skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed, although I usually skip items with the word "startup" in them - I'm too old for that :) The rest is great.
You obviously pride yourself on being an intellectual, yet you havent even scratched the surface. Think deeper.

The answer lies in the answer to my question.
Have you searched Google for "Online Memorial"? Plenty of people think this is a good idea. There are 3 paid placements at the top of the search results so I assume there's some money in it as well.

If you still want to go forward, make sure you are differentiated.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions (and bad specs).
Ok, so we won't be trading Justin.tv on the NASDAQ... did anyone really expect to?

I think we should be more focused on profitability - not IPOs. Honestly, the chances of any of us creating an IPO-worthy company are pretty slim. But, as long as we create profitable companies, then we're set. And you don't need 1B page views / month to be profitable.

If you're generating cash, there's no pressure to find an exit strategy. And if you do want out, there will ALWAYS be investors willing to buy you.
Is that juwo guy paying attention?
Webkinz is incredibly popular w/ kids. My cousins (12 and 20) are basically obsessed w/ them.... It's a great model: kids are hard to advertise to, so make them buy a plush toy to get on the site.
Couple of points.

1. Your valuation is correct and considering you only have an idea, its pretty darn good.

2. The 2.5% of profits would come after the salaries. Salaries aren't profits. That said, you can't just pay all your profits out to you in salary. You will need to set that up ahead of time with his / her input.

3. Lastly, just from an outsider perspective, your buyback clause comment makes it sound like you are being a bit greedy. You have an individual who you call your friend and who is giving you a good valuation and you are
a) concerned about 2.5% share of the profits s/he will get (relative to your collective 97.5%)
b) Trying to pull the shares out from under him whenever you like.

An investment is a partnership and it is, to say the least, bad karma to screw over a partner. He is risking his money for the upside. An upside comes at an acquisition or an IPO not a buyback from the founders.

If you don't want to give up equity, don't take money. If you need money, equity is what you trade. This will likely not be the last time you make this trade, so start getting comfortable with it. Still, it sounds like maybe you will be happier with all 100%.

All that said, get a lawyer.
Basically: more precisely, that modern database APIs (not just ORMs) can hide much of the complexity of using an sql database, so that it seems neither "elaborate" nor "a higher order of magnitude" more complex to the programmer to build, test or debug. And since modern database layers often give you tools to help build data structures, it might seem simpler to use those tools than to build something without them.
Hey, we all got our start somewhere :) The earlier you do it, the better.

Props to Juwo for getting off his butt and putting something out there.

That's more than most people I know can say.
The ACM Turing award lectures are wonderful. But this one is the best of all.
You shouldn't worry about sharing your ideas. They are, after all, not really worth anything to us:

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
Sweet, I can't wait to toss up this tropical scheme up for my site :D

http://www.colorschemer.com/schemes/viewscheme.php?id=3933
Because, when you want to actually use that "color-picking thingy" you saw here 5 months ago, you have no idea how to find it.
I don't think the issue is one of mediocrity. I can certainly see the merit of your idea, but it all depends on execution. Would I use it? I don't think so. I know plenty of people who would, though, and if they created such a memorial for a friend of mine, I would be compelled to visit and add to it. So in a sense, it is viral, and as someone else mentioned, there is certainly a market for it.

So go for it. It doesn't seem like a super-complex idea involving crazy algorithms or anything. You are going to have to really consider design issues about how such a site should be navigated, if perhaps it should be linked with MySpace or Facebook or something so that friends can refer people to memorials on the site or something. Or come up with a different plan altogether.

The point is that it doesn't matter how good the idea is if you don't have a good design in mind and the motivation to make it happen. I think it would be great, but can you do it? (That's meant to be a motivational challenge in order to help get you started on it.)
It might not be quite so solid a fact. I've worked on websites with closer to 20m visits a month, and they've been able to swing deals for slightly better CPMs. I suspect that many sites with over 100m visits would probably see advertising opportunities open up if they're aggressive enough, especially if they've been able to collect even a small amount of demographic information on their visitors. So the linear relationship is probably not definite.
for a flash demo, do you happen to know if a video playing in a media player on the screen will be captured in screencast?

or is there another tool...
This would be the perfect time for statsaholic.com to release their own toolbar / plugin.

I'd install it.
Google Remembers Where You've Been
I dont know if this exist or not, but it is a great idea. We all need to remember the ones that are gone. Personaly I have experienced it in my family and it would be nice to have a space where I can upload pictures and videos and have others come in and share their stories about that one person. This is a good way to "rendre Hommage". Go for it. You could put this up in less than a week.
Google: Winner takes all
"DBMS are optimized for the fastest possible disk I/O."

