skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Were they form emails or did you specifically target the journalists/bloggers you were talking too?

Form letters get ignored - personal emails less so.

Choose your words carefully when approaching these guys. It might take a extra time, but the end result is worth it.

Just work harder.
I've been memorizing lists of Superbowl champions by year, just in case. Think how stupid you'd feel if you suddenly found yourself in 1972 and didn't know who to bet on to make your millions? You'd have to wait 10 years to buy Apple stock.
Human Interest. Look at what you put out from the perspective: Would this be part of the human interest category in a newspaper? If not, then you're unlikely to get covered unless you know someone.

Furthermore, who are you? You have to be someone newspaperable, for example:

"The guy who made a robot that sang songs"

"A 16 year old boy"

"A guy who traded a paperclip up"

There are so many standard developers, you need to make a press friendly definition of yourself. Then email interns who are always looking for a story. Locate them on linkedin.
To add to me previous comment - You should send targeted mails to journalists with intelligent comments about the stories.

It should be so insightful that they should feel that it would have been a better article had they spoken to you before writing it.
printgreener.com sells software at $29 whereas purifyr.com charges for $299 for the developer API account. (Hmm, seems like I haven't made it clear enough, maybe?)

As for the "green card", yes, that's right. Their whole message seems to be geared towards this. A good execution.

"you hardly tell the user why they would want to do this."
Hmmm, I think you're right. Let me think of this and give the homepage one more shot.

Thanks a lot, rythie.
I had the same experience you describe.
Your mail should offer some insight to them. They must feel that your comments/viewpoint adds to the story.

I've had lot of success after sending intelligent comments to articles in mainstream media. Journalists respond back, more often than not.
Mainly "form emails".

> "Choose your words carefully when approaching these guys."
That's the hard part. Any examples? Or reference to articles that I could read and improve?
Its not cheating.

Relentless resourcefulness is the phrase.
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To some extent I also agree with the author. Product development scene in India is really bad.
All-Time Top iPhone App Sales Figures and Estimates
> "targeted mails to journalists with intelligent comments about the stories."
So you mean "before selling them your service, you should try to setup relationships with them by leaving intelligent comments on their posts"?
Lead Nurturing & Bringing The Dead Back To Life 
I don’t literally mean “dead people” although it would be a great advance in technology if lead nurturing could do that. I mean bringing dead leads back into the sales pipeline using lead nurturing. A lot of companies gather leads over long periods of time through various channels and somewhere along the line, they get marked “cold” or “dead” in the CRM and never to be seen again. These dead leads can still be very valuable but they need a little nurturing.
How could you get 'personal emails' of the mainstream journalists? I seem to be outside of the 'media circle' at this moment.

Also, what would you suggest to do with the bloggers I've already contacted? Maybe I could use the "new version launched" as an opportunity to contact them again?
There are a few things:

- You have to tell the press a story, and it has to be interesting. The best stories are about people, the worst about technologies. For startups the story of how you have struggled through countless insourmountable obstacles and are now making big money is perfect. It is personal, it fits the cliche, and it gives readers something to look up to. Don't focus on your technology (unless you are trying to get an article in a trademag or something similar) normal people just don't care. If you need to talk about technology try to find a story where people are using your product to gain some advantage. Involve emotions if possible, it makes the story better. How Tim re-found his long-lost kindergarten girlfriend in old age and the two of them now happily living together because of Google is a much better story than how good Google's serach algorithm is.

- Personal connetctions and relationships. This is what PR people do. Journalists are different, have different taste, and find different things interesting. A story that may seem uninteresting to one might be picked up by another. If you don't know anyone try to read through the newssources where you'd like to be covered and see which journalist writes about stuff that is close to what you do. Then contact him. By phone. Talk to him and ask him what he thinks and whether he would like to do an interview with you. Journalists are nice people, and they make their living talking to people, so don't be afraid of it.

- Give them an easy story. Combining one and two above to make an easy story that can more or less be copy-pasted to give a full article. Journalists are lazy. Don't forget to include photos. (Again, it's people that are interesting. If you include product shoots make sure there are some with a proud owner showing off the product)

- Don't ever lie. Journalists have an excelent nose for liars, and when (not if) they catch you they'll never talk to you again.
May be this also because of brain in India.
A => B != B => A.

There are a large number of people who are not highly intelligent who have negative social experiences as teenagers for other reasons. There are very few people who have high intelligence (140+ IQ) and positive social experiences in adolescence.
If a site doesn't get linked to, did it ever exist?
Sounds like you need http://www.coboloncogs.org/INDEX.HTM
Honestly? Whenever I've shot off emails to people as introductory emails it has always been fairly informal but always targeted.

