He talks about that in the video (linked elsewhere in this thread, on YouTube.) It's used to keep out the more casual trolls. But on the site itself, you're not required to reveal your identity.
1) Provide an api (or release a dataset) and let people experiment with new ranking schemes.
2) The influence of your votes on ranking could be correlated to your relative importance in the community. You could do this with a simple PageRank where nodes are users and edges are votes.
Ebay is a deceptive example; auctions inherently have powerful network effects. I think Amazon might be a slightly better example: tons of competition but still a lot of money to be made. There can be many winners in this market, and Groupon will probably be the biggest winner.
As your first sentence indicates, in this scenario you have specific, attainable goals. Just getting to that point goes a long way towards beating procrastination.
Bill Gates (44.2%) , Pierre Omidyar (32.5%), and Larry Ellison (30.6%) are the top three in terms of Pre-IPO ownership. I wonder how they managed that.
Also, Microsoft only had 5.4% VC ownership pre-IPO.
Ebay had ~20% of equity owned by outside investors at IPO. Oralce had 8.3% at IPO. There is an inverse relationship between outside investment and founder equity. VC funding should be seen as just another tool, not the goal of a startup. HN - for all it's benefits - sometimes obscures this basic fact.
If you live in California there's an annual minimum franchise tax of $800, plus whatever annual fees are charged by the state you incorporate your LLC in.
My unused CA S-Corp has been the bane of my existence lately. From the $800 fee to the documentation required to stay in good standing (small, but easy to forget when the company does nothing), it's more pain than it's worth.
If you're someone with lots of ideas and lots of peaks of excitement, it actually might better to postpone incorporation until you can't responsibly continue without some sort of limited liability.
Which is why we invented http://foundrs.com, which is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Don't pay any taxes until your business takes off (at which point you should incorporate), but have a good founder agreement in place so that the compan doesn't explode during takeoff :-)
In California, it is $800 or an amount based on total revenue, whichever is greater. The formula differs for LLCs, S Corps, and C Corps. Furthermore, S Corps do not pay the franchise tax in their first year unless they are profitable.
Generally, incorporation as an LLC is preferable for entities making more than $100,000 in revenue, while an S Corp is preferable for lower revenues.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc