Plan B: Moved to SF, worked at a trendy startup. Real Hackers met: are you kidding? I pass 12 of them on the bus every day.
What do people think of this:
As a side note, other than the lack of members, what makes your site stand apart from hacker news and proggit?
The lack of members is the biggest feature. The odds of it turning into the next Reddit/Digg are much lower than the odds of that happening here. :)
Seriously, the idea stemmed from the YC meetup last week. PG said that the YC interviews aren't like interviews at all, they just "Do YC". If the team and YC seem to click, then they get accepted. I think the same thing applies for finding good cofounders--you just start something and see if the chemistry among the team clicks. I've started projects with friends and complete strangers before, and whether or not I knew them before the project isn't correlated with how well we worked together. There are a few people I met the day of starting a joint project who I'd love to start another company with.
That's what I hope this site could do: not just bring hackers together to discuss startups, but bring them together to launch things and find new cofounders.
I think there are a lot of people on HN that would be great to work with, and the best way to find them would be to just start projects. I currently am lucky enough to have a few hours free each day, but unlucky that I'm far from the Valley(I've got family commitments that have been keeping me in Southern MA all summer). When I get to the valley, I think it will be easier to find co-founders, but until then it's not that easy.
Although I will not dispute the SF(San Fran) comment, I hope to see South Florida become "the other SF".
I'd say South Florida is one of the top 10-12 places in the world in terms of number of startups at least according to: http://www.startupwarrior.com/
Linux.... 16 year old Finnish kid with nothing to do during those long cold finnish winters.
MySql.... bunch of swedes with the same problem.
PHP... a few hackers with credentials I'm not familiar with but I don't think they came from academia....
Ruby... Japanese kid obsessed with unix and C.
Rails... Danish kid going to a business school in denmark and hacking on the side......
True, the code that runs the internet was written by a bunch of UC Berkley grad students but that was back in the days when you had to be tied to some kind of entity like that in order to have access to the hardware that was needed to run your code. Since the mid 90s this hardware has been very cheap and available to anyone with the passion to purchase and develop.
Many have and they have left traditional venues for new and creative functionality in the dust.
Beyond which, I have only one response to the "look at all the things made by people who aren't professors". Well, look at how many people who can program who aren't professors. Think of all the projects that grew from BSD. Think about Latex.