skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree.

To build on this comment, I disagree with pg's statement that startups have and will spread somewhat randomly. The biggest defining factor is having a (more) free market in a given place (inc. lower taxes and a /proper/ legal system).

In fact, that's largely why northern Europe had the Industrial Revolution and why most startups are in the US today. Because the US seems to be becoming more statist, that could definitely change.
Cybersecurity Act would give president power to 'shut down' Internet
At the beginning, there is always a 'center', but that does not negate the influence of the other districts.
I suspect that PG has gotten caught up in a bit of the valley hype.

There are many more counterexamples. Microsoft (does it not count because it was pre-internet?) was a start-up outside the valley at one point. MySpace didn't start out in the valley. So why skype? because a valley company overpaid significantly for them? (I love skype though, i just don't think they are the best counterexample).

Detroit thought it had all the 'talent' and 'knowledge' in building cars, and then got it handed to them on both sides, cheaper and better from Asia, more expensive luxurious and better from Europe.

No question the valley has investors, and very talented ones at that. As costs for internet start-ups decreases, amazing open-source technologies like hadoop continue to spread, and talent realizes they can excel anywhere, why would the valley continue to as the center?

What will be the draw to keep people in the valley? Angel financing can now accomplish what only VC could a few years ago, and that continues to change. Ideas are not limited to the valley, technology is not limited, for many start-ups their are no physical goods, and when there are, those are created overseas.

So, though Silicon Valley may be the center today, what will make it the center tomorrow?
NUI is simpler than Cocoa? It doesn't look that way.
I really like the analogy with SVN and the air conditioner though.

I sounds like big company logic to me though. A Startup would just pay 6.95 per month to host their SVN repository.
First to suggest that this is a horrible poll? Why: how would you answer this?

Accept = A x compensation + B x environment + C... + H x responsibility... + ... Z unknown factors + $alpha$ Hidden factor 1 + $beta$ Hidden factor 2

Step 1: Ignore all factors beyond H. Fair enough, given how you're framing the question with respect to only these variables.

Step 2: Compare several jobs and then what, minimize the errors, and find the largest coefficient, ignoring any and all covariates!?
eBay Announces Plans To IPO Skype In 2010
You must have posted this while I was putting out my rant below. I agree, though I'm confused by your last 'desktop software' comment.
The lesson to learn from your example is: don't work for someone without getting paid, unless you /really/ trust them.

Not: we need the government to be our nanny. That results in all kinds of really bad side effects, including those illustrated by the person who started this thread.
I always say to continue doing your thing. These guys are just starting out, so even if you are a year late, at most they'll maybe have 1-2% market share.

Go look at their site, see what they did right, see what they did wrong, and modify your product accordingly. If necessary add a few extra features to differentiate yourself
Yes, I think so. Like I said, it is not exactly executed like I would've done it. However, I am worried about the edge they already have in terms of being in the market already. Since it is a market with strong network effects (like many web apps) it will be hard to convince existing users to change services.
#2 and #5 sound like they might actually have some revenue potential, but a startup based on a "Firefox plug-in to provide real time analytics for your links"? That sounds like a neat side-project, but I can't imagine how to found a company around that.
> Why is it bad that in order to automatically generate binding legal documents, someone involved needs to be educated in the subtleties of legal language?

I wouldn't put up a huge stink if the law was "you must pass the bar exam".

However, the law is "you must attend 3 years of law school".

> These laws do not exist solely to frustrate you

Agreed. They exist to decrease the supply of lawyers, thus increasing the price that lawyers can demand.

Frustrating me is just a side effect.
Maybe you're right. Although they're rare, there is certainly precedent for private roads, and many of these are successful. For example:
"The Dulles Greenway is a private road built in the western suburbs of Washington, D.C., in 1995. Though constructed with some restrictions set by the state, it was built with private money and is run as a for-profit business. The first year it opened, 6.1 million trips were made on the road. In 2006, 21 million trips were made. This type of private toll road has the ability to move large numbers of people without the aforementioned problems associated with the federal interstates that we are told are indispensable. It has shown its viability, and we might well be seeing many more of these private toll roads in the future."
See http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0809d.asp
Fascinating.

This it the first thing that I've ever read that made me think that moving from MA to CA might be a win for me, personally.
FWIW I think you are absolutely correct, "I eagerly await ${predictable_event}" adds little.

I do think that a user controllable OS that provided a unified desktop/handset/mediacenter/cloud environment would be a good thing.

I think apple has provided some very worthwhile innovations; but as we go into the late adoption phase, we need open standards, and openly licensed environments that are Owned by the end user.

