skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ideas ARE worthless.

"Here's another way to look at it. If merely telling someone your idea means that it can be ripped off, then you hardly have a defensible product. If secrecy is your main weapon, then it will be hard to find investors. By the way, what happens when you ship? Are you going to ask every customer to sign a nondisclosure too?" And what about your first employees?

(quote from an Old Guy Kawasaki Column)
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/2005/06/16/entrepreneur-venture-capital-kawasaki-cx_gk_0616artofthestart.html

And if you think the fact that her seed-funded team of 5 developers gives her an indomitable advantage, think again.

It's not what you do, it's HOW YOU DO IT.

So what action should you be taking? I'd say to look real hard at what she's doing. If she nailed it and has built something great, find another idea. They're everywhere. If she hasn't nailed it and you can make a better product, make it.

And, if you're feeling vindictive (I wouldn't bother with this), you could plant a few seeds within your shared network-- tell your mutual friends/contacts what she did.
Trust in karma. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay," saith the Lord. :)
don't say it. period.
The Lunch Break Challenge. What can you do in an hour?
MySpace definitely executed well, but no one has a monopoly on good execution. In your original comment, you said that if someone else could execute as well as he could, then there's something wrong with the idea. That's not true. There's a good chance that the poster is already screwed, because the person who stole his idea is probably competent. Just because the idea has been marinating in his head longer doesn't mean that he will be more successful. The suggestion that the advantage gained from being the person to come up with the idea in the first place is substantial enough to offset the head start that the person who stole the idea has isn't firmly based in reality.

With that said, I still think he should try to compete with her if he thinks the idea is worthwhile, but he should definitely reevaluate whether or not it's worth it to leave his job/school to do it full time. At this point, anything less than full time isn't going to accomplish anything.
I'm curious now....How do I get Google to delete my presentation from her email?
I had an idea for something simple and decided to hack it together during lunch today.

How about a little friendly competition once a week? See what we can hack in an hour? It was fun to have the idea, choose an implementation and hack it together in a very short amount of time!

Obviously, there's lots I can do to improve this little service. The intention is not to do something for real, but to have a little fun, be creative and push myself a bit.

Who's in?
She crashed once - why not help her crash again: Launch.
Don't feel bad. Just think of the original guy who came up with the idea for facebook. Zuckerberg was PAID to work on his friend's version of facebook, and he simply went off and created his own.
Noting wrong with a bit of fun...
I firmly believe that you need 1 screenshot, or maybe a 5s screen cast. Just something that gets the jist of it out there. 2-3 minutes is too much. Most tools have dozens of options, so be a reductionist here.

If you're going to be marketing juwo to different types of customers, have a 5 sec screencast, and then links to 3 or 4 subclasses (this will help you when you start advertising w/ google adsense as well.)

I'm too busy to help further :)
Most webapps are trivial to implement, and the real value is in the idea. Given the idea, a competent programmer-designer could probably whip out most of the popular webapps out there easily.
Dodgeball dead.
first off, just wanted to say that this sucks, and you have a right to feel pretty pissed right now.

my first suggestion would be to contact this person directly and discuss what has transpired.

Other issues aside, there might be an opportunity to partner, especially if she has funding and you provide the development expertise.
Everyone have ideas, few have visions.
NYTimes talks about Apple's former CFO and Steve Jobs
Is there a technique for getting content on a social based website at the start?
I don't believe that. You know all that text you already have? Just go through it and highlight the key points. Then out of those key points pick the ones that matter most to an ordinary person who just happened to stumble upon your website.

