thomasbarker.com I just build stuff

Valleywag was Nick Denton's great experiment in pathological narcissism: if you make fake celebrities out of a microcosm of people, can you generate enough pageviews and ad revenue to make a profit? The short answer is no, you cannot. It seemed like it would have worked, though. People in Silicon Valley are self-important enough to believe that they are real celebrities after being mentioned on a web site.

Now, Valleywag is going to be relegated to a column on Gawker.com, where it's going to be abundantly obvious that nobody cares about a group of well-to-do twenty-somethings going on vacation to Cyprus. This is actually Web 2.0 coming full circle. In the beginning, nobody cared who you were, and in the end, nobody cares who you are.

Fuck me, this is satisfying.

Here Is A List Of People Who Never Mattered, And Still Don't

With the death of Valleywag, here are some people who are no longer internet celebrities:

• Leah Culver: attractive white girl who programs in Python. Became internet-famous by virtue of dating around Silicon Valley. No marketable skills in the real world.
• Dave Morin: works at Facebook, is somehow important as such.
• Brittany Bohnet: dates Dave Morin, somehow in that blast-radius of importance. No apparent marketable skills.
• Me: became internet-famous for making fun of people like the aforementioned. Will continue to do so. Few apparent marketable skills.
• Julia Allison: soft-subject columnist who discovered the hard way that beauty has a shelf life. Came to the Valley to find a rich husband, still spinning wheels.
• Marissa Mayer: Still important because she has spending authority, but no longer a celebrity because San Francisco nouveau-riche will never be New York City society, no matter how hard it tries.

Reserve your spot now - when the money comes back to the Valley, we'll be looking for a new batch of makeshift celebrities. We'll be back in 2-3 years.

Anonymous comments are back! I'm trying out a service called Mollom for spam prevention. If your comment sucks but doesn't suck enough to be classified as spam, you'll get a captcha.

That's really about it. Keep on keepin' on.

[Ed. Note: promoted this meandering college-student whine from the peanut gallery because a lot of CS majors are about to enter the School of Hard Knocks]

Fuck. Simply, fuck.

OK, maybe with a little Goddamn and a pinch of facepalm. Why all the obscenities and and blaspheming? I'm a third year Computer Science major about to walk into the steaming pile of brown-bag-on-fire that is the tech industry. I don't even get to enter it now while it's still ablaze. I get to enter it two years from now - ya, it'll take me five years. Wanna fight about it? . It's facts like this that almost make me want to hang up my Lisp compiler for good. (I'm one of those CS majors. Go fuck yourself).

I Would Gladly Take It Up The Ass From SBCL

Steel Bank Common Lisp, how I swoon for you. I can hear the collective groan of the Uncov community now. I care not. We will elope in a couple years and get married by Elvis. Just because I have an inordinate amount of love for this language doesn't mean I'm all that good at it yet. Maybe that's why I love it, we're still at the lust phase and haven't moved on to the complacency-I'd-rather-fuck-one-of-your-hotter-friends phase. As Theory and Intelligence are the foci within my CS degree, it is probably a good thing that I enjoy the language that 99% (number pulled out of my ass) of all Artificial Intelligence software/research is written in.

Whoa There, Nelly. Theory?

You betcha. You know what's really funny though? I still know how to actually do things with computer code. While I do spend a ridiculous amount of time recreating algorithms that have been around since the 1970s for homework, I actually have a background in practical programming. Amazing, eh? That's the cool thing about (Insert My Awesome University Here), they teach us about programming and doing practical things first, then lead us down the path of brain explosion with theory.

For instance, things like the FizzBuzz problem don't scare me. Asking me to open a file and manipulate its contents in Python, Java or Brainfuck doesn't send send me for new pair of shitless underwear. (OK, maybe Brainfuck does.) That not functional enough for you? I don't have to prove myself to you. You're not my real father, you're just fucking my mother. I'm going to go cry over my dead father for a bit. (Not really, he's alive and well and will probably find this somehow)

OK, We're Back. Time For The Point of the Story.

I'm going to spend the first five to ten years of my "career" optimizing code so old it's chiseled into the concrete foundations of the building. Woo-fucking-Hoo. I think I'm OK with that though. I'm in this for the long haul. I'll take some abuse from my love because I like to think the high points are better than the low ones. Even if the low ones mean a trip to the hospital to pop my shoulder back into it's socket. Even if the low ones mean I don't have feeling in three fingers in my right hand anymore. Even if ... stop, breath, it'll be OK. I'm going to go change my major to Management now.

