skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Damn, how did you hear about what I'm working on?

Look for an email from me within the next two weeks.
You'll know it from the subject line....
Thanks for the notes, I'll take some of these suggestions. The "YouTube of conversations" idea really resonates. Sometimes a simile does far more than a detailed explanation - Command Shift 3's "like Hot or Not except (...) you click on hot websites" is perfect, for example.
Oh, I've come across this commenting system on mike lee's blog. Very awesome idea. Takes a bit longer to reply (and sometimes I think twice about it and don't at all), but that probably raises the quality of comments on his site. :P
Yes. But this one is expressed more clearly, more directly, and without the sensational headline hyperbole.
The best position possible and the most equity aren't the same thing. If you can sell 1% of your company to an entity that adds 2% to the value, it's a good bet.

Regarding:

"The point is, if it's easy enough to avoid, why not just save up the money, and then do it?"

Here's why not. You take 2 years to save your money and then roll the dice. If you win big, you get 100% of your exit. If you lose, you spend all of your money. If you raise money, you get more funds than you'll save in 2 years. If you spend it carefully, presumably this will up your chance for success. If you win big, you get 75% of your exit. If you lose, you spend all of someone else's money. And you don't spent two years of a finite life doing something that doesn't turn your crank. :-) Add to that that the fact right investor(s) increase your tiny chance of success by a little bit without requiring that you give up any creative control...

Well, there are lots of good reasons.

I'm not disagreeing with the path you're on-- it just seems like you dismissed the alternative for the wrong reasons.
Wow, that was... anticlimactic.
How to get an idea for a startup
Three Queries to Test any Search Engine
I agree - however some slack can be cut to erlang - it has proven itself to be "carrier grade" (running exchanges). However, I think its most exciting attribute is reliable fault tolerant software you can bet your life on (relatively speaking !). Not so much the scalability (although its the scalability which gets all the press at the moment).
Paradoxically, the road to riches often means acting as if you already have that freedom.

I think the only true freedom comes from within. Money can't give you this freedom; but this freedom can give you money.
Reminds me of Robocop: You have 10 seconds to die.
It's clear from your post and comments that you're a very smart guy. I can tell you think so too, but I'd bet you're even smarter (relatively) than you realize. I agree that if you follow your plan, you're likely to be successful, if you don't give up just a bit too soon and go back to the solid, dependable paychecks.

My only two cents concerns your patience. I'll admit, my only experience working for someone else was a year-long internship right after college, but despite it being a sweet gig in a beautiful place, I hated it, and it was all I could do to make it to the end of the year. Since then, it's been only startups for me, and it's so incomparably different and better that I just have to weigh in that your 3 year plan is a little too patient and risk-averse for me.

It sounds like you love your job already. That's definitely key. But if you wait another 3 years to go for it, and find out you're fantastic at it and are having the time of your life, won't it seem like you should have given it a go even sooner? For instance, by getting a cofounder willing to pay the company bills for a while as an even trade for your fantastic ideas? Seems worth considering if you'd both rather start sooner than later. Making your own stuff full time is so fun.
Don't fear the haters, kid. Just do your thing. Most of the people criticizing you are just trying to make themselves feel better about that next game of Mario Cart they're about to play instead of actually, you know, doing anything.
This was somewhat surprising to me: "The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

I guess it just reaffirms the pg/yc philosophy.
This, sadistically, has nothing to do with lazy evaluation.
Had me thinking it was serious for a moment.
I particularly liked level 3 - Affinity - but there again where would all the good arguments come from.
"Not to say that getting rich is simply a matter of having a swell attitude. The path to riches usually involves the kind of risk that would make most people feel a little queasy. Harrison Group head Jim Taylor recently persuaded more than 3,000 pentamillionaires to discuss their path to success. Perhaps not surprisingly, none of them had a cushy union job down at the DMV. The vast majority — 80% — either started their own business or worked for a small company that saw explosive growth. And almost all of them made their fortune in a big lump sum after many years of effort."

The article mentions the other 20% is made up of heirs (10%) and fortunes from passive income / stock picking. The other 80% made it from startups. Of course, this leaves out the career ladder; don't MBAs get rich too? I don't envy them, but I know they exist, and I know they have money, as do MDs and JDs. Where do they fit in?

