skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not many companies do large-scale marketing prior to receiving funding, but it does happen. After funding, you will see quite a bit of marketing, depding on the company and the product. Take for instance Loopt ads in New York cabs.

Most initial marketing is limited to blogs, startup-specific news, and the like, but every situation is different.
It's 99% making something people want; the sorts of projects in question are rarely something anyone actually wants.
I contend that concept products correlate highly with companies that have a high cash/agility ratio.

GM and Ford, despite their dire financial situation, have such low agility that they pass this test. Toyota had some Scion car at the last Seattle auto show that was shaped like a bank vault. WTF. Attaboy guys -- you just let your guard down and gave the signal that the Koreans (Kia and Hyundai) have an entry into that segment.

Microsoft is flush with cash but won't make the hard choice -- cut the anchor to the desktop OS and productivity software business to transition into whatever their next fortune would be. Windows Mobile exists to sell Windows NT licenses. MS Surface is a UI device for some corporate middleware thing that is currently shown on 15" CRTs in cubicles across the world? This must be what it's like to paint yourself into a corner.

I can't say too much about Nokia because I don't think I even know one person who owns a Nokia phone anymore, and I certainly can't think of anyone who owns a Nokia Smartphone. My perception is that they basically make trusty but crusty candybar phones for people who learned a phone UI in 1997 and don't want to change.

Ultimately I think it's inevitable. GM, Ford, MS, Nokia and now Toyota are all huge behemoths in their markets. They have the blessings of huge volumes, but the curse of not having a focused market direction (other than "yes").

Apple has the luxury of a small enough and well enough tended market definition (premium phones + audio players + consumer PCs) that they can tell a story with the release of each product. The sheer volume of MS or GM products makes that impossible. Perhaps concept products are (an impotent) attempt to simulate the same thing for companies that can't.
wow the down-modding here is definitely a case of down-modding out of disagreement. someone should fix that
Actually, we're up to almost 10 times that many users now!
Platform leader Benjamin Ling to leave Facebook, as platform continues to evolve
I think that's an example an evolutionary "just so story".

There may be some truth to it, but "genius" impacts such a small percentage of the population, that I think calling it genetic is quite a stretch.

Ambition, yes. Few people are ambitious enough to want anything more out of life than a 30+ inch TV.

But to take the leap into the territory of tremendous accomplishment, and to claim that it is a function of sex drive, cheapens it a bit in my opinion.

I think more likely there are just some people whose natural skills are called "genius" by society when they are young, and so they are society's "young geniuses". Who do we have today, Zuckerberg? Some kid who got into MIT?

Most of this is just hype. I think the true genius is someone who adapts over time and creates something tremendous that can't be credited to a social fad or a bubble.
BMW's brand tells a very clear story: "We sell performance sedans and four seat coupes. You can denormalize for comfort or price to a limited extent."

Even their convertibles 2 seaters (the old Z3 which was fairly slow) and their SUVs (X5, particularly) are as or more sporty than their competitors.

I believe that attempting to define your brand through your concept products implies impending death by mediocrity, but releasing concepts consistent with your brand are probably net neutral, maybe of minor benefit if you're midway between two home run product releases. Releasing the concept technology as a product is ultimately what moves brands, in my opinion.
I like this bit: "It also looks at articles that contain flags like (sp?), which is the author telling us that he or she failed high school English."

The poor spelling found on the Internet creates a positive feedback loop that makes it increasingly difficult to spell words properly.

Before wide acceptance of the Web, most written words appeared in magazines, books, newspapers, and other sources which were, hopefully, reviewed by professionals with more knowledge of spelling than the average person. If you were unsure of a spelling you could write out the word and easily recognize if the word matched the ordering of letters that you had seen so many times before.

