djm

My dog died on March 30 and I had a new puppy by April 21, despite the inevitable feelings of guilt from doing it so soon.

Being a puppy he is a real PITA and lots of work but his presence has given me a real pick-up over the last few weeks.

If anyone is interested in this sort of thing, read through the articles in the study hacks blog - http://www.calnewport.com/blog/. It's aimed at students but I've found it interesting and somewhat inspiring nonetheless.

Founders at work found me 'Kate' who is a total babe but sadly in America. The thing is, founders at work isn't actually in the list of books in her profile.

little schemer found me 'Polina' but she doesn't have it in her book list either.

I tried searching with and without quotes around the title.

Hope you fix that. I like the idea of the site itself though. Bookmarked for future use.

I haven't tried this investment myself yet (insufficient funds) but I'd be interested if I had the money spare.

Warning: I'm not sure about how this works in the US, but here in the UK I'd have to obtain a consumer credit act license for lending more than 25k.

Since then I've changed a few things. Here is what I am doing now:

1) Make a list of what I want to do tomorrow before going to bed.

2) Write down what I am doing during the day on a time sheet of one hour blocks. I was using 30 minute blocks initially but got sick of it.

3) Try and do hard stuff first (coding) and easier stuff after (everything else). I try and start work as soon as I get up as well.

4) Disconnect the internet. I physically unplug the cable. My current work allows me to mostly get away with this and I only go online about twice a week.

Since my previous comment I'm now working for myself on my startup too. I've found a few additiuonal tricks to cope with being on my own:

5) Go outside every day. I have to make a conscious effort to do this or I end up staying inside sitting at my computer for a week at a time. I normally just go for a walk around the park, or sometimes arrange to meet a friend for a coffee etc.

6) Pretend I am only going to do four hours coding per day. If I sit down at the computer at 8.00AM thinking "I'll stop at noon and go for a bike ride" then I have much less difficulty in getting started. I almost always end up spending more time coding than this once I get started though, because I hate leaving something unfinished.

http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/ http://aaron.swartz.usesthis.com/

_why is listed on their mainpage too but his interview seems to have been removed

My french teacher couldn't speak french properly - she used to look stuff up in study guides and read it, pretty badly, to us. Much of the focus was on memorising lists of words rather than learning to build sentences etc. I don't think my experience was that unusual.

The argument that native english speakers shouldn't bother learning other languages because everyone else is learning english is common, but ridiculous. We all travel and migrate more than we used to and this trend will presumably increase over time.

Being the odd one out in a group because you only speak english feels like a disability in many places. It's especially embarrassing when the group speaks english to include you thus highlighting the difference even more.

I didn't know languages education was voluntary in the US. I would have assumed that most children, especially those in California, would be required to learn spanish. Maybe some french for those living near the border with french speaking parts of Canada. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It's well established that learning a foreign language is easiest as a child. Perhaps the best way to make a monolingual nation multilingual is to adopt a policy of favouritism in hiring teachers for young children who are bi-lingual.

Me too, but thats why god (or somebody godlike) invented freezers. The secret to eating good food every day if you don't like to spend time cooking is just to make stuff in big batches and preserve it.

Today for instance I spent 30 minutes or so making possibly the most delicious stew man has ever tasted. I made enough for eight servings and am freezing most of it. It would have taken me almost as long just to make one serving.

People make plenty of excuses about why they can't cook but it's rarely true.

The character constraint forces people to say whatever they want to say concisely which I can see as being valuable - it's all too easy to otherwise get lost in the sea of data that is the internet. But that's about it.

How do people use it? Are most people using twitter from their laptop/PC or from cell phones? I can understand the need to keep messages small if you are using a hardware interface that provides a constraint on what you can practically write. But those limitations will go away in time.

I would guess that people will want increasingly higher bandwidth communication, not less. I can see people putting up with SMS type messaging for now, but I'd bet they'll ditch it when they can buy a working star trek communicator.

Seriously, if anyone can provide me with the true enlightenment on this please do so. It sometimes seems as though I'm the only person alive who just doesn't get it.

I wonder what prompts others to stick with scheme.

You briefly commented on living the (relatively) simple life - having fairly few possessions etc. I try and live somewhat like this myself and have found it very liberating.

If you're interested I'd much like to read an essay with your expanded thoughts on this lifestyle decision.

cheers, david

In the earliest stages at least, what you need most is a place to be able to think and work and create something without too much distraction.

I'd say a good place to start a startup would be similar to a place you'd want to live if you were working on some hard math problem or something. Somewhere you can walk the streets and think about stuff, with libraries with quiet corners and ubquitous coffee shops would be my ideal. I guess that probably describes a lot of university towns, especially the older ones.

If a whole family sign up to your site and like it enough to use it they will probably become long term users. After all it would be a pain in the ass for them to try and collectively move to another service.

With this in mind, if you go the premium route, it may be in your interests to consider offering a more substantial sign-up discount - a 21 day free trial wouldn't excite me to try out your product.

