skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Help me out
I am desperate to jump in and want to sail startup boat before it is too late ( age is a main factor ;) - I am 32 )

I don't have solid idea or I am not able to decide how worth my idea is. Whats best way to evaluate your idea - whether is it worth taking a chance or not...

Or just jump - try and see ? :)

I know PG mentiones that idea doesn't matter much as it changes over the time to fit the customer need but still idea needs to have potential to get at that level..

Share your experience and thoughts ...
Joel: Five Easy Ways to Fail (in a Software Project)
Bah. Friends are overrated anyway! :)
Depending on how old/nerdy he is, she might only distract him for a minute or two... snickers
Great points. What I mean by unnecessarily complex is: I've seen to many enterprise systems that are simply electronic versions of manual processes.

The problems that enterprise software system really try to solve are masked by trying to genericize them for every situation and everyone. It still comes down to solving one specific problem and solving it well.
I really like the concept surrounding sorting.

It really helps you visualize why you need to separate your lists into smaller piles before sorting if you can, since it takes the same amount of time to sort a 50 element list as it does sorting a 40 and a 30 both.
There's a gem buried in one of the responses: "I don't think you'll have much luck unless you can find one or more coders who're as excited about your idea as you are, and who you respect enough to treat as equals."

Why would anyone competent join you on the terms that you've described? (There's a Dilbert about a company that wants to pay industry standard salaries but expects to have above average talent.)
We are very close to agreement. There's hard work in picking the best and most competitive business processes, and it's going to be different for every organization.

That's why "project management software" isn't the same as "software to help us plan and control building and deploying industrial power transformers in a union environment where we have high governmental reporting obligations" or some such. Companies either want to sell generic products with feature bloat all over the place, or home-grown shops try to take fragile systems and glue them together with more and more code. Either way you end up with a lot more complexity than the organization needs.

But it still might not be a simple answer. And nobody wants to do the work of figuring out what the minimum amount of complexity is for each situation. (Even though there's probably more money in that than anything else)
DocSavage, thank you for your comment.

I am not familar with Levin's book and the context of his statement. But my experience with rolling assets into a C-Corp is very straightforward. Forget for a minute whether the original entity is LLC or S-Corp. Let say a lone entrepreneur has been laboring over some intellectual property and he is ready to get funding. Before he takes the VC money, his lawyer will create a C-Corp which initially has no value, it will acquire the asset from the entrepreneur in exchange for 100% of the C-Corp (which also has no value). That is a tax-free transfer. Then the C-Corp will issue preferred stock in exchange for the VC money (say 25% of the company in exchange for $5M), all the time encapsulating the asset of the entrepreneur and not subjecting him/her to any tax consequences even though on paper his/her asset is now worth $15M (since he owns 75% of the company). And it makes no difference whether the asset was originally owned by a S-Corp, LLC or just a sole propriatership. The key here is that when the tranfer was taking place, the C-Corp was just a shell and had no value. I hope this helps.

--Denny--
I think of a list just as "a list". An ordered collection of anything.

"Linked list" is not an abstraction (at least, not in Python), it's an implementation detail. And IIRC, Python lists are not actually implemented as linked cells, so they have different performance characteristics.
Brain regions responsible for optimism located
China's Alibaba Unveils Its IPO
1). Find a cofounder.
2). Build it. Now.
EBay: The Place for Microfinance
I have tried few things with friends and it didn't work out in part-time. I am willing to bite a bullet and want to try with full dedication but in that case I have to look for someone who is ready to do it fulltime.
There is an open source version being built for Mono:

http://www.mono-project.com/Moonlight
This is a really cool suggestion. I'll try starting this weekend. If I don't meet my goals by the following week I'll owe anyone who notices a beer (either when they come to Chicago or when I visit wherever they're located).
Guys, many of you missed my point. The post was not about C. It wasn't about the language, it was about people. I wanted to point out that C programmers, as a group, are getting things done.

I suspect there aren't that many of them, there are fewer people programming C these days as compared to Java or C#. But they produce spectacular number of open source products we all use.

Respect them for that. That's all.
Landsat Image Viewer
There are a lot of dumb people that are millionaires. Perhaps measuring intelligence is the wrong way to go about it: perhaps we measure intelligence the wrong way.
You are desperate? Why? If it's because you want to move AWAY from something else, then forget it. You absolutely must have total passion for your endeavor or you will fail. Sounds like you're not quite there yet (prove me wrong). When you are, it will be impossible for you to resist going for it. Age is irrelevant. Having a co-founder is good, but not mandatory. Having something that you MUST do is the key. When you do, get going, and let us know. Good luck.
HyperCard -- A Trip Down Memory Lane For Others, Too?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercard

I spent a few years of my early adolescence making lots and lots of HyperCard stacks. All those hours spent with HyperTalk and experimenting with layouts and process flow benefit me to this day.

