Perhaps you could start a news.yc Vote Exchange website. I liked the funny linux command line story, so in exchange for me not upvoting it, you can not upvote something else!

I claim that one of the best features you could add is a feedback mechanism in the site. At the minimum, stick "Report a bug, Request a feature" as a link on all of the pages. Then give the user a simple text field to type their comment into. If you want to go fancier, I think iminlikewithyou.com has a nice feedback mechanism. (The implication being that you could look at their site and steal the mechanism :) )

If the text looks grey on a grey background, you might be using firefox. The site is much more readable on IE. Not that you should have to change.

It is a compelling story, but I think the lesson is that you need the right *kind* of positive thinking.

I've been using django, but I picked it because I enjoy python more than ruby. I think that they are close enough that the selection comes down to whether you've any pre-existing experience with either framework or language. If not, then I claim the decision really lies between which language you want.

My biased and un-researched opinion is that you'll find more support for learning python than ruby.

Definately return to the main page after editing a comment please. I think I hit 'update' 3 times before even thinking about why I hadn't switched back.

The difficulty of keeping everyone informed increases greatly when you go from 2 to three people, as you go from one communication channel to three. A small programming team can take advantage of easy communication to have better efficiency over a large team, and I imagine that the advantages are similar for all of the tasks in a startup. Because a startup is desperately trying to make itself successful before running out of money, efficiency is probably even more important and increases the chance of success disproportionate to the increase from having more people involved.

Having never started a startup, I wouldn't know, but how long does the average successful startup go without hiring more people? The number of founders pretty clearly only matters during that period. And, is that the hardest part of getting a startup off the ground? PG wrote that he generally hired people when none of the people already at the company could do the job themselves. Seems to me that if 3 people have incredibly much trouble communicating, you'd have a similar amount of trouble once there was too much work for two people and you had to hire another one.

What's different between the very earliest stages of a startup and the stage where you've hired one person?

This problem is firefox specific. For whatever reason, IE does The Right Thing. Actually, the whole site just looks better in IE, so maybe this should be a request for better Firefox support :)