I'm probably about as "un-HN" as you can get.
I live in a small industrial northern English city, about 10,000 miles from the buzz of Silicon Valley both physically and metaphorically.
I don't know how to code except a bit of really basic stuff, I don't have an education from a top university, I don't own a laptop or an iPhone or even my own home PC.
I don't work at a company that makes mashups out of widgets using the Google and Twitter APIs then turns them into Facebook apps.
But I still work in a startup, even though it's not in the web field. We're a new regional digital radio station on a platform called DAB. I love the startup atmosphere; it's so much more rewarding to come in every day and get stuck into building this thing up. It's not a web app, but it is a blank canvas for ideas and development-- we really want to do things differently to any radio station that's gone before and put to death the adage that "there are no new ideas in radio".
Personally, I take an interest in the way in which radio's using new web technologies like Twitter to have a two-way conversation with listeners and turn them into participants. I'm interested in the social news model and how it could be adapted for our medium. I want to give new life to a medium that's condemned as dying on a regular basis. We're really not "big bad old media", you know.
Some of the technical stuff on here goes way over my head, but the quality of submissions and discourse is far better than other social-news sites I could mention. I'd rather have a site that's a bit above my technical level than one that's full of conjecture about Apple laptops or pictures of cats.