Briel's comments

According to the thread about it on Reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/gme_meltdown/comments/lrp639/why_is...), it's because:

Some hedge fund bought a bunch of calls and then pumped the underlying. Option sellers had to buy shares to cover.

How you speak. It's something that almost all of us have to do everyday for work and our personal lives and how you speak has a huge effect on how your message is perceived, and each of these interactions over time shapes your relationships.

Since many of us are taking online calls now, this is a great time to record your side to hear how you really sound like. You may be quite surprised - it's not just that your voice sounds different, how often you use filler words, repeat yourself, ramble and the tone that you used can be quite different than what you thought it was. From there, you can identify your weak points, practice (speak on your own and record it) and improve.

I would actually say personal branding is not as important early on as niche specialization. For example, you're not just a Rails developer, you're a Rails developer who specializes in building MVPs for SaaS products.

Also I wouldn't focus on content as much right now. It takes a long of time to create and market content that gets meaningful traffic and unless you do keyword research right (or get lucky), it may not even bring in people who need your services.

Instead, you need to ask yourself: where can I find people who need my services? Example: Angellist, accelerator programs, etc. And reach out to them with an idea of what you can help them build. Here's a good template for this: https://artofemails.com/new-clients#developer

Do not wait for them to find you because this is how the feast and famine cycle happens.

This was an interesting in-depth article about series of leaks and internal turmoil that Google experienced:

https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery...

1. Soon after, on the plane ride back from a work trip to China, Damore wrote a 10-page memo arguing that biological differences could help explain why there were fewer female engineers at Google, and therefore the company's attempts to reach gender parity were misguided and discriminatory toward men.

On Wednesday, August 2, Damore posted his memo to an internal mailing list called Skeptics. The next day he shared it with Liberty, an internal list for libertarians—one Damore hadn't known existed. By Friday, the tech blog Motherboard was reporting that an “anti-diversity manifesto” had gone viral inside Google.

Pichai was on vacation when his deputies told him that Google had better deal with the Damore situation quickly. Pichai agreed and asked to corral his full management team for a meeting. By Saturday, a full copy of Damore's document had leaked to Gizmodo.

2. Google was reportedly in the process of bidding for a project. It was called the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, otherwise known as Project Maven. The project would involve labeling past drone footage to train a computer vision algorithm so that, once everything was in the cloud, new drone footage could be analyzed automatically.

There was no consensus on Maven inside Google's fractious workforce, which includes former Defense Department researchers, military veterans, and immigrants from countries under US drone surveillance. Even the employee group for veterans was split on the project. But Maven's opponents were organized in a way that Google hadn't really seen before. Employees fanned out into different groups.

3. More leaks from inside Google fed the frenzy. Screenshots of conversations among Google employees on internal social networks, some dating back to 2015, appeared on Breitbart. Meanwhile, on a pro-Trump subreddit, a collage appeared that showed the full names, profile pictures, and Twitter bios of eight Google employees, most of them queer, transgender, or people of color.

For the employees who were being targeted, the leaks were terrifying. How many of their coworkers were feeding material to the alt-right? How many more leaks were coming? And what was their employer going to do to protect them?

4. Late this June, Project Veritas, a right-wing outlet specializing in stings and exposés, published a slew of leaked documents and snippets of hidden-camera footage from inside Google.

These featured snippets are great for Google, because they keep you on their search pages longer. But they're bad for the websites because they can completely lose your visit, even though they're the ones who created the content.

These snippets also take up more space on top of the page and along with more ads, it means fewer organic links are appearing on the first page.

I took a peak at the OP's post history (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20945426), it seems this is their chatbot (for FB): https://mapletechno.com/landing.php

Unless you have moved the chatbot to a different website since then, based on the product as is, it would be better to focus on a) translating the website into English and b) finding some beta testers and users.

I guess most of the replies here are based on your use of the word coporation, hence they're sharing advice about lanfing multi-figure deals but realistically, the target market for FB chatbots are small to medium business owners.

With Upwork, since they're an intermediary and marketplace and hirers are the ones who are paying and providing supply, it's in their interest to offer services that cater to them like time logging and charging connection fees, even if it's unfriendly for freelancers.

