3 ms·

Could someone enlighten me about Pinboard, the founder idlewords and the back story/relation with YC. The comments regarding Pinboard and idlewords are very in

• thaumaturgy 10y ago
  I'll take a crack at it. A long time ago, idlewords and pg were both active here and they were the opposite ends of some kind of spectrum. pg would write things and idlewords would throw rocks at them and sometimes write his own things in response. At some point idlewords got temporarily hellbanned. It was supposedly some kind of innocent error but at that point idlewords took his ball and went home. At some point he started up a bookmarking service to compete with Delicious, and it really took off after Yahoo bought Delicious and then made an unholy mess of it. A lot of early Delicious users (myself included) went looking for an alternative, and there was pinboard, waiting for us, and it was better in a lot of respects. So he's done pretty well at running pinboard, it is a lifestyle business, and he's an excellent writer and it's hard to tell whether he's a writer that happens to own a bookmarking service or a programmer that happens to be a decent writer. Anyway, a lot of the stuff he's written has gotten some exposure and he's given some talks. I've started to see people talking about his website obesity presentation (http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm) in circles WAY removed from HN. He uses his twitter feed to poke fun at the SV startup scene, too. Overall he's a foil to some of the sillier aspects of Silicon Valley.