pg

Thanks for saying the site is high quality, but if so it's despite (or possibly because of) the fact that much of the development happens in the repl of the live site. There are not a lot of whitepapers around here. We tend to think by writing code.

It would be a disaster if that were true, because in this type of investing as in any other, returns are proportionate to risk. Fortunately it isn't. As I said in another thread, a quick sample of the current batch suggests half had no growth when YC accepted them.

YC does face a danger in this respect, because as it gets better known, there are an increasing number of applications from fairly established startups. To avoid that danger we make a conscious effort to fund risky outliers. E.g. the 17 year old kid from Bulgaria with zero revenues or users.

That said, startups should certainly seek growth, because that's how you evaluate and refine an idea. When you try to get people to use something you've built, and especially to pay for it, you learn quickly what's wrong with it.

The only misleading thing about Adrian's advice is the implication that you need growth to get funded by YC. That is definitely not true. A quick random sample of the current batch (the first 10 in alphabetical order) shows only half had any growth when they were accepted.

It's also rare for a startup to succeed without making money for the employees. The founders have the same type of stock as the employees, so the founders generally can't make money without the employees also doing so. There are occasionally cases where a startup gets so close to death that it has to raise money on terms that wipe out all the existing shareholders (including the founders), and then goes on to succeed. But usually those successes are middling anyway.

I agree about unsexy ideas though. All the startups I mentioned were unsexy ideas to start with, though their success has made some of the ideas seem somewhat sexier.

As someone going to work for a startup, you're in much the same position as an investor. It won't be fun or lucrative to work for one that fails, so you're trying to predict which ones will succeed. In fact, it's even more important for you than for investors, because your portfolio consists of a single company. So I would suggest doing what investors do, and try (a) to learn as much as you can about how to predict which startups will succeed, and (b) analyze any company you're considering working for very thoroughly.

I've written a lot about how to predict which startups will succeed. I'd look for a startup with very determined founders who are working on a problem that grew organically out of their own experiences.

You get the money later when you do that, which is another big reason people in SF don't spend so much. In finance you get paid as you go, and a lot of people in NYC spend it as they go. Indeed, friends who've worked in the finance industry have told me firms have a deliberate policy of encouraging new recruits to spend all their salaries and bonuses, as way of getting them hooked. Whereas in SF a lot of people's net worth is tied up in illiquid stock.

I did it to discourage spammers. I wanted to make sure they got zero clicks from their posts.

That doesn't happen on most threads, but it does happen on some, and pending comments may help fix the problem. I'm not sure it will. The moderator will have to experiment to see what works. But since the code was slightly complicated I wanted at least to get the initial version done before I left.

One thing I noticed while it was turned on was that the comments were actually pretty good. It may be that bad comments tend to be concentrated on particular threads, and that the right way to implement pending comments is per-thread rather than site-wide. That was actually the original plan, but it was simpler to implement site-wide, and I usually try to do the simplest thing first, in case it works.

I know a lot of people are worried that this will break HN socially. I frankly am relieved it didn't break HN literally. The new code touches so many things. I'm amazed it works. But if it does seem to be breaking HN socially, we'll tweak it till it doesn't, and if that's impossible, we'll turn it off. I'm not wedded to having pending comments. I just wanted to try it to see if it can eliminate the very worst comments.