skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd do the early phases like this:

1.) Release to family members, trusted friends & people that have a stake in the project. Get their feedback.

2.) Release on news.YC. Get their feedback.

3.) Find some influential bloggers in your field. Don't release to them; instead, send them a personal e-mail asking for their feedback.

4.) Go to forums in your field, pick out some dedicated early users that are really into the space. Send them personal e-mails and get their feedback.

5.) Release to the blogs and forums you identified in 3.) and 4.) Pay close attention to feedback and iterate.

6.) Release on Reddit/Digg/the rest of your list.

I've been a part of a startup that tried the PR blitz thing and it failed miserably, because we didn't serve any useful purpose. Gotta make it basically good before people will pay attention.

There've also been several times when I've released on news.YC to a very ho-hum reception and then killed the project, or otherwise took it in very different directions. That's probably not the response you want to hear, but it's much better to kill a product without a market early than to keep improving it speculatively.
User-generated content and the producer-consumer and producer-producer models.
Piotr Wozniak (inventor of SuperMemory) wrote about this eight years ago: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
tried to register right now but can't for some reason ...
Because we all miss Calvin and Hobbes. So it makes us feel nice to see Calvin again, even if it's not the "real" one.
First, fix your subscription news form.

"There has been an error submitting your email address. Please contact us at contact@onista.com."
"Why these large firms, and now even places like YCombinator continually think the best way to move forward in software is to hire as many gullible young naive programmers as possible and work them to death is beyond me."

Seems like this guy doesn't understand how YC works (and judging by some of his comments, OP as well) any more than the last troll. YC doesn't hire anyone other than the occasional caterer (and to my knowledge, none of them work 80 hour weeks).

PG invests in people and says to work very hard (not as a mandate, but as advice, which he gives just as freely to people he doesn't fund) and in the troll's mind he's hiring them and forcing them to work for 2 months without sleep.

My question is, why does this sort of stuff keep climbing up the page? It's not interesting, it's not well thought. It's just senseless accusations from people who apparently didn't even take the time to read YC's FAQ.
They received VC money (U$S 15 million).

So, we are on a bubble, or we are not seeing something.
Yeah, the IPO has (at least for now) ceased to be an indicator of success.
I ditched the article after the writer failed to understand the rationale behind the naming of the common scientific behavior known as "positive feedback." Clearly alarmist BS.
Also, YC gets 6% of the first round. That gets diluted significantly over time by further investment. By the time a company hits a liquidity event they usually have significantly less.
I think it's surprising that we still can't figure out the purpose of an observable process that blows a third (or more) of our lives, yet somehow we've come to a definitive theory on how the entire universe came into existence.

I guess the more we know, the more we realize we don't know.
The message they send is clear:

Not even the sky is a limit!
Ask HN: What top-level domains do you register?
When registering a domain for a startup is .com, .net, and .org enough or do I need to consider additional top-level domains?
Hmmmm.... if change is irreversible, then shouldn't we just start partying it up?

It will probably take few centuries before the earth start getting inhabitable, so us, our kids, and our grand-kids will be fine. They will have to put up with droughts, flood,etc, but they will be able to cope.

Ah, and earth will be fine. There have already been 3 cataclysmic events, where 90% of life died (65-70%, on the latest one), and earth just recovered from it, with new dominant species.

So, earth will recover from this too, just not with humans on it.
Lise Buyer to Facebook: Call Me
When former Wall Street analyst Lise Buyer helped take Google public in 2004, anything seemed possible. Yet on the heels of a quarter when not a single technology company went public, most in Silicon Valley are no longer sanguine about their options. Buyer doesn’t understand why.
Bluffing Could Be Common In Prediction Markets
The future of communications is passive.
I sometimes read things like this and wonder if I should honestly take them seriously or not.

Cuil did great on the PR front. Sure, their product wasn't all that wonderful, but getting that much attention even if lackluster is something most startups can only dream of.

We're in a similar situation to the poster, but since we're B2B our "testing" basically means working with two customers. We're planning on launching with as much hooplah as we can raise when our demo site goes live in the near future.

There's a lot of power in a launch; it's your chance to get it right and get some attention. At no other point early in the startup will you have as much momentum to getting PR attention. If you can pull it off reasonably it's a great chance to catapult your startup a good ways down the road.
Hey, I Googled 'Onista' and found your recent Vimeo video: http://www.vimeo.com/1376104 as well as some introductions in various forums. Looks like you're building up the hype well.

