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If you wanted to take a scientific approach you'd need to be able to do something like the following: (A) measure your actual work output and (B) some way of measuring your 'maximum expected output capacity'.

if A much less than B you are being lazy. if A is close to or equal to B then you are burnt out.

[The short answer of course is, if you are reading Hacker News you are being lazy]

As an aside; Pivotal Tracker - the feature / dev tracking software manages to define output using average number of work blocks completed over the past X weeks. How you measure your maximum expected output capacity might be more tricky to define.

mattslighton Show HN: My weekend project, MealMogul.com

Tom, I'm working on a project similar to GrubWithUs (blog.eatsocial.net). We are a team of 3 and just started working every weekend on this about a month ago.

How many of you are working on this?

mattslighton Show HN: My weekend project, MealMogul.com

Advertising this could be one of your biggest costs. Reduce the requirement for advertising by devising a traction plan, if you haven't already. You already have the right idea by targeting a small area first and then expanding.

There is a similar site to yours already launched in London, fairly well established called HouseBites.co.uk - have you studied their model? Mike from HouseBites gave a talk at YCombinator London about 1 or 2 months ago. Did you see this talk? There is a video floating around somewhere.

Some of the logistical issues were discussed which may give you some assistance on for Meal Mogul.

I am also working on a different yet related project EatSocial.net (see blog.EatSocial.net) - think meetups in restaurants. Would you be interested to meet for a chat? I am based in London and would like to hear more about Meal Mogul.

mattslighton Show HN: My weekend project, MealMogul.com

Another similar site in the UK is HouseBites.co.uk.

They are revenue making at the moment (note sure on profitability).

I am workimg on a similar project st the moment EatSocial.net where the focus is on eating out rather than eating in. Think meetups in restaurants.

Early blog posts about it here: http://blog.eatsocial.net

http:

mattslighton Pete Smith on Silicon Milkroundabout: Startups team up to take on the banks

I think it's been typed in Word!

mattslighton Pete Smith on Silicon Milkroundabout: Startups team up to take on the banks

Trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes; employers, customers, investors etc is only ever a stupid idea longterm.

mattslighton Pete Smith on Silicon Milkroundabout: Startups team up to take on the banks

I looked at a number of cites to base my new company and chose London for it's mix of diversity, access to talent and strong business culture.

For a tech heavy startup SF was the only other serious competitor.

I must disclaim I am English.

mattslighton RIP Steve Jobs. RIP Apple.

Lets face it Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs when it comes to presenting. How do you explain Apple's dip between 1986 to 1996 which coincided with Steve absence?

mattslighton YCLDN 29.09.11 Summary

  * Scribbled entrance notices being thrashed out five minutes before first talker due to speak
  * Orderly British queue forming for mammoth order of pizza and beer (red stripe went down well)
  * Pre talk banter on why anybody still using PHP needs to exorcise the demon, install RVM and start using Ruby with HAML, SASS and Coffeescript.
  * @kzhu from Mint Digital when asked “What’s your market size? Surely only everybody has one fridge”, replying “everybody”
  * @giniji for hacking together SWYM.me, a buggy startup the day before and knowing that his search strings were chopping off the first characters. Uby on Rails.
  * @Harjeet for encouraging all hackers to apply well for YC and take the pilgrimage to Mountain View
  * Many a wannabe CEO on the prowl for the elusive CTO
  * Something special is happening in the East End of London right now. Where it will take us. Who knows.

mattslighton Urban Airship: Postgres to NoSQL and back

I can summarise this presentation as:

  * Postgre 8.3 on AWS not good enough
  -> lets try Mongo
  * Mongo performance not good enough
  -> lets try and fix this
  * Oh shit we don't know what we're doing lets go back to Postgre
  * There's a new version 9.0 this might sort us out
  * No sadly Postgres 9.0 is no better
  * Oh wait maybe Amazon performance is to blame
  * Lets try it on real hardware
  * Oh yes that's better

mattslighton YC NYC, September 26

I can't understand why YC isn't involved more with London

mattslighton Shifting media, Newspapers fading?

Blogging has been declining for some time now, especially since the rise in Twitter. No conicidence I am sure.

Newspapers are fading fast. Anybody following the News of the World Scancal in the UK will tell you their thoughts.

The question is, will newspapers they die?

mattslighton How would you implement the Hacker News Ranking Algorithm with Mongodb

the score is also dependant on time

mattslighton Will Polldaddy let me keep my ftp.polldaddy.com username?

This seems a bad idea to me. I wonder why they don't have tighter controls on which usernames can be chosen. I notice that you can not use 'www' or 'blog' for obvious reasons, but usernames like ftp and mail don't seem to have been screened. I suspect that in time they will have to have some form on control on this.

mattslighton Ask HN: How do Tumblr & Posterous make money?

until adwords, what was the Google business model?

mattslighton Google Already had a Like Button (and other redundancy)

Yes, it was called PageRank.

surely google's real "plus one" is it's page rank. a mechanism which is far more sophisticated and less prone to fickle bias.

why do we need an additional method to say "i like this website". the backlinks and google's original algorithm back in 1996 was supposed to be this innovation.