That would be part of why I am eager for alternate software loads for this sexy hardware.
But what's interesting is that Joel is pretty clearly making the point that he is the man responsible for making sure the "supporting roles" happen, allowing the programmers to assume allthe "prima donna" roles. In return, he gets to own the lion's share of the company and a commensurate share of the profits.

"instead of diverting to track B and talking about how to successfully structure a small to medium sized company (like his)."

Doesn't it make more sense for him to talk about the case of a small to medium sized company, which he actually knows something about?

I think, though, it isn't too hard to extrapolate the lesson for startups: if you are a programmer who formerly worked for a small to medium sized company, you suddenly need to figure out on your own how to do the jobs of that other 80% of the people at your company were doing. In fact, elsewhere I think Joel has made exactly the point that when he started Fog Creek he and his co-founder were the ones doing all of those tasks, in addition to the coding.
I was not sure whether to post it or not. I am still not sure. It's not because I am afraid other people will be interested in this idea (ok, maybe a little bit), but maybe it will bring some bias in the conversation. But I agree that knowing my idea and knowing the competitor would help to assess the situation.
> You either need to remove the monopoly and allow capitalism to do its thing, or you need to institute regulation to prevent them from ripping off the customer.

Except that, in general, instituting regulation to fix the problem that the monopoly caused doesn't actually fix things, but only partially fixes those problems, and introduces different problems. Removing the monopoly grant is by far the better solution.
How do you define lying, though? Does the animal have intent to deceive, or does he just have a cause/effect memory that makes it behave in ways we anthropomorphize as lying?

I've seen some dogs do some pretty clever things, and I think they have more brains than most people give them credit for, but I don't think they intentionally deceive.
Well yes obviously they're a profitable industry, I don't deny that. I'd be the first to hunt down numbers to back up what you say, I was in the card industry myself for awhile. But I wasn't answering the question of 'are they a good business' I was answering the question 'would I pay for today's virtual gifts' which I understood to be your submitted topic. And I was being honest: in my experience virtual gifts have never appealed to me as a consumer. I likened them to gift cards because gift cards provide no added utility while reducing liquidity - they're a huge consumer sham. But as to whether these items are profitable, absolutely - they're spectacularly profitable!
Agreed. But I don't think he's really advocating shielding programmers completely from the sales process, or from customers.

He does say:
some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls

I think it's nice to shield developers from the chaos of the air conditioner installations, but feedback based product development is definitely something they should get involved with.

It's harder with startups, of course, because if you have limited cash, you can only hire a limited number of people and those people then have to do everything. Not sure how FC (and even 37s) handled this when they were small (in revenue) and couldn't just hire support staff to create this development abstraction layer. I think just dumb luck had a lot to do with it, though.
> Is it really such an open-and-shut case?

No, but a reasonable percentage of those convinced that "it's all the government's fault" are going to continue to see it that way no matter what (and get offended when that gets pointed out, apparently). Just like other people think that more government/laws/rules is always the answer. For that matter, I'm pretty convinced of my "radically moderate" views which are somewhere around The Economist's.

Which is why these sorts of discussions rarely go anywhere, even over a beer, to say nothing of short, sharp answers on internet forums.
Actually, once I realized that I'll never remember their name anyway, I stopped fretting so much about trying to memorize their name, or what they look like, or pretty much anything else about them.

If I never see them again anyway, who cares; and if I see them again enough times, that information will start to stick naturally.
Boston College Campus Police: "Using Prompt Commands" May Be a Sign of Criminal Activity
It really depends on team member skills and your individual process. If you have a designer who is not a web designer, but just a graphic designer who makes PS mockups, and he passes the comp directly to a developer, then that developer better be a competent web designer.

As an expert in both web design and programming, I can say that combining the needs of HTML structure for CSS and for template structure is a very subtle balancing act (nevermind the standardista bloggers with one-page sites who have 10-page manifestos on what constitutes a semantic class name). If you have a designer who knows HTML/CSS well, and a developer who knows the back-end well, they will need to have very good communication to arrive at anything approximating an optimal solution.

Now as developers we may intuitively feel more capable of understanding the nuances of CSS than a designer is capable of understanding code, but I think that does a disservice to the web design profession (eg. Eric Meyer knows more nuance of CSS in a very technical sense than almost any web developer ever will). The answer is, as always, "it depends on the individual." I have seen developers quickly get in over their head with CSS because you have to know so many arbitrary implementation and browser details to make it work right.

