skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to agree. If they can solve the pay per view concept for niche live events, they'll make money. If they can make partnering with live bands, seminar presenters, etc. seamless and profitable for both parties, it could be a big market.
Actually people do move to the City for the food. The point is that all Chicago has is Charlie Trotter's. SF has hundreds of amazing restaurants.
It's a small business that is attempting to become either a large business or part of another large business.

37Signals is neither; it's about six people who want the company to remain small and independent. (I have no problem with that.)
Easy!

1. Pick one word that is somewhat related to what you do. Make sure it ends in "ER" or "ED".

2. Add .com to the end of it

3. Drop at least one of the vowels, preferably the last one.

4. Register that domain!

Bonus points if you can find a word that ends in a top level domain. Then, just add a random dot anywhere else in the name. And Poof! You now have a three level domain that nobody will ever remember how to type in - but hey, it's sooooooo web 2.0.
I'm just guessing, but I'd say he's intimidated. Usually people who are frequently accused of arrogance are overcompensating. He doesn't like the Bay Area because so much happens here, and he's not a part of it.

Afford? DHH is not rich.
Let me clarify that. The Wikipedia article says that MyRichUncle become a traditional maker of student loans "following an unsuccessful attempt to secure greater financing". In other words, although they had plenty of young people who wanted to sell a fraction of their future earnings in exchange for money now, they could not match those young people up with investors.

They began trying to match young people up with investors for a fraction of future earnings in 1999 and began making traditional student loans in 2005, which is where the "6 years" comes in, but during those 6 years they might have had to turn away most of the young people who wanted money now.
A deal with LiveNation alone would cover most of their expenses.
On requesting an estimate
"explosion of companies named phoodcaphe.com and this dropping the e is not a good trend. It's cheap knockoffs of a few successful companies and products that did it well"

Some of the names are awful, I agree. But most of these companies -- including Flickr -- are using this kind of technique because all the domain names in the world are already taken. It's a defensive/desperation thing.
Bare with me as I really dislike suburbia:-) Suburbs (of which I would exclude most college towns I am aware of -- that's not too many) are hell holes. They are not good for raising children unless you think spending an hour or two per day of quality time while feverishly preparing/ordering dinner and/or getting them ready for bed is quality time. Most suburbanites waste upwards of 3 hours per day commuting to and from work in the cities where all the jobs are. The exhaustion of parents is apparent in just how often suburban families have their meals prepared for them by fast food outlets or restaurants. Those suburban parents are simply so exhausted when they get home that they often give up and order a pizza for dinner. This unhealthy lifestyle bleeds down to their children. I can't remember the last time I saw children actually running around outside and playing in the suburbs. And if they were, they'd probably get yelled at as these days adults don't want other people's children ruining their immaculately kept lawns or blocking their cars on the road while they play sports. Suburbs rarely have community focal points and destinations are only reachable by driving. Not that those destinations are particularly noteworthy as they're big box plazas and faceless corporations whose contribution to local community culture is comprised of sponsoring the local soccer team.

We've had a few decades now to observe that the promises of suburbia simply don't hold up. What's sad is that broken families stressed from both parents having to work jobs to hold down a mortgage for the perfect suburban home, consequently eating into the time they would normally enjoy being a family, and epidemics like obesity which are more rampant in suburbia than in many major cities in North America, have done little to get people to wake up to the reality that suburbs suck. But you know what probably will wake people up? High gas prices and an imploding real estate market will.

This TED talk sums up my thoughts on suburbia quite well: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/121
I commented thusly on the site as well, but it bears repeating:

A friend of mine used to joke about rewriting the rules of discourse during Q&As so that instead of this: (P = presenter, T = troll)

P: “Any questions? … Yes?”
T: “Have you considered the effects of aliasing?”
P: “We’re using a bicubic blah blah blah…”

You would have this:

P: “Any questions or comments? … Yes?”
T: “I know about aliasing.”
P: “Thank you.”
ActiveShipping - useful Ruby gateway for interacting with shippers (FedEx, UPS, etc)
Data Visualisation Blogs You Might Not Know About
It's not 37Signals's goal to stay "small"; it's their goal to grow revenue instead of people and real estate.
Why don't you launch with no ads, and see if you actually get the traffic you are predicting? Worry about the ads later.
Amen. I look at Amazons revenues, and the way I act when I buy stuff on the site (piling up more and more from their recommendations) and wonder why they are not cleaning GOOG's clock.

Profit margins seem to be the key.
Did you read my comment, or do you just not know who Grant Achatz is? SF has hundreds of restaurants. On the high-end, many of them are good (below it, you wind up in North Beach for overpriced tourist Italian). But Chicago does too; so do Seattle and Atlanta.