If anybody else 'round these parts used to spend a lot of time with HyperCard, I'd be curious to hear their thoughts on how it has affected their current work, along with any whale tales of monster stacks.
Zoomomail : new french startup for image zooming
Well, it depends on the idea. If it's something that would help you personally then go ahead and do it anyway. Even if the startup fails you'll have built a product that can help you. If you are trying to solve a problem that a bunch of other people have then you should also do it, but make sure you find one or two of the people that would actually use your product and get feedback from them.

There is little reason to not just go ahead and do it. Either way you'll learn something and it should be a rewarding experience.
Non-hacker wants to make next Facebook with tag cloud. Plz help!

Where can I find a hacker to build my brilliant Web 2.0 AJAX idea for free and for no equity? Thx.
Published November 2007 ?
I used both Basecamp and SharePoint. I chose Sharepoint in any given day.

Mind you I'm not the only person that dislike Basecamp.

http://www.whybasecampsux.org/

NB: My current office uses Basecamp but I never bothered to open it unless there is a message for me.
I'm of the opinion that, if we can all agree that social software is important, Google would get a ton more out of Facebook than Microsoft would. Google doesn't seem to get social software at all.
"There are a lot of dumb people that are millionaires."

But are there a lot of dumb people who BECOME millionaires, without winning the lottery?
One Easy Way to Fail (a Software Project)

By doing anything other than the following:

Have one to three rock stars and a pretty clear picture of what your audience wants. Code like crazy. Get Version 1.0 out there. Get feedback. Adjust. Repeat until done.
I love Joel for promoting the idea that working more than 40 hours a week is unproductive, but it does seem contrary to the startup mentality.

Would startups be better off if their founders only worked 40 hours a week? I don't think so - working crazy hours is a competitive advantage of startups.

Of course, motivation is the big difference, but that's a whole different argument than Joel is making.
Except for prosper.com, most of the micro loan links in the article appear to be for third-world entrepreneurs.
"Besides private school, they could live somewhere else, or homeschool."

What if both parents work? What if everywhere else they can afford to live has public schools just as bad?
My two contrarian cents:

1. Stop worrying about your age. It isn't significant. Taking a historical perspective, people who found successful companies in their early 20's are pretty rare. Don't forget that YC's young-founder approach is basically an entrepreneurial (==risky) project taken on by people who were in their 30s when they had their own "liquidity events". Young-founder talk makes programmers happy because it suggests there's not much about company-building that you can't pick up by yourself if you know a few basics -- making it just like programming. Also, lot of two-point-oh people focus on youth culture because it obviates the need for programmers to think about designing applications simple enough for Grandma to use.

2. The sense of urgency to get moving is what matters. Recent college grads have this in abundance -- it's the only way they know to feel -- but you can cultivate it too. Proactive behavior is the biggest constituent of success in business, and impulsive coding is a good complement/substitute at this stage.

3. All the advice you hear about "the idea" is contradictory and hard to parse. Here's my attempt: Your idea probably sucks, so you should implement right now. That way you get feedback from the real world as fast as possible. If people tell you your product is teh suck, or if they ignore it completely, or steal your idea, your problem space will be a lot better defined than it is now. Time spent wondering whether you should do X is wasted. Questions about the nature of X are best answered on the fly.
Historia Matematica: How lambda functions (Lisp/Scheme) came to be
well, where are you located?
I am trying things in part-time - on and off - for last 7-8 years. It just affects your day to day work/family life ( as I tried all that in part-time ) ..so now I just want to give a final shot ( start in fulltime or not ...) by end of next year. I am not running AWAY..but it is something which i wanna do and thats my goal...
My experience is that you should _plan_ as if you have 40 hours a week per developer because you are going to be wrong and end up needing more time than you expect. The work after 40 hours is just keeping you on schedule.

