skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
obviously it's not the climate the most important reason.
Europe has a very prominent problem to solve before even having the chance to develop such a hub.

But in the future there be a place that will concentrate and host those people ready to build this ecosystem.

It's more a culture problem Europe is facing. There may be ventures geographically descentralized that succeed but they wont be concentrated anytime soon, because there arent enough attempts and often the very comptetent people move to US.

The huge irony is Loic Le Meur, the French guy who is hosting LeWeb3, who is supposed to be working towards that purpose. Interestingly enough, his new startup is now in San Fransisco..

p.s.
even if the beach is cold, I guess the sun is there and the lifestyle and life is non-stop, and must have been a catalyst in the beggining when Silicon Vally began to attract people. Anyhow, of what I now real estate was pretty cheap even 25 years ago, which must have been a very important role. Paris is already big and expensive and cloudy. London the same. Cities in Germany the same.

The people and the prices are not startup friendly.
Lets see how it goes :)
http://reddit.com/info/2z6fy/comments
I like the idea, but one problem I have is that they require me to give the applet full trust on my system.
What is the closest to Sillicon Valley there's in Europe?
TED | Talks | Erin McKean: Redefining the dictionary (video)
It's even harder to move to Europe as an entrepreneur for someone who is neither in the US or EU.
How does YC make money from any of this? /confused

Except may be it encourages his startups to move to the Valley, which increases the chances of YC's(and the startup's) success. Of course that just validates his essay that the Valley is the place to do startups.
Production quality software:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function drawError() in /usr/local/www/cbd-live/date_wizard.php on line 655
I'm from Atlanta, and I'm now living in the SF Bay Area...

Here's why I don't think Atlanta can duplicate or really compete with Silicon Valley:

Atlanta just doesn't have as many "crazy" people who are willing to take a risk on "stupid" ideas. I think this article sums things up well (just substitute Georgia for Michigan):

http://www.metromodemedia.com/blogs/posts/TMeloche3037a.aspx

Atlanta will never have enough "crazy" people... while Atlanta is one of the most progressive cities in the South, it's still pretty conservative which doesn't really allow for thinking differently and taking risks on a more massive scale.

It's also good to note that a lot people from either GT or Emory move to either New York or California after graduation or shortly after...
s/as productive as/more productive than/

Fixed it for you. :-)
Linux support is coming very soon, we're just having a hard time finding enough computers to test on. Thanks for trying it out,

Raj Advani
Lead Engineer, UpNext
This is a pretty good implementation of your idea.
http://www.craig2mail.com/
I've used it to find items that are rarely posted.

Edit: my bad, they got shut down by Craigslist
http://www.craig2mail.com/craigs.html

Aside: What is up with CL? Their policies seem very short sighted.
There's also http://www.zvents.com/

Jesus, this is ANOTHER idea I didn't implement (I had this same idea 2 years ago) I was too worried about the details and ran out of steam when I should have just cranked out the code.
i had a hard drive die on me after 6 months in. they are cheap and decent, but if you do use them make sure you cron some auto backups. right now i have it on raid 1.
5 weeks after I launched Startup Schwag it made the front page of the WSJ (attached article) as a possible indicator of the internet's next hype bubble. I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but hey, wsj aok =)
So sorry. Once I saw the textboxes, I didn't even bother looking for a one time entry. Any way to avoid this for idiots like me?
Um, yeah. So I granted the thing trust and it CRASHED my computer. As in, mouse froze, then unfroze, but one of my video cards was down (2 screens blank) - nothing ever appeared in the window. And both monitors stayed blank until a restart. Not ever going there again.
Granting the applet trust on your system allows us to access your video card, enabling hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Essentially to use 3D acceleration you have to trust the applet to the extent that you trust any desktop application you install on your computer. Perhaps in the future Sun will introduce a more rigorous permission system where you can grant only what you choose, instead of all or nothing.

