tl;dr: When hiring a programmer, choose substance over style

One peril of cloud computing: an S3 outage is currently affecting Heroku, and Realized is unavailable at the moment.

"Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs" by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah takes you step by step through exactly what its title says.

...and one of the authors reads HN, so that should count for something.

Having Basecamp walk the plank in the 'trailer' is engaging. But isn't Google Apps the real competition?

Because of its searchable Knowledge Base for customer self-help, we also chose to use Tender (the SaaS platform used by New Relic).

Grocery stores figured this out years ago with self-checkout. Scanning each item can be tedious (looking up produce codes, etc.), and yet many customers prefer to scan their own items.

I do not mind at self-checkout when an employee helps to put everything into bags, though.

really? it's funny, I'm mildly human-avoidant, and I generally avoid the self-checkout unless the lines are significantly shorter because it takes me quite a bit longer to check myself out. First, I've gotta scan everything, and not being a professional, i'm slower than the checkout guy is. Next, the machenes just plain suck. "Unexpected item in bagging area" etc... it takes twice as long, at least, to get through the self checkout than to get the human.

Really, I think 70% of the problem is that the machines, as currently implemented, suck. The other 30% is that scanning barcodes quickly is something of a skill.

I find I tend to use the self-checkout only as a replacement for the express checkout, i.e. I only have a small number of items, that will probably fit in one bag, and that won't require keying in a bunch of product codes. I find in this situation self-checkout is the same or faster than regular. For large numbers of items, however, regular checkout is much better.

Interestingly enough Costco (wholesale consumer goods) removed its self checkout option.

Perhaps since the average transaction there is around $200 with many large sized items (30 rolls of toilet paper).

A priceless quote: "Never in the history of man has a software developer said "I'm stuck doing Ruby for my day job but I'm really hoping to find a job in .NET or Java.""

From a broader perspective, I expect that the Rails versioning nomenclature will conform to SemVer (http://semver.org/). Yesterday, wycats tweeted that he believes strongly in SemVer, in regards to Bundler.

SkyMarshall said Those will all teach you what not to do, which is just as, if not more important in investing and trading than what to do.

Anyone can notice the successful investment decisions after the fact: buying Apple Inc on March 6, 2009 at $83.50 or selling BP on January 19, 2010 at $62.30. No stock or mutual fund can beat the market, each year, over twenty years. Neither can you.

What you can do is not beat yourself. Within the nuts and bolts of a portfolio, some trades may cost you dearly in terms of capital gains tax. Lopsided distribution of your investments in too few asset classes will also wreck havoc. Avoid these mistakes and you can greatly improve your rate of return.

<another_shameless_plug> I run the investment website http://blog.realized-app.com and companion web app for getting these decisions right. </another_shameless_plug>

Yup. And one more consideration to add to that, the math of losing money is brutal.

For example, say you start trading with $100, have a bad day and take a 50% loss, and are down to $50. What % gain do you need to get back $100?

Not 50%, as many new investors answer without thinking. To get from $50 back to $100 requires a 100% gain.

If you only a 25% loss down to $75, you need a 33% gain to get from $75 back to $100.

If you took a 75% loss to $25, you need a 300% gain to get back to $100.

Given the loss, the odds of getting the gains required to break even are not good.

Avoiding losses is a huge part of making money trading, which is why I particularly like both What I Learned and Taleb's stuff.

That highlights a fundamental error many people make - you can't average percentages. A graph of an index fund on a percentage basis for the last 20 years tells you nothing useful (at least not directly).

If users were the customers ... really gets to the core of the problem that Facebook has evolved itself into.

Instead, users are the product. Advertisers are the customers.

Too bad the original article failed to clearly make this point.