skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is very nice, sensitive post.
I've got lots of coping mechanisms, and I've worked alone a long time. Don't be alone unless you want to be.

If you are looking for a sustainable solution to competing and coping in the world, it is to find a good team. It might be some one just like you, or some one who seems opposite.

Low hanging fruit so there is measurable progress, a clear plan so there are attainable goals, and a team to share the journey.
So, how far down the derivative curve can you go online? Like would a starta-startastartup.com fly, I like the idea of a rapid prototyping market. How would this middle market determine if an idea floats or not. Would you be discriminating in your clientel? (How would you keep out the guy who just wants someone to make the genius website, or if he's in, how do you make sure he's happy? <- Have you worked with this guy yet?, I promise he's everywhere.)

If so, does it follow more of a micro-loan, ('micro-code'/prototype) model. What services do you provide after the first month to the budding startup?

Do all websites count as a startup? What diffentiates from an "web development studio"? Price-point?

Without an intense portfolio, I don't know that it's going to fly. But of course, best of luck!
"Inserting a big chunk of C++ into my Apache listeners doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings."

Uhm, what language do you think all the Apache modules (mod_rewrite, mod_perl, mod_php, etc.) are written in? They're all either C or C++, so by your logic all of Apache won't give you warm fuzzy feelings.

"Neither does the fact that mod_rails just flat-out doesn't work on OS X,"

This is false. Passenger does work on OS X, but because of an issue in the default Apache installation provided by OS X, Passenger is unable to work. If one installs Apache via MacPorts (or some other means) then Passenger will work just fine. In fact, the installer warns the user about exactly this issue.

Many, many people have tested Passenger on OS X, and it works fine for them. Ryan Bates of Railscasts, the one who made the screencast, used OS X. Pratik Naik, a Ruby on Rails core developer who helped with testing Passenger, used OS X.
It isn't quite as simple as that. After idling some time, it will release memory that Mongrel wouldn't release. There are many topics about the exact details. Future versions will feature more memory optimizations.
I do 2 hours of surfing everyday (10km of running every 2 days in case of flat days), and I don't think it helps much on the morale side.
So I force myself to work even if it's slowly and in bad mood, it's better than nothing.
Hands on with Microsoft Surface ("big-ass table") at AT&T store
The Performance Benefits of Ajax
SEO Rapper Friday
I'm not sure why, but we (people) generally sleep better in cool air and warm blankets. Having a cold pillow facilitates this.

Another good reason to turn down the thermostat and/or use a fan at night!
That's funny, I do the opposite - I choose songs that I can sing along to (lots of Jonathan Coulton). Keeps me calm and productive.
I absolutely agree that funding isn't always the best way to go. I started two companies with outside funding - and you won't imagine the work you need to do to keep your investors happy. Now I do it without investors - it's simply too much work, and doing software isn't that hard.
I've found this too. Lately this week, I've been getting up several hours before I have to go to work and spend some time hacking on my own stuff. I think this is a more reliable way to keep that time free.
<b>st3alther was HERE</b>
the New Ubuntu ver. 8 was Update and More secure.
If I'm really in the zone, I'll listen to punk or hardcore like AFI or Saetia and not notice. Other times, I pretty much stick to cello or violin music.

Mostly, silence.
mudge's os ... smudge ?
The Hemingway reference was a tasty infobyte, anyone else have a favorite 'inertia management tip'?
Why You Must Embrace Rejection to Succeed
This game inspired me to write YAZI!

http://web.archive.org/web/20030811081833/scrawlsoft.com/pro...

