skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think even a million dollars per startup may be necessary but not sufficient. You also need a culture - funding 30 all at once provides some level of a community. That's well and good, but would the accountants and lawyers in that city be as good as the ones in the Valley? No. So that money goes back to the Valley, too. And they have a gravitational pull that would make it more likely that a company would go back. Not for sure, but more likely.

So you'd have to make sure you had a rock-solid, streamlined process to make sure that the legal/accounting talent in the city (hell, white list them) knew the ins and outs of 83B elections, DE incorporation, how LLCs aren't appropriate for funded startups, and all that stuff that small business lawyers/accountants don't need, but are essential to not making it hard to get that 2nd round of VC funding.

And then you'd have to have the press. TC, VB, CNet, and whoever else can actually drive "mainstream" pickup are located pretty much in either the Valley or (to a lesser extent) New York. So your costs of getting press or going to conferences to network/"run into" partners and VCs is higher too.

Oh, and what about when the million dollars runs out? You need to have a local angel investor base that can give another million, or at least another half. People invest in what they know, for better or worse. And two hackers with laptops are going to be a lot more familiar in the Valley than anywhere else then you have to find a replacement for that infrastructure, as well - maybe you have to have the local business community have a co-investment fund or something.

The point is, I don't think any amount of money can create a culture conducive to the information-enabled software/internet companies we're talking about that even begins to approximate the Valley. Sure it can be done from elsewhere, but it's twice as hard. First thing JamLegend did when it finished the LaunchBox program was move west - and they had an awesome product with tons of favorable press. (The only counter I can think of is TipJoy, who moved east - but only after they presented to 30 angel groups out west who said no.[1])

As to a specific city I know well, I've been very vocal - there's no better place on earth to bootstrap an internet/software company than Chicago, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a city that's worse to try to raise funds in. (There are many that are as bad, but worse is a small set.) And if there aren't those support structures, then the founders will take their laptops and move west. Money alone can't solve that.

[1] http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2008/09/08/weekly7-Y-Com...
A "standard of living" sounds like an objective or expectation which one sets personally or is set by your lifestyle or professional or personal peer group, whereas "cost of living" seems more like "the minimum amount of money it takes to get by in this region." At least to my ears, that difference is why it sounded a bit odd, like "teachers need more money to support their California Lifestyle," or whatever.
Thanks for the recommendations. I've been wary of other books on evolution, even though the subject fascinates me, because I worry that they will be either repeating the same information (even the evolution bits of HTMW seemed repetitive since I read it immediately after TSG), or worse, dissecting creationist arguments. Dennett's book looks like it might be a good complement to TSG though, so I'll check it out.

The Language Instinct is on my list too now. Thanks.
Old Fashioned Books, Still Good for Techies (almost poetic)
Typos: Goverment, tradional.
... and now you know who he is. PT Barnum and all that
Most people haven't read John Eliot's "Overachievement", which is a tragedy for anyone who strives to get a hell of a lot out of themselves. The book is loaded with counterintuitive thoughts on performance that go against mainstream ideas right now:

http://www.amazon.com/Overachievement-Science-Working-Less-A...

It's only $5 at Amazon right now - very cool book to learn about your physiology under pressure, fight or flight reactions, harnessing/channeling pressure to achieve more, and so on. It reads fast, has interesting anecdotes and good scientific references, and is a potential major overhaul for driven people. I've seen references to quite a few books I like in this thread, but this one is one I didn't see anyone mention.
Is this something you could replicate your existing MySQL database to in order to have a hot spare? That might be a way to provide service to people who aren't on EC2.
My favorite book on conflict management, and dealing with bad situations as they're happening rapidly and getting to their root causes:

http://www.amazon.com/Difficult-Conversations-Discuss-what-M...

My favorite book on small business and why things usually go wrong:

http://www.amazon.com/E-Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-Abou...
A few years ago, Ka-Ping Yee wrote http://passpet.org/ with my assistance. Unfortunately we never got it to the point of being really released as such, although the darcs repository is available. It's a variant of the sha1(sitename + secret) approach that's been mentioned in other comments, with some extra features to improve its strength against phishing and password-guessing attacks.
RoA Biggie
Yahoo India
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.

--> Alternative theory: There's less adult bookstores, tougher licensing/zoning/legal codes, and less other real life outlets where people can come in a baseball hat, pay cash, and leave, so they choose online more.
Looks great. Seems snappy and responsive. Good sounds. Personally I like to see elements of humor in iPhone apps. So perhaps you could add some sounds for the pull trigger "nothing" and pull trigger "shoot" cases. For example when someone pulls the trigger and nothing happens you could randomly play a "Whew!" or "Well Kiss My Grits" sounds. Then for the "shoot" case play a nastier sound. Also some gun smoke might be nice.
It would be pretty straightforward to make a list of the most eminent Silicon Valley angels and from that to generate a list of all the startups they'd invested in. If a city offered these companies a million dollars each to move, a lot of the earlier stage ones would probably take it.