My 2c after watching the video: I don't understand the instant negotiation. Is there a limit on the number of times I can submit a bid? If not, can't I just start really low and then increment by $1 or $2 until I meet the minimum? If there is a limit, what's stopping me from setting up multiple accounts so that I can discover the minimum, then bid that amount on my legit account? Since this seems to be a major differentiation point, I hope you've ensured there is no easy way to cheat the system ;)

Also, how do people pay each other? If you're relying on people to exchange money privately, how are you going to handle disputes?

One more thing about the video: your accent. I'd try to get someone without an accent, probably a woman. I think this would appeal more to your target audience.

How many people do you have working on this besides you?

As far as the Onista site goes, you've done a fantastic job with it. There seems to do and explore and the interface is intuitive and clean.

Wish you the best of luck in the coming weeks!

Matt
You don't. Alpha tests are, by definition, internal-only.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89
Here's one from the GroupLens project for movies,

http://www.movielens.org/quickpick

Is HTML "machine - queryable" for you :-) ? I didn't see an api, sorry.
Why no downmod for links?
Didn't think I'd be the one to say this since my first reaction to Hacker News was that I was very turned off and offended by downvotes without motivations.

My rule is:
* Upvote good posts that you agree with.
* Comment on posts you disagree with or want to add something significant to.
* Downvote only when people write racist stuff etc.

But lately the forum has been filled with links that are irrelevant, blog posts with very low quality etc and the only way I can disagree with them is to answer them but I don't want to because that brings attention to them in the form of many replies plus it makes me waste my time on them which is what I don't want to.

So why isn't there a downvote for OPs/links?
I'm gonna go with a guess and say "Ummm, no."

I did, however, look up the folks who wrote this. Climatologists? Nope, some guy called Andrew Simms from some place called the New Economics Foundation. These are the same guys who made up that "Happy Planet Index" which got a bunch of press a few years ago by ranking the countries of the world from best to worst according to various bullshit criteria with carefully tuned weightings (Cuba was fifth, the US was 150th slightly behind Ethiopia and Burkina Faso). The guy is currently billing himself as "head of the climate change programme at the NEF", but as far as I can figure out he's also "director of policy" and wrote or co-wrote most of their other publications. I can't find any reference to any actual academic qualifications other than the fact that he "studied at the London School of Economics".
The problem with the "Tipping Point" is that we humans have gotten to the point where we could cool the earth if we got desperate enough. We know from studying volcanoes that injecting large amounts of sulphur particulates into the stratosphere will cool the earth quite effectively. Any number of industrialized nations could do enough of this to counteract global warming for modest fractions of their GDPs. There are other materials we could use that would persist higher than the stratosphere and reduce certain negative consequences.

Unlike other things we can do about climate change, this is also quick!

Of course, the problem with this, is that there are sure to be unintended consequences. Perhaps this is another sort of "Tipping Point" -- where humanity follows a spiral of ever-increasing interventions with unintended consequences that spiral out of control.

More important: the ability to manipulate the global climate will have profound geopolitical and strategic ramifications. These are perhaps just as dangerous as the CO2 tipping point.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_keith_s_surprising_...
your skin certainly knows where and when to (re)grow...
Don't go overboard. For example, neither facebook.org nor facebook.net redirects to facebook.com. And you don't even have to own the .com. 37Signals doesn't own the .com for any of Backpack, Basecamp, Campfire or Highrise. Get the .com, and then go worry about making it good, instead of worrying about what other tld you need.
This reminds me of slide rule competitions.

I remember being in a typewriter repair shop in Albuquerque and they had a small collection of antiquated equipment.

One artifact was a slide rule that seemed like about the size of a very large bayonet. Even had a sheath, a hilt. It had what looked like katakana written on it.

Maybe we should bring back slide rule competitions back.
Direct Marketing is Dead. Long Live Direct Marketing
Data as a Catalyst
Suggestion: A certain amount of karma is needed to submit links! It's easy enough to get karma through comments. That would probally help a lot on the signal-to-noise ratio.
Net Neutrality and Metered Broadband
With automated tagging, Web links can surprise
Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed.
Moved to new server and missed recreating this table. This table was not part of the other schema.
Just when you thought you've seen the nerdiest thing in the world...
Dave Gentzel: The Quest for Something Better
All of which, in a sense, are a Between (or a Break).
Social Media Marketing Ain’t Always “Cheap”
Hey Matt,

Yeah, that video will be linked from our index page to show demo. Regarding accent, yes that is one thing we need to fix. I and my partners all are Indians (moved to US almost years back) and hence have heavy accent. I am trying to find somebody who does not have accent and willing to help us do the narration.

