WarTheatre

I have been reading HN for almost a year now (always via Google Reader) and lately I'm finding HN increasingly difficult to use because of the high volume of posts. Each day HN has about 100 posts which makes HN quite time consuming to even scan. Actually reading the posts? Forget about it.

Increasingly more often I find myself skipping HN in Google Reader because it has become a time consuming chore to find content I'm interested in. This saddens me because quality wise HN is IMHO the single best aggregator for IT startups.

I'm not sure what to do about this information overload problem but I feel it's time to remove HN from Google Reader because in its current form HN is simply broke.

I'm open to all suggestions about making HN more managable.

I've hoping you can spread some light over the confusing that I'm experiencing right now.

For the past weeks, my friend and I have been discussing our new business venture. Actually, the idea is his and he has been planning it during the past years but it's only become serious during the last months.

I'm supposed to do the tech stuff for the company - coding, web sites, etc - but my understanding was that we both would be founders or atleast or equal partners. But my friend has other plans, it seems. Basically, he is about to be the sole founder and owner of the company. I can understand this to a certain degree; it's his idea and he's working full-time on the idea (I already have a job, so all my work is after my office hours). But I feel let down and hurt that he's decided to "demote" to an employee or contractor. Especially since I'm fully capable of discussing business ideas and development and actually discuss these matters frequently with him. What's worst, I've just signed a very general NDA that covers pretty much everything I'll do at the company and prohibits me from divulging information to other people. I felt forced to sign the NDA because I didn't want to let down a friend and because he insisted on it. In hindsight I realize this was incredibly stupid. Also, the NDA has made me really doubt my friend's trust in me and if I actually want to work with him.

I do want to make this startup work, but it feels that only a couple of weeks in, I'm in an inferior position and obviously more of an employee than a partner. Also, and this part is what I really hate, I've come to question my trust in my friend a bit because of the NDA.

I might start working as the IT guy for a real estate startup which really needs a streamlined IT eco system to be succesful. What I would like to have is a web based ERP that manages data about staff, sales, real estates, buyers/sellers, accounting, etc. I also want to be able to create totally separate sites and blogs that can exchange data with the ERP.

I understand that such a system might be complex and espensive, but I've done enough research to know that there are open source ERPs, CMSs, blogs, etc that are quite competent. I don't, however, know if there is a combination of open source product that developers prefer to work with. Do you? If you had to create such a system with of the shelf products, which ones (floss and commercial) would you chose. If you think I'm completely off base, I'm more than willing to hear your suggestions on alternative solutions.

Thank you for your insights.