skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My solution was to place a standard building sized block of wood measured to the length of my standard keyboard under the keyboard so the nearest edge of the keyboard sits up on the block, and the furthest edge of the keyboard sits on the table as usual. This way, the wrists can rest on the flat upside section of the wood with the fingers then drooping over onto the angulated keyboard. It's meant to simulate how your arms and wrists feel when you hang them down freely - no flexion of the wrists up or down, and relaxed.

Similarly, place a thick book near your mouse for your wrist to wrest upon, leaving your palm to drop onto the mouse which slides on the pad that sits on table. For me, smaller mice are better that can be moved with just the fingers and highly sensitized.

This solved the RSI in my forearms.

Note: The wood block must be the correct size so that the keyboard slants neither too high nor too low, and that the forearms do not touch.

I use: '2x4 (pronounced "two by four"), but few people realize that the actual height and width of a 2x4 is really somewhere close to 1 1/2" x 3 1/2"'
http://woodworking.about.com/od/typesofwood/p/WoodSizing.htm
I just went to a physiotherapist about this very issue, here's what I was told.

First, I've been experiencing a dull pain shooting up the BACKS of my hands to my wrists, following the middle finger. This may or may not be what you have, and I recommend looking into this yourself. It cost me 80 CAD to visit a physiotherapist and it was worth every penny. If you are going to be typing for the next 5, 10 years or longer (here's hoping we get a better input system...) I urge you to visit at the first bit of pain.

Onto the diagnoses. A primer on the human body: the nerves and blood vessels that get to your hands come from your spinal cord. To get there they must pass under the collarbone and above the first rib. My problem is that I have a slight posture problem (no one has ever noticed it) where my shoulders slouch forward a bit. This is very common for people that use the computer a lot, and it was compounded by my height (6'3''). As I am a tall person, I slouch while talking to people, inspecting things, pretty much whenever I do anything in a world built for the average sized guy.

This posture problem results in a small constricting of the space between the collarbone and the first rib - putting pressure on the blood vessels and nerves going through there. This causes extra strain whenever you pull on these items (which you do while moving the fingers). To make matters worse I do not do a lot of upper body exercise. I run 3k a day and bike about an hour and a half, but none of these tasks work my back muscles. While typing for extended periods of time these muscles recognize they are not needed and 'shut off' to conserve energy. If they were used more they would not be shut off as quick. When they are shut off the shoulders slouch more.

I was recommended a series of stretches to help the constricting of the blood vessels and nerves. I was also recommended to start swimming regularly to build muscle. I have also started using the program "instant boss" (quick and dirty program) to have a 10 and 2 schedule - 10 minutes on and 2 off. I follow it religiously.

I'd define the stretches but my hands are hurting a bit and I need to stop typing. I do recommend seeing a physiotherapist yourself though to get customized stretches that fit your body type. Take breaks, really read up on ergonomics.

Hope this helps.
What I Believe: My 10 Web and Blogging Expectations
Competitive Social Networks
I have an idea about creating a social network around a "competition" to induce positive change. Has anyone here had an idea similar to this or know of any companies working on a competitive type of social network?
Others have suggested great things to do outside of class, but I have some related to CS.

Take a compiler course (or several). This really should be required, but unfortunately it wasn't at my school until after I graduated. Also, lots of algorithms and other "real" CS courses. Now is the time to learn that stuff.

Avoid the "trendy" courses (Stanford Facebook application class, I'm looking at you) and go for the hardcore CS stuff. The rest you can easily learn on your own, but I found having a professor and structured course was invaluable for the CS topics.

Of course everyone is different, but that's my opinion.
I'm not going to advocate substance abuse, but if you are going to do it then you might as well do it in college with experienced friends looking out for you.