Also:

"Getting rich also requires a certain amount of stubbornness and clarity of purpose. Consultant Joel Kurtzman, who evaluated 350 startups for his book Startups That Work, found that successful outlets usually have a team of two or three founders who share a common vision; the success rate for this model was a remarkable 50%. The odds for solo founders were more like the oft-quoted one in 10, in part because they often found themselves working at cross-purposes with hired guns who see things differently. That's what 34-year-old Justin Jarvinen learned the hard way. The entrepreneur saw two promising business ventures go down the tubes after he took on partners who tweaked his ideas beyond recognition. But three years ago he started VerveLife, a service that helps companies promote online marketing efforts with free music downloads. Knowing that his success depended on his enthusiasm for bringing the idea to market, he carefully chose partners who supported his vision."

So, according to this article:
80% of people who get rich do so w/ a startup
50% of good teams succeed
10% of solo founders succeed
Why "variables" in CSS are harmful
pg and his followers? I really hate how this site feels like a cult sometimes.
but, can you scale an application without making it reliable ? imho, they are two sides of the same coin.
I'm not really literate in the technicalities but something doesn't add up.

The preferred stock deal with MSFT values the company at $15b 'internal valuation' that the shares were issued at is $4b. Aren't these supposed to be approximations of the same thing, roughly?

Does that means that they can't go public with a valuation lower then $15b?

That MSFT deal seems insane. Facebook would have to be an advertising powerhouse.
so sad. his whole life has boiled down to fetishisizing work

how about this for a plan - get married and have kids. you'll have a regular sex partner, and when you are sixty, you won't sit around wondering why you are alone

and if you save some money, take a winter off and be a ski bum. one year cruising between whistler, aspen, half the crazy ass monster resorts in the alps...beats the hell out of pissing into the wind in the website game
http://forum.modrewrite.com/ has really helped me a couple of times. Just about any reasonable rewrite scenario you can think of has been asked and answered somewhere in the archive.
Thanks for bringing up the Gini coefficient, I had not heard of it before.
Why not build and solve a problem you have?

because he's following the herd
The format they use is beyond horrible. Hundreds of pdfs or a badly OCRd version?

Here it is in a much nicer format: http://books.google.com/books?id=a3gsxbGBdfIC&printsec=f...
CPAN might be perfect now, but it wasn't always golden. The fact that every module relies upon dozens of other modules meant that your life sucked when one of the dependencies crapped out during an ubermodule install. You'd have to trace down where, what and why the dependency was broken and the idiosyncratic nature of Perl didn't help much with fixing things. Tearing my hair out during another aborted CPAN install was one of the reasons I switched to Python in 2001. Python came with its own set of issues but at the time they seemed more appealing than dealing with amateur hour on CPAN.
Find Out About Greece
I really like ancient Greece and there's a lot of info about it at this site.
It also decimates the "rich get richer", "us vs them" lines of BS politicians maniacally shovel our way in order to extract our votes.

Good news folks. Its possible to get rich through hard work and a little cleverness. That's also the bad news.
I can't see the videos, because requiring an install of Silverlight and launching IE is an onerous requirement.

But, I'd guess they used an online (and likely offshore) transcription service. One such service is http://castingwords.com/ . A search for [podcast transcription] will list other options.
I like it too. I might even use it, if there are enough high quality participants.

I read the whole Theory page and it struck me as blah blah blah blah blah, except for these two points:

1. Conversations on topics you want, going on right now;
2. Karma keeps the quality high.

To me those are the core, and they're a pretty cool core. If I were you I'd strip everything else out. And emphasize those two things on the main page.

Personally, I'd drop the recommendation system, or at least drop talking about it. There's so much tripe surrounding that kind of thing that, when I read it, I noticed that your credibility instantly dropped in my mind. I'd rather you put your effort into making it really easy for me to browse/search what's going on so that I can make my own choices. Recommendations won't make me want to use your site if there isn't a lot of value there already. And if you do develop a kick-ass way of recommending related stuff, don't talk to me about it, just show me a few suggestions unobtrusively and I'll eventually catch on.

I also like the slogan "chat rooms that really work".

