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dstillzon The Gauntlet

Update: OK. No one seems to get the joke. The explanation is as follows. These are my actual interview questions. No coder would do an essay assessment, so I came out with the most outlandish, didactic, "you are inferior" way of making an assessment. I promise my April Fool's joke will be better.

dstillzon Domain Squatter Tries New Business: Running Websites

Don't call us domain squatters. We're domain farmers. And you're just jealous. :-)

dstillzon Ask YC: How many people here were regional BBS users back in the day?

Too young. My early scene was meeting up with the local kids to swap BASIC programs, pirated games, and 8-bit video game cartridges.

dstillzon Ask YC: Whats your Twitter handle?

http://twitter.com/dstillz

I got it a long time ago but started using it very recently.

dstillzon Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator

Just because I upvote something doesn't mean I want to save it!

dstillzon Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?

I'd love to have that.

Kind of a more-intensive, tech version of the Tuesday Night Music Club.

First rule: no bringing your girlfriend, even if she is Sheryl Crow.

dstillzon Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?

I really think I can prove myself and my ideas. I wish I were better at networking.

dstillzon Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?

Yeah, a different, more literal kind of alone.

I got burned last summer by bringing people on board too early. I'm the hacker-type.

The other people were the kind whose strengths too were different from mine. One was a high-powered client-interfacing guy, who has since taken a full time job as an IA, after the failure of his own Web 2.0 startup (all in under a year!). The other, and the troublemaker, was a high-powered marketing person who wanted to fasttrack the branding campaign before I even had a product or clients. We'd all worked together well in the context of a larger company, but we couldn't reconcile our directional aspirations for a startup.

So this year, I'm alone. In Northern Virginia's technology corridor. I would love a hackerly co-founder, or at least someone to bounce my ideas off of. All my friends from CS classes keep moving to the West coast to work for the Googles and Microsofts of the world. I have a feeling my YC application this year is going to be rejected simply because I'm a sole founder.

dstillzon Ask YC: Are you working part-time on your startup/project/idea?

I feel that THIS summer will be THE summer that I turn one of my projects into a startup, so in the past month, I've quit full time work and moved into a cheaper place to live.

I'm currently doing requirements gathering for my first project, and I've already done around 400 lines of coding. I wish I wasn't alone.