skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't realize Slashdot still had that kind of traffic. Good to know. You're right about HN users. They don't tend to Digg or Reddit you much. But they do stick pretty well if your product is in the category, so they're worth quite a bit on their own.

Definitely I would recommend just running a blog on Wordpress.com or TypePad or blogspot. Some service that can withstand the heat of any big press releases. Just in case. You can spend a few bucks to make it look like a subdomain of your main site anyway. Blogging can net you some organic search traffic too.
What about a Saturday? I'm in the process of moving back to the Midwest but I still might be able to make it?
Personally I think the best way to fight fair in a relationship is to maintain less close emotional commitment, so there's no big fear of lose, and to try to point out an unfair tricks (eg, "You're just trying to make me feel shame without any specific reason. Why? What's wrong?").

Other, ask questions; stay classy.
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It's not spending less effort on non-renewable resources; it's spending more effort on renewable resources to achieve the same amount of production from the non-renewable resource. So to maintain current levels of production the level of effort would have to increase, when switching which means everyone works harder/longer for no increase production.
I've got to say that sending out a press release if you only have $1000 is just not the best use of funds IMO. Press releases have their place but is it really what you spend your first $1000 on? No way.

Adwords seems the most logical choice. I'd spend $20 and buy Perry Marshall's Adwords book and learn how to do split testing. With a $1000, you shuld be able to generate enough impressions to figure out what keywords work, what your competitors are doing in Adwords, and have a handle on what your landing pages are doing. Once you have that then you can more ably spend the next $1000.

Here's that Perry Marshall book: http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Guide-Google-AdWords-Million/...
I think that depends on the range of contexts you imagine, which depends on your experience and perception of people/the world.

If you only consider people calling you out legitimately, then accountable is a good word.

But if you consider that there are people who don't play fair or hold themselves to even a basic set of morals that you agree with, and you've personally seen enough to know that genuine high-stakes situations do not only occur in movies, then I think 'vulnerability' also applies.
One further thought...

999 out of 1,000 startups get 3 click throughs total that way

I think that comes from submitting your start-up as opposed to submitting a blog post about your start-up. Each submission has a small chance of success (especially early submissions), but if you write and submit often, your chances increase, as does your skill in how to submit successfully.

If you only have one shot at it, though, then yes, it's a waste of time.
I would have to agree. Even at the end he states that this will turn out to be a "Ponzi-like" if technological advances no longer progress.
Unfortunately I doubt it, the government is always in power.
Google adwords for a news aggregator kind of product is mostly going to go in vain.

Advertising on relevant blog would get you a better reach.

Beyond that a well chalked out email marketing and as others mentioned heavy social media penetration would work for this.

Additionally adding some kind of a virality into your product to increase word of mouth, some interesting ways where people would find it useful or intuitive to forward it to friend would work.

Finally, a very aggressive seeding from your own team - send it to all friends, repeatedly request them (if they would and if no, why not) send it to their first circle.
Announce that sometime within the first 10 days of its launch your service will float one fake news story or headline amid the stream of real news. The first reader to email you identifying the fake wins the coveted $1K "User Editor at Large" award. In addition to the money give the winner a temporary featured column on your site. If the contest generates interest, repeat it as often as you can afford to -- perhaps quarterly? Good luck!
not completely related but isn't the lack of rigidity/strictness the reason for all the problems related to HTML today? To me this will open another pandora's box of long term headaches
Daily + hourly + monthly backups to S3, my local machine, and a USB flash drive that I keep in my wallet at all times:

http://www.amazon.com/KingMax-Microsoft-Certified-Drive-Wash...
I have never issued a press release myself, but various people told me that I should. I am just thinking that Adwords are more of a "one time" investment: either somebody buys your product after clicking on the ad or not, but there are no longterm gains (except that you could reinvest the earnings from selling the product). It seems unlikely that somebody would decide to blog about your product after stumbling upon it via an ad, for example.

Therefore personally I prefer investments that have a potential for growth - like a press release might make bloggers write about my product, which might increase it's page rank and give an enduring boost to visitor numbers to my site. A google ad does not increase page rank.

Sure, with Google Ads it is simple maths, but my impression was also that it is very hard to make money with adwords. For example I was selling a mobile application where I would have earned about 2€ per sale, but relevant keywords cost around 10cent. So even if every 20ieth clicker would have bought the app (a very high conversion rate, I think), that would only have been the break even point.

As for the press release, I wouldn't spend 1000$. Actually one can make them for free, but with my app back then I just felt it might be good to pay someone who is more skilled at writing to do it.
A free version should help a lot, try that before you lower the price.

