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adamzerneron Startup employees don't earn more

This talks about aggregate earning rather than earning per unit of time. I think the latter is what people are/should be interested in, and from what I understand, startup employees put in a lot more hours.

adamzerneron Ask HN: Where do you go for learning about health and well-being?

https://www.painscience.com/

Well written, thorough, and most of all... actually evidence based!

adamzerneron Ask HN: How Did You Escape 9 to 5?

Sorry I was on my phone and couldn't link - http://www.daedtech.com/the-beggar-ceo-and-sucker-culture/.

In short it refers to letting others take advantage of you.

adamzerneron Ask HN: How Did You Escape 9 to 5?

I worked for about a year and a half after college and then quit to do my own thing (autodidacting -> startup). At each job I was frugal and saved over half the money I earned. I also accumulated money by working small jobs in high school and college, and some from my grandparents. It I'm frugal, the money I saved should last at least 5 years or so.

While working my full time jobs I spent as much time as possible improving myself, rather than succumbing to Sucker Culture. The same applies to high school and college.

adamzerneron The downside of being happy: creativity kindled by sadness

Perhaps I'm missing something, but on first glance, there are some things that jump out at me:

- Sample size of three.

- Linguistic analysis. Perhaps they're not actually sad. Perhaps they just happen to be writing about sad things.

- Unrepresentative sample (they're all successful musical composers).

adamzerneron The future is arriving too fast

As demand goes down, supply will too. There comes a point where it isn't worth making something anymore. Those that demand it still will miss out. To me, this is an acceptable outcome of capitalism.

But I don't think that's what the article is saying. I think it's saying, "There's a difference between wanting and liking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incentive_salience). Demand is determined by wanting, not liking, and so that's what the market responds to. People don't do a good job of wanting what they like, and thus the market is reducing supply too quickly."

Ie. plastic circles (and their analogs) really make people happy. If people were smarter, they'd realize this demand for them would be higher. But because they're mistaken, supply falls too quickly.

I agree, but don't know of a solution.

adamzerneron Things I learned dealing with psychopaths in startups

Do you knoW that this person is a legitimate psychopath?

adamzerneron Economic Inequality

There seems to be an assumption that if you tax the rich, they won't be motivated to grow the pie. I don't think that that's true. I don't think people would say, "Tax rates doubled. Now I only expect to make $100M instead of $200M. It's not worth it any more; I'm quitting."

Here's how I see it:

A: Double taxes; 10% smaller pie.

B: Keep taxes; inequality grows.

C: Increase taxes such that innovation stops.

Graham seems to be arguing that B is better than C. I agree, but he doesn't seem to address A.

adamzerneron What RESTful actually means

> Stateless does not mean that servers and clients do not have state, it simply means that they do not need to keep track of each other’s state.

For this reason, I've always thought that the term "stateless" is confusing. Maybe "client state independent" (the response that the server sends back is independent of the client's state)? I don't love that term, any better ideas?

adamzerneron Ask HN: How do develop a side project when you have a 40hr/week job?

Assuming that you have the energy to do coding after work, it seems like this is really a question about time management rather than about motivation.

One thing I'm trying right now and that seems like a good first step is to track what you spend time on every day. I'll give you an example. Right now I'm home for Thanksgiving, which is sort of a vacation, but I also want to be productive. Here's what I did today:

11:50-12:45 - Wake up, internet

12:45-1:00 - Work

1:00-8:30 - NFL, hang out with friends

8:30-9:00 - Quick work out, shower

9:00-10:45 - Dinner + work

10:45-11:25 - Break, clean up, shave, wash up

11:25-11:50 - Work

11:50-12:00 - Pats-Broncos OT

12:00-2:00 - Work

2:00+ - Relax, sleep

I don't know if that was the most helpful example given that I'm on vacation, but whatever. I've found that I spend a lot more time on little things like eating and cleaning than I'd think/hope (I'm a very slow eater).

Anyway, I think that having good data on where you spend your time is very useful. Both from a logical planning perspective, and from an emotional/motivational perspective.