This seems like a highly effective way to kill startups. Never mind the whole "moving to a different city where you won't have many contacts" bit -- if a startup is still small enough to be able to move easily, throwing a million dollars at them is likely to give them too much of a runway.
Did you read the part where they said this was the third or 4th iteration of their DB backend? Or maybe I read that somewhere else.

Point being, experience will come.
You might be interested in this:

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=plausible-deniability
Lets Go Deep - 1st Base Is The Place To Be
The question is: is there something in silicon valley that makes startups more successful here? If there is, then the companies you fund will be working against competitors that have a significant advantage over them. I don't think a sample size of 30 is large enough to answer this question one way or the other. Therefore, while the initial prototype requires minimum investment, it likely will not give you the information you need to decide whether to continue with the program or not.
Great insights as usual PG.

We're dealing with an investment group that has this (in a much much smaller scale) in mind. My major concern for them is that I'm not so sure it can be done on a smaller scale.

Do you think cities can do a small version of this and become not the next Silicon Valley but at least startup friendly?
Not quite. If you're a seasoned Emacs (or presumably Vim) user, you will know it's not Emacs or Vim within about five minutes. It is nicer than vi or mg, though, and it starts up really fast.

Yi does provide great facilities for implementing these features, however. Syntax highlighting is done by proper incremental parsing instead of flaky regexps. Emacs has tried this, but honestly, Emacs Lisp runs way too slowly for this to work. Yi seems to handle pretty big files with good performance, which is very nice to see. Hopefully "extensible" major modes are finally nearby. (If you've ever read cperl-mode.el, you'll see why regexps are a bad choice for implementing syntax highlighting.)

Although it is not my current editor of choice, I think Yi is a better "way forward" than continuing to let the C-based GNU Emacs platform live on. Emacs' great strength is the hundreds of thousands of lines of Lisp code it bundles. Emacs' weakness is that it wants to support that code forever, even though it makes modern features like concurrency impossible to implement. My plan is to add compartments to Yi that will emulate Emacs and run Emacs Lisp code. This will let you edit with simple.el's editing features, or check your mail in Gnus... without having the "real" Emacs around. Then, when you want more modern features, you can start porting the legacy Emacs Lisp code to run on Yi directly. This is better than the usual "let's reimplement emacs" plan of "let's throw away everything!". (This is why you are currently using GNU Emacs or XEmacs and not SXEmacs or the one written in CL. It's too hard to rewrite everything all at once.)
Wow...but when it comes down to it people probably don't care about the domain as much as Toy R Us thinks. People find the toys they want, then price compare on Google. Or if they want to skip that step, they'll just buy it from Amazon.
There's a different way to put it also:

A start-up usually takes at least four, on the average seven years until a "liquidity event" occurs (Some stay private forever and while profitable, don't offer any opportunity to just hand the business off without losing everything).

Thus, if someone is willing to try building a start-up (potentially, a four year commitment) why not try a college education provided they have the means?

Lastly, college education has rewards in it of itself: not just the employment/entrepreneurship opportunities it may open. There aren't very many jobs/many feasible/executable start-up ideas out there where you'll get to write operating systems, compilers, design RISC chips and code in Haskell and Scheme (I did/could do all of the following, despite going to a school that wasn't, by any means, a top research center for EE/CS). Add to that being able to attend lectures and write papers/essays on topics in such as Ancient Greek History.

The last paragraph sounds like something I'd like to do if/when I have a "liquidity event". On a personal note, had I not been exposed to these topics, I may have found routine software engineering work to be the most exciting task I could put my mind to (as I did, when I briefly worked full time during and after high school) -- and would see no reason for entrepreneurship.
The programmer sees an incredibly small fraction of the price I pay for videogames, and that never bothered me either.

I know the general "I support the band but hate the big megacorp behind it" is popular in some places on the Internet, but at least here, I can come out and say "I don't think the people who provide capital and marketing are parasites".
I think access to capital is the first step, but access to employees is what would present the larger challenge. Sure, you could get a hundred or so new grads from your university every year, but how many hackers migrate to the bay every year? What's the turnover rate?

If you have a million in funding, you're probably going to want to hire some people to help you (you have enough money to shoot for the stars; moreover, ramen profitability seems both a waste and unable to recoup the investor's money). Hiring good people outside of SV, especially if you want to use interesting (read not java / ms) tools, is going to be a bit more of a challenge. Especially if there are 30 other startups in the area trying to do the exact same thing.
How to Buy Domain Names (from the founder of PhoneTag.com)
I'm suspicious of the claim that there can be more than one silicon valley. With founders being more mobile and VC in... shrinkage (less willing to take risks setting up in new markets), the likelihood of any such concerted effort being possible is nil. After all, you're not going to get anyone outside the organizers to move from the valley in significant numbers, so I think the prospects for natural growth is limited.