Raj Advani, UpNext
In my opinion, using a map as an event calendar is fantastic (I was working on this exact thing 2 years ago). The idea is good but your maps are what makes this REALLY good.

EDIT: Spotlight mode is a GREAT feature. Very nice!
Hard to argue this, though I really do want it to work here. We're doing a startup in Atlanta and I'm pretty well hooked into what's going on, but some of Paul's points about the necessary infrastructure (investors mostly) are true enough. I'm just about at the stage where I'm speaking to investors so I'll report back what I find.
It is in fact a complicated question, let me say that you are focusing only in US statistics.

That assumption may not work in other countries.
As a serial CEO I moved my latest venture from NY to Silicon Valley when I took it over. My reasons were access to talent and access to capital. Our target customer is Wall St but I felt it was lower risk to be far from the customer than far from the talent pool to build the technology. Finally, there are too many fun things to do in Manhattan - and not that many fun things to do at night in Foster City; this helps startups focus.
If you're serious, then this isn't the place for you.

Try reddit instead.
Sorry about your experience. Unfortunately our resources are limited and we haven't been able to access all videocard combinations on which to test (but we're trying every chance we get!). We'd like to able to sort out remaining hardware conflicts, though; to that end, would you be willing to email me what videocard and OS you're using? You can reach me at radvani7 -at- hotmail dot com. I'd greatly appreciate that!

Raj Advani, UpNext
Granted. My case isn't very concrete. I'm going by the very general principle that if something isn't growing -- making new connections, adapting, and creating -- then entropy starts to happen.

I don't think the web can grow much more complex without it outgrowing our ability (as both users and providers) to use it effectively -- at least not to its full potential. Therefore growth will probably have to be balanced by growth in our intuitive knowledge and competencies: education.
Why didn't you use Flash? I doubt that many people will give a website they have never used before permission to access all their files.
I used to feel the same way... Atlanta is nice, but you need to live in the Bay Area for a bit and you'll understand. It's a huge difference, especially for software startups
Yes, of course. That would be a nice start.
Flash doesn't have support for 3D hardware acceleration. We're rendering up to 100,000 polygons per second; the maximum flash can handle is around 5 to 10 thousand. Java on the other hand supports all of this, has a great threading model, and will allow us to use direct GPU programming in the future. In addition, when Flash does start allowing 3D acceleration (as has been seen in some old Shockwave prototypes) a permission box will still be required (as Flash by default is also sandboxed away from the videocard). While I love Flash for what it does, it simply isn't the platform of choice for 3D.
I think the issue is concentration. The ingredients are there, they're just scattered in various ways.

1. Geography: Atlanta is sprawled out, so even if you live near Tech or Emory, odds are you can't skip down to the local coffee shop to get a feel what other startups are doing.

2. The Business Mix: Silicon Valley is tilted heavily toward technology in general and therefore also to startups (at least the kind we're talking about here). In Atlanta your friends and neighbors are likely to be bankers, accountants, healthcare professionals, or any number of corporate types than startup founders or even early-to-medium stage technology employees.

3. The Business Culture: There's little "porosity" among companies -- the knowledge/social network isn't there, and that's probably the most important ingredient of a startup hub, more important than money, IMO.

Interestingly, I think this might be an scenario where a YC clone could do the most good -- because as we are always hearing here, its real value is as an aggregator of like-minded people, enabling some of the knowledge interchange and social connections that don't happen naturally.
the iBigDog helps eliminate home invaders while making your floor dirty. Is that close?
I misspoke above: we're rendering up to 100K+ polygons per frame, not per second (and hopefully > 30 FPS on most computers)
Yeah when we were there for Startup School in March we noticed it. Then again we were at the YC reception so it's not really fair to compare (that was really a cool event), but there's a definite vibe in the air. It's almost as if you're doing something wrong if you don't have your Mac with you showing somebody your latest build.
Industrialism was less of a jump for China and Japan (and maybe the other
places you mention -- I am not too familiar with their history) because they
already had regimented work, national markets, centralized governments, &c.