Playing HHGTTG on a Newton was almost self referential.
SomaFM and DI.FM, in particular "Groove Salad" on SomaFM.
Physicists Renew Claims, in New Experiment, of Detecting Dark Matter Particles
Pageflakes Acquired By LiveUniverse: Further Push Into Social Networking
Andrew got us set up for dallas.startupdrinks.com. Post a comment and we'll get a first get-together set up.
New Facebook Ad Network Takes a Page from Beacon
"Were no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do i"

The only song you ever need. Endless loop.
The personalized start page is dead. Long live the personalized start page.  (Pageflakes acquired)
Yes. If we want play by play, we can all do `git log`.
Irony in code - your new Ajax wrapper
StackOverflow Sounds Pragmatically Postmodern
lately, the field and clinic
Running has always been a great reset for me. Emotional stress, job stress, and even in the worst of times I've managed to push a semi-psychotic break back by a couple weeks. Though running has never been a proactive solution for me, only after I've gotten to deep in the sledge do I lace up and kick it out.
I like it, a lot! I signed up and started making my site right away. For some reason, it didn't like my RSS feed. I'm generating it from blogger and using feedburner, so I'm a little surprised that it didn't work.

Very cool idea, though!
porno accompaniments.
Strangely, even though I'm nearly fluent in English, I can tune out English lyrics effortlessly, but not Dutch ones (my native language).
1 - Keep a sporty life. Exercise releases endorphines -pleasure hormones- , refreshes your mind, and fine-tunes your vascular system.

2 - If you have a girlfriend/boyfriend, you not only have someone to talk to and bounce ideas to, but also someone to synchronize with. It will help split your day into large chunks, erasing away long hours of slipping through half dozing over a keyboard.

3 - Make sure to get a few minutes of sunlight straight to your face every day. Keeps your internal clocks in synch, and refreshes you.

4 - Wake up early, even if you go to sleep again at midmorning. The dawn fresh air also resets your internal clocks.

5 - When in doubt, stand up and go for a walk/exercise/house-cleaning frenzy etc. Remaining doubtful in front of the keyboard is not constructive. Accomplishing small tasks will tune up your mood as well.
Reminds me of a zen method. As you're waiting to fall asleep you slowly count up. Each time you get to five, go back to one. If you're lucky you might remember catching yourself at 6 or 12 a couple times, but usually your just out!

(It takes a little practice.)

A little glossolalia will fork your language processing and symbolic thought, and help turn the volume down on the pesky internal monologue.
What you describe is more like my experience when half-awoken in the middle of the night. That's when I'll hold adamantly to some complete bit of nonsense ("Really, this does make sense!") while my wife smiles and nods and tries to get me to turn over and go back to sleep. I often remember the event afterward and can't think why I thought I was making sense.

In contrast, when I'm falling asleep (and I assumed this was more what the parent was talking about) I'll suddenly realize that there have been one or several strands of nonsense running in my head for what seems like some time. Sometimes the strands seemed like reasonable trains of thought until I attended to them, sometimes they're just imagined dialog of other people (experienced as mentally overheard instead of consciously imagined) or something else.

But to become aware of them (and to be aware of them as nonsense) in the falling asleep case isn't to snap out of the state. The state continues often until I'm asleep, and a kind of metacognition appears over it with the realization that my thoughts don't make any sense and drawing the conclusion that I'm in the process of falling asleep. Except the original state is probably better described as semi- or sub-cognition.

It's nice to know a couple other people have similar experiences.

I'm not aware of any connection in myself between throwing an exception when almost asleep and being mindful of my emotional state and its effects while awake. (Except perhaps the correlation that I'm more mindful generally now than a few years ago, and the going-to-sleep thing might be a last-couple-years phenomenon. I don't remember it for sure before then.)

I do find that using programming metaphors (e.g., throwing an exception) for my mental processes is almost always misleading.
I had to click on some of your "Read about us at:" links to really understand what you're offering and how your site works.

I don't like to register for something if I don't understand what it does or how it works. Perhaps an informational link on the home page or a quick video would help draw people in to your registration process.

I like the overall page structure and design otherwise, though.
Regarding 2:

I struggle with this all the time - I always start working on something one way but as soon as I come to a realization that there may be a problem with the one, I switch to the other way. It leads to a lot of thrashing.

