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.
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".
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.
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.