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Just my personal opinion, but if you’re looking for a place to advertise your startup, then I doubt HN is the right place. Personally I come to HN because it’s

Just my personal opinion, but if you’re looking for a place to advertise your startup, then I doubt HN is the right place. Personally I come to HN because it’s one of the few places you can have a discussion and read comments without having to dig through dozens of memes and low attempt jokes.

quantstats 6y ago
I was going to answer in a similar vein, although I don't normally participate in the discussions, mainly because English is not my native tongue and although I think I can now read at the level of a native speaker, I find it significantly more difficult to write in it (and, being a language that for reasons that elude me I love, I hate how artificial and unnatural my phrases sound like). In my case, I have a background in statistics and biotechnology and I use Hacker News (via RSS) to learn about new developments in machine learning and related technology. I tend to ignore all news related to politics/social issues because HN, on average, has a very narrow-minded (too engineer-like, often ignoring a lot of vital nuances) way of looking at those topics. Also, I'm from Europe and I find that there's a particularly American way of looking at business and personal projects that we don't have here and that I feel beneficial to get exposed to (even with its downsides). Edit: To expand a little more on my process of using HN, in case anyone finds it interesting, I subscribe to the frontpage RSS feed, so that I usually get between 75-100 stories (just the headlines) per day, which I then proceed to quickly scan to open the interesting ones (both the original URL and its accompanying HN discussion). I've found the signal/noise ratio to be more than worth it (also factoring in the time it takes me to do all of this).
- n4r9 6y ago
  Well, the level of English in this comment is well above that of the average on Hacker News!
  - quantstats 6y ago
    Thank you for your comment, you've really brightened up my day!
  - mbrodersen 6y ago
    Agree :-)
- jraby3 6y ago
  Wow, I have to say that I think you write beautifully. I’m a native English speaker learning a second language and I can only hope to be able to write this well.
  - quantstats 6y ago
    Thank you so much for your kind words!
blackbrokkoli 6y ago
On the other hand, it may be one of the last places left where you can actually naturally advice. Stuff like... "Oh I can tell you a thing or two about the legal complications of cubesat launches, my company did this for the last 12 years. [...]. By the way, this is our website" ...is probably more effective if a potential client stumbles over it than 100,000 "targeted" facebook ads, especially if you serve some highly technical niche.
throwaway744678 6y ago
It may be relevant if your startup provides a product (tools or services) targeting HN demographics, let's say, technical users/tech companies/startups.
graeme 6y ago
I actually found my favourite finance tracker, Lunch Money, because the creator posted here. And her posting it here really helped her company grow. So it does happen a fair bit if your startup is relevant. https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/

quantstats 6y ago

I was going to answer in a similar vein, although I don't normally participate in the discussions, mainly because English is not my native tongue and although I think I can now read at the level of a native speaker, I find it significantly more difficult to write in it (and, being a language that for reasons that elude me I love, I hate how artificial and unnatural my phrases sound like). In my case, I have a background in statistics and biotechnology and I use Hacker News (via RSS) to learn about new developments in machine learning and related technology. I tend to ignore all news related to politics/social issues because HN, on average, has a very narrow-minded (too engineer-like, often ignoring a lot of vital nuances) way of looking at those topics. Also, I'm from Europe and I find that there's a particularly American way of looking at business and personal projects that we don't have here and that I feel beneficial to get exposed to (even with its downsides). Edit: To expand a little more on my process of using HN, in case anyone finds it interesting, I subscribe to the frontpage RSS feed, so that I usually get between 75-100 stories (just the headlines) per day, which I then proceed to quickly scan to open the interesting ones (both the original URL and its accompanying HN discussion). I've found the signal/noise ratio to be more than worth it (also factoring in the time it takes me to do all of this).

n4r9 6y ago
Well, the level of English in this comment is well above that of the average on Hacker News!
- quantstats 6y ago
  Thank you for your comment, you've really brightened up my day!
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Agree :-)
jraby3 6y ago
Wow, I have to say that I think you write beautifully. I’m a native English speaker learning a second language and I can only hope to be able to write this well.
- quantstats 6y ago
  Thank you so much for your kind words!

blackbrokkoli 6y ago

On the other hand, it may be one of the last places left where you can actually naturally advice. Stuff like... "Oh I can tell you a thing or two about the legal complications of cubesat launches, my company did this for the last 12 years. [...]. By the way, this is our website" ...is probably more effective if a potential client stumbles over it than 100,000 "targeted" facebook ads, especially if you serve some highly technical niche.

throwaway744678 6y ago

It may be relevant if your startup provides a product (tools or services) targeting HN demographics, let's say, technical users/tech companies/startups.

graeme 6y ago

I actually found my favourite finance tracker, Lunch Money, because the creator posted here. And her posting it here really helped her company grow. So it does happen a fair bit if your startup is relevant. https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/