skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stopped coding for a few years, and recently started spending significant hours a week on coding again. The feeling is quite incredible. I had forgotten how good that high is.

I do think that the author doesn't understand Flow fully. The ideal state of Flow is when there is a concrete challenge with immediate feedback, which coding is great at providing. The other activities he compares coding to don't have such strong feedback or concrete challenge.

The only activity that compares with coding for me is rock climbing. While it is a physical activity, it has the same kind of concrete challenge and immediate feedback. It is totally immersive.
Well, one thing to make sure you do is delineate your work from the rest of the life. So, Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM (or whatever the hours), you're in work mode, but as soon as the clock strikes 5, you turn off everything work-related, and you should not be considered reachable, barring any emergencies.

If that doesn't work for your co-workers, you fundamentally have an unsustainable company, which is no more your fault than theirs.

When clients and your work make a claim for your personal time, you need to put a stake in the ground - directly or indirectly by not responding outside working hours.

It also sounds like you may have a problem with your planning and workflow, if you've got e-mails and texts coming your way like a hailstorm. Since you're a founder, you're fortunately in a position to dictate how communication and project management works. Because no one deserves a flurry of e-mails and texts.
Also Google participated in an industry wide conspiracy to keep wages down and keep other companies from poaching or even hiring applicants from Google.
The simplest solution I know of is to start raising your prices. You will gradually start to get fewer new clients, and gradually start to lose a few of the old ones, but individually the remaining projects will be more profitable and enjoyable, and the work volume will become more manageable, all without having to ditch any of your clients (rather, they will be ditching you, leaving you off the hook).

A book you might find useful is 'The Business Side of Creativity': http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294978649
Faulty Circuits (2010) [pdf]
You're probably overestimating peoples' reactions to you leaving. Business owners manage to simultaneously believe the business is beyond their control and yet hanging on their every word. They can't both be true, right? If you left tomorrow, odds are a successful business continues, and it will be one which wouldn't have existed but for you.

That said: what stops you from having an all-hands meeting and saying "Is this REALLY what we want?" If it isn't, it is your business. Change it. Client needs to be able to text you at 8 PM? Client will be assisted in finding a more appropriate service provider. Employee feels that nobody can go home at 6? Employee gets told by his boss "Go home. It will be here tomorrow. There are companies that pull all-nighters every day. This is not one of them."

Also: raise your rates.
The issue isn't leaving, but abdicating your responsibilities. This is clearly what you care about as well, when you say "I can't ditch them." While there certainly would be something to be said for the "meaning" of what you'd pitched if you leave, the key here is making sure that the actions you take do not negatively influence everyone else there and the people you brought into this venture.

I think the question to be asking is "What steps can I take to transition my responsibilities to other people without negatively affecting the company and my colleagues?" If you can find an answer to that question--hiring someone who you groom to replace you, making the business more institutionalized and self-sustaining so that you don't need 14-hour days, etc.--you'll be closer to getting there.

It's pretty incredible how many people I see who start their own companies hoping for freedom, and find the opposite. Responsibility often means less freedom, and having clients and employees beholden to you means more responsibility. In some ways, being employed can mean being more free. There was a great article on HN recently pointing out that the true level of freedom for entrepreneurs is likely to be found not at founding your own company, but specifically at founding your own moderately successful company--once great success comes, you have much more responsibility.
I don't know if you have the patience or time for it, but The E-Myth Revisited, an old book with a cheesy name, was made for you and this situation.
> Not "um we have 8 pages left to design for tomorrow, nobody is going anywhere" says one of the developers.

It's your company, if you want to leave on time that is your prerogative, me I'd go pull the master breaker and shout "home time, fuck off" ;).

You sound like someone rapidly approaching burn out, you need to give yourself some time away from a screen to try and get some perspective on what you are doing.
Sounds like you need to talk to your project managers and review how you're setting timelines with your employees and clients. If you don't have any project managers, then you and anyone else in management need to do it. If it's just you, you need to get someone help with management! You should be able to take your team to beers (maybe 4pm instead?) scheduled every couple weeks, barring a big launch.
The part about salting confuses me. Shouldn't salting remain effective against rainbow tables even when the salting mechanism is known?
It sounds like your company has bitten off more than it can chew. You didn't mention how you're doing money-wise. If you can afford it, perhaps you should stop taking new clients until you've finished your current projects, and then negotiate more reasonable deadlines in the future.
This is commonly known as the Straw Vulcan Fallacy. If a course of action leads to less total utility (including fun, happiness, etc.) then choosing that course of action is irrational. This obviously includes overanalysis.

