brianmckenzie

Yeah, I got hit by the same issue around that time last night. I've been using gridserver for dev purposes, but wouldn't dream of hosting a production app on there.

They're good for something like a blog, though - I believe that was the main idea behind the grid, to survive the Digg effect or something.

I found this post quite inspiring as I put the finishing touches on my application. Thanks, dude.

Just a guess, but the point of the question may be to gauge your long-term aspirations and risk tolerance.

If he'd applied to YC, Mark Zuckerberg would probably have answered differently than the Reddit guys, for example.

A former YC founder told me to just put down a number in the 5-10 million range.

Calling Chicago a 24-hour city is overstating the case a little bit. There is some startup activity there, though.

I've been known to listen to Zep and other classic rock, it's about half of what I listen to, but usually not while programming.

Yeah, there were times I didn't feel right about going someplace, or who was going, so I wouldn't. The rest of my crew did get busted on one of these occasions, too - glad I sat that one out.

Yeah, I'm another one for Zero 7, or any downtempo electronica while hacking.

We used to break into this huge abandoned church near campus and climb up to the top of the roof, which was a big dome...such a view! Dangerous, though.

As a side note, I'm curious: is anyone else here into 'forbidden' urban exploration? I was fascinated by this stuff during college.

I had some trouble getting on earlier today, but this is the first time I've noticed anything.

History of Science.

Granted, it's not a math or CS course, but nothing has better informed the way I think about problems, technical and political. It might as well be called 'History of Problems'.

I like it, good work, but there should be a 'close window' button on the final slide.

People from the 'top-tier' schools are shooting for a multitude of things besides entrepreneurial success. I graduated from UChicago, and it seemed as if a massive majority of my fellow students were going after law, banking, or academia. At my five-year reunion I was one of the only people I met not pursuing one of these paths. In addition, many students at these schools have some kind of anti-business ideology or another, so subtract them from the picture as well.

I agree that there are probably more great teams from the technical universities and high-end state schools than from the ivies and famous private universities.

I'm curious as to how long you'd have to answer all these. Many are pretty fun to think about, but I'd be pissed if they only gave me 60 seconds to answer some of them.

You're taking what I said waaay too literally.

But if we're gonna go there (and this is all in jest), I see it like this: in 1981 Depeche Mode were a bunch of drama-whoring junkies with Casio keyboards, yet they managed to express the same basic ideas in far fewer words, plus a catchy euro-pop beat.

I appreciate some aspects of Ayn Rand's thought, but find her books a chore to read.

Alan Greenspan considers Ayn Rand a major influence? It's an interesting factoid, but falls far short of implying causality. I could make another Depeche Mode reference here, but it would be extremely tasteless.

When Greenspan and his ilk characterize people as 'parasites', I parse that as 'anyone who gets between me and the forests of money to which I am entitled'. I might see where he's coming from, but his rhetoric is needlessly violent.

Someone whose philosophy can be summed up in a Depeche Mode song is probably not the brightest light in the history of western civilization.

I'm drafting my application now, but will probably not submit unless I have a solid prototype by the deadline.

What I found curious about this test is that I think many of my answers have changed over time. I scored an 18 today, but I bet I would have scored somewhere in the high 20's when I was a kid.

Violin was my first instrument, but I've mostly played guitar for the past ten years or so. I guess I was a musician long before I was a hacker, and I see a lot of similarities between the two - the variety of things you can do, the amount of time it takes to become decent at either, etc.

Surprisingly enough I've never tried to bring the two together. Signal modelling/processing software...talk about 'hard problems'!

Oooh, I gotta have one of these. Wonder if it will come out in the US...

I'm still using Basecamp for some stuff, it's pretty good for distributed teams. I tried Backpack, though, and it has seemed to actually make my life more difficult.

Yes, I get these too. Pretty much every time I talk to someone who takes an interest in my startup, they raise some issue that I either hadn't thought of at all or hadn't thought about in the same way. That doesn't even cover the hacking-related 'oh crap' moments, but most of mine have been conceptual so far. It's to be expected: there are tens of startups in my space, I assume that some are technically better and many are worse.