Now, for some words, you've probably seen the improper spelling more often than the correct spelling. That makes it more difficult to recall or recognize the proper spelling. For children subjected to this misspelling onslaught at an early age, it must be worse. I suppose many of these spelling problems would not even exist if English were a more intuitive written language. However, I expect this all to go away as grammar checkers are embedded into web browsers.
Major Bug Kills VMware Powered Virtual Servers
Platform Lifts-Vertical Platform Lifts
Disabled Access | PlatForm Lifts :Axess4All Limited are part of the Cibes Lift Group, the market leading manufacturer of screw driven Platform Lifts,Disabled Lifts,Disabled Access in Europe.
BillG's Last Review
IBM competitor to Ebay?
I don't think the audience was that huge (he was about to be laid off, presumably because the ratings sucked). He did have enough of an audience to get critical mass. Beyond that, there was a lot of luck (and SEO).
I don't know exactly what these thugs are claiming, but it's far from nut-job territory to claim the feds have no business in these local drug and murder cases.

The unmitigated contempt the author has for posse comitatus is a little disturbing. He can't even entertain the idea that perhaps there are good reasons the federal military should be barred from domestic law enforcement?
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ie=UTF-8&q=knol

The top ad is knol.google, but wikipedia is the first result. (Unless you count that google finance graph).

Crap Google search is so cluttered.
I completely sympathize with Mark. I was an Apple hater for years, and was ecstatic when I discovered Linux (Ubuntu 7.04) and could move away from Windows as well.

Then a good friend of mine convinced me to get an iPhone. I was hesitant at first, but after trying one I decided to go for it.

Then I got a job where my choices were a MacBook Pro or a Dell with Vista. Three guesses which one I took (the first two don't count).

I must admit OS X is really nice, and full Unix compatibility is a huge plus. Still... sigh

[Edit: missing period]
I wrote down one idea here: http://www.spiteful.com/2008/08/12/so-youve-sold-your-first-...
Ask HN: Profitable startup's small revenue. What next?
Hi guys,

Two years ago, we launched our startup (all previous attempts didn't even last an year). It started out slow, but picked up gradually. Today, its one of the top 3 web services in its 'genre', in terms of traffic and market share.

We started as a free service, but moved to a 'freemium' business model last year. Our revenue comes from paid plans and advertising. Our monthly revenue ranges between $500-$1000. We are working on a few other avenues for marketing and promotion, which can increase our revenue.

We have no immidiate plans for IPO, or selling our startup, or finding an investor. We want to continue growing our startup organically.

But, I've been thinking about expansion a lot lately. I was wondering, how can one grow a startup once it reaches a profitable stage yet small-scale (like us at the moment)? We have revenue around a few hundred dollars coming in, but how can we take it to the 'next level' and increase our sales volume as well as profit margin?

Any advice, suggestions, or views are most welcome. Thanks!
Please, please, please take this back to reddit.
One of the more interesting things they're doing is that a bank up here in Canada is giving them away when you open a specific type of account:
http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/products/deposits/nolimit/index....

and they heavily advertise it on radio, tv and billboards.

It almost evokes the word "toaster" a la bank promotions from the 50s (or at least old tv shows). If what you're trying to do is sell, not a computer, but an "internet appliance" to a mass audience, it seems pretty smart.
iPhone owners who do care about Freedom 0 will just jailbreak the thing though.
if you feel like learning java or brushing up on some skills, you could hit up grails. rails clone that i like. not quite as productive as grails, but its not bad. still new but is showing promise.
Ask YC: Obtaining Public Record Data
I'm in the midst of creating a prototype for a system that combines Real Estate Public Record data (think Zillow level data) with Criminal & Sex Offender Public Record Data (think criminalsearches.com).

Zillow has a pretty clean API, but requires you to brand every page with their logo and links if you use their data. CriminalSearches has no API.

Public record data is pretty easy to find on a State by State basis - but would involve writing a crawler to gather the data for each State (for Criminal) & County (Real Estate). Is anybody aware of an easier way to get this data? I've tried to find people that will license the data feeds, but most don't allow commercial use of the data once you've subscribed to this type of service.

Any advice or expertise in the YC Community in this area? Thanks.
Marketing, marketing, marketing. Become a 'sponsor' of other companies, and look for a target audience. Just do anything you can to make people aware of your product.