> > I would be happy to tell you how stupid you are based
> > on some unhappy incident in your people's history.
> You misunderstood me...

My point is, many of the "smart" peoples of the world were embroiled, not too
long ago, in the pleasures of fascism. Consider also the Chinese -- they are
smarter than all of us. What kind of government have they got? Not one
characterized by its trust of the people...
Well, we did two rounds of fairly big invites (500+ each time) with the original language, and both hit that 65% number. The most recent (just a few weeks after the previous invite round) was where we made the change (700 invitees). But yaw, I'm suspicious of any conclusions drawn from stats like these. At the end of the day, all I could offer was my hypothesis. :-)
Good idea! It hadn't occurred to take this as an opportunity to experiment until the most recent batch yielded such interesting results. I'll definitely A/B test next round and post the results. We've got several thousand more people to invite (in blocks of 500-700) and 5-60 more signing up per day, so.... Plenty of opportunity!
Thats what I heard. I do not think it would bother me much. I can stay in for the day and only go out at night.
The danger of something is not the only factor in banning it. It's the danger : utility ratio. Cars are dangerous, but their utility is very high. Guns are also extremely dangerous, and their only utility is their danger - they are made to kill people (and protect, as a side effect). We ban guns because we consider their utility low compared to their danger (replacing them with police and a civil society).
Thanks for your explanation. I agree with you that Sun should do something about the permissions model. It seems unnecessary to put access to 3D acceleration in the same security box as unrestricted file access.
Do atheist men want to have children?  Or do they merely accede to so because their wives really want children?
Men who are religious might want children because it is a religious duty to do so. But there is no such duty for atheist men.

One might argue that evolution resulted in men and women being different in this way so that there is a separation of concerns, with men more concerned with bringing food for their families while their wives take care of their children.
Thanks. Your advice have been very helpful. What I am gonna take away from this, is that it's not environment that makes the man, because the environment tends to smooth out to the averages, even if the environment is the "high-tech" startup's. One has to make one's own mark and not get too comfortable.
How do you define a would be entrepreneur?
doatheistmenwantchildrenordotheymerelyaccedebecausetheirwivesreallywantchildren.com may still be available.

if it is, you should jump on that.
1. I spent a good deal of time tooling up and down 101. SV and Ess Eff are kinda like Atlanta and Alpharetta. If you walk into the Starbuck's at 5th & Spring on any work day and toss a quarter into the crowd it will land within 5 feet of an entrepreneur, an investor, or both.

2. Great point. Real estate is king in ATL. Read "The Man in Full" for more.

3. I think the social network is here. I literally sit and look at over it every day from my office window.
LOL. I intended it as a joke, you know. In reality, though, a title like that would probably get many readers to click, but once they realize that the title is misleading, they'll down-vote it.
You're right, that's why i think european policy makers need to change that
Here's the kicker though:

Grad school is by definition, professional training for academia, if you were more a hacker-type, would you be eventually forced into "publish or perish" thinking instead of building real world applications. And If you were to immerse yourself eventually in the hallow halls of the ivory tower, would you (meaning an average person) be able muster the courage (and I'm serious) to have enough faith in your ideas to become a grad school drop-out?
Newsvine - Prototype Phone Gives Fitness Check
Functional Programming In The Enterprise
More of this out there than meets the eye.
This concept has big potential. I'll be eagerly following your progress. All the best!
You can try it without registering.
Why can't we be friends?
Probably the best ever Social Networking and Bookmarking Toolbars and Extensions
I get SLAs now. Duh.
>Grad school is by definition, professional training for academia

