It wasn't so long ago that the Nook was the key to Barnes & Noble's future. Now the bookseller is planning to back off of its efforts to sell its own e-reader, and is working on strengthening partnerships with tablet suppliers. [NYT]

It's not that Julian Assange isn't giving interviews—it's just that he's leading a busy life inside the Ecuadorian government's London embassy, and it's a question of fitting reporters in. [Ars Technica]

Kara Swisher leans into the backlash against Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's new book. [AllThingsD]

In case you can't wait for the competing biopics currently in production, here's what it's like to go on a double-date with John McAfee. [PandoDaily]

(Photo: Hyperbole and a Half)

The Amazon phone nobody wanted is coming. [The Verge]

Different ads looping simultaneously on the MTV website is just one version of hell. [Wall Street Journal]

"Our company is at the intersection of X and X" is the new "It's like X for X!" [Bloomberg]

Paul Graham is talking shit on Google Ventures. [Business Insider]

Reddit nabbed 3.4 BILLION pageviews in August, thanks in large part to Obama's AMA. [Daily Dot]

Mr. Graham (flickr.com/pragdave)

Startup soothsayer Paul Graham penned a letter to Y Combinator's portfolio companies about withstanding the fallout from Facebook's poorly-performing IPO. [Business Insider, Hacker News]

Fred Wilson wants to put Mr. Graham's musings in perspective. [A VC]

Apple will yank Google Maps from iPhones later this year, which is just another reason why we're quite happy with our Galaxy Nexus, thankyouverymuch. [Wall Street Journal]

GigaOm rounds up what we know about Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker's video startup, Airtime, set to launch at a press event this morning. [GigaOm]

Oh good, there is an Instagram for animated GIFs. [Wired]

The Lazerows (michaellazerow.com)

In a bizarre missive with a linkbaity headline, Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow declared "I Have Sex With My Co-Founder. And I Like It." Okay, thanks for sharing?

Mr. Lazerow, whose business partner is his wife Kass, claims that many cofounder relationships resemble marriages, and therefore you should vet cofounders much the way you would a potential mate. So basically, don't found a company with someone who is emotionally unavailable or unhealthily obsessed with his mother? Good to know.

In his post, Mr. Lazerow quotes Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's widely-read story about cofounder relationships resembling marriages:

My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit. And the startup was our baby. I summed it up once like this: "It's like we're married, but we're not fucking."

Except that for in Mr. Lazerow's case, he is fucking his cofounder, and apparently wants everyone to know about it.

Mr. Lazerow points out that when he was originally looking for funding for his startups, many investors told him that they didn't invest in husband and wife teams. That's an understandable rule of thumb, as cofounder relationships are notoriously messy, and in truth, not all husband-wife duos fare as well as the Lazerows.

Six Apart founders Ben and Mena Trott are still going strong, as are Babble Media founder Rufus Griscom and his wife Alisa Volkman, who is Babble's VP of sales and strategy. But Flickr cofounders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield lasted nine years before filing for divorce in 2010.

And as one female entrepreneur named Grace Ng pointed out last year, the "cofounder relationships are like marriages" comparison is very convenient for men, but not necessarily so for women. "This [comparison] creates a rather challenging situation for female entrepreneurs seeking a technical cofounder, most of who are male," wrote Ms. Ng. She then went on to describe a horror story where a technical cofounder she hired admitted he was in love with her; when Ms. Ng answered that the feeling wasn't mutual, he refused to do any work unless she entered into a relationship with him. Classy.

We agree with Mr. Lazerow that you should "start your business with someone you truly love," but though many cofounder relationships are like marriages, actually being married to your cofounder isn't always in your startup's best interest.

We appreciate the candor, Mr. Lazerow, though you may want to take the advice of one Business Insider commenter and "get a room."

A still from The Social Network, found by Googling "Drunk startup" (newwavecrashing.tumblr.com)

There are a whole lot of ways you can cultivate a great startup idea--hiring talented team members, learning to master the pivot with poise, and scoring a hefty round of funding are just a few. But what's another popular way to hit on a moneymaking idea and embrace the fearlessness needed to pursue it? Get drunk. Really drunk.

The Internet is abuzz today with "startup stories," spurred by Paul Graham's post yesterday about how he decided to start Y Combinator. In a move of solidarity, Union Square Ventures VC Fred Wilson penned a missive on his blog about how he came to found Flatiron Ventures, and asked other founders to share their stories in the comments.

While a core dissatisfaction with their current professional prospects was a key theme among many of the stories, another was a little surprising: these ladies and dudes are really into drinking!

