Comment by cperciva

One personal tip, you come off as an arrogant prick because of your "I am holier than thou" statements. These kind of behaviors will drastically reduce the amount of people that will want to work with you or help you.

I work with MDs and PhDs on a daily basis, analyzing their technologies for their start up companies. By far, I am much more willing to put in extra hours for friendly people than those that cram down my throat how much better they are than me.

A crucial part of making something people want is finding out what people want. Intelligence is an advantage, of course, but is no guarantee. For one thing, it may make it harder for you to understand the needs of the less gifted and educated.

Friend, if you don't mind taking more of Paul's advice, read "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. That, combined with your impressive record, will make you an unstoppable force at whatever you pursue.

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bx=on&sts=...

That has to be the comeback of all time.

News.YC does flame wars a whole lot better than the rest of the internet...

HAHAHA! Awesome.

Yes, only once. But I actually consider my first score on the Putnam (53, ranked 53.5th in North America) to be my most impressive performance on the Putnam, considering that I was only 14 years old at the time.

we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program) basically, sync and backup done right (but for windows and os x). i had the same frustrations as you with existing solutions.

let me know if it's something you're interested in, or if you want to chat about it sometime.

drew (at getdropbox.com)

It looks like a great idea - except - the sucking up of bandwidth to make the first backup. I'm definitely looking for a better remote backup service for my Architecture firm, for which I currently pay far too much, but my server unfortunately is Windows SBS 2003 - whose OS I truly dislike. I am forced to do this for compatibility with my Revit BIM software unfortunately, so I guess your product won't help me.

I think it's a good idea, but already done, though. I use Carbonite to keep an online remote backup of my hard drive. They charge a fixed rate regardless of the capacity of the drive. Of course there is always space for competition, so if you think you can improve on their offering, then go for it.

This would be off-topic in this thread, but definitely not in this forum. If you make a new top level post requesting feedback, more people will be able to contribute and benefit from it.

My first reaction was: I see this more as donationware open source. But then again, if you feel your technology would be hard to replicate, and if the cost is on the S3 ballpark, I'm in.

I just read more about your security strategy - and that is definitely something people really want - reliable and secure data backup. Good luck.

Interesting project, unfortunately I didn't found any way to enter in contact with you. You can contact me through my project web site http://www.disnetwork.info

I'll be glad to discuss this remote secure backup project with you. It was once on top of my list for a DIS application, but I dropped it for various reasons that I would be glad to share with you.

"Remember also that every time you open your mouth in the presence of a person who has an abundance of knowledge, you display to that person your exact stock of knowledge or your lack of it! Genuine wisdom is usually conspicuous through modesty and silence."

If we assume 100 million internet users that you saved 100 years, that's roughly 30 seconds per user. Let's say just 10% of people use OS X or Mozilla - that's 5 minutes per user.

This is not to belittle, just to put your "100 years" in context. It's great work and you've saved me personally a lot more than 5 minutes.