342 karma · joined April 14, 2009
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Generally, I just love tech. I write about social media crap mostly, but I also get my rocks off reading about bleeding edge stuff like augmented reality, AI, and robots.
WWiV and VisionX were always my favorites, but I regularly dialed into a few Renegade boards.
When it comes to tech that I wish there were still a use for, I don't think anything will outrank the BBS in my mind. The same way some people feel about Steampunk, I feel about BBS's.
Typically I don't even notice who posted it to HN unless I've really liked the post and never seen that domain before (and thus wanted to learn as much about that new-to-me site as possible), so I can't say I personally have any feelings on others who self post.
Relying on a small community on some of my blogs to post things I think will be of interest here at HN isn't effective, either.
I like getting as much input and conversation around my posts and posts of my contributors as possible. I view Hacker News as a way to bring new eyeballs in to deserving contributors (the same way I view Reddit and Y!Buzz, depending on the type of post it is).
As an editor of a group blog, I view part of my job is hunting down and finding the right audience for my contributors, and thus have little compunctions posting stuff from my blog that others wrote, as long as I think it has a shot at appealing to the community here.
It is true, though - with innovation outpacing business much of the time, there is truth to that. The landscapes of tech shift daily, and I don't see many VCs with their fingers on the pulse of those shifts. Some, but not many.
I went to seminary briefly before deciding to go back to being a coder, and my favorite courses were apologetics and the courses having to do with creationist theory.
They didn't teach creationist theory as the absolute definitive truth, they tought it as a plausible element to many Christian worldviews (in many variants, including Deism, Intelligent Design, Young Earth, and others).
If you're looking for a variety of resources representing the different creationist worldviews, check the curriculum and resources at Summit Ministries. They were, at one time, loosely affiliated with Dobson's Focus on the Family organization (not sure of the current status of that affiliation), and lead by really deep thinkers in Protestant beliefs.
The idea that Yahoo, in a matter of a few short hours, was able to search and index all the user accounts that touched a blog system over the course of five years is a bit odd to me.
It's not impossible, and given the China issues in Y's past, it's not implausible, just not that likely to me.
The biggest growth area in my personal income from my online activities (aside from the day job) has been the amount of money I've been getting from sponsored tweets.
It's not a perfect model, but I've already doubled the amount of money I've got this month from last month, with no significant jumps in my personal influence.
Activity stream advertising that benefits the publisher, not solely the owner of the social network, could be where we focus next.
Of course, the FTC isn't exactly making that easy with these guidelines (i.e. what qualifies as "conspicuous disclosure" in a tweet?).
I'm well aware of the bacteria and other creepy crawlies living in my body.
Common sense, to me, dictates that introducing other living cultures into my body seems to be a bit dangerous and fraught with potential unintended consequences, to further clarify my "fraught with peril" comment from earlier.
So, to that end, I can't tell you from any sort of personal experience or learned knowledge whether they work. It just seems like something I wouldn't want. Irrational? Maybe.
Sorta reminds me of the old comedian standby joke: "who was the first guy to look at a cow teat and say 'we're all going to drink what comes out of THAT?'"
I'm all for alternative medicines, but this sounds fraught with peril.
Privacy advocates talk about how behavioral ad networks are violating our privacy, and I've yet to hear a solid argument as to how they have been abused thus far to the consumer's detriment. I'm interested in any and all thoughts because I am, in general, a privacy advocate... I just don't see the impending doom that others seen in BANs
I'm just callin' it as I see it. As someone who sits in this world more or less 24/7, I can't remember the last time (prior to the last couple months) where a bootstrapped company gained wide-acceptance like has been happening recently.
I think that was the point he was trying to make, not that it's never happened before.
This is our world, and though the Silicon Valley startup world encompasses more than these types of companies, this is what was likely in his mind when he wrote it (and the context by which I interpreted the post).
.... but if I were to interpret that sentence and edit it to better clarify meaning (which in retrospect, I probably should have done since I'm the site's editor), I would put the qualifier "most" in that sentence, so it would read:
"Technology, however, isn’t the driver any more for [most] startups."
We see that to be quite true when you look at the base building blocks of many web startups. They're largely the same underneath the UI, same development environments, same infrastructure, and many even run on common CMSs, and it's the positioning (i.e., the marketing) of the startup that's the key differentiator.
That marketing influences the community that floods the site, how they perceive the site, and thus how they use the site (which affects the iterative direction of the site).