Crime has spiked in the city of Palo Alto, which is home to Facebook and a couple of other walking corpses. Since June, there have been twelve street robberies, eleven of which remain unsolved. There have also been 146 home burglaries so far this year, up from last year's total of 128.

Why is this awesome? Because try as it might to be genteel, Palo Alto is still within driving range of some poor communities. If you've got no qualms with crime and you lose your job because the economy goes to shit, who better to knock over than a bunch of rich pricks? The median home price there is $1.3 million, so your chances of a score are pretty good. Shit, if you rob someone on the street, you've got a 91% chance of getting away with it.

Voting for Obama Makes It All Better

In response to this, the citizens of Palo Alto have turned to the police for help. The police, having been relegated to arresting shoplifting Stanford students for years, don't know what to do. The only thing they can come up with is to start interrogating black people, no joke. At a town meeting this past week, Palo Alto police chief Lynne Johnson said:

We do not want to create an environment of fear of people of color in this community, absolutely not, but on the other hand we have to do due diligence in trying to apprehend the suspects that are doing this ... When our officers are out there and they see an African-American, in a congenial way, we want them to find out who they are.

Oh no! Colored folk in our town! I don't know whether to laugh or facepalm. And in a stunning display of cultural understanding, Chief Johnson explains that black people who wear do-rags are likely criminals:

The one suspect around the California Avenue train station was wearing a do-rag. If my officers see an African-American who has a do-rag on his head, absolutely the officers will be stopping and asking who that person is.

Right, so if you're black, don't wear a do-rag in Palo Alto. This probably goes for Indians, and anyone else with darker skin.

Something tells me that she's never been to Oakland.

Two blogs that I know of are trying to become the new FuckedCompany: FuckedStartups and Screwdd. Both suck.

The first time that shit got ill in Silicon Valley, FuckedCompany was appropriate. Pud did it very well, and fuck me it was funny. It was so good because the companies that were collapsing had raised tens of millions and in some cases hundreds of millions of VC dollars. What could have been done with all that money? How many kids could have been given the chance to go to college? How many drug addicts could have gotten into rehab?

No, instead we got Pets.com and Flooz. The great subtext to FuckedCompany was the amount of money going down the shitter.

Bubble 2.0 saw orders of magnitude less money going into companies, so the attempts to make fun of the ones that fail is just lame. That, and you guys really suck balls at putting words together. Read Pud's book. He's a teacher. Respect.

I'm Handing Out Chocolate Covered Onions on Halloween

There is one part of this downfall that does deserve chronicling, but it hasn't happened yet. The media orgy that surrounded Web 2.0 made a big deal out of a lot of nobodys. Take Leah Culver for example: the internet's Sarah Palin. There was a lot of attention surrounding her because she is a rare figure. A good looking girl who can program and is doing a startup. Granted, it comes out later that she can't program all that well and nobody cares about her startup outside of San Francisco, but she's still a pretty damn good news story.

When conditions worsen, people are going to want to find out what happened to nouveau-media-rich nobodies like Leah. Is she working some mindless programming job somewhere? Did she quit tech all together? How much does being on the cover of the MIT Technology review really get you? Now that's schadenfreude.

Twenty-somethings who appeared to have accomplished a lot in reality haven't done anything that the world cares about. There's how you sell magazines and get pageviews. The headline I want to see?

"What $60 Million in Digg Stock Will be Worth in 18 Months"

One of the most profitable hustles in the IT industry is programming methodology. You don't need to produce anything beyond books and seminars, and your customers' only requirement is that you leave them feeling able to accomplish something. If they succeed, then obviously it is because of the foresight and experience that birthed your process. If they fail, then they missed some esoteric yet critical detail, so it's not your fault.

This basic confidence trick has made a lot money for the people who preach Agile development. Paul Graham, the father of all that is Holy on the internet, has invented a new model of software development. I will formally call it Fanboy Driven Development or FDD, as it is yet unnamed. Graham is very much an engineer, so the process isn't as well-braded as Agile, but I think it's a diamond in the rough.

