skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hackers with no equity in company: good or bad?
Does YC frown upon applicants who have hackers on their team but hold not equity stake? How should they be included in the application.
billQ Answers My Call for a Better Way in Managing Bills
that's interesting - when i looked at stuff I wrote 10 years ago I began to wonder what the hell I was on while i wrote it.

I have a feeling 10 years from now when i look at code i write today, I'll have the same reaction...
google apps myself, I haven't hit the limit. Just create more users and append a # (noreply1,noreply2) to the end of them. I thought I read that was google's answer for when your breaking the limit.

Question for you, what are the limitation, besides this, you've had with google apps mail servers?
I'd list such people under "suckers". YC doesn't provide enough money to pay anyone a decent salary, so anyone who isn't getting equity is being short-changed.
matt:
I admire your ability to look at things differently and express those beliefs among a crowd that in all likelihood might burn you at the stake for them. People fall into herd mentality much too often.
Some registrars also offer e-mail service, like GoDaddy. It's much cheaper than webmail.us but you don't get as much storage.
Knuth has done lots of useful work. He represents some of the best that CS has to offer in terms of addressing implementation issues.

But clearly, we need to go beyond this and think about apps too.
They are being compensated, not looking for YC to do that.
it's invisible
Would it hurt to throw them a couple percent?
The grad school choice was easy for me, I was 100% sure I wanted to be an academic. Also, grad school in the physical sciences is a little different than in CS (i think.) Here are some things to consider: Are you currently doing research in a good research lab? Do you like it? Are there any professors/groups that you are ecstatic about working with? Do these profs/groups have funding for a grad student?

If you answer yes to all of the above, then you have done enough due diligence to make an educated decision, go work for the groups you identified. So you know, I answered yes to all these questions, and I still hate grad school ;)

Fundamentally, and we are all guilty of this, we think that the most important problems to solve are obvious from the get go. Worst, we think important problems must be personally interesting. Try another approach. Solve a problem that's interesting to you, better than anyone else, see where it takes you. The only reason a phd is fun is cause you get to do that.. It's not clear that these style-over-substance startups do not offer you the same opportunity.
What would be the reason for "throwing" them an equity stake? Many people believe this makes a person more dedicated to the company, which is absolutely false.
you will not get accepted.
Didn't end up applying to AppFactory, but maybe I should write that application now that there is the FB grant fund with even better terms (free money).

For anyone curious, one of the facebook platform ideas was to make a Sim City type game for the facebook platform where your city got bigger and better as more people viewed it or you invited them to make their own neighboring cities.

Kind of like this French site, where you build a city by having people go to your web site. http://rms.miniville.fr
Student lays Smackdown on Web 3.0 Hype
Vista the true infomercial
Make it vest and you've got nothing to lose...
As far as I can tell, Facebook apps aren't growing explosively anymore. So there is no immediate need for capital for infrastructure. Just built it.
Agreed. And with his cocky and conceited personality, who would want to even associate themselves with him?
Hell... I have some of the symptoms in that article, and I'm only 23. I don't think the ability to recall random strangers' names or remember why I walked into a room really affects my coding, though. I would argue that the older I get, the better I get at remembering the things that really matter (big picture stuff, the project I'm working on, etc.) and forgetting the rest.

Also, here's a counterexample, a checkers player who was basically undefeated well into his 60s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley

Presumably he had to play several matches against younger, "sharper" opponents.
The only files damaged were a couple that were written just before a crash. No one has reported anything missing from an application.
I have to thank my HP 48GX calculator.

I just love RPL! ;)
Then why do you think startups have such a thing as options? Do you think everyone else is just mistaken in believing that equity matters in startups?
The only way most companies can measure people is by the amount of time that they put in. So if one is not at the office it can be very hard for the manager to work out how much people are worth. This is because most managers can't work out what programmers do anyway.

So though people who work from home might get twice as much done. They still won't very far up in the organisation. Which demoralises them. Plus if they work as part of a team which works face-2-face, they still spend a lot of time working out what's happened at work.
> They supposed to be used for exceptional results that cannot be handled locally.

The point is that there is no such thing. Exceptional situations should always be handled locally, and by locally I mean on the very next line. If they can't be, then the program should stop running.

Writing code with exceptions is very hard to get right. Not checking return values is just stupid.
Why do you think that is false?
ESR has a pretty good answer to that: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

See especially the first question in the FAQ.
You know, despite the fact that the tech community flocks where the sheepdogs tell them to as much as any other, maybe more, they seem more open to dissenting opinions. Especially when they're well expressed and come from someone who agrees with them 90% of the time anyway.
Facebook has apps, sorta like Myspace has music.

