skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I am not a programmer" - "I will divide equity equally"

Aren't these 2 statements a little inconsistent?

"I do have what I consider to be strong ideas"

Don't we all?

I have a feeling that you need to get used to the idea that a web startup is all about building the product (at least at this stage).

2 non-programmers = bad

1 non-programmer + 1 hacker = better

2 hackers = best

I really don't mean to pick and I certainly don't want to rain on your parade. Just a quick reality check from a seasoned hacker.

I hope your idea is fantastic and you find the perfect match. Good luck!
The best thing I learned in school was typing in middle school. It is by far the most useful thing I have ever had taught to me.
vladimir.slepnev at gmail
lol, forgot about that. Agreed!
Might be because he doesn't have command of the language, and doesn't feel like learning templates. Or macros. Or reflection. Or whatever.
At this point in time I'm not worried about outsourcing, since I probably wouldn't want to do most of the jobs being outsourced anyway. I have no desire to write accounting software, etc for Fortune 500 companies for the rest of my life.

I'd much rather work on interesting and creative projects. I don't think outsourcing lends itself well to these types of problems, though that may change in the future.
My undergraduate education was in Industrial Engineering. Industrial Engineers are the outsourcers. They have been portrayed memorably as "efficiency experts" in movies such as American Beauty and Office Space. There will always be jobs for Industrial Engineers, until they start outsourcing the outsourcing.
Probably looked better if you were closer to the explosion. But not too close.
Video of a missile taking out the spy satellite. Welcome to reddit.

Just kidding; it just seems popular on here to compare every story that isn't a 'Top Ten Ways to Use SEO to Get More Visits to Your SEO Tutorial Website' type of story with reddit.
Reading other people's code can be a good way to assess command of a language. I've needed to dig into a number of Python packages over time, and have found it quite noticable how much more quickly and completely I'm able to grok such code as my command of the language increases.
Top Health 2.0 Web Apps
What to Expect When You're Computing for Speed
school taught me the grind and to not shy away from a challenging problem, seriously.
Wow, the fact that girls are becoming very talented online writers, artists, and communicators -- which is awesome, BTW -- is uncorrelated with female enrollment in computer science programs.

In other news, apples are not "a kind of orange" and expert sculptors are no more likely than average to become plumbers.

This is the kind of article which future historians are going to read with giggles. It's as if I found an article from 1898: "young people are using the telephone to talk to each other, but many of them claim to be uninterested in electricity."
Feel free to start the discussion about the future of space exploration, the unspoken casualties of future astronauts from the increased space junk, the nature of government surveillance, etc.

:-D
I learned (initially) from Mario Teaches Typing, at home.

I imagine this was considerably more enjoyable than learning at school.
Apparently. I was just stating my enthusiasm to see Loopt on AT&T/Verizon, not that it was some grand new idea.
It gives you hand cramps
It's procedural knowledge
Google eyes Cleveland medical records
It’s hard to find a good partner outside the bay area
Brain-Reading Headset to Sell for $299
For the love of teh internets, will people stop constructing sentences that end in "the next Google?"
The results are messy
You’re usually not sure which language to use
Meet the Teams | X PRIZE Foundation
You’d guess Danica McKellar is good at it
IPython: an Enhanced Python Shell
One wonders whether the stable number of Facebook users is approximately equal to the number of high school and college students.

The hypothesis that high schoolers with Facebook profiles will continue to use them throughout life is only now being put to the test. And here's the thing: In high school, many people really care to know exactly what each of their classmates is doing and who they are dating. Sometimes that continues through college. But eventually people grow older, and they escape the social fishtank that is school, and they go out into the world... and, what do you know, eventually you stop hanging around with all of your school friends. You make a big show of keeping up with all of them for a while... but eventually it tapers down to sending Christmas cards now and then. You visit every few years. And you certainly don't visit them all.

I'm not saying that you'll ever stop using social networks. But there are a lot of social networks now. They're not that hard to develop, and they're just going to keep getting easier. And the result may well be that different people will gravitate to different ones as they go through life.

Facebook's counterargument is that they are going to be the generic platform on which all future special-purpose social nets will be based. But Facebook wasn't designed as a generic platform. It was designed as a social network for college students. And I'm not sure that opening the user base and tacking on a thousand third-party apps has really changed that. It's hard to take a tool that was carefully optimized for one task and repurpose it for N other tasks... especially when there are a thousand competitors with similar technology, and the lock-in isn't that strong.
I agree. ideas are cheap (and they tend to change too). unless the idea requires a lot of biz dev (sales), I also fail to see the logic of a 50 50 split - unless money is involved
Well, 1998 was in the heyday of ArsDigita, so that may have been why that policy went the way of Slashdot's Beanie Awards.

