skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know nothing about OpenID. So I went to their website:

This is their tagline:
"OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity."

blah blah ...user centric... blah

How about: OpenID allows you to have one login for multiple sites.

This is the paragraph after the tagline:
"OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity."

I don't even know where to begin here.

This is all a long way of saying that I think the upside of supporting OpenID is very small. It may be a brilliant idea, brilliantly excecuted but few will use it b/c it is so poorly explained. Making users feel stupid is a bad way of getting them to use your stuff. Open or not.
Uh... I think that if you need to optimize "food expenses" to this extreme, you have much more serious problems than software.

Penny-wise, pound-foolish... wow
Ask News.YC: How do you handle dispute resolution between 2 founders?
My startup has 2 founders: I'm the Woz, and my cofounder is the Jobs. We have been working under the assumption that it'll be 50/50, at least since the 3 founders that didn't do anything left. It's seemed to work well in terms of both of us feeling like we're pulling our fair share and aren't being cheated.

However, we just spoke to a lawyer about incorporation and corporate structures, and he said "That'll make for an interesting agreement for dispute resolution." I'm curious how other companies in this situation have handled it. I know Apple brought in Ron Wayne as the 3rd founder to act as a tiebreaker - how did the Reddits do it? Any other examples?
EditGrid Launches Dynamic Image -- Create Your Own Statsaholic
I know another startup that was faced with a similar issue (they have since been acquired, proving that this does, indeed, work)--they decided to split it 49.9/50.1 with the person who thought of the idea first getting the majority.

Naturally if you have thousands of shares, just take one from the person who's going to get less equity and give it to yourself (assuming all shares have equal voting rights).

Another alternative is to split the equity 50/50, but have the voting rights divided differently. This is a pain in the ass because you have to insert a bunch of (extra) legal mumbo jumbo in the operating agreement for tax purposes.

A potential problem is if you both sort of thought of the idea together (i.e. it was an iterative process). Well, then, if you are adamant about a 50/50 split, you can always resort to third (neutral) party arbitration if a dispute should arise, but this is a pain.

I would do it 49.9/50.1---one of you must have started this entire process.
public speaking toastmasters  meetup at MIT
Hello Everyone,

A big part of starting your business and leading a company is being a good public speaker. Toastmasters is a great organization that allows for practicing public speaking in a fun and supportive friendly environment. I would like to invite you guys to come visit the Tuesday Evening toastmasters at MIT which is every Tuesday at 6 pm in room 2-143.

Its free to come visit and participate if you want, meet people, etc

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly at mpresh@gmail.com.

Hope to see you all who are local to Cambridge MA to come and visit

-Mike
Remember that success comes from improving OTHER people's lives. All your achievements, while probably very gratifying to your mother, have not improved my life at all.
But how many people wouldn't have signed up if the option isn't supported? That's important to figure out how worthwhile it is.
Bug if the cursor moves out of the bounds of the grid. I gave up, didn't want to start over...

Very few women in that list.
While a 50/50 ownership+voting split may seem "fair", your lawyer is right that it can easily create a situation where it is difficult to make resolutions and get things done. And in the world of a startup, the inability to quickly make decisions can be the equivalent of cutting off your own air supply. While it may mean one less point of equity today, it could be the difference between your startup ultimately going anywhere for both of you.
Well, if you want to impress people with your startup prowess, you're better off succeeding in that context before bragging about it.

I have no opinion of you or your entrepreneurial abilities in the same way a physicist has no opinion of gravity.

If I can measure what you've done (e.g. in terms of customers, revenues, successful exit sale, etc.) then I'll respect you (or not).
Do you use OS X or Mozilla? Have you ever used their software update mechanisms?

If yes, I've improved your life -- they use my delta compression work (bsdiff, originally written as part of FreeBSD Update) to reduce the size of updates which have to be downloaded. As of about a year ago, my work had saved users around the world well over a hundred years of waiting for updates to download.
That is entirely the wrong way to respond: you will get a lot of that (from VCs, prospective clients, etc.) and dealing with it like that is guaranteed to lead you to failure, simply because everyone will come to see you (rightly or wrongly) as a complete prick.
"Remember also that every time you open your mouth in the presence of a person who has an abundance of knowledge, you display to that person your exact stock of knowledge or your lack of it! Genuine wisdom is usually conspicuous through modesty and silence."
Django I think.
Conversion rates, user loyalty, whatever is relevant to the purpose ultimate purpose of the site.
Google offers 1000 results
Annotate your website prototypes
Value of Angel Networks?
I'm in search of an angel/seed investor for my startup, and while I am working my networks, I wonder what people's opinions are of the various Angel networks out there? Many allow direct submission of pitches/business plans, charging a screening fee.

