skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What happened to the Milanese Leonardo?"
Just for the sake of argument, I can think of some counterexamples:
Archimede living in Syracuse (not exactly the mathematics and engineering capital of the ancient world),
Einstein in Bern, Bobby Fischer in NY (and not Moscow).
I'm sure you can find many many more.
A weird thing: the Borders in Pasadena is about the same size as any other yet it unfailingly has the books I want to read. Followed by Westwood, Santa Monica and Hollywood.

Interestingly, Moleskine (which is totally "stuff white people like") recently created a Los Angeles City Notebook including a map of "selected" parts of LA. Metropolitan LA is 4,850 square miles, so one wonders where they selected. Answer:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/atwatervillage/2444508587/
The fbOpen Initiative: Facebook Confirms Plans to Open-Source Its Platform
Arrington On Copyright: Wrong
Web 2.0 = Bubble 2.0?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt: "The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet"
I'm curious, Hackers, what do you think of the reddit redesign?
Bracing for flamewar...
Sounds like a business opportunity for someone outside the U.S.
Amazon Slashes Kindle Price by $40, now $359
i am that, want to and plan too, but not yet
At long last, an XM-Sirius union?
Great article. I think that those messages apply not only to cities, they apply to whole countries in a certain periods of time. I live in Russia and I can hear the message very clearly: "you have to win". And it works: soccer, hockey, music -- we've won several competitions in a very short time frame. Hope you'll hear about us on the web startup front in a near future too :)

I never thought before about the importance of place where you live and work. After this article I see that St. Petersbourg is a far better place to start something new than Moscow. Startups are "second class citizens" here just like in New York. I thought about moving before, now I have made a decision. Thank you, Paul.
The bums in Cambridge are almost always white.
I like it for the most part. Not crazy about the uncompressed link display, but thats not a big deal. The biggest thing that bothered me is that my subreddits that I am subscribed to have changed.
Paglo Launches Its Search Engine for IT
Mobaganda: A Dead-Simple Invite Site Built On Google’s App Engine
No I wouldn't name Cambridge because "When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books". If intellect was based off of the number of books in ones bookshelf, a few of my friends would be gods amongst men. If the main criteria everyone is using to evaluate whether a city is the intellectual capital is a) how prestigious the cities institutions are and b) how condensed those universities are to each other, then I agree, Cambridge is that location. Any other basis for a decision is entirely subjective and a futile conversation to continue.
+1 for using 'trustafarian'.
San Jose, Costa Rica: Spend more time with family

Minneapolis: You should be nice

Providence, RI: You will eat well.

LA: You should look better or be more famous, preferably both.

Chicago: You went to the wrong fraternity
Where is the art capital of the contemporary world? If Paris is where people appreciate art, and New York is where people buy art, is there a single city better than others where people go to make art?
If a collective cannot be ambitious, then it follows that a corporation or a web community cannot be ambitious. And yet that does not seem quite right. Or are you saying rather that a town could be ambitious, but that Ithaca does not seem to fit the mold?
We use Trac. Aside from it taking a while to get installed properly, the software is really easy to use (really important in getting non-tech people to use it) and quite functional.
Syracuse was in fact probably the richest and most sophisticated city in the West at the time.
Okay, me too.

Columbia SC: Uh, the culture is pretty much centered around it's mid-tier University of South Carolina, which is a party-hardy Frat/Sorority vibe. So, I guess it says "YEEE-HAAAAW! More beer, Bo!"

Hartford, CT: Unless you can calculate the death of a 55 year old smoker with no major medical history within a margin of error, the city says "There's NY below and Boston above, take your pick, pay your toll, and have a nice day."

Raleigh-Durham, NC: Duke University, UNC, Wake Forrest, North Carolina State, Shaw, and various other colleges all within around 20 interstate exits of each other. I guess it would say "study hard, and find job at IBM, Sony-Ericsson, or Cisco." Not too much entreprenurial spirit here, I guess because the tech giants gobble them up with nice offers right out of college.
Dyson admits: there is no accurate way to measure CO2 previous to 1958, when Keeling starts. Further, CO2 varies in important ways depending on location.
See the last section of http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
That's what I meant. Perhaps "On the brink of becoming..." would have been clearer.
How to Win the Lunar X Prize to the Moon
Wouldn't breaking the rules, if it were truly that general, result in something more substantial than goofiness? And if it's just goofiness, perhaps a better way to put it would be "break the social conventions".

It might seem like I'm being contentious just for its own sake, but I'm not. It's precisely the thing that most irks me about Western Europe: the attitude of "don't break the rules". Europeans seem to like to break rules that are obsolete or largely inconsequential (e.g. about drugs and sexuality). And they're very proud of that. But the big and important rules, like those of business and broad social order, are universally accepted to the point where they are seen as morals.