That said, I find people have different biological reactions that determine if they will enjoy a particular chemical experience. If you have no interest in it or don't enjoy it, then don't worry about it. If you do have an interest in it, then do it responsibly.
What irks me: he's supposedly doing xkcd full time now, and he can't manage five comics a week instead of only three? I mean, it's not like they take a long time to draw.
This is the best advice ever. Being single while coding for a startup around the clock can be very depressing sometimes.
Cool.

Now, if only ASP.NET was "cleaner" and didn't have all that "event-driven" ugliness.

More widespread usage on Linux would help too. Mono just hasn't taken off in terms of mainstream production use.
A review of the D language by someone who has worked in it
>Go out with as many women as possible. Once you join the startup life the women will be few and far between.

Or get one (or a few) good girlfriend(s). Also, make sure one of them is bisexual.
Short answer: don't have meetings.

Long answer: work in the same room together for a few hours a week (10-20). This way as questions come up they will get resolved in context. Announcements, presentations and other broadcast-type things can be made at coffee break. Start having meetings after this model stops scaling.
+1. I quite like C#, but it's not enough incentive for me to switch to Windows.
Not sure. Probably because I tried a few times and was bored - and just wanted to get back and do stuff.

But I get your point. Thank you.
4 people should be in a state of continuous meeting.
Psychedelics are counter-addictive. They are only abused by those who have severe problems with generally 'abusing' anything that makes them feel good (and psychedelics don't 'make you feel good', they simply remove the mental barriers allowing you to feel that way if you so choose). All substances mentioned with the exception of LSD exist in nature, DMT is produced in the human brain and is responsible for near death experiences, and possibly dreams (and is the most powerful psychedelic listed; claims that psychedelia is unnatural are unfounded). LSD is highly similar to LSA (which occurs naturally). There are not issues with 'biological reactions' with these substances, except issues that cause mush to be far more potent on some individuals (start with a .25 gram dose [will do basically nothing in 99% of people, but will let you know if you are hypersensitive]). The only long term 'issues' people develop from long term psychedelic use, are creations of their own minds. When mental barriers are broken down, when you /truely/ have control of your mind-- its just like having root access, do something wrong and you might fuck something up. Do whats natural, nothing you see, think or feel on psychedelics is anything but natural.
I checked out launchsplash... It offers one or two free sites also...

both look pretty good though..
Unfortunately this is not an option. One of our team is working on the west coast, the other three are east coast. We currently do not have an office - we are a home based organization (we are coding and running around contacting potential clients/investors).

We are having weekly meetings to get everyone back on the same page as the work is largely independent at this point.
www.projjex.com is pretty simple and effective.
Kernighan is in error for those cases where in the process of coming up with a clever solution you make yourself smarter.
what is the point of this?

The isp's will still be able to tell that it is bittorrent by the traffic patterns and the lawyers will still be able to sue you because your ip address is still exposed.

I guess if you don't like other people knowing that you are really downloading you got served 2 it can be helpful, but other than that idk
This is a very good case for trying something.
Meetings should have an agenda. By mail. 5 days in advance. That will kill "impulse meetings". First point on the agenda: "Is this meeting necessary?". Every time. With luck, it can be adjourned in less than 5 minutes. If not, you have something to discuss.

Meetings have a secretary who writes down decisions. The referendum is available as quickly as possible. The same day or the next. Meetings have a speaker who conducts the order in which people are speaking. For each agenda-point, you have 2 rounds of discussion. After that, you must cast a vote on the point or make a decision.

Ok, that was the extreme version. But it is either that or "till the coffee cup is empty" meetings. The advantage of having some rules is that you will actually get something done in the meetings. If you can't get something decided, voted in or otherwise actionated, don't hold the meeting.

Remember: If there is 8 people in a meeting, each minute in the meeting takes 8 minutes of work. Also, there are 8*7/2 relations between these people. This leads to the conclusion that you must keep the number of people down in a meeting.

Finally: Get consistency in when meetings are held. In my former code-job I hated getting in to work in order to do some great coding, just to be shown off into a meeting. All productivity that day was totally gone afterwards. Do that 3 days a week and you have cut your productivity of your developer to 2/5. Do it for all of the 6 person staff and you lost about 2.5 persons in productivity a week.

