Thank you for this wonderful post! I was beginning to feel left out.
While the rest of the U.S. is consumed with mid-term election results, World Series celebrations, fantasy football, Survivor, and Justin Bieber thinking he can dance with 5th graders, we hackers pay little attention and keep on working.
Then you guys come along with fresh hacker-friendly drama. Thank you! It's been 3 weeks since Angelgate, and things were beginning to get monotonous alt-tabbing between my IDE, my debugger, my test runs, email, and hacker news.
</sarcasm>
Now that the sarcasm tag has been lifted, let me say what I really think:
Why is it that those of you who have so much spend so much energy being drama queens? We hackers struggle every day, sometimes for years, building stuff, but if we fart wrong during a pitch, you send us on our way as if nothing we ever did matters. Anyone who comes to this board can bitch and moan about a million different things, but most of us don't; we just keep on working.
Why don't you all just STFU and do the same. There's already too much drama and too much work to be done. When Silicon Valley turns into Hollywood or Washington, D.C., we should all start worrying.
Because this is what drives traffic to blogs. He's hacking here, just not code. It's also a little game theory, as Arrington's willingness to publish anything anyone does to screw him probably also makes people think twice about doing so.
Also, it's not unimportant to startups. Jason is an angel investor. If this is even half true, I'd avoid having Jason invest in my startup. You can divorce your wife more easily than you can divorce your investors.
There's certainly interesting game theory at work here, the problem is presenting Arrington's "play" as factual news. I would consider grellas' meta-analytical comment here to be HN material, while the TC article actually posted here is just drama.
While I agree there that sharing this information can be informative to entrepreneurs, really the onus is on us to do due diligence on the investors before taking money.
Ed this was the ugliest post I've seen on HN -- that I was extremely happy to upvote.
Really guys. Enough with the drama. Get a therapist, join a yoga club. Anything but the continuous gossipy spam that keeps flooding the boards. We're out here struggling day-to-day: take your spectacle/drama-of-the-week onto Oprah or Dr. Phil or something. But please not here.
You know, the 1-of drama posts are fine: "My cofounder left me for IBM". I can handle those every now and then. But this shit has gotten into a business where hackers just waste their time speculating on it. It's like soap operas for hackers. What a tremendous waste of time and productivity such postings create.
I don't know if I can handle that kind of drama though. Personal issues with Jason Calcanis? Big deal. But I can think of nothing more dramatic than to choose IBM over a hacker. If we allow that, next thing we know we'll start seeing "C++ is better than Lisp" posts. Now that's a hacker soap opera.
You're getting all worked up over two drama queens. You say "those of you" and "you all" like there's a huge group of Jason and Mikes out there, but I don't see it. It's always these same two guys going at it, so I'm not sure why you care enough to even write this, let alone get as bothered as you are. Jason and Mike are two of the biggest egos out there. Why don't you just ignore them?
While the rest of the U.S. is consumed with mid-term election results, World Series celebrations, fantasy football, Survivor, and Justin Bieber thinking he can dance with 5th graders, we hackers pay little attention and keep on working.
Then you guys come along with fresh hacker-friendly drama. Thank you! It's been 3 weeks since Angelgate, and things were beginning to get monotonous alt-tabbing between my IDE, my debugger, my test runs, email, and hacker news.
</sarcasm>
Now that the sarcasm tag has been lifted, let me say what I really think:
Why is it that those of you who have so much spend so much energy being drama queens? We hackers struggle every day, sometimes for years, building stuff, but if we fart wrong during a pitch, you send us on our way as if nothing we ever did matters. Anyone who comes to this board can bitch and moan about a million different things, but most of us don't; we just keep on working.
Why don't you all just STFU and do the same. There's already too much drama and too much work to be done. When Silicon Valley turns into Hollywood or Washington, D.C., we should all start worrying.