Has anyone found it to be worthwhile, personally or anecdotally? New York Angels has a lot of really good people on their board and as members (Josh Kopelman, Esther Dyson). Worth my time/$ to submit a pitch?

(disclaimer: YC not an option, co-founder has kids and can't move. Also sending to CRV Quickstart. )
Don't forget that people also just enjoy the stereotype. Take it cum grano salis.
Sounds really hard to me.
Agreed on items #1, #2 and #5. #3 is more of an issue on how you design your system than of the programming language itself and you can get away with #4 if you throw other languages into the mix.

For example, you can do your website with django or Rails because you need to keep some agility in the frontend but you can use something like Java for background processes. Picture this (it's just a quick example): you can create an online store where the web frontend is developed with one of the aforementioned frameworks because it'll allow you to add new features quickly but when the client puts in an order for something you put a message in a JMS queue and use some j2ee application to process that order because this background process doesn't change much and it may be faster to develop with this technology.
Given PG's formulation, liquidation preference plays no part in the value-of-equity equation, since it can be factored out into the average outcome.

But sure, it does tend to depress average outcome. Then again, if your outcome is dominated by the presence of very-high-value possibilities, a reasonable liquidation preference may be no big deal.
A crucial part of making something people want is finding out what people want. Intelligence is an advantage, of course, but is no guarantee. For one thing, it may make it harder for you to understand the needs of the less gifted and educated.
is YC suited for game devs?
Well, is it? I have an idea for a game and have most of the codebase done. I am an avid reader of YC news and notice that a lot of the posters are into either enterprise software, or social networking/web 2.0 applications. I am a yc hopeful...but wondering if I should be looking elsewhere. What do you think?
This would be off-topic in this thread, but definitely not in this forum. If you make a new top level post requesting feedback, more people will be able to contribute and benefit from it.
I personally wouldn't do anything but 50/50. Even if it is 49.9/50.1 you are saying that the person with the higher % is inherently better, and this can leak into the dynamics of the startup in so many ways. Lawyers like to point out things like this, but they aren't the entrepreneurs.

I can tell you from experience that if you have the right co-founder, 50/50 is no problem. If there is a disagreement, however minor, you talk it out until one person convinces the other. This pretty much never happened in my case, by the way.
Europe's Young Entrepreneurs 2007
An increasing number of Europeans 25 and under are starting their own businesses--and inspiring others to do the same
Thanks Joe, although my academic adviser might take issue with the scholar part. :-)
with sitepass?
I get a whole lot of that (even from my family: my sister told me "So, mom and I were talking in the car, and it's great that you're doing this startup, but honestly I don't think you'll succeed.") When I gave notice today, I had to listen to my boss go on about how I was too young to start a startup (I'm 26), how he spent about 15 years after getting his Ph.D learning about business and working in the industry, how my technical skills were too weak (nevermind that I wrote two of his products, and he's never seen me program in a language other than Java), and how if my idea was any good at all, I'd have been able to secure funding for it (nevermind that we're not interested in outside funding until we have some traction).

I've found that the best response is to sit there, listen carefully, take note of any valid points, and ask followup questions if you need more information on one. You may learn something: despite the overall negativity of the conversation, my boss had many points that I'm going to want to keep in mind as we move forwards.

Understand, there is a lot of self-justification going around when it comes to entrepreneurship. As long as rich people are the distant Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets, people can put them up on a pedestal or say "Oh, they got lucky." But if someone you've grown up with or someone who used to work for you gets rich, you have to ask yourself "Why them and not me? Are they just smarter than me?"

Many smart people will do just about anything to avoid admitting that others are smarter than them, so they instinctively say "Oh, he's just going to fail." And when you succeed, they'll say "Oh, he just got lucky." If you succeed again they'll start saying "The game is rigged!".

But if you stoop to their level and say "Oh, look how smart I am, of course I'm going to succeed," you're just engaging in self-justification yourself. And that's a dangerous mental attitude to get into, because it blinds you to details. The reason you're smart in the first place is because you pick up details that other people don't; you can easily become stupid by believing yourself smart. This comes from experience: I did precisely this in high school and college, and then found that when I actually tried to get something done, the results were much more disappointing than I would've liked.

(Therapy for myself: I think you're smarter than me, I think you will succeed, and I think that if you do succeed, it will be because of skill. But keep what I say in mind anyway. It may be useful.)
Ottawa startup scene: list of key startups and tech entrepreneurs
Were these people questioning your ability to pull off the technical challenges? If they were questioning the business potential of the idea, your impressive credentials in math and programming are besides the point.
It's funny cause I could barely finish the article with all those cash registers ringing in my ears.

Seems like ycombinator did it again.
News.YC does flame wars a whole lot better than the rest of the internet...
Sam Altman is one of the nicest Silicon Valley entrepreneurs I have ever met in my life.
Room number correction: its actually 2-132.

