skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had no idea that Waterloo was so into security research. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that some of the people in the department help develop OTR, which I've been using for just over a year (it was especially comforting while I was studying in China). As it stands now, Waterloo is at the top of my list of places I'll apply for grad school. Thanks for the great recommendation!
Ask YC:  Is a social app where users are told to lie to their friends acceptable?
One could argue that the notifications say would be misleading, but what if that's the whole point of the app?

Also, what is a lie anyway when it comes to these social apps? Would giving a gift to someone be considered a lie if it is only a virtual gift and the word "virtual" is missing?
Probably partly. But readers here also seem to pounce on some comments that are politically incorrect.
I mostly agree with this, except I also think it's pretty important to have at least one other co-founder... but it's even more important for you to be able to trust and work well with those co-founder(s).

Going out and finding some random dude that you don't know or trust to be a co-founder for the sake of having a co-founder seems like a huge gamble and just a bad idea.
I like the case you're making here, which mainly seems to be that if you're waiting around on a cofounder, you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Unless you already have a potential cofounder in mind, you may be opening yourself to other problems by trying to find one (delaying the project, working with someone who turns out to be not as good as hoped, etc.). So I have to agree that your advice to just start working anyways seems quite good.

That said, just tonight I was able to see what value a cofounder can have in a simple programming project for a class. I had an idea for a project, and he already had some ideas for how we could go about doing it (various machine vision algorithms). We then bounced various ideas off each other, came up with a good interface, argued a little bit about some small details, and came up with a good, shared-effort approach to tackle the problem at hand.

Having a "cofounder" in this case already has proven to have a few worthwhile benefits:

1. Shared knowledge leads to less time necessary in research

2. Ability to think out loud to someone besides yourself or a pet

3. Having to work with someone forces you to come up with decent interfaces for the pieces of code, leading to more modular, maintainable code than if you just jumped in single-handedly.

4. The work is shared (duh :-)

5. If I don't feel like working on the code the day before our planned meeting, that's too bad. I'm still going to have to do it or look like an ass the next day.

Maybe point number 5 is the biggest one. Inevitably, there will be stupid little stuff which is part of the project that you just don't want to do. Having someone to face at the end of the day may just be that little bit of extra motivation you need.

Of course, it's still possible to do much of this stuff on your own. Being able to leverage open source libraries helps with 1 and 4, so if you can handle 2 3 and 5 on your own, then you can probably do it without a cofounder.
The Art of Worldly Wisdom (useful for business and other affairs...)
This should really be titled, "How to pull off an effective viral marketing campaign." From the third page of the article:

"Want to buy an honest "D" battery? Check out Powerex. These are the best rechargeable batteries I could find. Click here to learn more. I liked them so much that I bought several hundred of them and decided to offer them through my company, BetterLifeGoods.com."
Does it use Markdown? I guess there's one way to find out...

emphasis

strong

This is an H1
=============

This is an H2
-------------

### This is an H3 ######

[Y Combinator](http://www.ycombinator.com)
Nope, just similar I guess...
I have an opinion about this conspiracy. Click next to read it.
That falls under the purview of traditional online sports betting which is illegal in every state but Nevada (where it is legal intrastate with tight regulations).
My best piece of advice... 10 minutes goes by really fast.
this is very well said, the single biggest determent of a startups success is product/market fit, not team (i.e co-founder)

(see:The Only thing that Matters: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-gu-2.html).

If you've got a solid idea you need to push it forward, not having a perfect co-founder right away is a lame "go or no go" decider.

Pitch constantly, get out of your apartment, and scour your networks for co-founder prospects, sooner or later you going to cross paths with someone that believes in your vision and has skills/experience/connections that will add significant value to your business.

To me, its go forward and keep things moving - and be aware that this needs to be bigger than you and teammates help you achieve that.
On a related note, have you seen 'Startup.com'?
The OP is saying that there should be a single person who has final authority. Is this incompatible with having multiple founders?

I can imagine a Kirk-Spock sort of startup, where one person excels at making decisions and doing the legwork, and another at providing information and skills.

I suppose, in practice, few people can trust someone else to make all the decisions, especially if it's their future on the line. What's your experience been?
My psych major friend is working on a theory that procrastinators have naturally low levels of endorphins, so they subconsciously use the stress of procrastination to raise those levels.

