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We're screwed now... techcrunch isn't exactly known for its overly insightful comments.

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I went to a talk by DHH once, and he said that they consciously try to pick fights with the big boys, and hope they respond. This accomplishes two things:

1) They get a lot of attention, and thus brand recognition

2) They move up into a league of players, where they really don't belong if you look at their business in terms of turnover, employees, etc. Basically its 37signals vs. Don Norman, 37signals vs. Microsoft etc. As if they were equal.

This is an example of that. And its brilliant marketing.

The arrival of less insightful people is inevitable. The goal should be presenting the site such that they matter less or don't bother coming.

Is this Hacker News or Valley Wag?

Chess.

The slowness is a self-defense mechanism. Slow down new signups and submissions.

Its genius really

Settlers of Catan.

With the "penny rule":

On any die roll where you get NO resources that isn't due to the robber, you get a penny. During your trading round, you can turn is as many pennies as you have victory points showing for a single resource.

This reduces the game's tendency to knock someone out of the running three rounds in because of a set of bad rolls.

Hacker News is the Schrodinger blog. Techcrunch can’t observe it without changing its state.