This is never a good approach, fully implement one way and make it easy to swap at a later point and document problems.
I have this happen very regularly.
Not sure who is upmodding this. I haven't heard of Git until today, but it (unsurprisingly) took me only five seconds to find the following link,

http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/tutorial.htm...

...which seems apropos and shithead-free.
The Cure for Burnout: Go Nonprofit
I see! I knew I was missing something. That makes sense
Alex Brandon's Deus Ex OST. Kahvi Collective (all free). Schiller. 120 Days. Yoko Kanno's Ghost in the Shell OSTs. Other minimal or bassy electronic music (James Holden). But when I have to fix some difficult logic, I just put the music away.
I have, like everyone else in here, experienced the same thing. I certainly go through periods of lesser motivation.

Things that I find help me get through it:
A) Momentum. Once I get started I don't stop for as long as possible, including working late into the night. Sometimes momentum can carry through to the next day if you maintain focus.

B) Deadlines and dependancies. I just wrote a project for my brother in about a week of my spare time. If that was a personal project, it would have taken a month of time. I had someone else relying on me, and had a ridiculously tight deadline, and it pushed me to ignore all problems and just do it.

C) Mental health. It is an issue we ignore - almost everyone has discussed physical activity, and I believe this is certainly important in mental health - but not many people suggest focusing on the mind. There are many things you can do to temporarily improve mental health, like travel, meet new people, exercise, etc; improving mental health fundamentally is very difficult. I won't go into too many details, but essentially you need to understand yourself, your passions and desires, your faults to really know why you act in certain ways.

All that being said, I suffer the same issues on a regular basis.
An Open Email to Tim Ferriss (Author 4 Hour Work Week)
This is an open email to Tim Ferriss that got a response less than 3 hours later. Tim, staying true to the model of outsourcing and efficiency, dictated the response to his virtual assistant.
This is more political than I'd like to see here, but I guess you could relate this concept to product design. If you have an idea of what's "best" for your users, you could arrange your UI so that that's how they use it.
Blocking Bad Robots and Web Scrapers with RewriteRules
as a designer I would say the front page is a nice start but there are some details I would clean up.

the "Build your own mobile web in 5 minutes." does not look great and probably needs to be an image.

I would make the text box to "Mobilize your blog" bigger and more of a focus of the top of the page as it feels a little hidden.

The fade to white around the images in the yellow box do not look great. I would take off the shading and perhaps just use a darker yellow border or something. Images that look crisp are always the best.

Other wise it looks great and was super easy to signup for. On the first occasion the "phone emulator" got stuck on my mouse and I could not close it with out refreshing the page. I have not been able to reproduce it though.
Delegation is easier.
i use twitter to rant when i'm in a bad mood. cycling helps. but what helps the most is when your users talk back to you and you figure out ways to improve your product/service.
Frankenmac! What's in a Mac clone?
NIH is the mother of invention :)
6.This can only create a form with a fixed number of
fields. While there are ways to generate forms with
variable number of fields, (generate the Form class
programatically), they are not easy or well documented.
(Remind me to write such tutorial sometime.)

I don't know if there are many tutorials, but this is pretty trivial.

The rest are valid points.
I think the creators of these casual games operate under the theory of relative productivity: You can feel more productive by making everyone you know less productive.
Or perhaps KAOS: KAOS Is Not An Acronym For Anything.
AFX, Aphex Twin, Tool, Boards of Canada, Kyuss, Pink floyd..etc because it makes me think like a computer Beeep...beep...beep!
Complex music doesn't distract me, although I also avoid anything with lyrics. I listen to a decent blend of orchestral, chamber, and solo music. Bach is my favorite composer, but I like all polyphonic Baroque for when I need to concentrate.

If I'm in real trouble and really need to focus, I break out Philip Glass. His early stuff, like Music in Twelve Parts, is mesmerizing, really helps concentrate.
Same here. Or muffled, fuzzy, unintelligible lyrics are OK too.