Look at the WriteWith.com site: http://writewith.com/ One sentence explains it and the screenshot is nice too. But after the first sentence, it has a little list of things a user can do, "upload documents, share with other people, chat, assign tasks, and track everybody's actions with a comprehensive history." And you can figure out wtf it does in just two sentences...amazing huh?
The question arises around the fact that at the start of an application that relies on user content there is none, so do people spam friends to get this content or is there other ways of getting a site up and running with useful content?
I'm still nervous about all of this. I know the Board has cleared Jobs a couple of times, but that doesn't mean the SEC has. Hopefully it all goes away.
why dont you tell us what the idea is?

what is her website url?
2-3 minutes for a screencast isn't too much. But don't have it autolaunch or on the same page. Make the screenshot link to the screencast and across it have, "Watch it in action!" or something.

Anyway, I should get to work on my stuff too :P
Connecting Google Voice Search (or any 411) With Car Navigation
The simplest solutions are always the best.
I would share the idea almost immediately with at least 5 potential customers.
Right. I like the design of http://www.edgewall.org/

And they get extra points for being open source!
Branding - a nice way to spend, but not make money
Maybe, but they have to come up with the idea first. And then they have to avoid being discouraged from going through with the implementation. And then they need money to put the implementation somewhere on the net. And then they need to market it or hire a PR company to do that. And they need to maintain and support it. And then...you get the point. There's more than just the implementation to web apps.
He's better off making his own karma.
Launch! For Sparta!
The New Way Of Search. People create the results. TallStreet.com
Even grad schools wined and dined me at the interview stage, and one school even sprang for the limo. I can guarantee no grad student expects to live like that, except of course when the next year's prospective students are interviewing. There's no implied promise that this is a typical day; it's simply what's done when you want the best.
it is fun to compete with pissed off
Yes, and the idea is the only hard part of all that. Especially if you're already a webapp-guy, not a random joe-schmoe who doesn't know source code from a security code.

These are webapps, not operating systems, not mainframes, not databases. The barrier to entry, cost of operation, and development time are all pretty low. You can hire the PR people when you actually need them (probably sometime after you actually have cash flow). There's plenty of ways to market a webapp for free, and I sure would not hire a marketing firm to promote my new site.
The site that pissedoff said was stolen but is not
Looking for cofounders
In order to stealyour idea you first must have owned it. Thing is, ideas cannot be owned, patnents (processes) can.
In conclusion, no one stole a thing from you.
Writing your main cash cow in a private, in-house language seems like one of the riskier decisions you can make.

If they would have at least open sourced it and tried to get some sort of community around it it would have at least start to become less dangerous as the community grows.

But programming your main (only?) product in a language nobody except your current employees knows? Employee turnover must be even more of a bitch over there then it is in most companies.

I wouldn't want to work there when this "one of our best developers" quits/dies/retires
pissedoff, looks like the idea is out in open. Get your site out there ASAP.
Nope, not even close...that was a terrible site btw.
It was a YouTube for documents. :-)
Go launch your site. Hell, you could increase the value of the site 3x if you just used a better stylesheet.
I vaguely remember reading about it, that guy got royally screwed. I dont want my case to end up like that.
But pissedoff you stole your idea from Reddit/Myspace
If PG wrote an essay "How NOT to start a startup," it would probably be most succinctly written as

How not to start a startup

April 2007

Juwo.com.

Japanese translation

Russian translation
Bubble's here!
Pissedoff, stop worrying and do your work and get your thing launched. if people are copying your idea, it means its a great one. Second thing is, world is full of copycats and even if she had not steal u r idea, some one would have become your competitor pretty fast. so think her as your competitor and kick start to get her out of business.
So she's outsourced the development and is spamming blogs to get registrations. Doesn't sound like too formidable a competitor to me. If you can code, you can develop your app and launch in less than than the time she's wasting trying to communicate with Indian developers in the middle of the night. Her industry connections won't matter so much if you launch a better product first.
you are cruel because you dont have anything to offer that will fix it.

you will get back in the same measure, and more.

thanks for making my day! :(
False alarm. Works for me.
Dude, my idea is not a teen site. PirateChick is an ass and put that up!
Lamer, one could say.
Grab some scrap paper, or emacs, or thinkature, or a whiteboard, or whatever.