Your best best is to take matters in your own hands, and proactively email people you know you can help with your services. This way, there's no intermediary controlling your relationship with your client and you don't have to play the waiting game either (waiting for referrals or networking to pay off, waiting for people to find your website, etc.)

This may seem hard at first glance but let's the take the example of data science work. You can reach out to startups who recently raised a sizable investment round (sign they have the budget and bigger growth goals) and share a few interesting ways you can help them uncover user behavior patterns that would them hit their next milestones.

Further reading:

[1] https://artofemails.com/get-new-clients

[2] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-guest-post-pitch-exa...

1. Landing page that shows mockups of your product and how it benefits the audience - capture emails "get notified of launch!"

You can drive traffic to the landing page by sharing it in relevant communities and by setting up some highly targeted ads.

2. Instead of programming your core feature right away, even as a MVP, if possible, do manual non-scaleable work to offer it instead. This lets you test if people want it, without spending much dev time or money.

Example: "Leading into the summer of 2009, the team developed the first incarnation of FanDuel in a Google Docs spreadsheet, says cofounder and chief product officer Tom Griffiths, who recalls recruiting test players on Craigslist and accepting their entry fees via PayPal"

There's a lot of focus on how they failed: strayed from their non-label musician roots.

But how would they have been able to monetize?

* Let fans support their favorite musicians a la Patreon and take a % from the donations?

* Partner with music labels to help them scout their next upcoming talents?

* Help musicians book shows at venues and take a % of the sales?

Nitpick but the website preview images are not resized from the originals well so the text and edges in them are all jagged.

I think one of the detrimental effects of the positivity movement is, it implies it's wrong and unnecessary to feel bad. Of course, if you feel bad for days on end, there's an ongoing clinical or situational issue. If certain external triggers consistently cause you to feel bad, you can dig deep to find the reason and start to address it.

But to feel bad as a short-lived (hours to a few days) reaction to an event at least partially within your control? Like getting a bad mark? Or screwing up a work project? It's completely normal and similar to the physical pain felt when you touch a burning stove. It's a stimulus "Oh this sucks! I don't want to feel like this again so I'm going to make X, Y or Z change to avoid it."

Since our mental wellbeing plays a huge role in how we use our knowledge and skills, one of my favorite HN comments (which is actually a quote from another source):

"Human life the Stoics appear to have considered as a game of great skill; in which, however, there was a mixture of chance [...] In such games the stake is commonly a trifle, and the whole pleasure of the game arises from playing well, from playing fairly, and playing skilfully. If notwithstanding all his skill, however, the good player should, by the influence of chance, happen to lose, the loss ought to be a matter, rather of merriment, than of serious sorrow. He has made no false stroke; he has done nothing which he ought to be ashamed of; he has enjoyed completely the whole pleasure of the game. [...]

Our only anxious concern ought to be, not about the stake, but about the proper method of playing. If we placed our happiness in winning the stake, we placed it in what depended upon causes beyond our power, and out of our direction. We necessarily exposed ourselves to perpetual fear and uneasiness, and frequently to grievous and mortifying disappointments. If we placed it in playing well, in playing fairly, in playing wisely and skilfully; in the propriety of our own conduct in short; we placed it in what, by proper discipline, education, and attention, might be altogether in our own power, and under our own direction. Our happiness was perfectly secure, and beyond the reach of fortune."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12995076

The main takeaways:

1. Pitch journalists yourself as the founder - don't bother hiring a PR firm 2. Pitch journalists who previously covered related companies 3. Pitch what your company does from an interesting angle so it's easy for the journalist to see its story potential - different possible angles:

Your personal story / background Exciting new feature Company hit important milestone Your product is truly innovative Interesting user behavior patterns Broader social/political/economic issues your product touches upon Pitch to local publications (you founded your startup in this city) Create a landing page/resource related to product and pitch that

* From: http://www.artofemails.com/pitch-press

I used to replay the same negative thoughts as well. Here's how I broke free:

Reframe all your negative thoughts.