About negotiation process, buyer can attempt as many times as he wants to negotiate the price, but if it is accepted then it will be locked for that particular product for that particular buyer. We have written pretty smart algorithm for negotiation and it will be impossible for buyer to know the minimum because it keeps on changing based on demand, requests, popularity, and lot of other factors.

So far we are 3 working on this parttime. We all have fulltime jobs and are developing onista on weekends and evenings.
Alpha tests are, by definition, internal-only.

There are several different definitions. One definition I like is that alpha testing is when you know there are still missing features, while beta testing is when the planned features exist and you're just trying to make sure that they all work properly -- in which case you could very easily have public alpha testing.
Thanks,
The plan (and more) that I am outlining on blog is something we are planning to follow in stages. not in one day.
So it will be as you are suggesting.

I have had it testing from some eBay sellers already, but certainly having it testing from couple of hundred users will help a lot.
"... it would be really cool to have a cute/humorous story to explain the name (and the business), so that someone mentioning the name would be asked to explain it, and get to pass on an interesting story. eg. Ycombinator. Easy for me to suggest - but coming up with such a story is harder. :-) ..."

A parent company that creates other companies as its namesake suggests ... "a higher-order function which computes a fixed point of other functions" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator
Wouldn't that stop a lot of people from getting involved here too?
Sounds like a good plan and yes this is what we shall do. Iterating is the best approach as we get some time to fix the issues before more users know about it.

Any idea on how to find influential bloggers? (Besides Googling)
Like is there any blog searching place that shows me ranks of blogs (based on traffic) and and have those distributed in categories like (Technology, Business, E-commerce, blah...)
http://www.drquincy.com/resources/tutorials/webserverside/ou...
(in PHP)

Also:

http://mtop.sourceforge.net/

http://rackerhacker.com/mysqltuner/

https://launchpad.net/mysql-tuning-primer

http://maatkit.sourceforge.net/doc/maatkit.html

http://hackmysql.com/mysqlreport

http://hackmysql.com/mysqlsla
Usually I err on the side of not killing stuff critical of YC no matter how crappy it is

That sounds like a good policy, and I think you should have stuck to it in this case and erred on the not-killing side.

I mean, I can understand killing obvious deliberate trolling (of the form "YC is gay ha ha ha") but in this case I think it's just not very well researched. Anyone looking at justin.tv's front page briefly (if, say, they were trying to write a blog post that involved looking at two dozen websites) could be forgiven for thinking it's a youtube clone -- the whole lower half of the page is devoted to pre-recorded videos with lengths in minute-second format.
Not necessarily. I'm quite a newbie here, but have enjoyed the discussion already. Then again, I do specifically try to ignore your typical trolls/spammers.
An Airliner Outfitted to Wash, Rinse and Repeat
I agree... I've seen a lot of very poor quality links making it to the front page and (I guess because I'm a jerk) I'd like to be able to downvote stuff thats clearly off topic/low quality.
I don't think low-karma users are the reason for a "bad" signal-to-noise ratio in submissions. I think that with more users, there is simply less consensus on what constitutes signal and what constitutes noise. A karma threshold for submitting wouldn't help with this.
There are editors that remove obviously off-topic posts...but sometimes it takes a while for them to kill stuff. And lately, the new page is pretty heavy on the spam and off-target links--obviously folks just throwing their site against the Web 2.0 community news wall and hoping something sticks.

I'd be content with a maximum of one OP downvote per week, or something. If it's precious and rare, then I need to really mean it to use it. Of course, that means that a few downvotes ought to be enough to keep a story off the front page. I'd also be perfectly content with it having a karma requirement (if you do more than lurk or submit spam, it's impossible not to rack up reasonable karma in a short period of time, so that's a pretty low impact restriction on regular users).
Is a large number of people involved a good thing?
This provides good insight into some of the techniques used to make intuitively slow dynamic operations very fast in practice!
Some observations:

Firstly congratulations on getting the idea from zero to launch in one month. Even if the thing fails you have invested only 1+ resources building. I tried this yesterday, registered and had a play around. Impressions:

- name: 2 words, elephant that never forgets but why spicy? longer to type

- registration: faultless

- no favicon: with tabbed browsers favicons make it easy to find

- demo: no video demonstration OR quick visual demonstration from front page to show canned demo how app is better

- clean urls: yes, but where is clean url on say popular? ~ http://spicyelephant.com/decks?direction=ASC&order=popul...

