The pricing is based on the number of signups per month, so that's 1000 new users per month. Do you feel like that pricing wouldn't work for your situation?
I have been in exactly the same position a number of times over the years. One day I realised that the reason I gave up promoting them is that I never really knew how my marketing efforts were doing so it always felt a bit futile.
This actually inspired my current project, which is all about measuring the results of your marketing (http://flockmetrics.com).
I think several things are helpful here. Understanding the key benefits of your product and figuring out who will most benefit from those features.
Once you know that you need to figure out how to explain your product in a way that those people can understand how it helps them and then you need to find those people.
I personally have found once I've been through that process and can see that I have a product that will make peoples lives easier it motives me to want to get the product to those people.
When I was doing the beta testing for http://flockmetrics.com I was looking for people with SaaS startups and I ended up using a few different approaches.
I contacted people I knew personally that were involved in startups.
I asked a friend who was involved in a startup incubator to email the incubator's founders mailing list asking for beta testers.
I posted on the @flockmetrics Twitter feed and my own personal one.
I know someone building a tool with https://api.ai/ integrating with Facebook chat and other APIs. It's been working well from what I hear. I just noticed it's now owned by Google.
Edit: he also just suggested https://wit.ai/ which is now owned by Facebook.
It might also be worth checking out http://sourced.tech/ as they seem to be doing something similar.
I know of sourced.tech as they contacted me about a position recently, but the job they contacted me about wasn't relevant enough to my skills and experience.
Your competitive advantage will probably be in the quality of the target lists you create. If you can nail that on a broad scale you'll have something with a lot of potential (this is probably also the hardest problem).
I'd consider starting by running some experiments for how to create relevant target lists.
I've been working on this for a little while. Flockmetrics provides signup analytics, the idea being that if you can measure how people are signing up you can begin to understand why and focus your time and energy on areas that will result in more users.
The home page has lost a lot of noise. I think they've done a good job of identifying the main reasons people would ever end up at the home page: sign in, sign up or search. The sign up and sign in forms used to be a click away.
I think the new homepage has lost a bit of the personality that Twitter once had and I think they'll find that people have trouble understanding what exactly the bar of user avatars is all about.
One of the great things about HN is how organic it is in nature. HN is loosely about startups and hacking, but really it's about what people in the startup/hacking world find interesting.
HN is self moderating (or rather community moderated). If people don't like certain posts they won't vote for them. If HN starts banning websites because some people don't like them then it takes the power away from the community and then you are on a slippery slope of moderated content and a world of approval conflicts and power struggles.
You or I might not agree with every post on HN but we have the power to not vote, or if you've contributed enough to downvote.
Of course there are always exceptions. Spam and illegal content are examples of this. But then we have the ability to flag those posts.
I believe it is included in the arc source package. You can get it from: http://arclanguage.org/install (there's a file in the .tar called news.arc). I do not know what licence it is released under however.
You need to figure out what is important to you right now. How much does the money mean to you? Do you need to have higher, more stable income? Can you live with a slightly lower income for a couple of years? Are the benefits a deal-breaker? Obviously getting experience is your priority and it sounds like both will give you that (though it sounds like company 1 will give you more of the experience you are after).
One thing you didn't mention with the two companies is possibility for promotion. If you don't know I'd recommend talking to each company about room for growth and opportunities to take on different roles.
The blog post that thread links to is worth a read.
I personally do some Django development on a netbook and have found it excellent, especially while commuting. I have not had a problem with being under powered (I don't know how Android development would compare) and the only downside has been the lack of screen realestate. Thankfully I bought a netbook with a reasonable keyboard size (Asus Eee PC S101).