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I have been struggling with a modification of:

    Guy: “If I gave you a million dollars, would you sleep with me?”
    Girl: “A million dollars is a lot of money, and you don’t look that bad, so I guess I would consider it”
    Guy: “Ok, since I don’t have a million dollars, would you sleep with me for $100?”
    Girl: (outraged) “What kind of girl do you think I am?”
    Guy: “We’ve already established the answer to that question. Now we’re just negotiating the price”

The question I'm struggling with is an issue of Social Games. It seems like this great business opportunity: low initial cost -- build something, throw it on the web, see if you can make money; they log everything, do A/B testing, figure out what people like / what people want to buy, and iterate on that.

The downside, it appears is that the amount of money I make ... is directly proportional to how addicted other members of human race is -- which means I become motivated to make the game as addictive as possible.

Have other members of HN dealt with this issue? And if so, how did you resolve it?

Subtitled: How to surround yourself with smart people outside of academia?

To me, the greatest advantage of being a CS professor, is being surrounded by lots of smart, motivated colleagues & students. The greatest disadvantage -- is that much of research appears to be about doing "new" rather than "useful" things, and funding is governed by NSF/DARPA rather than market demands.

YCombinator seems to have this figured out -- put yourself in a position where students who want to launch startups come to you. So, question is: how do you start something like this?

If my company is incorporated in DE, but I live in CA, yet I only sell iPhone apps,

do I have to pay CA corporate taxes?

[Does selling iPhone apps count as doing business i CA?]

After reading 48 Laws of Power, I started seeing interactions between 1) others & myself, 2) others & others in a completely different light. There were these mental "hooks" I could analyze human interactions through.

Neil Strauss's "Rules of the Game" did something similar.

I'm currently reading Robin Baker's "Sperm Wars" and it's again showing me human interactions through a new light.

So, HN: what are the books that presented new theories / ideas on human nature that has changed the way you view / analyze human interactions?

I want to register a C corporation. However, I don't want it to link directly back to me (this is not for tax dodging; I will happily pay my taxes). I just want my involvement with the startup to remain anonymous until I succeed [no need to broadcast my failures to the world.]

Is there anyway to setup this up?