John.
The state of Enterprise 2.0
Hi Jaggu,

I'm in Virginia and currently looking for a cofounder. Drop me a line if you are interested in talking some. My email is my profile.
If you're doing a startup, your life will be the startup. It won't seem like work. But if you hire employees, their life will not be the startup. And it will still be more "work-like" to them than it is to you. So keep them to 40 hours.
Stress Mess in US - 48% can't sleep right
I think there is a problem here gigamon. In your scenario when the C Corp acquires the assets of an LLC at 0 value or extremely low value - say 0.0001 c per unit, then the founders common stock basically is assigned that value. If then right away, a VC pays say 3M pre money for a third of the company which may have 10 M shares - i.e. $1 per preferred share stock, the IRS will have a problem because the stock value cannot enhance by 10000 times so soon even if it is preferred stock. This is why lawyers ask entrepreneurs to form companies asap so that there is some time between founder share allocation and investment where you can show the company gained value from the time founders were allotted stock.
well i mean, we'd be paying the beta developer in equity, so if they are excited and passionate about the idea, then it should be a nice fit.
The "$15 Billion" Nonsense
That seems a bit counterproductive to me--if you know it's going to take more than 40 hours, then why not at least try to make an estimate? If you think that your weeks' work is going to take between 50-70 hours, then budget 70 hours and be glad (or get ahead!) if you finish early.

That said, I can't imagine any startup getting far by working 40 hours a week. 80-100 is probably a minimum for a founder... it has to be your focus, not just your 'day job'.
$500 million more for facebook?
"...and a massive stock valuation. They can make acquisitions of key technology and talent without spending much."

I don't agree with this. There's no liquidity in the stock, and just because MSFT thinks the company should be valued at $15B, I don't see why I should, or should expect anyone else to.

Wouldn't a $15B valuation make their (newly-issued) stock options _less_ attractive to new employees, since they would only be in-the-money if Facebook IPO'd with a (kinda high) $15B valuation by the public markets?

It's a bit of a different question for acquisitions, in which they can trade stock outright. Still, to do a deal, it seems they'll have to buy at very high valuations, giving their own highly-valued stock out in return. So it should still cost them (about) the same %age of FB to acquire a company post- and pre-investment.

It's certainly not _bad_ to raise a quarter-billion dollars in exchange for 1.6% of the company, but I don't see how this makes their stock much more valuable to an independent observer; without liquidity, it's still anyone's guess. Granted, people will probably guess higher now, but I still don't see that valuation as a free ride to low expenses.
I don't think it makes sense to apply "total_valuation = microsoft_price / microsoft_stake". There are a load of wishy-washy things Microsoft could be looking to get out of this - a seat on the board, knowledge, position, credibility, yada yada... I doubt they're in it to make a direct return on their $240 million investment. You could probably add or subtract $100,000,000 or 1% from the figures involved and it wouldn't affect whatever Microsoft's trying to do.
MySpace v. Facebook: Competing Addictions
Clearly, only superstar hackers are skilled enough to add features to FogzBugz.
Getting to launch! A step-by-step guide
Why Specialists are Grumpy and Generalists are Happy
Cheap raw materials, incredibly cheap energy, vastly expanded markets: it's a recipe for a cake walk -- and it was a cake walk.

Didn't work out that way in Russia, though, did it? Whereas Japan, which has severely limited sources of energy and raw materials, has done very well. Conclusion: culture matters more.
Summary:

American high schools are less effective than they could be because they employ bitter old cranks that the students wisely ignore.

Also:
"any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life"
Lisp NYC: Dinner with Roger Corman (of cormanlisp.com)
Joel's experience working for Microsoft shaped his mind. It has been MS trademark to start slow but building a _SURE_ thing with good architecture (security is a different story).

How old is MS Office now?

Compare that with Silicon Valley startup mentality: code like crazy, take shortcuts, release early, flipped your company and let the new hires figured out the mess.

(Or you could opt for re-writes like the Reddit people have been doing since their inception).
blog.pmarca.com: You have to love this industry
This is phenomenal advice. In my experience, everything said here seems to be 100% true.
There is a model from organizational behavior saying that performance = ability x motivation x opportunity. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar plays out across societies.
No kidding.

I'm almost wondering if Microsoft's move was less about Facebook and more about upping Google.
Whence the Force of F = ma? I: Culture Shock
Will all due respect, iamyoohoo, it is done all the time, especially in Silicon Valley. Keep in mind that we are talking about a company that has no product, no revenues and is losing money (Founder's money). Then on one day, it has $5M in the bank and a Board of Directors of big name VC's. In fact, let's look at the problem in reverse. If the company is truly worth $15M (with the Founder's IP) and then then the VC's put in $5M to get 25% of the company, then why are we giving them preferred stock. The reason is simple. Until the company has the $5M, it was worth zero. In fact, even after the investment, we would price the common stock at 1/20 if not less of the preferred stock (so that future employees can get options at a discount price).

--Denny--
That's true enough. Of course, it applies to every other stock, too: Google's ~$200 billion market cap is based on the price of the last trade, which for all we know was a 100-share buy that mostly constituted an investment in smugness. Since there are so many small investors, and since large investors have lower turnover, the vast majority of investment transactions are non-representative, but they're still the best information we have.