- feedback: google group (good) no twitter, blog. Would have thought a twitter account and blog was a good idea for features and latest new decks?

- loading: no check for javascript block

- layout: readability reduced by lots of text. cull text.

- New deck: there is no easy way to create new deck once registed (ie: need a big easy to find button for people with really big thumbs so they do not have to hunt for it). Link to create deck should be off front page. When user is logged in "Make new deck" should be at the front page not just http://spicyelephant.com/profile

Now most of these are pretty trivial. The app works. What about marketing and getting feedback from users to improve? The only real things I'd suggest would be:

- add "make new deck" to front page easier to find

- add a demo walk through with story with pictures and text showing how the app is better

- add blog and twitter support (more feedback & data push).

One feature request I'd really like to see is a widget I could add to a third party site linking back which allows other companies to create information, test and show users results.
We have done lot of testing on our application using some external users as well and fixed close to 2k bugs to make it more stable. As you are suggesting, we are planning public Alpha.
I'd also add:

- Contact form fails
An interesting counterpoint (kind of anyway): http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...
God I hope so. Only 8 years and change until people can start arguing about OTHER scientific/political hot potatoes.
I missed that on my first read-through. Yes, that's truly terrible.

But if you stopped after that you missed the bit about how great life was in Britain in the period 1938-1944, when we apparently were using less resources, but were happier, and how we need to get that feeling back.

update: Also, the article promises that if you want more then there's information available on their website. Unfortunately I can't find anything on their website except two copies of an enormous counter (yup, still 100) and an invitation to spam your friends with their monthly newsletter. Can anyone find it?
It'd be nice to have a [pdf] warning in the title of this one.
I don't upvote anything until I've actually read it.

Assuming this is the default behaviour of most users it shouldn't be a problem to comment on bad links.

If I see a new link with a couple of comments but only 1 point, I'll quickly read the comments to make sure it's worth clicking first.

That said, I think adding a small barrier to submitting links wouldn't be a bad thing. Even stopping anyone with 10 karma or less would mean that people have to have a small investment in the community already. Hopefully that would mean they would have a feel for what is appropriate material.

EDIT: I just want to credit ichverstehe for the karma to submit thing. My comment was a response to him
Britain seen from above
Missed addressing the payment question.

On Onista, users can pay each other the same way they do on eBay.

Paypal, Credit Card, Money Order, Cashier's Check, Personal Check
I'm not really one to ask, since it's not like I've had great luck finding influential bloggers, and I usually leave the marketing to others anyway. I'd check out your competitors, see who's commenting or writing about them, and then see if they have blogs or homepages though.
I'll repeat here what I've heard PG say before: If you want to improve the quality of HN, focus on upvoting. Find good stuff and upvote it.

Try reading the top links on the "new" page. If you click on an article and it's no good, write a comment explaining why you think so. It'll be one of the first comments on the article, and will serve as a sort of mini-review for those of us who tend to skim comments before reading articles.

Incidentally, reading comments before articles is a great way to help filter out the stuff you won't like.

If you find a good, relevant link on the new page, upvote it! This is one of the most important things you can do. Lots of decent articles disappear from HN without ever getting their first upvote.

Oddly, despite having seen an untold number of complaints about the lack of downvoting, I can never remember the stated rationale for not having it. But I think it has to do with the ease with which gangs of people could organize to downvote articles out of existence.

(You might think that claques of upvoters would also be a problem, but it occurs to me that artificial upvoting is a problem that gets noticed very quickly -- everybody sees what makes it to the top -- and can then be fixed, whereas the swift, silent, and unfair disappearance of articles can be harder to detect and reverse. It's a much easier problem to detect bad links that accidentally hit the front page than it is to detect good links that accidentally get banished to the gigantic, spam-filled garbage heap.)
I really like the design sense here. But the decision to give some whitespace padding between items (sites, movies, etc.) means that you can't get an accurate idea of the totals for a given period. Compare to these: http://www.leebyron.com/else/streamgraph/

For the movie graphs, the visualizations are limited to the top twenty-five movies so it doesn't matter. But his traffic visualization shows all referrers. Those graphs would convey more information without the whitespace.
I think that software patents have failed us because code is still magic to the USPO.

One computer that, for example, calculates large prime numbers looks exactly like another that does the same. The patent system considers the one a copy of the other, It cannot understand that there are radically different ways to calculate large primes. In short they actually don't understand software at all and try to treat computers like gear filled machines.
PDF of the actual paper: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rsami/papers/manip.pdf
Sports Illustrated Moves Fantasy Football onto Facebook; Tries to Catch Up