Do I sound bitter? I probably am :)
I disagree with your short answer. Our 3 person company has a weekly meeting every Friday from 1 minute to anywhere to 30 minutes depending on if anything needs to be discussed in more detail. It's a very good idea to get together once a week outside of just working together to go over the week's happenings even if it's only for a few minutes. It serves to seal the deal of the week and get everyone completely caught up.

I also disagree with your long answer. It's not necessarily productive to work in the same room. That's why God invented cubicles! In all seriousness, though, a lot of people -- myself included -- work best in isolation. The bottom line is that you should get the people together in your group and figure out what will work best. Some people prefer working in the same room, some people get distracted because of that, etc. Find our what works best for you and stick to that.
1. Ergonomoc evaluation by a specialist to set up your desk, monitor etc. Ask your employer, they should provide it.

2. Inquire about work-place injury laws in your state. Your employer will likely have to pay the expenses.

3. Record all expenses no matter who pays for them. If you become disabled reciepts may help to make employer shoulder part of the weight.

4. Physical therapy. It's important to continue excersizing until, well, forever.

5. If mouse is source of your problems try using two mouses alternating left and right hands. You'll get used to it.

6. Carpal tunnel and RSI are two very different things. It's important to see specialist to tell one form the other. Carpal tunnel is actually quite rare, but consequences are severe.
Since people are already advising you to ditch the meetings, I'll just answer with a direct tip.

Try sending out an email detailing the meeting's goals, agenda, and any preparation you expect from the participants. This is sometimes called GAP and I had a coworker who was a bit of a task master who'd come from a company with the policy that you didn't have to go to any meeting that didn't provide this. I like the sentiment, at least, that meetings require preparation.

So for a weekly meeting you might send:
Goal: To assign work responsibilities for the week
Agenda:
* Keeping our promise to deliver X to customer Y
* Assigning bug #123
* etc.
Preparation: Could everyone come prepared with the state of their work?

In my experience, the preparation part is the part most likely to fail. Either the meeting planner isn't the type of personality to enforce it or the meetings aren't important enough for the participants to actually do the prep. In either case, you can drop it as just having a clear goal and agenda will make any meeting better.

Also, forcing yourself to be clear about the goals and the agenda will help you see ways that you could eliminate parts of your meetings.
Amen. Do not go to the vapid parties, but do go to parties. Learn to throw the parties yourself if you have to. They don't have to be big at first -- a lot of the best parties I've known had less than a dozen people.

I assure you that somewhere, somehow, there are groups of non-vapid people on or near your campus. Find them. Try clubs of all sorts, film societies, drama clubs (cast or crew!), amateur sports, music groups, anime or SF conventions... whatever. Just find them.
1) Get a mouse that's flexible enough to use with either your left or right hand. It might feel weird at first, but switching sides every hour will reduce a lot the pain. Takes a bit to get used to but you'll eventually adjust.

2) Try to use the keyboard as much as possible for everything. Go into your Keyboard & Mouse settings and enable full keyboard access (or ^fn F7 to toggle on/off)

3) Use either Firefox/Camino for you main browsing because you can enable "find as you type" which you can use to navigate the links on a web page.

4) Take regular/breaks. I use http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/ to remind me at set intervals.

5) Exercise regularly (running, walking, golf, something to get you away from you computer).

6) Meditate, relax, listen to music. Whenever I feel like I'm tired or overstressed, I listen to this for about 20 minutes. I'll feel refreshed and much more focused.
http://www.pzizz.com/ (Energizer track)
See a medical professional! That said, anecdotal not-medical-advice:

I had mousing-related pain, and I fixed it by mousing left handed. The first couple of days were incredibly frustrating, but after a week I had probably 80% of my right handed dexterity.

To prevent the same issue from building up in my left hand, I started alternating between left handed and right handed mousing every couple of weeks.

