I spent this evening in a big room full of geeks. The room belonged to Y Combinator, Paul Graham's venture/incubator firm, and the geeks were assembled for the Startup School reception. Startup School is a chance for amibitious geeks to get together and learn about business from a number of experienced folks in tech companies, venture capital firms, law firms, etc. It's also not-so-secretly a huge recruiting event for Y Combinator's upcoming Winter Founders Program, which hopes to continue on the success of the just-ended Summer Founders Program. Most of the younger geeks are at Startup School because they want to build and work in startups. Most people over 25 (there aren't lots) — excluding speakers — seem to be there to recruit partners and staff.

The conversations you have in a party filled with geeks are much more challenging than normal party talk. First of all, virtually everyone there is male (maybe 5 women among the crowd of ~150) so flirting doesn't get you by. Secondly, the protocol for meeting a new person is to inquire about what they're doing with the most insightful questions possible. Thirdly, they ask you the same thing and you have to have a spiel about who you are and what you do that keeps interesting people wanting to talk with you.

In case you're wondering, here's my spiel in condesnsed form: today was my last day at a 400-engineer software firm where I started 2 years ago after college. I'm taking a week off and then starting at Renesys, a company that tracks internet router activity around the globe and assembles a minute-by-minute map of how the internet is structured. I'm not a networking expert— at Renesys I'll be working on web application development, making the huge pile of interesting data into valuable visualizations and analyses. This continues to develop my focus on usable, responsive, and pleasant web applications; a focus I've first learned in making Voo2do, a web-based to-do list manager that has grown to 3800 users in 3 months. I'm excited about my new job and also hope to someday found a startup.

Most other people have spiels of comparable complexity and room for conversation. The goal is to listen to what they say, explore those parts that are interesting from a technological or business standpoint, and ask some questions or make suggestions that will twist their brains around. The most interesting people to talk to will not only tell you about a spiffy project, but will also listen when you suggest they automatically extract metadata from RSS feeds and work that into further discussion. The least interesting people tell you how smart they are, and then state that they're finally solving natural language processing without giving any comprehensibly specific examples of what their system actually does. But even those people can be somewhat interesting, if as nothing more than studies in the sort of hubris required to create a company out of nothing but ideas and sweat.

I had about 6 or 7 conversations like this tonight. I met some fun and smart people. I told Joel Spolsky about Voo2do (which is inspired by his technique). And Joel told me how freaking smart my soon-to-be-boss Jim Cowie is. That's a pretty fun little coincidence.

Suppose you finally admit to yourself that you like reading the New Yorker and decide to get yourself a subscription. You could get a year for $46 at newyorker.com or amazon.com; just $1 an issue equalling 72% off cover price. Not bad. Or you could do a Google search for "new yorker discount subscription" and choose among vendors like SpeedyMags.com, which sells a year for $19.05, a savings of 89%.

These cheaper vendors will probably send you more junk mail, but the savings seem worth it. Why is it that the price differential here is so high? Are many New Yorker readers so lazy or fearful that they can be expected to pay $27 instead of doing a google search?