Why Is The Letter 's' in 'Lisp'? It's Cruel to Arrington.

FDD is very simple, in fact, it's easier to implement than something like Extreme Programming or Scrum. The first step is to find or cultivate a small internet community of programmer-fanboys who will jump at every opportunity to fellate you. Graham has done this very well with the Hacker News forum, where hundreds of college age and younger boys go every day to hear the gospel (Graham has consistently stated that he likes his entrepreneurs young, yet undeflowered by the harshness of reality).

When you have this small army of programmers who have convinced themselves that they are independent-minded, you then set them loose to do your bidding. Like any good con, the mark will think it was his idea, when in reality, you have been calling the shots all along. In Paul Graham's case, he tried to make them develop his dialect of Lisp called Arc. That's really all there is to FDD. Easy, huh?

Startuppers Don't Live In Oakland Because There's Only One Whole Foods Store

Arc was on a roll when it first started. Sure, it lacked every basic feature that a serious programming languages had, but it had a strong community. Paul Graham expected the Arc users to implement shit like Unicode support, while he would concentrate on the core language. For a while, this worked great. Fanboys worked on the boring parts of the language while Graham just watched, occasionally issuing an edict about direction.

Things changed, though, when Graham abandoned Arc, leaving nobody in the driver's seat. Why he did this is a secret he will take with him to his grave, but relying on a bunch of God damned nerds to develop a programming language will produce more blog posts about the Curry-Howard isomorphism than cohesive, usable code.

Arc has since been relegated to the aw-how-cute discount rack of programming languages. However, as I mentioned previously, if your project fails under a prescribed methodology, the system didn't fuck up, you fucked up. Like every other attempt at making Lisp relevant again, someone in a leadership position either pussied out or got lazy. Without a He-Man to love unconditionally, a fanboy is nothing, so it's no wonder that Arc lost what little steam it had. (In the end, Lisp is dead like Latin is dead: it it still spoken by a few people who think it is the language of God, but the rest of the world has moved to something more modern.)

Whatever the case, FDD provides a great way to deal with criticism: just say that you're focusing on the long-term vision.

Valleywag is running a good story about Michael Arrington, the has-been, and I feel validated because somebody else is finally saying it. Arrington himself will stay on his feet - he's not a dumb guy, but the TechCrunch concept is on its way out to pasture, if it's not already there.

For a second time, a river of venture capital was flowing through Silicon Valley, and someone had to be there to document it all. Since Web 2.0 was more about traffic than IPOs, it was only natural for a kingmaker to emerge in the media. TechCrunch marshaled a lot of users around Web 2.0 products and collected some handsome ad revenue in exchange. That was all well and good, but as Arrington will learn, media is a fickle business. It doesn't take much to slip into irrelevance.

Times Were Good, But How Do You Stay Relevant Now?

The money river dried up in a hurry, and TechCrunch has been caught with its pants down. Lately, it's been nothing but stories about mobile phones and giant Silicon Valley companies. This is likely to continue for a while, with the anemic startup throughput we're seeing.

Unfortunately for Arrington, those stories don't draw a lot of traffic. Why? Because they're boring. Without new startups to write about, TechCrunch has become a bullhorn for press releases. There are two recipes to fix this: break stories through research or bring readership with writing talent. It's damn sure the latter won't happen (remember I refused to work for TC), so TechCrunch will have to start investigating, and this probably means finding a new niche.

The First Dotcom Bust Killed Publications, Too

The editor of a publication establishes its direction. With startups gone, TechCrunch is just thrashing, and is running out of energy. The next couple of months will be the critical period that decides if TechCrunch thrives or becomes the next Infoworld, and it will all depend on the editor. Unfortunately, being unexperienced in the media, the odds are stacked against Arrington. Uncov, however, will be continuing its long tradition of awesome. I ain't no suit-wearin' business man like Mike. I'm just a gangster, I suppose.

Arrington spends a lot of time telling startups that they need to be dynamic. They need to roll with the punches and adapt to the climate. The climate has just changed violently for the TechCrunch-style media, and Michael Arrington's face will soon be marred by dust, sweat and blood.

The Arena is kind to no one.

California has a time-honored tradition of knowing better than everyone else. As an outsider, it's hard to get used to, and I'm still trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. 80% of Uncov readers are outside of California, and I am here to tell you that this state isn't as great as you think it is.