I thought that was a pretty fascinating theory.
Oops. You forgot to explain why. Use your own remede
VectorMagic from Stanford - Converts bitmap images to vector art - an online auto-tracer
New Hack: Tired of getting kicked off News.YC?
Is noprocrast dragging you down? Or the maxvisit clock staring you in the face? Well, then I've got the solution for you.

1. Wait minaway minutes after your maxvisit has timed out.

2. Reload the front page

3. In new tabs, open each and every link on the homepage

4. Read til you become exhausted and forget about those silly arrows. By now, your maxvisit has expired, and you'll have to wait minaway in order to press the arrows, so you'll do it when you loop back to step 1.

Luckily news.yc isn't high volume enough that you have to do this more than once or twice a day.

Enjoy!

(oh, and I really do like this new feature... so does my employer)
Former Technician Blows Whistle on AT&T Over NSA Spying
$60 board runs Linux, Google Apps
What about for Facebook apps?
When there are multiple founders, there's usually one who is a bit more driven than the others. Usually if you had to send an email to just one person at the company, you'd know instinctively who to send it to. But it's rare in a successful startup for anyone to have final authority. In a good startup, the founders generally seem to operate by consensus.
It's not something that is important, it's a very vague descriptor.

Some may consider "teachers" a niche market, others "elementary special ed teachers in Ohio" a niche market.
Is this incompatible with having multiple founders?

I should hope not. There has to be a unified vision of some sort. I'd like to point everyone in the direction of the Fred Brooks presentation from OOPSLA: http://www.oopsla.org/podcasts/Keynote_FrederickBrooks.mp3
@limeade -- I don't live in SF ... but if everything makes sense I would move down there to work on something good ... I also have some ideas myself :) you can find my email address on my profile ...
Just Sell Digg Already, Jay
Why is this post is at -3? It may be a little rough (non-native English presumably) but it's totally on topic and not spammy.
The title doesn't match the content. A more accurate title would be "Absolutely, DO NOT, get a bad co-founder!"
Yeah either way I think its fairly clear draftmix should be considered the same as any other fantasy sports league. I guess my point is that betting on the result of a game is usually accompanied by odds to increase the luck the component, and fantasy sports doesn't.

You'd think picking week by week would control the randomness, certainly you're much less likely to be hit by an injury which would be one of the largest random components. Also players tend play well or badly in patches.
Something I disagree with. This site is part social news and part forum. This is a forum-style post. Fits right in.
Hehe... TC seems to attract a lot of weirdos :)
removes news.ycombinator.com from marketing plan
If you Google for "self-exclusion tools" there is a standard that most of the mainstream gambling sites implement. I did a quick search on ProQuest and JSTOR, but I couldn't find any information about their efficacy.
Holy diety, this is severely cool. If only there was a desktop version...
I applaud. Now if only redhotpawn.com/blitz/blitzchess.php would add that feature.
Digg to sell for $300 million? Really?
Sometimes I prefer to not click through to another site. At least here, I don't have to worry about a painful interface, frivolous widgets, or distracting ads. It's all about the writing and our opinions of it, which is all that really matters to me, anyways.
It is the same difficulty that a hunting party would have growing into a village.

Maybe it's just me, but this analogy is not all that clear to me. What exactly prevents a hunting party from growing into a village? If the point is that a village would require people to fill support roles, I think that is what the employees of the company would be for. That would destroy the analogy, so I think I must be missing something.
Apple needs a kick in the pants before they catch up to Nokia... Nokia just took yet another step ahead with this technology. I own a Nokia N95-8gb and it already blows the iPhone out of the water.
Solar ships coming to San Francisco in 2009
weiirdddd.

wasn't adelson in an article here just the other day talking about how he wouldn't want to sell? i mean, it makes sense that he would play it coy, but still.

the good news is that they aren't selling for $2-3 billion, at least we know the market hasn't completely lost its mind yet.
Personally, if you're just planning on making a Facebook app, I hope you're doing it for fun, or to satisfy your own app desire, or with some eye towards a future opportunity. Making a Facebook app interface for an independent site makes a lot of sense, but I would not want to center my entire business model on a closed platform that has shown little evidence of revenue with the constant threat to have my functionality mirrored and obsoleted. So in that sense, I don't think the writer of a Facebook app has to worry about a cofounder, since said writer would (hopefully) not be expecting to found a company out of the venture. That would be like saying someone starting an open source project needs to wait for a cofounder (ignoring, of course, that whole "open" part).
Multiply Big In The Philippines, Lands Ad Deal
That doesn't really solve the usability problem, it just cures the symptom.
Nothing prevents you from doing that after you come up with a viral app. Facebook is a nice place to experiment because it takes so little time to build Facebook only apps.
The plane analogy doesn't work because dual engine planes are more reliable than single engine planes... unlike founding teams, engine can't decide that they want to go in different directions and engines are not insecure, ego driven, or prone to misunderstanding each other. Nor do engines have investors coming in sowing dissent between them.