Good luck in any case and keep HN up to date with how you guys are doing :)

You can buy mugs that have a french press built in - see http://www.amazon.com/Planetary-Design-Commuter-Double-Shot-...

I have a similar though cheaper version of one of these and it's pretty good.

What interested me most about these two articles though was his ability to articulate his thoughts so well. I've noticed that it's frequently the case that successful people are very good at clearly saying whatever it is they want to say. This is a trait I'm trying to develop myself.

In the Uk and europe (western europe anyway) supermarkets now either (a) don't let you have them at all, (b) make you pay for them, or (c) let you have them but make you ask the checkout operator instead of having a bunch that you can help yourself to.

Most supermarkets are also selling larger more sturdy plastic shopping bags. These are marketed as a 'green' iniative as using less of the other bags is supposedly good for the environment.

There was another startup (totally forget who they were) that posted to HN some time ago with something vaguely similar (though not as nice looking). I think they were just providing an alternative UI to buying books on amazon though. I've always wondered what happened to them.

Of course! Google Mitch Altman and TV-be-gone. I imagine there are very many others too.

Also, there is a cool video floating around somewhere (can't find the link right now) of how to build your own balloon based satellite that incorporates off the shelf cameras and a computer. I think it was a make magazine project.

- well meaning but incompetent staff. People don't seem to understand that wanting to do good doesn't naturally translate into the ability to do it.

- no real management. I suppose this may be local phenomenon, but where I am (UK), there seems to be a tendency for small charities to be managed by wealthy housewives as a kind of hobby job. There is very definitely a social network of them that dominate the charities in my town. Often this means the management will be consistently absent from the organization. You can also see my previous point.

- no real check on the management. Charity trustees are often people who just want their name to be associated with a charitable organization. I can think of several trustees of the charity I work for who probably have only a vague idea of what we actually do.

- funding constraints. Charities in the UK who receive funding from government departments are usually monitored in terms of the volume of work they do rather than the outcomes they produce (which are much harder to quantify). Thus the incentive is often to not try to improve efficiency as reducing the work load may negatively impact funding.

Obviously my examples are to some extent just personal experiences that may not be universal. However I would guess that most non-profits face similar problems and that these problems may help explain why you got such a negative reception with your projects.

With regards to volunteers though, what did you to do assess their competency to perform the tasks they were willing to help out with? I ask because part of my job is to manage my organization's volunteers (which mostly come to us on work experience placements from the job centre). They frequently start working for us claiming to have various skills and then we discover that they often don't. For this reason I am usually quite unhappy about accepting new volunteers - when I have to get rid of them is is much harder (emotionally, for me) than sacking an incompetent employee. This might also help explain some of the resistance you encountered to what you were doing.

I do tend to think this format is abused when people wish to write quick and dirty articles online though. For me, an article titled 'N things...' tends to be reason enough to ignore it in most cases.

Also, I will admit to preferring the essay format overall. You cannot lose yourself in a list like you can in a good essay regardless of how good the content is. An essay is more like a story which sucks you in.

The system that has worked best when I can bring myself to stick to it is:

1) Write a small paper list before going to bed of what I want to do tomorrow.

2) Tidy my room and get any work materials that I will need (which for me normally just means relevant books etc) ready on my desk.

3) Try to start work the moment I get up.

4) Record what work I do on a simple paper based schedule in 30m blocks during the day. I'm somehow less likely to procrastinate if I know that I am going to have to write down that I've done it.

Thats about it. Getting up at the same time every day and avoiding too much coffee helps too.

I seem to be able to stick to this system fairly well most of the time but when something happens that causes me to stop, then it often takes me weeks to get back on track.

Whatever system you use, just make sure it is as simple as possible. You don't want maintaining your time management/productivity system to become your full-time job!

Hope this helps ashishk

It will be interesting to see how that data compares to the poll results.

You see groups of cyclists whizzing along chatting as they go, effortlessly maneuvering around traffic (including you or me). It was incredible.

One time I was tiring near the summit of a mountain in the pyrenees and an old man reached into the back pocket of his cycle top and handed me a sugar cube whilst overtaking me on the way around a bend. The gradient we were on was about 10-15% I think. I nearly went over the edge trying to take the cube from him.

Does anyone know if somebody is going to make videos of these? I couldn't see any mention of it on the site.

I don't think it's a good way to start programming but I would encourage people to learn it at some point because of the reason you gave.

I'd also suggest that the best way to get to grips with C is to learn assembly with a simple processor at the same time. People always seem to get stuck on pointers etc and that's easy to understand when you know a processor's addressing modes. Plus, it's always fun to use gcc to output (unoptimized) assembly code and compare it to what you would have written.

*the other meaning of the word

As far as technical stuff goes I'd like to go through SICP - I had a small exposure to lisp years ago and would like to try it out again.

I'm also going to be doing some courses with the UK's open university (distance learning) - a math refresher and a course on processors/hardware.