California is big into these voter-sponsored initiatives. All you need to do to make something into law is collect enough signatures to get it on a ballot, and then sell it to the voters on TV. Take tens of thousands legalese words and reduce them down to a 15 second commercial - oh yeah, this can't miss.

Being an American, I always rely on television to tell me what to think, so I should be enjoying all of this advertising. Normally, that would be the case, but with the election so close, every other commercial now is about some proposition on the ballot. Last election, I simply kept tally of the number of commercials on each side (with bonus points for appeals to emotion and protecting the children), and voted for the side with the most points.

It's an easy system, but I've lost count.

Bay Game, Bay Slang, It's A Bay Thang

It's not just the voters who suck at life. Remember in 2000 and 2001 when we all watched the rolling blackouts from the outside and thought dude, what the fuck is your problem? Yeah, that was the state legislature. I don't know what they were trying to accomplish, but I do know that in Connecticut, when we flipped the switch, the lights turned on.

I suppose this was California's first realization that there are mean people out there who don't share the sunshine-up-the-ass attitude, and will take advantage of your shit if it's possible. It was satisfying to watch Enron jam power up California's ass for $250 per megawatt hour. Great fuckin' job, geniuses.

With all this going on, why live here? Venture capitalists and nice weather. That's really about it, and the investors are hiding in their shells for the time being.

Shit is majorly ill in Microsoft's RPC system, allowing remote-root style attacks on Windows computers. Announcement at El Reg and Microsoft.

Go, go gadget Windows Update.

Google's G1 phone launched yesterday with an underwhelming response from, well, basically everybody. Not quite up to snuff with our memories of the iPhone's launch.

Google did manage to beat the iPhone in one area, though: the expected line wait time at the retail outlet on launch day. In any Operations Research class, they will teach you that an effective way to deal with a queue is to have multiple agents servicing requests in parallel, as Apple did on iPhone launch day, employing many people in the store. Google's superior mathematical minds figured out that the core problem behind long queue wait times is the existence of the queue in the first place. Eliminate the people waiting in line, eliminate the wait time. Who's smart now?

There was also a little bit of hubbub in the tech media over the Android App Store, but that fizzled out because there aren't a whole lot of apps in the App Store.

Can You Feel The Energy?

Even TechCrunch had better things to do. Arrington sent two of his lackies to cover the launch, with one story announcing the launch of the store, and another story reviewing the "top ten apps". Since there were only forty apps available at the time, picking ten wasn't all that hard. The number three pick was Pac-Man, a game that has existed for 28 years.

Innovation, thy name is Android.

Now is clearly the perfect time to launch a non-necessity consumer electronic device: right after Silicon Valley has announced waves of layoffs. Maybe they are trying to capture the buy-your-way-out-of-sorrow market, but if that were the case, they'd be selling whiskey and OxyContin.

Yahoo is firing a bunch of people to cut $400 million from its budget. That sucks for the people who work there, but the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who hustled Yahoo out of more than $2.5 billion in the last 4 years probably aren't terribly concerned.

In the typical American fashion, Yahoo bought a bunch of shit it didn't need with money it didn't have. That, of course, was no problem at the time because the stock market always goes up, and they get a fuck-ton of airline miles every time they buy a Web 2.0 startup. In the other typical American fashion, the sharks took advantage of Yahoo's poor financial sense and engineered a little bit of the old redistribution of wealth, namely, distributing Yahoo's wealth across their pockets.

I love this country.

Sorry You Lost Your Job, But These Guys Got Rich

Oddpost - Because Gmail Is Hard
On April 1, 2004, Google launched the first beta of GMail. This was one time when the word revolutionary was actually appropriate, at least in the context of web-based e-mail. It didn't exactly solve world hunger, but it caused Yahoo to freak the fuck out and pay upwards of $30 million for a ten-man startup called Oddpost a couple months later. Oddpost became the new version of Yahoo Mail, and the world breathed a sigh of relief.

VerdiSoft - The Ghost In The Machine
VerdiSoft was a company that did something with mobile phone syncing. It's some way to sync your office shit to the numerous mobile gadgets you have because you have no interpersonal relationships and need to fill the void with material possessions. VerdiSoft never actually shipped a product, but Yahoo never believed products to be important. What is important, though, is spending $58 million on a startup you'll just roll into Yahoo Mobile.

