skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally agree with this. A good co-founder is way more important than a few more equity points because it was your idea. It might be different if you've spent 6 months on your own building it, though.

I disagree about the dedication--I wouldn't even bother working with a cofounder who wasn't as dedicated.
You could always just come up w/ your own ranking algorithm. It shouldn't affect the structure of your app at all.
My email is andrew.yates@byiq.com.

Thanks for the tip.
"Experts warn that too many adolescent web businesses could reinflate bubble"
I think the idea itself isn't worth much intrinsicially--there are indeed infinitely decent ones out there. But the idea directly fuels passion, which is extremely valuable.
Dude, if I won the Putnam I would invent some letters that signified that fact and put them after my name. Heck, maybe in front of my name.
Gotta love this: "laid-getting wankers". :)
Probably, but I couldn't think of a succinct way to say so when commenting.
Count the profit difference from changes you made in your business.

Million Dollar Experiment: I haven't heard of this, but you're exactly right. I'm glad I core dumped this idea here first. Wow, risk is hard in practice as a tech guy.
Thanks for (actually) answering the question.
What search keywords did you use or did you have this bookmarked? I'm curious because I tried and couldn't figure out what keywords to use.
what makes Newsvine a dog?

Great UI, 6 employees, small amount of funding 1.5 million, and a liquidity event to a big co... what is lame about that?
A long-lost text by Archimedes shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus
pmarca on crack...
Nice bait. I can't wait to hear what the switch is.
This article has the same text as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64572
I thought programming was a way to understand how these neat machines worked, so like many other 10 year olds, I tried programming BASIC on an 8 bit (Atari 600XL with the awe-inspiring (not) GTIA chip).

But my first real taste of hacking came in grade 7: understanding and implementing a 1-99 counter using seven segment LED displays, a 555, and some 7447 BCD->7 segment LED driver was lots of fun.

And then in high school, it was all about understanding the Amiga.

Looking over the Amiga schematics in the Hardware Reference Manual and figuring out how the low pass filter circuitry worked was fun.

Writing my first 68k asm program to do sine waves and programming the Amiga's coprocessor chip to do on the fly scanline colour changes was really cool too.

PS - for all you Atari ST lovers, here's 25 cents - buy yourself a real os :)
--Grabs a cup of coffee and joins you on the bench--
Demodulating v32.bis with your ears.
Rapidshare top sites: 26 File Search Engines, 16 premium account generators
Unless we're talking about a patented technology, IMO you shouldn't even consider the initial idea when discussing equity.

If I were in a startup, I'd want it to be a total free-for-all where new ideas are valued. Not one where the older ideas are considered to be worth more. That's totally backwards -- your ideas about the business are likely to change and become more valuable as you gain experience and talk with customers. And unless you prefer co-founders who treat it as a 9 to 5 job where they are mere implementors, they will be coming up with many of the important ideas too.

The worth of the initial idea is measured in the fact that you got other people to even commit to the project. Call that a victory and move on.
No way this will work over the course of a single one player game. It really needs a centralized server and thousands of players, not to mention a better fitness function than lifetime.
Smart way of thinking about it, that gets to the heart of the question, rather than repeating the trite 'worth nothing', which is obviously going to piss off the idea guy, and create problems.
Intel Launches Digg Clone For Software
The people jumping around in the logo look like they're desperately trying to attract the attention of a search and rescue team.
A good analogy is a comparison between a Honda Civic and a Lamborghini. Driving the Civic is predictable and undemanding, and it gets the job done decently. The Lamborghini is less forgiving and asks more of its driver, but used well will handily outperform the Civic.

"And wetness has nothing on the sharpness of the blade." I'm not saying that people should shave with dull blades. I'm saying that given a sharp blade, the single biggest improvement that people can make while shaving is maintaining proper lubrication.

Have you learned to use a single-blade razor with a brush and some proper cream? It takes a week or two to develop good habits. If you still found that setup inferior, maybe you were responding to the fact that it takes about twice as long as the more popular kind of shave. (Ameliorating that is the fact that a nice cream is one of Earth's finest olfactory delights.)

In fairness to your point, I never shave every day, no matter the type of blade or cream, because of the reason you cite--not enough growth to do anything but irritate the skin.

To each his own, but your advocacy of electric razors saps credibility. I haven't used one of the super fancy ones, but the ones I have used, which were mid-range, were uniformly mediocre. They do make it easier to shave every day, but at the annoying cost of a sub-par shave.
Measuring my inbox depth
Eh.

Say all you want, no sustainable revenue means no business, sooner or later.
Exactly. For what I consider to be the best idea I ever had, I was able to attract three very talented people to apply to Y Combinator with me, with a 25/25/25/25 split. The value of my idea was that it made people excited in its potential and my 25% was only valuable with the contributions of my partners.
> It's worth keeping in mind that trade is not a race or competition. It doesn't hurt us in any way if Europe accumulates wealth quickly.