The rub is that people keep comparing facebook to Google, without seeming to have any idea how it'll get that far beyond a vague notion of connecting people. The only person I know who doesn't use Google search is my grandma, who doesn't use a computer. In contrast, not even half the people I know my age use facebook, and essentially no one older than me uses it or seems at all likely to ever bother.

Its a platform that allows a kind of lightweight, asynchronous and with easy opt-outs and opt-ins, shared online experience. I think it actually threatens to become the internet for a lot of people.

It's not there yet, though. The login requirement is a barrier. The interface is still pretty complicated and it's not much faster(if it's faster at all) than its competitors. There's still nothing so compelling that people can't break a Facebook habit if they want to.

Facebook has a lot of potential, and of course millions of users count for something, but it's not a Google and really doesn't seem to be headed that way.
I checked out your blog. Someone who blogs about Scala doesn't need schooling from me on CS. ;) I think I see what you're doing now.

Ok, to tell you the truth -- this is something I've wondered about recently myself. I happen to know about the codebases of several successful Web 2.0 sites post-acquisition. And in many cases, they used the naive solution and got away with it until acquisition. It's difficult to blog about these things in public, but I've circulated similar speculations privately, that maybe all CS knowledge is a huge waste of time for entrepreneurs.

Using naive solutions has definitely worked for some startups. But it comes at a fairly heavy price. You are essentially betting everything on being acquired before you get so slow that your own users start hating you. Once acquired, you then get a reprieve from death, and then you spend about one year building your 2.0 version that actually scales decently (all the while fighting fires with the clunky 1.0 version). Meanwhile your users scratch their heads wondering why, once you got all that money, you stopped building any new features. This pattern has been repeated many times for successful web 2.0 startups.

Contrast that situation with a company like Google or Facebook. One of Google's main advantages was scaling, from their algorithms to their ability to create vast computing infrastructures. Facebook acquired this sort of talent a little bit later in their history, but they are definitely there today. So when they got offers to buy their company for millions of dollars -- even a billion dollars -- they were able to say no. Because they knew they could grow faster by themselves. Last year Zuckerberg was considered an idiot for turning down a billion dollars. But he knew that F8 was in the pipeline, and he was very smart to say no.

Being able to scale means freedom. Ignoring scalability is a high-stakes bet. But either strategy might work, depending on what the startup's business model is, and the talents and inclinations of the founders.
AOL was the internet to a lot of people. Why we regressing? We used to make fun of AOL people.
The Future of Cognitive Computing - Panel Discussion (vid)
Donald Knuth Questions Answered Video
Do you mean building on demand hardware something like assembling pcs with 4 gb memory OR building fpgas (or asics) that solve your client's problems in hardware?
Why qualify it with "safely"?
I haven't used 411 recently; but if I used it at all, I guarantee that my girlfriend wouldn't approve of me using it for that purpose.
to disqualify malicious hackers, probably
A smart guy like you doesn't need to be so owned by an office such that people can't come to you on their time. Why not post an email address?
Legos.
Try kaizen to become a hacker. It worked for me.
Andreesen is wrong on so many fronts. The biggest is

"The web, after all, vanquished proprietary online services like America Online, Prodigy, and Compuserve -- the so-called "walled gardens" -- in large part because the web is a platform and the walled gardens were not."

Umm, no. Broadband vanquished them. They allowed unfettered internet access long before they began their downward spirals. I had AOL in high school, when they were approaching their zenith, and never used any of the walled features, just internet and IM.

When you phrase platform the way he does, it sounds superior. When, in reality, you have people piling layer on top of layer until what remains is something so complex and unreliable that few people can understand or tolerate it, you end up with something nobody wants.

And honestly, anything is a platform once somebody turns it into one. Myspace most definitely is. People make good livings just making layouts for it. Photobucket got rich off of it. Lots of indie bands sold concert tickets and CDs thanks to it. Dane Cook owes it his entire career.

