I'm sorry if you don't understand how this relates to startups. It does.
I know of very few founders who didn't move to a new place for their startup. Understanding how the qualities of a region affect the prosperity of its companies will aide you greatly when weighing the costs and benefits of moving for your startup and where to move to.
Prior to what I have learned through HN, I may have moved back to Europe without giving it a second thought. Pull your head out of the compiler for a minute to see how location will affect your hacking career.
Reddit content is funny pictures, useless politics, inflammatory youtube, and misleading headlines. This is none of those.
1. If your parents make 100k+ but don't want to spend it on your education, you're screwed.
2. If you're not a spoiled only child and your parents have to divide that money up then you're screwed.
#1 angers me especially. Parents I know don't do that anymore, especially when colleges rape us with such obscene tuitions while doing relatively little to improve the education.
You can't really call vastly different sites the same idea. This train wreck totally misses the "I would show this to my friends design" aspect of the idea:
From what I can tell, those sites are totally different as far as first impressions. Plus, hotornot got the most brandable domain in the history of the internet.
edit: archive.org confirms it. You've got to be kidding me if you think those sites are remotely similar except for one tiny feature.
Damn, I was going to say hotornot, but you already did. There have been thousands of other startups though that have had first mover advantage work for them in a huge way.
Hell yeah the more the merrier. There's no way tiny yc can support the huge number of capable people out there who's talents are going to waste. That's becoming more obvious every cycle.
Edit: unless they really screw it up and scare away investors. Still, I am impatient to see angel funding to less well-connected people expand at a higher rate. Even risks considered, I welcome the yc clones.
I'm not saying that you should ignore this data or not release early. I have though, have seen customers be very wrong. I'd say they tend to see only short term goals, not long term. At worst, your product will become a design by committee disaster.
You're not talking about evening the score, you're talking about inhibiting people from ever getting ahead again.