This isn't quite true. The nations that accumulate capital tend to buy up the high return assets of financially weaker nations. Now that the dollar is tanking, due to the deficits and monetary irresponsibility, you see foreigners snapping up American companies and properties. The dividends from those things are now less likely to be invested here.
And he should coevolve knights, removing the need for humans altogether.
He seems to have really missed the point of machine learning by not trying to collect as much data as possible.
I see. Even at $3 I think you're getting ripped off.

http://www.bitlaw.com/forms/nda.html
http://www.how-to.com/Operations/legal-form-nda.htm
http://articles.chooselaw.com/business/view/Free-Non-Disclos...
I have had a long history with LEGO as well. And from LEGO I went on to C64, and programming in BASIC.

Thus I really enjoyed my summertime assistant job building this at our University:

http://web.abo.fi/fak/tkf/rt/robot/
Having done relatively well in a robotics competition that used Lego Technic, I got really annoyed using Legos to build something mechanically complex because of what I dubbed the "Lego Design Flaw." Legos have a 5:4 ratio of width to height (or height to width?) which makes it much more difficult than it should be to build in the full 3 dimensions.
I'm an aspiring hacker, but definitely not there yet. I've made some cool stuff in FORTRAN and Matlab (numerical analysis major) and I've pulled off some somewhat clever stuff in SAS, but it's hard to really feel like part of the community without knowing some kind of "industrial strength" language like python, C, C++, Java, Scheme, Perl, Ruby, etc. really anything that you could build a web-app in, even if it's blub.
I think this is a useful metric for evaluating a startup team, but I do think the metric is subjective!

I am sure a lot of us (not so fortunate ones) realize our best abilities while working on something we really love.

So the best bet would be to describe your abilities relative to the problem you are trying to solve. How are your abilities helping your startup make significant forward progress?
I am waiting for the shaver with laser blades...
Good idea. I know so many people who have to wait weeks for broadband after just moving into a place - with this they could legally use their neighbours connections...sweet.
So maybe my logic is off here... But does it follow that academic performance correlates poorly with workplace success?

Edit: I'm not attempting to justify low grades. Just curious if that could be a valid corollary (not sure if I'm using that word correctly).
SAP to buy Business Objects
Inconvenience Doesn't Scale - Yahoo's Ian Rogers to Music Industry
What's best?  low-fat diet?  low-carb diet?  vegetarian diet?  the answer.
If you are in a position where you need to sue someone for breaking confidentiality, having a three dollar document backing you up is probably not a good idea... legalese is legalese for a reason-- because it's concise and reduces possible alternate interpretations.
Social Media's Facebook App Revenue Reaches $5,000 / day
Ok. I'll pledge mine.

It would be nice to have some kind of buddy system to help encourage one another and share strategies / techniques.

Current profit: ~ $3k between my various businesses.
What does YC think of "JihadOnYou.com" ?
O'Reilly Report on the Facebook Platform
Facebook App 'Super Wall' Worth $10 Million?
Seems a bit high to me. How much actual revenue does it bring in?
America: Where Cutting the iPhone Price by $200 Results in a $1 million Lawsuit
This could be the start of something really really neat, especially if people have time to work on it.
Who said SAT scores correlate poorly with workplace success? Startup success, absolutely, but "workplace success?"

I'd assume that it would correlate pretty well to the success of corporate workers.
It's about your raving fans
Bumpin - New social networking startup
Download our extension from http://images.bumpin.com/bump@in/
I don't know about you guys but I'm always reluctant to sign a NDA. I usually flat out refuse, and most people don't seem to mind if I don't.
Download our extension from images.bumpin.com/bump@in
This would only work if everyone in HS either expects to work on web applications or the trend spreads to all industries. That might take a little longer.
I believe an idea is the most important part of a startup. However the idea is useless in the wrong hands, A paint brush in most peoples hands does not mean much,but in an artists hands it's very powerful. Never the less the artists is nothing with out the brush.

please visit www paintbrush com for all your brushing needs
This question is all about showing that you have achieved a level of excellence in a particular field. This could be academically (having won awards) or entrepreneurially (having set up stuff or had a large impact on people) or creatively (being incredibly awesome at jazz piano).

Think of a situation where you show above average ability relatove to someone. The truth is high achievers will continue to do so irespective of field - so if you want to be the best in the startup world try and extrapolate back to comsthing you have achieved.
"I'm in a hurry. I'm making this up as I go. I'm in the luck business of diversifying risk over lots of stupid ideas very quickly."

That sentence says volumes, both about you and the organization you're representing.
That his last name is actually Ponzi.
Then again, if startup founders knew exactly what they were doing all the time that would be a counter to innovation, which is a function of adaptation and serendipity.

