What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up?
I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on and on. Most people I know with real talent feel similarly about HN. Heck, I even know YC guys who feel this way about it.
Judging by the rest of your comments on this site you're far too intelligent to be commenting here in the first place, so why keep at it? My hunch is that you find enjoyment in talking about how intelligent you are and making others feel less intelligent then you. That or you have something to prove as a result of being inadequate your entire life, but internally, you just know how brilliant you are and have to shout it from the rooftops while bringing down others.
I'm curious, what have you accomplished that's so great? Do YOU have any achievements to back up your arrogance?
I'd venture to say that you're actually not that intelligent at all. An intelligent person would realize striking a balance between radiating their inner brilliance and being a modest and kind person is necessary in life. You have clearly not yet learned that lesson.
Intelligence won't get you very far when no one wants to work with you because you're a huge dick to everyone around you.
Judging by the rest of your comments on this site you're far too intelligent
What comments are you talking about? The ones I see are either retarded, extremely arrogant (but not intelligent), or about average (relative to other comments on this site). From his previous comments, I would guess hes of average intelligence, for this site, but EXTREMELY arrogant. Not really a desirable combination, if you ask me.
I cannot know whether or not you would qualify my abilities as "talent". The way you've constructed your response leads me to believe that if I told you I won the Nobel Prize in Javascript, you'd list stupid things that Nobel Prize winners have done.
Even if this site is mostly "talentless wantrepreneurial pundits," which has some truth to it, you're not the slightest bit overwhelmed at the amount of high quality information here?
Intelligence has may sides. In my opinion, one of them is being able to handle people. Offending people is rarely a clever thing to do. I'm not talking about criticism here, I'm talking about offending people. Even if someone's super-intelligent in terms of science, being rude to people means that he or she has never managed to learn how to interact with people.
This is an incredibly important skill; I've found that it's a lot easier to enjoy life if people like you or at least don't dislike you.
More often than not, it's these sort of comments that sadden me most when reading HN. I actually expected the OP to be about this very topic.
Although my account isn't very old, I've lurked at HN off and on for quite a while. It is my impression that they are increasing, although maybe I only pay more attention now that I have an account.
Okay, it's a jerk comment, but I do like that word, "wantreprenuerial". I knew a farmer who raised sheep and sold their wastes as fertilizer. Called himself an "entremanure"
ignoring the tone from galois - what do we think the untalented should do? certainly someone will be in the ops position (including reading hn / awareness of the wider tech industry) without actually being talented.
I'm not sure that 'untalented' is really a significant concept, since being talented is much more a perception than a definite reality. It's like saying someone is uncharismatic. I guess the severity of such claims would depend on who was doing the assessment. Just as valid is 'latent talent' that even the potentially talented person may not be fully aware of until later in their life. Anyway, I think it's nearly safe to assume that anyone who has made it a habit of reading HN, would not have to risk the disappointment of actually being technically untalented.
I think it was heinlein who wrote that you can break intelligent people into two categories. One sort knows (s)he is better than average but is concerned with levels of intelligence, how smart they are and is susceptible to flattery. Another sort knows they are intelligent enough not to worry about it, knows that other things are the limiting factors in their life and perhaps even feels like a bit of a freak.
also I've seen enough from this username that I think, troll???????????????????????????
No more than you could point to "Seniors Jeopardy," "GED Jeopardy" or "Aspiring Actor Jeopardy" in the TV Guide. Choosing to focus on a particular demographic doesn't, and shouldn't, compel you to focus on any others.
It's not jealousy, I think it's great the companies were featured. It's always cool to get your photo/product mentioned somewhere :) Interesting to note that 1/3rd of the people featured were Women. Higher than I'd imagined.
I think it could be a bad thing if you make decisions in order to get on such a list, if you're spending time trying to get on such lists rather than doing what you think is best for the business. Getting featured on Techcrunch/Inc/etc won't make or break your business.
My comment about pandering to journalists was a more general point. As was stated by TechCrunch, they ignored "Visual Website Optimizer" basically because they thought the name was unfashionable. I'd be very doubtful that any customers or potential customers would care.
Journalists write about what people want to read about - extremes/freaks/car crashes/drama/soHotRightNow/epicFails etc. Which may well not be your business or your product. But that doesn't mean you have a bad business/product...
I guess this is part of the reason to really shoot for a top school while you're in high school: many people who don't make it end up with a colossal chip on their shoulder for the rest of their lives. Ok, you weren't good enough to get into Stanford. Isn't it time you got over that?
Google has always made it clear that they intend to hire the best and brightest. Facebook has always said the same. When Zuck arrived in Palo Alto, he prowled Stanford for top engineering talent because, like Google, he knew that that was the key to the company's long-term success. He found the guys who made Photos, their first real killer app. They weren't even programmers. They were just clearly brilliant people.
37 Signals is a company full of hypocrisies. They have clearly won the lottery with the popularity of Ruby on Rails but insist on deriding others who have won similar lotteries and actually managed to turn their luck into something huge. They rail against taking investments but make an exception for taking money from Bezos because that particular money isn't used for operational purposes (cuz they marked the Bezos money with special ink and keep it in a separate safe from their other, properly bootstrapped money, which is ok to use for operations). The only advice they're qualified to give is: "how to successfully bootstrap if you create a piece of open source software that spreads like wildfire and lets you make money selling books and software to legions of fanboys".
Lol. I don't hate Microsoft, just almost all of their software, and some of their past business decisions. But there are plenty of decent folks working there, including a few I know, that I don't hate.
For me that was one of the turn-offs of CouchDB, that it had been around since 2005 and still was not considered to be production-ready as late as last year.
Despite being alpha (and now beta), CouchDB's been in production at a number of installations for years without issue.
Because the #1 goal is reliability, we've hesitated to recommend production use, until the most recent release (0.11). CouchDB 1.0 ships this summer, and is definitely a safe place to put your data.
I annoys me that people never seem to realize that 37Signals is a company that has "won the lottery", as David likes to say when pejoratively describing the success of companies that have chosen a different route, in a major way with Ruby on Rails. The popularity of Rails is a huge contributing factor to the success of 37Signals. And without Rails, nobody would ever have picked up any of their books. 37Signals is a popular counter-example because they promote themselves, and the vast majority of their ability to promote themselves through talks and books is direct result of hitting a grand slam with Rails.
I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on and on. Most people I know with real talent feel similarly about HN. Heck, I even know YC guys who feel this way about it.