Edit: on reflection, I seem to notice a pattern which, if it really is there, I suggest you avoid like the plague. It is the idea of the system being "intelligent". It comes out in details like your choice of the word "Theory" and the title of this post, as well as in the emphasis on the recommendation system and its overtones of AI. To me this is a big turn-off. I don't want a chatting system, and I certainly don't want an "intelligent" chatting system. What I want is intelligent conversation. It seems to me you've got the kernel of something that could actually offer me that, which could be genuinely valuable. Focus on that and try to get the system out of the way.

Edit 2: while it's fresh in my memory... I noticed another thought going through my mind which was, "I wonder who is on here that I know from somewhere else", like HN for example. I wonder if people would be willing to link their user names to their names from other communities. I would, if I knew that lots of other people from HN were talking about stuff on your site.
are the lot of you fourteen years old? or just that old mentally? you're sitting around talking about how you will divy up your little hypothetical companies...did you read richie rich comics as a child?

1. get an idea someone gives a shit about. 2. find someone to put money behind your idea. 3. then you can get your rocks off playing god with the stock options. without 1,2...talking about 3 is just mental masturbation
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Perl is a Shinto shrine. Perl is an act of love. (.mov link)
What's the Warren Buffet quote? The one where he said that he's not happy because he's made so much money, but he's made so much money because he's happy?
I started to doubt the wisdom of the article when I read:

"To enter the nation's top 1%, you need more than $5 million."

I know 'more than' isn't the same as 'greater than or equal to' but doesn't this indicate 1 in 100 Americans are multimillionaires?
It then goes on to say that there are 930,000 of them.
Thanks for the insight.

Losing someone else's money is a good point. On the other hand, I can live incredibly cheaply (and have in the past), and these days developing an idea is effectively free, apart from living expenses.

And you don't spent two years of a finite life doing something that doesn't turn your crank. :-)

Spending two years hacking without a boss would turn my crank plenty, even if all that comes of it is that I learn I'm not cut out for running a company, and go back to a job. I don't hate my job. The work itself is great; I just dislike working for someone else.

You've definitely pointed out some of the value in accepting investment, even before it becomes a necessity to keep going. I'll keep what you've said in mind, thanks.
Not so much a successor as a sibling rival. I've always assumed the name was a bit of (typically cryptic) humor.
Hi, troll.
Yep, especially for techies in america, they already have the right skills and conditions to feed themselves and families, then getting out of bed at 5am just to make some more sounds absurd. Not so much if your purpose is change the world, or be #1 in something.
Personally I'd have been really confused if there wasn't the theory page because that's the first thing I went to see when I landed on the site...
Typo on the theory page:

"Coupled with an analysis of your actual chatting history, this data lets Circle makes helpful suggestions as to what conversations you're likely to enjoy."

"makes" --> "make"
Take any worthwhile topic, and you'll find smart people on both sides of the fence. Many smart people bitch about ActiveRecord, but many more use it and find it highly productive. "Torn to pieces" my ass.

If you can't see why a web app framework might want to ship a DB library, you're blind.
As I understand it the valuation at the time of the Microsoft deal was meaningless, at least as far as other shareholders go. Their move was based on an effort to "get into social networking," not a strategic long-term investment.

I could be wrong. But I think that's a believable story, especially in light of this news around FB's own (much lower) internal valuation.
Yeah Sona@Panama!! lol

Then imagine meeting this super duper hacker Michael Scofield who unfortunately would have also lost his invaluable laptop to the FBI.
Ask YC: What's your best failure story?
Does anyone want to share a story about a failed startup with the community? Those stories usually make for interesting reading and it's always good to learn from the experience of others.
keep swinging. sorry not everyone is in the mutual support echo chamber.
The bay is necessary to get your idea in the first place. It's not because the people who live in the bay are unusually creative, it's because there are unusually large numbers of creative people in the bay.

What a load of crap. There are unusually large numbers of creative people all over the world, if you know how to recognise them.

In fact, creativity more often occurs from a meeting of unrelated ideas - and you're more likely to get that talking to someone who isn't doing the exact same job within the exact same mind-space within the same giant echo-chamber.
This doesn't make much sense. I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas. The idea is the easy part, executing is harder.
oh i'm sorry, do you own this thread?
Hi, troll
"The problem is that online news isn't really free -- it requires funding from the dying offline business because online news doesn't have a viable business model."

Very True. An online reader is just not worth much. Even if they do get you onto their site.

