abossy

I agree. I'm a UTCS grad that was hell-bent on getting involved in startups, but there simply weren't many options at the time ('08). The reasons I witnessed are the following:

* Austin is no longer an entrepreneurial town.

* The 10% rules hurts the entrepreneurial spirit.

* Geographic isolation hurts the entrepreneurial spirit.

* Little emphasis on consumer companies.

* No network effect.

* No virtuous cycle.

More details here: http://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-so-few-startups-founded-b...

I also enjoyed this one: "The buildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors express very little, and they are arranged in a confusing maze... These buildings are a pretty accurate reflection of the VC business."

Agreed. Also, how many of the 800 apartments were booked for the Denver DNC?

Quora no longer forces you to log in with Facebook, nor do you need to log in at all to browse the site.

Wow, this is the first time I see Startup School being announced for this year. Am I the only one who seems to have missed it? Luckily, I was able to get my application submitted within 3-4 minutes.

Do you have any evidence that investors want short-term returns?

This is a common misconception, and I'm not sure where it stems from. Investors would MUCH rather back Facebook than Mint, that is, investment dollars in a long-term success that becomes essential to the industry goes much further than a product that's acquired relatively early in the company's life.

Check out his LinkedIn profile for details about his work experience:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelarrington

Aside, from First Data Corp., he doesn't list which companies he founded. I would assume that he was the co-founder in those that he held a C-Level position: RazorGator and Pool.com.

He has an interesting background. For example, I don't think a lot of people know he has a Stanford Law degree.

The Microsoft campus is within biking distance of the Caltrain. It's not a terrible ride, from what I can tell.

Also, ask on the wiki! http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse40 Somebody courteously offered me a ride from Noe Valley, although I'm not sure I'll be able to make it.

Somebody should really build a product to do this automatically.

Google Instant will most likely never come to GMail search. The speed at which GMail queries are returned simply aren't fast enough for real-time search, and it's unlikely Google has a monetary incentive to improve the speed to this level. Remember, GMail search is a feature; Google Search is a business.

There are a few reasons GMail search is slow:

* GMail searches must search a genuinely real-time index of your e-mails. An e-mail must be searchable the instant it's created. Web search has an inherent latency which allows Google to do offline processing to improve search speed.

* It follows that, GMail must be an exact match, while Web search is an approximation.

* Popular queries can't be cached and returned quickly.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gmail-take-longer-to-search-my...

This minimalistic design has long been a cornerstone of Google's brand. That they are changing this (and why) is noteworthy to anybody who cares about design on the Internet.

If you don't like the story, you can skip over it to the next one. :)

Posting a bunch of code by esteemed coders that I normally wouldn't stumble across myself would be cool. For example, some cool Peter Norvig's code snippets, pieces of Quake II, etc. I would normally have to hunt these down but your site can provide a consolidated home for interesting code.

Re: 2. Two social sites are clear winners: Facebook and Twitter. Delicious initially had strong adoption, hence they were acquired, but it's been downhill since then. Google Buzz can be considered a failure; Google forced their social graph upon users and they weren't happy.

For the two successful sharing sites out there, hundreds are struggling (Digg included) or dead.

In regards to the rest of your points, there's no telling how the product will exactly play out until we have access to play with it for ourselves.

If I'm understanding the video correctly, I'll have the same problem that I have with Facebook and Twitter: interesting things are either getting drowned out or not being posted at all. I agree with a few of the other posts; this feels like more of a half-hearted attempt to mimic existing sites, instead of delivering something completely new, the way Digg did in December 2004.

I had not heard of LISP at 15, either. I already knew I loved programming, but what I was doing was rudimentary. I can't imagine how a teenager finds his or her way into such advanced programming. I personally need a formal computer science education for that.

Patrick Collison is really impressive, and I had the fortunate chance to randomly meet him at a coffee shop (he probably doesn't remember me). He is a YC alum, having founded and sold Auctomatic. He later created and sold an iPhone app that was a locally compressed copy of Wikipedia. Very cool. http://collison.ie/

Are there any input/output samples?

Could you share some screenshots? The browsershots link [1] posted earlier only contains Windows XP.

It's hard to tell exactly what the quality is in Windos because the browsershots images are low-res, but it looks like the edges are very noisy.

[1] http://browsershots.org/http://code.google.com/webfonts

Are there plans (rumored or confirmed) to release the Half-Life series on the Mac?

That's true of any company; it's a matter of reaching scale in the first place.

Can you name one recommendation service that is an 11-figure business? The only company I can think of whose core business is mostly recommendation is Pandora, and they're not even that large; nine figures at best.

I pursued this idea with randomwalker for about 6 months before realizing there's absolutely no business value here. My advice to Nowmov: choose another market before it's too late. We did, and it's been going much better for us. Fortunately, we didn't come across a strong celebrity endorsement like Ashton Kutcher's, so there was little cost to switching gears.

The problem with video recommendations is content ownership. YouTube has a monopoly on user-generated content so they immediately became our number one risk. Our business was henceforth bound to their ToS. Shortly after we switched gears, the Totlol debacle surfaced on Hacker News, confirming our suspicions that the risk was too great for a business to tolerate.

The main obstacle with the YouTube ToS is that they don't allow advertising on pages where the video content is the focal point of the page. Nowmov clearly focuses on videos, so the 'get-big-and-strike-it-rich' model is not an option for them. Moving beyond YouTube -- say, using licensed content -- cripples their product, because there simply isn't enough content to create a compelling recommendation engine. Even Hulu, being backed by industry giants, is bleeding content providers.

I can't emphasize this enough: this is a cool product, but not a good business. We had cool algorithms that provided fantastic recommendations and kept users on our alpha site for an average of 13 minutes before adding any type of social features. "Pandora for videos" was dead simple to pitch, too. I wish NowMov the best of luck and I hope they can succeed where we failed. The world needs a product like this.

What's wrong with uShip?

This is a duplicate of: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255097

This is the first I hear about a DoJ investigation, but this article largely comes off as FUD. It dances around a few weak claims, none with real evidence to back them up.

First, there's a shortage of computer scientists [1], which has led to an increase in salaries and fierce competition among companies to hire good employees. It's no accident that Google has had better perks than any U.S. company in history in order to attract top talent. They're already spending a lot per employee, and that they would fix employees salaries is ludicrous, considering they would lose out on great talent.

I don't even know what to make of, "skilled computer scientists with some management responsibilities, for instance, often make base salaries of $180,000 to $210,000" -- in Silicon Valley, at least, this is the top tier salary range reserved for only a privileged few. It would also seem strange that the DoJ would be helping these salaries stay at this high level. The government doesn't have a great track record of publicly trying to make the rich richer.

Somebody please enlighten us with the real facts.

[1] http://www.cis.udel.edu/jobs/market/

Keep in mind that SF is highly gentrified. Lower income people get pushed out to Oakland and to the cities south of San Francisco. Additionally, lower income people have less options when choosing a place to live. Hence, a car might be the only viable option for some.

500,000 cars in what given area? People commute to the city from all over the Bay Area.

"Doesn't this mean that people with inflexible schedules (i.e. people who are in lower income brackets) will be charged more?"

If their inflexible schedules coincide with the time during which there are expensive rates, then yes.

I tried to invite you (using the e-mail address listed on your blog), but I'm getting a 500 error. Anybody else having this problem?

I'm completely against celebrity gossip, but this article does have one tidbit of useful information for Bay Area residents: Charlie Ayers owns a cafe in the Town & Country Center. I'll have to check it out!