-Mike
It can't hurt to apply. I think you'd need to have some kind of hook to set you apart from other game developers to have a serious shot at it.
Go management!
Ditto here, and am in full agreement, excellent advice.
Am trying to remember if I did that after I was rejected from SFP2005...I know that I offered them free equity in exchange for advice and the ability to come to the YC dinners, but I can't remember if I offered cash. Probably not, as I was poor at the time.

My offer was ignored, BTW.
Lisp Hackers Hit Another Startup Homerun (Flektor)
The Curse of The Elegant Languages
yep, immediately thought of that too. PG writes VERY good stuff most of the time and is very smart about a lot of things, but when he strays into areas in which he is not well versed (the unions essay comes to mind), he ends up writing pieces with obvious holes.
PG's On Lisp in Japanese: less than $40 printed in 2007 - On Lisp in English: out of print $300+
Learn Haskell in 10 minutes
Good god, the amount of useful and practical advice in this comment is astounding. I hope you get 20 karma points. If you follow that advice you're 90% to success, because it says a lot about your personality. No wonder YC wants people to participate in YC News.. If I had any money I'd invest it in you.
Yes, congrats - this is great news!
Damn.. PG, if the book is NLA and there is that much demand, why not print more?
All that promising talent, consumed by cannibals. The travesty!
give him time.. he'll get an iphone ;)
A few tips:

1. Open up Microsoft word.

2. Type all that out.

3. Save it as "Resume.doc"

4. Don't open it again until your next job search.
In this case, oversimplifying is warranted, mostly because the things glossed over are either sufficiently complicated that it's hard to make simple, or are things are already generally known.

Take, for example, the 50% point. Once you hand over so much stock that the amount you and the people you implicitly trust hold dips below 51%, you've lost control. Clearly an issue outside of the 1/(1-n) equation, and yet not really relevant. Everyone knows this already.

Then there's the general notion of not handing out too much stock to too many factions, but this too is more or less established knowledge amongst the target audience.

Having said that, the nuance of factoring in odds of success is a worthwhile consideration. Hat off for explaining it!
It looks like a great idea - except - the sucking up of bandwidth to make the first backup. I'm definitely looking for a better remote backup service for my Architecture firm, for which I currently pay far too much, but my server unfortunately is Windows SBS 2003 - whose OS I truly dislike. I am forced to do this for compatibility with my Revit BIM software unfortunately, so I guess your product won't help me.
Apple to Hold iPhone Workshop
Kill the other partner.

Just kidding, I'd follow the advice of others, either involve a third person or have on person carry slightly more weight in the company (in terms of equity).

Just an aside, but you know who I go to when I need advice on a dispute or question though? My mom! I swear that lady knows everything about life!
Do you have any specific holes you could point to as examples?
Man how do you come back to a title like that? You can't even say "your FACE is a peice of shit" because he has that covered too!!

I like the article too, though it's a little hostile for my taste.
Sure, massive distributed processing is a stretch. But as a general guideline for app architecture, this is IMHO a pretty good one. :)
I read the union essay a while ago, but your failure to sufficiently consider risk-aversion in this one was a major hole. I don't mean to really criticize that much, you write consistently great stuff.
Actually not. That's why I was careful to speak of the effect of trading equity on the "average outcome" rather than e.g. "average valuation at liquidity." What I'm literally saying is, does the trade improve your odds of getting what you want? That subsumes both your risk aversion and your utility function for money.
What it's like to be an entrepreneur (video)
http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=35171
That works, except then I guess the hole was not making it clear enough that you were talking about utility rather than expected value. The problem with your response, and the reason that I don't really see it as a good explanation, is that your basic principle is far less useful if it requires the user to calculate their expected utility.
We'd consider a game co.
Troublesome quarter for Yahoo again - Portal's executives say they will address company weaknesses
Most seem to be pretty near useless. Not one YC startup (of 38 prior to this round) has gotten funding from one. In fact, I can't think of any startup I know that has.

I would especially steer clear of any that charge a fee.
He must not have found Plone!
In practice it's not hard, because nearly all founders' utility functions are practically step functions.
Well said. OpenID seems to be the latest fad that will more than likely fizzle out unless big sites start pushing it. And I don't see that happening in the near term since they all prefer to have your email so they can "market" stuff to you.
Cases 2.0 Launched (community for sharing E2.0 case studies)
Perhaps a startup will come along and make OpenID easy...
I agree. We encourage two founders to split stock evenly. If you have to depend on a shareholder vote to decide things, you're already dead.
What kind of healthy but extremely inexpensive diet do you recommend? It's the fresh produce that really adds up.
Splash screen is an admission of failure
How Open Is Facebook, Really?
The article ignores how market prices work - the formula presented lets you know the maximum equity you can give up and still get a positive return by doing so, but incorrectly explains why VCs accept much less - the minimum equity a VC can accept and still expect a positive return on their investment can be far lower than the maximum the startup can afford to give profitably. The VCs are subject to competition with other VCs, so in such cases they cannot force the startup to accept a just-better-than-breakeven deal.
Most of the codebase done and no prototypes?
Don't like dogs? Work somewhere else.

