BranchOut Falsifies Wall Street Journal Quote

I know many startups don't link back to the original article because they don't want to drive traffic away from their site. It's not for any particularly nefarious reason at all. When people see a link, they'll click on it, and they often won't find their way back.

I don't understand how they got 25m users to begin with. I they they made me a profile one click after a friend invited me. So I guess I do understand how they got 25m users...

"falsify" means "to forge or alter as to deceive," not disprove.

Did the same search. Wow. This is pretty scummy; I had thought they were bad but, not this bad. I already was not too fond of them due to the number of requests to join their service I receive on Facebook.

Is the WSJ fully indexed by Google? I thought they hid lots of stuff behind the paywall.

(Not saying the quote isn't manufactured, but that a Google search isn't a good test.)

I considered the syndication possibility. If that's the case, BranchOut may excuse themselves with a bit of "Well technically, it was in the Wall Street Journal..." However, I think that sort of excuse doesn't do much for one's integrity in these circles. It might do as much for their image as saying "The five stars are just a divider for the text" might.

I've used the Oxford comma since high school when my favorite English teacher introduced me to them. At the time I didn't know they had a name. I found out they were called Oxford commas about five days ago when watching an episode of Boss on Starz. Since looking it up then I suddenly come across the term a lot now which is weird because I had never heard that term before.

Apparently quite common among hackers. I remember reading a section about it in ESR's Jargon File ages back that had a great explanation:

  Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

  Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd”.

  Standard usage would make this

  Then delete a line from the file by typing “dd.”

  but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the string
  d-d-dot, and it happens that in vi(1), dot repeats the last command accepted. The
  net result would be to delete two lines!

http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html

Typically newspapers omit the comma; my guess is to save ink/space, but if anyone knows for sure, I'm all ears.

Wsj has a style guide, which presumably says no Oxford commas.

When you read a comma in writing, there is a pause in the flow of the sentence, like there would be in speech. Overusing commas can distract from the point you are trying to make.

I find the Oxford comma is completely unnecessary. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel a common turn of phrase (like black and blue) necessitates the addition of a comma, try switching around the items in the list (i.e. 'black, red and blue' vs. 'red, black and blue'). Less commas == more flow.

PS. I am only posting my 2 cents because you misused "it's" in your last parenthetical.

From Wikipedia:

"Opinions vary among writers and editors on the usage or avoidance of the serial comma. In American English, the serial comma is standard usage in non-journalistic writing that follows the Chicago Manual of Style. Journalists, however, usually follow the AP Stylebook, which advises against it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma

I've done it and I've seen it done by others. When I did it I banked on people ignoring the heading above it which reads "Never yet featured on" then some prominent logos below it. Here: https://writeapp.me at the bottom of the page. I was trying to be tongue-in-cheek but it can easily be misconstrued. It looks like BranchOut really does want to mislead in a more sinister way.

You won't have to - the plastic back can be folded in half and won't break.

The "Hacker News Effect" is really not that bad. A modest Linux server runing WordPress with WP Super Cache can easily handle the traffic.

There's no joke about how to tell when a startup CEO is lying, there is however a joke about politicians.

Seriously though, president is probably the least important job in america. I bet America would be just fine without a president for the next 100 years. Why you elect presidents based on things like 'likability' and 'electability' is because it's a very unimportant job, that just about anyone can do.

Probably why America doesn't elect very many highly trained people to do the job. Community organizers, peanut farmers, coke addicts, philanderers, actors, etc.

Why does this get downvoted so hard? It's a proven fact that both parties lie through their teeth. I understand HN isn't a political platform, but this is a serious subject relating to business as well as politics. If you're going to downvote, provide a counter argument.