Start by describing what it is in a single, full paragraph. At this point, it doesn't matter how long your description is, or how spiffy it sounds. Just try to keep it to one paragraph, two at the most. Then, start compressing it. Find ideas that really aren't important right off the bat and cut them. Find ideas that are similar and combine them into smaller sentences.

"Snipshot is a web-based application. Users can upload image files, or submit a link to another picture on the web. Uploaded images can resized, cropped, or enhanced. Basic attributes can be modified, like brightness, saturation, and hue. Images can be saved to your hard disk in 6 different formats. They can be published to Flikr or Webshots."

Combine sentences 3 and 4. Sum it up as "Uploaded images can be edited." Then combine with sentence 2 to say "You can upload or link images and then edit them." Cut sentences 5 and 6 because they aren't important right now.

Then you have "Snipshot is a web-based application. You can upload or link images and then edit them."

They compress it even further: "Edit pictures online."
Have presignups. In week before launch, we spent 75% of our time signing up users in advance.
I remember that essay, and my employer works a little like that (we have a platform that all of our products are built upon). IMHO, it doesn't work quite as well as it sounds like it should.

Problem is, information is lost every time someone communicates their needs. Customers don't actually need what they say they need; there's always some detail that they forgot to mention that only shows up when you watch them use the product. That usually changes the tools that the programmers need, which often aren't the tools the programmers say they need, because programmers have their own preconceptions about how the solution should be implemented. Someone who's only done JavaEE programming will likely say "I need a tool that automates maintanance of my Hibernate and Spring configuration files", when they really mean "I need to store my user's session data between sessions."

There's often a strong organizational pressure to use the output of the toolmakers, even if the tools aren't suitable for the job. In my case, I'm not sure that I'd use our platform if just given our customer's requirements and my choice of toolset. But I can't really say that, because it harms morale and makes me seem like a lone wolf who can't work with other people. (Okay, I have said that, with the expected result.)

The nice thing about research labs is that nobody expects them to be useful. Other programmers can pick up or drop their work based on whether it actually is useful, not by some corporate policy. Unfortunately, the people most likely to pick up an interesting research lab project generally refuse to work for a big company. So there's a long history of guys in garages ripping off the best ideas of corporate research departments, and eating the parent company in the process.

If I were managing a large, cash-rich corporation, I'd have a small exclave a mile or so away from the main campus. It would have two buildings: a top-notch research lab, and an incubator (and a shared cafeteria, of course). The research lab would be staffed with high-priced Ph.Ds and tenured professors, the best in their fields. The incubator would be full of high school dropouts on grad student salaries, but with $40M+ stock grants contingent upon building something that millions of people will use. All executives from the parent company would be prohibited from setting foot on this campus.

Come to think of it, this sounds a lot like grad school, but without the bullshit.
Ok, how about: "A juwo is a list that can help you Save Time, Organize, and be More Productive."

The para you asked is taken from juwo.com:

A "Swiss Army knife" piece of software that gives more power to consumers to structure snippets of audio, video and text as a bullet list, to more easily index and annotate them, and to share the lists with others. Its benefits extend to multimedia as related to more enriching broadcasts, collaboration and organizing.
I read all the comments and can't believe no one gave you some concrete advice. Sure, ideas are worthless until they are implemented but that does not JUSTIFY someone STEALING your idea and breaching the confidentiality! Just because you haven't implemented your idea fully, does NOT mean someone's JUSTIFIED to STEAL it!

Here's what you should do: expose her! That's right, start a blog, start the website for your idea and tell everyone how this person got the idea from you and breached the confidentiality. Post email exchange, provide a timeline of your conversaton with her, provide what you provided her with. Get it out in the sunlight. Investors and VCs will shun away from her since who wants to invest into a person that's a THIEF and invest into a company that might get sued by somoene (you)?! Startups have a low probability of success and these legal issues could just sink it. It's easier to invest into a "clean" startup.