If you look at the empirical evidence, you will see that most successful companies are started by an individual. Now, of course, a successful company needs more than one person to be involved-- they need employees. And early employees can be very well rewarded and significant contributors to shaping the idea.

But leadership by consensus does not work, as anyone who has belonged to a high school club or organization knows. In a business environment, it is death- the founders never reach consensus and generally they constantly pull against each other, undermining each other and ultimately undermining the company.

Leadership by consensus is quite literally the absence of leadership.

When there is a leader, and that leader is capable, the company succeeds.

If you have a pair of people who work well together, then as you concede generally one of them will be the clear leader. Dividing the work and having each lead sections of the company is fine- if you know the person who you can do that with. But such people are generally quite rare.

Unfortunately, the advice that you must find a founder in order to start a company is bad advice-- in most cases this will lead to the company failing. There are, of course, examples of pairs of people who co-founded companies together and they are well known because they are the exception. But the vast majority of successful american enterprises are started by an individual with an idea and the dedication to pursue that idea.

Forming a company takes vision. It takes dedication and it takes certainty that there is something there- and opportunity to add value that has not already been seen and seized by other entities.

This is why leaders who start companies are far more likely to success than friends who decide to "do a startup" and "manage by consensus."

If you don't have a cofounder already- you shouldn't be looking for one. Hire some employees.

But you're far from screwed-- simply looking at the history of startups in America and you'll see that single men with vision are most often the ones who succeed.
Hmm... I don't know what was angry about what I posted. I just saw another "how to get a founder" thread followed close on the heels of a post on another site from someone lamenting that they couldn't find a co-founder.

Sure, it has sucked to when the founders were fighting... but its been years since I went out on my own.

Don't confuse confidence and passion for anger.
Waterloo has a pretty good reputation for CS. The area has an active and friendly start-up community as well.
Hey there-
That's what happens when you have creative collaboration with someone.

Every employee you hire should be sharp enough to be able to do so, and the good ones will be bringing ideas to you unbiden.

If you've got a co-founder, great. Nothing wrong with that... its just that the idea that you need one is in error, and if you ever have to present to someone who thinks that way, your first couple of employees you can call the "Founding team" or "cofounders" or whatever you want.

Its just that in order for the company to function- you need a vision and a direction.

Startups too often find themselves going in circles wasting time because everyone's second-guessing everyone else... and this is more likely to happen when you have cofounders trying to reach consensus rather than a founding team with a clear leader
IF you treat an employee with respect and take him seriously and explain why you are doing Y instead of X, that employee will tell you again when he has other ideas.

You can have as close a relationship with an employee as you do with a founder.

I think the problem is that people get stuck on labels here-- the idea that only cofounders can have an opinion or will have their opinions listened to is probably pretty accurate in reality, but it doesn't have to be that way.

In fact, one of the most valuable and rarest commodities in a high tech startup is humility. Always hire for humility along with confidence- they aren't contradictions!- and show it yourself.

I think that employees are generally pretty good about letting people know when they are doing the wrong thing... even if they think you're not listening. You don't have to listen very close to tell which way the wind is blowing.

The problem is that too many people are too arrogant to take the direction of the wind seriously, and this can actually be worse with co-founders because their grousing can drown out the employees.
Right, and that mutual support can come, in large part, from other employees. One company I worked at, due to the personality mix, was kinda rough, and we were in a tough time funding wize and market wise-- but the office manager, and older german woman with a strong will, took it upon herself to fix things and thru random help, negotiation and general positive attitude really made things a lot better- she was a one woman support organization for a 12 person startup.

Finding great people to be employees is very important, and I'd say more important than finding a co-founder. In a way your co-founder has to embody everything... but each employee can contribute a part to the whole.
Actually, the converse is true- most successful companies in the US are founded and lead by a single individual.

There is an underlying reason that those companies that failed failed- no two people are alike. When you take two people and give them equal say, you are sowing the seeds of conflict which will-- and this is a guarantee- end up resulting in someone leaving or the company failing.
I think its kinda arrogant to say that founders are superior and thus its disparaging to call someone an employee.

Employees should be highly valued.