Maybe it's different in Berlin?
Limiting te number of people each tester can invite seems silly if part of the goal is to generate content. You could even add a beta signup page so people could get in without an invite. They'd still understand that you were still building content that way.
Of cities I know, I think Paris might be the place to go to make it. Assuming what you want is to make good stuff rather than to create a brand, that is.
A new web app (intelligent chatting system)
I found this on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/info/6kvu6/comments/
It looks very interesting.
The pay-as-you-go won't be enabled until sometime around the end of the year.

The quoted CPU pricing "$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour" is similar to Amazon EC2 small instance pricing ($0.10/hr), but it's probably not a straight comparison. AppEngine seems to charge by the sip, as might be expected from a compute utility, while web apps will probably require a minimum of 24x7 usage of an EC2 instance. So AppEngine should be less costly on the low-end.

Here's an interview with some AppEngine managers on the announcements tomorrow:

http://readwritetalk.com/2008/05/27/pete-koomen-paul-mcdonal...
> This is one of the advantages of not having the universities in your country controlled by the government

Does pg really believe universities in the US aren't controlled by the government, or did he just mean their locations?
All of the city messages in the essay should be qualified with to the most ambitious people within that city or even more narrowly to this particular community of ambitious people. Put another way, within a given community of the most ambitions people in a given city, what is their metric for success?

I went to MIT for undergrad and grad, and then lived around there for several years thereafter. I do not think that Cambridge tells all its’ residents that they should be smarter. But it does send that message the average person within the MIT (and presumably Harvard, which I know less about) community.

My first company was in educational software and I interacted some with the Cambridge public school system. Some schools were pretty connected to the ambitious community, and others were almost completely separate. In other words, there are pockets of people, perhaps a majority, that are not in the ambitious community and do not perceive the ambitious community message. I would bet that in these pockets, there are sub-pockets, each with their own messages.

Now Cambridge is a weird place with an unusually concentrated group of the same type of people, and I agree that I haven’t at least found any place else like it. But it is just a pocket of Boston, albeit a bigger pocket than some of the other ambitious communities in other cities. And as Paul pointed out, Cambridge is not Boston. So he is really not talking about cities.

Again, he is talking about specific communities within cities. There are probably even other ambitious communities in Boston (in its financial district, for example), where the message is not you should be smarter, but something more along the lines of you should be richer. And I’m pretty sure there is another, separate, local politics community, where the message is more like the DC message described (on a smaller scale). (My wife worked in a state agency, and we have friends who were in the legal community there. I myself was the treasurer of a city council campaign.)

So, in sum, I agree there are messages within communities. But I wouldn’t generalize to entire cities. The reason I think people get confused is because particular types of these communities only exist in certain cities, and in sometimes just one. The messages Paul describes are in the communities he is more likely to happen upon given his network and interests, within those cities. Yet there are certainly other communities within those cities with other messages. These other communities, in the aggregate, probably account for the vast majority of people in a given city.
yup, im in that boat.
Erlang By Example
It's lovely how you dissect and dismiss the statement on the basis of being a subjective determination without questioning for a second just what the hell "intellectual capital of the world" means.

I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience.
There is a disproportionate number of white bums, but there are certainly a lot of black bums too. So I would not say they are almost always white.
Well, except in this example, many actually will.

Amazon and eBay aren't doing so badly, eh? Although they're hardly the standard for online stores, I suppose.
I find it too distracting and too spaced out compared to before. I guess its a good thing as I waste too much time there anyways. I read on some post that it was possible to revert the changes so I might finally make an account. I cant comment about the NSFW section yet as I am still at work....
Google App Engine Announces Pricing Plan, APIs, Open Access
"Nerd Girls" TV Program Challenges Stereotypes
An MIT student made a documentary a few years back about bums on the street of Cambridge. While the evidence is clearly anecdotal, none gave off the aura you describe. They were completely disconnected from the MIT/Harvard community. Instead, they were entirely engrossed in their own world (and in some cases, how they got there).
'Biggest drawing in world' revealed as hoax
New York, too. The artists have to be in touch with what people are buying so they know what they should make.

</poorly disguised contempt>
Should Twitter be an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet or a Vending Machine? | High Scalability
Tokyo, Japan: Doing nothing, even for a minute, is a sin.
Help Send Us To Startup Camp + Foo Camp
Hoping to get some feedback, but also if we end up going, that we can share our experience back with the YC News community.
Hells ya! :)
Bill >> Steve

listening to him is what MSFT should do more of.
Fair enough :) that's why we made sure to add the option for our super density-fans.

