Hacker News Reader

cienrakon Stanford & Cornell Fight to Win Bid for Engineering Campus in Manhattan

Right but why not use the local schools who have better resources and roots here?

cienrakon TechStars Raises Fresh $24 M, Offers New Startups $100K Each

How are these terms different than what goes on with YC and StartFund? Better or worse?

cienrakon Is Paul Ceglia a sleazy grifter or Facebook angel investor?

Probably a little from column A, little from column B.

No great empire is built without a burying a few bodies, but it seems like the skeletons Mr. Ceglia wants to shake loose don't hold together in the light of day.

cienrakon Why 80 Percent of Web Projects Are Total Bullshit: A Freelancer’s Rant

The link points to an article demonstrating how people who play Magic the Gathering are marginalized by mainstream society.

The freelance programmer who wrote this piece is not Jon Finkel, a full time Magic the Gathering and poker pro.

Try harder.

cienrakon Andy Weissman Leaves Betaworks For Union Square Ventures

Interesting note.

Andy Weissman and John Borthwick are both alumni of Wesleyan University.

USV co-founder Brad Burnham is from Wesleyan.

A strong community of liberal arts educated folks making big waves in the New York tech scene, both on venture and new media.

cienrakon Mike Arrington Introduces Us To the "First F*ucking Amendement"

The winner from this group receives the Disrupt Cup and $50,000, taking over possession from Disrupt New York winner Getaround. Without further ado, the runners-up is Prism Skylabs. And the winner is…Shaker! Disclosure: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is an investor in Prism Skylabs and is a pending investor in Shaker.

cienrakon Venture Capitalists With Powerful Blogs May Run Afoul of the SEC

So is it a problem that Fred Wilson blogged for months about Kickstarter before revealing that he was an investor?

cienrakon Venture Capitalists With Powerful Blogs May Run Afoul of the SEC

Does this apply to folks with personal blogs like Fred Wilson and Mark Suster or just big corporate blogs like TechCrunch and GigaOm?

cienrakon Fog Creek Software Becoming a Betawork’s Style Innovation Lab

“We reached a certain point where I realized we had this mature product, kind of running under its own steam, and while we continue to improve and update it, we could take eight people off of FogBugz,” Mr. Spolsky added. Those eight employees were split into teams of two and given the freedom to spend three months building something that interested them. “I like to think of this place as an idea factory,” said Mr. Spolsky, echoing a sentiment betaworks co-founder John Borthwick has shared with Betabeat. “They have some time to work on something and if its great, we might scale. If not, we pivot, or kill the project and try something totally new,” explained Mr. Spolsky.

cienrakon Arrington Plays His Nuclear Option Against the NY Times

Mike Arrington has played his "nuclear card"

Nowhere in the extensive coverage of Crunchfund or the op-ed scolding by David Carr did the NY Times mention that it was an investor in True Ventures.

Ironically, the NY Times even lumped GigaOm and Om Malik into its list of conflicted bloggers.

cienrakon Arrington now officially out

Disagree. Arrington will have a powerful personal blog. But now he gets to have his cake and eat it to.

He leaks intel to his former staffers at TC to cover. He writes occasionally as an unpaid blogger. And he runs Crunchfund without any conflicts.

cienrakon Arrington now officially out

This is good news. Erick is a great reporter without all the conflicts of Arrington.

cienrakon Grouper Sets You Up With Three Facebook Strangers, But ‘It’s Not a Date’

So this is a triple "non date"? That sounds like it has a lot of potential to be awkward. What kind of social engineering goes into picking the people?

cienrakon General Assembly Get Funding From Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos

I wonder if startups accepted into GA will have a standing offer for funding like YC folks?

This seems to be about education, so perhaps the dealflow is implicit via goodwill from the funding.

As GA co-founder Brad Hargreaves wrote, " When we launched our first certification program—Front-end Web Development—a few weeks ago, we received over 100 applications for only fifteen available spots. Demand for this kind of education has clearly outstripped supply. And we want to answer the call."

cienrakon How a Stand-Up Comedian Made The World's First Handheld Panoramic Video Camera

For anyone who's interested, here is Kogeto CEO and Dot camera co-creator Jeff Glasse doing his stand-up comedy routine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LuQSCUcMgk

cienrakon How a Stand-Up Comedian Made The World's First Handheld Panoramic Video Camera

Build it and they will come.

cienrakon How a Stand-Up Comedian Made The World's First Handheld Panoramic Video Camera

There is some video of this camera in action on Youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfnU7ts7mlk

cienrakon The Patent Pledge

A recent study found that patents per capita was the most important factor in determining the gap between the haves and have nots in a nation.

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/31/309483/patents-...

What's poorly thought out about this pledge is that a shop of far less than 25 people could easily clones of web and mobile apps at scale.