skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The more I think about this post, the more conflicted I am about it.

On the surface, there are some obvious truths. Startups are hard; they're definitely not 9-to-5, 5-days-a-week jobs. There are also way too many people who think they're like a normal job but with added rockstar status and the potential to suddenly become fabulously wealthy, as if by random.

But. As Arrington says, it's a mindset thing. It obviously does take huge amounts of effort to get something off the ground, and the people you work with should be selected for their motivation to do that when it's required. The danger is that people will interpret his article to mean that everyone should work long hours all the time; that's simply not right. They should work the hours it takes to reach the goal, assuming the goal is reachable. Machismo is not productive.

While it's true that there's a lot of hard work involved and a lot of people are simply not cut out for it, here are some other truths. Balance leads to creative thinking. Lack of sleep leads to loss in productivity. Burn-out leads to no productivity. A business where you ask your employees to give their lives to the product is fundamentally unsustainable. A company is a community of people, and you have to understand their human needs to keep them motivated.

It's also true that if your employees aren't motivated to reach the goal, something is wrong - either the employee isn't right, or your goal isn't right. It comes down to hiring the right people, having a killer idea that motivates people, and being a good leader.

I also bristle at his comment about unionization. I don't think unions are a bad thing - but any unionization would have to be context-specific for Silicon Valley. There's nothing wrong with collectively bargaining for rights, but it can't be a cookie-cutter solution. I'm pretty sure smart tech people are capable of creating a 21st-century union that supports their rights while keeping the creative flame of their industry alive.
Before 2011, I'd never been athletic and I don't naturally have a runner's build, but this year I started entering road races - first a 10K, then a half-marathon, and now a marathon. By committing to running the race, I am incentivized to train hard.

That's a roundabout way of saying that I do a lot of exercise. I can't recommend this highly enough for so many reasons, but to answer your question, one particular benefit is that I've found this regulates my appetite to the point where I eat only the calories that I need.
If you're deficient in vitamin D, and you know it, then why not take vitamin D pills? They're cheap, they're small, and having micronutrient deficiencies is not cool.
On AngelList: PopSurvey
You're missing the point. The proper way to handle an allegedly unsupported browser is to degrade gracefully:

"I'm sorry, your browser may not be supported [Continue Anyway] [I'll Comeback Later]"

Otherwise, you permanently lose a lot of potentially users who have modern browsers.
And that's why my hiring criteria has always hinged on the level of compulsion said candidate exhibits. Sleep needs to be a secondary concern when stacked against a deadline.

Although, I will be the first to admit that every now and then I fully rest up and swear I'm going to get more sleep because I can actually see the productivity increase. That thought is often a quickly fleeting thought however....
a text link?
Why I use the Kindle Fire
I've found that extra info to be interesting and useful, it's true, when I can get it. For instance, Norvig's Lisp-in-Python essays came out with the code still in some flux and I could compare his improvements to mine.
Social Proof Is The New Marketing
Next Apple iPhone to have a 4 inch Display?
Please, let's get rid of the saturated fat bogeyman:

This is the part conventional “wisdom” doesn’t get: saturated fat in the diet doesn’t directly translate to saturated fats in the blood. It’s all how it’s metabolized. Saturated fat levels in the blood are influenced by the prevalence of carbs in the diet and the subsequent carb-generated lipogenesis process. -- http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat/
From the graph, it looks like drugs are the bait for bitcoins. It looks like every geek with a drug tweak bought in to bitcoin in the days after the Gawker article. It's not DNS related nor is it 100% responsible for the spike, but it is a unique solution for anonymous drug trade.
To me, Instagram and a gazillion other companies on the web exist solely to be acquired. I mean, what can Instagram really charge for? It has basically become a chat app but with pictures to start the conversation instead of "hey!".
Yup, interesting page, but I have to say that I found the section on 'study methods' a little disappointing. That section reduces the idea of learning to memorising information.

As a teacher I'm more interested in helping my students achieve a deeper learning - an awareness of how concepts are connected and how they link to the lives of my students.

If you happen to have access to an academic library, look at Visible Learning by John Hattie. Plenty of evidence (the book is an attempt to synthesize the findings of many hundreds of studies).

http://gwegner.edublogs.org/2010/03/01/john-hattie-visible-l...

Having said that, getting teenagers to make a simple to do list and to allocate a little time per day to routine 'deliberate practice' is a good start. The Pomodoro Technique page went down quite well, especially when I brought in some kitchen timers...
“Will It End Very Badly?” Probably Not.
I guess it was already submitted and HN picked it up, so he tried his luck this way. :)
> Sleep needs to be a secondary concern when stacked against a deadline.

Do you tell the candidate this during their interview?
Interesting. How successful has this strategy of hiring only compulsives been for you?