Get the word out about her! Learn about SEO and work on getting your page to show up on the first page results when someone searches for her name. Talk to journalists (TC, GigaOM, etc) and get them to write about what happened to you. Expose her and get some publicity about your site in the process! Destroy her reputation! NEVER forget: in business, reputation is everything! Worst thing you can do is keep quiet about it.
Whats your favorite tool for creating a wireframe interface sketch?
Karma doesn't exist.

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Ellis11.html
Has anybody tried both Flex and OpenLaszlo? OpenLaszlo is already open source and compiles to both flash and ajax, so from the outside it looks like a more attractive choice. Any opinions on how they stack up?
Before I design a web interface, I usually like to sketch it out to organize my ideas. I'm still using good-old graph paper and a mechanical pencil, then will often scan my sketches to post on our internal wiki. Are there better tools out there that would maybe allow for sharing & collaboration?
That's not actually that hard to do, given how little many teachers are paid.

I made more straight out of high school than most of my teachers did. And a bunch of my friends were running $20/hour web design businesses while in high school, which (on an hourly basis) is more than our teachers were paid. This was 1998-1999...it's amazing how much teenagers can make in boom times.
What Linux laptops do you use for development?
Sun and IBM developing new high-end servers (for video and gaming applications)
For starters, eliminate "Swiss Army Knife." It's a bit too general and therefore distracting.

Also eliminate the part about giving more power to consumers. When I visit your website, I'm not thinking of myself as "consumers." I'm just a guy who wants to get something done and wondering if maybe you can help.

Take the rest of that sentence and separate it into one sentence for each idea.
Simple: has that woman built the product as well as the OP planned; has she achieved/executed the marketing plans as well as he is planning to? I want to bet the answer to both questions is "no" in which case at this point it is a probably a waste of his time to even think of her.

Back in '01 when my uncle was doing his startup, couple months before his site's launch we ran across a site that was VERY similar to what he was building. And here was a site that looked like it had been born out of my uncle's business plan. Few months later that site would fold--and we're still in business today.

Better question is HOW well is she doing what you planned to do.
I appreciate your help.

What I am struggling with is, I am doing all the stuff - but people (at least on YC) dont get it:

1) links to 3 screenshots

2) simple cartoon diagrams with an analogy to shopping lists

3) a list of "what is in it for me" i.e. how juwo can help you.

4) links to demos for each of the above in 3).

Isnt all this good enough?
I've been looking at a Dell and at http://www.linuxcertified.com/
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17117
http://www.teenwag.com
Pissedoff your idea is Reddit+myspace but stripped off all the goodies it was just a forum, We really worked on teenwag for longer
Nice attempt, but falls short. Everybody knows you can't jump in Doom. Clearly, they need to go back to the drawing board.

Just kidding. This is awesome!
How To Backup Any Blog For Free
Look what happens when you quote anything from the Bible?

they have downvoted you.

you now have -1 points. As I learned myself.
Joost Signs Advertising Deal With 31 Major Brands
Still, there are good ideas that can be easily stolen. Apple's transparent case for Macs was a brilliant idea - in fact one of the factors that brought them back to the market. That was too good and too easy to steal. It happens.

Thinking "it's implementation, stupid" is too narrow-minded and Web2.0-ish.
Helio's Halo starting to dim
From the moment you think of it.
I use InkScape for wireframes. It saves everything as SVG so the files are easy to send to people I'm collaborating with, and they can open in Illustrator if that's what they're using.

http://inkscape.org
It seems not entirely unreasonable for the SEC to enforce a situation where cheating means you and also possibly everybody else loses. It's a bit like a coach saying, if you don't shut up, everybody does fifty pushups; you're more motivated to shut up that way.
I don't wireframe. I get an ugly-but-working real interface working and wait for people to complain.
Tim O'Reilly's Recent Interview with Jeff Bezos on S3, EC2, and 37Signals (video)
What is the point of startup formalities (e.g., incorporating your company, having official job titles, etc.) before you have significant traffic?
ok, I am going to do something different. please stay tuned.
It is a bit strange that while it is so easy for anyone to get a web 2.0 startup going, there is still this expectation of having founders go through formalities such as incorporating their startup, assigning official job titles, etc.

