skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Petercooper shared a great list here are some of my thoughts...

We failed to promote our last start up very well (Seekler.com), and our new start doesn't rely on eyeballs so we aren't really promoting it. That being said we did learn a few things. Some of these are probably specific to our type of site which was silly / interesting lists, other tips might be more generalizable.

* Focus more niche, whenever we specifically targeted and marketed based around a niche we were far more successful (batman comics vs. comics http://seekler.com/lists/Best+Batman+Graphic+Novels+(Comics) )

* Engage highly motivated users, we wanted to make a great horror movie list and we found a couple horror movie blogs, forums, and fans and got them involved in the process from the beginning and after they all thought it was good we promoted it.

* Time you promotion, some days are better than others to announce a link / site / news. Figure out what days are best for your kind of content. Then try to focus all of the announcements across various sites into one day. Single day focus always did much better for us than slowly stringing along a few links here and there. (likely because of the larger social news and voting effects)

* Get a good relationship with a couple bloggers that write about your topics. We had a few that we could email at any time and they were happy to add a link pointing out our new announcement or release.

* Blog and Twitter we have had a few blog articles drive as much traffic to the site as any marketing attempt. I have also been amazed at how many people will sign up to follow site announcements via twitter if you don't abuse it by posting all the time.

* One in awhile go for something edgy, some of our mainstream lists did well, but some of our weirder ones were easier to get links for.

* Share the wealth if you get some good traffic from other sites link back to people, you will find them more likely to mention something you do if you have been showing them some love.

* Spend a little time making sure you site is OK at SEO, just good enough that you aren't hurting yourself when you do get linked up for various topics.

Anyways just a couple tips off the top of my head, our attempts where never hugely successful but we had a handful of good traffic hear and there. Hope some of my thoughts help.
Or rather, Google starts measuring subconscious effects of normal marketing.
Sorry if this is inappropriate for this site. I need beta testers with Blackberrys so that I can test the different screen sizes.
Touche! :-)
Rapidshare limits volume for premium users; kills anonymous downloading
Coders get 70 percent of Android Market revenue
RIP Rapidshare.
I don't think the design of the physical phone itself is enough to beat the iPhone. I know people say it's all about the software, but that's not really true. I don't understand why companies are trying to compete with apple without making good aesthetic and behavioral design THE top priority. It's like the zune vs. the iPod, and the G1 is the zune.
It's "touché," jerk.
Understand Your User
Day late, but for launching apps, "Shared File List API" - which i mentioned originally.
Hmm... interesting. If I were to go that route I would probably get an Asus eee instead.
I waited for 2 hours, only to be told that I should take Tylenol, get rest and drink fluids. I was very upset

Why? There was nothing wrong. Would you have been happier if they diagnosed cancer? I find the (mostly American) obsession with pills very very strange. I hate seeing this getting imported to Canada, but more and more this seems to be the case.
My cousin studied architecture at Cooper Union from '97-'99 but left because he couldn't stand deconstructionism. That doesn't help train more competent architects, but maybe it's a signal that schools will see.
Thanks for the info lacky. The comments about support and speed are pretty alarming. LeaseWeb might be worth looking into but cost isn't really a concern right now. We need premium (fast) service and a host who isn't afraid of the possibility of a frivolous suit (especially since we pay any and all legal fees!).
It's just acutely sad that the paper of record is no better off than the rest....

Speaking as someone at a newspaper, I can tell you that the NYT is better off than many of the rest.

In short, they've been making moves towards becoming an Internet company for longer than others, as evidenced by their 100+ person development team, use of Ruby on Rails for major projects, and overall technical talent. That is a unique position among newspapers.
Thanks for your reply. You will note that I was specifically writing about software entrepreneurs who learn and prove knowledge of the latest technologies and latest languages. They will never have a tough time finding a job if they needed to. Even before I edited and added onto my post, I mentioned that.

In my opinion, if they're broke, assuming they are software developers who use the latest technologies to create live projects they can demonstrate (and not some other kind of entrepreneur), then maybe they should "cash in" on their earned skills and work for a while.

Also, having lots of obligations requiring a steady income are needs that should be taken care of first. Everybody is in a different financial situation short term, but the fact is that if you give a startup a go, and use the latest technologies, you won't have a problem finding a job if you need to.

As to at what point a software entrepreneur should put off their ambitions and work at a related company instead for a while, that will depend on the startup and personal circumstances, so it is out of scope for my posts.
There is very little room for computing in pure math research. The Four Color Theorem is still an exception and not just because mathematicians can’t program. That said this is irrelevant because the article is about the undergraduate program. Only a minority of undergraduate math majors end up as PhDs in math. The rest do something else. Sadly some of them end up teaching high school or as actuaries (no offence). If they want to do something else but still math related then yes, they definitely need a programming course!
I named the host above (Rackspace) a few hours prior to your post. ;) And no, nothing wrong with vaginas...
I might have to fly out of LGA instead of JFK soon to try this out sometime.