Start sending emails, get on the phone. When you find people, give them a reason to use the product you're trying to sell.
Exactly. These devices have gone from being 'eeePC clones' to 'Netbooks'
We're actually looking at doing some BOSS-optimized searches on one of our sites, too. Really enjoy using the API so far. Y! gets a lot of points in my book for trying this out.

If you can't be the #1 search engine, get a piece of all the little vertical search engines.
Yes, initial marketing would normally look for a target audience (Not just on the internet - get on the phone too). Spend some time on forums, blogs, etc.

Find websites that allow you to write about your product(s) (What it is, why people should use it, etc).

Maybe even getting in contact with tech-based magazines. Ask if they can do a review of your products (Or hell, even feature the product/link to the product on a cover CD if they have one).
It actually looks better than 99% of the WinAmp skins I
remember.
Ask the EveryBlock guys how they get their data. http://www.everyblock.com
Home chemistry and a medical device company are two completely different things. Medical devices and pharmaceuticals fall under FDA regulations which require quality control, proper labeling, auditing etc. As far as I know this man was not working on a medical product or pharmaceutical and as such does not fall under any FDA regulations.
Fair-Trade Ticketing
Forget the Olympics. This is what everyone should be watching on TV.
Cool new language: Fan
...because clearly listening to music is the exact same thing as a website.
My opinion comes down 180 degrees from the article Author.

The full name of the brand is "Eee PC", not just "Eee" - a mistake the article author makes. It's clumsy and inelegant, too long, nobody says the whole thing, and if you say it aloud it sounds the same as "EPC" which isn't good for literal word of mouth -- no google result for EPC sends you the right way.

ASUS isn't even pronounced the intuitive way (for English speakers): http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/eee-pc/how-to-pronounce-eee-pc-32... -- it's evidently pronounced ah-SOOs, not AY-suhs. Branding faux-pas (fox-pass, if you please).

Asus is fighting an uphill battle here. Not only does nobody know what an Eee PC is, they don't know what an Asus is. I have been geeking since I was a toddler and I know Asus makes motherboards, but even I don't know if they're any good. They sound too much like Acer, a company that does make PCs, but not the one you care about in this case. In fact, in my free association exercise I think Asus -> Acer -> monitor for my friend's Packard Bell 486 a long time ago. Uphill battle indeed.

In fact, I didn't even know Asus made ready to buy computers, until I visited their site and recognized one that a coworker owns and is quite proud of.

Furthermore, if you search for Asus on google, the first hit is for "ASUS International" and the second hit is for "ASUSTek Computer Inc.". Even they don't know what their brand is.

These are great gadgets but their branding is screwed, stem to stern. They've pretty much rendered themselves ineligible to be a premium / high margin provider in this field. The consolation prize is they know how to play the cut-throat margins game, so they can at least work that angle.

If I was running the show I'd rename Eee to something that prounounced easily and spelled like it sounded, and then anchor that as the brand name. Move the current products under that name, so the "Asus Eee PC Surf" would become a "WhateverBrand Surf". After building that brand up move the entire Asus prebuilt laptop line under a sub-brand of the new company name. As now, position as a company that makes easy to use computers, differentiate by using customized and streamlined Linux. Sell the main product with a clear slogan (think "Just big enough" without the obvious phallic misinterpretation), and maybe they'd have a consumer brand that they could build from.
There's a yawning chasm between "works" and "doesn't suck".
If that were the only thing they were claiming it would be different. But they are claiming that the person referred to on the federal documents isn't them because it's in capital letters.
You're assuming that because they can't learn from mistakes they can't learn at all.

The article is not specific enough.
I knew it would be stupid from the moment I saw that David Brooks* wrote it.

