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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

The logical follow up question is: assuming swombat isn't part of a secret cabal, how does he avoid setting it off in the future?

You probably can't answer that, but I know I like tweeting about my HN posts and inviting folks over to HN to participate. If that's a bad thing, we need to know that and not do it anymore.

EDIT: Is there is a prohibition against tweeting submissions?

EDIT2: Happy to abide by whatever rules there are, but without knowing them I can see where it could get very frustrating for a lot of folks. A couple of my submissions I was sure were being flagged, but now I'm guessing it's because I shared the link with folks. That's an extremely non-intuitive system response.

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If tweeting about your posts and getting them exposure is a bad thing, this is no forum for entrepreneurs.

This isn't a forum for entrepreneurs: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403868

Sad. I've told numerous people that this was the best online community of entrepreneurs bar none. I guess we need a new one.

Whoa, same here. I guess I will direct my referrals elsewhere from now on.

On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?

> On that note. Where is the best online community for entrepreneurs then?

That's easy. Check out Hacker News. Oh wait...

Its a great forum for entrepreneurs to learn. For entrepreneurs to promote things on is a different story.

I own the domain startup.io which I originally thought I would use for a Startup Q&A site.

A news submission site is appropriate as well.. anyone want to help?

As far as I know it is. As a forum for hackers, it's a forum for a superset of the subset of entrepreneurs YC cares about.

There are several reasons it's better to aim for the superset. One is that this type of founder is more omnivorous by nature, and even when in the throes of starting a startup, gets bored reading about nothing but startups. The other is that hackers are more likely to become founders unintentionally. Many don't realize till only a few months beforehand that they are about to start companies. So if you look at the set of people who will eventually start startups, what they're interested in reading about now is not "entrepreneurship" but e.g. programming languages.

From the YC application page: "We're more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments on Hacker News."

With all due respect to PG, this sounds like an invitation for entrepreneurs to use HN, since one would think that YC is looking for entrepreneurs.

HN not being for (i.e. targeted at) entrepreneurs doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a high concentration of entrepreneurs on HN (especially if you hypothesise a correlation between being a hacker and being an entrepreneur).

Tweeting about your posts is fine. I do that myself. But you didn't link to your post (http://swombat.com/2011/4/12/bushido) but rather to the HN story about your post.

I frequently link to the HN story rather than my blog posts directly due to the additional value HN comments provide.

Same here. Even if you have something bad to say about my submission, better to share it with the rest of HN than simply tell me on my blog. Helps everybody. Keeps somebody else from submitting stuff like it. And if you have something interesting to add, more people see it on HN than on my blog.

As long as you're not explicitly trying to game the system, I never saw a downside to it.

Linking may be ok. I suspect it is the explicit request for upvotes that ends up setting off the voting ring detector.

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