Because we ourselves were bored with reading about nothing but startups. If our site was boring to us, it was probably boring to the audience we intended it for.

This is hard for business guys to understand, but the people who make the best startup founders often don't care about business very much. Some of the most successful companies started next year will be started by people who do not currently plan to start companies.

I'll posit that the "startup" theme was what was responsible for all the self-help-SEO type posts.

I'll gladly put up with arcane posts about how to configure your emacs environment to write haskell if it means I don't have to see anymore inane posts about improving my credit score by "track suit CEO."

I don't like this idea. There are already many places on the net to find out about hacking. But this is the only place I've found for good stories about startups (of course, I stopped looking after I found this place). From what I can see, there is much more to a startup than hacking. And there are more kinds of people involved with startups than hackers. It is a disservice to the startup community to change the focus here.

Besides, this site already has somewhat of a hacker focus anyway. Look at these items from the top-ten at this moment: #3 Coding Horror: Discipline Makes Strong Developers #5 Blueprint is a CSS framework #6 How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary #9 We are living in someone else's computer simulation

Not exactly business ideas.

And while you may be bored with reading this site, I don't see you as the typical audience here. I see this site as being for people who are in startups or thinking about doing a startup and who want to learn as much as they can. Not for people who've already been through it and already know all this stuff, like yourself. Even if Startup News began as your baby, I think you have to let it go.

In short I think your initial premise is wrong. Just because you're bored, doesn't mean everyone else is bored too.

I don't agree. I think this Hacker News idea is fantastic. Some time ago I proposed a "classic.reddit.com", the idea being the same: having a place where we could have the good old reddit, or rather, where we could have intelligent news back again.

42.

Yes, guys, it was me all around. Funny that it took you so long to find out. I kickstarted this big simulation as a weekend hack and let it evolve for a month, so I could come and play as Warren Beatty.

Can we now, as a universe, move on?

 * * *

This is not science; it's religion, philosophy, or abuse of language. You could never prove anything about this kind of stuff either way, and IMHO throwing around probabilistic estimates is 'not even wrong'. The scientist quoted in the article admits such estimates are only 'hunches', so I guess only the reporter is to blame for placing this stuff under a 'Science' header.

Now, I'm not protesting that we talk this. It's fascinating stuff. It's funny to recognize in this thread some of the same crazy ideas that would get people shuffling away from me at parties, like 'what if our whole known universe is but an atom inside other universe, which in turn [...]?'

Re: worlds simulated inside worlds, aka the Matrix, aka Plato's cavern- when I did work on a MMOG we had this conversation once or twice that if we gave our non-player characters ability to learn and communicate for an arbitrary length of time, eventually they'd come up with theories like "Every object in the universe has an unique ID, which is a 64-bit integer". And they'd wake up after a downtime and comment things like "gee, finally capacitor recharging is fixed!", and then stop and wonder about the deep meaning of that.

Re: internet and cybernetic consciousness: when I first learned about the internet, one of my first thoughts is that the interconnected computers would create a new consciousness, or an ecosystem of competing consciousnesses. Not that it would be pursued, but that it would happen spontaneously, just like life evolved out of the primordial soup.

Then I thought that something similar would happen as a result of connecting so many people. Now, it's been always like that to some extent (cultures, memes, ideologies, etc. can be thought of as supraindividual consciousnesses), but the instant communication would make it more ostensible and powerful. Just like oxidation and explosion are instances of combustion, yet the difference in speed makes it counterintuitive for us to recognize any sameness between them.

Fast-forward to 2007: for about a year, the global hivemind has been thinking intensely about cats with captions. Who knows what deep intentions hide behind this?

I've decided that what is amazing about Norvig is that he is skilled in both theory and practice. A maker and a thinker.

That's ridiculous. It's just making clear what should have been clear from the start, which is that news.yc is news for Y Combinator people, not just about their startups.

Hacker News is also much less bland. And for those hackers who don't think they're interested in startups, it's more tempting! (Muhahaha! Come, hackers, and catch the chronic startup syndrome!)

I posted this in another thread: why not start a NEW website hackernews.org or something and leave this site alone? Why mess with success?

This site is, after all, a subdomain of the YC site which is an early stage investment firm. n.yc.com made sense since it dealt with YC company news stories, VC investment, angel investment etc. stories. If you wanted to get funding from YC or wanted to learn how VC investment procedure works, this was a perfect complement to the main YC site. Now n.yc will become another reddit and will get flooded with all kinds of nonsense and will get a lot of "how do I haxor my ex's myspace account" since "hacker" really means cracker to like 99% of the internet population. Instead of spending 10 min to get an idea what the latest trends in investment community are, you'll have to spend 20+ minutes while. As for being bored and you're a startup founder, you're in trouble! And if you're really bored and need to read something, there's plenty of reddit & digg subdomains that are interesting.

This new site will lose focus and will degrade into another digg or reddit. Second law of (thermodynamics) Internet almost guarantees it. Paul, if you want this site to become bigger and grow and become a better reddit and all that, why not get a new domain and start it there? Why destroy what works?