Maven Networks - Still Trying To Make Online Video Profitable
Google realized that it was making the other publicly traded companies look bad, so in 2006, it bought YouTube as a solid loss-leader to even off its balance sheet. Still wanting to run with the big dogs, Yahoo pissed away $160 million on Maven Networks two years later. Maven does something with video platforms or some shit. Fantastic.

You Can Probably ReFi That Sucker In A Few Years

Yahoo spent billions more on other stuff, too. Funny, none of these "investments" prevented them from laying off their staff.

The goal of Web 2.0 was to get users first, then figure out how to make money off of them. Well, at least that's what you tell your investors. In reality, the goal is more like "get users, and hope to get acquired and become somebody else's problem". For Silicon Valley, this really is self-destructive behavior, with Yahoo being the enabling friend who brings us clean needles from his job as an orderly. Sure, he's not intervening like a true friend would, trying to get us into rehab, but he feels like he's helping because we're still disease-free.

Well, hospital administration just figured out that Yahoo has been raiding the supply cabinet. Looks like we're fucked now.

As a journalist, it's much easier to leave your cronyism undisclosed. After all, if people found out that there motivations to your writing beyond truth or entertainment, then they might think less of you. Maybe they'd even stop advertising on your website.

There's always been a bit of conflict of interest within TechCrunch, and for the most part it is disclosed pretty well. Arrington is an investor in Seesmic... that sort of thing. But what about the conflicts you don't hear about? I told you all earlier about the relationship between YCombinator and TechCrunch, but that could be written off by skeptics, as I presented no hard proof beyond what a source told me.

This time, though, I have proof.

What's Webaroo?

Webaroo is a tech company. I'm not really sure what they do, but they've raised a lot of money to do it. That doesn't really matter. What matters is their coverage on TechCrunch.

Mike Arrington's rave review of Webaroo was published in April, 2006. In June of that year, Webaroo was "selected" as a top entry to the TechCrunch sponsored Supernova 12 event. Supernova 12 was like the TechCrunch 50 before there was a TechCrunch 50: a showcase for the "best" startups that applied. Later, in July of this year, TechCrunch wrote about Webaroo closing a funding round.

Well That's Nothing Out of the Ordinary

This is all well and good when they conveniently ignore the glaring cronyism. Webaroo was co-founded by a gentleman named Brad Husick. Brad Husick is the husband of one Gail Clayton Husick, a former partner at the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where Arrington used to work. Did they know eachother? Probably. They co-authored a book in 1998.

Husick's name is nowhere to be found on TechCrunch. The only place you'll find it is in a comment thread on one TC story. It's not listed in Webaroo's CrunchBase page. Husick seems to have since left Webaroo, as he is not listed on their management team page, but there are several articles on the internet that reference him as co-founder and President of the company.

Interestingly, the last post about Webaroo on TechCrunch, the one where their funding round was announced, stirred up a little controversy. It was posted by now former TechCrunch writer Calley Nye. After its publication, a "source" told TechCrunch that the funding had not yet closed, and the announcement was premature. This happened in July 2008. Two questions rise out of this: who was the source, and why did Calley Nye stop working for TechCrunch shortly after? Occam's Razor, indeed.

Anyway, as for the other startups cheated out of their chance to present at Supernova 12: sorry, guys. Your co-founder should have been married to one of Mike Arrington's friends, that makes it a lot easier.

If this relationship went undisclosed for so long, what else don't we know?

Yes, I have decided to move on from Pressflip, but Uncov will continue in all its glory. Uncov started last year as an outlet for poking fun at the postured-up absurdity on the internet. I wrote a lot of mean-hearted things about a lot of people and companies, and for the most part, I stick by what I've said.

The vast majority of the people I've picked on have taken it well. They get the joke. I've run into CEOs at parties who have complimented me on how well I've torn apart their product. Conversely, I've had CEOs and founders write me the most butthurt e-mails and comments I've ever seen.

In both cases, I have felt justified in what I've written because I can. People point out the irony of me talking trash on startups while doing a startup myself. Yes, this is the point: to show you that no matter how illogical something can be on the internet, there will still be hype and buzz around it. It's not supposed to make sense.