At the end of the day requiring a back-end to generate your HTML is a heavyweight process that excludes many talented people from the design/mockup process. Even as a developer, I often find it easier to test things out with a static document that run a big software stack and tweak database values to test output. Also, I find HTML wireframes to be much more agile than either paper or Illustrator wireframes. Even in the scenario you describe where the developer has to integrate changes from a designer into a template, I still find it cognitively easier and much less error-prone to see those changes with an HTML template vs markup generated by some other language. And what about when the designer needs to utilize generated markup as a basis for some design tweaks. In that case they need to probably do a lot of whitespace formatting and possible attribute reordering in order to get it to somewhat resemble the markup they originally created.

Of course there is a place for generated HTML, and I think Seaside really magnifies the gains to be found with the right approach, but again, it requires a very different approach from the typical designer/developer team.
Consider it validation and figure out the big picture, who will get to market faster, is backed by a more aggressive vision and where are the short to long term wins for the consumer.
What do I think? I'm not sure what the question is.

Do I think it's a good business model for certain games and game-like interactions? Absolutely.

Do I think it's silly to pay money for virtual goods? Absolutely not. You pay for hapiness plenty of other ways, who cares what the vehicle of that emotion is?

Have I ever purchased virtual goods? Yes. Over $2,000 across 8 games.
I am keeping my eyes on Boulder, CO. From what I hear, good university, good business climate, willing to take initiatives (Smart Grid being rolled out as we type).

Now if they only had ocean access... :)
All industries have "centers":

finance -- New York, Boston
automobiles -- Detroit
entertainment -- LA
etc.

There are natural reasons for that: new companies are often founded by execs who think they can do better than the big companies they leave, infrastructure gets built up that benefits all in that given industry, talent begins to congregate in those areas, etc.

I think that different types of startups might be congregated around different geographic locales: biomedical startups would likely flourish near big research hospitals, etc. Service industry startups likely aren't clustered: restaurants, etc.

With technology startups, yes there is a natural clustering in Silicon Valley and Boston, but I think that's because tech startups are fairly new. I hear lots of good things coming out of Chicago, Austin, Columbus, Minneapolis, and elsewhere. It's definitely spreading.
Do you want to back up that assertion? I'm not saying regulatory capture doesn't exist, I'm just saying it's not the primary driving force behind legislation. You don't get to just say I'm wrong and make vague references to historical trends.

Unless a company already has lawyers on staff, they have no way of determining whether a legal expert system is a good product or not. For that reason, it cannot be a substitute for a living, breathing lawyer. It could certainly be a tool for lawyers, and streamline the hell out of most legal processes, but to treat it as something more is to give up on any lowest common denominator for legal advice. And while this would certainly harm lawyers, it would also harm a great many other people.
He probably should have said "inverse".
Yes, I also thought about XING (http://www.xing.com) here in Germany. Many people say it's just a copycat of LinkedIn, but in my opinion they have created a much better business network than LinkedIn. And: they're profitable. Their business model ("Freemium") worked out and they've sucessfully expanded in other European countries and China.
With a good hash function, that would work! English text has about 2.5 bits of entropy per letter.
How is this stuff making it onto the front page?

Usually I'm the first guy to roll my eyes when people start talking about the decline of the community here. But this story is not remotely related to start-up, web culture, or even programming.

If you enjoy reading and discussing this trash, please head on over to Reddit or Digg. No need to shove it in our faces here.

Jay.
but I doubt it will be enough to overcome our disinclination to kill another person

Clearly it isn't, in most cases. But then again, soldiers don't go around arbitrarily killing people either. The fact that the conditioning exists has little to do with whether or not it is exercised.

I think for certain individuals, simply watching the actions of others is enough to alter behaviour. As such, watching continuous murders may indeed be enough to alter behaviour for a select group of outliers in dramatic ways.

The conditioning norm remains subconscious until summoned, which would mean that for most of us, it would never be used. Extremely stressful situations would of course trigger the reaction - and this would fit with the crazed gunman incidents that seem so prevalent these days (historically, gunmen tended to have military experience, interesting side note).

untrained combatant will sometimes literally die instead of firing their weapon

I think he was using historical information to make this observation. It seems obvious to me however that most modern North Americans are not longer subject to this "limitation". Fighting back pirates is certainly a good supporter of this, and seems to lend some support to his point.
EBay plans an IPO for Skype
Plan 9 blew my mind as well.

Everything's a file!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs
But what's most important is not % error rate, but % error rate / s.
PG does appear to assume ease of movement by potential founders to current startup hubs. Large cultural and language barriers remove this ease of movement. Perhaps a more rigorous claim is that there will be very few startup hubs per largely-different (culture,language) region.
How to Revise an Email So That People Will Read It
This has been happening to me for a looong while! Its reasonable since I didn't really take initiative(quick enough, atleast) for it to be "my" project.

