skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Keep in mind also that a strategic investor is always willing to pay more for the same stake than a purely financial investor.

This is because the strategic investor -in addition to reaping financial rewards- will also gain something else. In this case, it could be an exclusive agreement for Microsoft's ads, or use of MSN as the default search engine, integration of other MSN products, etc.

Even if Microsoft's deal puts a nominal valuation of $10B on Faceboook, Facebook's IPO (if it happened) could put the valuation lower.

Btw, this is an important point to note when evaluating exit strategies. Depending on the circumstances, getting acquired could be a much better exit even if the public markets are interested in your IPO. Youtube was probably not worth $1.6B based on just its financials, but it was worth that much to Google (or at least Dr. Schmidt thought so).
Decisions...
I couldn't disagree more. "Self interested" absolutely does not have a well understood meaning in casual, every-day conversations. It's one of the most ambiguous terms out there.

Try this out: at a dinner party (one that you don't care if you're invited back), declare that "all people act out of self-interest, ultimately."

Odds are good that two people will disagree quite vehemently about this, and at the core will be a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be "self-interested".
Fred says the 10billion is not real

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/09/facebook-really.html
I think there is a genuine need for this, even in these times of faster, easier access to information.

(Since you asked for spelling corrections: "[...] to work out the incentives for al participants"; should be all. Also: "The problems I see consist in [...]". In this case, consist of would probably be more appropriate:

http://www.bartleby.com/68/65/1465.html )
Quite possibly I am. I thought he was saying this after not releasing his premium account types for JotSpot initially and getting different feedback than he would from people actually willing to pay.
Announcing the SEED Conference featuring Jim Coudal, Jason Fried, and Carlos Segura
He doesn't say his site will limit itself to mentoring about business.

As for evaluating mentees: that's a good question. I guess it's not very different from selecting any other type of associates (employees, cofounders), just the stakes are not so high: it's less traumatic to terminate a mentoring relationship if things go wrong. There is no money at stake, and any time investments have supposedly paid for themselves until not long before it became clear it was not working out.

The standard solution to hiring (written application, followed up with interview) should be a good start.
An awful lot of the stuff he describes outsourcing seems like it would be just as fast if he did it himself. Ordering food? Placing Amazon orders?

I realize he's going for humor with some of the examples, but in each of these cases, once he's decided to outsource, written the e-mail requesting action (and making sure it's understandable to someone for whom english is not a first language), and checked to make sure it was done right, it's probably not a net gain. And he's paying for it.

I'm sure there are instances where outsourcing is wonderful--coding (in some cases), research, waiting on hold--but using a service like this in place of a secretary sitting right outside your office seems misguided.
Facebook is harder to replicate than Google in one way: Facebook has a large network effect on its side, Google (search) doesn't.
Solution 1: Higher cost, shorter turn around time. Spend the money to hire several programmers to implement your ideas for you. However, keep in mind that you should become technically proficient enough to communicate with and monitor the programmers. Otherwise, they're apt to take advantage of you.

Solution 2: Low cost. Long turnaround time. Start learning now how to program and build the web startup yourself. The biggest drawback with this option is that there's more to learn to correctly build a web application than to build a more traditional desktop program. It could take you six months before you've got a comfortable enough grasp of web programming to make progress on building your program. Although if it can be built as a Facebook widget or on top of existing services like those offered by Amazon, that may cut down on overall development time.

Solution 3: Higher cost than #2 but much lower than #1. Turnaround time would also be somewhere in the middle between #1 and #2. Partner with a friend of yours who also knows how to program. This way, if you decide to learn how to program you have someone right there to help you. You also have the option of dividing the work where you handle the business side and let your partner(s) handle the technical end.
First, to Paul: I have really enjoyed a lot of your essays;
most are very insightful and/or motivational, keep up the
good work. I have to ask, what's up with the word wrap? On
one hand the articles are formatted for a 80 lines terminal,
and the comments do not render OK on my 1920*1280?

I have been reflecting along the same lines for a while,
here are few thoughts, if anyone is interested.

Philosophy is constructed from two words and could be
translated literarily from Greek as: love of knowledge.
This implies a "lover", and from this individuality in the
act I see flowing a lot of the problems you describe.

From my understanding, Wittgenstein main point is: "meaning
is usage". This is a generalization that is a centrality of
philosophy itself; Russell alludes to it in "the problems
with philosophy" as he sets the reader on a quest to right
something that can't be.

Here's my reasoning: since no two person can use a word in
exactly the same way, the inherent imprecision of language
and of philosophy as a construction is a feature not a bug,
a v.useful one still; ever had this epiphany moment of
having a great idea because you misunderstood someone?