Inadvertantly you've highlighted another problem with having cofounders, especially in a startup- you have an intrinsic clique of inner circle people, the founders.
I definitely see where you're coming from, and I agree to a certain extent. It's just that there are some things that an employee may not do which I cofounder would, in my own hypothetically-played-out-in-my-head scenario.

1. An employee is less likely than a cofounder to express disagreement, especially on ideas that it seems like you are "married to".

2. A cofounder is presumably completely onboard with you and the project. They are there with you from day one and feel (almost) just as strongly as you do about it. If things take a turn for the worst, they are more likely to hang on for the ride than an employee, who might elect to take up a position at a more promising-looking startup or a job with more security.

3. A cofounder is more likely to become an outside-work friend (if s/he is not one already). In general, true boss-employee friendships are hard to come by. Having a friend who completely understands the ups and downs of the project can be important psychologically and emotionally.

Don't get me wrong... I agree with you that a startup can definitely be done independently by the right person. I just wouldn't agree that a cofounder is a detriment. It certainly can turn out that way, but it could also turn out that you make a lifelong friend and get that extra value that helps your startup get through the rough patches.
Keep in mind that a lot of UBC graduate students actually come from Waterloo. While Waterloo (and maybe SFU) have a good/strong CS department, they're strong in undergraduate.
"the single biggest determent of a startups success is product/market fit, not team"

I believe this must be true because I can't count the number of times when I've heard investors say "it doesn't matter about the product, we invest in the team." (I'm not being sarcastic, its only dumb money out there.)
Agreed. I'd also like to see somebody like Jakob Nielsen do a usability test on some OpenID-enabled sites. Without that data, the claim that OpenID will improve user signup rates while decreasing tech support expenses is about as credible as the paperless office and the flying car.

If it costs $30 to reset a user's password over the phone, imagine what it costs to explain OpenID to that user.
Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder for the sake of getting a co-founder.
An interesting corollary might be "Lessons for YC". The extreme time crunch just doesn't seem conducive to making accurate evaluations.

Of course the people with the money make the rules; it's not a question of power, but every process can be improved.

A 10-minute interview tests presentation skills more than anything related to the idea, technology, or founders' other abilities. This skews in favor of quick impressions and existing YC bias (towards ideas they already were waiting for someone to present).

I wonder if the median application received even that much (10 minutes' worth) consideration. It seems like a continuous process would work better, with staggered starts; looking at 20 applications every week rather than 500 in one week would allow a more thorough review.

Then instead of going to the same 10 weekly dinners, it would be a sequence of 10; e.g. weeks 31-40. The only real trick would be Demo Day; but that could be rescheduled for every 3 months instead of every 6 months (or monthly, and investors who are vetted get a card that gets punched every time and on the 11th visit they get kicked out if they haven't invested in anyone yet).

Now the acceptees have a couple months before the "official" start; other people might be ready to apply now but it's a 6-month wait for the next batch to get in and 8 months to "start"! That's an eternity in Internet Time.

Another advantage would be allowing the continuous pool of acceptees to relocate to the #1 spot (Silicon Valley) regardless of the time of year. It's a little silly that the Bostonians have to move there afterward anyway -- it's like a conflict of interest for YC, "Help the individual start-ups by putting them in the #1 spot" or "Try to help the #2 start-up scene play catch-up via imports".

Of course I could be wrong about everything, it's up to you.
Apologies if we're stating to go in circles...

1. Not if you take them into your confidence and make them know that you value their opinion. Who doesn't want the CEO's ear? Its really all about the attitude you show them (and their personality, which is something you can select for.)

2. I think that you should hire with the same criteria and standards that you find a co-founder, and you should reward people based on their contributions. I've watched co-founders work themselves inot a cushy CTO role where all they did was go to conference and pontificate via long (never read) memos to the rest of the company, while another cofounder- the VP of engineering- did all the heavy lifting.

3. Maybe- if your cofounder is someone you knew before founding the company, then I think this is true and it could be a critical factor in the quality of that particular compnay. Like I said, if you already have a founder, or you already have someone you know who is perfect (they aren't but that you think so means they are close enough) then great- be co-founders.

But the general word is- don't start a company without finding a co-founder first, and that's not right.

I have worked on teams where the "boss" and the people on the team had a very healthy working friendship. This included lots of outside of work activities, generally because we were to a large extent a family. But this isn't necessarily easy, and like you say if you have a cofounder who can provide that, then it would be foolish not to start a company with them.