If you are reading this you are not working on your startup.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34114

by awt • 19 years ago

45 28 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

exogen• 19 years ago

How do you know I haven't found a way to monetize reading news.yc all day?

nurall• 19 years ago

I do it too.. sitting and reading news.yc all day... and my day job takes care of the monetization..

nickb• 19 years ago

Wanna buy some karma?

thingsilearned• 19 years ago

lol, you're right! back to work!

henryw• 19 years ago

How many times do you visit yc news in a day? I'm averaging 2 to 4.

Jd• 19 years ago

Probably 6 at the moment. Too much.

antirez• 19 years ago

For a founder reading programming.reddit.com or ycnews IS to work. It's just a matter to manage to read a bit to relax and earn interesting information and then back to work instead to burn the whole day in news sites.

bayareaguy• 19 years ago

Agreed. If you're in a startup, it's good to spend a little effort now and then looking at this sort of news since occasionally you'll learn something relevent to what you're doing.

daniel-cussen• 19 years ago

Could not agree more; this has become a way to slack off.

juwo2• 19 years ago

news.YC = talking about intending to work on one's startup. ;)

npk2• 19 years ago

news.YC = down-modding ALL of juwo's posts.

juwo2• 19 years ago

so, it was you!

(Dont worry, I did not downmod your post here).

sharpshoot• 19 years ago

or taking a break

terpua• 19 years ago

ditto

amichail• 19 years ago

It's just not obvious how many breaks you should take though so as to maximize overall productivity.

nostrademons• 19 years ago

Who says? I'm just waiting for my VM to boot. ;-)

umjames• 19 years ago

Hmmm...

Read news.yc or work on boring enterprise apps at work?

That's a tough one :)

romlet• 19 years ago

Hah best post title ever :)

nmeyer• 19 years ago

don't you tell me what to do. i'm a reble.

euccastro• 19 years ago

Any reason why you can't downvote news entries?

mdolon• 19 years ago

Hmm.. let's try some reasoning.

Building a startup correctly takes research and knowledge (out of many things), which, if tallied as part of the building process, amounts to work. The various resources and the affluent discourse presented by news.YC presents knowledge in a host of fields, but is primarily focused on the subject of startups, as hinted by the title of the aforementioned site. Thus, we can deduce that by being on this site and reading this topic, in an attempt to further our startup knowledge through means of discourse, is in fact 'work.'

In theory, I am working on my startup by being on this site, possibly by even reading this thread.

Of course, when all is said and done you could have probably been working on your startup instead of reading all of the above BS. :)

adnam• 19 years ago

If I'm writing this, I'm not working on my startup.

staunch2• 19 years ago

I wonder how many people think this then spend countless hours playing games/watching TV and other mindless forms of entertainment.

redrory• 19 years ago

/sigh

mechanical_fish• 19 years ago

"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

-- Richard Hamming, "You and Your Research" (http://paulgraham.com/hamming.html)

awt• 19 years ago

Well, you know which one you are.

If you are reading this you are not working on your startup.

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