I think that's disputable. DBMSes are designed for a number of considerations and it's not hard to demonstrate how alternatives can outperform a DBMS in terms of disk I/O and general performance.

Consider an HTTP request that modifies records. A typical DBMS-backed app will write all the changes to disk whereas a prevalent system (AKA object prevalence) need only write "POST /someurl arg1=value1:arg2=value2:..." or some equivalent. The data is updated in RAM with a write to only one or two disk sectors in the majority of cases, no communication with a DBMS, no construction and parsing of SQL, and none of the other overhead. A typical prevalent system will be orders of magnitude faster than the DBMS-backed equivalent, and simpler to boot.

Object prevalence doesn't offer a query language and has different scalability considerations, but it would take an absurdly broken design for a DBMS to outperform it.
Someone with kids has metioned the Lego site to me too. I guess the young childrens market is probably just as big as the Myspace Market
1B views=5M$ is an approximation to first order. I'm sure I could be convinced the CPM is off by a factor of 5. However, there's got to be a fairly hard minimum sales/month for an IPO: I didn't know it was $60M/year.

If your goal is to form a business that will make the founders rich, it's good to have some numbers floating around in your head. Maybe I was the only one, but I didn't have these numbers in my head, and I felt they were educational :)
Your Company Needs Fanboys -- Lots of 'em
Does there exist or is there a market for an online to-do list (see comment)? Edit: apparently rememberthemilk.com.
In the past, I have been continually frustrated by my inability to get things done. I find that I know what I should be working on, but I instead do things like lurk here or obsessively check my e-mail. For the last month or so, however, I have started to write down the things that I would like to do in lists (using a Google homepage feature), and I find that I do a much better job getting things done.

I also live with my girlfriend, and sometimes we have things that we would like each other to do. Oftentimes, she'll ask me to do something, I'll say "okay", I'll forget, and it won't get done when it should. It would be nice if she could easily add to my list.

In general, I have a need for a to-do list application. I feel that if it's something I need, however, that others might find a use for it as well. The idea I have is to allow it to connect with other applications like Google Calendar, although it would also have a built-in one for those who don't use a calendar program (me included). I would be able to add ideas to my to-do list either by adding them to the calendar or by simply adding them with some priority (i.e. Immediate, High, Medium, Low). Then, in my preferences, I would be able to assign priorities to items based on how many days away they are (i.e. 1, 5, 10, 11+).

Finally, the point of all this would be to have a simple list of things I need to do, with highest priority items appearing on top. Items without an explicit due date would gradually increase in priority based on some scoring system. There would be a simple way to mark items off the list or to lower the priority. I feel that this system would produce a nice mix of tasks that include items with a deadline and things that I would like to get done that don't necessarily have a deadline.

The additional interesting part of the whole thing would be to allow other members to add items to your list. You could have public items on your calendar (as with Google) which everyone could see, but you would also be able to have friends add things to your calendar, for example if they are planning a party and would like you to attend. Now it would conveniently show up in your to-do list and you wouldn't forget about it. Or if your wife wants you to clean the gutters sometime this week, she could just add it to your list with Medium priority, with the knowledge that it would gradually rise to the top of your list and you would get it done.

Does anyone find this to be an interesting idea? Is there anything out there that does this already? As I said, I really feel like I could use something like this, so if it's already out there, I would be quite happy to use it. If not, well, I guess it's something I should make :-).

Thanks in advance for your comments.
The hidden lives of MySpacers - Why opinions from anybody but users rarely matter.
Most Meetings Should Be Held Without Chairs
Marry Your Passion and Divorce The Rest
I've seen a lot of todo list applications in the past year. http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ is the most popular I believe and should meet your requirements.

For now I'm sticking with paper notepads. They're flexible and portable. The only downside is that copying tasks from my "this week" list to my "today" list involves rewriting.
I actually agree with this.

I'm a 35 year-old entrepreneur and enjoy following the YCombinator stuff. Like clockwork, when I mention the idea of YCombinator to other elder entrepreneurs like myself, they say, "Pish Posh. $5k per founder for 5% of equity?!"

The reality is that you have a pretty low chance of success. If you can eek out a few more percentage points by giving away a small slice of your company, it's worth it. Whether it's to YCombinator or a key employee.

And, I'd also point out this-- Willingness to give away equity for increased chance at success shows that you are committed to the idea of business success (rather than the idea of personal wealth).
You know, I've realized that many great people are great at things they started when they were young.

I think that's because, growing up, you often stumble across what you're passionate in at a young age.

So - are you working on you're passion?
I'd say successful companies applied CMM after they became successful, not before that.
The design also needs to take into account that the vast majority of customers for a memorial site will be older folks (I've seen enough memorial services being planned to know that it's the grandmothers and great aunts that do the work...everybody else is too wrapped up in their own grief to get anything done...maybe this is just in the matriarchal south, but I suspect it applies across the country). That's a really hard market to design for.