That being said, thank you to everyone who wants to be my Dad. I'm sure he's flattered. Thanks to the bloggers who have said things like gee, Ted, it's not easy as it looks, now is it? (by the way, nobody has come out and told me that fatherhood isn't as easy as it looks - so I am assuming it will be a breeze), or those who have admitted their own failure of prose and quoted Theodore Roosevelt's The Man In The Arena speech. You are the reason that Uncov will continue to exist. I do it because nobody is there to stop me, and because traffic continues to grow.

Yes, I really am that awesome.

Paul Graham thinks it's a good idea to start a startup during a recession. As is usually the case in anything he writes, Graham uses a lot of text to convey very few ideas. His most recent diatribe, though, has a solution-to-word ratio of zero.

In the text mining world, we would consider this to be very poor signal.

YCombinator, LLC.

Venture capitalists are telling entrepreneurs in their portfolio to buckle down, and that shit's not gonna be very good for a while. It's a shame more of them don't live in PG's fantasy land. Let's take an example:

Fact: Investors are shaky now, fleeing to more stable investments, thus giving less to venture capital firms, which in turn distribute less to startups.

PG's Solution Investors are dumb. They are doing it wrong. They shouldn't do that.

Well, that's a fantastic theory, but how does it help us?

Let's say you're a YCombinator company just starting out right now. Two founders, so YC throws you about $15k. Fifteen thousand dollars for you to get your idea off the ground, which has to cover capital expenditure and your personal cost of living. After that money is done, you are expected to have raised venture capital, be acquired, or be self-supporting.

Trying to raise venture capital in the next year is going to be like trying to raise the dead. Being acquired, well maybe, but unlikely without raising VC. Be self-supporting? Then maybe you've got yourself a for-reals business plan, and don't need Paul Graham's chump change.

The 43 Word Version

Here are the salient facts distilled from Graham's verbal diarrhea:

You should start a company now. The economy is of no importance. All that is important is that the founders are smart and the idea is good. Don't worry about raising money because magic will happen. After all, this is Silicon Valley.

Ah, yes. It's a crying shame that your landlord won't accept an explanation of your idea in lieu of rent. Oh, right...also ignore the fact that ViaWeb was acquired by Yahoo in the height of the first dot-com bubble.

See, I've cut almost 1,100 words out and offered the same amount of hope and the same number of solutions.

It's unfortunate that being an expert in a dead programming language can't make a person into an expert in a living, spoken one. Also, to clarify, I have never and will never seek investment from Paul Graham or anyone that looks like Paul Graham. I don't like Paul Graham because he is a false prophet.

Having read a lot of alarmist blog posts lately, I can say categorically that nobody is more qualified to comment on America's financial condition than a Ruby on Rails programmer who read Freakonomics.

Social media is starting to get bored with the economy and the government's $700 billion bailout package, likely because bloggers have run out of reasons why the world is about to end. I think what everybody needs is a writing workshop, so in that regard, I am here to help.

Choosing a Topic

There are two basic blog posts you can write about the economy: Oh Fuck We're All Going To Die and People Who Always Had More Money Than You Still Do. The latter is an easy subject and doesn't require a whole lot of preparation. For example, the world will likely be thrilled to hear your hard-hitting commentary about the AIG executives spending more than you make in six years on a weekend retreat. The legitimate journalists of the dying mainstream media will find all the facts; all you need to do is whine.

The first type of basic story, however, is a thinking man's blog post. This is where you can show us all what you learned by reading the Cliff's Notes for The Wealth of Nations and skimming the Wikipedia page on collateralized debt obligations.

Naturally, this brings us to the second point.

You Don't Need To Understand It To Make It Sound Scary

The first step to sounding like you know what you're talking about is to use big numbers. Since we've all become numb to amounts in the seven-hundred-billion range, you're going to have to think bigger: trillions, tens of trillions, that sort of thing. Combine your very big number with something that is ill understood by the general population and you've got a recipe for pageviews, my friend. Let's see an example:

This is how F-ed we are. Outstanding credit default swaps worth more than the Global GDP. $700 billion is a drop in the bucket on $54 TRILLION.

-- headline, reddit.com

Well gee, that sure sounds like something I should be afraid of. What products or services can I buy to help me alleviate such fear? I had best click the link and find out.