That or lecture halls crammed with belligerent hobos.
Skip the learning phase, go straight to useful work. Sometime ago I had to render some maps with Mapnik (http://mapnik.org) which is driven by Python scripts. I didn't know any Python, so I just pasted an example from the 'net and started reworking it to suit my needs, experimenting and reading docs whenever I got stumped. Quickly picked up enough Python to write my own scripts, solve other tasks. For me it's the only way to learn.
I respectfully disagree with edw519.
While your assessment that you are indeed not a "programmer" may be technically accurate, but, if this is you:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/B06/B99

then I think you sufficiently qualify under a very broad definition of a hacker, or, alternatively, you are quite technical yourself. While you may currently feel you need a co-founder for your project who is a "programmer", you should not sell yourself short.

One thing you should strongly consider is just plunging in and trying to code for yourself. Take a look at this article regarding the founder of Plentyoffish.com. Mssr. Frind built the site while learning to program. See, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/business/13digi.html?_r=2&...

So one approach would be to learn to program while you put the site together. While this may be rough in the beginning and ultimately result in total failure, you will at least (a) know more about what goes into making a web app (generally) and (b) when you seek a technical co-founder you can be much more precise and clear about what you need.

As for languages, Ruby on Rails or Python would both be great. But, just for fun, take a look at Arc
http://arclanguage.org/

Hope that helps.
Shoes - A Tiny Toolkit; Easy windowed Ruby apps
The thing with the study about having $1,000 but the most and having $1,000,000 but the least is that it doesn't account for what that money can get you. If everyone in the world had a billion dollars then a billion dollars would be relatively worthless.

The study should have been phrased: "If you could have only $1,000 worth of stuff but it was 100 times more stuff than everyone else, or $1,000,000 worth of stuff but it was 1000 times less than everyone else, which would you choose?"

I think the majority of people would choose to have $1,000,000 worth of stuff, even if it's the least, which translates to "I would rather be considered 'poor' in a thriving society than be considered 'rich' in an impoverished society."
Making Money from Your Web Site
Launchbox, a YC clone, is now ready to take applications
I knew I would probably get attacked on this post in some way. I am not naive and I do realize my limitations. Additionally, in a business you are looking ideally for individuals who complement yourself in skills (i.e. one business person, one technology person).

What is wrong with 1 non-programmer + 1 hacker sharing equity equally? I realize product development is paramount. I do not expect to be twiddling my thumbs while my partner hacks away. As a user of the internet and sites like the one I would like to build, I have many ideas concrete ideas about features/functionality I would like on the site and would hope to function as a team in developing the product.

Beyond that, down the road much of the focus would be on user acquisition strategies (for a user generated content site such as the one I would like to do). I cannot imagine I would not be able to contribute equally to the overall process of building a sustainable company.
Programmers vs the Apostrophes
Well, I'm not 100% sure you are asking for my experience, but here goes anyway (I'm a mathematician/physicist, by training and profession, and I don't write web GUI's except for fun).

However, I'd say that I regularly use stuff from about 4-5 of my college/grad school classes. Virtually everything else I learned "on the job" (i.e., in grad school, doing research).

Oddly enough, I recently found myself using some tricks I picked up from a machine learning class for something completely different (the philosophical kind of quantum mechanics).
I keep thinking what these kids really needed to learn was to put their toys away.
Thanks for the advice. Right now, I would like to continue in my hunt for a co-founder but do plan on trying to pick up some knowledge of programming even if I do find someone to work with.
What split do you think is fair here? Assuming both are working hard on the idea?
I like the Chumby itself overall, but this business model is just terribly flawed. People don't want to be "advertised to", many people go to great lengths to avoid or remove advertisements, and this trend is growing not shrinking.

Chumby's will be $99 for a 3 pack on Woot in a year or 2.

Their business model is also a little bit like the carriers wanting to charge the mega content sites (Google) to carry their packets.
Way to be in line with all the most popular stereotypes... Girls are totally making animated glitter art and podcasts about their inane personal problems!! Meanwhile, boys are very pragmatic!!

NYT == heteronormative
http://www.projectwedding.com/

a YC related company
Operating Systems and assembly-level courses taught me the foundation for what I need for low-level and kernel debugging that I do now quite frequently.

The other courses all been used quite a bit towards opening doors for me in starting businesses and job opportunities.

I honestly have to say that there's not a single CS course that didn't provide me a valuable tool which I've used. I'm not sure if that's normal, or if I am just the sort of person who finds uses for the tools in my toolbox.