"I was slightly drunk on a Friday night seven years ago," begins Fernando Guttierez, founder of a small healthcare business. "I made a bad move while going down the stairs in a bar (i.e., I fell) and injured my knee... I had had a difficult time to find a good therapist that could work on the hours and places I wanted, so I created a business around that." That's one way to solve an alcohol-induced medical emergency.

"It seems that getting drunk or drinking is an emerging theme," commented William Mougayer, Founder/CEO of Engag.io. "I wonder if that should become part of the Lean Startup process. Wanna start a company? Get drunk & it will come."

"I guess I could say I owe my freedom to vodka," concluded the endearingly clumsy Mr. Guttierez.

The devoted commenters on Mr. Wilson's blog aren't the only people who owe their business ideas to a little help from liquid courage.

Elias Bizannes, founder of StartupBus, came up with the idea over drinks in Australia. Mark Zuckerberg famously began the process of building Facemash, Facebook's predecessor, with the line "I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie."

Several of this reporter's friends have been known to go on drunk domain buying sprees from time to time. (No word yet on how hollandoates.com will get itself off the ground.) And with apps like Go Daddy making it so easy to buy a domain name from your phone, it doesn't bode well for the drunken domain squatters among us.

We suppose startup brainstorming while drinking is better than drunk tweeting, or worse--drunk Gilt Groupe shopping. So if you need us, we'll be at House of Shields, throwing back whiskey and waiting for our next million dollar idea to hit.

Could I make this any easier for you? (via twitter/paulg)

Paul Graham's plan to give away his best billion dollar ideas? That was so last week. The man who pioneered the practice of the startup idea freebie has taken his "Don't worry about coming up with your own concept" theory to its logical extreme. Now, you don't even need an idea. At all.

On the Y Combinator blog yesterday, Mr. Graham, a partner in the prestigious incubator, let the world know about a little experiment they're trying with this the next cycle of applicants: "If the only thing holding you back from starting a startup is not having an idea for one, now nothing is holding you back. If you apply for this batch and you seem like you'd make good founders, we'll accept you with no idea and then help you come up with one."

It sounds to us like a riskier version of "fund the entrepreneur, not the idea," only without forcing them to clear the hurdle of at least being able to generate and articulate one compelling concept.

Where's the logic in that? Mr. Graham says he realized Y Combinator had already sort of sanctioned the practice:

"A lot of the startups we accept change their ideas completely, and some of those do really well. Reddit was originally going to be a way to order food on your cellphone. (This is a viable idea now, but it wasn't before smartphones.) Scribd was originally going to be a ridesharing service."

While some eager beavers thought sidestepping the "we're too early" excuse was a good thing ("No one is earlier than this," wrote @dess_e.) Others seem to imply that in these frothy times, a barrier to entry is not a bad idea.

No idea what you're doing? Apply to @ycombinator: ycombinator.com/noidea.html

— Michael Friis (@friism) March 14, 2012

And what of those who just wanna be part of the hard-work-and-world-change startup lifestyle?

They need a reality check, implied serial developer Yong Fook. Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams (who had a great idea that ended up failing) agreed.

Amen “@yongfook: If u want to "do a startup" but don't have an idea you're passionate about, you're just in love w idea of being a founder.”

— Jonathan Abrams (@abrams) March 14, 2012

That one got 39 retweets, including one from Dennis Crowley, who's managed to come up with a few concepts on his own.

"You're welcome!" (via twitter/pg)

Betabeat first alerted you to the phenomenon of investors giving away their best ideas like so many party favors last June. But it appears repeat offender Paul Graham is at it again!

Back in 2008, Mr. Graham kicked off the practice by posting a list of startups Y Combinator would like to invest in. "We don't like to sit on these ideas," he noted, "Because we really want people to work on them." But his latest offering to the shared pool puts that list to shame.

On his personal blog recently, Mr. Graham posted seven (count 'em, seven) different "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" that could make you (yes, you!) a billionaire.

Of course, Mr. Graham's point was that ideas this big actually "tend to repel" people, he wrote, noting "how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are." But we prefer to read this as a To Do list. All we have to do is build "A New Search Engine"? We're rich, bitch! Or we will be soon.

Mr. Graham's other six suggestions, below, are no less daunting, but thankfully he offers plenty of guidance to lead you in the right direction. Take for example, his rather acerbic take on New Google:

"Lately when using Google search I've found myself nostalgic for the old days, when Google was true to its own slightly aspy self. Google used to give me a page of the right answers, fast, with no clutter. Now the results seem inspired by the Scientologist principle that what's true is what's true for you. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Google search results used to look like the output of a Unix utility. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen."

Can't think of a way to work it any better? Then can we interest you in these billions instead?

Replace Email: "My inbox is a todo list, and email is the way things get onto it. But it is a disastrously bad todo list."