PhD programs are but a lot of master's programs are very expensive, high-end vocational training, like Master's in Software Engineering and other engineerings. It's a good way to pick up an engineering skillset when you had an undergraduate degree in something other than engineering.
Yes, exactly. This is why business.com turned out to be a bargain at nine million.
Gee, my site is Web 2.4 rc1. Will I be ready?
He arranges web 2.0 conferences in the Bay Area too....
For me the following sentence says that there is no 'bubble 2.0':
"The overvaluations this time are not being made by businesspeople and investors, but consumers and users." At worst you could argue that this is a fad but not a bubble. Users cannot create bubbles, only investors can.
PG and Silicon Valley vs. Ryan and the rest of the world POLL
No more opinions. lets do numbers.Name one startup in the valley and its direct competitor outside the valley. Then pcik which is doing better.
3 Things you should (not) learn from Meg Whitman, courtesy of The Economist
Also I really don't like the terms: 'Bubble 2.0' and 'Web 3.0'. Can we not wait for some industry consensus before brandishing these terms. (Thanks I had to get that off my chest).
1.Twitter (inside valley) vs Jaiku (outside valley). Jaiku is the winner so far.
1.google docs (in) vs Zoho (out). google is a winner so far although i use Zoho
fix it aston!
Hmm. So much for the quiet launch.

I'll consider this thread an interactive bug queue...
or take a holiday there and aggressively pitch.. Also there is no funding minimum for instance for a US E2 visa.. but as the article suggests to me, the ycombinator startup fund might not be enough..

Also consider the following, the std. angel investment is $12k from ycombinator. That gives you 3 months, which is also about the minimum amount of time you can arrive on tourist visa.

Can you take that to get up and running and then move to silicon valley? If your idea is promising then you seem to be ok.. It doesn't seem that reality gets in the way here, either by immigration policy or the details of a ycombinator investment.
Sweet. There's now a drawError(), but that still doesn't change the fact that you got to an error state. Do you remember what you did?
This is really cool! Nice job guys. Now bring it to the west coast, okay?

And add some fun stuff like a godzilla mode a la sim city.
We're running CBD.com on PHP. That's been an adventure so far... There're a lot of hooks back into our core product, though, and that stuff's happening via RPC's. There's a tiny bit of C++ code, consequently, that came about for this app.

PS: I'll let our frontend folks know you like the design.
We're not banking on YC to fund us. We're chasing two other deals concurrently, and if that fails we'll get day-jobs elsewhere to bootstrap.

However, we think that YC is one of the best deals out there. There's the networking of course, but then there's the PR, or the 'social capital'. If we impress PG enough, he'll say something shiny about us in an essay, and suddenly our website grabs the starry eyes of thousands of readers. It's also probably worth a lot in confidence to be picked as a probable winner out of an application pool of more than a thousand.
We set you up for the date first, then we ask the personal details. You can tell us your gender and orientation later on (and they don't even have to match what you asked for on the date).
My dad is atheist, and I don't think he was browbeaten into having all three of us...
Are we back to 1999? A Java program that needs full trust to do whatever it wants on my computer! They will lose 95% of the visitors at that stage.
No problem, and good luck.
I dunno.. even in biotech startups tend to cluster around specific areas (and universities).. A lot of state govts want to attract business, but have yet to achieve critical mass.

Without a doubt, you have to be near a university.
Sunnyvale.
Analytics & Marketing - A look into Britney Spears
It crashed my FireFox, but is working in IE.
I have never seen such a book but then I have never looked for such a book. I was convinced that when I started my first startup, I had a disease. Now that I have started my second, I know it is terminal.

If you have read a book to convince yourself that you need to start, then chances are you have no need to. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu
"Startup for less - Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs"
http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/startup-for-less.html
StartupLA - 2-Day Startup Conference at UCLA, Oct. 27-28
I used to love AdWords but have been driven to alternatives because of the per click pricing going up so high. I get pretty good results from Adbrite.com without spending much.
Today is the Day
dudes! why you ask if you have to move to silicon valley?? That is such the wrong question! The reason is because they invest in people that say, hey, you know what, I'm going to put webcams on my head and broadcast it to the world!! I mean, if that works so will any other "conventional" silly idea... just make something that didn't work so well in version 1.0 and make it social or 2.0ize it.