But, craigslist has shown that if you take a newspaper product and dump it onto the web with a perfect implementation (say what you will about craigslist and how ugly it is...but it's a beautifully functional ugly that's a joy to use), you'll get lots of users. Every day there are thousands of obituaries published. The paper gives you three or six or whatever lines for free, and you can pay for bigger ad-style layouts. Just like classifieds being really cheap for a few lines, but getting more expensive the more copy you write, you can remove the expense of extra copy and adding pictures.

So, taking something that's currently inconvenient (call the newspaper, spell the name three times, struggle with the family about who gets listed under "survived by", since you're running out of words, etc.) and making it convenient and free sounds like it'd be a winner. It's the "free" part that makes it hard to make money on. Who wants ads for home mortgages and crap all over their grandfather's obituary? But I dunno if people will pay for it.
Google Acquires Web-Conferencing Company, Marratech
How many Y Combinator founders are/were NOT young hackers?  Any 30+?
First impression: good idea because I haven't heard of something like that before.

After thinking about it: Good idea but won't create a big successful business for the same reason above. There are already several web sites that does that (search on Google like madanella suggested), and the fact that they are not well known is an indication that it's not a popular concept.

Having said that, you can still take something and make it successful if you manage to figure out the perfect combination of features and marketing ideas. Successful companies do that all the time, they take existing ideas that don't have much traction and make them better. Google didn't invent search, Apple didn't invent MP3 players, and Microsoft didn't invent operating systems.

A point to consider as well is that it's probably not appropriate to put ads on a memorial page. Some people will be sensitive to it. In that case, how would you recover the cost of hosting pages for very long periods of time?
Definitely useful, but making money could be a problem. Google ads on the pages might be a little bit morbid. I don't think many people would pay for such a service since there are plenty of free alternatives already, so I really don't see where the money would come from. A slick, user-friendly product would get you users, but monetizing them doesn't look particularly straightforward to me.
Good analysis, but there is a catch. Newspapers already have readers. When people post in a newspaper, they want to get the word out. But if you create a web site specifically for this purpose, I doubt that people will read it often to check if someone they know had passed away. However, if a known online news service provides this as an extra feature, then people will figure out that they can get the word out by posting there.
I think the reason why they aren't popular is because they suck. The don't let you do the one thing that you'd really want to do when creating a memorial. They don't let you collaborate. If I was creating a memorial for someone I would want to solicit stories and memories from the person's friends and pull them together to form a story.
Yes. All good points. Thanks guys - this feedback is very helpful.
I would love to meet up with people in SF. Anyone coming up to the city?
Seems like a feature, not a company. But to get a better feel for it, test the concept: create a public wiki page on one of the free wikis out there and use it as a shared to-do list for you and your girlfriend. If you're still using it after a month or two (until the initial enthusiasm of a new idea fades away), then you might be on to something.
Lifestreams could help create new personalised discovery engines
Thanks for the link. I've signed up for it, and it seems to almost precisely describe my idea, so that's good for me; it will save me some work :-).
will there be a time when all this web 2.0 will not mean much for folks? or is it here to stay?
Don't be a hero: Giving up is good to do
Well, a wiki doesn't quite do what I would want, because one of the most important parts is the automatic updating where items move up the list as their deadline approaches or as they've been in my list for a long time. Having to constantly edit a wiki to reflect this just adds something else to the list of things to do, "Maintain to-do list".

The site that danw referred me to was almost exactly what I was looking for.
What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup?
What are your top 3 questions about how to turn your idea into a startup?

My top 3:

1. How do I get money?

2. How do I get a good deal?

3. How do I recruit great people?

I'll collect the responses and post the results here on news.yc.

- Nivi from Venture Hacks, http://venturehacks.com
No sure why that was downvoted. I was sincere. I think it's a very nice angle on my original idea.
1) Whats my business model going to be?

2) Whats my business model going to be?

3) Where am I going to get a cofounder?
Okay, now I would say that the folks behind Zenter should definitely be worried about Google's predictable move into online presentation software. E-meeting software is going to be killer whether it empowers project collaboration or remote presentation broadcasts.
After developing the idea, researching the market and such:

1. What's my business model?
2. How do I get to prototype/alpha/demo?
3. What investors are interested in this stage, industry and business model?
Idea: Self-acquiring feature startups
It's all about the story:

1) Who is my audience?

2) What will I help them do that is better than what they have to do now?

3) How am I going to build it?
So many of the new services being created and offered online are accused of being features only. Wouldn't there be an opportunity in combining a set of these feature-startup companies into a very interesting acquisition target or a company with more potential for going public?