Replace Universities: "One could do a lot better for a lot less money."

Internet Drama: "So how do you deliver drama via the Internet?" [Ed. note: PG! Give us a call! We can totes help on this one.]

The Next Steve Jobs: "So if Apple's not going to make the next iPad, who is?"

 Bring Back Moore's Law: "There's an intriguing middle ground where you build a semi-automatic weapon—where there's a human in the loop."

 Ongoing Diagnosis: "One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations."

Have your own billion dollar idea you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments. If any of them make us Peter Thiel $$$, we promise to Zaarly you a thank you note.

The full statement from GoDaddy:

Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA

Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Go Daddy is no longer supporting SOPA, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" currently working its way through U.S. Congress.

"Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation - but we can clearly do better," Warren Adelman, Go Daddy's newly appointed CEO, said. "It's very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Go Daddy will support it when and if the Internet community supports it."

Go Daddy and its General Counsel, Christine Jones, have worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. Jones has fought to express the concerns of the entire Internet community and to improve the bill by proposing changes to key defined terms, limitations on DNS filtering to ensure the integrity of the Internet, more significant consequences for frivolous claims, and specific provisions to protect free speech.

"As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Go Daddy is rooted in the idea of First Amendment Rights and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy," said Adelman.

In changing its position, Go Daddy remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its reversal on SOPA though, Jones has removed blog postings that had outlined areas of the bill Go Daddy did support.

"Go Daddy has always fought to preserve the intellectual property rights of third parties, and will continue to do so in the future," Jones said.

@aplusk just tweeted out: "I am moving my domains off of @Godaddy due to their support for #SOPA. Paul Graham is also doing the right thing (cc @paulg)"

We all know what a tweet from Ashton can do to promote a brand, but can an Ashton sanction pull it under?

(paulgraham.com)

Notorious Nodejitsu just got a big fat "get out of jail free" card from Paul Graham. The New York-based startup has been persona non grata on the influential geek forum Hacker News since . . . well, we first heard about the drama, oh, back in December?

Mr. Graham, who runs Y Combinator and Hacker News, says Nodejitsu was banned for spamming; Nodejitsu's founders suspected it was because they compete with Y Combinator alum Heroku. But as of Sunday night, Nodejitsu's back in the game.

Heroku and Nodejitsu both host apps for developers, although Nodejitsu does it only for apps written in node.js, while Heroku has a wider range of offerings, including Java and Ruby. Heroku launched "experimental support" for node.js in April 2010, as Nodejitsu was just getting started. The race was on.

Yesterday, a Hacker News user posted an alternative to the forum called Lamer News, inspired by all the kvetching and conspiracy theory surrounding the opaque moderator policies of Hacker News. Some users say the site is "a shill for Y Combinator companies;" "why did Hacker News remove my blog post," and so on. Foursquare's Eric Friedman's personal domain, marketing.fm, was mysteriously banned after a post about VC breakfast etiquette; others have been mystified as to why their submissions did or didn't show up.

The site provoked a discussion about Hacker News policies in general. "We don't ban sites of competitors of companies we fund," Mr. Graham said in the thread. "Even if we wanted to do something like that, how could we ever get away with it?" Then he leapt to a conclusion: "I'm guessing you're referring to Nodejitsu.com. They're banned because they created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts."

The accusation brought a fiery rebuttal from Nodejitsu's clear-eyed CEO Charlie Robbins, a coder who was recruited out of college to work at Microsoft, did his time coding in the finance sector, and also serves served until recently as the CTO of General Assembly. "Your claim that Nodejitsu 'created an army of sockpuppets to vote up their posts' is outrageous. Let me enumerate the issue here," he wrote, and proceeded to pick apart Mr. Graham's statement and attack Hacker News for its lack of transparency in four arguments.

Mr. Robbins explained that banning Nodejitsu meant that not only was the company's blog blocked, any developer using Nodejitsu would run into trouble if he or she tried to put an app on Hacker News--something that is commonly done to get users or feedback.

"The problem with that is you are also penalizing Nodejitsu customers (like myself) that host their projects on their platform," Frank Denbow, a local founder and coder, wrote in the thread. "I support the Nodejitsu guys but I'm not an employee and don't share all their viewpoints; I was just working on my first Nodejs project for NodeKnockout and wanted to get some feedback from the HN community, but my site was blocked also."

"I didn't realize users' stuff was hosted on subdomains. Ok, I'll unban nodejitsu.com," Mr. Graham responded. "We don't ban sites lightly. We only do it when people make repeated, deliberate efforts to bypass lighter weight protections ... I'm happy to unban nodejitsu.com if you promise to stop trying to game HN. In your case I recommend the following standard for what counts as gaming HN: if you're not sure, don't."