I realize this is a somewhat unpopular thing to say here, but I don't care about startups. I have little interest in being in a channel where that's the only thing people talk about. I'm here for the general tech news.

The conversations on #startups are not always about startups at all, its just a bunch of people interested in startups hanging around, talking about all kinds of random stuff of interest to hackers in general.

What's #startups?

It's an IRC channel. You can connect using this:

http://www.mibbit.com/

#startups is the channel, irc.freenode.net is the network (it is on the list, just a ways down).

Or click: http://www.mibbit.com/server=irc.freenode.net&channel=%2... :)