"Successful news providers in the future will need to start with a much cheaper cost structure to match a much lower revenue model. "
The business model might just be collapsing. And that does not necessarily mean a new one takes its place. I mean I can't take the 'new music business models' (t shirts and personalised songs & stuff) seriously. Sometimes industries collapse. Print news might be one of them.

"Successful news providers in the future will need to start with a much cheaper cost structure to match a much lower revenue model"

How about 0 cost (99% of blogs) & 0 direct revenue. BTW, for writer I think the alternative business model is more feasible. Books, appearances, lectures etc. A good few big name journalists could pull this off. Quite a few bloggers (in the business blogging field at least) do.
I would say that in general, for an MBA to reach the $5M point, they have to be part of a startup. For an MD to reach that point, he has to start a very successful practice or make some good investments to go along with his income. So I think those two positions already fit into the mentioned data.
People move to bay area to find similar hackers and share/get-motivated from their experiences. Ofcourse the investors too.
But moving to bay area to get ideas seems wierd.
I think you can, if you really want to ;) eg think of "striping" user data and sessions across a farm of servers. You can scale out that way, yet one server goes down and some portion of users are not being serviced.

I guess that is possibly more reliable then you started with, as the rest of the servers are ok, so you are probably right.
Not to put a downer on things, but this is not going to be useful for me at all. Why should I want to chat with complete strangers about random topics. And why online?
I really like the idea. A few things I noticed:

Tagging a conversation with a pronoun like "I" will probably means it sticks around forever.

Can you join multiple conversations at once? What happens if two conversations share a tag? Are they merged?

To stop conversations being tagged incorrectly, you could perhaps ask users that join via that tag if it was accurate or not.

It'd be awesome if you could automate tagging of conversations. I'm not sure how many people will be motivated to maintain metadata about their conversations (the only way to find that out is to get more users though).
An MBA makes a high middle-class income quite likely - you'll probably be one of those people earning 6-figure salaries - but it's unlikely to result in a large lump sum payment, which is a more likely way to become very rich.

So, MBAs will probably accumulate a few millions over their working life, if they're good at managing their money, but they're unlikely to find themselves with $5m at 35.
I tried to read the essay but as soon as I saw the page my eyes started burning
August is "Web Month" in Leeds, UK.
But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful. The point is that you want a lot of conversation on a particular topic, and some "accidents" to occur within those conversations. If the topic is "doing stuff with computers," then you'll have more computer-related creativity coming out of a place that has a lot of computer ideas bumping into one another.

This article falls into the "why are hubs hubs?" category.

Not to nitpick, but how could there be "unusually large numbers" of anything "all over the world"? What's so unusual about that large number, if it's everywhere?
Reads like self-affirmation more than anything else.

Frankly, in my field the ideas that are getting funded in the Bay are mostly derivative and hardly innovative - almost everyone is trying to monetize through online advertising instead of actually selling things.
A series of events all organised around the web in August have been dubbed the First Leeds Web Festival.
Also, scrolling this page is surprisingly CPU-intensive. At least on Firefox 2 Ubuntu.
Good idea and nice start.

Suggestion: Add up-down voting for tags/topics, then rank the tags/topics on a redesigned front page that looks more like HN or Reddit. You could make the site behave like a HN for which all link submissions were self-referring (like this one), and all commenting/conversation happened in real-time.
Most people have no idea of what the asterisk key does, and have no experience in markup languages.

I guess I expect tools written in a language which emphasises usability for developers to do the same for users.
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An article that tells me how to use Apache is definitely worth 60+ upvotes! Honestly, I can appreciate the effort that went into this tutorial, but I would expect that a "hacker" could get this information just from reading a README or an example htaccess file.
I think I was on there at the same time as you, I was very impressed.

It's clean and straightforward and mostly gets out of the way and creates a good space for conversation.

Karma should not be limited in time., think of it this way; in CofC karma is like facial expressions. If you want to experiment with Karma try a decay function where it returns to 1 after a few minutes, and where a users karma donations reset the clock.
Ask HN: New site feedback ('ideas for things to do' - using RoR, EC2, AJAX, CC, API, etc)
It is rare that an essay makes its point in such an unintended fashion.
Except for those MBA's that go into the higher tiers of banking/finance/trading. Those guys can get bonuses that, if saved over a few years, could easily reach $5M.
Android also comes with a nifty xmpp messaging system that could be used to replace SMS
Thoughts On Scalable XMPP Bots