*http://www.dickipedia.org/dick.php?title=David_Brooks
AffSpere.com The NEW Article Directory Online With A Twist
Hi, Cory here. Today I have something special to share with you. It’s a great NEW article directory for article publishers looking to get their articles syndicated aroung the web, but at the same time get paid for doing nothing more them submitting your articles.
I remember learning about China in a class and one of the things that was said was that they perceived Communism slightly differently from the old USSR, they perceived it in a more Confucian light.
Robot dogs will put you out of business.
Change the hyperlinks into buttons(those aren't a good case for hyperlinks--they don't link anywhere) and expand the words into full words rather than abbreviations and you'd have a nice little skin there.
After living here for 3 months and experiencing laws such as the ridiculous liquor-sales regulations, I quickly realized that while there happens to be an anomalous preponderance of smart, progressive-thinking people here, it is still at heart (or at least in law) a very Puritan state.
How to Launch a New Platform
I've found a sauna helps by sweating the compound out of my skin.
How Renters Work The System To Live For Free In One of America's Most Expensive Cities
Aren't sales a better metric for determining marketing effectiveness? (vs. Eric Sink's personal opinion)

The EEE is targeted mainly to consumers in Taiwan and the rest of Asia, where it has consistently sold out since it was introduced. It even sells out at the Taiwanese computer store in SF where I buy my ethernet cables.
Are you capable of pink box testing?
normally, we do a regression on this behavior alone to conclude this. This is epidemiology research, it singles one factor.
Hacker News Top Submissions
I can't modify the firmware image in my Bosch engine ECU, even though doing so could significantly improve the performance of my car. Mark is right. Nobody gives a shit.
Of course, when Twitter goes down, which is actually much more often than MobileMe, well, people are just up in arms. And while some are likely turning back to e-mail, I still think that Twitter is a bigger force than many of us realize.

Gah! Personal E-mail on your handset was never in! People are not up in arms because these features still work:

- The telephone itself (i.e the feature where you actually talk using words and the words come out the other end)

- SMS

- Exchange syncing (the only reason I bought the iPod touch software upgrade)

- Webmail using the spectacular browser

- The apps for facebook/twitter/IM/etc

The twitter echo chamber effect is astonishing. It's far more self-flagellating than even the blahgosphere, which was almost insufferable for a while a few years ago.
Ok and if you speak French, go running and then tell your mom on http://trainoo.com :-)
... and Apple will do whatever they can to brick those phones, and in the arms race that follows, it's a coin flip as to whether Apple will win (like DirecTV did) or lose (like Microsoft did with the first Xbox).
Congrats!

You made it further than most startups ever do. Can you share with us what you do?

I'd echo imawesty's advice: expand and profit by acquiring new users.

Best of luck -
It's similar to the argument of riding on half-flat tires, because it gives you a better workout.

But it feels fantastic to move efficiently. I don't know if that gives a better physical benefit (though I bet it's a factor) but it provides motivation. And that helps with the most crucial factor of all for effective exercise: to do it.
Yes but my wife frowns upon it.
This artackle (sp?) wuz purdy (sp?) funny. I thought something was fishy.
Actually there you have Twitter's monetization. Let free accounts follow 100 users and also let them have 100 followers. And then have different levels of premium followers for businesses who want to use tweets as a public relations tool. i.e. $20/mo bumps it up to 500, $40/mo bumps it up to 1500, $100/mo bumps it up to 5000 and $299/mo lets you have unlimited followers
Coming from the South, I'd say it really would depend. Making shit in your garage or shed is practically a God given right in the South. I encountered more people there who regularly made things than I have in bigger cities. I think people would feel toying around is certainly all right if done on your own land and in a way that your screw up will only cost you your own life or property. That said community tolerance of tinkering is related to cultural norms. Things that are really "bad" will get people against you (eg better booze is fine work where better meth is certainly not).

Honestly, I'd guess the article's kind of regulation or enforcement is probably more correlated with population density than anything else. The more packed in people get the more concerned everyone is about someone mucking up the finely tuned dance.
I don't think Apple is as pressed to fight this war as DirecTV was.

Also you can jailbreak the thing without additional hardware which wasn't possible in the DirecTV scenario. I doubt that we'll see jailbroken iphones going away anytime soon, the process is becoming effortless even for non-hacker types and the benefits are obvious (even if you've never heard of Freedom 0).
Virtual Reality (plus an exercise pill) will put you out of business.