Though, most phones have some sort of bluetooth capabilities nowadays. How bad of an idea would it be to transmit the boarding pass from the phone to the receiver that way instead of having to rely on the scanner?
HTC has a lot of stuff up their sleeves, this is just their first Android phone for the US. froma design perspective, before the iPhone came out, HTC was lightyears ahead of any other handset manufacturer. I'm very much looking forward to their future Android phones, especially since i cant freaking stand at&t and my iphone freezes/reboots all the freaking time. also waiting for instinctiv shuffle for iphone 3g haha. and shopsavvy.
Frankly, I don't get this attitude. Who is fighting Matt and his generation? Life is at is always has been, business and ambition is as it always has been.

If you want to strike it out your way, then do so, it's not a fight and nobody will battle to stop you. Just do it in silence, calmy and as if it is perfectly normal, because it is.

The battle is in your head. You see everyone working in cubicles, so your mind is telling you that that is where you should be, but your heart is telling you something else. The struggle is inside you, outside, nothing and nobody really cares what you do with yourself.
It would be pretty hard to overdose on homeopathics. They are basically sugar, and they are tiny. Add in the cost, and it would cost a fortune to overdose. You could probably clean out an entire store's inventory and not overdose.
yes, i'd be interested in seeing it put on the web for use. for casual observers, this is interesting.

no, i don't think it could be built into a viable online business. most people who have backtesting needs have access to the necessary data via existing subscription services.

unless a new service provides "cleaner" data and more breadth than existing services, it'd be hard to be competitive.

the consumers in this market are relatively insensitive to price, so that wouldn't be seen as a significant advantage either.
They will never have a tough time finding a job if they needed to

Talk to someone who went through the dot bomb. There was a while there where good programmers were having difficulty.

Software entrepreneurs can fail just as hard as any other entrepreneur can. It's hard work running your own business, even in software. This gets even harder and harder as you get older.

Even PG says to start young, when you don't have any massive responsibilities. The older you get, the higher your "minimum income" level goes.
The G1 sucks for one simple reason - it looks like it sucks. It's like sticking the engine and dashboard of a ferarri in a 1999 mazda - the spec sheet tells you it's great, it handles great, it's cool on the inside, but it's still not going to impress any ladies when you drive up with it.

They should have put a little more effort in the external finishing.
Yes they do exist. They exist because those people are us. Nobody argues that the WSJ was wrong about the data they collected, but they were horribly wrong with their conclusions and assignment of blame.
Well said. The funny thing is, there's nothing about this argument unique to our generation. Both the WSJ article & Matt's response could've been written at any time in the past, and perhaps at any time in the future.

Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
No. That's owned by my friend Jamie, not me. Sold him the name for $1.
I'm a long-time HN fan (PG fan, YC fan, etc) - so HN is actually my main source of news! It was weird to see my name on the list of news yesterday.
I don't doubt that the description is fair, but I think that it comes down to this: if a few entitled slackers expect 6 figure salaries straight out of college, that's their problem, but if an entire generation of would be slaves aren't eagerly strapping on the chains, that's management's problem.

As a gen Yer, I got the sense from the article (and I'm sure this is full of bias) that the onus was on me to "shape up." I think the exact opposite is true, that management is going to have change expectations (which the article does address).
I agree with the general sentiment (no point in having company loyalty, longer hours without a purpose and suit/strict work environment not leading to greater productivity), but the people posting on news.y.c are slightly different from Gen Y'ers as a whole.

First most of us are technology professionals who by the time they started their first job out of college had already had work experience (contracting while in college and in my case, also working while a high school student during the dot-com boom).

We however, tend to gravitate towards Internet and specifically web. Outside of these industries, even in software, there is very little chance to work in the sort of relaxed environment that we work in.

For example, several of my friends studied Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering as undergraduates: they want to do work that is more hardware and algorithm related, to put their education to a use. Nonetheless most of these companies (e.g. Intel) are very much "be there at 8:30, or we'll have a chat" sort of places, where starting salaries are low and advancement is slow.

In the end there are people who are forced to choose between a more relaxed environment and a chance to put their education to a use and work on problems they find really interesting.

Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and ambitious professionals who would love to use their skills in a less rigid environment. Start something other than a web application company and capitalize on this.