The best advice I can give is make sure you know who you're writing too, what their blog is about. Perhaps include a link to a relevant article in their blog (always use it in plain text form, bloggers love having their ego's stroked)

If you need an example, I guess a very rough one is something like.

----------------

Hi there .....

My name is ..... and I'm from ......

I've been reading your blog for ..... months and an article of yours that caught my attention was the one about .....

(link to article in plain text form)

My company does ..... and this is along the same lines as ......

I thought this might be of interest to your readership.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this email. If you would like to get back to me my contact details are in the footer.

Thanks!

Name
I often wonder if the issue is that many educators feel there is an aspect of teaching that can be learned and mastered separate from the subject matter. In other words many think one can be a good math teacher without a passion for and a love of mathematics. The author's tone in discussing arithmetic conveys an attitude I often see with respect to one of the most powerful tools a child learns.

We see this in programming shops with the pointy-haired boss phenomenon. Management is taught as a science unto itself.

I'm reminded of a recent essay I read by the category theorist Eugena Cheng (http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/illogic/illogic.html).

Imagine your children learning the "trivial" facts and algorithms of arithmetic from a teacher with this world view of what math is.
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These web tools will keep you on track and let you find the best family-friendly, Christian-focused sites and resources that the Internet has to offer.
Stolen cellphones could also be rendered useless by programming them to disable themselves if they detect that the user of the phone is not the legitimate owner.

"911? I need help! A man has just collapsed at the bus stop! I'm calling from his ... hello? Hello? Well, shit."
Excellent point. It's actually quite miserable pay considering the lifestyle hit.
Painful read, because this offer's essentially a trap.

Law firms care beyond what is healthy about "professional image", at the personal level as well as for the firm. Anyone who takes this sort of offer is essentially penciling himself out for the best assignments and the partner track. A 6th-year associate is going to know what she's doing and probably has decided she isn't going to make partner, or doesn't want to do so, anyway. For her, this might be a good deal. A first-year who takes a stipend to defer is setting himself up for disaster. It looks really bad; it's a horrible way to start one's career.
I remember early in my programming career, I had a program that was a tangled mess and making changes was requiring more and more effort just to keep everything straight. I was able to refactor the code into three well contained, clean modules. I distinctly remember the sense of satisfaction I got from that. I imagine it is similar to the satisfaction a wood worker gets when everything is just right. Not joy per se, but certainly a sense of satisfaction.

Another programmer at work explained to a non-programmer why he liked programming by comparing it to cross word puzzles or sudoku. Again, it isn't that cross word puzzles are a joy so much as it is interesting and satisfying.
Don't underestimate the (negative) impact hardware will have on the market for Android applications.

This isn't like the desktop computing world, where even a low-end Dell box will run most software people care about; the low end for mobile devices consists of millions of ludicrously-underpowered handsets. Telcos love these because they're incredibly cheap (see: "sign up for a family plan and get five phones free!"). But from a developer's perspective, these devices are a terrible platform: even if you write an application that can run on a low-end handset, you probably can't turn a profit from it since the prospective customer is someone who, by definition, is willing to forego useful/interesting features to save a bit of cash.

So any successful business around Android applications will probably have to target the higher end of the market. But that end of the market is:

1. At a price point -- in terms of handsets and voice/data plans -- where people start to think "if I'm already paying this much, why not just go ahead and get an iPhone?", and

2. So much smaller in terms of handset and carrier choice that the average person probably won't be swayed by arguments about handset and carrier choice.

And that's without getting into the problem of writing applications which can run across even the limited spectrum of higher-end handsets: maybe you've got a touch screen and maybe you don't, maybe you've got on-board wifi and maybe you don't, etc.
High levels of academic and cognitive ability, usually coupled with intellectual interests and the traits valuable (e.g. focus, creativity) in pursuing them.
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Its not what you know, its who you know. Always.
The above points, taken together, do not support the conclusion that the article is claiming "the computer merely augmented an existing understanding of mathematics".

She was a fifth-grade student at a public school in Boston. This indicates that she had a sufficient understanding of mathematics to reach that grade level, and had previously been instructed by the traditional method. The result being low test scores.

We're not talking tabula rasa here, we're talking about a regular student with a poor grasp of the subject matter.

Additionally, the text you've placed in quotes is meaningfully different from the post you're replying to.

They do support the conclusion that the student had no demonstrable understanding of mathematics, and that through using the computer, she gained a demonstrable understanding of mathematics.