Justin.tv is the youtube of the future.. Name one VC outside of Silicon Valley that would have invested in that? When I first heard about it I thought.. man that'll never work... I was so wrong! It's a webcam, on his head, that simple.

Imagine being a VC and getting this biz plan:

1) put webcam on head and broadbast to world.
2) ???
3) profit!

I guarantee you that nobody probably knew (even the VC) how the hell they would make money at it..
EA Acquires BioWare and Pandemic Game Studios
We only use the trust for browser-based 3D acceleration (a concept most people would attribute to the 21st century). The applets of 2007 are going to be far different than what you saw in 1999. Java may seem like an old beast but Sun has some really nice things in store with their latest Update N release. Thanks for trying it out!
Dedicated Server Service Provider Recommendation
Does anyone have a favorite service provider that offers reasonable rates for dedicated systems (not virtual) and has a tech support group that doesn't suck? Thanks in advance!
It 'tanked' to where it was over the summer?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64795
The real question is, what is the idea that you have NOW that you are not implementing and you are too worried about the details and might run out of steam when you should be just cranking out the code?
Europe is ass-backwards in some sense.. they need to take more risks and foster a risk taking community.. It has a lot of pluses, but many minuses.. Every young person from the continent typically moves to London to work and make their money.

Also, about mobile.. Europe has had mobile for a lot longer than the US.. yet it takes Apple releasing the iPhone to begin to unleash its true power??

Interestingly some of the biggest investors in the tech boom and the housing bubble were UK and European institutions.. So the money is there.. it just needs to be redirected locally...
I certainly did not say that. What I said was that if there was no exit, it wasn't a startup. IPO is also a form of exit.

But the conclusion here is also false: you need bold and intelligent investors even more to build a long-lasting startup like Google.
We've had a bunch who've done it. Heysan, Buxfer, and Auctomatic were all founded entirely by non-US citizens, along with several others that haven't launched yet.

If you raise a certain level of investment, you can stay in the US. I don't know the details; it varies depending on where you're from and where you raise the money.
DONOT MOVE TO COLMA! That place is 50% cemetery and where I spent my summer :). Maybe if you were right by the BART or something, but either go further north to San Fran or South to the Valley.

I'd recommend San Fran as its a lot more exciting than Palo Alto. Living in an exciting area is extremely motivating.
All other things being equal, is Silicon Valley the best place in the galaxy to start and build a software or web services business? Hell yes. Will lots of startups that are started and built in Atlanta and Munich and London and Austin nonetheless be successful? Hell yes - but they should demo to investors in Silicon Valley.
The Structured Web - A Primer
We get equity. We can literally only make money if founders make way more.
We were thinking Pac Man but I like the Godzilla idea also.
Ok, so he's technically wrong about the beaches, but he's right about the climate. The fabulous climate (and landscape) is a big draw for the Bay Area. I feel excited every time I fly into SFO.
I bet those bits of information would be extremely useful bits of information to post in a YC FAQ.
My job's giving me a heart attack!
Atlanta just doesn't have as many "crazy" people who are willing to take a risk on "stupid" ideas.

I found the same thing to be true of St. Louis, my hometown. People just aren't ready for new ideas - they'll spend hours telling you why you're an idiot when they don't understand what you're trying to do in the first place. I try not to even mention my startup while I'm there - I've even had people say they had religious objections to what I was doing. It's just nuts.

It's hard to understand the quality of the Bay Area startup environment until you actually live here for awhile - before I moved to SF I had this nebulous idea that it was where I should be, but in hindsight the difference is much more pronounced than that.

Here, you're almost in the minority if you don't have big, 'crazy' ideas.
the flip side... that sounds like the good life
Google Checkout: $10 to be my friend?

Facebook Marketplace: $10 to be my friend?
The Piraha and us
Were they both sent at the same time of day / day of week?