Technology is a weird thing; inspite of being unpredictable, there are milestones we know that will be reached; how they are reached, how soon they are reached or who does, is a matter of initiative, luck and money.

I would suggest that you look at it as an opportunity; get in touch with the guys who're onto the idea now and express how passionate you are about this; share your ideas, and any work you've done on it yet.

In short, try and jump into it with those guys! You may hit upon more than you were expecting: they're obviously people who got started and who think alike: Match made in heaven?

The rest is upto you, grasshopper!!
Good Luck!
You ask a very astute question that is too rarely asked. The way this plays out in the United States is that many entrepreneurs complain about the growing role of the federal government in regulation of business over the last two centuries, which plainly is a correct description of the historical trend. But only legal historians, with their specialized knowledge, notice that many state laws have become much less restrictive of business activity over time. It's actually rather difficult to figure out what the overall historical trend is at all levels of government in the United States. Some businesses may be easier than ever to form, while others are harder than ever to form.
I was hoping something like this would come along. I'm always looking for new places around me and usually keep an eye on the Yelp reviews coming into EveryBlock (Not so much for the opinions they have about their experience, just that it's a new place to try).

Would be nice to set a default location for a little activity stream of my neighborhood so I can get an overview of what's new. It's nice to see what's happening in New York, but cafes, etc. are more dependent on location than Delicious bookmarks. A default location would also help when using the map; I have to click in three-or-four times to get to Los Angeles each time I want to add an existing place to my places.
Not sure what your background is but for most people learning ObjectiveC and Cocoa is much longer than just learning a new toolkit. I have no problem programming in ObjectiveC with Cocoa but may people really do.
I don't see irony, just wordplay between "local" and "remote". If you are given a tool that can remotely connect resources then it's not unexpected that you should only build the stuff in one place. You use the remote-connection tool to reach everyone, making anyone doing the same thing elsewhere mostly redundant.
It's a very interesting read, but agreed that it has no place on HN.
I'd LOVE to have outsource a few hours worth of google research to plot the founding locations of all of the startups on these lists:

http://startup.partnerup.com/2009/04/08/complete-list-of-q1-...
http://startup.partnerup.com/2009/01/06/complete-list-2008-w...
http://startup.partnerup.com/2008/01/02/2007-acquisitions-we...

Of course, SV would dominate, but I wonder by how much. It'd be REALLY interesting to see it as a ratio to total startups started, but I think that'd be a harder # to come by.

I think startup success is fueled by how many people have the desire to start something up and access to early-stage funding. The Valley clearly dominates the latter, but it seems (anecdotally) that hackers who want to spin something up are becoming more commonplace in non-valley locations.
When you interpret Paul's "startup" as a "newborn Internet media company" the essay makes a lot of sense, especially the comparison to movie business.

But if you interpret "startup" as "newborn consumer electronics company" or a "newborn software company" or anything else more generic not squeezed into a web page it falls short: first, the percentage of GDP generated by internet media is miniscule, the whole thing isn't that big, it's a sizable niche in a software development world but not more. For instance, when measuring life in "robotic startups" one may conclude the SV is not relevant, but Boston very much is, and Japan is taking over the world, I'm sure Trevor would agree with some of this.
This is on the line of why I think this article is actually pretty weak; it's acting like a bunch of known, understood factors are somehow new and revolutionary.
> I had difficulty getting past the "my tribe is better than your tribe" stuff.

It seems to me that this is a reaction (perhaps an overreaction) to the idea that introversion is a problem. Certainly, many people do see it as such.
Thanks for your opinion. What caught my eye about the submitted article was that the criminals in the story apparently were not nerds in the sense of "Why Nerds Are Unpopular," as was often claimed at the time of the crime.

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

In general, I'm always intrigued by efforts on the part of mainstream media to correct misimpressions originally spread by mainstream media, and I figure some start-ups will have occasion to need to learn how to influence mass media reporting on their businesses.
I've shipped in Motif, GTK, and Win32, and I know ObjC/Cocoa; of these 4, Cocoa was by far the easiest. Can you point me at some critiques of Cocoa vs., say, QT?

Again, I get that it's cross-platform. But that's not a huge win for the iPhone, which is so idiosyncratic that any good app is going to be one big special case for that platform.
Agreed and flagged.

However, passing on the message (because I was told off about this when I used to do it), please do not sign your comments (it's against the guidelines).
Driving a car in the vicinity of a Bank may be a sign of criminal activity

Fortunately, that is not the case in 99.99% of times.