This contradicts your earlier post, which implied that this was (for unspecified reasons) not an effective method of teaching math skills.
Where are the dates for the posts on your blog?

http://txtms.blogspot.com/
It's never who you know. It's always who knows you.
So in your proposed solution, you're going to "push" the data to memcached, but rely on polling to get the data to the end user, right?

If the problem is that your webserver doesn't handle large numbers of open quiescent connections well, then don't use that webserver. Clearly you're capable of writing the application that is pushing the data into memcached. Just have that same (type of) app push the data to the end consumer. Designing a naturally push app to be push-into-cache and then poll seems to be going the long way around.

It may also set you up for a terrible scaling "elbow" where at some point with increasing load, you'll suddenly be polling for data that was just expired from memcached and you may have little warning that that's about to happen.

Apple's worries about battery life and end-user experience are valid and no amount of tears from small developers is going to change them. They have to keep giving the consumer a good experience, which is ultimately what you/we as developers have to do. If that changes the economics slightly, so be it, but Apple is rightly concerned foremost about the buyers of iPhones, not the developers for them.
Wouldn't you have to use the same phone in order for the "return" sound to match the previous recording?
If a man speaks himself in a forest and no woman can hear him, is he still wrong?

Humor aside, you posed an interesting question. The answer is of course yes, the web page exists, but it's not reachable. Which means that for practical purposes, for the society as a whole, it only exists by the manner in which its owner is affected by it in his/her interaction with the world. Which is a very low kind of existence.
How to attract non-techie beta testers
What is the best (and cheapest) way to attract 5000-10000 Indian non-techie beta testers to try out a call in information service being developed by a new startup?
The time commitment is 5-20 mins a week (upto the user and at his/her convienience)over the phone to a toll free number. The users may even be compensated in some small way for their time.
Would love to hear suggestions.
With bloggers, I always find it's better to try and push your content to the smaller bloggers first - everyone's always trying to get promoted on the techcrunches or the mashables.

As for emails - really, just look for journalists who've written on your subject in the past. They usually have contact details up there.
Making shit up isn't resourcefulness, it's lying and in this case cheating.
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Your approach, Purifyr, seems as though it should be a more consumer friendly alternative to printgreener. From a story perspective though it's not being presented as a consumer-oriented product which limits the market a prospective reporter/blogger sees when they think of writing a story. i suggest you start with this:
"Free account could submit requests no shorter than 30 seconds. If you'd like to send requests more frequently, please check out our commercial offering."

if you're intent on not using a passive payment model (advertising) to subsidize consumer traffic, this page is destined to be your main conversion choke point. this page needs to sell your product. there should be a big, friendly button that lets the consumer (not developer) immediately make that purchase. alternately, show an interstitial ad and count down the 30sec before letting them see the content.

more fundamentally, you need to decide who your market is and optimize for them. are you really set on targeting webmasters and if so, how many content producers out there can afford 300/month while accepting a maximum of 10k views/day. seems like your major competition there is any freelancer who can hack out a "print view" wordpress template or even a simple print-view css file for less money. seems like a consumer model might make more sense, but then i would think about this almost more like an rss reader - if you're targeting consumers, you should consider ways to make it as easy as possible for people to maximize the content they see through your lens. the bookmarklet is a step in the right direction but isn't something most web users are used to.

once you have your market more clearly defined, alert the media that's producing content to entertain said market. they always need a story but they have discriminating tastes.
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Profession is protected and controlled (like medical profession). Supply is controlled. Too many complex laws. Need somebody to interpret them at a hefty fee!
"Trying different ones"

That is like trying to do a numeric division on paper after knowing the answer, because a calculator showed you. I.e. trying to fit a value that "ought" to fit.

I am sure it was greater fun to just examine one's procedures and materials, and take no assumptions. Just imagine: these guys could have stumbled upon a great discovery.
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Cool stuff, thanks for all the info Matt.
I like redfin.com, estately.com, and realtor.com. Then use dwellicious.com to bookmark and track listings from different sites in one place.
The Web 2.0 car: Local Motors and its crowd-sourced racecar
There are only 2 things that make me jump up and dance spontaneously:

(a) when a great song comes on in a dance club and I'm with a hot date

(b) seeing something I've just written work for the first time

I don't know if I'm bragging or complaining, but lately, I get a lot more of (b) than (a).
Cocoa with Love: Showing a "Loading..." message over the iPhone keyboard
Just a quick note that you may want to consider a new name, when I read the brand name I mentally pronounced it as 'Chemo' as in chemo-therapy.
I see your point, and I do agree that it is stupid to dismiss something just because it's from Microsoft (the same goes for any vendor/platform/etc.).

