That is absolutely untrue. It's pretty clear that Buzz was inspired by Brightkite. I'm not going to pass judgement on the similarity, but the inspiration is clear.
Interesting, anecdote, but user tests show that you are in the minority. About 80% of people immediately scroll down when they reach a new page with sparse content at the top of the page.
If they had a dedicated server stack, they would probably have done the same thing as a hardware RAID anyway. They just replicated in software what they would have done in hardware.
When you poke a Euglena[1] with a pin while looking at it under a microscope, its sensors detect an intrusion and immediately start flapping the flagella (the thing it uses for locomotion, analogous to a leg) to get out of the way. That's a super-simple nervous system. Many plants do this as well, using a slow production of chemicals which move branches and leaves.
As you get more advanced, going up the biological totem pole, every creature uses that exact same sensor => action mechanism. Pain is the brain's complex interpretation of the pin prick, and an animal attempting to remove itself from the source of the pain is the same as activating the flagella.
My brain has mirror neurons which make me literally feel your suffering as you experience it, which is why humans are so against "pain" and "suffering". It's also why I personally will never injure another human, or even another animal, purposefully.
Is it more "wrong" in any scientific way to injure a human instead of a dolphin or a bear or a chimp or a plant -- or even to break a window? Absolutely not. This is why science should never be used to prove or disprove human "morals" and morals should never dictate the functions of science.
It's not a scientific judgement? How can you say it's OK to kill plants but not "animals," considering they are made of essentially the same thing? Where is the line?
It's fairly easy to trace the evolution of the nervous system from simple single-celled organisms to modern animals. Moral repugnance is a purely human invention.
TechStars, actually, has a better track record of exits when compared to YC. YC has some bigger companies that are still growing, but the TechStars scorecard right now is looking pretty good.
More valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when Google bought them.
