Hell, I'm 62, and I just started a project which may well turn into a startup in the foreseeable future. Go for it!

In all honesty, 38 is probably more "ideal" than "too old".

Been done plenty of times. Now get to work!

"Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does."

Overfunding does kill some startups, but it's an exaggeration to call it the number 1 cause of death. What kills the most startups is building lame products.

I don't think it's as hard to keep a site from sliding as one might think from the examples of previous sites where things went downhill as they got more popular. Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit were all companies. They wanted to grow. Whereas News.YC is a side project. We don't care about growth. It's much easier to do things to keep up the quality when you're willing to sacrifice growth.

Suggestions:

1) Talk to others who got sued, form a single group, hire a lawyer, and fight like hell

2) Talk to others who got sued, and as a group, talk to Amazon and all the other who are big and did not get sued, and cooperate to get a declaratory judgment with the "sponsorship" of the big fish that did not get sued.

This is all about grabbing the low-hanging fruit to go after the people than can defend themselves well. The natural defense is to undo that advantage of the plaintiff.

Everyone knows it's a bogus patent, don't be foolish enough to fall for the trick. Unite.

Here's my thought on the matter... The "Killer feature" here is the lack of killer features. There are no buddy lists, stupid picture icons, special groups, or karma-whoring incentives. It's just a simple place to exchange news that is generally relevant to a hacker community.

The lack of needless bells and whistles to constantly hold peoples attention will generally make this site un-fun for the unwashed masses of Digg and Reddit refugees.

BTW, welcome to hacker news...

How ironic to read this question this evening. I'm 38. Right now I am finalising the documentation pack (16 documents in all!) to sell my second company. It's two-and-a-half years old. We sign the documents in 12 hours time. The company took no VC, but just a small amount of trade money. We're selling out to our largest customer because they made us an offer we couldn't refuse.

At 38 you are most certainly NOT too old to startup. At 38 your personal circumstances may mean that you cannot take the same level of risk that you could at 28 or 21. But if you are happy, healthy, and have a means of keeping a roof over your head and your dependents' head, then go for it.

The very very worst that could happen is that you could find yourself looking for a job in a few months time. But you'll be looking for that job with a bunch more experience, and credibility, than you would have without having tried to start something.

Best wishes to you. Enjoy it. And if your luck works out, you'll make a fortune. If your luck doesn't work out, you'll hold with you a great experience that you'll cherish forever.

No.

While this all may be a good plan it is not the only way to go. My startup, engineyard.com is only two years old. But we built something people wanted and started selling it to them in September of 2006 with only $120k seed money raised from friends and family. We were profitable by January 2007 and had 50% growth month over month for most of 2007.

We could have just left it at that but we had plans to become an open source company as well as a hosting company. Developing new software projects like Rubinius, Merb and Vertebra take time and money to pay top notch engineers. So we decided to take a gamble on going big and we took some VC money. The thing is, we already had a profitable business and the VC's came to us, we never sought them out.

So we were able to accelerate our strategy by taking the VC money and we got excellent terms since we already had a profitable business. And we took money from Benchmark that was less then other VC's were offering us because Benchmark's contacts and knowledge has been a huge strategic advantage for us.

We have been able to grow our 3 person startup to over 80 employees worldwide, and through our VC's contacts were able to secure a series B from Amazon, NEA and Benchmark.

We would never have been able to accelerate our growth and ideas as fast as we have if we never took money. By taking money we have cemented our place in the Ruby landscape as the 800 pound gorilla ;)

So yes maybe it is the safe play to not take money and try to sell a product that people want and thats great! But sometimes it really is worth taking big risks with big money working toward big goals.

This is not an either or scenario and both ways of doing things are equally viable

The first and best book on investing that you should read: A Random Walk Down Wall Street (http://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-Down-Wall-Street/dp/039306...). This book has great investing advice; is funny, interesting, and well-written; and clearly explains what's going on behind different investment approaches. In other words, it doesn't just answer the "what" question, it answers "why" and "how".

As for specific advice, investing isn't that difficult. The best approach is to be lazy: decide on an asset allocation (e.g. 50% US stocks, 30% international stocks, 20% bonds), buy index funds, and rebalance to these percentages every now and then. Vanguard (https://personal.vanguard.com/us/home) is probably the most respected provider of index funds; give them a shot.

Check out David Swensen's lazy portfolio if you want something more advanced: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6203264.

For investing discussion, try http://www.bogleheads.org/.

Oh. Oops, noticed the date. How things change in just a few years. =)

Still, it shows how fast X is progressing, now that we've ditched XFree86.

Since the split, X has really moved into the 90s, gaining <sarcasm>esoteric</sarcasm> features like monitor hotplugging, being able to configure more than one input device at once (like a touchpad and external mouse) and other silly things that nobody would ever want.

It's also jumped ahead of other window systems by leaps and bounds in some areas -- for example, multitouch support has been merged in, and X will be the first desktop window system to support multiple pointers, input redirection is on it's way, a new OpenGL framework (Gallium3D) is coming, new 2d acceleration (Exa/GEM/TTM/...) are in various states of merged-inness, etc.

And they've done all of this while deleting between 10,000 and 50,000 lines of code per release. And preserving backwards compatibility.

I'd say the future looks pretty bright for X.

[edit: give a better overview of what I mean by X progressing]

because it answers the question perfectly.

We've funded people older than that. In some types of startups it's the ideal age. E.g. if you want to build a factory or make enterprise software, or do something else that requires lots of capital and/or industry experience.

In case you don't wish to scroll through all the TC comments, this might be pertinent:

"I’m the Zlio.com CEO. If you are one of the sued companies (like us), please contact me by email: channel at berrebi.org.

We need to discuss together"

# The above is not from me, just quoted from the TC comments!

PG https://hackertimes.com/item?id=196547 :

"1. The kind of stories that are most popular on reddit and digg (pictures and politics) are banned here.

2. Because that kind of stuff is banned, the average digg/reddit reader, if he comes across News.YC, finds the content boring and leaves.

3. The custom of the site is to be civil in comments.

4. Votes on comments affect karma.

5. Trolls are fairly rapidly banned. The only reason Giles hasn't already been banned is that I thought perhaps he was joking."

To be quite honest, I find that format easier to read (well, why else would I have posted it that way?)

A short snippet that is being responded to puts the text in context, allowing the reader to see exactly what I'm going on about, without reading the article over and over, matching up what part, exactly, I'm responding to.

Sure, massive copy-and-paste is a waste of time, and obscures the post. However a lack of context, in my opinion, will make things even more confusing to the reader, especially in the case of the text that's being responded to being on a different page.

Ah well, each to their own.