(Same holds true for financial companies - many high end finance geeks are now getting layed-off in mass droves -- again, feature, not a bug)
Ask HN: What's the YC company that lists electronic parts for sale?
The name is escaping me.
It's not poor people, it's people without equality of opportunities, tied by family weights, unable to become enterpreneurs even if they really want to because society around them has collapsed.

Emigration is, so far, the only solution (even if painful), but despite being college-educated and very capable, the western world doesn't want them--not easy to get visas of any kind.

And 50+ year old people don't feel like moving at all, because their country used to be fine and is now, very deep in, their home. One can always pretend that nothing has changed--we humans have perfected the art of self deception.

Was it their fault that it collapsed? That's a slippery slope. I have no answer. But the current situation of Argentina may serve as a comparison reference to any over-hyped news of "collapse" or "martial law required to fix the economy in the USA": the USA is doing fine, thank you, as can be seen in this very forum of enterpreneurs.
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how bad is it that because i work in finance, i immediately assumed the "receptionist test" meant sitting with the receptionist for 5 minutes without sexually harrassing her or trying to hit on her. so sad haha.
I recently wrote a script to test this.

Using the benchmark at http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/csstest.html I applied all the styles using jquery. It ended up being roughly 10x slower. But the real issue seems to be the browser.

The jquery code finishes up really fast, but the browser sits there for a noticeable delay, presumably rendering. In firefox this means that you look at an unstyled page for a while.

But this only addresses the issue of CSS3 Selectors. I am curious about the possibility of implementing more of CSS3 in jquery. Seems like it would be incredibly slow, will have to try
No, but ours is the first to do so en masse and be widely pilloried for them, at least in this country.
And anyone who has ever written a line of code knows how silly what you just wrote is.
Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like your example is somebody who is older, with family and kids to support, a mortgage or other startup debt to pay off, and going through the dot com bomb, as a counterpoint to my statement.

Again, it does not disprove that in the long term, somebody who is a software entrepreneur who learns the latest technologies and has visible projects they've completed, will not have a difficult time finding a job. I am not saying the salary will be huge or that you won't need to relocate, or that there won't be a bad time in the short term.

But in the long term, somebody who is competent will learn way more than they would have during the same time they would at a job, and if they have projects they can show off, they will not have trouble finding a job to pay the bills--that's the entire scope of my post.

Would it be correct to say that how entrepreneurs handle their personal and company funds are out of scope for what I said? In the long term, you will learn more from working on your own projects, and if you can demonstrate your projects, will have no problem finding a job (no more than any other person competing for the same job.)

Therefore, when competing for a job, somebody who has put to use new technologies that companies want to incorporate, and can demonstrate this, will likely do very well in the hiring process.

Also, when companies lay people off in a bad economy, it doesn't always mean that they can't afford to have that many people. They may actually want to hire experts (at a reasonable price), knowing that during a bad economy, there might be some looking for a job.
Where Don't People Care About The Economy? Facebook
I didn't get that sense to be honest. WSJ's audience is mainly boomers in management roles, not you. (although there's an example of what the article is trying to say!)

I agree though that this isn't your problem at all, and I think you're seeing that shift with the notion of flex time, etc. These things only exist as a response to your generation. Xer's would have loved them, but we never had the numbers.

And that's the other key: your numbers. The last generation to cause this much havoc in the workplace was your parents'. I think it's funny that it's them that will need to deal with the fruits of their labour, to be honest. :-)
is it bountii.com?
octopart.com ?
There are tons of little indie games nobody's ever heard of that's made people rich. I know a guy who made a pretty simple persistent Flash drag racing game (i.e. your car customizations stick around between visits) and pulls in mid-6-figures a year.

Maybe I'm in the wrong field...
No, it had a funny name. I think they would search different companies selling electrical components like resistors and such.
Yeah! That's it. Thanks.
You treat it like a foregone conclusion that sooner or later we'll all be married with children. I personally cannot think of a single logical reason for bringing another human being into this world. Sounds like an easy way to ruin a perfectly fun life.
The Hills: Episode 12
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I was a cashier for two years at two different places, then was a checkout supervisor for one. Ran a meat counter, worked the floor at a Sam's club and a Home Depot, and ran a restaurant, all before the age of 22.

I'm no stranger to menial labor.
Not true. It hit the pre-market circuit breakers. There are lower levels than that and will only trigger before certain times of the day (12pm 2pm).

And we've been in a crash for nearly the entire month of October.

And I do video commentary about stuff like this that I have to plug: www.investingwithoptions.com
I didn't think so either in my early to mid twenties.

I'm not saying that everyone will have kids, but this whole discussion is about generalities, and the consensus is that most people will have kids.