For one data point, I stopped attending the NYC Less Wrong meetup (through which I happen to know the author) when I met my wife (through said meetup) and decided I'd had enough of the sex, drugs, and roc^H^H^Hstrategy games lifestyle.
Sounds like you are doing well! Perhaps look for some grey in between the 2 extremes.

Ditching everything vs Burning out - classic balancing act of a startup innit

Running full pelt at a marathon only to hit 2 miles exhausted - time for tortoise to take over - he actually makes it!
Or, I could send out a resume on Monday and have a new job offer by Friday, one that includes a 20% raise and a hiring bonus.

Grueling, painful negotiation processes are, well, grueling and painful. The revealed preference of software engineers shows that the concrete benefits of jumping ship quickly outweigh the merely potential benefits of negotiating a raise at considerable stress.

I can see how it makes business sense for companies in the industry to try to make negotiation easy and the norm, and when they decide to, they'll find plenty of willing partners.
Show HN: My week-end hack, Merge Pull Request = Mark Tracker story as finished
How To Pick Up A Girl, OH WAIT
Ha, so this explains it. I hadn't been paying much attention, other than noticing that prepending "+" to google search terms (something I did infrequently to begin with) had started to just return zero results most of the time.
book looks like scanned(including type) but text is selectable. how does it work?
The main mistake you made was thinking that the startup life was a Bohemian life style. Doing a startup is incredibly stressful, you have to be pretty compelled to do it (really enjoy working on the problem, working with your team, etc).

First off, you CAN leave the business you started if you're getting burned out. Second off, I would try to pinpoint why you dislike working on your company. Does the problem not interest you? You keep referring to everything you are doing as 'work' and paint your coworkers / cofounders as your jailors. If you're not interested in solving that problem, you need to get out or you will bring the company down with you.

Now, you have to ask yourself if you dislike working in GENERAL. That may be a possibility and if you still want to have the dream lifestyle you've always wanted, I would look into freelancing part-time or starting a small lifestyle business that pays your bills and then some but doesn't require much effort.

If you want to fix your current situation/ burnout, try googling around for advice - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-avoid... - and set expectations with your team on the hours you are available as well. If you just want out, then what's stopping you from getting out and starting over. You can't be passive aggressive about this; it's going to be awful if you stick around, don't deliver, don't show enthusiasm, and aren't willing to fix it and it's going to be awful when you have to tell everyone you're leaving. Starting a company takes more stomach than picking between these 2 decisions and you've already done that so either of these should be a cake walk in comparison!
Hacker School is not a random website where you throw up code to have random strangers look at it. It is a three-month-long "writer's retreat for programmers," where you are sitting and working with other developers every single day, just like in a workplace, except that you're working on what you like and won't be fired.

Code reviews are in person and could easily become unprofessional or attacking--but they don't because there are very strong social rules about how to conduct them effectively and with improvement in mind rather than criticism.

I respect the point about thoughtfulness vs personal experience, but you should at least make the effort to look up what Hacker School is before making comments about it.
Absolutely- and one of the reasons they job-hop is because they can obfuscate their lack of competence for six months or so and then either leave or are reassigned/fired.
I think the most important thing to consider here is that these logic questions they use to test "rationality" are awkward word puzzles, and the test reveals more about how well people can work out what's being asked than their underlying rationality. The fact that most people would jump onto the "bank teller and feminist" option in the conjunction fallacy test is because the question as posed contains mainly feminist-related ideas, and so the brain's natural tendency is to jump to the answer containing the word feminism. That's less about rationality and more about how attuned are you to the likelihood that the questions you're being asked are worded in a tricky way.
Switching jobs works well when developers are in their 20's. But I've found in the 30's that a number of factors combine to make it much less attractive:

1) Each jump becomes less and less. There's an invisible salary cap for software engineers. By the time a software engineer is in their 30's, they've jumped a few times and are already close to the maximum.

2) There are costs associated with switching jobs. There's a risk that the new job could be far worse (team, boss, culture, etc.). And you start at zero reputation and connections at a new company. The lack of reputation often means less flexibility and influence since the others at the company don't trust you yet. The rewards are greater than the costs in the 20's, but usually not in the 30's.

3) It also happens to be the time when many get married and have babies. This increases the risk factor.

4) For total compensation there seems to be two tiers of companies, the top tech (google, facebook, amazon, etc.) and everyone else. I've noticed the big difference is not the base salary (top tech only pays a few % more). The really big difference is cash bonus + stock (RSU).

