skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing is inherently wrong with AOL. But there is something wrong about a tech consultant with an AOL email address.
The draining part of work is the fact that you have people expecting you to get X done absolutely as fast as you can, recurse with Y. And the micromanagement. By the end of the day it's mentally draining.

At school, nobody cares whether you do anything. And when you do something, it's by your own decision. I mean, I know you decide to do something at work, but.. It's hard to put into specific words. School lays all its expectations out in front of you; work shoves them down your throat.
Austin. I didn't even think of that. Who's the catalyst there?
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: post-singularity fiction, freely available online
Wait what...IE4 made phone calls?
The Industrial Revolution due to a change in the English population?
Sims Creator Will Wright Demos "Spore" (TED Video)
One thing I like on reddit _is_ the arbitrarily long title names, because it is easier to come up with a good long title than a short title.

Regardless, you can get around the 100 character limit on news.yc by editing the title after you submit.
>churn out meaningless solutions to irrelevant problems.

That can be said of most of the advancements in math, science, and computer science. At a time, there was no need for zero, calendars, calculus, square root of negative one, etc. What the author calls irrelevant today will be tomorrow's great achievement. Most of Turing's work was irrelevant at the time, other than his work on cryptography.

I don't think it is proper for great minds to worry about trivial things like enterprise Java code or what it takes to build a social networking website. This stuff is simple, that's why we can outsource it to other countries that don't have the resources to invest in the future developments that are needed for progress.

Also, the whole article is based on the author's opinions, which isn't bad for that fact (actually the article was entertaining to say the least), but they aren't backed by something in any form.
No, not NYC... most hackers are paid too well by i-banks and hedge funds to risk joining a startup, and those startup founders who do succeed don't stay here to become angels (as they do in SV and other startup hubs).
Where's the data?! Just calling Pareto's rule on every new phenomena does not work. Asking us to agree or disagree on something that none of us really has any data on is beyond pointless and actually harmful.

For instance, Yahoo data with Flickr shows that less than 10% of people actually contribute content. So Pareto's rule does not apply there. But only Facebook knows how it works with their users. You can't just blindly apply these "laws" to various user groups and expect them to be even half true.
Fairmount Automation, est. 1996
http://www.fairmountautomation.com/
Neal Stephenson - "The Great Simoleon Caper" (short story about digital currency)
a) Nice link.

b) Any ETA for news.yc search feature?
>news interesting to hackers generally.

Obviously hackers have found this interesting, but I agree it is on the border of being irrelevant. I think it is useful to use PG's rule of thumb that if it's covered on TV news then it's off topic which I think this is an exception to.

I like this new direction that yc is taking, the site was rather boring to me before which I barely frequented until I saw that it changed on reddit.

I shouldn't come here to often because each time I read something by PG I feel like quitting my job and starting a company.
Oldie but a goodie
DC is for enterprise Java programmers and only big government contractors. I think the general job market in DC is ranked #1 though.
The point of Pareto's rule is not so much that the numbers must be 80 and 20. The essence of what Pareto proved is that the few(causes) are responsible for the many(effects). So Pareto's principle is very much at work in Flickr.
How quickly we forget. - TvByDemand | Forums | Iraq
It's amazing, how we americans are so easily fooled. Here's the biggest bamboozlement of them all.
I think the YTMND guy put it best when he realized that all of the top content on his site is adaptations (to put it nicely) of content created elsewhere. None totally original.

So that's about 99.99999% vs 0.000001%.

So beware of creating a site where users have to create totally original content. Sites like hacker news have it easy in that respect.
I'm thinking of moving to Boulder from Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) simply because the cost of doing business is so insanely high here. My apartment rent has gone up $1200 over the past 5 years, the traffic sucks, taxes are high, wages are inflated, and we don't need to raise capital.

There are ways to deal with these factors (BART, biking to work, cooking at home, handing out equity in lieu of cash, etc...). But, why bother when there are more affordable places to do business in the U.S.?

I'm looking for a place in the U.S. that meets three criteria:
(1) a great year-round outdoor lifestyle with lots of hiking trails, mountain biking terrain, and possibly rock-climbing and/or skiing
(2) young, smart people
(3) affordable living (rental prices, food prices, traffic)
(4) a nearby university with a top-40 School of Engineering
(5) not a resort/retirement community

Right now I'm looking at Ventura, CA (ocean sports are a good substitute for moutain sports), Boulder, or Bozeman Montanta. Neither Ventura nor Boulder are "cheap", but they are a bargain compared to Palo Alto. Ventura is within 40min of UCSB (Santa Barbara is too expensive) and Boulder is obviously a college town.