After you've planted the very large number with a complex financial instrument, you should give a high-level overview of what that instrument is, because the intricacies that would let your reader decide for himself are much too hard. Your readers didn't go to school so they could attempt rational thought, they went to school so that you can tell them what they need to be afraid of.

That, and you don't have a fucking clue, either.

Once you're done sweating the reader down, it's time for your disclaimer.

Don't Blame Me, I'm Just A Writer

You can never end an Oh Fuck We're All Going To Die on a down note. You need to give the reader some glimmer of hope. This can be done one of two ways: the professorial statement or the unsettling reassurance. Both of these endings will absolve you of responsibility for not knowing what you're talking about.

Professorial statements can turn your scaremongering into wisdom. Your best bet here is to quote someone else, for example:

He added what was perhaps the most salient point: "I hope this lesson will be the beginning of a larger lesson: The economics of competition and greed does not serve us well."

-- Some Douchebag, Alternet.org

This ending shifts the burden of proof to the expert you've been pulling quotes from for the past six hundred words. Bonus points for the anti-free-market message.

The unsettling reassurance, on the other hand, lets the reader know that maybe things won't be as bad as you say they will, but only if such-and-such a group of people do such-and-such a thing. This is the ideal time to fire up the political undertones.

The fiscal costs of these actions will be large but the economic and fiscal costs of inaction would be of a much larger and severe magnitude. Thus, the time to act is now as all the policy officials of the world are meeting this weekend in Washington at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.

-- Guy with a Foreign Sounding Name, The Huffington Post

This one saves your ass because the responsibility now falls on such-and-such a group of people. If they don't follow your advice and things go to shit, it's their fault. If they do follow your advice and things still go to shit, then they probably missed some minute yet critical detail of your elaborate plan.

Now your reader has forgotten that you're completely full of it, and will leave feeling either educated or called to action.

Just don't let them forget to click the AdSense on the way out.

Take a break from your state of PANIC and reflect on how great the world of Internet was just a year ago:

• Is It A Bird? Is It A Plane? No, It’s Google’s Share Price! (actual headline)
• Dig a Silicon Valley girl, where nerds quantify the hottness of women in tech, was actually given attention by bored bloggers
• Facebook chose its $15 Billion valuation, tech media complys
• Others strongly disagree, say Facebook is clearly worth $100 Billion
• Extremely important internet people went to an invite-only conference in Hawaii
• Alibaba.com raised one of the largest Internet IPOs in history and Yahoo actually made money
• Everyone was excited about Google's OpenSocial and the potential of poking your friends across socialnets
• Don't even get me started on all of the money and funds that were created to develop Facebook applications

Now you can return to sleeping on your bank. Unfortunately your mattress is not FDIC insured. Shotgun insurance will take 10 days in California.

Silicon Valley is somewhat insulated from the recession because we simply refuse to accept bad news. Convenient as that is, every now and then we need to deal with people who live in reality, namely investors. While Menlo Park venture capitalists themselves may think that economic downturn is a fairy tale, their limited partners have a different opinion.

VCs are still making their rounds in the Valley, but they're demanding at least two forms of protection. The pill just doesn't cut it anymore. What I mean is that writing a social network for the tree squirrels living in your yard in Django is now only half of the picture. An actual business model beyond "get a bunch of traffic and get bought out by Google" is important.

No glove, no love.

Lean, Mean Money Makin' Machines Servin' Fiends

What's going to happen to scams like YCombinator? Paul Graham gives up $5,000 per founder, expecting them to develop a product in a couple of months. After that, you're going to need to either raise more money or sell the company. Investors are now advising their portfolio companies to cut their burn rate to weather the storm, so what does this mean for the entrepreneurs full of Paul Graham's seed?

Well, for starters, you're going to have to forget about that apartment in North Beach. In fact, you'll probably have to move to Oakland. That will be a good time to remember how tolerant and progressive you are.

Please Let It Die

This crisis is a welcome cleansing of the internet. One of the reasons that Uncov has returned is that I said long ago I would see this Web 2.0 thing run into the ground. There will be collateral damage, but fuck, it's going to be entertaining to watch.

Even if my project goes down with all the rest, I will be satisfied by watching the collapse of stupid shit on the web.

Ed: Promoted from the Peanut Gallery.