Mogwai, Pelican, Explosions in the Sky, Pinback, Castor, Elliott, National Skyline, Isis, My Bloody Valentine, Jesu, Portishead, The Mars Volta, Low Frequency in Stereo...

Lately, Japancakes' Loveless cover album has been in non-stop rotation. Good stuff.
I would be more impressed if you had turned over 2 million without funding!
May come across as negative, but hey. Almost all suffer from the same weaknesses. Although it's debatable, I reckon that elevator pitches (general ones anyway) should contain the following. A brief hook as danohuiginn has written. What's the product and who are the 'buyers'? What's the revenue model? Who is behind the company? Competition? Unique Selling Point(s)?

Transpondr - what is the product itself? Is it free analytics for your podcast? Who is the 'we' behind it? Is there competition and why is it different? it's first sentence/hook is good though.

Logobid - Should think about who they are pitching to. Why should I set the price? It's not as clear as so the above note. How are they making money - rev share? Competition? How is it different? who are they?

Publicitr - the first sentence doesn't add anything. they are talking about a market, not what they do. again, who are they? competition, how different? not exactly passionate.

siphs - is it share-this or tell-a-friend? Does it matter which? Choose - bloggers or publishers? Try not to offer everything to everyone at this stage. Far too wordy. As above. How to monetise? Who are they? Competition - anyone else doing it, what is wrong with several submits?

zambino - nice hook. too wordy though. Second sentence - what does it mean? Again, who are they, competition, USP, revenue model?
The idea itself looks cool, but the main page lacks focus.

Might I suggest a prominent path to a quick demo - free registration will put off any casual user, whereas if there were an easy "conveyor belt" taking you through the steps of building and demonstrating a really easy mobile website, you'd have much more engaged users by the time they finished.
When I first typed in my blog URL, I was hoping to immediately see the "mobilized" format of my blog. But I am now asked for another URL name - the name for the mobilized blog. It is a bit unexpected.

After giving an URL name for the mobilized blog, I was hoping to see the "mobilized" format of my blog. But now I am asked to signup.

I gave up.

It is a good idea with lots of potential. But without seeing some mobilized format, I am not going to sign up.
In that case, why not relate it directly to product design instead of dragging politics into it? It's a concept that's expressed well in books like "The Paradox of Choice".
On dieting...

I've always had a problem with weight. After extensive research, I tried the Hacker's Diet and lost 60 pounds over 7 months. The big problem with HD is that it doesn't emphasize increasing your protein intake. As a result, I lost some muscle mass as well as fat. I kept the weight off for two years but eventually gained most of it back. Another criticism of HD is that you lose your energy--had I been working at the time I couldn't have pulled it off.

I'm currently doing a medically supervised diet called a Modified Fast which does emphasize increasing protein and virtually eliminating carbs. One of my board members recommended the clinic and they claim they can do 15-20 pounds a month with no muscle loss or decrease in energy. I'm ahead of schedule but I'm only a couple days in so it doesn't really count. (The first 10 lbs are water weight.) I also take an appetite suppressant called phentermine during both diets.

Here's the Wikipedia link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketogenic_diet) for something similar to my current diet. They call it the Ketogenic Diet. (The whole point is to kick your body into a state of ketosis where it rapidly burns off all your fat. The protein is to make sure it doesn't also burn off muscle.)
All this baseless talk about a new OS is a really lowly linkbaiting and karma-earning strategy.

Can we stop upmodding such stories please?
Interesting, very interesting.
BusinessWeek:  Tech's Best Young Entrepreneurs
pg wants to make Google search technology de facto standard for news.yc.
I like stuff with driving beats that keep me focused on what's in front of me.

Talking Heads is really great hacking music. "Born Under Punches" is a really good example of a song that you can hack to.