I think the course (in the last 7 years) that has offered me the least would have been Linear Alegbra, but that's primarily because I didn't go deep enough after it to really broaden my skills to apply to those sorts of opportunities. I see lots of cases where I could use it, I just regret that I didn't improve my grounding in it because it would have opened more doors for me.

I'd say that the first 2-3 years of engineering, I used very little of what I learned in school. Very strange, but now that I'm working as a principal engineer/architect or on my own projects, that CS schooling has been incredibly valuable. It helps that I covered areas like AI, languages, graphics, and networking in my electives.

If you want a generic software engineering job, I don't think a CS degree is really ideal (depending on the school). For me, (i.e. someone who loves computer sciences), it was a perfect choice and I use those building blocks all the time now.
DC! Why would a startup want to relocate to DC unless they were going to do something related to governement contracts?

I just don't get it. If people are going to make YC clones, why don't they do it in the Valley? There's a large enough market here, that I think it could handle 4 or 5 YC clones and still not saturate the market. The only competition that YC has in the early, early stage funding market are angel investors and credit card companies/savings accounts. Charles River Ventures program doesn't really count because it's a loan with strings attached based on Series A funding.

Granted, there's a lot more angel capital floating around in the Valley, but you have to be here, and know people before you can have access to Angel funding. It's hard for people hoping to move here and start a business right away. That's one of the things that YC has going for it. It attracts applicants from all over because of PG's writings and this here site, and it helps them hit the ground running.

Paul and Jessica are always saying how they regret that they have to turn down so many great groups of founders. They get roughly 600 applications per round, and they are only able to fund 10-20 every 6 months. If another YC clone came around, and tried to sort through the 580 applicants left out of each batch, I still think that they'd probably do pretty well.

And, if it was based here, they could run groups twice a year here in the Valley and they wouldn't have to be Bi-Coastal. YC's roots on the East Coast has got to complicate things a bit for them.

So, there you have it. Someone take the idea and run with it, but if someone picks the idea up they owe me a few shares of common stock.
Q&A with Tesla’s Car Guy
Jacob Kaplan-Moss leaving World Online to hack Django full time
Rise of the Machines (Anybots)
DDOS Danger For Online Gambling Sites
Although not having a programmer on your team as a founder will hurt your chances if you're applying to YC, if your idea is sound and you are flexible you could always hire someone (even contract someone or outsource it) to build your idea, just make sure that person is pretty invested in making a good product, not just "doing a job". In addition to regular pay, you should still offer a good amount of equity (non-controlling) in the company that he's building for.

Put another way: A good way to find a programmer who could turn into a business partner is to start on your own and hire contractors. Eventually you'll find one who really gets along well with you and has a similar vision as you do. At this point (and after you've experienced "working" with him) you could bring him on as a partner and viola, you've got a programming co-founder.
a couple of guesses:

1. cost of living, though DC is still pretty expensive, the outskirts might not be so bad.

2. proximity to Virginia where there's some tech business out there

3. proximity to where all the VC of this fund are, AOL being McLean, Healthcentral being Arlington

4. that it really doesn't matter where you dev, it only matters when you pitch
Do a 25-25 split (26 maybe, to have >50%) and hold the rest in the company so you don't lose control as you begin funding yourselves.

Startups (tech startups specifically) are a pass/fail course. You either all get money, or all get nothing (taken from one of PGs essays I'm sure). It's pointless to argue over equity except in order to keep control.
To touch on your "web gui code" comment-- I think that may be marginalizing people a little bit.

Hackers can do web GUI code. Nowadays they pretty much have to do so, because it's often the ideal front-end for whatever backend software you produce.

Computer-oriented businesses that build up a long-term business advantage are going to start with some solid technology behind them that is difficult to reproduce without knowledge. For example, new search engine technologies, new streaming codecs, new AI prediction routines, etc, etc.

For a less grand example, our site, http://bug.gd is pretty simple from a web design point of view, but I learned from my CS courses that full-text indexing isn't something to take lightly in large quantities. So I know enough to search out tools (like sphinx or lucene) that implement algorithms I can literally understand to be reliable, fast, and memory efficient.

The CS schooling also allows us to write more client software for different OS's that help catch and report error conditions into the global error database. We'd be stuck with only a web frontend if we didn't have people with good CS/os backgrounds to work on lower-level API to catch what we need there.

Secure coding is another area in which core computer science compentencies are worth every penny.

Anyway, sorry to ramble, but I think your question comes from a perspective of misunderstanding just how many zillions of doors open to a computer scientist that are harder/closed/lost/hopeless for those who don't dive into the technology. It's not all lost on web GUI development.

