

Thanks to the HN community - grellas

For the past two months, I have been lurking in and about the HN community as a "noobie," making a few submissions and a fair number of comments on topics to which I felt I could contribute, even as a non-technical person.<p>I am now constrained to "sign off" for the time being. I did not want to do so without saying thanks to you all for your graciousness. I have felt most welcomed here, even as one who is not strictly a hacker, though I have concluded on my own that I am misplaced as a general contributor to the site.<p>I do hope to contribute or comment occasionally in the future on startup law-related items, as time may permit. Thanks again and bye for now.
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jyothi
I must have missed a lot of your comments. I just went through all your
threads. I must say they are tremendously useful. Thanks!

There was a time when HN first page would be more full of startup material (in
which case you would have been able to educate us all lot more).

This is what necessitates tagging on HN - newmogul too could have been just
one more section on HN filtered by economy and finance related threads. The
community definitely has a huge overlap.

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jws
I hope he isn't leaving to pursue a new career as an Erlang programmer.

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icey
It was nice having an actual lawyer around here instead of the usual bunch of
bloviators.

Hopefully you're off to do something interesting!

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grellas
I'll be around practicing startup business law as usual, and I will be making
occasional contributions to the site in that area.

I really appreciate the people here and am not suggesting in the least that I
feel alienated from you, only that there is a mismatch between my world and
the hacker world that has led me to conclude that my general (non-law)
contributions to the site do not really add anything meaningful to the
discussions.

Thanks to all for the kind comments (and, no, I won't _ever_ be doing Erlang,
whatever that is, not after what I saw yesterday).

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jacquesm
I don't think you should take what happened yesterday as reflecting on Erlang
in one way or another, that was a very limited number of users behaving in a
childish way.

But you are reinforcing a point I made elsewhere already, that tricks like
that actually hurt the Erlang community.

I don't know much about Erlang myself but it seems a nice enough technology.

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tptacek
Sad to see you go. Still following your blog. Great stuff.

What would a community do differently if it didn't want people like you to
feel misplaced? Just too technical?

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rms
One problem I see is all the people here that misunderstand what Hacker News
is about and think that the only thing on-topic is discussions about
programming.

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jacquesm
You'll be missed George, you're like NYC on /. only (much) less abrasive.

There was some pretty good stuff in your postings, I know I learned from them.

I hope to see you back here some day!

this one should probably be in your bookmarks:

<http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_010.html>

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rms
It's been real. Also check out <http://newmogul.com>.

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satyajit
What's with Newmogul - saw it for the first time. A HN clone with biz focus??
Interesting.

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movix
I'd say that's EXACTLY what it is.

I'm curious as to how someone starts a site like Newmogul. What's day one
like? Do they just have a load of links to news aggregated articles with
comments from anyone they can grab around their office, and a lot of empty
space on the site? Genuine question - how does it work? How do they drive
their traffic in there?

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rms
It's really tough. New Mogul worked because it was started by Nickb, a virtual
link submission machine. For a while it was just a lot of stories submitted by
Nickb and he mostly voted up every story submitted by someone else. It was
only about 2 months ago that there started to be lots of comments. About a
week ago Nickb went on vacation and hasn't been submitting and the site has
held together.

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timwiseman
It shall certainly be a shame to have you contribute less. I found your
comments to be insightful and useful personally.

Also, while I personally think that having this site mostly focused on more
technical matters is nice, I do think there is room for nontechnical
contributors in general.

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alex_c
It's been great reading your comments - definitely valuable contributions.
Hope to see more in the future.

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jhancock
thanks for your contributions. and thanks for the heads up that you will not
be around for a bit so we don't have to see posts wondering why you
disappeared ;)