I'm in favour of "try before your buy", especially if what I'm buying more expensive than the competition (which in your case is about a gazillion other games, many (most?) of which are less expensive than $3).
If you are optimistic, it will spread in your entourage (it appears to be contagious in a way nobody understands, see oxytocin). Not only it gets rid of being upset and ungry, it will restore trust with time, if and only if it is sincere* (like regret on the other side).

*"Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt"
If you absolutely want to advertise, don't forget about StumbleUpon.
Gah, you're about a week early for me to show you my article answering this question. Here's the short version.

$1,000 will buy you about one feature worth of magazine quality pillar content plus effort to launch the content (by contacting relevant blogs, news organizations, etc). The ROI on evergreen content over the long term is stupendous -- it brings in links like crazy (which translates into direct SEO benefits), brings in traffic for forever, and is just stupidly cost effective.

Here's a (cheaper) bit of evergreen content which is Pretty Darn Useful for my niche: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/dolch-sight-words-bingo.htm . I think that probably took, with its sister page, 2.5 hours to put together, so call that $250. (I have since become vastly more efficient at pumping out the content. You can hear more about that in a week when the article is done.)

Those two pages have, at last count, something like 100 backlinks, including from some fairly high authority pages ("Would you mind if we included your resource in this year's copy of the [American state] reading curricula?" swoon). Buying links on that scale would cost me thousands of dollars per month (I do not recommend buying links).

That page alone had 30,000 visitors in 2008 alone. Buying 30,000 visitors, all of whom wanted something very close to what I sell, would cost me about $1,800 via AdWords.

Direct revenue as a result of it was only about $1,000 in 2008. (I say "only" because it is one of the most poorly monetized pages on my site. I tried to strike a balance between monetization and linkability, mostly aimed at linkability since that was published before anyone had heard of me.)

So yeah, with $1,000, I'd suggest writing (or commissioning) some pillar content aimed straight at the people who you want to convince to give you money/influence.
I guess not, unless he is Warren Buffett
Yeah that's true. If you do a blog entry about your startup, it improves to 998.
Which makes more sense: owning one quality $100 knife for 30+ years, or going through 10 $20 knives over the course of 30 years?

It depends. The $100 knife could become lost, stolen or damaged. Improved or cheaper knives, or even a new technology to replace the knife as we know it, could appear in the next 30 years. You could even keep two cheap knives so you have a spare whilst the other is in the dishwasher.
Mosebro: mobile semantic browser for Android
Yes.

Also, “syntax-free” is a misleading name. What they mean instead is just “flexible natural-language-like syntax”.

The problem with the natural-language approach is that (a) it is unpredictable and fickle, hard to clearly document, and often buggy, even in an implementation which has been tested for 15–20 years, and (b) it doesn’t scale well to even medium-sized projects. Anyone who can learn to write quick one-off scripts in a language like AppleScript or the one suggested here can as quickly learn to write quick one-off scripts in Python (90% of the language can be ignored and it's still useful for such tasks). But if they learn Python, as soon as that simple script grows, learning new language features will allow scaling the script up in complexity.
No, his argument isn't fallacious, but yours is a straw man.

He is NOT saying that regulation was the problem, and he's not saying that less regulation will solve the crisis. He's saying that blaming libertarianism, free markets and "unfettered capitalism" is a fallacy - simply because the financial market is neither of those.
You can also remove (explicit) recursion --- which almost the same as removing points in practise.
It's not really a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme pays interest to attract investors so it needs significantly more customers with each iteration. Madoff's infamous one paid out 12% annually, so it needed to grow by 12% each year just to achieve stasis (or it would have if cash outs equaled profits anyway, some years it was probably more or less).

Social Security isn't a Ponzi scheme because it would work perfectly well if the population remained stable over time, or shrank. And it would even be alright if it grew slowly and linearly.

What really throws a wrench in the cogs is when the generation retiring is much larger than the ones still working, especially the one or two before it. This is why the Baby Boomers leaving the work force is so problematic.

The good news (in a sick sort of way) is that our diet and health care are so bad that we save a little due to lifespans actually shrinking. People mistakenly attribute the problem to longer lifespans, but the expectancy of a working-age adult (the only group that matters for the purposes of entitlements) has barely budged since before Social Security was invented, and is now quite possibly shrinking. Lifespan from birth (as it is typically expressed) has risen almost entirely due to lower infant mortality.
Yes, you are correct. Though in mutt you can hit 'n'/'p' while reading a message in a thread and you will move to the next/previous email in the threading order. I would imagine one would need to use scrolling in gmail for any substantial thread which results in a pretty similar experience (i.e., you only see one or two emails at a time).
I actually found learning Turkish quite pleasing. But perhaps I just love to learn strange (for me) things.
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No, what I meant is that you build a reasonably successful blog and weave your start-up into the posts. You can't do that on every post, but it shouldn't be too hard to promote your own start-up on your own successful blog, right? :-)
Anyone can be sued for libel in Britain for any content that is read by even one person in Britain.

