

The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000 - thankuz
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/12/never-sell-half-your-company-for-1000/

======
adrianwaj
"Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech
investor who ever lived."

vs

"Don't know if it's true or not, but if it is, Paul Ceglia could be the
greatest early investor of all time, at least in terms of returns."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2437351>

Nice one Erick!

One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just
recycled HN comments.

~~~
ChuckMcM
"One of the reasons I don't read tech blogs is because very often they're just
recycled HN comments."

Since there is an ongoing discussion of the quality of HN comments and whether
or not they are improving or declining in quality, I'd like to dive into this
bit more.

Given the kicker 'Nice one Erick' I'm wondering if this is a complaint that
pathik (the author of the referenced comment) is in 'real life' Erick
Schonfeld or if its a complaint that Erick plagiarized the comment and turned
it into a throw away opinion piece on TechCrunch?

One might argue that mining HN comments for OpEd blog pieces would be one way
of producing content likely to appeal to the HN readership. In this particular
case a one-liner comment by pathik was fleshed out (slightly) into a
comparison of investors using a quality metric of their startup ROI. Without
taking into account their negative ROI on things that went south. In my
opinion the lack of depth or extended insight in the TechCrunch piece was what
made it 'throw away.'

And one of the things about 'dynamic' journalism is the whole echo chamber
effect. Perhaps most interestingly demonstrated when the 'primary source' for
Wikipedia articles are articles that are published outside of Wikipedia but
point back to Wikipedia as either one of, or their only source [1].

So if we are successful at creating really high quality comments on HN, and
people take those insights and turn them into traffic generating blog entries
(taking on some of the mantle of insightfulness) do we care?

Personally I don't particularly care if someone takes something I've said and
writes it up and gets credit for it. But its definitely a weird part of this
interconnected social opinion graph that is created by the web.

[1] [http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-
creat...](http://techdebug.com/blog/2008/04/19/wikipedia-article-creates-
circular-references/)

~~~
adrianwaj
From that article, I would have preferred Erick placed his own unique input
into the echo chamber against a yellow background, if he has any!! (actually,
seriously speaking, I appreciate your point, and I feel my initial kicker does
not really mean much more than what it says. Everyone has a different way to
research and write and that is what makes the world such a great place!)

------
adrianwaj
A convicted felon can also be a reformed felon (is he really a convicted felon
or is this demonization or a setup [http://www.businessinsider.com/self-
proclaimed-facebook-owne...](http://www.businessinsider.com/self-proclaimed-
facebook-owner-paul-ceglia-and-wife-arrested-for-grand-larceny-after-failing-
to-deliver-wood-pellets-2010-7) ?).. anyhow to me this whole thing is
unimportant, but it'd make a good poll <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll>

~~~
gexla
He may very well turn out to be a rich felon. What I hate about felony
convictions is that they get you lumped into the "felon" category with people
who have committed much worse crimes. In this case it seems the dude was
busted for possession of shrooms. Why categorize him the same way as we would
with other felons such as murderers or rapists. On the other hand, it's
everyone who has an interest in tearing him down who are calling him a felon
(media and Facebook.) Let's see if people will be calling him a felon when
he's 100+ million richer. He's a great investor! Maybe he can invest in my
startup.

------
waynecolvin
Rich people always have people coming out of the woodwork. Just the same
negotiating your salary when getting hired and business decisions when
starting up are important!