I used to obsess about past mistakes. Thought: "I wish I didn't do that." Reframe: "If I didn't do that, I wouldn't have learned that lesson to be the person I am today. Or in the position I am today."

Stop worrying about problems that haven't even materialized yet and very likely never will.

We waste tons of mental energy worrying about problems that never happen. If you don't believe me, make a list of all you worries about near future events. Wait a week and see how many of them actually happen. You'll find 99% didn't.

This one was the hardest to put into practice: be kind to yourself.

A lot of people believe that if you stop criticizing yourself, you won't learn. You won't improve. You'll become arrogant.

When you criticize yourself, you actually make it even harder to learn from your experiences / actions. Why? Because when we feel badly, we're not very productive about forming ideas on how to change and putting them into action. Instead, we seek distractions (sometimes really unhealthy ones) to try to make ourselves feel better.

When you do something that leads to a negative outcome for you, preventing that negative outcome from happening again is enough motivation to change in of itself. You don't need to make yourself feel bad to learn and change.

I listened to a lot of Youtube videos and songs in the language. The biggest impediment to language learning is that it can be extremely boring. If you're learning it through entertaining content, it gets easier.

On http://lyricstranslate.com/, you can find songs translated from and to a lot of different languages. It's a lot easier to remember words when it comes with contextual markers: music, it's place in a line of lyric.

Here's a productivity tricks that works for me:

Reason why I stop working on a project is because after a while (or 10 minutes...), it just gets boring.

So I toggle between 3-4 similarly important projects a day. The excitement of doing something new when I switch helps me keep working (just on a different project).

Yes there is a cost to mentally switching regularly but it's worth it to avoid the much higher cost of watching Youtube instead!

Here's the process that works (with some persistence) even if you don't have a revolutionary product:

1. Go to Google, toggle to news and enter the name of similar startups

2. Go through each recent article and add the journalist to a spreadsheet

3. Go on Email Hunter or Email Format to find how the publication formats their email addresses to guess the journalist's. Journalists also tend to use [email protected] for their personal emails.

4. Email your pitch in 3-5 sentences max. Don't just describe what your startup you does, use an interesting angle or story to show its impact.

Instead of: "We do delivery logistic optimization."

Story: "Why the heck is your technician always 5hrs late? Cause it took forever to fix the issues of the guy before you.

We're helping our customers like Comcast and Oracle smart schedule all their appointments based on data like a) how long issue x typically takes to fix and b) real-time traffic conditions.

In high school, I worked taxi dispatcher, seeing firsthand the inefficiencies in coordinating drivers."

Journalists don't want to advertise your startup for free, they care about writing a story that entertains and educates their readers. Feed one to them.

Good roundup of pitch templates using different angles: http://www.artofemails.com/pitch-press

>The order also imposes a $50 million judgment against Lumos Labs, which will be suspended due to its financial condition after the company pays $2 million to the Commission.

So does that mean after paying this fine, Lumosity is in financial trouble?

Except Elon only gets the kids for only half the time (shares custody with his ex-wife) and has a current wife and nannies taking care of the kids when he has them. He mentioned in videos that he doesn't get to spend that much time with his kids.

Just because it's possible for executives to work long hours, it doesn't mean it's healthy for their family life to.

Honestly, at this point online influencers with midsize followings should treat their creative content and the fanbase they've been able to build up as a portfolio of their skills to get their foot in the door of more lucrative opportunities.

I'm not quite sure why they're working minimum wage jobs to make ends meet when they could for example be using their online experience consulting for businesses who would love to devise impactful, authentic ways to connect with the demographics of their fanbase.

I think a lot of these middle tier influencers would benefit from training on how to present their skills/experiences to businesses who are willing to pay. (Not viewers.)

I just read a story about how this girl Esmee Denters (she used to be signed with Justin Timberlake, then the label dropped her) was working part time at a yogurt shop. She could easily make much more for example coaching aspiring singers on to navigate the music industry, etc.

Basically, maybe your viewers won't pay for your content but you can use your content for the proof of expertise to start an auxiliary business that makes money.