Rachel Ehrenfeld was successfully sued in Britain by Khalid bin Mahfouz for writing Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, a book that was never published in Britain. 23 copies had been shipped to Britain by online booksellers, which was enough for Britain to claim jurisdiction.

British libel law also makes web hosts, printers, bookshops etc. liable, so it is very easy to get anything out of circulation by going after the weak link in the chain: that is how Alisher Usmanov go Craig Murray's blog taken down withot actually Murray himself.
That's not speed reading. That's reading fast. There is a difference.
Hacker News is in the list. I can't imagine Michael Arrington actually reads Hacker News. Please reply to this comment if you are Michael Arrington and let us what is your username. This will help many hackers here who need your advices on their startups.

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=techcrunch <- You?
"This usually leads me down a path of questions that result in me having to teach myself something to build something to solve a particular problem which fulfills a need." - but better make a quick post to hacker news first.
Any b'bay hackers around?
Seems like there's an awful lot of polemical posts on Hacker News lately from Conservative political organizations. Guess they figured out that here they could promote their agenda for free.

Is that really what Hacker News wants to be? A political forum? If so, I'll encourage the folks at Media Matters, Center for American Progress, and Campaign for America's Future to start posting here.

It's bad enough that Conservative political groups are hijacking a startup news aggregator. It's worse that the ideas they're pushing don't work.

Conservatism--the political philosophy promoted by AEI, Hoover, Heritage et al--is the flip side of Communism. With Communism, the purpose of people is to serve The State. In Conservatism, the purpose of people is to serve The Market. Thus, popular New Deal programs such as Social Security are anathema to them.

Both Communism and Conservatism work badly, producing similar effects. Our unregulated Conservative markets have crashed and burned just as badly as the Russians' hyper-regulated Communist markets did. States and countries run on Conservative principles are typically backward and stagnant:

--Mississippi and Alabama have Conservative state governments, and have practically no startup activity. Massachusetts and New York are not Conservative, which makes them capable of spawning MIT and Silicon Alley.

--Conservatives say that the keys to a strong economy is low taxes on rich people and unregulated markets. We've had them for the past decade, just as we did in the 1920s, and just as it did in the 1920s, our economy has melted down. What happened when we had sky-high taxes on rich people, and highly regulated markets? We got the U.S. economic boom of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and built the world's biggest middle class.

The fact that their political philosophy has produced poor results doesn't give the folks at AEI/Hoover/Heritage pause, however. Just like the old Communists, these Conservatives are now complaining that "Conservatism DOES work! It's just never been tried!" Just as with Communism, Conservatism never fails, it is only failed.

As for the ideas of Milton Friedman that these Hacker News Hijackers are pushing, we may want to read what a Nobel Prize-winning economist has to say about them:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857
Your boss should be glad to have you work 24/7. ;)
I don't understand why it would only make sense for one class to buy into Social Security. If it's a good investment, it's a good investment; 'rich' means less than 'has a particular set of risk/return preferences'.

And I think you validate his point if you claim that social security is only solvent because it redistributes money from the rich to the poor. If the system is unsustainable without giving some people a lower return to subsidize other investors (i.e. soaking the rich to pay off the electorate), it's a ponzi scheme.
There’s a reason secretaries preferred IBM’s extremely well-built typewriters: decades of research went into optimizing their feel.
If you believe 'Subscriber count chicklets', I've got a bridge to sell you...
Concerning software abstraction layers: What do you think of OpenCL? It's advertised as a way to utilise the combined computing power of multi-cores and GPUs. I am not at all an expert on this but it seems just too good to be true.
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It is a cool product with a reasonable pricing. And, the slideshows they make are better than many desktop applications out there.
"For instance, you could say "ta shi hen gao de," for "he is very tall." This is grammatically correct, but then the sentence has a tone that is like passive voice in English."

I would interpret such a Mandarin sentence to come from a discourse context in which the person's height has already become a topic, as for example when the speaker is conceding to another speaker that the person is tall (but perhaps unskilled in basketball, nonetheless).