I’m getting really tired of seeing a new article submitted to digg every freaking day by some douchebag who feels obligated to share his newest discoveries about Firefox to the world. In almost all cases, all that happens is some idiot realizes you can modify browser settings by typing “about:config” in the address bar, and gets overwhelmed by a sudden h@x0r rush.

What they don’t realize is that anyone who is technically capable enough to edit those settings probably already knows it exists, and has settled on the fact that the minute potential increases in speed are simply not worth the effort. Unfortunately, these script-kiddie-wannabes will not stop until every last setting has been toyed with and then documented in what they will ambitiously refer to as an “optimization guide”. In reality, these could be more accurately described as manuals for people who wish to reduce their productivity as a human being to that of a freaking lawn ornament.

Actually, I take that back. Lawn ornaments are, for the most part, harmless. They will not set your lawn to flames, or unlock all your doors while you sleep. Misguided assclowns of the internet, however, provide no such protection:

“You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time.”

Yes — that’s right. He is advising you to “optimize” your browser by configuring it to stop responding to anything you do. I speak for myself here, but I think the ability to move my mouse whenever I damn well want is a feature that I’ve kind of gotten used to.

Here’s the deal: we don’t have dialup modems anymore. The bandwidth most people get is sufficient. The browsers don’t really have a say in how long it takes to load a page anymore (unless, of course, you’re Firefox).

Since we’re on the topic, what the hell is up with Firefox’s memory consumption anyway? Every iteration of this browser since it was a little Firebird has added all kinds of neat features but they never seem to improve on the endless prostitution of memory that this browser has become famous for. I have seen articles, presentations, and other forms of propaganda trying to allure me with all the new features Firefox 3 has. Some of the new features are useful and intuitive, but it still eats almost as much memory and CPU as Photoshop (which seems to have placed an infinite loop in its startup). The Mozilla foundation needs to wake up and recognize the gargantuan elephant in the room. New features be damned.

--
daretorant.com

Earlier this year, I said that Uncov was dead. Well, I lied. It's back. Today is the greatest day in the history of the internet.

I'm not going to focus on startups, because startups are boring. I've posted up the archives of everything that's been written here so far, so if you are really desperate for somebody to tell you what to think about Web 2.0, or if you forgot how awesome I really am, you can re-read all that.

Brave New World

Since I actually have shit to do during the day at my for-reals job, I can't keep up the post frequency I used to. As such, if you register for an account, you can write posts to your own blog at uncov.com - the Peanut Gallery you see to the right. If you do a good job, we'll promote your post to the front page.

If you want to blog at uncov.com, it should be in the style of Uncov. It doesn't have to be technical or nerdy, and you should feel free to take shots at people, so long as you do it in the Uncov fuck-you-and-everyone-that-looks-like-you fashion.

Also, if you're interested in giving me some money for sponsorship or shit like that, email me.

When you see a TechCrunch article about a YCombinator company, it's not there because the company is interesting or innovative (even though some of them genuinely are). No, it's there because of a butthappy relationship between Mike Arrington and Paul Graham.

A source close to TechCrunch tells me that there is a formal agreement between YCombinator and TechCrunch whereby every YCombinator startup will be featured on TC in exchange for the exclusive launch story. I have yet to uncover whether any money is changing hands, but it seems unlikely.

This alone isn't terribly damning, but it shows a pattern of behavior on both sides of the deal. It's always been clear that being featured on TechCrunch isn't a result of merit, so this is a nice validation of my little theory.

It's Not Cronyism When We Do It

I talked to a YCombinator founder about this who told me how he never knew about any formal arrangement, but, as a YC company, when you're ready to launch, you call Paul Graham and he makes shit happen. Mike Arrington fancies himself a king maker, and Paul Graham fancies himself a power broker, so this arrangement is the natural outcome.

This kind of shit is par for the course. The TechCrunch 50 Potemkin village was rigged. Arrington awarded the $50,000 prize to a Twitter clone that was a spin-off of a company founded by a good friend of Peter Thiel, who runs a VC firm that partially funded TechCrunch 50.

Return of the Mack – Watch My Flow

This marks the return of Uncov. There are a few other TechCrunch goings-on that I'm tracking, so as soon as I get some confirmation, you'll read about it here. If Arrington has pissed you off in any way, shape, or form, and you want to run your mouth off to Uncov about it, contact me. I guarantee your anonymity.