If you set off to generalize enough on practical philosophy,
I guess you get to the wisdom expressed in sayings and in
illustrations; they convey by high bandwidth a particular
pattern of analysis from one individual to another one that
seeks wisdom, but one would be hard pressed to call
receiving (as in "idee recues") sayings as a philosophical
endeavor.

The way I now see philosophy is it's a quest to a personal
worldview acquired through a personal love for knowledge.
It cannot be exact nor absolutely true unless you're a
dictator or a cult leader. This is why the idea and
"ideators" are so closely associated; people talk about
A.Rand because through her constructed world view she gives
an ethic that have seducing finalities; however as you point
out, objectivism as she conceived it cannot be perceived
again by a human being let alone brought to new heights.

I find that reading inherently imprecise philosophical
material can give very strong insights exactly because of
the words are soft, and impact each unique individual in a
different way. The ones that are not purposefully unreadable
that is (Foucault?), in this I agree with you. "I", as my
existing uniquely individual self, personally agree with
you; another unique entity that defines itself as an
ensemble of cells and electric currents. Seriously, I find
it rather unconvincing that because you cannot pinpoint
self, or soul, you negate something as evident as
individuality, from which "I" choses to defines itself. I
guess this fits "l'air du temps", ref Dawkins, Pinker and
co. It has the smell of groupthink tho.

(BTW, evilmonkey your comment got me ROTFL)

Best regards,
Francois Payette
He thinks that 80 character widths are inherently more readable on a screen.
This seems silly. The guy with the big idea should be handing out peanuts to the code monkeys, not giving them all of his cash. Knowing exactly what the web system should do is far more important than a few programming skills (you can replace the code monkey more easily than you can a good startup idea).
Do you think that's because it's easy for you personally to generate ideas? Such creative thinking comes more easily to some than to most others.
Q: Anybody knows what is the font used for code snippets in 'On Lisp'?
It is like courier new but nicer.
May you can tell by looking at it @
http://www.paulgraham.com/lib/paulgraham/onlisp.pdf
The whole thing still only works when the big idea guy has money.
That only follows if the arguments that prompted you to quit are of philosophical nature.
Sorry, this was just a parody. There are people who have valuable domain knowledge. They can develop not one idea but many. They know how to sell the idea because they can make the case on the basis of deep knowledge. They are credible in the eyes of investors and so on.
Speaking as a developer who joined a project started by a guy who had a great idea for a business, the things I looked for was a really solid business plan, a good understanding of the problem domain, and a map that showed how we could get from here to there in 18 months.
I might be more cynical than most, having gone through 3 dotcoms as a developer, but I'm also more optimistic than most (having earned less than 20k in the last year while we build this thing and I earn my pony, and the estate upon which to esconce it).

Don't sweat the code if that's not your strength: focus on your business plan. Most seasoned coders have seen umpteen
'cool ideas' burn and die, and it's usually not technical issues from which Demise doth spawn. The one freakish happenstance of the current market is that, while most coders are not great risk takers, they are wonderful risk-smellers.

Some background: the progenitor of my current gig spent the last 3 years trying to build a business. He tried to outsource, and contract, and everybody told him it couldn't be done. We met through a mutual business acquaintance, and I fairly scoured his plans. 3 months later, we had a working prototype, and we launch in 4th quarter 2007.
Voted up, not able to discuss the details at the present time.
thanks will chek although i believe 1600 is way too much for me.
thank you for the details
You be the VC
Cheap custom built gaming computers/PCs
If it's not fun, do something else.
This one:

> European countries don't have so many super poor people as the US, which makes their average numbers look better

Your statement that the most productive people are in the US, is another way to say that wealth in unevenly distributed in the US. In this case, the most "productive" people would actually be in Saudi Arabia.
this reminds me of the call center movie (http://callcentermovie.com)
Huh? Who said anything about money? Thehigherlife just said he had a good idea.
Get roomates than. With another roomate, you can split a $2200 bedroom, and end up paying around $1100, which is more reasonable.
Another warning: Find a job before coming here. It can be hard to find a good one, and usually takes time. The city is expensive, and there is lots of fun things to do, and you will see that money evaporates fast in here.
The only other place more expensive in SF is NYC.
Agreed in full.

Nice design, though.
Ahh, a fellow baker ;-)
Are eyeballs enough?
Are eyeballs enough?

"[..] the extent of the crash didn't dawn on us that quickly. I don't think it dawned on a lot of people. We just wanted to build momentum with this $500,000 and then raise more money later in the year."

"At the time it was pretty much the belief that, if you have a buzz and you have users and you have good seed investors, you can raise more money. We said, 'We'll make money, but this is down the road so we don't need to focus on that. We are going to focus on building more features getting more users.'"

