tonyjwang

Flash fill looks sick.

I was thinking something along the lines of a portfolio of work or LinkedIn profile to get a better sense of your skills/identity. I actually have a scraping project related to a nonprofit grants prospecting startup and wanted to see if you would be a good fit for some work.

I think scammers, even the ones in Nigeria, use a wide variety of tactics. I think it's prudent to be wary in a situation like this, where the OP is explicitly looking to offer services for money in an unusual situation in what will likely be an unconventional transaction.

Hang out at top universities. People there are ambitious and always looking to work on stuff - and there's usually an event or club or two that you can attend where you can meet like-minded, action-biased individuals, even of you're not a student.

Hack-a-thons are also good.

Notepad++

Like notepad, but with basic features (tabs, indentation, syntax colors) for virtually any language you program in.

Could you provide more info? I have no idea whether you're legit or a Nigerian scammer.

I think you're being unfair.

1. The person on Twitter doesn't exclusively ask Ryan about the business. He specifically asks how he spends his day. Even if the asker wanted to know more about the business and less about his day, Ryan's response is appropriate given how the question was phrased.

2. Ryan does talk about which business activities he focuses on. He specifically mentions how he used to handle newsletters, wireframes, support emails, and marketing plans but now focuses on strategy, product, and team communication.

3. Ryan is a CEO of a venture-backed company and people, including ones on HN, are sometimes interested in the lives of people like him, both the personal and professional aspects. The personal details he shared helped me understand how he's able to maintain work-life balance, notwithstanding the demands of a CEO, which I find personally useful.

4. As to your complaint of him specifically mentioning his iPhone, one of the other commenters put it best: "Because his identity revolves around the brand of his phone and he's just begging for your validation. OR The post is full of specific details and he owns an iPhone."

If you want Ryan to be more specific, you could ask him on his blog. But I think it's unreasonable to expect that Ryan should have had the foresight to be more specific, and then subsequently criticize him for not being specific.

You might like Durham, NC. Small town feel with a slower pace compared to the big cities, but a decent startup scene with a few local incubators and universities nearby. If you want to work for a big company, Lenovo and a couple other big companies have campuses nearby.

Hackers also like living and working near other hackers in a hacker-supportive community.

Also, if you're a Berkeley or Stanford grad, you probably prefer living in an exciting city like San Francisco instead of staying in suburbia. And even if you personally don't, your friends will, which means SF is still the place to be.

I've started and stopped programming, but feel like http://www.teamtreehouse.com has been really helpful. They have lots of videos to help fill gaps in knowledge, with a bunch on building web apps from start to finish, including RoR and other languages/frameworks.

I used idea paint to create whiteboard walls:

www.ideapaint.com

To offer a different perspective, I disagree with jnorthrop and think your value proposition is clear - you're helping companies encourage customers to share purchases and provide metrics of how that sharing affects the bottom line.

I like the idea and think it's clever.

Under the ABA's Model Rules of Professional Conduct, providing legal advice without a license potentially could be considered "practicing law without a license" or, for licensed attorneys, the creation of an attorney-client relationship, which creates duties for the attorney.

I was in a similar position as you: C++ experience from AP Comp Sci courses in high school, CS106X (accelerated intro-level CS course at Stanford, ended up majoring in something else), and Wordpress hacking from various projects. Worked through Rails for Zombies, why's (poignant) guide to ruby, but none of them really stuck for me.

www.teamtreehouse.com OTOH, has been great. easy-to-understand videos with logical progression.

Shift + T adds a gmail to Google tasks via keyboard shortcut.

Even better, you could buy and sell one on Craigslist and save even more.

The idea is nice - when my fiancée and I travel to Taiwan for our honeymoon, I'd probably want to read reviews from people who travel like us (or have also planned out a couple vacation) rather than just any tourist.

Some comments on design: the images and text were a bit dense for me - yet I also felt I didn't get enough of a sense of the UX. For me, I'd like to envision the ACTION I would be taking on your site - what links would I click on, theoretically, to search for information, how would I find users like me, etc. Also, because the images were circumscribed by circles, it felt like the screenshots didn't capture enough for me to REALLY want to learn more. It felt like I was peering through a tube, unnecessarily constricted in my access to information.

Anyway, just my 2c. Good luck!

clickable: http://www.nonprofitgrantsfinder.com

Cool site. What tool did you use to design it?

I'm really curious how you outsourced your app development. Have you written a blog post about it? I'd love to see some of your documents that you used to communicate with the outsourcing team and a list of books/sites/references that helped you accomplish what you did.

www.founderdating.com

On second thought, forget what I said about dividing the value by two. Brain fart.

To offer somewhat different advice, you could simply try and value his earlier efforts, not based on how much he's lost on his earlier company, but on how much the knowledge is worth to you.

For example, if you two started out as 50-50 partners and wanted to buy this knowledge from someone else, how much would you pay for it? Divide that cost by two, and that's how much you should "pay" your cofounder, whether in equity or cash.

The common wisdom is 50-50 no matter what, and it's a good rule of thumb; you don't want to feel like you have more or less at stake than he does and vice versa. If you're going to compensate him for his previous work, issue debt from your new company or pay upfront; I'd avoid changing the 50-50 split as much as possible.

And, of course, as other posters have mentioned, it could be that your current negotiating position indicates something negative about your cofounder, which is possible, but I don't think that's necessarily true.

Under "Get started in minutes" Its should be It's.

Cool idea.

It's funny - a lot of my classmates at Stanford who started out in non-CS programs switched midway or picked up coding skills later. There are three startups that come to mind, two of which are YC alums, where at least one co-founder did not initially major in CS but picked up enough technical chops to code an awesome product.

I think it's difficult to learn outside a college environment - without the educational support system of peers, teachers, structure, credentialing, and student loans - it's a tough choice to try and learn how to code later AFTER you've already majored in something else. There's no guarantee that if you learn how to code on your own that you're learning properly, or efficiently, or anyone will hire you or want to co-found a startup with you. I think there's A LOT we can be doing to improve the pipeline of software developers.

That said, personally, I'm probably going to learn how to code and forego a joint degree in an MBA program, even though I'm 26 and two thirds done with law school. Is this the right choice? I'm not sure, but among all my friends who are entrepreneurs, it seems like coding is something you really can't afford to not learn anymore.

Sorry, still figuring out the details of HN. Clickable?

http://www.quora.com/Choosing-Colleges/How-does-a-star-engin...