Assuming you're not joking, of course.
Well, sort of. Working all the time isn't sustainable. But the point of starting a startup isn't to do things that are long-term sustainable, it's to build as much as you can in a short period of time to outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever comes up.

And I say that as someone who needs work-life balance -- that's why I don't have a startup. I want to spend time with my wife and kids and hobbies and things, so I have a nice job that I can go to every day and then come home again.

Expecting to maintain work-life balance while creating a startup is bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Why I'm Returning My Kindle Fire
Part of the same process, yeah.
I'm so glad I was pushing 30 before I really became aware of this startup scene. The general impression that comes off, to me at least, is work hard, stop moaning, accept pennies and one day you'll be rich - assuming that unlikely outcome happens and we don't use of the thousand ways possible to screw you out of any riches.

To me at least, and as an outsider, I'd say things like this may hold up for founders, but as a non-founder you better be young and have very little in the way of commitments. Get the experience and use what you've learned to found something yourself.

As a caveat, I am obviously not well in on the startup scene, but from what I've seen & heard over the years, there's very little to tempt me as an employee.
As a current BCG consultant, thanks for this. Have been fortunate to work on real strategy work, but have lots of co-workers doing IT diagnostics and other not-so-exciting things.
To some people, Reality is just the byproduct of a million conspiracies. You sometimes just have to give up on those folks.
how is that update policy enforced in a p2p network? Are bitcoin users allowed to use arbitrary clients?
Any you will determine that, programmatically, how exactly?

Besides, badges are for kids.
I don't see a problem here. If people are working too hard, let them vent. What's it to you? Especially if they haven't struck it rich yet. It's not like you are forced to read their complaints, unless you are their boss, but then I would question your motives.
There's work. Then there's productive work. What pisses me off is having to pull an all-nighter doing ultimately meaningless work. In startups there can be a lot of meaningless work unless you have all your ducks lined up both strategically and tactically. The older I get, the more I realize that having your ducks lined up requires presence of mind, clarity, and focus, all characteristics that are fleeting when you're sleep-deprived and being powered by Red Bulls and coffee.

In startups, marathon work sessions should be kept to a minimum. They're valuable and they're a useful tool. But they come at a massive cost. The more you rely on them, the less effective they become and the harder it is for the person who participates in them to reach their original productivity without massive amounts of downtime in between sessions. If you're going to commit to some crazy over-working session, you better have a damn good reason. Most startups who push this culture don't.
Thank you! I thought I was the only one. I feel like saying this sort of thing on HN is blasphemy and stuff people don't want to hear even if it is only out of sincererity and curiosity.

Acquisition makes sense but there are far too many startups out there tht seem to have this model. That's going to hurt a lot of people in the long run. Those who aren't acquired will have gotten rich but the VCs will get burned and then there will be far less investors willing to spend some money when a startup that actually has a valuable product with a profitable model comes around. It's like a big race to get in on the startup trend before the bubble bursts.
"""I'm so glad I was pushing 30 before I really became aware of this startup scene. The general impression that comes off, to me at least, is work hard, stop moaning, accept pennies and one day you'll be rich - assuming that unlikely outcome happens and we don't use of the thousand ways possible to screw you out of any riches."""

Startups are tax for people who are good at math, but don't bother checking their odds.
Your startup is not part of history. You couldn't find better evidence that SV is an intellectual bubble than this post.
The overworking has nothing to do with changing the world - rather, it runs contrary to it. If perpetual overworking is necessary for a startup, it's not pushing anything revolutionary enough to be considered changing the world, as the overworking serves entirely to get a product to market faster than someone else, given that someone else can produce an equivalent or superior product.
The problems with emissions trading
Eh, yes and no. It should give context and detail but only the necessary details. The kind someone would need to get their bearings if you threw the code at them with no point of reference besides the log.
* Vegetarian Adventists consume fewer “doughnuts, coffee, and eggs” than omnivore Adventists

* Vegetarian Adventists tend to have similar health outcomes as Mormons, who are not vegetarian but do abstain from alcohol and drugs and have strong sense of community

* Recent re-analysis of the Adventist Health Studies show the fish eaters – not the vegans or vegetarians – have the lowest relative risk for all-cause mortality (0.78 versus 0.89 for lacto-ovo vegetarians)

* Study found that non-vegetarian Adventists eat more doughnuts, drink more coffee, and eat more eggs than the vegetarians

* Researchers’ conclusion: “Among Seventh-day Adventists, vegetarians are healthier than nonvegetarians but this cannot be ascribed only to the absence of meat.”
“Associations between diet and cancer, ischemic heart disease, and all-cause mortality non-Hispanic white California Seventh-day Adventists” by Gary E. Fraser, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 70 No. 3

http://www.slideshare.net/ancestralhealth/ahs-slidesdenise-m...
http://vimeo.com/32062337
Maybe this is true..

people with ADD/ADHD who get lightly buzzed might have boosted their focus.

