at smaller screen sizes something in your formatting is breaking words apart. I first noticed on Chrome Android, and then I checked on Chrome on my MBP, and yes, when the window is too narrow, the words get broken but not hyphenated.
Meta: this company scraped my contact & project info from github and spammed me multiple times to add me to their stable of experts. It felt incredibly slimy.
I'm sure they're very excited about reaching the HN front page.
Hmm. HN likes substantive articles and dislikes sketchy tactics. Those two almost never conflict. When they do, though, we tend to favor the substantive article, which this one clearly is. It's an elementary tutorial, yes, but an unusually well-crafted one, and had it appeared on the author's website (http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog.html), there'd be no question.
Perhaps the positive reinforcement of seeing what actually works to get on the HN front page—solid content—will combine with earlier negative reinforcement—prior sketchy tactics have gotten this site penalized—to induce a change in behavior. I know that sounds unicorny, but the last time something like this came up on HN, a different site actually cleaned up its ways. Maybe lightning will strike twice.
I am curious to know why this post was taken down. It was certainly a useful post that organically bubbled to the top as quality content. Can someone please provide feedback.
It wasn't taken down. It was knocked off the front page by flags. My guess is that users feel the site is spammy.
By the way, one of several tactics that you shouldn't use on Hacker News is astroturfing. That (along with vote-rigging) are likely to alienate users and get your accounts, and your site, penalized.
Thanks for bringing this up. My name is Ed Roman, and I'm the CEO of hack.hands(). I'm sorry if our expert onboarding approach was offensive in any way to you. As a young startup, we're still learning as we go and adjusting our approaches.
In case it's valuable to you, I'd like to offer you a free pass to a virtual conference we're holding, at hacksummit.org. This event has some of the best programmers in the world educating you, while raising money for coding charities. You can use the code ZACH to get through registration without any hassle.
I'm happy to chat further over email about any concerns you may have at ed@hackhands.com.
While it was semi-promotional, they offered him it as a sort of compensation. Should a company not be allowed to give out their products for free for compensation?
> While it was semi-promotional, they offered him it as a sort of compensation. Should a company not be allowed to give out their products for free for compensation?
Of course they should be able to do so, but chasing someone down who has (publicly, implicitly) expressed a desire no longer to be contacted, and for whatever reason making the contact in a forum in which it does not belong ("sorry if it was unwelcome" arguably belongs here; "how can we make it up to you?" belongs, if at all, in private communication), it seems to me is an unsavoury tactic.
The event doesn't really need more promotion -- it's already the largest developer conference in history. We're trying to raise money for a dozen non-profits in the coding space, and all money goes to them, not us -- so I'm not going to lose too much sleep if the event gets some more exposure incidentally from my reply to offer someone a free ticket.
If you read my bio, I think you'll see that I understand the demographic quite well -- http://about.me/Edro
at smaller screen sizes something in your formatting is breaking words apart. I first noticed on Chrome Android, and then I checked on Chrome on my MBP, and yes, when the window is too narrow, the words get broken but not hyphenated.
"How does lazy Ev" new line "aluation work?"