So in the platform race, Facebook is losing. They're a more restrictive platform built onto a smaller one.
eBay was not started to sell Pez dispensers. That's a marketing myth they perpetuated which has since been recanted. A brief Wikipedia search shows that it was story crafted by a brilliant P.R. agent a couple years after they'd launched.
Weren't business professionals Rolodex's target audience as well?
You don't need funding, but getting money lets you take advantage of the irrational exuberance of the VCs or the FREE MONEY that the Facebook grant fund is offering.
That sentence "Platform is the Bubble 2.0... was speaking about platforms in general. Average Joe doesn't know or care about platforms. Average Facebook user (who is far from Average Joe) may know about some of the apps on Facebook, but has yet to find anything compelling and never really will.
cowmoo,

The vast majority of startups fail. An important corollary: The vast majority of social networking startups will fail. Social networking has, predictably, massive network effects. There's only going to be room for maybe a dozen major winners. Everything else will be a niche or be eventually undercut by open source. For some reason most founders don't recognize that.

I'm someone who can't handle corporate dronery. In a graduate school environment (at a top school in physics) I was, intellectually, quite happy -- some of the smartest people in the world go to grad school, and while they're shirking on their advisors they can be incredibly interesting and productive.

So far, the only experience I have with startups is trying to, unsuccessfully, suggest to them what to do (it's difficult to convince people to modify their sacred ideas...) and trying to found two (one, something that was to be a working web annotation engine, I was working on this before Diigo was announced and got millions in funding, in retrospect I could have beaten them anyway because their entire approach is ill-conceived) and my project that I'm working on now (it's going to change the paradigm of Healthcare online and perhaps fix healthcare in the USA -- no joke. I merely need to avoid being jailed for hyperbole -- email me if interested, especially if interested in cofounding for the winter founders program.)

But grad school in CS isn't really school. You're given a lot of free time, a license to basically study what you want, if you play it right. That's extremely valuable, but it isn't necessary, and it might be more productive to learn how to do that without going to grad school at all.

Just avoid the corporate vampires, that's all.

Dani

(Dani <dot> Fong <at symbol> gmail)
This is one of the best pieces of advice that I've ever given, so mark it :)

To approach a hacker and not be ignored, you need one thing: to be a hacker.
Now, if you're not a software hacker, just don't talk about software. Start a conversation about astronomy, psychology or whatever the field is where you really HACK. By HACK I mean you are so knowledgeable that you flow, you are very curious for the hell of it and you constantly experiment and innovate. Now, it could even be DANCING. It doesn't matter. We hackers love to hack together. I'm an electronics noob, I have a good friend who's an electronics hacker and when he tries to break down his ideas to me like you tell a three year old I barely follow, and yet I love to spend nights hacking electronics with him, even if sometimes all I can do is turn the screwdriver. It's so much fun to experiment and innovate together, or talk about cool experiments in a field you love.
So hack together, get to know the guy, and THEN suggest a project in his field, and if he likes it - you're in. Clue: he'll like it 90% of the times.

For example, I met this bioinformatics Ph.D. in a Ruby User Group where he came to look for programmers for his really cool web startup. He could do some perl and pascal but wasn't a developer. We started talking about his startup ideas, my startup ideas, genetic music composition - whatever came to mind. During the conversation it happened that we INVENTED NEW THINGS together. Today I advise him technically for free, just because it's fun to work with him, sometimes a few hours a day.

Aur
"It's an online rolodex! "

LinkedIn is.
Use OpenID Beyond Authentication
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Blurb - Self Publish Without Webapp
MeeCard - A Snippet of Youness Online
Alway handle errors locally? That seem to break both modularity and abstraction.

Consider a module that does some IO. The module might be used in different kinds of apps, both GUI apps, services and command line apps. How should this module handle a "disk is full"-error? Should it show a dialog with a warning, or write the message to the console and die? The appropriate action would be completely different depending on the type of app and the context wherein the module is invoked.

Exceptions allows the module to delegate the error handling to the right level of abstraction.
Hm, let's say I want to take a slightly different approach from Ponoko and the likes.

Maybe in a week I will talk more about it ;-) Anyway, definitely serious stuff, not just a niche market.
Is there a feature on this site that will allow me to send you my email on a private channel?
I wondered if anyone would bring that up. I think another thing that will happen is that acquirers will figure out how not to ruin the startups they buy.

A company that bought a bunch of hot startups early on and didn't destroy their productivity would be a force to reckon with.
VERY good point.
There are too many other factors that come into play when it comes to selecting a good co-founder/equity holder. Things such as vision, rapport, dedication, etc. Equity/options are too compensate someone that you want in your company when you don't have the financing to pay them what they are worth.
email me at drewyates36@gmail.com and I'll delete this comment when you do
Ask YC: Online demo url
We just read that YC prefers an obscure demo url that is not password protected, and
we have the following options.

http://56.34.433.32

- url to our development server

- This is safe without a password protection, but it is less reliable and I have to keep my computer on until YC reviews our demo.

http://www.demo.com/obscure, or http://www.obscure.com

- url to our production server

- Although direct hits aren't likely, without a password protection, we are concerned that they will become accessible from search engines.