Name someone who has moved from NYC or Chicago because the restaurant scene in either didn't match up to San Francisco. I'll take your word for it that that person exists.
Most children in the U.S. do not have to go to school if their parents are willing to help them avoid school: the parents need only tell the school district that they are homeschooling their child from now on. (The parents then of course become responsible for overseeing the child's education.)

The school district will probably not like it, but unless the parents are under court supervision for some reason (e.g., the parents were convicted of a crime) the school district probably cannot force the parents to send the child to school, especially if the parents are willing to do research on the internet or appear in court once or twice.

But if the child's parents want the child to go to school, then yeah, the child has to go.

The public school system is probably a waste of time for a bright child who can learn on his or her own unless the child lives near an exceptionally good public school. More bright children who have proven that they can learn things on their own should be homeschooled.
FCC chief says no need for new regulation of the Internet
I don't know. The last big VC-funded company I was with was in Ann Arbor, MI. When the valley influenced the rest of the VC-backed or acquired companies I worked with, it did so by moving the established company out to California. I've never worked for a company whose opportunities came simply from being located in California.

Meanwhile, the elephant in the room here is that you aren't going to be acquired by Google, in the same sense as you are not going to win the lottery. There's a get-rich-quick mentality behind web startups that is totally not borne out by the numbers, and it cuts both ways: unrealistic hubris that infects judgement (for instance, by moving teams out of comfortable environments to San Francisco), and devastating emo temper tantrums at minor setbacks, like not being accepted into YC.
No one is arguing that Amazon isn't worth a very large fortune, and that a big part of their value is in the data that they have about customers and the reviews that customers have written for them for free. But that doesn't really alter Facebook's value (there have always been multiple sources of data about consumers...and yet it is still valuable data).
Allstate Insurance had/has a VC arm? What on earth.....
Way to take my argument out of context.

First, I'm citing Feedburner to demonstrate that large Google acquisitions don't have to come from the Bay Area. Are you refuting that?

Second, if you ask me to name more Chicago startups, I'll add 37Signals, EveryBlock, Threadless, Inkling Markets, and of course Orbitz.

Third, nobody is arguing that any other city in the US, including Boston, can go toe to toe with San Francisco simply on body count. I am, however, objecting to the argument that in 2008, the only way to be successful in a web company is to be based in the same city as your potential acquirer. I'll guarantee you this: your customers will not give a shit where you're located.
Game Changing Android Application
If Android manages to clear the porting obstacles that await it as it's distributed over more than one reference device, and if it manages to deliver a high bar of quality (at least as high as the SDK has shown so far), it could really change the way we live/work. Those are some big ifs ... but some exciting ones nonetheless.
Mint's Fresh Take on Personal Finance
One Place for Your Many Online Lives
I like how Yahoo's stock went down after the announcement:
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:YHO...

Is the subtext here that by doing well financially, it makes it less likely that MSFT will take over Yahoo? And as a result, the arbs are selling Yahoo now?
I Just Started My FriendFeed
I'd just like to thank everyone again for their input. Hopefully soon ill be posting with not only a name but a live link.
Just have a timer that changes the ad every 30 seconds (or whatever time frame you want). Coding wise, should be pretty trivial.
Yeah, I've worked with Drupal, it is far worse. However, new things like Rails, Merb, even Django suffer from this far less.
Data mining personnel
Start without ads, gain your traffic, ebay your adspace and then advertise these listings in the adspace your selling. Depending on your volume, niche and longevity it might work.

Just an idea.

EDIT: Sorry, just saw noodles point.
Besides MyRichUncle, who offered money mostly for college, yours is the only report I know of someone actually being offered money for a percentage of future income.
[Ask HN] to the guy who kept asking questions at SS
leave one - want to ask you a couple questions about the points you brought up.
Just because there are some crap companies being started, and some crap investments being made, doesn't mean everything coming out of the bay area is as DHH describes. I'm working at a company thats doing quite well, and will continue to do quite well. Being close to the bay area was essential, so essential that the founders both relocate from their homes for most of the year to be here.
If you live in a metropolitan area (not a given -- like I said, college towns are a nice alternative) -- you generally have the option of living inside the city proper, or living in a suburb. If you want your kids to have a yard to play in, you'll probably end up in a suburb. But that still doesn't mean you have to be a typical suburbanite.

Some suburbs are snotty, overpriced McMansion nightmares. Pass. Others are more affordable. And if you find a suburb you can actually afford to live in, you may not have to have both parents working like crazy to make the house payment. One problem solved. Second, you may have the option of taking control of where you work. If you start your own business, you can often find cheap space in the 'burbs. Or you can work out of some kind of "third space," if you don't need an office.

Don't get me wrong. I'm definitely not defending the cookie-cutter keeping-up-with-the-Joneses traditional idea of the suburbs. Just the idea that you can make a suburb work as a decent place to live on your own terms if you want to.
Who Stole the Plans for iRobot's Battle Bots?
Pandora is a fantastic example of how this works.
I loved DHH's speech at startup school, but having lived in Chicago and now living in SF, I have to disagree with him on this one.