I have noticed that when I drink a single IPA beer and I can think better, write code better, etc.
Coolest Arduino projects
"""Sleep needs to be a secondary concern when stacked against a deadline."""

Actually there is only one deadline that matters, and it's called death.

If your company is "stacked against deadlines" in order to compete, you're doing it wrong. "Fast time to market" is a rat race for marginal benefits, not a business strategy.

Google didn't get #1 because it was first on the market. Neither did Facebook, Microsoft et al.
What's your point, re profitability?

Are highway systems and surface roads "profitable?" And the airline industry (as opposed to the aircraft industry) has generated little or no wealth in more than half a century of existence.
How do you make a system fault-tolerant? Make it distributed. How do distributed systems work? By communicating via a network.
Some time ago go i read an article about an ex CEO of some biotech firm who wanted to complete a very hard multiple days bike race and trained for over a year.
He knew he couldnt keep up with the pros who didnt sleep at all and were nearly killing themselves, instead he tried to get good sleep everyday while the pros raced on. In the morning he ended up overtaking many of the guys that didnt sleep at all and genereally felt very fit throughout the whole race.
Of course he didnt win, but as far as i remember had a very respectable finish.
It was an excerpt from a book but i cant remember the name nor any details about the race :/
Meh - honestly working insane hours becomes unproductive and is foolishly glorified by many around SV. Getting 2 hours of sleep on a regular basis is just going to make you non-functional after a while and will lead to shooting yourself in the foot. This culture seems to be manufactured by VC-backed startups with limited runways and some of the more tyranical managers who hear about the greats like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that drove people incredibly hard and achieved enormous success. I think the better path is to work toward a certain direction that you enjoy, focus on enjoying your work and not trying to hit some "level", and treat yourself well so you can produce well. Your enjoyment and health should be your top priority and in return I'd bet your efforts will be much more effective.
Guidelines, by definition, only exist to guide people.

So yes, you are allowed to wander past them, ignore them, and use them as you believe most efficient.
Agreed, I also somehow see a big distance between the start up community and the real world. The term "big data" is an amazing example of this. Everybody speaks about "big data", yet companies are left dealing with "middle data" with old painful spreadsheets.

Everybody writes about listening the "customer". Yet, as you also imply, nobody seems to really care. I work in finance/controlling and yet I never managed to have a discussion about the domain problems of my field with those start up people, maybe there is a problem right there...

p.s. can you put a link at your start up?
Also fun is the version where pieces "respawn". There are 6 respawn points. Every minute, a dice is rolled and the piece captured earliest (of all captured pieces) is placed at the respawn point indicated by the dice (knocking off any piece that happens to be there, of course).

There are no stalemates in this version.
Sweet interface!
Sorry, it wasn't a proc object, it was a block. The following is a potential fix, but it's irritating to have to write it.

blk = lambda { |arg1, arg2|
# do something
}
obj.some_method(&blk)
If there would be one then it would be affected by observing since Google will close those profiles of 12 years olds. Thus snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
As someone that's bootstrapped for 3 years, I can say that working hard is imperative, but can also be incredibly detrimental to your business. I believe in the spirit of the blog post, as long as you don't get caught up in absolutes, because obviously burnout is counter-productive.

Most startups I see are weekend projects, or 3-6 month endeavors that really don't qualify as being a part of history and are dominated by goal of making money. However, considering the author it's safe to say that Arrington is assuming that you're actually trying to MAKE A DIFFERENCE, instead of building the next coupon loyalty program with game theory and achievements. It's probably also safe to say that someone with his universally accepted work ethic is probably seeing alot more 'whining' in his current role than previously exposed to.
Sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised at the amount of people that don't check social networks prior to buying a domain name.
Sleeping 2 hours a night is a sprint. Unless you are a superhuman, you can't sleep 2 hours a night for more than a week and still be more productive than someone on a normal schedule.

The point being, you can sprint in a crunch. You can sprint to meet a deadline next week. But unless you expect your company to be bought a week after you found it, you should probably be pacing yourself at least a little. Go ahead and give up work/life balance- for a medium-term project you can risk burnout- and go ahead and work 16 hours a day. But get 8 hours of sleep.
Ha, didn't know about that - good tip!
Fuck this investment banking bullshit.
> outrace competitors and adapt quickly to whatever
> comes up.

I am afraid it's not about outracing competitoros, but the fear of competitors. At the end you just get exhausted and fail without any competitors in sight.
Either I am way under-estimating the difficulty of executing a startup, or I am some kind of superman able to tolerate way more of life's shit sandwiches (without crying myself to sleep every night).

