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Comment by teeboy | Hacker News Reader

You are a domain squatter. It's a shame people like you lurk on HN.

It is hilarious how clueless you are. Even if you take offense at his speculative registration of domain names, you can't criticize Jacques of lurking. Check the HN "Leaders" list . . . he's #4 on the list of all-time karma.

Jacques, I love reading your posts; they offer great insight into real entrepreneurship. Keep up the good work (including domain speculation)!

And you are totally clueless. And I'm not exactly lurking here.

Let me give you a hand so that in the spirit of the linked article you may educate yourself on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

I don't think people in HN like to encourage domain squatters.

http://jacquesmattheij.com/auction-of-domains-for-sale/

People on HN don't typically encourage cluelessness, you really should be careful with what terms you use around here. Language is a powerful tool when used properly if you start using words without knowing their meaning you make a fool out of yourself.

An important part of that definition appears to be:

"using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else"

Looking at the list of domains on that site I can't see any that meet that criteria. If someone wants to speculatively registers domains that don't conflict with existing trademarks or company names I don't see what the problem is.

The interesting bit is that the vast majority of those were registered for projects that never saw the light of day. My priorities have shifted over the years (mostly: kids) so I've decided to slow down considerably. Hence the sell-out, I don't think I'll ever get around to most of these, maybe one or two that I'll put some weight behind but my days of launching 3 different projects per year are with a high degree of certainty behind me.

Just yesterday I wrongly typed musicbrainz.com, looking for the powerful open source music tagger. It appears to be in the list. I don't mind grabbing a few bucks from a big Corp when they forgot to get their domains, but I find it a bit vulturish to squat names of open source projects.

It might be the case that Jacques did register this name without knowing, but it seems not very likely.

There was a rumour that musicbrains was going the route of CDDB (now gracenote) and I registered the domain on the off chance they were going to close the data.

A similar thing happened with freedb (hence freeddb), which ended up powering daz.com for a couple of years but with better replacements out there the project was shut down.

Funny how everybody is always so ready to see malice.

Check out reocities.com for one that did work out as planned (at least, according to me, I'm not sure Yahoo would agree with me there).

Well, if you appreciate the current work of MusicBrainz team but foresee the possibility of them going commercial, maybe you could, meanwhile, link or redirect to their official http://musicbrainz.org/ site. That could be a fair solution for non lucrative project domains.

Whatever the merits of that claim, it's off-topic for this article.

On March 22, 2012, I was working at one of the VC-darling startups (Peter Thiel is an investor) and brought in to a meeting with my 26-year-old "tech lead", the VP of Finance, and the CTO, then told that if I wanted to keep my job, I'd have to sign papers disparaging the performances of 10 of my colleagues.

I'd been promised a leadership role (VP/Eng "unofficially", the title becoming official after 6 months) and this would have been my first official duty: fucking over some seriously capable engineers. Reasons for this were not given to me. It was just "something you have to do if you want to lead". Seriously, WTF? Since when is leadership about fucking innocent people over?

The back story is that the CTO was leaving and the "tech lead" was a protege who wanted to take some shots before the CTO left, in order to cement his position until the next CTO came in. How he managed to convince the real execs that this was a good idea, fuck if I know. My guess (which I can't prove) is that some of these people had "too much" equity and the firm was looking to manage them out, and that having a 28-year-old, who knew nothing about their work, sign horrible performance reviews would disgust them enough to quit.

I didn't sign the papers. After I refused to cave when they extorted me out of a promised severance, the CEO embarked on a months-long campaign to ruin my reputation after I was gone.

I bounced back with a bit more resolve. When I build a company, I want to make sure that kind of nonsense never fucking happens. Yes, there will be disagreements and "politics" related to which ideas are more important. Fine. That's okay. But if I am running a company, extortion and sabotage will never happen on my fucking watch.

After that experience, I don't judge people for how they make money. Domain squatting is not my favorite activity, but it's an honest living compared to a lot of the stuff I've seen in the supposedly legitimate white-collar world.

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