I listen to an insane variety of music while hacking. Some highlights of the past month or so: Bob Dylan, Ruby Suns, Evangelicals, Paul Simon, Anton Webern, The Dodos, Xiu Xiu, The Velvet Teen. A pretty good variety of classic rock, indie rock, experimental and classical.
I think this is a very good point.
You need some way to really pull the user into your service, As stated above, step them through the "conveyor belt" on the main page and engage them from the second they hit your site.
The voodoo economics of free
Love the concept. Over time can amass a nice archive.

Perhaps if a comment box were under each startup pitch?

I like danohuiginn's comment-- can each be distilled to a one sentence pitch? Sometimes an elevator ride is only 1 stop :)
Being a single founder supporting a live website is not like writing. There's a lot more pressure once you launch.

This is a good way to stay productive--launch and you'll be forced to stay on your toes.
I think the whole "dropping the vowel" thing is getting a little annoying with all these web startups. Transpondr? Publicitr? Come on...
somafm.com ftw!
Clinic is good, simple rhythm for detailed work. Good call.
The thing that jumped out at me is that Facebook is not on the North America list at all and is at the very bottom of the Europe and Asia lists. Also weird how RIMM is not on the Europe/Asia lists.
Joel did corporate work (MSFT, Juno) for 10 years, had MSFT stock from the early 90s, etc. If you did corporate work for the entire decade of the 90s, were single, and owned hot stock, and still couldn't have $50K, then I question whether you have enough financial discipline to run a company.

Big difference from fresh college grads or undergrads.
That is why that is step 7 and funding is step 6. Although I only mention exit. I will change it to say or other measurably success :)
This advice is given to every startup that presents here (don't get mad, I agree with the advice!). I think we should change the name of the site to "Hacker News - where you don't have to register to test drive a product!"
i played the original game, when it was released, on my ibm pc clone. this was long before the internet, so information wasn't as free-flowing back then. i remember hearing a bunch of "reasons" why the sequel wasn't coming out, but nothing like this.
> a great online book called "The Hacker's Diet"

It's a lot more complicated than calories in, calories out. Nutrition is a complex topic involving the interplay between nutrients and the endocrine system and sleep, and differing kinds of exercise. If he just said "Eat less, exercise more" then he'd be right. But everything else he says is wrongheaded.

> I wish there were tons more written like this one, but on other topics

There are way too many books like this. Some intelligent guy blathers on about a complex subject of which he doesn't really know much.
I use this elevator pitch formula. Can't find the original source.

For [customer-base], [startup] is a [category] that [main-feature]. Unlike [competitors], we [differentiators].

I strongly suggest putting such a pitch in your news.yc profile. Here's mine:

For people with many pictures and little time, ourdoings.com is a photo-sharing site that organizes them for you. Unlike conventional photo-sharing sites, we make it easy to create an illustrated story of what you've been doing, and to share your story in illustrated email.
#1 is key for me. Once I have the problem and course of action in mind, I can plug away easily. Otherwise I kind of flounder around, unless I purposefully focus on figuring out what I need to do next.

Also, I'd say 99% of advice is useless. People don't usually need to learn more effective ways of doing things. What they really lack is motivation and that's usually because they're trying to force themselves to do something they really think is pointless.
I agree. Django's admin app is truly amazing and lets us get up and running without having to code a whole back-end just to do basic CRUD. Granted, it's not for everyone, but for the majority of the people it does mostly everything they need.

Not to mention Django has one of the most thorough documentation I've ever seen from a framework.
Glad I'm not the only one who gets it!

Though, it isn't just connecting the internet to real life, which still sounds mundane. The real Big Deal is the network effects you get from the feedback loop between the two. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel the two together in a social context create an autocatalytic environment, which is essential to every form of progress in GGS.
Ok then, Mr. Downmodder, physically quantify friendship, love, beauty, goodness, and truth.
It's either that, or I wasn't automatically logged in after registering. Either way, there is at least a usability bug. If a person can write a submission without logging in, then the published work should at least be caught somehow, so it doesn't disappear into the ether through a user mistake.
I think the author misses two of Django's biggest drawbacks (at least for me):

1. Lack of migrations

2. Poor REST support
Support?