I disagree however with your list. I'm not familiar with Gazelle or WPF, but the rest of these items were not "invented" by Microsoft either and can be sourced back to some other point of origin. So it's not fair to say Microsoft's technology is being copied in these cases because they themselves copied the ideas.

The frustrating part is that, similar to General Motors, Microsoft does have good engineering going on but most of the results that come from these efforts never see the light of day in commercial productions. This is the nature of a large company organized in this way, and why we tend to see innovation in newer, smaller companies that don't know any better.
Timing is another thing. When we tried to get press for a site targeted at moms, we had a lot of luck approaching news papers, tv shows and blogs around, surprise!, women's day and mother's day.
The evolution of scientific ideas
Mobile numbers to get 11 digits in India by 2010
hmm, you've raised a good point: "who is your target audience"?

So far, all paid customers are using the API as a web service. Two of them are quite famous iPhone applications provider paying the standard $299/mo fee, three of them are vertical semantic search engines or recommendation engines that paid much more to have the code deployed behind their firewall. Hopefully this could make it easier for you to understand why the website is designed with developers in mind.

The reason that I'm making this site more consumer oriented is that I found the current market is a bit too limited. There are many opportunities, for example integrated with Epson's Web2Print software, that I simply don't have the BD resources to attack. I was hoping that by raising more awareness of the service on the consumer side, I could get more publicity which in turn will bring more developer customers.

I guess my question is:
1) Do you think my strategy make sense or not?
2) If I were to make this a paid service targeting consumers, what might be the good pricing point? $20 per year? What might be the 'selling point' to normal users?
perhaps programming is not for you?
I can probably rob an old lady of her purse and get away without getting caught. This isn't exactly being 'relentlessly resourceful.'

Not all methods are equally ethical.
Why is that downvoted?
Tailor your resume to the potential employer - remove the startup for the conservative ones.

If it's a really long time just say you were a free lance consultant or something.

Cheers
That is a fair point - though I actually doubt that 80 hrs/week is standard. There are those weeks, but they're not the norm. The lawyers I know (the ones at the big first) work about 50-60 hrs/week. Still tough, but nowhere near that bad. Unfortunately, this is all anecdotal, just what I've observed and what friends have told me.

Also, the lawyer is not contracting - it's a job. I think plenty of developers would take a job that pays 240K/yr for a 60 hr workweek.
By that token, what _is_ fun?

Let's say you ask a painter if he enjoys painting. Do they really enjoy the act of dragging a brush over a surface, of cleaning brushes, mixing colours? These are just the low-level, mechanical parts of the activity. Playing scales fits in the same category, so does a lot of refactoring.

What about the thinking part?
Sure. But we made those complex laws. We can simplify them for the benefit of the society!

It amazes me sometimes.....so much money rolling towards a profession that does not produce any wealth!
But surely you would only be cut off after the owner of the
phone explicitly tells the phone company that his phone has been stolen? I think this sounds like a pretty useful idea. Although it remains to be seen what the false positive/negative rates look like.
Why 30 Years, specifically?
Am I the only one here who derives a considerable amount of joy from the act of writing code?

I've worked across a wide variety of languages and environments, including far more Access VBA than anyone should be exposed to (I loath Access more than any other environment ever), and yet, even here I love writing code. There's something amazingly zen about it; I am the machine, corny as it sounds. It's where I am at peace.

I don't know how to respond to people who see coding as merely an end to a means, except to say that that may be true for you, but for me it's far far more.
Ask HN: Review my startup - TwitterGrep.com : NY Times of Twitter
Hi Guys,

Just launched TwitterGrep.com - twitter + wefollow + disqus mashup

Aim: present the best of twitter in a clean and simple nytimes.com style with disqus.com to handle discussions

Target audience: people who don't twitter but are interested in twitter and the great info coming out of twitter

## PR breif ##
Twitter Grep: Twitter powered news and discussion service

What TwitterGrep.com is

- Twitter Grep is a simple way to see and discuss all the latest news coming out of Twitter.

- TwitterGrep.com aims to be the New York Times/Bloomberg Terminal of Twitter. There's so much great information in Twitter, we're here to bring this information to you in the simplest form.

What TwitterGrep.com is NOT

- Twitter Grep is not some new fancy Twitter client

- Its not an Adobe AIR app

- Does not require you to have a Twitter account

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

Cheers

Justin
mobile business is going to force tax reform. what incentive will people have to run a profitable business in a country with crappy tax laws when it can easily be run off a laptop from anywhere?
Thank you for talking about an ISO standard! It changed my mind about writing dates as dd-mm-yyyy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601