-Evan Williams (Blogger.com from Founder's at Work)

Are we all doomed to repeat history? Is it a sound strategy to go for growth first and worry about making money later?

Has advertising really matured to the point where an advertising-only model can work? If I can get a couple million people to use my app on the regular then I'm sitting pretty in multi-million dollar acquisition land, right?

Someone please shed some light on this mysterious monetization thing.
Sorry, I was just experimenting with my remote jedi mind trick on you.
You already posted about this once before. My strategy has been to start with small, unobtrusive ads, just to get people used to the fact that, yes, there are ads. You can also get some idea of how much money a few small ads will generate.
Why 'Total Geeks' Build Businesses Faster
This comment causes the whole page to be too wide. Could a moderator please mark it dead?
RCA's New Multiscreen TV
That doesn't explain the ridiculous width of this page. This is a problem specific to this thread, caused by a comment which contains a very long line without whitespace.
I think the author makes a good point about criteria that are most easily fulfilled by the privileged.
Historically one of the tools that was used to keep racism on the move was stories about ancistry.eg.Africans were told that they have no history, that all the ancient historic structures that they saw were built by a lost white race that lived there. Similar stories can be found in all cultures propagating racism, Inside Hinduism they had stories which claimed some people descending from the gods while the others just happened to be standing around.

This is what was broken quiet unintentionally by Darwin,
Move over Aeron, your butt just got a new best friend
Unskilled and Unaware of It
Fair enough, but read the original comment. It talks about providing the idea, not the sales expertise.
The comment I was referring to is called racism. Now you write that I am stupid.

What's the point ? What is this suppose to demonstrate ?
I hope there's some sort of plan to use this to let people edit their Myspace profiles, though I'm not sure how feasible that is. I can't see why anyone would want to use this by itself.

The new focus on home pages doesn't sound like a very good idea either. Google and Yahoo have been doing that for years (not to mention Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc), and your improvement on that is to let people position and resize images and videos? Good luck with that.

How about a different approach? You've written all this code that lets people easily lay things out on a web page. Hm... that sounds kind of like a desktop publishing application. What do people use those for? Flyers, invitations, newsletters, etc. And all of these things are notoriously annoying to send via email. If you crank out some templates and hype up your product as an easy way for people to make and send flyers (with videos embedded!), then you'd at least start out with a few users.

But home pages? It's been done. Many, many times.
Hungary issues entrepreneurial permits to prostitutes
Talk about moonlighting...
I can't see how Darwin's theses refute that history about the African white aboriginals, unless that "they have no history" is supposed to mean that their ancestors didn't exist anywhere (?).

Did Hinduism revise their creational myths, or was the whole creed discredited as a result of Darwin?

For all I know, which is not much in this topic, Darwin may have helped debunk racist stories. OTOH, Darwinism offers new pretexts for racism. Didn't Nazis abuse a good deal of Darwin (along with Nietzsche) to cook their ideologies?
The geeks just don't get IT - Telegraph
Quite provocative. Let's hear your arguments against this.
Impressions from the StartupWeekend in Hamburg, Germany
Max Levchin Interview on The GigaOm Show [video, podcast]
I mean there are languages that have functions as first class data. Not wrapped up in objects. Think Lisp, Scheme, Haskell. Even Python can do this - otherwise map and filter would hardly work.
Oh, yes. I remember.
Yes, they can. I was just to lazy to look this up myself. Thanks.
Thanks for the corrections - I should have been more careful. Too bad I can't edit the post any longer.
I did not even say I want to solve this problem with a web site. But I saw the same problems you pointed out.

For example making the service expensive would weed out a lot of people who are not serious about it. But I do not believe high price this would actually be a solution.

Perhaps matching mentees and mentors is not that different from matchmaking in a romantical sense. We could learn some things from dating sites.
That looks like a great article to email to co workers;-)
I'll buy that, too.

Anyway, I think the "beta" aspect of that statement is "try it and see, and change it if it's wrong". If your business model is "everything is free and I hate ads", then you'll soon find out that it's wrong. ;-)

It also ties into Kraus' favorite saying: You make what you measure.
I can't disagree more. Social mobility exists but poverty is nowhere as easy to escape nor self-created nor eradicated as you suggest. And the income gap appears to only be getting worse. The median household income is somewhere around 50k. Good luck trying to raise a family (food, car, rent/mortgage) and save for their education on that. And the financial aid you point to is usually loans that are paid off over a decade - add that cost to the next generation.

Selection could always be biased to uplift rather than simply advance. The debate has been dominated by racial inequities. By addressing socioeconomic discrepancies in education across the color spectrum it's possible to redistribute wealth through a Horatio Alger ethos generation after generation. Problem is, those differences are exacerbated by local school districts and so the best hope of focused change is through college. But fewer than 50% of the American populace goes on to attend.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
> The poor are largely poor because of themselves and not circumstances.