Which one is it? I kinda need to know before I start a startup :p

Feel free to downwote for hubris (reverse psychology, hah).
Amen. Sprinting works when you can see the finish line. Sprinting with no finish line in sight? Just stupid, and you're probably never going to make it to the finish line.
I have heard of some people having migraines on their first one or two fasts, but most of them say they no longer get them after those first ones.

If you want to try it, it might be better to ease into it, for example try having some fruit instead of no food at all.
It all tastes pretty bad at first, but Adagio has some interesting blends that might make it easy to ease into mate.

http://www.adagio.com/herbal/mate_sampler.html
Hacker's view
I work at a startup that has an amazing office, with a full bar and eight taps for draught beer. This makes it easy to knock back a few while coding throughout the day/night. I'd dare say, that the availability of free drinks coupled with a culture that promotes drinking as a social lubricant is just about the most tempting atmosphere possible.

Surprisingly, people do not take advantage. I think some less mature people may like to brag about how much they can code whilst drunk, but it's just like any other drug: If you can do X, Y, and Z incredibly well while under the influence, odds are you'd do even beter while sober.

If you can "get shit done" while drunk b/c you're no longer afraid of the awkward situations, odds are you'd do even better at handling them sober.

We've never had an awkward situation where someone checks in epically bad code due to being sloppy-drunk that I'm aware of, but that's b/c people are largely self-policing and they realize that what you an manage to do drunk, you can dominate sober.

I don't wish to sound like a prude. We do enjoy the refreshments, but usually after-hours, or at least when doing exploratory R&D, perhaps playing with a new design. To do your best work on the most important projects at a startup, you really to to bring your "A" game.
I'm in my early 20s. Startups seem to be the only way out of 40 years of mediocrity in TPS-land for me, so I don't really think I have much of a choice. It's startups or nothing for me.

Or maybe I am being myopic? Are there more options to be had in life than mediocrity/wageslavery vs glory/startups?
You have to evaluate how you want to work from a personal perspective and your relationship with the company you work for.

I agree that constantly over-working can have a detrimental effect, but so can not reacting to the 'right' deadline.

I've seen the result of an extremely successful startup (many years back) after the IPO and multiple stock splits, and no doubt there was a 'effort debt' being paid by the company after that period.

However, I very much doubt many of those people financially regretted their efforts. They won the lottery.
Not to state the obvious, but you lost 30 pounds because you burned more energy than you consumed.

It wasn't the sugar that caused you weight gain or loss.
A Stanford education (free)
> P.S.: not getting enough sleep decreases productivity. The 37Signals guys have covered this a few hundred times at this point. I also seem to recall Richard Branson saying that he "needs his 8 hours."

I think the culture of correlating working longer with working harder comes from occupations where there is a relatively close connection between the two, such as in occupations that primarily involve physical labor. However, a lot of the work done by startup founders is not in the physical realm, and therefore the efficiency with which that work is completed can vary drastically depending on the mental state of the worker. Of course, the worker's mental state is heavily dependent on his/her sleep schedule.
Facebook faces European crackdown on targeted advertising
"""I hope this made things a bit more clear."""

Yeah, much clearer. Here are my remarks:

"""Searching in shared posts in Google+ is one of the key features that Google+ has over Facebook and other social networks since it will let you simply search for "that interesting site my friend shared with me last month" instead of going through his posts manually."""

Maybe, but that would be trivial for Facebook to add. It's not like full-text search is rocket technology. And in this domain, PageRank is not even needed.

"""Google+ is more natural because of it's Circle system. You don't broadcast all your interesting findings to everyone you know, you tell it to the select group of people who might be interested, just like in real-life. """

Yeah, that's nice. But does it bother people using Facebook? I don't see it. Also Facebook added some similar features lately.

"""Then where will Siri get the results? Siri can't pull them out of thin air, they have to come out of a search engine and if Apple values the "magical" experience of it's users then they should use Google."""

Not necessarily. There are better sources than Google for a lot of stuff Siri caters for. For example, Siri already uses Wolfram Alpha for math, stock, general information related searches. Apple could provide its own dictionary searches, wikipedia searches, it's own map data for location searches, use the iTunes DB for music and lyrics searches, IMDB for movie times and movie/actor info, Amazon et al for shopping, travelocity of something for airplane tickets, etc covering a lot of ground query-wise. And they could also switch to Bing in a heartbeat. You get the idea.

"""But I think that is a bad move, since Apple would then be inventing the wheel again, only to disconnect themselves from Google maps."""

No, they won't invent the wheel, they bought a company that has already invented and made one. And it only makes sense to disconnected from Google Maps, a service by a competitor mobile OS vendor, that could even cut them off of it altogether when he wishes.