His point seems twofold: 1) The availability of funding in the Bay Area tempts people to take it whether they need it or not, and 2) The competition for top talent is stronger here than anywhere else.

The first point, on funding, is news to me. Yes, the availability of VC here is correlated with more Bay Area startups being funded. It doesn't mean that your startup will automatically be funded just because you're located here - the competition for funding is as strong as the competition for talent.

I meet people doing self-funded startups all the time. The differentiator is whether you want to be the next Facebook vs. traditional profit model. Yes, the funded web-2.0-ish startups get most of the press here, it doesn't mean that no one is doing it another way.

Yes, the competition for talent here is fierce. Right now I'm looking for a CSS expert, no programming required, and even that is nearly impossible to find. However, I know I will find someone sooner or later because I'm located in SF. I shudder to think how hard this would be if I were in St. Louis or something, or even a less tech-centric city like Chicago. A few weeks ago I needed an expert Flex hacker to help with something I'm building, so I just called up my friends until I found one. Try doing that in the midwest. Also, I'm at the kind of small, traditional-profit-type company that DHH so admires.

Hackers move here because SF is the best place on earth to be a hacker, and that fact mitigates in your favor when looking for talent.
How to decouple from Twitter, now
"Eye flirting" might be perceived as rude in the wrong context by people who aren't lesbians. Understanding that context is part of being socially adept.

There's a fine line between confident and creepy.
Computers for the people
It's not a public company, and if the contract or moral obligation to the original shareholder was inalienable (probably), it shouldn't be treated like it is.
FCC: Comcast blocking was widespread | InfoWorld
Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
SEO:

run a search on Yahoo.com for site:your competitor's sites, or people who rank highly for the keywords you want to rank highly for. Look at the inbound links coming to these sites. Figure out why the site that links to your competitor should also link to you, and then tell that to the site owner.

The biggest grey hat SEO technique right now is "articles." You write or have written articles about some topic relevant to your site. You upload these articles to article directories, with the terms that the article must include certain links back to your site. People trying to get content on their site repost your article, and you get links to your site.
I used to agree with a lot of what you say. Then I had kids ;-)

Actually, I still don't disagree entirely, but you did leave out one very important consideration: schools. In many American urban centers the schools are poor, and housing in urban school districts that are good is prohibitively expensive.

So you start looking at suburbs, and the commute is a trade-off you make for the better schools.

Oh, and I wish we could order pizza here -- too far out in the sticks.
Adbrite.com would allow you to sell ads for a length of time (day, week, month) instead of being based upon impressions or clicks.
That's a good list... whether it is the absolute truth or not, it consists of good practices.
is asp classic better then both ruby and php?
His "avoid sets" principle reminds me of the argument that Lisp is counterintuitive because people don't think in lists.
Sounds like there is a good story here...
just to nitpick, Orbitz totally wasn't a "startup" in the conventional sense, and certainly not the DHH sense. It was a project conceived and funded by a cartel of major airlines. The initial funding was 150 million dollars!
> The public school system is probably a waste of time for a bright child who can learn on his or her own unless the child lives near an exceptionally good public school. More bright children who have proven that they can learn things on their own should be homeschooled.

Aren't there often socialization problems associated with home schooling? I don't know a lot about the topic, so I could be dead wrong. But overall, I would be more comfortable sending bright kids to a solid school with a good gifted and talented program where they can spend time with other kids their own age than home schooling them myself or having them skip a bunch of grades.

Is this a misconception on my part?
Their competitors have $200 million? What the hell do you with that much money? Snort coke and munch on dodo egg omelets?
You're right; I'm just thinking about tech companies, but the same logic would lead someone to count MOT.
It takes two months(!!!) to get money from Adsense, for example, anyway.
Performance targets can be a double-edged sword. When the Blair government introduced performance targets for the public service, it resulted in a mixture of improvement and unintended consequences (ie. gaming of targets).

Manipulation of targets in the case of hospitals, from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4721174.stm

So as Greenspun says, the selection of targets that are difficult to game is pretty important.
12 Steps to Complete Search Engine Domination - From Zero to Hero in Just 6 Months
EcoCho Apparently Not Green Enough For Google
Sony to buy Gracenote for $260 million
Take Your Friends' Activities Wherever You Go With MySocial 24X7
Interesting.