Bloggers for example expect this and it is less likely that they would write about your startup without such formalities.

Can anyone shed light on this situation?
Nine Lessons Learned about Creativity at Google by Marissa Mayer (audio)
Entrepreneurial Leadership Qualities by Adaptive Path (audio)
I usually comment on the idea as soon as I get it, but for the prototype, I have to have something quite functional, with at least one feature that really impress or shows the point clearly.
Secret to Successful Negotiations by Joel Peterson (audio)
I don't. I use a MacBook Pro.
Pencil and paper to rough out ideas and proportions, and then HTML and CSS.
Being kind to your employees should really just be obvious. Unfortunately it is not. Many people with rank in a company treat others terribly, simply because they can. Probably they don't know any better, and haven't considered the downsides. Joel does a really good job of packaging ideas from books like Peopleware and Mythical Man-Month in a way average people will respond to. No matter what his software company does, that's valuable service.

I don't know all that much about bug tracking software, but at my last company the trouble ticketing system they used was a monstrosity (Peregrine Service Center). Everyone hated it. It had a sluggish java applet client. It was an enormous resource hog, it was buggy, and had a horrid interface. It took forever to log in and logged you out after 15 minutes of inactivity (taking over your desktop to inform you of that fact). I'd guess this load of crap was costing the company a fortune compared to a shrink-wrap solution like FogBugz.

Here's a picture of the interface: http://www.goladus.com/_.jpg
Denim (http://dub.washington.edu/denim/) is kind of interesting. It's a Java Application with an "interesting" UI (seems a bit ironic). It's probably worth a few minutes of downloading and checking out to see if it suits your style.

Personally (and I'm more of developer than a designer), I'm with wammin, pencil paper or many white board sessions are where I start for the first few dozen iterations. The last thing I want is yet another tool to get in my way, providing more complexity than value. Once things settle down, or if you have to work with off-site people, electronic versions make a lot of sense.
Future of Web Design - Great recordings of useful presentations on web design
I've had terrible, terrible experiences with Linuxcertified.

The stuff they put together themselves is totally shoddy. Things come apart and rattle around inside, the monitor connection starts to get fatigued and the screen develops snow, and it's heavier and thicker for less functionality than other laptops.

Much better to get a Dell preinstalled with Linux if they start doing that, or look at Emperor Linux: http://www.emperorlinux.com

Much better experiences with them. I even got one for my girlfriend, who doesn't know anything at all about computers; they put Ubuntu on it and she adores it.

I'm currently on a Dell M70, which works fine; if I were to buy a new one, it'd be from Emperor.
Still works here, I checked the link when I read it on valley wag :D
I use Emperor Linux. They are expensive but very responsive to customers.
Sweet, thanks for the tip. I just installed inkscape and it looks awesome. I have been looking for a good drawing tool for linux, this might be it. Can't believe I never heard of it before!
Y Combinator Day, Pt. 2
There's a lot more to being a web design expert than learning to code in HTML and CSS.

So sayeth Jeffrey Zeldman:

Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don't know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.

Every time I think I can stop talking about these obvious, simple truths, some crazy bad 90s style train wreck hits me headlong and makes me weep anew.

(http://www.zeldman.com/2007/04/18/cant-link-with-em/)
When does imitation become duplication? (on YC clones)
Ubuntu 7.04 on a HP Pavilion laptop (dual-boot with XP ... but I rarely boot into windows anymore). Ubuntu is great.
Will Michael Dell still shut Apple down and give money back to the Shareholders?