The biggest risk (and most likely outcome) with any tech startup is financial failure. The smart strategy is to do things that will boost your odds of success. Hoarding equity is rarely a good way to do that -- you will most likely end up owning 100% of nothing.

I'm in college, I run an entrepreneurship organization on campus, work full-time at a startup, and I'm doing a side project for fun.

Here's my only complaint, to fellow people who work a regular job or startup AND a side project: don't chunk all of your work into the weekend. Try to at least see your code every day, otherwise it's like coming back from a week-long vacation and not remembering your code very well. Ever stare into the sun and try to get around in a dark room? It's like that.

This past week has been particularly bad because we're doing a push on the product and I've had to do some hiring, but usually I'll try and at the very least look over my code every night so I can keep it fresh in my mind (which keeps my productivity just as high).

And wow, I can relate to this:

"All the engineers kept notebooks, of course. Blogs. They'd write frustrated entries, only to have massive elated breakthroughs the following day."

As for the recommendation to learn native JS: I suggest you instead take the route of learning jQuery. Say goodbye to cross-domain, cross-browser, xmlhttprequest issues. Selectors, manipulation, AJAX, traversing, CSS, effects, it's all there and it works really well.

Pretty clever too.

Click on the logo & letters on the bottom and you can throw them around.

Implementing a given design, especially when it's minimalist, is not the hard part.

If it takes 14 cooks to run the kitchen, each managing antigriddles and sous-vide controllers and pacojets, and your ingredients include absurd amounts of truffles and morels and caviar and better-than-sushi-grade hamachi, and you can only seat 6 tables in a night --- because dinner takes five hours --- then yeah, I can see you coming out at a loss.

oh no, a lame xss bug in a 3rd party cgi script that runs on a solaris web server hosting a website that uses no cookies. surely this is big news!

Now that's built-to-flip.

It hope he has a liquidity event, validating the accelerating pace of business development and shortening of the product life-cycle of today. And when I say "today", I mean of one actual day.

Seriously, it would be awesome if he made out with some cash from this idea. What he's offering is: a cool name, a cool idea (a validated-to-some-extent idea), an implementation, a (nascent) network effect, and publicity in the relevant community.

Of course it seems ridiculous because it is only a day's worth. But that's no real argument against it; it may be an argument against the sale price being very high, but it's no argument against it being worth something.

There is however one very limiting argument against it - the ease of duplication:

If you believed this was a great opportunity, how much would it cost you to catch up? Almost nothing, and you might prefer to start fresh anyway. If it had been going for 3 months, and had 3 months worth of brand recognition, network effect and improvement of implementation, that would be worth something. I don't know how much, but it would take 3 months (approx) to duplicate. And if you didn't buy it, you might never catch up - so not just a few month's worth, but some proportion of a life-time's worth.

Greatest effect i've ever seen on HN.

A lot of people don't like C++. I get that. What I don't get is why people feel personally affronted by the changes. All of the language extensions address real problems that have been faced by real programmers.

C++0x is the solution a large group of people came up with to answer a lot of problems. Articles like this one are written by people who appear to be largely ignorant of these problems. The implicit assumption here is "I'm smarter than the C++ committee." If you think that, then you should wade through the documents produced by the committee and see how you would solve these problems: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/

He's definitely a Mac guy, but I can't blame him. For $10m I'd promote cigarettes to cute at-risk kids.

Monica Lewinsky

You have achieved the difficult task of making CVS less usable.

AFAICT, Sarah Lacy's counter argument paraphrased is: Okay, so if Y Combinator can improve your chances by 10%, then the small equity cut is arguably a fair price. But you can get the same mentoring for free! The free stuff might even be as good!

So is her argument that paying for anything you can get for free is a rip-off? No, she's not even saying that. She's saying it might possibly be a bad deal. That's not even a counter argument. That's FUD.

The idea of making sure to keep your side project's code fresh in your mind is a really excellent one! One of the hardest problems with side projects is being forced to neglect them long enough that it's painful to dive back in.

Apparently getting reviewed on Techcrunch == $20