He knows where he is starting and where is going but not the journey inbetween. I think thats pretty fair. Give him time.
What if it's all been a big fat lie?
Today is my 21st anniversary on the net: in October 1986 I got my first email address.
When did you start and what's your first memory?
A New Diet Idea:

"The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease."

cool!
Start-ups: Super Marketing Ideas for Super Success
The long & short of leveraging informal networks for formal results - FoundRead
Act big on a small budget
"We're operating under the principle of `fake it until we make it,'"
On Finding Good Programmers
"...making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot."
-- Paul Graham
Start-up as commodity, start-up as nine-to-five
For my money, the lower barrier to entry won't create a problem for VCs because fewer and fewer of these start-ups are going to need the VC stage.
We can help him in discovering the journey.

1. It is quite similar to Steve Pavlina's Million Dollar Experiment.

2. My interpretation is that this is a sort of a "club" where anyone is welcome to contribute ideas and work on their own or in ad hoc collaborations to increase the value to the world and as a by product report their earnings so that Andrew Yates can add them to his total as being the trigger for this whole thing.
This is like the butterfly effect in chaos theory or a leadership training in the real world.
This month will be fun for the participants and is achievable.

I won't be able to come to the face to face meeting (I'm in Israel) but will participate if there is a website. waiting for byiq.com
Yahoo's Ian Rogers To Music Industry: "Inconvenience Doesn't Scale"
It's tasteless.
I have to say that I agree with Marc.

The problem with the first bubble wasn't caused by non-profitable companies. It was caused by hubris over stock prices. The reason why so many people lost their shirts in the first bubble was because millions of Joe Averages took out cash advances or cashed out home equity to buy Internet stocks. There was a lot of hubris around the NASDAQ and average investors jumped in on the action en masse. I personally knew at least 4-5 people who had left their jobs to become day-traders.

I worked with a Med student who had maxed out 8-10 credit cards, bought high tech stocks with them, and then bought a collection of motorcycles with his stock earnings. When the bubble popped, he was left with a bunch of loans on expensive motorcycles, $100,000 in credit card debt and a great position on worthless Pets.com stock.

Sarb-Ox has really clamped down on the number of IPO's that are occuring now. So, even though there might be hubris around web apps right now, the average investor has no way of pumping money into those businesses, and that's a good thing.

What start-ups are creating are several products in tandem: The first is software that actually does stuff. The second is a community of users that develop and grow around that software product. The third is a small tight-knit group of people who have proven their capacity to produce.

Big Co is interested in all three of those things. And Big Co has proven repeatedly that they are willing to shell out a bunch of cash to aquire the software, the community or the people. Even if the startup isn't profitable, the software, community and people are still very valuable to companies that need those things.

What start-ups aren't creating this time around is IPO fever where the stock price gets ramped up while the founders and employees cash out. This is what's going to prevent the next big bubble from forming around web apps for quite a while this time around. The fundamentals are much better this time around.
HDFS was originally built as infrastructure for the Apache Nutch web search engine project. Watch out Googlers.
Loic Le Meur's New Startup Launches: Seesmic
No, but is startup-success correlated with intelligence? (I hope not!)
The Longtail of Facebook
The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You'll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)
Maybe people should see how much others improved at their extra-curricular activities since they took them. You are not forced to do those (as you are forced to study for some exams or go to work), you do them because you have fun with them. Then, what you would really be measuring is how determined the person in question is to be better. That's an ability too.
Hi Paul,

I'm not quite with you on universities.

I haven't been to US education system, but I don't think you get to know stuff like Fourier series or why inverting a matrix is unstable, etc., until you get through a university. And such stuff is important in high tech. Unless you're into web sites that host user generated videos. Being in video hosting pays off, for some, but it's not what I'd call high tech. I mean, it isn't a new UNIX, or a new Internet, or a new CPU design.

Those bigger, more interesting things were done by people who'd been to universities, and I think there's a reason to it.

Those startups started by undergrads, they may very well make money and produce cool apps and products, but I doubt they will drive technology.

I recently found I wasn't keeping up with new languages any more. Not because I've become too lazy, but because there aren't any new concepts in all those Pythons. Those are products of smart hackers, and new concepts are done by scientific kind, who seem to be out of fashion today.

Thanks for your writing anyway.

Alexander
And I have to say that I disagree.

The Web 1.0 bubble wasn't based on the way in which people found the money to buy these stocks or the hubris in the expectation that these stocks would always go up. It's just about fundamentals. When you buy a stock, you are buying how much the company earns today and adjust that for how much it could earn, say, ten years from now.

People bought Pets.com either with the naive expectation that it would earn billions in the future or with the expectation other people would think so. There was no evidence, just lots of hope and the eternal wish to get rich.