It wouldn't be especially surprising if MS overpaid -- but I don't think that's what Facebook wants. Companies usually like to IPO at their peak valuation. Investors very rarely want to buy discounted goods during the IPO (which is why many startups would undervalue their early venture capital investments: if they were funded at $.25/share in January, got another round at $5/share in July, and were going public at $20/share in December, they give new investors a comfortable trendline to look at. Swap the last two valuations, and you start scaring people).
He's so productive, he's constantly living in the future...
I think spending more than 40 hours per week programming is unproductive, because of the mental exertion, but there's a lot more to launching a successful startup than programming.

Once you've expanded to the point where you have people who only program, Joel's advice is probably good: "encourage your staff to work a sane 40 hours per week" except for occasional bursts.
Interesting Tidbits/Notes from the Facebook/Microsoft Conference Call
Win Your Startup Capital
Nightmares offer clues to nature of dreams
Don't update your Windows: Microsoft update brings PCs to a standstill
Hi, you don't have to split a triangle into integers. For example, you could have

50^2 = 25^2 + 43.3^2

Strictly speaking, if you have a circle of radius 50, you can take the sine and cosine of any angle and get a possible way to split the length.
> However, tolerance for homosexual acts between men seems to be strongly selected against

Actually historically there were numerous instances of largely-homosexual civilizations. Just look up the true story behind the movie 300.

> Creating sperm is expensive and wasting them with a man is not to your advantage.

I think you completely forgot about masturbation, which pretty much destroys that entire line of argument ;) Males "waste" sperm on a constant basis. :)

> It was also important for men to be highly focused on interfacing with females

Actually in many societies men were NOT focused on social interaction with females, a trend that continues to this day especially in certain religious countries. Interaction was and is often limited to reproduction, with gender segregation in social roles (the men spend most of their time with other men while the women spend most of their time with other women and children).

It really doesn't take much effort at all to get a female pregnant. The vast majority of effort is in child-rearing, not procreation. Homosexuality actually confers some advantages, such as:

- Male bonding, leading to more effective teamwork, which is a huge advantage in small tribal societies;

- Exclusively-homosexual males don't compete for females yet can still lend their muscle to protecting the tribe.

In a small tribe, competition for females can lead to infighting which will put the whole group at a disadvantage to a neighboring tribe that has the same gender split but in which most of its males are homosexual. (Effeminate homosexuals tend to be much less common than non-effeminate ones, which is why so many gay males can fly under the radar.)
Maybe not dumb, but plenty of below-average intelligence. Quoth PG:

> One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. And more to the point here, vice versa. Work people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand. The most extreme case is developing programming languages, which doesn't pay at all, because people like it so much they do it for free.

There are more reliable ways to get rich than the way that we go about it on this forum. It's just that they're unpleasant enough that most people would prefer to stay poor. Construction contracting is a good example.
The whole point is that microsoft is not really an 'investor' in terms of a general market. Microsoft would have competitive reasons for buying a stake in Facebook that go beyond a direct return on investment, which is all a normal investor is looking for.

If Microsoft has a 98% of a map to buried treasure, but a critical 2% is missing, that 2% is worth a lot to Microsoft, but nothing to anyone else. Unless MS is willing to buy it from you, that is. If 1.6% is all they really need of Facebook, the rest could be worthless.
That's true, but that's irrelevant. Is an investor really going to be snooty enough to turn Microsoft down, if the most valuable thing that can happen to Facebook is a sale to MS?
D. E. Shaw.
Does anyone know of any regulatory or institutional reasons why it may be easier for a hedge fund than a venture fund to make truly speculative investments like this? Or is this (if even true) just a one off outlier?
I quote James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, page 293:

"Students did the work on time, writing real definitions to the first two and last two terms, but for the thirty or forty in the middle they free-associated whatever nonsense they wanted. 'Hawley-Smoot Tariff: I have no idea, Mr. De Moulin,' might be one entry. Or 'Blue Eagle: FDR's pet bird who got very sad when he died.' Educational theorists call such acts "day-to-day resistance" -- a phrase that comes from theorizing about slavery...

"Of course, fooling the teacher is of little consequence. Quite possibly my sister's teacher even knew of the ruse and joked about it with his colleagues, the way masters chuckled that their slaves were so stupid they had to be told every evening to bring in the hoes or they would leave them out in the night dew."

So, no, you're not the only adult who remembers what school was like.

And school is worse today -- students have more restrictions, more rote testing, and less academic freedom than ever. No wonder they feel and act like imprisoned, rebellious slaves.
What if you specialize in generality? I guess that explains those mood swings.