We're keeping our servers in a Bay Area datacenter, but there really is no reason to stay here since our company is profitable and cash-flow positive (an algorithmic hedge fund specializing in OTC energy derivatives).

I've never been to Fort Collins. How does it compare with Boulder?

There is no reason to be in Silicon Valley if your company is profitable, cash-flow positive, and self-financing. If not, then Silicon Valley is a superb place to raise capital; however, be prepared to pay dearly for it (both in equity and in cost of doing business).

Thanks!
I must rescind this statement. As a result of these discussions, I began reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which, in the chapter "To Farm or not to Farm," makes clear the disconnect between agriculture and sedentary living:

"Another misconception is that there is necesarrily a sharp divide between nomadic hunter-gatherers and sedentary food producers. In reality, although we frequently develop such a contrast, hunter-gathers in some productive areas, including North America's Pacific Northwest coast and possibly southeastern Australia, became sedentary but never became food producers. Other hunter-gatherers, in Palestine, costal Peru, and Japan, became sedentary first and adopted food production much later. Sedentary groups probably made up a much higher fraction 15,000 years ago, when all inhabited parts of the world (including the most productive areas) were still occupied by hunter-gatherers, than they do today, when the few remaining hunter-gathers survive only in unproductive areas where nomadism is the sole option.

Conversely, there are mobile groups of food producers. Some modern nomads of New Guinea's Lake Plains made clearings in the jungle, plant bananas and papayas, go off for a few months to live again as hunter-gatherers, return to check on their crops, weed the garden if they find the crops growing, set off again to hunt, return months later to check again, and settle down for a while to harvest and eat if their garden has not produced. Apache Indians of the southwestern United States settled down to farm in the summer at high elevations and toward the north, then withdrew to the south and to lower elevations to wander in search of wild foods, during the winter. Many herding peoples of Africa and Asia shift camp along regular seasonal routes to take advantage of predictable seasonal changes in pasturage. Thus, the shift from hunting-gathering to food production did not always coincide with a shift from nomadism to sedentary living."

(<i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> p. 106)
You're in luck -- the last version of YC news on archive.org had it!

http://www.darrenherman.com/2007/04/04/where-are-the-tech-st...

The O'Reilly Radar post is here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup_centers.ht...

The numbers are a year old but Seattle was #3 and NYC was #4. Although Tacoma is grouped in with Seattle, I'm not sure how meaningful that is -- it's kind of like grouping Oakland with Mountain View.
I lived there for 15 years and didn't see all that many. But I lived in Parkland, which is a bit north of the drug dealers and a bit south of the retired businessmen.
37 signals was running successfully for 7 years before taking an investment.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/bezos_expeditions_inv...
What percentage of people on YouTube make their own videos? That is a fairer comparison.
Sure, there are a handful. But the fact that those few are famous on account of having taken no investment is evidence of just how rare it is.

Among successful startups, the ratio of those that took outside money to those that didn't is 100 to 1, maybe 1000 to 1. Where the threshold for success is going public, it's effectively infinite.
I don't think all hunter gatherers where nomads (but some agriculturalist are, or do shepherds not count), and I think I read in another book that nursing actually acts as contraceptive (Edit: I just saw that the article also mentions infanticide to keep children spaced four years apart, so true, some gruesome aspects are there).

Anyway, the point is certainly not to recommend going back to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. Although I wonder if startupping is not somewhat akin to hunting.
I agree with this point, and it what I intended. The key to the Pareto rule is that it should drive personal effort. For sites like Facebook, I think that you would just attract the content drivers (the 20%), and then the other 80% follow.

Think about it in terms of the Tipping Point. Go to the mavens/connectors first. They have all the knowledge know everyone. They'll do the buzz marketing for you and persuade others to join. Another term would be early adopter. I know that I have personal done this for Meebo.
Austin is like the only city in 750 miles with a substantial high-tech background and a creative-class culture, isn't it?

I've spent time in Dallas (home of Texas Instruments) and while it is a nice working-class metroplex, Austin seems to have far more of the character of a startup hub. Same thing with St. Louis, I understand.

On the other hand, Lawrence, Kansas has the character but not the high-tech (and it's kinda little).
The "crazy friend" paragraph reminds of a chapter in Founders at Work. An interviewee comments that if you can't persuade one other friend to take the plunge with you on a startup idea, then the idea may not be worth pursuing. We're all looking for that crazy friend at some point.