It doesn't mean that there isn't money to be made each step of the way.
Intriguingly, bike shops do not sell long sleeve tops (that protect you from sunburn) - but surf shops do. Cyclists have told me that they don't get sunburn - even when cycling in the sun all day. But surfers do get sunburn. I'm not sure what to make of this.

I'm theorizing that cyclists are somehow protected by constant movement (unlike surfers waiting for a wave). Perhaps the airflow is protective? Or perhaps it makes cyclists aerobically fitter, and this makes their skin more resistant to sunburn (and therefore skin cancer).
It's an 800-word op-ed column. The essence of the form is generalizations, vague trend-spotting, and suggestive questions.

You've also deceptively misquoted the article to make it easier to mock. Brooks' actual question is "What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West?"

There's a lot more nuance to that question than your rephrasing, and Brooks is just as aware of Japan, Singapore, and South Korea as you are.
That's a very good point. My company for instance builds project management software for (digital imaging|photography) companies who manage several clients at a time. I literally had to work and breath in one of these companies just to write the software for them.

Had I built that software for myself, it wouldn't had have any traction with the employees in that company.
Strange that you amongst all the people here touting his tautologies had just realized that.
This is how we roll on HN:

1. Something happens
2. Someone links to the 'something' blog
3. Someone else links to TechCrunch which is just now catching up
4. Comments are made in the TechCrunch submission about TechCruch not really even being involved in 'what happened'.

Metafiction isn't just for literature anymore.
Interesting read. I don't know the author, but it seems he practiced a lot yet fumbled some. Which can be normal, as writing code in a whiteboard is just not natural. To test raw coding skills, it would be a better idea to provide or have candidates come with a latop with their favorite dev enviroment/IDE/editors so they can code in a more realistic situation, the way they do every day.

It is always a good idea to get a good refresh of CS basics, and algorithms, and more advanced stuff as data graphs, but at the end of the day, (if the interviewers are good), your raw skills will show up. Just like math, skills are built in top of each-other and show with time, an you can advance more if you internalize low level abstractions (pointers, linked lists, hashtables, etc). You can't just pick a book and learn these things in few days.

But a 9.5 hrs interview is grueling and a tad exessive, also tells something about the company that you are joining. If they like interviews that long, means that have some huge bureocratic internal processes. Interviews by 3 technical people, and one manager/product manager should be more than enough to spot a good a candidate, within a 4hr time-frame.

Anymore than that, it is just a waste a time.
Thank you! Sure, I'll keep submitting whatever I find interesting in the little time I have.
From the article: And San Francisco has its share of heartless landlords. One extreme example is the terror tactics allegedly employed by property owners Kip and Nicole Macy, who were charged with numerous felonies earlier this year for, among other things, cutting the support beams from one tenant's floor, burglarizing another's apartment, and cutting off utilities to another.

The key word here is "allegedly". As in "alleged by a tenant who doesn't pay his rent and is fighting eviction".
Minority Report is here: rolling video billboards in Boston
It was my major in college.
I'd be interested to see what Tufte's might look like ;)
Except that it actually gives information.
Thanks - we will try to get a hold of them. They don't look like they're using verbatim Public Record datasets - but may come in handy.
My Son a Hacker? I lol'ed
Seven-Sigma dating. It's like six sigma only we don't know what we're talking about.

I'm with several of the commenters. There's a big difference between books and reality. I'm not going as far as edw with his "modeling controls the discussion" (e-gads! Get this man a UML primer and be quick about it!) but there's a long, long way from a guy peddling a book to a guy you'd actually want helping you to do anything.

I'm not throwing books out. Not by any means. Lots of my friends have written software books and I'm peddling one myself nowadays. Got a bookcase full of some good and some not-so-good books. But it's a medium, and the medium has its quirks.
As Blogs Grow, So Does Spam
Scientists closer to developing invisibility cloak