brianmwang

One small suggestion: stop using text-align: center on everything. It's generally poor design practice and makes for unfocused layouts.

This is quite a day for news from MailChimp. We had already decided to go with MailChimp for our bulk email needs and have been on the fence about Amazon SES vs SendGrid. But with us already leaning toward Amazon SES, this pretty much just seals the deal.

Incidentally, the startup my partner and I are working on is very much inspired by the same notion found in this XKCD comic. We're entering private beta in two weeks so if you're interested, shoot me an email.

It still happens even in major metropolitan centers like NYC. I still vividly recall being gawked over by a crowd of extremely rowdy girls on Halloween day, having "Look, it's Jackie Chan!" thrown at me. They were pretty much shrieking about it and on the subway, no less. Nothing to do but have to actually listen to that nonsense. It shocked and sickened me for a while.

Granted, the girls in question seemed to be from generally poorer, low-education areas. That still doesn't excuse it in my book though.

The one thing that absolutely drives me up the wall is the recent touting of "Tim Ferriss's 'Slow-Carb' Diet" as if this was some sort of revelation previously withheld from the masses. Every time I hear somebody saying they're following it from 4HB I think, "These principles have been freely available and many times presented through a variety of media channels for years. Why is this news now and why is it being credited to Tim Ferriss?"

I won't downplay Tim's mastery of self-marketing, but seeing this kind of thing makes me go bonkers.

There's a reason I've always called Japan the #1 exporter of weird.

This hits home for me since I just finished reading The Design of Everyday Things. The two improvements that Jason suggests can be traced back to some core design principles that Donald Norman lays out in his book:

1. An indicator to inform the user of the object's current state. Based on the comments in the original post, it seems that the dishwasher actually does have an indicator light but for some reason it was accidentally covered up.

2. A forcing function, which is meant to constrain user actions in order to prevent error and/or guide the user toward the intended behavior.

The final sentence in your characterization of Facebook is uncannily similar to what AOL was in its glory days.

Yes, very helpful but this feature isn't new at all.

Penn's "34th St" magazine has been doing this every semester for a while now: http://www.34st.com/content/2010/dec/shoutouts-fall-2010

The formula works.

FYI, the following repeats under your FAQ question "What is an 'optimal wake point?'"

An optimal wake moment can be thought of as a "semi-awake" moment – the lightest point in your sleep. Waking at these times will result in minimal sleep inertia or grogginess. More info can be found here: The Science of Waking

So what exactly does the WakeMate enable you to do to get refreshing sleep on an irregular schedule?

+1 for "Django deployment best practices".

I'm a huge metal head, but unfortunately most of that music easily distracts, whether it's the vocals, some killer riff, a favorite solo, etc. I think a big reason I've been adding some post-rock (Sigur Ros), trip-hop (Massive Attack) and dubstep (Burial) to my playlist is because they're moody yet rarely depressing. The vocals are minimal, the beats slow paced, and the samples interesting but not distracting. A new favorite of mine these days is the Lush channel on Soma FM.

This looks great Patrick. I've been consistently impressed whenever I read your HN input; I just sent a tweet promoting Appointment Reminders.

Above all else, Tim is a master self-marketer.

I've always found it interesting that I'd never heard of BrainQuicken until he got his fame from 4-Hour Workweek. Granted, that fact alone doesn't mean the company wasn't successful when Tim was running it, but it is curious.

IMHO, he comes across very much as a "famous for being famous" type of person and for that, I've never really liked the guy. Some of his ideas are interesting, but it's hard to take him seriously when he's practically Aleksey Vayner.

The original point doesn't even have to do with whether you want to impress others. It has to do with your users' motivations - that's what matters.

Much of our behavior in everyday life is driven by how we present ourselves to others.

Are you sure you're not drawing both a strawman argument and false dichotomy here with respect to near-field communications? While I can't speak with authority on how it'll be implemented, what makes you think that the use of NFC will be without your explicit consent? How is this any different than one taking out a credit card and swiping it at a machine?

Regarding WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS... these options aren't default on my Nexus One. I control when I want to use these features. Barring the cases of strange backdoors and apps secretly grabbing your data, I'm not sure what the issue here is.

His account of the 9th grader reminds me of the advice to punch out the toughest looking guy in the room on your first day of prison to establish a reputation of unfuckablewithness.

This is fairly obvious but easy to overlook advice from Fred.

The concept of flow is often mentioned here on HN and letting competitors destroy flow is an easy trap to fall into. As others have mentioned, the question remains how much time one should allocate toward observing and reacting to competitors. While it is undoubtedly above 0, one has to take into account the opportunity cost involved as well as the energy wasted on switching gears, which can be quite significant and is often overlooked.

Agreed- I really dig the design.

However, one little nitpick: the copyright and credit text at the bottom of the footer are killing me with the text shadow. My eyes strained to make out the characters.

I did essentially this for quite a while to save money. >50% of my daily meals consisted of whey protein in water and peanut butter. Not exactly the most balanced diet, but it sure saved me a ton of cash.

This may betray my own ignorance, but I believe 中国人 is perfectly fine for describing oneself even if you are not from the Mainland, such as in my case. I've hung around plenty of 1st generation Chinese folk from Taiwan and conversation seems to still use 中国人 as a general term, not as something specific only to Mainlanders. I suppose if you really wanted, you could use the term "Han Chinese", but that is in fact more ethnically specific than 中国人.

Does this also apply for an application that was submitted before the deadline? More specifically, is it fine to make an edit to the application after the deadline period?

I've only attended one NYTM so far, but the one time I witnessed somebody get booed for asking the "how will you make money" question, it certainly wasn't wrapped in MBA speak. The crowd response seriously saddened me - this sort of attitude will only detract from the amazing things going on in NYC right now.

One thing you may want to consider is proposing a part-time arrangement with an agreement to end employment permanently at some date. This is, of course, assuming you are willing to quit the job for good. However, this has been working out quite well for me as it affords me significantly more time to work on my startup while removing the need to hide intentions at the day job.

It's as if he hired somebody to find the top 12 most mentioned web sites on TechCrunch to form the basis for his business plan.

That's not the right URL.

Go here instead: http://codelesson.com/courses/view/introduction-to-programmi...

See: 4chan