How did you guys handle this problem, and what would be the most appropriate form of the obscure demo url?

Thank you very much, and good luck to you all!
Personal judgments aside, his current job just plainly seems undesirable to me (based on his description of it).

That's not making a judgment on him or his past accomplishments.
Haha...I don't know levering the irrational exuberance of VC's is wise in the long run :)

Do you know how the Facebook grant fund works exactly? They reserve the right to be the first to invest?
That is a valid objection. Though there are only 5 or 6 web startup hubs, out of the thousands of similar sized towns in the world. That number could increase by a factor of 10, and it would still be likely that you'd have to move.

And in any case I doubt the number would increase. The power of hubs is self-perpetuating. So no matter how many startups originated in St. Louis, there wouldn't be a lot there when a given new one started, because many of the previous ones would have already moved.

(Suppose it happened that 50% of the next generation of big movie stars were from St. Louis. That would not make St. Louis a rival to Hollywood.)

Also there's the empirical argument: I can't think of one industry in history whose growth made the established centers irrelevant.
In lazy languages, it's very obscured, because you're not sure whether the integer you're pointing at is a four-byte number or whether it's a big unevaluated expression.

In strict functional languages, and also in Lisp-like languages, it's not obscured. You might, say, not know exactly how many bytes a certain datastructure takes, unless you do some thinking but the same goes for C and C++. (For example, tell me how many extra bytes the std::string datatype takes in the nearest implementation of the STL.) Garbage collection adds the danger of leaving around dangling references, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the functional aspect of the language.
Equity should be given to individuals who are critical to the success of your company, individuals who are indispensable. Too many companies give equity to individuals who can be replaced once the company becomes self-sustaining. Equity shouldn't be given to "good" coders just because they contributed in the beginning. Equity should be saved for the "great/exceptional" coders that you may attract as your business grows.
The empirical evidence suggests startups don't work that way. All the most successful startups had great techical people from the beginning. If you don't have good technical people at the start, you never reach the point where you attract them.
You don't think a founding coder is indispensable to your company? Are you saying that if this person decided, one week from launch, to quit, it wouldn't matter? If so, why have them on the team at all?
I agree with Marc. What made the web win was that random people could make web sites. So there started to be way more stuff on the web than on AOL. By late 1995, the main reason people were signing up for AOL was to get access to the web.
ok, then i guess you could replace PEZ dispenser with "broken laser pointer" or any other misc item, and the rest is still valid. it was still a dinky site in the beginning that crashed often
> we are concerned that they will become accessible from search engines.

Add a robots.txt so the site doesn't get indexed.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Thanks a lot, that's a great solution!
I don't dispute that. What if you have great technical people in the beginning who happen to have no equity stake? A talented developer is a talented developer (regardless of how they are compensated)...equity doesn't make them any better, does it?
If you are paying someone to work an 8 hour day, no problem just paying the programmer.

But if you want someone to work a practically unlimited number of hours as is most often the case then you are going to either need to pay the person to work two 8 hour shifts, hire additional programers, or give the programmer some equity in the business.
I think you've hit it... the idea + the person. They have to think YOU are competent. Most Geeks/coders appreciate competency above most other traits...

The change-the-world thing... is 50/50, in my experience. Some coders really want to change things for the better, others look no further than the screen...

The last thing I'll say is that it seems that lately... a lot of coders have gotten really judgmental about the DESIGN of the products they work on. So if you commit to having a talented designer contracted it might get you brownie points. Nothing kills the buzz like having to skin one's app with the client's sister's scribblings

please pardon my bluntness

I'd be much more diplomatic (and less honest) if you were my client ;-)
I could be wrong but to me without the platform the apps don't exist, and I still feel that the majority of ppl under 30 care about facebook apps: mostly college, high school students, or semi-fresh out of college ppl.

speaking of platforms, doesn't joe 6pack use windows at the very least?
You could also use a non-standard port. We are.
It's a good thing it's ending today, as we got our first goatse entry today... http://inthebox.webmin.com/its-just-not-a-contest-until-you-...
That's another great solution. Thanks a lot!
i don't know. I'm not old enough to remember. I just equated a rolodex to an ancient address book... anyways my point is that plaxo just doesn't have the coolness factor that facebook for has personal use, though you're free to disagree