1) How to embrace rejection ... not just accept it but embrace it. Most smart engineers prefer to avoid rejection by spending more time on developing technology or products and they want to get it as perfect as possible before presenting it to a potential user or customer for critique. This is wrong. Get over rejection. Embrace it. Do it early. Any chance you can, get in front of people who are not your family or your friends and get real feedback. You don't learn anything from positive feedback. Your learn a whole lot more from negative feedback.
2) How to develop a sensitivity to other people's inconvenience. For everything that is new, there will always be early adopters. It is easy to let initial success gets to your head. But to going beyond the initial veneer, your product or services have to simplify people's life, not just the smart or motivated people, but the normal and lazy people.
As my base jumping friend told me once, after about 500 jumps, you will start to realize how cold it is up there. This is just the beginning. Suck it up.
Negative feedback can be more honest. In every criticism (especially if it's someone who you don't have an existing relationship with), there is usually a nugget of truth.
"If you put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig"
I finally got a job at Roy Rogers after a year of searching, and the rest is history. I got over the rejections, and you can too. Of course it's pretty funny looking back, but only given the proper perspective. You have to look at things for what they are.
Because he has a sense of irony?
Despite the hyperbole, I'd argue that a lot of HN users and YC alums express similar sentiments.
And did you remember to test against 0x5943, rather than 5943?
And did you take Endianness into account? ;-)
How 'bout:
$echo -n "YC" > foo
$hd foo
00000000 59 43 |YC|
00000002
(UPDATE: fixed code spacing)
printf("%hx", *(unsigned short *)"YC");
printf("%hx", htons(*(unsigned short *)"YC"));