The normal way of expressing "he is tall," "the language learner is smart," etc., is to use what linguists often call "stative verbs" (English-speaking learners often call them "adjectives") without any use of "是 [be]."
Hey, I've got a crazy idea. Instead of a completely unsupported, fantasy standard "smart link" you could instead offer a link to a vcal file, or vcard file, or a location XML file. Then every damn computer and mobile device in the world would be able to do something useful with the data, right now not in some magical fantasy future.
This would do violence to Hamlet's soliloquy in Shakespeare's play.
I'd love to read your article :D
make sure you submit it to YC
I am one of the organisers of headstart.There is a tweetup planned as well in case you guys are interested. Mail me - vinayak at headstart dawt in, in case you need any help from the organisers.
Frugal is cool in cash-strapped US
That's an interesting book recommendation.

http://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Age-Illustrated-Primer-Spectra...

That looks like a good genre fit for my son's tastes, and the title is not at all familiar to me. Thanks.
the main problem with Social Security isn't really changes in population size (though it still is a problem). The core problem of Social Security is this:

"Taxes paid by today’s workers are used to pay today’s retirees. If money is left over, it finances other government spending—though, to maintain the insurance fiction, paper entries are created in a “trust fund” that is simultaneously an asset and a liability of the government. When the benefits that are due exceed the proceeds from payroll taxes, as they will in the not very distant future, the difference will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing, creating money, or reducing other government spending."

Basically politicians (of both parties) raid the Social Security fund and just leave IOU notes behind to fund their pork projects. If the money was untouchable and only used for Social Security, the problems we'd see with just population changes wouldn't be nearly as bad... hence (I could be wrong but I feel) this is one of the core arguments that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.
I have seen a lot from libertarians; few from conservatives or Conservatives. Which particular anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-Drug War, traditionalist, or otherwise conservative articles were you referring to?

I think it's really funny that when you see some viewpoints with which you disagree, it is because some big, anonymous agglomeration ("Conservatives!") must be abusing their freedom of speech by saying things with which many HN readers agree (and your solution -- telling an actual big, anonymous agglomeration to push their viewpoints here -- just seems to exacerbate the problem). A few other points:

In Conservatism, the purpose of people is to serve The Market.

What does it mean to 'serve' the market? The market is an abstraction -- you can't make 'it' better or worse-off, though you can do that to participants.

Our unregulated Conservative markets

You're referring to how the unregulated hedge funds produced much worse returns than the highly-regulated commercial- and investment-banking industries -- and how the only safe spot in the current financial turmoil is the highly-regulated, government-created, government-subsidized mortgage industry, right? Right?

Mississippi and Alabama have Conservative state governments, and have practically no startup activity. Massachusetts and New York are not Conservative, which makes them capable of spawning MIT and Silicon Alley.

Has it not occurred to you that you have the cause and effect wrong, here? New York and California can have more abusive governments because even if you pay 50% of your marginal income in taxes, you're still better off starting a startup in CA than in Mississippi, or trading derivatives in New York rather than Alabama.

What happened when we had sky-high taxes on rich people, and highly regulated markets?

Some day, you will be introduced to the term 'loophole'. You will wonder why the three-martini lunch and the company car used to be so common, and are now so rare. You will run the numbers on the Reagan tax cuts and find that the reduction in nominal rates would imply gigantic cuts in total income received, which is not what happened -- and then you'll realize that, in general, tax cuts are accompanied by loophole-closing, and tax increases are accompanied by loophole creation. That's just how things work.

Thank you for linking to Paul Krugman, well-known as the first person to be awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for his political rants in a popular newspaper, rather than his academic papers. I haven't actually read what the prize committee said about him, but everyone I've met who agrees with Krugman's polemics seems to see the prize as new evidence in their favor, so I am assuming that this is what the award was for. Right?
They're more believable than many other guessed metrics that are used online - Alexa, Compete, et al.

Services like Google Reader report their subscriber numbers in the user agent string to FeedBurner and these are then included into the total. The remainder is worked out from IP accesses, user agents, etc. It's not precise, but in terms of the relationship between one feed and another, quite reliable.

There have been ways to "game" the figures here and there (such as the Netvibes trick that went around a few months ago) but these are usually picked up and solve and reputable content providers were not using them in the first place.

A lot of people believe in numbers from places like Alexa or Compete and they're far more shady than FeedBurner's numbers. My own analysis has shown the numbers to be "reasonably" accurate, based over my own cumulative 30,000 or so subscribers on a few different feeds.
Passive sentences don't have some sort of intrinsic enjoyability, you enjoy them. E-Prime makes that distinction clearer. That's what the wikipedia article tried to say as "Using E-Prime makes it harder for a writer or reader to confuse statements of opinion with statements of fact.": it makes opinions harder to pass off as a statement about an intrinsic essence. (Does such a thing even exist?)