If it is entirely out of the blue and you have nothing in particular to discuss, it might come across a bit weird or creepy. Expanding your social circle is probably a great start though.

I completely agree. As much as I hate videos that play automatically, your intro was inoffensive enough that I listened until it got interesting.

On a side note, why do you have invite only on?

Best of luck whichever way you go with your startup. Maybe you just need a short holiday to sleep on it...

The site is not completely ready and we got stuck into that non-sense of making everything perfect before we opened it.

Given the direction in which governments seem to be moving, it's probably more relevant now than it was then.

Too paranoid to upvote and comment from my normal account...

Speaking for the US and UK, I'd hardly call what we had in '06 particularly liberal. DHS in particular springs to mind...

I agree, although I'd love to see some results or examples (and I must admit I'm a little pessimistic). I hope to see some on the website soon :)

That's true.. When anyone gets some results page from this, would be great to post them here for the rest of us to see.

I enjoyed reading the article, and I wouldn't have found it if it wasn't here on HN. If it shouldn't be here (according to the HN community) it wouldn't be sitting at the top of the news page.

I agree popular vote took it to the top of the first page, but it indicates a change in the composition of the community or a change of interests from startup-related technologies to more general discussion.

I, obviously, have an unpopular opinion.

> but it indicates a change in the composition of the community or a change of interests from startup-related technologies to more general discussion.

You mean, like when its name was changed from "Startup News" to "Hacker News," maybe?

Shall we call it "General News" now?

I'd think that this discussion is significantly more hacker-y than many of the others here. I mean, I can see your argument: HN is obviously becoming more and more mainstream, and hence, articles will tend more and more in that direction.

This article, though, isn't one of them.

It's very geek-ish, not so hacker-ish.

To be fair, we can't verify that either way. If a company treated me as the reviewers claim, I wouldn't give them more than one star either. As was mentioned in other comments, there needs to be some validation of reviewers built into yelp.

I don't agree with Eil's comment at all, but that is no reason to vote his comment down. Comment voting is to make interesting comments more prominent and to remove noise, not to banish unpopular opinions. I don't interpret Eil's comment as a trolling attempt that warrents down-voting either.

I've only spent about a week in India (Delhi, Agra and Jaipur). It was a good trip, but not necessarily 'fun'.

If there is one thing I learnt (as a caucasian), it is that anyone who talks to you on the street (who doesn't have an obvious reason to be there like a shop keeper with merchandise) is probably trying to scam you. Trying to buy a train ticket to Agra from Delhi was a nightmare; we ended up organising a taxi through our hotel. It was hard going from being used to trusting directions and advice from strangers at home, but I got over that pretty quick.

Also, carry plenty of small change; anyone who does absolutely anything at all for you will expect a tip.

Have fun :)