891 karma · joined May 15, 2009
Formerly engineer @ a large pharma focused on data science projects, primarily JS and Python, also interested in copyright / open source licensing.
hitesh at gmail.
What bothers me most about this whole setup is it makes a legal education even more expensive than it already is for lower to mid-income students.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3618708763/
edit: here it is with 4 comments. check out the whacked-out indentation of the comments -- the nesting is all off:
lawgician was going to be a digg/reddit type of thing for legal news -- i don't think its gonna happen soon as doing this right would involve more time than I can give right now.
poofilter originally was intended to filter political news and somehow assess the bias level of the source from left to right, blue to red. someone else did this recently but I forget the name.
obamanutpunch was going to be a simple lolcat-type site of photoshopped photos of president obama punching people in the nuts (see chuck norris here http://www.flickr.com/photos/hitesh/3254005822/). Later, I found out that there were actually 2 definitions in urban dictionary for the term (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Obama%20Nut%2...)
poofilter.com
lawgician.com
And from what I've seen of the relatively new seed investment firms, you can approach some just as early - an idea, a team, and a plan (sometimes as short as a few pages). Some would prefer that you not even incorporate yet.
It was 1999, though, and likely less formal relative to the more mature market now. Back then it seemed most angels were friends or family of the founders. The boom was so strong that getting early investors was no more difficult than talking to friends who liked to invest. You could also work with an incubator but we didn't call those guys "angels."
Initially I stopped visiting techcrunch because of the ignnorance and hatred in the comments for a post Arrington made about a T-shirt company that sold intentionally offensive and incendiary products. I revisited a few months later (after I read they reshuffled and hired more reporters). Things were a little better for a while but Arrington seems to have returned to his aggressive and argumentative self. I didn't see discussion of it here but yesterday he went off on the Times and attacked their journalistic integrity for reporting techcrunch's dubious recent history (see last.fm).
Laporte is right, though, Arrington is a troll. He picks fights with anyone he can. "What are you gonna do about it" seems to be his attitude about everything, and when people disagree, he censors their comments from his Bully pulpit. This is no different from what people like O'Reilly and other right wing radio hosts do when they cut the microphone of people they do not agree with.
Even if there's only a "like" button that brings more liked comments up, it'd be something. No system is perfect, but all of them work well enough to bring useful content up and push trollish content out or invisible. And if trolls want to fight amongst themselves, they can still do it (either at the bottom of the page or by turning their threshold off).
You simply cannot have folks pick and choose which comments to keep and which to censor. That definitely will not make for good discussion, as evidenced by their efforts to date.
And even if its wordpress, as someone pointed out its open source and I bet there are multiple plugins that setup such functionality. I simply don't believe that these "tech" people in Silicon Valley would have a problem finding someone to do a little coding for them. Seems lazy more than anything else.
Again, my belief is simply that this is not a new problem. The word "troll" has existed since the BBS days and over the last 10 years other sites have come up with clever ways (that work) to filter the trollish comments out. I don't think any of them are perfect, but it seems a bit cynical and overstated to say "any" voting system would be gamed if other sites have managed. Even digg.
On slashdot and reddit and even on digg, if you set your comment threshold to +5, what's left behind is pretty good conversation. On HN, trollish comments are grayed out almost immediately. What's most disappointing is that slashdot has had a comment karma system since '97.
Instead of complaining about the trolls, I'd prefer if they actually did something about it.
But Laporte does get pretty salty there. And at one point he tells all of them to fuck off, not just Arrington.
To his credit, he filled a void. I wish there were folks like Arrington around and things like the VC-funded "internet week" in NY this week back in 1999 during the first dot-com boom. Something is better than nothing. And he's on the right side of a lot of things -- specifically on intellectual property regulation.
And also to his credit, he's trying and he listens. He's been responding to commenters on his site and there's something to be said about that.
The other thing worth noting is that outside of geek world, just about everything seems like troll kingdom. I want to puke when I see sites with millions of visitors but without threaded discussions, but its a sad reality and a slow process. The nerds are always ahead of the curve. The sad/funny thing is that slashdot didn't have these issues in the late 90's.
In terms of a site that covers the same news without the dickishness, aren't we on it right now? This is the best startup-news site I've ever found. And when t/c posts something worth reading, its usually here within minutes.
I'm a recovering lawyer myself and I left because working with lawyers was worse than anything I had experienced before (which was working mainly with startups and non-profits in NY).
Its fascinating to me. There are a lot of bitter nerds out there who passionately hate T/C, like fanatically so. It seems the slashdot/reddit crowd has repeatedly criticized those guys for being marketers rather than geeks, and they are right in that basic premise but I think the level of animosity is unwarranted. Even if these guys aren't pedigreed nerds, they are fascinated by and love technology and they are an important part of the industry.
Its one of the reasons I like HN -- it has a much more nuanced view of the important role folks like Arrington and the VC community play in the bigger world outside of nerdland.