5) Unfortunately, the interview skills required to get into the top tech companies is biased against older software engineers. For an engineer in their 30's college is a long time ago. They could spend time getting algorithm books and studying, but there's less free time at this stage in life. So the only big jump that's worth it financially (top tech company) is very difficult to do.
I wonder what tiny percentage of searches used a + to get to a google+ page and what percentage of those were using it incorrectly.
The company you started with the friend was part of the bohemian lifestyle? Or you want to quit the company you started to pursue a bohemian life style?
How Disney built and programmed an animatronic president
Muni Bus Converted Into Homeless Shower Opens This Month
Using SimpleDelegator as a Migration to Presenters
Have you had a discussion with your cofounders and employees about establishing goals for work/life balance in the company? If so, what did they say?

Realistically, I don't think owning a company will give you massively more freedom than being an employee of one. But it does put you in a position to enshrine freedom as a goal for everyone in the company, employees and owners alike. Economic necessity will mean absolute freedom is never possible. But in my experience, it's very possible to have good work/life balance, flexible hours, and a fun workplace so long as the leadership is on board.

You might also consider asking whether you're setting the right expectations with your clients. If you're constantly making promises that force you to work 14-hour days and always be in crisis mode, perhaps that could be adjusted.
I did the same, with pretty much the same cicomstances. The fact that we had a choice in the matter leaves us pretty much privileged, no doubt in my mind.
I like this is (or appears) to be html embedded in an email. PDFs are annoying.
I agree with your thoughts on hyperbolic discounting.

Maybe I'll be dead next year. Maybe I just don't trust you.

Probabilistic reasoning is a tricky business. Also, I can reason about the likelihood that the store is going to have a loaf of bread tomorrow because we have experience dealing with that every day. The kind of scenarios concocted by economists are quite odd. Rarely is a stranger just giving you money with no strings attached.
Former social scientist here. Can confirm.
He's fairly clearly not doing well. His business is doing well.
To be fair, my second move was mainly to relocate to the Valley (in large part for personal reasons, although it doesn't hurt that it's an attractive region for salary). I'm hoping to stay at this particular job for longer before switching, and I think for my next move, it would have to be a lead developer position (I have turned down several high profile lead developer jobs already due to my feeling not ready yet) - freelancing full-time definitely does sound attractive from an income perspective since I do charge a significant rate, but I'm worried about freelancing being a static gig professionally. I also like working on teams since I can learn a lot from others, and teach others as well.

Even with the cost of hiring, I have been an extraordinarily valuable asset to the places I have worked, far more so than they have anticipated. I have gotten high praise for my quality of work and working well on a team (& across teams). I think employers just never expected me to progress professionally so quickly.
I suspect people with asperger's are often 'more rational'.
> I even know people who deliberately did "out and back" jumps to leap-frog over others at the same original company.

This is commonly known as a valid strategy at the place I work. It's very difficult to come in giving a shit about my code when the future of my position is a dead end.
a couple decades back, when my dad was working for one of the big telecom companies, they invented a new job title specifically so they could promote him with the appropriate pay bump while also keeping him coding instead of managing. (They later hired/promoted others with the same title.)

I thought it was a great solution. If a dinosaur like a telecom company can do it, why can't others?
As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.
That is what you get when you isolate decision maker from consequences of his decisions. HR does not feel the pain of you leaving, so he does not care. However, he has trouble to find a new person for low salary, so he is forced to raise the offer.
If you want freedom, learn how to algorithmically trade Forex.

Edit: Downvote? I'm serious about this. Trading is the only activity I know that gives you

1) income

2) no boss to report to

3) no employees to take care of

4) location freedom (e.g. can be done from anywhere)

5) relatively low starting costs

6) low starting risk (you don't need to work 2+ years to figure out if your company will actually make money)

7) a market you know will always be there

8) an ability to be totally hands off with
algorithmic trading

Most people think this is a pipe dream — perhaps that explains the downvotes. It's not. I live off semi-algorithmic Forex trading and know many others who do too.
Growth Hack: "The Twitter Machine" [Info-graphic]
Having worked for a number of years in the Valley, I can say that the salary part is true. However, now that I work at a large tech company that's public, the big thing that's missing from this is stock / RSUs. After doing my taxes, I realized how much of my compensation came from them and it makes a difference in a couple percentage points for base salary look small. On top of that, companies give refresher stock so that you accrue more of it the longer you stay.