None of the motivating factors listed are sustainable feelings. I don't see myself feeling anger for days or weeks needed to accomplish something meaningful. For most, anger motivates to act stupidly. Maybe, we're looking for inspiring factors. Inspiration would be mean that we are genuinely driven to accomplish something.
The reservations seem rather unqualified indeed. A lot of strawman argumentation to begin with (singling out specific subjects of CS the authors deems unworthy). But even about PCC I don't think the author has the right notion. It is not the same as type checking. As an example, at my old university department they created a proof of the euclidian algorithm and extracted a program from it that would compute the gcd. That way you have more than a syntactically correct program, you have a proof that the code actually gives you the gcd. And yes, it was very academic, but still.

Also, if CS is so useless, how come most leaders in the Netflix challenge seem to be CS departments?
Indeed. I love this comic:
http://static.flickr.com/100/267584452_4c7f35863f.jpg
A good example being YouTube? Or Google (before adwords)? Twitter? Delicious? Reddit (before advertising)? If you build something people want to use, monetizing it is always something that you can pull off.

I would say that a business model has to exist eventually-- and a startup ought to have a few in mind. But I don't think an active business model is required to be labeled as a "startup".
I'm not sure that there's a non-US city that is a contender for #3....
There's one reason if you are profitable..

Hiring.
For me the connection with hacking is that it points out a potentially unintuitive thing, and switching from hunting to agriculture also is a kind of hack. Is a startup not also trying to hack society in a way? Also I thought it interesting that some ancient societies seemed to have less work hours.

Obviously it won't interest everybody, but didn't pg say "anything that interests hackers", not only hacking itself?

Anyway, my apologies if it was too far stretched. I hope I will refrain from further submissions in the future. Perhaps I should check out Reddit...
To me, this blog post is a "duh!" moment. Of course, it's true, there are a number of factors that influence an apparently revolutionary discovery. It's similar to topics covered in Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop. Let's also not forget luck. That's another determining factor.
A promissory startup promise gets enforced
Every time I hit TechCrunch, my start up buttons get pushed. Being both a tech and law geek, I naturally did a quick search for any caselaw related to startups in Washington. I found many, but guess what else happened. One of the named defendants, specifically Mr. Rood, from InstantService.com v. Rood (see here), showed up on the very first case I found, this time as a plaintiff.
Austin also has Univ. of Texas - ranked seventh in CS research. The startup I'm involved with is planning on opening up offices there when it's time to grow.
Music p2p startup Groovershark preps for launch
P2P music sharing startup Grooveshark today launched a big-better new feature laden release, as it preps-up for it's open beta launch later this month.
This piece is both well informed -- there are certainly no factual errors -- and vitriolic beyond belief. What is anyone supposed to take away from the author's attack on partial evaluation, for example? The author seems to suggest -- but does not say -- that function composition would be better handled by writing even more functions and passing around lists of function pointers.
I'm skeptical (but can't refute without actually researching it) of the assertions about academic advancement vs. free market advancement. I think the fact that academic research may not have any immediately obvious practical application is an advantage in the long run.

In any case, that post was very interesting. I bookmarked it and will have to revisit it sometime.
Heh. I had hoped the saracasm in my comment was evident. Apparently not!
I agree, that's why I'm going to have to come back and read it again when I have the energy to filter out all the strong opinions.
Also, the slogan of the town is "Keep Austin Weird". I like it.
Map of Internet Usage By Country - Country size proportioned accordingly
YC West Coast Demo Day Roundup
As a Colorado resident, let me say that I'm pretty sure you'd be very happy in Boulder. According to USNEWS, CU-Boulder is #40 SoE. The other 4 criteria you have describe Boulder very accurately.

As for Fort Collins, I haven't been there much, but it is definitely geographically much more "out there" than Boulder. I think FC is about 60 miles north of Denver, while Boulder is about 25 miles northwest. The 25 miles between Denver and Boulder are pretty built up, at least by Colorado standards, while the drive to Fort Collins from Denver is pretty desolate.

Boulder is a bit more expensive than Fort Collins, but coming from the Bay Area, I'm not sure you'd notice much. It's all mighty cheap on the Front Range compared to anywhere near coastal CA cities.
University of Texas, National Instruments, AMD, Dell are some of the big contributors of talent. Tech stuff is growing here, and there are unfortunately some growing pains as a result. The startup culture is still not what you'd see in silicon valley, but I'd say its improving.