I'm not proposing that VCs or some company act as the acquirer. I'm proposing that these companies merge their teams and traffic and resources 'equitably' and keep working toward the goal but with greater momentum. Kind of a 'hackers co-op'.
Wow. The first one is really close to the color scheme I chose for my house.
Take a look at http://legacy.com/Obituaries.asp
StumbleUpon Launches StumbleThru-Site Specific Stumbling
Alec baldwin goes bonkers
Alec baldwin
hmmm - still no sign of a feature to allow collaboration between people who knew them.
It is really frustrating how lazy bloggers/investors always are rationalizing why great startups should be doing bad, instead of figuring out what makes these "bad" startups do so great.

Nice example.
PG has said here a few times that he's invested in several companies with 30+ year old founders. It seems not really about age as much as it is being able to take the risk and not having a lot of overhead to support (a family, mortgage, etc).
I spoke on this topic at the Web 2.0 expo on Wednesday and have blogged on it in the past.

presentation available here:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/04/19/presentation-at-web-20-today-show-me-the-money/
I always try and be a hero and like DHH says, its bad.
I probably should have pointed out the implications for disk I/O. In many cases, the serialization of the command in the journal has a smaller footprint on disk than the data that's modified. Consider an extreme case where a small HTTP POST touches dozens or hundreds of records.

And appending data to a log is essentially an ideal disk access pattern.

Of course this can't be said for the snapshots, but you can offload that task to a replica server.
web 2.0 expo presentation about how to build web 2.0 business models to scale
there's also AllegroGraph product implementing triple store (kinda RDF), that can be accessed via Prolog.
i like that kind of data store very much -- it is as convenient as using plain objects, but supports complex queries, and do not have any additional layers like ORM.
links:

AllegroGraph tutorial:
http://www.franz.com/products/allegrograph/doc/lisp/agraph-tutorial.html

my little lispy wrapper to SPARQL:
http://abcl-web.sourceforge.net/rdf.html
(i like it somewhat more that Prolog used with AllegroGraph :)
I was more interested in the non-hackers part of the non-young-hackers. Harj said something about how he started something without knowing how to hack; I was surprised, because I don't even know what you DO in a web startup if you don't know how to hack. How does it work?
my proposal at http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15163 provides an alternative path to "big enough".
99% of programmers are law-abiding citizens...
1. Do people want this?
2. Are you ridiculously passionate about the idea?
3. Are you willing to suffer deeply to make it successful?
Business News and Financial News at Forbes.com was (sorry waws just testing the writewith posting tool, nothing real here :s)
Newsflash.. this is not Digg! Paul... can we please get a "bury" or "spam" feature. Say... 5 people bury something and the link is deleted.
Any tips on how i could learn Ruby/RoR if i dont know jack bout coding and dont have a helping hand around where i live? Please help :S
I really like it too. However, there are many people here who would love to get funding from YC one day and this probably influences the sorts of things that they talk about.

For example, you may find many posts on lisp but few on java. This is particularly strange given that Google's gwt is probably the best way to build ajax apps.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=14675

http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/3

I tought myself
I'm assuming you're young. Please look at other posts, and compare them to your own. You probably don't realize that you're presenting yourself poorly. I say this with good intentions: When I was a 15 year old, I posted a totally inane and off-topic question on sci.crypto about my chemistry project. At least your question is relevant to this group. :)

If I'm right, and you are young, the best thing you can do is to learn a core set of skills, don't worry about RoR yet. Go to the website http://www.drscheme.org/ where you can d/l free software and a free textbook. If you study the book carefully, if you work hard, you will learn a lot.
3 ways to cash out your startup by Reid Hoffman
Two more resources:
Colour Scheme Chooser http://www.siteprocentral.com/cgi-bin/feed/feed.cgi
Colour Lovers http://www.colourlovers.com/
Links for Web Designers : April
Seem to be in a design mood today. :) Hope the link is informative/helpful.

Have some fun with the ColorJack sphere!
Venture Hacks: Accelerate your vesting upon termination
I don't want to start a new thread, so I'll post my idea here as well: a web-based personal organization system. Basically a calendar and to-do list, with the calendar possibly integrating with Google Calendar.

This may seem like 37signal's Backpackit but it isn't because it won't be just a dumping ground for various notes it'll be much more organized/automated. It'll follow the Getting Things Done system sorta...so if you add a new item to your Projects list, it will create a new list of next actions for that project.

Also, any list items that include dates or times will be included on the calendar.

I don't know what else I can include to differentiate this from Backpackit, anyone have any suggestions? And is it a good idea to work on even?
I'm about to turn 33, but also sufficiently rootless that it's not like I'm taking on a lot of extra risk by trying something like this. No kids, no huge mortgage payments.
A new income stream for Microsoft (funny).