Prioritization, motivation and efficiency are topics that are too big and too well covered for a comment of mine here to be useful.

adamzerneron Show HN: Tango - A tool to help you think

Code: https://github.com/adamzerner/tango

adamzerneron Show HN: Hacker News desktop app made with Electron and Node

Sure thing :)

adamzerneron Show HN: Hacker News desktop app made with Electron and Node

But it's tempting. My hypothesis is that it's too tempting.

adamzerneron Show HN: Hacker News desktop app made with Electron and Node

That's a pretty cool idea... but do people really want more HN? My impression is that most people want to read it once or twice a day, but are driven to it more often than that as attempts at procrastination. So this seems like it'd be a net loss for most users.

adamzerneron Why It's Safe for Founders to Be Nice

It's always been a pet peeve of mine that people depend on the medium of text so much. My impression is that much of this information could have been better communicated with graphs. Better yet - interactive graphs!

The only real reason why someone would stick to text that I would think of is that they don't have the time, skills or resources to use something else. Maybe pg doesn't _personally_ have these things, but I'm sure that there are tons of designers who would love to help him out.

adamzerneron Ask HN: Any web dev. material targeted to experienced software engineer?

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS/blob/master/READM... is something that comes to my mind. In general, I think that there's a ton of the sort of material you're looking for! http://teropa.info/build-your-own-angular is another one. There's also some books and stuff on design patterns.

adamzerneron Ask HN: When you can't fall asleep, what do you do?

I find that I need a cutoff point where I'm not allowed to do any more work. Otherwise I'll be thinking about work and productivity up until the point where I literally become unconscious (fall asleep).

Sometimes I read/listen to educational stuff. I try to keep it on the lighter side. Sometimes I listen/watch comedy. Right now I've been watching Seinfeld before bed. Before that was Khan Academy history.

I remember hearing advice from some credible source (that I can't remember) that it's not good to keep trying to fall asleep when you are struggling. I think 20 minutes was the point where it was recommended to get out of bed and do something else for a bit. Anecdotally, it works reasonably well for me.

adamzerneron Marvin Minsky's Homepage

That's a fair point.

http://justinjackson.ca/words.html is one of my favorite articles.

adamzerneron Marvin Minsky's Homepage

Not to complain, but I find it surprising that the web pages for such prominent academics/people are often so ugly. Why not pay some web designer to spruce it up? Or maybe have the department/school use a nice template? Seems worth it to me.

adamzerneron Geography of Emotion: Where in a City Are People Happier?

> data from the Twitter microblogging platform to analyze the properties of these areas. Specifically, we have extracted a large corpus of geo-tagged messages, called tweets

lol

adamzerneron Change Your Name

Very cool! This makes sense to me. Specialization and trade.

adamzerneron Change Your Name

True. I hate domain sharking.

adamzerneron Change Your Name

> How do you find them? One answer is the default way to solve problems you're bad at: find someone else who can think of names.

Imagine a website where startups could describe what they do and users could propose and vote on ideas for names. It's been on my list of potentially decent project ideas.

adamzerneron Ask HN: I'm launching my startup in 3 days

I think that this is a fantastic collection of approaches - http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-techniques-startups-use-t....

adamzerneron Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

For what purpose? To advance your career? Self-improvement? Fun?

1) I'm guessing more finance and math.

2) I second the CFAR recommendation.

3) Whatever you want!

adamzerneron Japanese-Style Entrepreneurship: An Interview with Softbank’S CEO

I didn't read the article because it required a subscription for me, but I feel pretty confident that he already had a lot of the knowledge. Because the alternative is that he didn't have the knowledge, and actually learned 4 years of information in 2 weeks, which seems crazy even for people with the highest aptitudes.

adamzerneron YC Fellowship

Is there a catch? What does YC gain from this? A larger pool of applicants to chose from for YC? Or is this philanthropic?

adamzerneron Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

Bret Victor talks about the inadequacy of normal form controls in Magic Ink - http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/#p169.

adamzerneron Show HN: “Who is hiring?” Map

Classic "why didn't I think of that"

adamzerneron Ask HN: My startup has failed. What comes next?

Personally I wasn't a great coder after my startup failed (right after college). So I went to Fullstack Academy, and then got a job as a web developer. I plan on taking another stab at it once I get some more experience though.