It doesn't get any wilder than the boomers, and more of them had kids than any other generation previously.
You should read more Krugman. It started with Reagan.
If you're going to be putting money to work, at least sell puts. You can catch an extra couple percentage points and will give you an edge in the long term.
I don't think there will be any positives coming out of Christmas. Everyone will look at Q4 retail numbers and get the wind knocked out of them.

Historically, equities do well in Nov and Dec. Markets may be random, but they do have tendencies.
Don't do divvies in financials at least. Look at KO, PFE, JNJ, VZ (7% yield!) and any oil companies with no debt (they're sitting on a ton of cash).

I've got a couple strategies here:
http://investingwithoptions.com/2008/10/iwocom-video-long-te...
Why the Encyclopedia of Life will have to embrace the Wikipedia model
thank you my friend ..

im preparing for an interview and these seem like they could help a great deal.
Already bought JNJ before I even posted this :). I'm liking FO as well.
Until you can safely scratch $100K from you income, you can't call people who do asshats.
There are a lot of ads on TV for "getting into video games" - but unless you're at a top-tier school (like USC) and have a top-tier thesis from your MFA program, good luck with that.

The game developers still want people who have made good mods or have done good art on freeware or something along those lines. That shows an ability to do the work - the same as how you can get hired based on your work on OSS.

Sure, if you come out of Stanford or UIUC or whatever, you'll be able to interview with Google, but if you didn't, you better have done some good OSS work, or no dice.

Eventually, I'll write a blog post on the parallels on the corporate blog.
I think "hyperdirectional" is a bit of a hyperbole, considering it looks unable to handle three dimensional movement, let alone rolling backward in time as well as forward. On the other hand, if they could make it 20x faster and able to carry passengers, I'd finally be able to parallel park.
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341532
Nod. That indeed the problem of Java. I even wonder why university teaches intro course with Java other than C. C is good to demonstrate how the computer actual works and the time/space complexity of program for CS people. For science people, why do not teach them matlab/python/fortran things that may more helpful to do scientific calculation?
It's been said many times before, but beating the iPhone isn't the point. Google wants more people using phones with good web capabilities. Android is trying to beat what most people have; crappy phones that can't access the web very well. If Apple sells 100 million iPhones, Google profits too; more people on using mobile web means more people using Google.
Eliezer, Overcoming Bias posts are unusually good. Yes, I think many of them do belong here at Hacker News.
To be in compliance with GAAP, Apple spread the revenue from its 6.9Million units worth of iphone sales (est. 1.4B revenue) this quarter to the lifetime of the iphone. Also most of the iphone revenue comes from monthly payments from AT&T.

But the great thing about this type of accounting is that the the iPhone sales from this quarter will consistently add earnings during the next months or years of economic downturn. This provides a great hedge against the slowing economy for its quarterly earnings report. Wall Street considers volatility as risk so its better for the stock to have consistent good earnings.
I remember, but it wasn't as significant.

This is likely because I used (and at one point ran) BBS'. We had FIDONet, CyberCrime net, Usenet gateways, phreaking, and other ways to communicate internationally. The Internet just made it faster and more graphical and allowed you to multitask.
The most popular modern accomplishment supplement is World of Warcraft.
It seems to me the people who promote these sweeping negative generational generalizations are usually those who have a vested interest in promoting them - this article being a prime example. Hmmm let's see, the WSJ article's arguments were based on:

1.The opinions of a few consultants (who no doubt make at least part of their living offering seminars for the poor managers on how to deal with these 'millenials' as well as seminars for the millenials on how to be effective with their new bosses).

2.Anecdotal evidence from a couple HR people and a couple managers, one "study" by Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MonsterTrak, an online careers site (they did a study - it must be true!)

3.A survey by another career site where even by its own metrics only two dimensions showed a clear majority opinion (higher pay and flexible work schedules - something the workplace has been trending toward for years anyway).

Every generation has been negatively characterized one way or another (the 60's hippies turned into the 70's/80's yuppies, generation "X" aka "the slackers", and now the "millenials" aka "the entitled". Somehow all the generations previous and present did fine and I suspect the same will be of future generations as well.
ooh i like that one too!
Another important question to ask yourself - Who does number two work for?
It's not that Gen-Xers were happy with whatever job came our way, it's that we had rent to pay and food to buy (and had no desire to live with Mom and Dad). Once the economy got better (and our businesses succeeded), we got picky too.

You might have what it takes to walk the walk, but don't jump to conclusions before you've trod the path of a truly awful economy.
That's a good point. But that only applies to google. T-Mobile would prefer to beat the iPhone, wouldn't they?
Goodbye Rapidshare, hello Mediafire.

(Don't you love it? Every time one of these services realizes there isn't much money in being a free host for pirated files to the world, another takes its place!)
Instapaper lets you create a library of online articles on your iPhone