So you and Marc are telling me that Facebook is really worth $10 billion. You two are saying that that's a realistic expectation based on an objective evaluation and anyone who doesn't agree should be ridiculed. Ah... there's the hint. Ridicule is a cover for fear. Personally, I don't need to hide. I have the fundamentals -- and time -- on my side.
I'm not sure where the audience is or how they plan on keeping them. If you don't find it tasteless and instead find it amusing, it's still a one-joke kind of site. So it probably sees a traffic spike associated with publicity and then drops of a cliff. Not much of a business model, imo. Or was your question about the morality of offensive sites?
quote Nas:

"No ideas original, theres nothing new under the sun. Its never what you do, but how its done."
Psssh... He wrote an OpenOffice clone in a programming language he himself designed with syntax like vector calculus.

Seriously, Word?!
Hmmm, most amusing, this community has a blind spot.
Haha! I loved the first comment (by innervision).
"SAT scores correlate highly with academic performance."

Incorrect.
"Fitness Phone" helps users stay healthy, avoid bad breath
Does a BIX (Byte Information Exchange) account qualify? I had one of these back in 1984, which I interfaced too with a DATEX-P (German Post) account running at 2400 Baud.
The comments that follow in this thread, if any, should be separated between the (critiques of the technical design and layout) and (moral, ethical ramifications, and subjective controversy)

That being said, the layout's nice, really intuitive design, and interesting concept. Keep in mind that TFA said that this was a quick weekend project.

On the other side of the aisle, this will probably piss people off. It was probably thought up over a couple of beers and some good laughs, so of course it shouldn't be taken seriously. It does good on keeping a disclaimer on the top of their website claiming that this is strictly for humor. And with me being personally against having humor repressed for the sake of a fundamental religion, I say go for it, but God(Allah?) help them if the mainstream media gets a hold of this.
Midwest Startup Weekend Approaching Fast (West Lafayette, IN Oct. 12-14)
Any response from buxfer?
The article is right and wrong at the same time, mostly because the topic is complex and there is no way to properly lay it out on just two pages. They did not mention a few crucial differences between two economies such as military spending for example.

For those interested in the subject I highly recommend the following book: "United States of Europe". That book tries to carefully compare US and EU as two major competing nations/economies.
Google and IBM to combine "cloud" forces
Why the iPod can be conquered
It's also easy to give.
God damn, this is the most incoherent crap I've read in a long while. Can we get a downmod arrow?
September 1986. First memory is the "hunt" networked game, and learning C in order to hack it.
Using IQ scores to measure people is extremely efficient. A 15 minute test can give you a good, rough idea of what sort of work a person is capable of. Someone who gets an 85 on an IQ test isn't going to MIT (no matter the effort), whereas a person with a 145 probably could (with effort).

This is mainly useful in situations optimized for efficiency--think mass inductions, as into the army or college, where individually judging people isn't possible. The army can't send everyone to officer school, and Harvard can't give everyone a one-semester tryout.

This isn't the situation faced by investors, who can devote more time to distinquishing people.
If these guys think their facebook app (or ANY app) is worth anywhere near $10M they have a serious problem.

There's just no way to build an economic moat with a facebook application. Facebook can come in and crush you at any time. Who would actually pay that much for something that could so easily be destroyed?

Maybe I am missing something here.
Ask YC: your google adwords experience?
I have started to advertise my site on adwords and so far the experience has been quite frustrating. The ads are not showing, after 4 days I still see zero impressions for all imaginable key words and their diagnostic tool does not really help, just says: "This keyword does not trigger any of your ads".

I have increased my budget to ridiculous $5CPC and gigantic monthly budget but nothing seem to work. At this point I am getting paranoid of things suddenly starting to work and getting a huge bill from google.

I searched for help here and there, but mostly found the same suggestions over and over, that do not work for me: "increase your budget!", "pick better keywords!" and "wait 3 hours for servers to pick up your campaign".

Anybody had similar and frustrating experience? Is it even possible to spend, let's say, less than $2K a month advertising on google ?
Searching for God in the Brain
I'm pretty torn between you two's viewpoints.

On one hand, it's clear to me that whether or not there's direct financial value to building a super popular site, there's definitely societal value to products that people like. I really, really want stuff like Facebook to be worth a ton of money, because they mean something to (a lot of) people. Plus, my personal instinct is to build social websites, so if I'm gonna be a millionaire, it's going to be along the lines of something web2.0.

On the other hand, it absolutely kills me that a tech company can get a valuation of 100x of their current revenue, mostly on the hope that somebody somewhere'll figure out a way to make real money on a product (and in the meantime people will make acquisitions believing that it's an inevitability). Posts like pmarca's make me feel like people believe in Facebook because if Facebook doesn't work, nothing will, and we really will be back to boring 2003 instead of exciting 2007.