Frequently Asked Questions

Field Notes is an independent bilingual editorial reference about AI, startups, and systems for the physical world. It combines structured summaries, original analysis, topic relationships, and source notes with a publicly testable Astro boilerplate.

Requests for Startups are themes and problems YC would especially like founders to tackle. YC presents them as inspiration and extra validation, not as a complete list of what it funds and not as a requirement for applying.

YC announced the format on August 18, 2009 as an experiment for the next funding cycle. The requests were refreshed repeatedly, including in September 2016, and expanded with specific areas such as Government 2.0 in May 2019. The current RFS index organizes requests by batch.

No. Field Notes is not affiliated with Y Combinator. Original titles, authors, and sources are identified; summaries, theme clusters, and conclusions are independent editorial interpretations.

The site demonstrates and tests a modern high-performance Astro architecture: statically generated semantic HTML, minimal page weight, low data transfer, responsive images, modular data models, progressive enhancement, and complete usability without JavaScript.

The target is 100 in Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO in Lighthouse or PageSpeed for every representative page type. This is a measurable quality objective, not a blanket guarantee: network conditions, test hardware, hosting, and third parties can affect results.

Yes. Content, navigation, breadcrumbs, images, FAQ, and glossary ship as static HTML. A small optional script improves dark mode, image transitions, and scroll-aware navigation; core functions remain available without it.

Requests, analyses, articles, FAQ, and glossary are validated data collections. The site model generates routes, translations, breadcrumbs, local navigation, structured data, and appropriate social images, so new content does not require copied static page templates.