I suppose what you say is true, but I don't see any reason to think such a transplant would ever outstrip the size/clout of the valley. And that's what it comes down to, is that with the big players already entrenched, and the weather so nice, no city will come close, even if the transplants do prove a boon.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
Samsung's problem is not that they are Korean, it is that they are Samsung.

I'm looking at the top selling MP3 players on Amazon.co.jp right now. There are products in the top 10 from Transcend (India?!), Creative(Singapore), Cowon (Korea), Apple (USA), and Toshiba(Japan).
Import Facebook Photos Into Your iPhone Contact List with Photo Phonebook
CSS3  Test
Amazon Caves to Author's Guild; Muzzles Reading Robots
Dental bridge cost uk
Dentist Birmingham offers modern dentistry procedures including Crowns & veneers, bruxism, tooth whitening, mercury free dentistry and lots more cosmetic dentistry services to fulfill individual needs and expectations.
The public generally looks askance at public funds being used for private benefits. Publicly funded incentives often are used to lure large corporate manufacturing facilities into town, but these generally are already very large and looking to employ thousands of locals.

It would be a hard sell to convince the voters that you should give $1 million of their money to three guys with some laptops that weren't planning to hire any more people for the next few years.
I just saw Johnny Cupcakes speak at UCSB last night. He's also a college drop out. While there are plenty of college drop out entrepreneurs that are very successful (e.g. Bill Gates), there are also a lot of successful entrepreneurs that are college graduates. An MBA is more debatable.
Oddly enough, Chicago (or, rather, Evanston,) already has "a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live." (At least, for some definition of first-rate.)
Agreed it would be hard to sell to the public. Perhaps if the following point could be more visceral:

"$1B invested in 50,000 startups would conservatively create 250,000 jobs immediately. If just 2% of those startups became wildly successful they would create 3 million to 5 million jobs."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=497559
Do Not Demo Naked
Don't forget John Walker, Autodesk.
Sure. You could make numbers up and hope they are true. Just be sure the homeless shelters are well-funded for when the money runs out.
What do you think should be the most important qualifying criteria?
1-3 are always golden for me, but 4-6 are hosted differently and are variable in their decency.
That's an excellent way to put it. Although sometimes you'll want to graph things that are not necessarily candidates for improvement, just to make sure the graphs stay in the acceptable range.

One of my few non-public graphs is refund rates. Normally, that is in the 2 ~ 3% range, and reducing that is not a major priority of mine. However, spikes in the graph almost always mean "You just screwed something up", so THAT information I want to see in a hurry.
This is really quite sick. By retreating on this issue Amazon makes it just that much harder for a reasonable interpretation of "derivative work" to hold, especially for any products that haven't even been invented yet.
Until Twitter (or Twitter clients) figure out how to, and start making, money, there is no point in paying attention to or even trying to predict a "war".
Old media and ideas that can't adapt to the times.
I don't think I should say, but I would say that the TechCrunch team were fantastic, put together an amazing event, and helped FathomDB get great launch exposure. I would definitely do it again, and would recommend it to others where the event's theme is relevant to your business, as 'cloud' is to FathomDB.
Definitely possible - you get MySQL root on the box. If this is a popular scenario we can also make it simple from our GUI..
I hadn't seen the help page. That info needs to be on the frontpage, otherwise a new viewer has no idea how your search works. There's no intuitiveness to your search system. That's not a dish, it's an observation.

If you want to email me for more feedback or if you'd like to discuss ideas, trickXmananation.com (X=@)
Do you think it's a "wise" idea to add Yahoo! indea's link here? :)
oh man, that is really a great idea! If this service was around 6 months ago, ma.gnolia wouldn't have to go down.
I used to work in a technology incubator in central Japan, and once you balled up all the support services, 100 teeny companies and a dozen that were decidedly unteeny added up to 3,000 jobs. It was one of the biggest things to ever happen to this town.

Its a good thing, too -- this region is otherwise extraordinarily dependent on a handful of ultimate consumers for manufactured goods. When a certain large car company has exports crater, those manufacturers get hit hard. The bank datacenter that they put here for cheap bandwidth and easy access to technical employees, on the other hand, won't shutter or lay off temps.

I won't tell you the total price tag but suffice it to say that if Japan got similar ROI on all their public spending, there would be articles here saying "Can I afford not to move to Nagoya?"
How many cores will a typical personal computer have?

Well, maybe by 2014, there will be something else other than cores??? Almost some geeks will create something innovative!!! Who knows?

EDIT: This world is changing in a crazy way... so fast pace more than you think... specially when it comes to the IT!!!