I guess the worst case outcome here is severe damage to both hands, so proceed with caution.
I switched to dvorak, got an Aeron chair and Humanscale KB tray when my hand started to show signs of RSI... 3 years later I haven't had any more symptoms of RSI.
Mind telling us which machines do you and your friends use? Are those MacBook Pro's by chance? I starteted having quite a bit of problems soon after buying one.
How sweet. I bet Bill Gates is about to become really interesting after he leaves Microsoft.
There was a thread a few years back on comp.lang.lisp about this very topic.

Peter Seibel (of 'Practical Common Lisp' fame) replied:

"Okay, here's how I do it. Of course I tend to overdo things--how do you think I dorked up my wrists in the first place so I can't say this is necessarily recommended practice:

a. Fill one pitcher with cold water and a tray or two of ice cubes, leaving room for you to immerse you hand and wrist without overflowing.

b. Fill another pitcher with scalding hot water, again leaving room for as much of your hand and wrist will fit into pitcher without bending your wrist at some weird angle.

c. Stick affected hand in ice water. Scream in agony until the numbing takes the edge off. Leave in for 1-4 minutes.

d. Move affected hand to hot water. If you timed it just right the water has cooled just enough that you avoid parboiling your hand. Leave in for 1 minute. Move your fingers around some.

e. Go to c until you get bored or the water in both pitchers has gone tepid.

I also periodically freshen up the hot water by filling a mug from the hot-water pitcher and microwaving it for a minute while I'm soaking in the cold water and then putting it back in the hot pitcher when I'm ready to switch. But I'm pretty weird.

-Peter"

Or you could just get a reasonable keyboard. I've been lusting after a Kinesis Contour for some time now ...
I've heard of people having issues with DMT and LSD, of the four you mentioned, though they might have been dosage issues.

Weed is the only one of the four you mentioned that I would have no trouble with doing if it were presented to me, and DMT is the only one that I would definitely not do without more research.
Love this presentation, feels almost like a work of art, reinforces business concepts with such simplicity.

At least I am part of the way there in building something based on Happiness as a business model, HappyWishes, My facebook application. (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=5595659604)

It is always nice to hear echoing thoughts.
One interesting tactic that we had at Yahoo and have adopted at a start-up (which includes several ex-Yahoos) is the "stand-up meeting", where the idea is that we all stand (as not to be comfortable and not have the meeting drag on for hours) and merely say what we are doing that may be a blocker to others (or where we are being blocked by somebody else).

Another idea (for engineers) is setup an IRC server and have everybody run a screened (as in the screen utility) client on a stable UNIX machine in a common channel. Screen on a stable UNIX machine provides persistence, IRC provides real time ability. 37signals campfire provides the same functionality (real time, but also persistent chat) for less technical people.
I'm not saying this lightly, I was dead set agains it before I became 100% for it. It boils down to one thing:

It's a lot easier to stay focused when the other guy is focused.
Yes that would be a good idea!

As for organizing the world's health, we may look to the future toilet connected to the Internet as a solution?

Upon use this smart toilet sends your specimen data over the net to doctor's computer. If there are any irregularities in the data you receive an email to schedule an appointment. With the world using such a technology and all the data compiled, I'm thinking our life expectancy rate would increase!

Im not in the medical field so Im not sure if using specimen data would be a fool proof way for early detection of life threatening diseases or not?

*Not sure why this got dugg down? Is there someone in the medical field who knows this concept would not work or argue against it?
Who's saying anything about focus? That's not the topic here. You're saying meetings (no matter how short or how on topic) are useless. That's really far from the truth. Any organization, no matter how small, needs to get together and re-hash what's going on within the company. You can't just expect to work telepathically.
Thank you. If you do choose to undertake this journey, here are some final guiding words of wisdom which may help you on your journey:

Hedonism is best served occasionally.

Go with the flow atleast until you understand it.

