Since when polluting valuable community information resource with paid commercial fluff became acceptable?
I fail to see what pollution has happened here. Both NKS and Wolfram Alpha are pretty serious endeavours, that most hackers should be aware and probably interested in.
Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.
You're mixing various concepts here... "Aggressive promotion" is, effectively, what most entrepreneurs need to do at some point to get some users on the system. The problem is not with promotion or how aggressive with it. The problem is with "unethical", brutal, blunt promotion, like spam.
I don't think anyone here has something against "aggressive promotion" in the form of interesting information that happens to relate to something that someone is building. Except for you, perhaps.
I fail to see what pollution has happened here. Both NKS and Wolfram Alpha are pretty serious endeavours, that most hackers should be aware and probably interested in.
Aggressive promotion poisons the well for everybody. People come to HN for the honest information and opinion exchange with the like-minded, not to be bombarded with PR.
You're mixing various concepts here... "Aggressive promotion" is, effectively, what most entrepreneurs need to do at some point to get some users on the system. The problem is not with promotion or how aggressive with it. The problem is with "unethical", brutal, blunt promotion, like spam.
I don't think anyone here has something against "aggressive promotion" in the form of interesting information that happens to relate to something that someone is building. Except for you, perhaps.