher long term cost, it's an uncommon choice for startups.

Basically, deploying a .Net site requires at minimum 1 personal license of Windows and 1 server license of Windows. Sometimes a non-free copy of Visual Studio, and usually a license for SQL Server (since many MS people use the whole stack for integration reasons). Without buying hardware, Windows hosting is also always more expensive.

Compared to a LAMP/Rails/Django style app which you could theoretically get off the ground for the hardware cost of a local PC and cheap VPS hosting.

Of course developer familiarity, your local hiring pool, initial launch scale, business partners, vendor integration, etc, etc, etc, all influence the tech choice and its impact on cost.

<comment><USER5> You're absolutely right about the costs of running real iron - Windows adds $1,000 per machine. But Windows virtual machines cost the same as Linux: about $20/mo for a lowend VPS. Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

If you are awesome and outgrow that VPS with some paying customers, then I think you can swing the $1,000 on a windows license.

I really hate being a shill for MS...

<comment><USER6> >Plus the code is compiled and tends to run more efficiently than Ruby for instance. :-)

Those words don't mean what you think it means. You're right that most CLR code will be faster than equivalently idiomatic Ruby code that accomplishes the same task, but the reasons for it have nothing to do with compilation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Please explain in more detail how this works. I signed up, but did not connect facebook/twitter because I'd rather not spam my friends with something I'm not 100% sure on.

Do my friends have to sign up for Wolfpack to be able to use this service? Does the messaging only happen on your platform, or does it duplicate messages across other platforms as well (fb messages, emails, etc)?

<comment><AUTHOR> The messaging only happens on wolfpacktales...and we don't spam anyone. Basically you create a group, invite your friends to join, the get a notification and following the link takes them to the group you created, where u can begin interacting and sharing.

<comment><USER7> So why connect to social networks at all? Not to knock your idea, but it seems like this is just a modernized private chatroom with built in social network spamming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once got 231 subscribers to my newsletter from HN. But over 3 days. I agree though, HN is a great place to announce and critique your app

</comment><comment><USER9> Kudos on taking the initiative and implementing this idea. I've often wondered how Facebook became so successful given that the one thing it's supposed to do well---manage your social network---is probably the least functional aspect of the site. For the most part Facebook is a personal homepage with photos and a forum and that's about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks...I figured someone has to do it right? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great app, thanks for sharing and good luck with it. One thing I noticed, is your about page says "It's less intrusive intrusive ...".

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Is this also a mobile app?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the next thing I plan to do. Presently it's only a web app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> clickable link: <http://wolfpacktal.es></comment>