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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

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rdl·

From what I know of applications to things like YC, this looks like great advice.

Re: Putnam, this thread was awesome. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35076

"Did you win the Putnam? If not, don't be bolder than this guy." "Yes, I did."

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Looked great but... still we didn't hear too much about Colin Percival, did we? Although, his success may be somewhere close - I don't know exactly.

He seems pretty successful to me. Unless you define success as being famous to yourself.

Guess, I got a problem with defining success of a person who works in a sphere that I don't know very well, unless there's an article in Wikipedia about him. That's my problem but I don't know how to resolve it.

I'd say Colin is substantially more "successful" than tarsnap has been as a business -- he's well regarded by basically everyone in the BSD community, crypto software community, etc. -- but that's because (IMO) tarsnap is a fairly niche product, executed well for that niche, but without much effort to make it a larger category product. Which is fine -- the effort to turn tarsnap into a more consumer-friendly or enterprise-IT-department friendly product might not be something he wants to do, and since he doesn't have external investors, no one is pushing him to do it.

Thanks for the info.

Interesting read. It was even cooler to see Drew from dropbox posting in the comments there.

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