Some voices are answers, others are questions.

All things are relative.

All things are subjective.

It is only possible to have a bad trip if you convince yourself/believe/decide you are having a bad trip.

Take _nothing_ for granted or as absolute.

Words are unreliable.

Do not be afraid to depreciate the mental monologue.

Do not be afraid.
We use skype when apart - both video and audio. Good camera, mike and speaker help. We'd just sit and code with a little window showing the other guy, when something comes up we would talk it over and then code again. Don't knock it till you try it!
StreamFocus.com :)
First thing: figure out where your problem is. Next time you feel pain, try to determine exactly where it is. Also useful when you talk to a doctor about it.

Then find a map of the nerves in your hand (Grey's Anatomy has one). Find the joints that that nerve goes through, probably one of those is squeezing it. Adjust your position/workspace to avoid stressing that particular nerve.
If you work in the same room you will stay up to date with your mates. When I checkin stuff, everyone in the room knows about it. And when I start cursing they know what's going, too.

I agree my "focus" comment was a bit offtopic. Got carried away there. :)

EDIT: and I did not say meetings are useless, please don't put words in my mouth. I said don't have them because there are better ways to stay in sync. Meetings can be useful, just not as efficient.
And yet you do DMT everytime you sleep (most likely), and certainly it is released during near death experiences. Unlike all of the other substances mentioned it is is produced by the human brain, and is the cause of many natural brain states.

(I do not, of course, recommend anyone go out and try DMT without first experiencing other psychedelics in the order given, or in fact without doing the research.)

I highly recommend you do that research.

http://erowid.org/

http://wikipedia.org/

Psychedelic use is not to be taken lightly. It is not a form of recreation (shouldn't be), it is a method of deep introspection, of breaking down mental barriers, a journey within yourself (among other things which really cannot be explained until you have reached the state of understanding that usually occurs with mush or mescaline use. This too is not an absolute, but is common to most peoples 'route' in this journey.)

Use of entheogens is, of course, not the only route to these states, tantric yoga can perform the same function as cannabis, and years (or decades) of deep meditation can take replace the use of mush, LSD and DMT.
Where to look for programmer that "will complete me :)"
No, I do not think I'm the business genius with all the ideas that someone simply codes at my behest. I have a very (un)healthly distaste for MBAs / B-School lazys. 31 year old proven-entity starting companies since 20. I love hackers, their attitude, and I know what I don't know. Let's prove that it can be done - together.

Help!
Things that have worked for me:

-Stop using a mouse. Use a trackball or a trackpad or anything else. I have a death grip on mice and I bet others do too.

-If you have to use a mouse switch your mousing hand. Deal with the fumbling and inaccuracy. You'll figure it out.

-Lean farr back in your chair(legs propped up) and rest your keyboard in your lap. Shift position occasionally.

-Move your monitor so that you look in different directions. Laptops are great for this and that compensates for their other ergonomic problems. You can usually find a way to move them higher or lower and correspondingly shift the strain.
Keep it short and to the point.

Have an agenda. Allow people to edit the agenda before-hand (a wiki is a good place for this).

Make sure actions come out of the meeting, so the time isn't wasted.
Sorry - one more thing: Yes, am looking for co-founder.
2 of us work out of the same office; the other works in a different state. (We do all get together every few months, though.) However, at least for us, we've found that it's better to separate ourselves inside the office for complete concentration. If someone needs to communicate with the other person, instead of yelling over to them, we send a message on Campfire and wait for the person to respond.

Anyway, this is all getting a bit off topic as far as meetings are concerned. I really think you need to do what is best for you and sometimes that's having weekly meetings, sometimes that's having monthly meetings, and sometimes that's having no meetings. However, I really advocate the weekly meetings, because it's very important to make sure everyone is on the same page. And not to sound corporate or anything, but you need to make sure your goals are aligned.
I recommend http://www.vitalist.com for GTD style task and project management. More ideal for single-person use, though.