Not that other hackers (non-CS) couldn't do the things I described, but I know those tools come in incredibly handy for me in trying to help shape this computer-heavy world.
Judging from the eager way in which people are seizing on this tiny bit of evidence, it seems like a lot of people want FB to fail. And when you want something to be true you should be especially skeptical of evidence for it.

Sites have flat spots. I would be careful before counting those guys out.
I've been nervous about this sort of thing for a while. This is an email that I sent to Bruce Schneier last month:

In your November article on laptop security, you mentioned the threat of having your laptop grabbed out of hands while you're typing on it. Combined with full-disk encryption, I use a very simple and effective defense against this: configure the system to immediately lock the screen on transitions from A/C power to battery. That way, the
thief can't take your data any further than the length of the power cord.

It's not completely fool-proof, of course: as long as the encryption key is stored in RAM, it's theoretically possible to extract it, e.g., by transfering the DIMM to special hardware while keeping it powered. But I've never heard of anyone actually accomplishing this, and it's certainly beyond the ken of your average identity thief and
possibly even the FBI.

I use Linux exclusively, and there implementing this is a simple matter of adding a hook into your acpid scripts. I'm not certain whether there's any easy way to do it in Windows or Mac.

One more thought in a similar vein: a lot of modern laptops include accelerometers so that they can make the hard drive protect itself if they detect that they're being dropped. I wonder if it would feasible to use these to detect that the laptop is being run-off-with.
Would it be a total collapse?

Possibly, because it wouldn't happen in isolation. Some still-free FB competitor would make a huge effort to get all the users who didn't want to pay, get most of them, and then most of the paying users would leave FB because their friends had.
Yup. Know Y combinator funded them. Actually, brings up another point. Curious what people think about applying to ycombinator if they have funded a potential competitor of your company in the past??
>4. that it really doesn't matter where you dev, it only matters when you pitch

They do have a pitch day scheduled in Silicon Valley, which puts them a step above the other YC clones.
Yeah. I would not apply to ycombinator without a programming co-founder (I am going to apply to launchboxdigital though).

Definately have considered "hiring" someone, but I wanted to exhaust trying to find a co-founder first.
They even copied the orange square.
What if they are the cops? What if they’re alone wherever you keep your computers while you are not there?
How does this work out for open source delevopers:
"Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols."

Open source != non-commercial. RedHat, Novell, etc... can and do sell open source solutions that provide interoperability with Microsoft products. It seems to me that this is a move to make Microsoft protocols the de facto standard while still wielding the power to sue competitors who use them.
I saw that, too, for some reason.
Well, technically if you want to use that model, then if each user spends $25 a month on products/services they find on facebook, then after a year(collectively) each user will have at least spent, $15 billion, which I think is worth...well... $15 billion.
looks like they learned how to use feedback loops
The main thing I gleaned from undergraduate university (applied math) was how to collect and structure data in such a way that useful information can be derived from it. This has helped me in writing software for image processing programs to doing market research for new products. The key courses in this were signal processing courses along with the math and numerical analysis to understand the analysis techniques. The computer science courses I took in programming languages, compilers, hardware, etc. were very good practice in how to abstract a problem and codify it. I have not used too many of the specific languages or techniques in my professional life however as that tends to more or less keep up with the industry.

The most important things I gleaned from my graduate work about 10 years later (MBA and some more applied math) were how to present interesting data to people in a way that they too could interpret it and derive value from it, and how to manage social networks effectively.
Don't let anyone tell you can't do it, where there is a will there is way. I do have to say that if you don't find someone if you are serious about this you should build a prototype yourself. I think even if doesn't become the actual site , the experience you will learn will be invaluable. Also if I was a person who you were recruiting it would impress me that you cared that much to learn. Plus you ability to communicate with a technical co-founder will be that much better. I also think don't underestimate the power of prototype to get you funding.
Paul and Jessica are always saying how they regret that they have to turn down so many great groups of founders.

Where do we say this? We often turn down groups with good founders for some other reason (they can't quit their jobs; there's only one of them; their idea isn't quite there yet) but we've never turned down a group that had everything right because of lack of space.

they are only able to fund 10-20 every 6 months

At current rates we fund 42 startups a year. But that number has been increasing by about 50% a year.
Yup. Even if Facebook told the VCs that Zuckerberg lays golden, candy-colored, web-two-point-oh eggs, it's still the VC's bet to lose.
you wouldn't show your mom your latest trick
Although this thread is ridiculous, You get 1 point for a Danica McKellar reference.
How long do you think it would take for YC to run out of markets if they limited it to one company per? It's fine, unless you're aiming for a direct ripoff (at least, that's my opinion! ;-) )
No, but millions of people see Gillette on their razors every day.