A somewhat tangential question...for a company like Craigslist that seems content to collect profits as an independent private company rather than cash out with a sale or an IPO, what happens to those that hold stock? I'm thinking not just of investors like eBay but in particular their employees. Since lots of starup employees decide where to work based on where they will be able to cash out their options, how does a company like Craigslist keep its employees on board?
Firefox 3 Bookmarks (My god, it’s full of stars…)
Search Wikia takes a step closer to the promise of ’search meets Wikipedia’
CNN launches new online community:  The League of First Time Voters
Virtualization Goes Mobile With VirtualLogix
I threw together a script that could try to coin words (say, by taking any letter, plus a suffix that your really like) or attach words together, and then check that against whois.

http://daniellefong.com/2008/03/01/on-naming-startups-and-ru...
That's probably because this guy's a poser. You can do all the networking in the world but, sooner or later, someone's gonna ask what he's got. All he'll be able to say is a rolodex.

"Build something people want."

Not "Meet people who want something"
>>> I'm definitely not defending the cookie-cutter keeping-up-with-the-Joneses traditional idea of the suburbs.

I grew up in the suburbs and never met anyone who met that stereotype. Suburban homes are cheaper than their urban counter part in terms of floorspace and acreage which is important if you are raising children. I've never met a family where both parents worked in order to afford their home and I'm not speaking of very wealthy people either.

What suburbs offer is a quiet, out of the way place, with lots of room, which makes family life much easier.

Then again, I live in Virginia so I might be confused. There's no distinction between city/suburb/rural county around here, and one never really existed.
"Sitting down and just building something cool without the above is generally a recipe for disaster."

Doing all of the above without building anything is a bigger recipe for disaster.

All that other stuff is important, but at the end of the day, someone who has already built something others want will be way ahead.
Tomorrow's news? Apple switches away from Gracenote for trackname-detection.
Why "no Macs" is no longer a defensible IT strategy
What about few, non-flashy non-annoying ads? :) I mean, you're the owner, you get to decide what ads you want, and you're allowed to place restrictions on what they can do, look like, etc. The more restrictions, the less advertisers you'll find, of course, but some simple rules that you set in place can differentiate your site. For example, Digg.com only has two ads on the front page. One above the fold, one below. I don't mind it at all. Just think, where your competitors have cluttered and frantic designs, yours could be clean and clear.
One other point. People may pay for ad free versions because the ad version is incredibly annoying and cluttered and hard to navigate. If your free version is nicely done (which I recommend), you can run ads site wide without annoying anyone and use memberships to get repaid for the things that really cost you money.
I just searched, and there are 15,321 groups with "fantasy football" in the title on Facebook.
This year's favorite Web 2.0 apps
I have not reviewed the evidence myself, but the homeschooling web sites I have read claim that the methodological evidence shows that homeschooled kids turn out to have closer friendships and better social skills than enrolled kids.
Network effects propel cloud computing
The article on one page:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...
Three words: Crack Legal Team
Doesn't Netflix already do this? I think you can already friend everyone there and see what they watched, how they rated it, what they put in their queue. Why would they pay Facebook for that?

Pretty sure YouTube and some music services have some of this sort of functionality too. Every site does these days.
Web 2.0 Expo 2008: Do You Know What's Missing?
I'd lean towards the "carrots" myself, and there are lots of potential ones (user customizable profiles, more simultaneous games, "pro" games, etc). Look at what other successful startup multiplayer game sites are doing and try some out. With carrots, you can still offer a compelling free service but there are lots of appealing things that dedicated users will pay for. weewar.com seems to have succeeded in this, for example (I've taken my wallet out for them in the past, just don't have time for games these days otherwise I'd still be on there).

I would think the key to retaining free players is the quality of the game(s) themselves, and the network effect of having enough players to play against. Checkers probably wouldn't retain me for more than a game, but some of the others on your site seem like they might. Scrabulous seems to be exploding on Facebook for example, while only one or two people I know play Chess... (unfortunately ;)

Maybe a unique game like Lost Cities from flexgames.com -- that was a neat game for a while that you can't find anywhere else...
Santiago is nice, though for different reasons. Good weather, cheap, still a big city.
I think people have fewer expectations than you might assume. Most people spend too much time judging themselves when interacting to bother doing it to others. But the way you judge yourself makes you assume others are judging you, but they're not, they're focusing on themselves. If that makes any sense, which it may not.

I'd say work your way up to attractive women. They're the hardest for a number of reasons (you're afraid of them due to approach anxiety, they're used to approaches and are more on their guard, etc.) Start off talking to guys and less attractive females. People are always most receptive toward people who appear to be in their own demographic and social status level, so start there and work your way out.
Although $30,000 seems like a lot to spend on a domain name, it's a much better investment than a lot of the marketing expenses that venture-backed startups spend money on.

The key is to have something simple, memorable, unambiguous and differentiated. You don't have to spend $30k to get that, but at least they picked something that works. Cheaper than hiring a high-and branding firm too.
Whatever the particulars or merits of the suit, I'm sure Craigslist fans will stand by the company -- especially with company notices titled "Tainted Love." Classic.