After 4 years and earned all of that initial grant, it probably will make more financial sense to move on as the refresher grants don't come close to the initial grant. It also is a point where salary disparity might be significantly different (depending on economic conditions).
I can confirm this. I'm (self-)learning to play drums, and since I'm still a noob, my synchronization of foot and hand is a little off. When I'm just fooling around on the kit, I don't notice these imprecisions. But once I get "in the zone" with a metronome and all, I can tell exactly every time I hit the bass drum a fraction of a second earlier/later than the hi-hat, and the feeling that follows immediately is a slightly unpleasant one, like when you commit a social faux pas. It's a curious shift of perspective, and such hypersensitivity happens to me when I get immersed in code too, so I guess it relates to concentration itself.
نتيجة الشهادة الاعدادية الليبية من موقع وازرة التربية والتعليم
What has happened to the scribd links for PDF submissions?
It used to be that every PDF submission automatically got a link to a scribd version, despite many, many people being upset and annoyed by this. But recent PDF submissions appear not to have that.

Has something significant happened?
> And because the JVM does global stop-the-world garbage collection, which makes soft real-time implausible because of the unpredictability of GC affecting your actors. Erlang has per-process heaps.

Not quite. Every environment needs some shared memory semantics. In Erlang that's done with ETS tables, which don't undergo GC at all. Java's GCs are so good now, that, if shared data structures are used sparingly, would still give you better performance than BEAM. Plus, you have commercial pauseless GCs, as well as hard realtime JVMs.

> Basically the Erlang VM was created for this use case while the JVM was not, and its not something you can just add with a library. edit: Also the lightweightness of Erlang processes compared to Java threads[1] and hot code upgrades.

The JVM is so versatile, though, that all this can actually be added as a library, including true lightweight threads and hot code swapping (see Quasar[1]).

Nevertheless, BEAM was indeed designed with process isolation in mind, and on the JVM, actors might interfere with one another's execution more so than on BEAM, but even on BEAM you get the occasional full VM crashes. If total process isolation is not your main concern, you might find that Java offers more than Erlang, all things considered.

[1]: https://github.com/puniverse/quasar
Thanks for posting, but you should change the title to Zhang Lei instead of Zhang Le.
I didn't mean that Apple doesn't make good products. They make pretty damn good products. But the products are only part of Apple's marketing strategy.

Much of what has made Apple successful is the idea of what a Mac, an iPod, or an iPhone is. For most of the iPod's lifespan it was not the best product on the market, it was just the best marketed. In the case of macbooks, the hardware has been roughly on par with equivalently priced competitors for several years. But they sell the idea of what it means to be a 'mac person'. They get you invested in the idea that macs are better regardless of the reality.

And that strategy is as much about reassuring people who already own Apple products (fighting buyers remorse, and grass-is-greener impulses) as it is about selling more.
That is the case in Canada too. Tobacco companies have been banned from sponsoring events since sometime in 2003.
I remember my local cinema in the UK having an intermission back in the 80's. I remember my dad buying me an ice-cream during Back to the Future 2 from a lady that came round.
How to remove all Ruby gems using a single line command
If you are on the receiving end of the abuse it does get easier to see it for what it is. If the collective asserts your inferiority you don't have a lot of options besides from thinking for yourself.

At the same time it is much harder for those most favored by the community to reject the special treatment... if not impossible.

I like how you point out that race, gender and sexual preference are just extreme examples. I was sort of stuck there but it indeed seems to extend to the color of the nail polish, the brand of clothing, the choice of OS, political preference..... and pretty much everything else.

I hope this topic doesn't change hn into reddit. (just kidding)
I've been in a similar situation: working 12h and weekends in a company I co-founded, hired people and got others to work even more. I've been one that my co-founders always doubted my "commitment" (using the very term in German) because I didn't sleep in the office like they did. Until I we got another kid and my wife forced me to work 6h days. I told them I needed to work less and it worked. Wasn't easy though, but it worked. During the following months, the company became a nicer place to work at. Don't be afraid.
"No results" is a feature, not a bug, I'd much rather have no results or very few than a whole pile of crap to wade through in case the real results are buried in there somewhere.

Double quotes should translate to 'match this or nothing', what's the point of quoting otherwise. And if the + command is now no longer used then maybe bring back the old usage, which worked just fine.

Change for the sake of change is ridiculous, changing a well known user-interface in order to push a non-core product is slightly mad.

It also shows how bad it is to have all these services belong to one single company, imagine google+ being launched as facebook+, do you think that google would have dropped their '+' operator for that?
> A purely rational person would likely not experience any joy or love

How do you know that? It's not unrealistic for me that they may found more love and joy
Sounds like you need a culture readjustment. Who is driving the culture right now? As a cofounder surely you should at least have a say in it.
It should, and they just said "the integrity of weak passwords cannot be guaranteed" -- even the best salting cannot prevent attackers performing brute force attacks; it will be slow, but weak passwords may be cracked in reasonable time.
That's almost as practical, comfortable, and dignifying as the alternative non-App solution of just peeing in your pants.