Yes, but what is rational can be dependent on the environment which you operate in, especially when dealing with economics which is not yet a science.
I'll give you an analogy of a research sample I got from a book.
Bee's by their nature or intelligence you may call it are trained to believe that light at the end of a tunnel is the escape. A rational and even sound analysis in nature.
Now if you put a dozen bees in a glass bottle, and point the closed end towards the window where light is shining, all the bees instinctively fly towards that direction of the light and eventually die of exhaustion.
In the case of the bees what was rational in one environment was render completely useless in another.
From my point of view the internet needs advertising, because if there wasn't Companies like Google orYahoo wouldn't have been able to take on Microsoft with subscription based services.
samson, As we all know, if your startup plan relies on getting a review on TC, you're going to fail.
Some people are living in a bubble, so they think a review on TC matters.
My gripe with TC is that lately, most of their articles have been based on "anonymous sources" or gossip. Having said that, I don't really mind too much either way if they're banned or not. I'd much rather they started reporting unbiased facts and news.
Real estate is important and for every link to techcrunch, and for that matter, cnn, nytimes, washingtonpost, and all the other mainstream sources there is less room for somethign outside the mainstream and finding that stuff outside the mainstream is why I have liked HN so much in the past.
The lack of that kind of watered-down-for-the-masses content is why I found HN so appealing. I would much rather read hacked together transcripts from Dijkstra's brain.
It's not so much that I have something against those publications, but rather that it is easy to get that content somewhere else. People forward it or it's at digg or something.
Which niche is HN meant to fill?
It seems like as the population of a community approaches infinity, the mainstreamness of the content approaches 100%.
No, newspapers were in business of printing that which appeals to majority of people (with some segementation - e.g. conservatives vs liberals or some other division in large enough groups to support the business). Conforming to majoirty's interests is counterproductive when my goal is to learn what's behind the next turn.
Okay so if this is the model that their going with, and I've been hearing this one for while. It would seem that they are trying to go after the same market that yelp, uservoice, and getsatification are all gravitating around albeit from different starting points.
Which is fine, its a large profitable market.
But then what differentiates them?
>It will be “simple stuff” such as lightweight analytics
okay...so technology as the driver has just walked out the door.
It seems like their sales pitch towards businesses will be based on the size of their user base. Which if thats the case won't they inevitably lose to Facebook? Facebook has a user base several times larger and as we've all seen Facebook is ready, willing, and happy to copy whatever works from whomever.
That's why it's so important to move quickly on this. They seem to think they'll keep growing the way they have, and that they're going to keep their user base by keeping things the same. In reality, their users are going to leave unless they get value-added services out the door /now/, not "by year's end".
I think thats an unfair assessment of a good book.
I was probably seventeen when I read the book, and have all but forgotten most of those laws, but I remembered many of the stories. Greene in the book carefully puts together an array of interesting stories of famous leaders, generals, businessman that makes the book enjoyable to read whether or not one agrees with his laws.
No offense, but I thought that story was messed up. What kind of man forces his wife to live in poverty to take care of him for 7 years so he can be free to read his books? I understand that wasn't the point of the story, but it was hard to ignore.