Incidentally, there's been a growing trend of Californians moving to Austin.
I hate to say it but I found The Myth of Innovation not a good read at all. It is very amateurestic (Scott routinely cites wikipedia), very fluffy, and with lots of childish notes.

Scott came at my company and gave a speach/presentation, and what he had to say in person was much more interesting that what he wrote down on the book.

I hope his next book is better, and gives more insight to us. Don't dumb it down for the users Scott. your speach was 10 times more interesting.

The worst part of it is that I was stuck with it in a remote beach between Albania and Greece, with nothing else to read.
I lived in Boulder from 2002 to 2005. I spent 2 months in Boulder this summer trying to figure out if it's the place to be. I love it. I love the quality of life. I love the relaxed atmosphere, the perfect weather & proximity to skiing. TechStars is there, Boulder OpenCoffee Club is active and there is some VC, as far as I can tell. There's a decent pool of relatively cheap talent in the Denver/Boulder area, CU has a reasonably well regarded engineering school, Sun and IBM have campuses there. StartupWeekend was born there.

I couldn't find the energy. The pace is an opiate. I couldn't find the noise. I couldn't find the 20-somethings actively changing things in tech; it seems like if you have any drive there, you leave. The vibe is bohemian (it's Boulder), and part of me would love to, as pg commented, move 10,000 geeks there and give a $500m endowment to CU to try to architect a new SV in the Rockies, but it's missing something. It seems like the scales are tipped 75/25 between play/work.

Please prove me wrong. I'd be there next week if I thought the startup infrastructure (developers, investors, etc) was active enough.
you can't go wrong reading Norvig. Now, if only I could make it through Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence as easy as this essay.
I think the notion that "we have great minds!" in combination with, "we outsource the simple stuff to other countries" is rather a bit ungallant. It's a classic trap, overestimating one's self and underestimating others.

The reason outsourcing is used is because of a favorable exchange rate due to historical inertia, even as we nudge it closer to the midway point every time we engage other countries. Going by population alone, their complement of great minds surely outnumbers ours.
I'm always fascinated by the folks who flip a U-turn on their startup like Cloudant. I have to assume it happens far more often in the YC environment. When you're just kind of holed up in your bunker and spring something on the world after you've brought it to alpha, I don't think it's so common to throw out what you're working on even if it's for the best.

I had a half-year-long entrepreneurial experience when I was 23, but it was basically just me, in the spider hole, coding, and never finishing the product. I was trying to make something technologically cool and didn't know (or care to know) a thing about the business aspect. It was a huge waste from a learning perspective, much less a money perspective, although I did enjoy it. I lacked a co-founder, investors, much of a clue about the market and guidance, but what was fatal was that I was missing feedback and a deadline.

I think startups are painfully difficult to assess without a structure that provides honest feedback and a real deadline. I think it's greatly to YC's credit that they have teams that radically alter their focus like Cloudant did, however it turns out.
Massive self-aggrandizing factual error in the third paragraph:

It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short.

Um, Jean Jacques Rousseau? Noble Savage? Only a few decades after Hobbes?

It may not be relevant to the case being made here, but come on. I remember writing "compare and contrast" papers on Hobbes and Rousseau in high school.
Same here. The trick is to start to care less about the day job and more about the real job. Start to think about the day job as a contracting/consulting gig to support R&D. That's how I generate motivation, even though I know I have a mortgage to pay.
Freaks, Geeks and Parents - An analysis of the High School Ecosystem
What's the story with Chicago. You'd think with 37signals, feedburner and ... I can't think of a prominent 3rd, you'd get a local startup community slightly more active than TechCocktail...
Cloudant is cool, just hope that router doesn't get you banned from those sites that specifically ban IP's for using download accelerators (IE making too many simultaneous requests).
Yes, the basic idea has been re-hashed endlessly:

http://www.thecourier.com/manifest.htm

It sort of bothers me that this is getting upmodded--not because it's off-topic, but because it's so painfully banal--every high schooler has already thought these things through completely, just like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42398
Indeed. One weak point in the essay (rant?) would seem to be the underlying assumption that the output of all CS research has to be usable by Joe Average Programmer to be counted as "good".

Physics wouldn't have progressed much if all research results had to be immediately usable by kids playing with Lego blocks. Most so called "programmers" are just fitting blocks together without any deep understanding. Just look at all the horrendous VB code out there.
don't forget the game developers.
Programming in Ten Years?

see

How to Create a Startup in 10.5 Hours.

I guess it's where you start measuring from...
YSlow: Yahoo's problems are not your problems
Physicists discover inorganic dust with lifelike qualities