As for the screwed up reddit subscriptions, we're aware of that problem and trying to hack things back together for affected users. In case someone from team reddit hasn't already told you - sorry about that.
Ask YC: Meetup at Google I/O?
Is anyone going to Google I/O on Wednesday and Thursday? If there's enough interest, I can organize a meetup/dinner for YCers to mingle.
Computer scientists devise a 'P4P' system for efficient Internet usage
Ok, So apparently an ad hominem argument without any valid justification or reasoning is acceptable. I at least tried to support with some sort of criteria or justification for a title. Not from PG, but from all of the commenter's who support the claim.

"I daresay your reading comprehension skills are subpar if you're troubled to detect a subjective declaration in a subjective essay about subjective experience."

Well sadly your reading comprehension skills are subpar because I have been responding to the thread, not the content of the essay. The use of the quote from the essay was used to make the point that the individuals here seem to so easily accept Cambridge as the capital without any mention or rebuttal with criteria or evidence to support.

There seems to be blind support to these claims and no defense for them. Why is it wrong for me to reject a claim but alright for you all to accept it? I seem to be the only one that is attempting to dissect the criteria or claim subjectivity while you give none.

Rather than downmod me and tell me I am wrong, propose reasons why your argument is valid.
guy is all ambition. good lucks.
I second this opinion, particularly regarding real world experience.

I was in a similar situation when I graduated, deciding whether or not to apply for graduate school. I decided to take an internship after I graduated for two months which eventually turned into a full-time job.

I know it's difficult among our generation (Generation Y) to be patient about something important, i.e. a job, graduate school, your own company, etc, but you'll see it'll pay off down the road.

Also, what did you want to study?

Good luck.
> Things like [..] electronics, etc would seem extremely cheap ($500 for iPod touch or 5 gallons of gas)

Almost certainly not, unfortunately. That iPod Touch would be significantly more expensive due to the shipping costs and the massively increased production costs. Anything that contains plastic would be far more expensive (since we'd be looking at a circa $3000 barrel of oil).
love the new spacing... I was feeling claustrophobic before.

I still think it could use more space between the header and the first links.. and you could do more with the arrows with out over doing it too...

over all though it's a solid upgrade!
> but can't they write off fuel purchases as a business expense?

Sure, but writing off expenses against profit only gains you the amount you'd have paid in tax on that amount, and not the actual amount itself. Writing off expenses doesn't make it a zero-sum game, it just puts 20-30% back in your pocket.
too be honest, i liked it before, not to keen on the new design too much white space for my liking.
I love it. Uncompressing the stories makes it much easier to read the homepage. The only thing I don't like is the voting system. Why do you have to make the points in the middle of the arrows? This sort of takes away from the simplicity of reddit.
Don’t follow the shortest path
Just for posterity, and so I can look this back up in a year's time, but.. I predict an oil price crash by this time next year. If we're not under $50/barrel by summer 2009, I'd be surprised.

I can't cite any great insights here, but I've tended to notice that when everyone jumps on the bandwagon of saying something bad is going to happen, some price is going to rise forever, or the like, the opposite tends to occur within a certain timeframe. It's now happening with property prices (and I remember the bulls just one year ago..) and it'll happen with oil. Same happens with memory prices too.
Looked at it again today and not seeing much activity, even on the Intertubes.

RightScale has been getting plenty of activity, though -- so it's a bit surprising.
Especially front wheel drive. Yeech!
i have started to think they might ultimately fail at generating revenue for what they first set out to do but they might transform into something else instead that can be profitable.

for example there has been some talk about facebook as a webOS and this is something i have been thinking about lately.
having your own customizable OS that you could access anywhere from any device is interesting and handy.
LG designs double-sided TV display
Vista on your iPhone - almost 'perfection'
I don't know Austin, why is it?
Does anyone really have 2,700 friends?
TechCrunch50. It’s like TechCrunch40, but better
"What does any of it have to do with "stop coding"."

Ummm...Because most of us can't code while working on something else. I think each of us is just taking a different view of the words "stop coding". I think it means "for a few hours so you can get all of the other stuff done", while you seem to think it means "and never fire up vim/emacs again in your life". Obviously, I'm not telling anyone to stop coding forever (or even for more than a few days). If you're a tech entrepreneur you have to build things and keep building new things, or you won't be able to retain customers in the face of competitors that are always building new things.

(And I'm not among those who voted you down. I merely wanted to chime in with a bit of what I felt was important about the subject...not really in disagreement with you.)
Do you think JFK had any idea if the technology would be ready when he declared the goal of a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s?

Yes. Do you think he got up and made that pronouncement without at least asking, say, Wernher von Braun whether that would be a realistic goal?
C Corp Versus S Corp
Under the best of circumstances, incorporating a business can be a complicated and confusing process.