As you point out, the hardest thing may not be the 'oh crap' moment but rather what conclusions you should draw from it, if any. In most cases I have elected to go simpler when in doubt. Other times I've decided to re-think various aspects of my project, but these are in the minority.

JS is better as a second language, because of DOM issues. It's better for a beginner not to have to worry about those. It is very convenient for beginners because it's built into the browsers, and many people learn it concurrently with something else. You could do a lot worse than JS.

For a first language, look at Python/Ruby and choose what you're most comfortable with.

The benefits of a robust, frictionless OpenID/reg solution probably outweigh competitive concerns for most people (on here, at least). Sometimes the potential benefits of cooperation outweigh the risks.

It would really help if a big player made a commitment to OpenID, but I'm not sure that's the only way it could catch on. If tons of smaller players could come together on a wrap-type system, we might eventually force the big fish to adopt it via pressure from the margins. It could happpen, it's a very compelling technology in a lot of ways. It would have to be really, really well-designed - that's key. I think it's do-able.

That being said, I want to see what YC-funded clickpass.com is like before I go crazy on some big new effort. If they have a killer solution I may just use that. Also, I doubt YC would appreciate it too much if I start an open-source competitor to one of their companies on hacker news.

It's ClickPass:

http://www.clickpass.com

Launching this month, according to their site. I'll be curious to see this.

Great post. I'm working on an OpenID implementation for my site right now so I've been thinking about this stuff. I really want to use OpenID exclusively, but not sure it's ready for prime time.

What we really need is a way to wrap the OpenID sign up process within our site registration, and when the registration is done tell the user 'Hey, you now have an OpenID which you can use on tons of other sites!'. I doubt that many non-geek users will be wading through all OpenID pages to find out how to actually get one - they will use it if they can sign up for one on my site.

Also, there should be an OpenID signup form right on the front of the openid.net site - why isn't there? They could just send it to a random provider or something. OpenIDs are so easy to use once you have one, yet so difficult to get.

Here's another thing I'm considering: since all AIM addresses are OpenID's now, just ask people for their AIM address and never even mention OpenID. Maybe make the login form default to AIM with a little text link to switch to OpenID, for people who know what it is.

If I figure out a frictionless OpenID strategy, I'll post it up here on news.yc.

To those of us in short-season Class A, Triple-A looks pretty good.

The newer versions have been modified by committee, probably to remove politically incorrect elements and 'contemporize' the book. It's understandable, I guess - the original was published during the Jim Crow era, and not very long after women's suffrage, so it has some eye-opening passages by our standards. The ideas expressed in the book also contradict much modern psychology and moral fashion.

Unfortunately the editors of new versions removed or changed valuable stuff along with the 'anachronistic' elements. A smart reader should be able to deal with the original version without getting offended.

I think the biggest reason to read the original, though, is that most of us are too young to have ever known someone from Dale Carnegie's generation in person. For instance, the oldest people I've ever been able to talk to were born circa 1900 or so - Carnegie is a full generation older. Mark Twain was still writing when Carnegie was a young man, think about that. Edison and Westinghouse were still duking it out over AC/DC.

Carnegie is old, but not nearly as old as Plato or Galileo or Augustine or someone you might read in college. Reading stuff written by people from his era is eye-opening because if you 'look around the edges' you get a glimpse of what things were like 100 years ago. The world has changed so much since their time, yet so little. Just the austerity of ordinary peoples' lives before the US became a superpower is amazing by our blinged-out standards.

It's useful for entrepreneurs, especially in tech, to have an expansive view of recent history. Also, it's just plain interesting. Is Carnegie's original book an anachronism? I don't think it is. I hope this makes some sense.

Wow, a startup in St. Louis of all places. I grew up and briefly worked for a startup there. Are you at Wash U?

San Francisco, CA. Although I'm taking a detour to Paris for awhile, long story.