Hacker News Reader

klein_waffleon Into Thin Air: How I Spent $5,000 on Air and Made Fifty-Year Old Women Swoon

Why read Guy Kawasaki? Evangelized product that sold itself, string of failures since. This article boring Apple fanboyism.

klein_waffleon Scott Adams: Connect citizens all over the world with a pen pal website to prevent new wars

I have a new proposal. Let's force all families to write letters to each other occasionally and even phone each other. This should stop domestic violence, no?

klein_waffleon Yahoo's Entire Design Innovation Team Fired

The Design Innovation Team produced a lot of interesting toys in Processing and Flash, but nothing that was relevant to Yahoo's business.

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=1

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=2

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=3

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=4

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=5

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=6

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=7

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=8

This one is just a ripoff of something a Google engineer did a long time ago, and has been part of the Mountain View tour for years:

http://design.yahoo.com/project.php?pid=9

The artists from yHaus were very talented, but their relevance to Yahoo amounted to supercool projections at Brickhouse parties. And that may be all that they were asked to do. Some companies treat innovation as a core part of the business, and others treat it as a P.R. exercise.

klein_waffleon Yahoo sale could be bad for minnows

Look at the recent startups bought by Yahoo. When was the last time you heard anything from them again? The one exception is Flickr, but they were profitable and on a rocket ride to the top before they got acquired. As for all the others, the users are wondering when they'll ever see a new feature.

So for all we know, the situation might be better for startups after a Microsoft-Yahoo merger.

Google's acquisitions tend to have some unique technology. Yahoo's acquisitions have mostly been innovators with media and audiences. Does anyone know if there's a pattern with Microsoft? Microsoft has said they want to acquire a bunch of startups.

klein_waffleon Yahoo Exec Souders To Google; Yahoo to Zero?

In any mid-size to large programming company, very very few of its engineers will know anything about web performance. They don't teach it in school and (until now) you couldn't learn this stuff from a book.

klein_waffleon Is Aaron Swartz the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0?

qwertyy: news.yc is as good as you are. If there's stuff that you want to see, post it. If you don't, just STFU or get down with Greasemonkey to edit out whatever you don't want to see.

klein_waffleon Is Aaron Swartz the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0?

He can't be -- Robert Scoble is the Paris Hilton of Web 2.0.

klein_waffleon Conflicting goals between VCs and entrepreneurs

Yep. Joel Spolsky summarized the risk/reward imbalance in an article: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/VC.html

This one is a bit more personal and rather bitter: "An Engineer's View of Venture Capitalists". http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?Art...

This guy's main experience was in the 1980s, so it doesn't take into account technical people who got rich in the 90s boom and then went into VC. So things may have somewhat improved, in that you might find VCs who really grok your idea. Nevertheless, that doesn't address the mismatch of incentives.