Wouldn't it just be easier if you could keep some of the benefits of a sole proprietorship while getting some of the advantages of a traditional corporation? Well, maybe you can.

It's called an S-corporation and for many small businesses it provides the perfect hybrid between a sole proprietorship and a corporation. However, S-corps are also subject to certain limitations that may restrict your company's activities. The bottom line is that if it's time to move beyond a sole proprietorship or partnership structure, you need to know the facts about your options.

C-Corporations

When most people think about corporations, they actually have C-corporations in mind. A C-corporation is a business entity that is capable of maintaining a life of its own, at least in the sense that it is allowed to retain its own profits. The corporation is taxed on profits at corporate rates and dividends are taxed to the company's shareholders.

It's also important to not that C-corporations are subject to more formal requirements than sole proprietorships, partnerships, and even S-corporations. These requirements include (but may not be limited to) annual reports, boards of directors, and federal reporting.

C-corporations are especially attractive to small businesses that are currently profitable or plan to be profitable in the near future because the company's owner can avoid claiming the business' profits on his personal tax return and instead allow profits to be taxed to the corporation.

S-Corporations

Unlike C-corporations, S-corporations are pass-through business entities. This means that all of the company's income is passed through to the company's shareholders who then claim it as personal income rather than corporate income. This eliminates the "double taxation" of profits that are taxed at the corporate level and then again when dividends are passed on to shareholders.

S-corporations are subject to more requirements than sole proprietorships and partnerships, although these requirements are not quite as stringent as they are for C-corps. However, to classify as an S-corp, the company cannot have more than 35 shareholders and is limited to domestic capitalization.

S-corps are an appealing option for small business owners who want the advantages of a corporation (e.g. not being personally liable for the company's debts and liabilities) without the additional burden of requirements involved with a traditional corporate structure.

Regardless of whether you decide to become a C-corporation or an S-corporation, you should know that as the owner, you cannot simply take a draw on profits. Instead, you will need to establish a wage for yourself and withhold standard payroll taxes and deductions.

Source: http://www.gaebler.com/C-Corp-Versus-S-Corp.htm
CSS Rounded corners: 7 lines of code, without any images
Clemson SC: Aren't we all glad we don't live in Columbia! More beer, Bo!
Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs.
Just typically corporate, in my experience. That kind of person uses "I" when "we" would be the correct pronoun, and "we" when "you" would be. When "I" would actually be correct, it'll be capitalized, or attention drawn to it some other way.
One addition - I would like to point out that smart people are most often susceptible to these Utopian authoritarian fantasies. Mostly they tend to underestimate the complexity of society and overestimate their own intelligence.
As I recall, the Oakland Science Museum is focused on technology. The American Museum of Natural History is a better museum in many ways, but its focus is entirely different. The Hall of Science seems like a leftover from the World's Fair--I'm probably completely mistaken.

I associate the Hall of Science with cranky aging amateur radio operators on account of the annual hamfests they hold in the vicinity. Those hams seem as if their wives ordered them not to come home until they sell off their old equipment. That's the impression of science and technology you get from the Hall of Science. That impression might be a little hard to convey, so try comparing the discussions on eHam with those on hacker news.
Apple raises prospect of solar-powered iPhone
Understanding HBase column-family performance options
YC hopefuls: If anyone wants to start a startup that will somehow yield reliable traffic numbers, we'd love to fund that one.
Now if only someone would unveil an open-source CAD program that didn't hark back to the 80s...
The Social Networking Arms Race
Solar-Powered iPhone?
Rediscovering the Lively Road Not Taken
Amazon seems to offer payment processing as well, but it's in public beta. Is anyone using that?

Sorry about being hush on the details, I'll let you guys know it all soon. ;)
I think Seattle is telling me "Get some tattoos and piercings and start smoking", but so far I have resisted.
Cool. How many browsers does it work in?
If you want a concise example of incentives gone awry, I believe there's a Terry Pratchett quote of the form "The king announced a bounty of one shilling per rat tail. Within three days, the first rat farm opened." I'm sure someone can provide a more faithful quotation.
Sofia, BG: You should be involved in some kind of shady dealings.
"...you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do."

This has discouraged me for years here in my small part of Ohio. It became so discouraging that when I learned I'd be moving to Boston for YC and, hopefully, never live here again in my life I essentially cut all my ties overnight. These were people I'd spent the last 7 years of my life with; mostly friends from high school. I don't know what we had in common 5 years ago that made us such great friends, but we certainly don't have it in common anymore.

It was both a very difficult and very liberating experience. I'm 23 and feel like I'm about to live for the first time. I hadn't realized until recently how important it is to me to be around people who care about the things I do; who are as motivated to gain knowledge and be successful, but it's... everything.
You could download the sound file first :o
I think it is possible, see some of the demos and play around.