Be that true or not, their children still ought to have a shot at a better life.
"How many of the top 20 visited Web sites of August 2003 are still in that ranking? Nine"
I joked on reddit that it was cheap compared to UK house prices. But you'd probably spend more on getting the place liveable:

At best it's empty inside, at worst, it's flooded, covered in years of graffiti and crap, the doors and stairs have rusted away and it's full of asbestos and other toxic materials.
nobraces: Python-style indentation for C
We also have plenty of Uranium, Wind, Water, Geothermics. Eventually fusion might be ready.

Oil is a wonderful substance to power cars - for its high specific energy content. But for producing grip power we are not that dependend on it.

(TODO: Fetch some statistics.)
It would be great if "But I wore the juice" turns into some kind of catch-phrase.
No I'll add that. I just wanted to get the thing to work first. That & remove 'deleted'. Along with

- add star (or some other indication) it in top 10, 30

- names of users responding to a particular story (score, hierarchy maybe)

Maybe plot some graphs of user contributions over time. I'll see what I can think up.
I wonder if the people writing this article are as competent in this field as they think they are?
"... I also recently wrote my own blogging platform (in Python). It's really simple -- no web UI for me (yet, anyway), and the whole thing is contained in a few hundred lines of code. ..."

This is sort of a geeks rite of passage. Some I can think of

- spolsky citydesk ~ http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/

- bray custom perl scripts ~ http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Colophon

- dave winer ~ http://www.outliners.com/

- trotts ~ http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/2004/05/its_about_time....

- ev williams - http://www.blogger.com

- Fitzpatrick ~ http://brad.livejournal.com

"... I don't have comments, but I didn't want them anyway. People have written Wordpress plugins for virtually every need I might ever have, but plugins are a pain to deal with for problems that I can now solve in 3 lines of code. .."

One thing I found was you really think carefully before you create something. I've shunned comments as well (constraints I've chosen) only choosing static pages. The advantages for such a low volume site are speed & reliability. Though I have thought having a feedback loop would be nice have yet to really come to grips how (having no RT server based processing).

I'll let you know the url of the colophon when I release my site.
Parakey: Did Investors Get Left Out In The Cold?
France Telecom's Orange to adopt OpenID
Indexed: MBA on a 3x5
Still putting off that business plan? Here's something that will push it to the back for a little longer.
In the spirit of "When you've got a hammer" as a business school guy I'm always thinking what's best from a discounted present value sense. It's hard for me to believe that the difference between decent performance at Harvard and better performance at a slightly less selective school is worth the enormous up front cost of the former.unless your marginal utility of a dollar really low.

Another way to look at this is perhaps "Rich families transfer wealth between the generations in a tax-advantaged, inefficient, socially acceptable way" I went to a perfectly good college on academic scholarship (and therefore almost certainly could have gone somewhere better (well, more selective) not on scholarship) and my friends were going to UChicago and Yale for econ PhDs right out of undergrad, so I don't really feel slighted in terms of opportunity.

The big advantage as I see it would be being surrounded by really smart people all the time and sneaking something ridiculous to the top of the dome would do wonders for self confidence later in life.
We are doing our business plan in beta during our product launch, for a few reasons.

1. its defining our feature set
2. as software folk, we are still learning about business, and its easier to walk first, and then run
3. we need the money now, we don't have valley funders to give us gobs of money in Milwaukee, WI. I think the state tracked 3-5 million here last year in angel funding.
4. our evaluation will be higher with revenue and on the ground business knowledge.
Time to bring in some reid hoffman logic:

The order at which you deploy features should prioritised as follows:

a) User acquisition
b) User retention
c) Monetisation

pg states makes something people want first, which covers a and b then figure out c. If you plan to charge for your product you have to consider which features people would pay for and not give them away for free initially as you will not be able to charge for them later.

If you don't want to charge directly - then focus on building the user base and you'll have an audience which you can figure out from what would keep them and let you monetise through advertising. Generally in consumer ad plays focus on reaching and keeping users first, as you'll be able to sell advertisers on that.
Understood and I definitely agree - to a point. I get ALL my news and entertainment online. Sometimes I just need to get away from the computer screen.

I read Seth Godin's blog everyday, but I still bought Small Is the New Big. I still bought and read The Long Tail although half the book was online.
Ask to see their work and then go with your gut feeling. Don't rely on arbitrary questions or other forms of measurement. When it comes to people, the proof is in the pudding and when you meet them, what your gut tells you.

I would have to imagine this is exactly how the YC application process works.
Known and working on it. Sorry.