The vast majority of offices don't allow dogs. Google allows a lot of things that most offices don't...you take the good with the bad. I've been to the Google offices quite a bit, and dogs are not a major source of annoyance for anyone, as far as I can tell (though, truth be told, I like dogs a lot--though the majority of them are small dogs and I tend to like them less than proper sized ones).

Nobody makes you work at any particular office or in any particular type of environment...it's up to you to decide where you'll be happiest. Seems pretty obvious to me, but maybe I'm too much of a free market fanboy to see how oppressive Google's dog policy is for dog-haters.
"How is this different from allowing people to bring guns to work that they may point at you occasionally?"

Wow. You're really nuts. What kind of dogs are you hanging out with? ;-)
I've had 2 and three person partnerships... One person tends to grab the thought-leadership and the others tend to follow (tho hopefully not so much that they don't speak up with great ideas).

I would advise having a buy-sell agreement that allows a graceful exit if one person wants out, but otherwise I'd agree that partner selection is 50% of the battle (and letting go of your own ego is the other 50%).

For buy sell agreements, the best I've seen, simply stated, is this:

At any time, partner A can make an offer to buy Partner B's stake for Value X (whatever they want to offer). The rub is that Partner B can decide to reverse the offer (buying Partner A's stake for Value X) and Partner A is obliged to sell.

Hopefully you'll never need such an agreement, but it sucks to feel trapped in a business (or trapped with a partner who has turned into a lunatic or is no longer pulling his weight).

So far, every partnership I've had has been an even one, and I've never had to exercise an buy-sell clause like that (knock on wood!).
I'm really glad I saw this post. I read the original article about Flektor posted on YC today and was really intrigued. So I'm glad that this author made the connection for me to that Lisp company purchased by Sony.

For those who don't read the article, note that it says, "Who knows if they used Lisp at Flektor, but I definitely need to check out their product now to see what the quality level is like." So anyone know which language(s) they used?
It's a shame if a seemingly good project would have to be re-created only to be topped off w/ basic customer awareness. I think a lot of open source projects suffer from this mentality. Take the "open, community, GPL, Torvalds" stuff off of your landing page. Your users aren't joining a cult, they're using your product. Like Levchin said, there should be a "Get Mine Now!!!" button. Firefox and Ubuntu are doing well because they are catering to the "Get Mine Now" crowd (which is everyone who isn't a developer.)

But on the other hand, maybe there is a great startup that could take the OpenID concept to the next level. I don't know b/c I don't really understand what they do! :)
Meet Ashton Kutcher, the next tech entrepreneur?
Yes, I know he's just Creative Director, but Michael says he's "actively engaged in the business," which is pretty impressive in my opinion.

The company seems very promising so far, I love companies that push technology to the next level, or even just make better use of existing ones.
"history shows that it ends in hubris (e.g. AOL, Microsoft). Facebook doesn't control social networking yet, far from it. But it's feasible that they will in future, if/when MySpace is vanquished."
Silicon Valley Firm Promises Free Domestic Calls
Facebook is the New AOL
I thought it was worth showing up here as a geek tool.

Sorry, it's not startup centered but it's nice to know about iphone alternatives.
I haven't tried OpenID yet, but my expection would be to just run apt-get on my Linux server to install some OpenID-server, put my name into a configuration file or whereever (web interface), and use a single login from then on.
Voted down for pointing out a bug? Whatever...
That wasn't a terrible article, but some of these suggestions were bad. Why would slow performance stop you from using url_for() when you should be caching the resulting html anyway?

If you're going to take this approach to performance optimization, you probably should just not use Rails in the first place.
Sometimes with the flames on here however, it feels like Craigslist forums, in all of their 2.0 glory... ;)
Marc Andreessen: Best book for tech entrepreneurs this year
In regards to incubators...
I can't help but laugh at the audacity of another tech-related investment firm commenting like that. He is trying to persuade people that YC is just writing cheques.
10 Pragmatic Steps To Raising Venture Capital
Anybody know if infogami went to Conde Nast as well? Nobody's answering their support emails.

Ordinarily I would just leave it behind as a lost cause, but one of the sites I created keeps accumulating spam, and I need the brief attention of someone at the server to take care of it. The thought of junk accumulating on permalinks I created makes me feel dirty..