Hacker News Reader

timgon Startup Company Form: LLC or S-Corp? Which is easier and which is better?

I went for a Delaware C-Corp. Costed me $300 to incorporate + 30 in annual fees, so far for the first year. This was a relatively large expense for me so let's hope it was worth it.

timgon You launched early and your users' feedback is all useless or wrong. How to get useful feedback?

I define useless feedback as people telling me that they want some obscure feature which I then implement and then, predictably, no one, not even the requester ever uses at all.

timgon You launched early and your users' feedback is all useless or wrong. How to get useful feedback?

No. I didn't say that they don't like it and there have been no noticeable bugs.

It was very well received by all of those who I heard from. The problem is that the whole "release as early as possible and get user feedback quickly" strategy has not been effective for me at all. My question is how I can get better feedback from users, not how I can suck less.

timgon What is your stimulant of choice to keep you working through the night?

Wow, something that's legal in the US but not elsewhere. Don't see that too often.

timgon Reddit: Language vs. Platform

The ease with which libraries can be used appears to be the only metric that matters in high level languages.

timgon What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

Simple:

The cost of pursuing the idea outweigh the benefit, considering risk.

More directly: burn money, cost of leaving present occupation.

timgon Polarize Me - If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you

Very complex topic that I don't think the author evaluated thoroughly enough.

This advice sounds applicable outside of this example case though.

timgon 3 YC Companies That Have Gained Some "Traction"

Traffic seems to be a very poor metric for comparison in this case.

timgon Is there a list of the programming languages and environments YC acceptees have used on their applications?

Nah, it's just because the lisp guys smell too bad to catch their flight to the interview.

timgon "Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp"

Hah, some of those other parts were much funnier.

timgon How would you build a human computer so that people can write possibly ambiguous code in high-level English and have it "execute" by others using common sense?

is anything closer to a layman's pseudo-code than python?

timgon When is the best time to promote your startup (e.g., on what day of the week and at what time)?

Agreed for sites like reddit, digg, maybe even closer to 330 or 4am on Sunday. None of the usual, intelligent users are on at that time to be critical of your site or discredit the comments you leave. Everyone is just blindly voting.

Of course, press releases are probably the most reliable and effective way.

timgon YouTube Obeys Fake Takedown Request From 15 Year Old

This story can still be outdone though:

How long until someone writes a virus that mass sends takedowns?

timgon I'm in dire need of assistance.

To be fair, if it wasn't social then it would hardly need to be on the net in the first place.

Eg:

Complex circuit analysis app - no, not on the net.

Tool that helps people communicate and share knowledge - yes, on the net.

timgon James Hong: Enough with the Facebook/Friendster analogies...

Was thinking the same the other day.

Someone needs to slap those PR writers back in line.

timgon Most Un-Impressive Recruiting Pitch I've Ever Seen :(

The generic nature of the content of this solicitation should have been obvious regardless of whether they included the recipient's name.

timgon 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date

Yes, skype seemed very big when I was in europe. Not so much here in the US, but still huge. Then again, it's not quite web2.0

timgon Good resources on offshore incorporation (taxes, legal work,...)?

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

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

timgon Why I'm frustrated that I wasn't accepted into Y Combinator.

summary:

Tease investors suck the life out of startups.

timgon Dinner-and-a-Movie Theory: Why Reddit Gets it Backwards

" How can we solve this? "

The real question is who would back the development of this. In startups, no one cares about solving a problem if this solution does not bring in tons of money.

I was thinking about this the other day. What you are describing, problems faced by a social site _late_ in it's life, are not of particular interest to most startups. Why? Because by the point this solution has made any difference, the exit has already come and gone.

(Not trying to be negative, but figure out how this system will make a substantial difference from the beginning and then you'll be set.)

timgon WriteWith : Everybody point and laugh

And, as yet another man has said, "there is no bad publicity"...

timgon YourStreet.com Brings Social Network to Your Street

This was one of the best features of a nice little site that was called myspace.

Let me rephrase this: search by zipcode does this great already.

timgon I'm in like with you invites

timg.is.here at gmail.com

timgon What is the best credit card processing setup for startups?

Don't forget to check the content policy,

http://checkout.google.com/seller/content_policies.html

Google's looks straight-forward, but sometimes providers have uncommon restrictions in there. eg, the "Travel packages and offers" wouldn't be immediately obvious.

timgon Host your own app or have it hosted remotely?

Violating what TOS? Who would ban ssh? BTW, all of the static files are still hosted on my original web host and I was using sshfs to transfer them. So the bandwidth was really minimal.

timgon Host your own app or have it hosted remotely?

I started off hosting remotely, but my extremely cheep hosting plan limited my CPU time excessively. Since I was behind a NAT, I had to do some proxying tricks through my provider to serve from my home computer:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/1e1a7/comments/c1e4ka

That certainly worked well. Now that I have more money to burn and a big site nearing launch though, I will definitely be trying out some dedicated hosting.

Basically the answer is: depends how broke you are.

timgon "Reject the idea of being almost good enough"

Somewhere within this plan, lies more hidden costs:)

timgon What is the best time of year to launch a site?

I agree with Feb/March/April. Summer will give you a lot of users who will use your site more thoroughly. If they're still around by winter then you have a good chance of sustaining the growth. That's my guess.

timgon How does news.yc order comments? They seem to randomly reorder themselves between reloads.

Well that's an interesting approach.

timgon "Reject the idea of being almost good enough"

I know people who were dead-set on ideas, put everything they had into it and literally lost everything. There are many places/situations where time, funding, and cofounders are vastly less available.

Lets look at it in reverse: why do so incredibly few people execute the most obvious, high potential startup plans? Because there are innumerable costs that those who are already at the top have lost their ability to accurately consider.

All I can say is, good luck all.