Hacker News Reader

thafmanon Mark Zuckerberg sells 30.2 million shares of $FB common stock at $37.58

I'm a massive proponent of the Distributed Social Networking Protocol concept, but since Diaspora tanked no one else seems to be picking up the mantle and Google/Yahoo/Microsoft don't look like they're going to roll out anything resembling an open SN protocol any time soon I wonder if it will ever happen.

thafmanon How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company

No, unsolicited email is never legal, CAN-SPAM only allows you to send email to people you have a prior business relationship with e.g. they signed up for your service/mailing list. Someone who posted a property to Craigslist hardly fits the profile.

thafmanon First Analysis of Nokia-Microsoft Alliance - Wow this is good for Microsoft

"The N97 coulda been an iPhone killer and the N8 and E7 all exhibited potential they might have been big... if Nokia ever really put their mind to it, they coulda crushed the iPhone"

I'll have two of whatever this guy is having.

Nokia doesn't just have a problem with execution it's not just about a features check list of touchscreen, appstore, music and gaming.It's about the attention to detail and ruthless application of quality in hardware build, software and UI. Nokia never even came close.

thafmanon Groupon: Is Google Making a $6 Billion Mistake?

IIRC Google now values YouTube at ~5Bn, and at that price I feel that there are plenty of companies who would bite Google's hand off.

thafmanon [dead]

Remember travel agents? Remember how they just kind of vanished one day?

Horseshit, I make a very comfortable, middle class living at an online/mobile travel commerce start-up that does booking transactions in much the same way that a travel agent used to. The travel agent job disappeared, but Expedia, Tarvelocity and Orbitz -to name just the big, public facing brands of this transition- employ tens of thousands of middle class people.

thafmanon How Our Startup Got Featured on CNN

A $10 gift card for 10 mins of phone feedback is probably the best investment of time/money that I have ever heard of, I will be shamelessly stealing this idea for years.

thafmanon Hipmunk Closes Hyper-Competitive Angel Round, Sans The Usual Suspects

Affiliate booking revenue

thafmanon Hipmunk Closes Hyper-Competitive Angel Round, Sans The Usual Suspects

The team are proven entrepreneurs, but it's not like other travel start-ups like Kayak and Tripit where the founders all have proven domain expertise, Steve and Adam are hardly travel industry veterans.

thafmanon Ask HN: Do startups need analysts? What can this 26-year-old semi-generalist do?

I once had a short conversation with Max Levchin (of PayPal fame) and the one thing he said that stuck in my mind -besides all the drivel about how Slide was going to change the world- was that 10% of a start-up's workforce should be metrics people, obsessed with measuring the company performance i.e. if you have a ten person start-up, at least one should should be an analyst, otherwise he said, the company is essentially flying blind.

From my own experience, if you can not only master the technical side of working with metrics, but be the kind of guy who can actually ask intelligent, relevant questions and structure them in a way that gets meaningful answers from raw data, then you are worth your weight in gold to any start-up.

thafmanon Study Finds That Apple Dominates Tech News

In other news, researchers also announced that 100% of America's imports come from other countries.

thafmanon What’s Hiding in Demand Media’s Finances?

gaming the Digg FP for traffic ala Cracked.com is now (for better or worse) basically over, I'm sure Cracked is seeing a massive loss of traffic.

thafmanon Free of Freemium, Things Are Starting To Look Up At Ning

If I remember correctly, Ning raised their last round at a ~$400M valuation. As a freemium Facebook competitor with Pmarca involved, you can sort of understand, but no one is going to pay >400M for a B2B social network maker.

thafmanon How to fire your boss

Fake

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100810/meet-the-prankster-...

thafmanon Ask HN: Did you ever do anything unethical to get your startup off the ground?

I wouldn't consider most of the actions listed "unethical" per-se, some actions like; "creating a ton of pages with keywords to get long tail google traffic" are legitimate, while "buying an email list to spam people" can be downright illegal.

thafmanon Keep calm & carry on: What you didn't know about the reddit story

He is the sunshine on my shoulders

thafmanon Old Spice on Twitter

completely seconded

thafmanon I own you, and you're easily replaceable.

In April of 2010, Forbes magazine named Patterson fourth on their annual list of "America's Best-Performing Bosses" based on a formula for calculating which executives delivered the best shareholder value relative to their total compensation. Factors included stock performance relative to industry peers over the past six years, annualized stock performance during the leader's total tenure and performance relative to the S&P 500 over that time, and total compensation over the past six years.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/27/best-performing-chief-execu...

thafmanon Six Slides

I think six slides + an actual working MVP with some traction is probably the best proposition for first-time funding.

Keeping your deck to just six slides, when you have nothing else to show might not be the best idea.

thafmanon A Cure For ‘Nigerian Internet Scams’.

Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day, set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

thafmanon Stanford = Army, MIT = Marines

I'm just surprised that Buzz seems to have taken the place of FriendFeed.

thafmanon Paths to $5M for a startup founder

I tend to think of these steps as analogous to lifelines in "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire"; some people can make it to the million with no help, some need lifelines and just others cash out (not to mention those unfortunate souls who guess wrongly).

thafmanon Ask HN: My co-founder sux. What can I do ?

Cannot agree more, some of the biggest problems at all stages of start-up life arise from "title-ing" i.e. co-founders giving themselves C-level or VP-Level titles and then trying to act as such.I once was introduced to a three-founder start-up whole all wanted to run the show. They ended up calling themselves Chairman, CEO and Chief Visionary Officer.

thafmanon Ask HN: product idea

I wanted to go one further and parse emails form major services (FB, Digg, Mint, etc.) to create a dashboard where you can see all the services that you're signed up for and see all emails from a single service. Never ended up doing this because I never got the feeling that gmail apps are a big enough market.

thafmanon Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997)

I'll take the bait, Apple and everyone else lost a massive opportunity to dethrone the Borg, not once, but twice. First with Windows ME and then with Vista Microsoft were caught with their pants way, way down and without an actually usable consumer OS. Apple could have owned that and could have made a massive push for the mainstream.

This being said, had they actually taken on the Borg at their own game they would be a very different company than they are today, and not necessarily a better one.

thafmanon Ask HN: Will Y Combinator launch topic-related threads?

I would love sub-reddit functionality e.g.:

news.ycombinator.com/hn/technews

news.ycombinator.com/hn/python

news.ycombinator.com/hn/webapps

etc.

thafmanon Skip the extra tools - my customers already hang out in my inbox and buddy list

Email for issue tracking hasn't scaled for me past the 200 customer mark, after that it was Highrise then FatFree CRM all the way. Way too useful to be considered an "extra".

thafmanon The rise of the app entrepreneur

OK, the community has spoken "entrepreneur" is apparently cool

thafmanon The rise of the app entrepreneur

I thought this was going to be about web-app entrepreneurs. And by the way, can anyone think of a less sleazy word for tech start-up people than "entrepreneur"?

thafmanon Ask HN: Why youtube explicitly doesn't allow downloading videos?

YouTube does have a download option for specific channels (e.g The White House http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P21yLeBFKHY). My guess is that we will also see paid-downloads through Amazon (or equivalent) for things like music videos. But I can't see YouTube offering the download option for dog-on-a-skateboard vids.