EDIT: Why would you really give me "0" point?!!!! 8-}
Wouldn't you say the same thing for any public funding of private ventures, why does the volume matter?

I don't support the government-as-vc idea myself but not because of any job projection numbers (real or made up). I think science and technology funding like NSF is a better way for the government to get involved in long term value/wealth/job creation in this country. The outcomes of the efforts can be more easily shared by the shared public money put in, seems more ethical to me.
Holy crap. I just changed mine to 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3 - my page load times seem like they have doubles. Not even joking.

Thanks for the tip.
I think it's definitely possible to front-end a cloud database with MySQL, but the question is: would it be faster or better in some other way? Relational databases are very functional, reasonably efficient and powerful, and give you some nice guarantees (ACID).

The 'alternative' databases trade off some of those properties for scalability; reintroduce them with a layer on top and I'd guess you'd lose those benefits.
I think you're underestimating the difficulty of creating vibrant neighborhoods that smart young people want to live in. Merely transporting 30 startups worth of people into a new city wouldn't create that kind of environment if it didn't already exist. You need the artists and chefs and shop owners and activists that make up the rest of the community in order to create the right kind of community.

Of the two example cities, Portland could probably very easily become a startup hub without this plan to push it, whereas Detroit would probably fail at it, even with this plan.
Another alternative theory: they're less willing to violate copyright to get their porn.

Yet another alternative theory: they have more sex in general and porn buying is proportional. (Those communities have lots of sex, more than blue states.)

Variation: they have standards standards that aren't met by "free" porn.
Yes, but you started a particularly lulzy ball rolling.
There sure is a lot of rhetoric about how "insecure" the Internet is, but there is a serious lack of definite agreement about what "security" means in this context. Does it mean lack of hard and fast authentication? Does it mean lack of flexible but not too flexible authorization? Does it mean exposure of children to porn? Does it have to do with software bugs and exploits? Or is it based on a belief that we'll somehow overcome the limitations of information theory and DRM will be a reality? None of these things, and many more, are "fixable" through a protocol change, or even an infrastructure change. Most issues arise because people put too much of the wrong kind of trust in the tool that the Internet is and the tools that the Internet provides. There is no silver bullet, and those who keep themselves up at night thinking that they are going to somehow figure it all out and be the savior of the Internet are only doing themselves a disservice by losing sleep.
Huh, maybe because I have 3 in the list (first) I never notice.
I think inviting 250,000 people to your city with three months of funding is going to have lots of unplanned side effects, many of which will occur three months after the initial funding date.
There's also the University of Chicago (clearly world class) and a raft of other institutions - DePaul, UIC, Loyola, Chicago State, and IIT. And everyone who went to a Big Ten school ends up here for a short period of time. (Plus, we have a bar for pretty much every Division I-A school in the country.) Chicago has no trouble being attractive to young talent, and it's cheap, too.
Reminds me of a russian proverb my co-founder attributed to his great-uncle:

"The first time you get hit by a train, it really hurts. The second time, it still hurts. By the third time, you start to get used to it."
Nice of you to notice.
That comment was more about how to point out the "leverage" that was possible, not any actual number.
Wufoo seem to have rooted themselves in Tampa on $118k, but they're an extreme case.

How would the evolution of Wufoo differ if they had be in the valley instead of Tampa?
Thanks for encouraging me to look at this closer. I was testing with this: http://pastie.org/402890

I was having trouble comparing results, so I combined your two into one, tried to make the cases more parallel, took out the alarm() stuff, and just ran it under oprofile.

My conclusions were that for cases like this, where the file is small enough to remain in cache, there really isn't any difference between the performance of read() and mmap(). I didn't find any of 10x differences you found, found that the mmap() version ranged from twice as fast for small chunks to about equal for full pages.

You might argue that I'm cheating a little bit, as I'm using memcpy() to extract from the mmap(). When I don't do this, the read() version often comes out up to 10% faster. But I'm doing it so that the code in the loop can be more similar --- I presume that a buf[] can optimize better.

I'd be interested to know how you constructed the case where read() was 10x faster than mmap(). This doesn't fit my mental model, and if it's straight up, I'd be interested in understanding what causes this. For example, even when I go to linear access, I only see read() being 5% faster.
Nice, Safari 4 gets all but the column stuff.
I thought the second to last paragraph said something much like what you are saying: "It will be easier in proportion to..."

(although I am saddened by the weather part, being in Madison, WI where we have an emphatic yes to the other criteria)
understandable...how about letting us know how you went about getting in touch with techcrunch, did pg phone Arrington? called yourself? emailed?
CNBC documentary "House of Cards" (video, 1:31) - analysis of 2002-2008 housing bubble
How to Put a Baby to Sleep | eHow.com
when will pricing be available? will there be a free tier?
Amazon Backs Off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle