JDGM

First off: don't feel too bad. The behaviour you describe is super-common and I think probably the norm, rather than the exception. Most people don't have to battle with it though, because they have regular jobs with commitment-reinforcing routines and regulations.

What you need is to somehow get that same level of external "force" on you in this new running-your-own-business environment, where otherwise it is so easy just to slack off.

Let's try a framing technique.

When you think about stopping work to play a game, I want you to very clearly visualise coming to your client empty handed and them firing you. I want you to visualise having no money and not being able to afford all those things you like spending it on. I want you to visualise - again, super clearly - losing the respect of your peers, your family, even strangers you have met on the internet, all because you couldn't just get on with it and do the work and make your business succeed. And why couldn't you? Because you couldn't resist playing a stupid game designed to make someone else money at the expense of your productivity.

Got that horrible and depressing scenario clearly, vividly, and richly painted in your mind?

Now, just as vividly, picture yourself sitting up straight with amazing posture, coding like a damn JEDI, master of your domain, submitter of outstanding work, ahead of deadlines, everyone loves you, this is what you're good at and by god you're owning at it. You're virtuous and awesome, an actual fucking adult, a creator, producer, and earner of real stuff with real value.

You get the idea. Your imagination is a powerful tool which can do a complete hatchet job on the person you deep down don't want to be but seems appealing in the short term, and it can be PR god to the version you aspire to be but somehow don't have the bravery and force of will to become. When you do that, and get these images in your head with enough detail that they seem real, it bleeds into reality and pushes you to becoming one over the other.

Other than that, I got nothing.

I really like how he put, at the bottom:

This minimalist site was bought, written, and launched in under an hour!

That simple sentence accomplishes so much.

1. It acknowledges the basic look of the site and that he is totally aware of this. i.e. If he does work for you it will not automatically just look like this basic site. Of course! (But good to clarify)

2. Despite being super-basic, it's still a legitimate design choice ("minimalist") and he is also aware of this. i.e. He understands style, at the very least to the extent of a popular archetype.

3. He bought the site, wrote it, and launched it. i.e. Although he is offering PSD to HTML, he may well be able to help and advise on other aspects of getting a website online so potentially could be the only guy you need to use.

4. It all took less than an hour. i.e. Everything involved in setting up that site would have been within his $65/hour, so it gives something to work from in estimating how much hiring him [for a more complicated job] might be.

I don't think I'm reading too much into it, that one sentence seems deliberately written to imply all those things. Which, means:

5. He can write skilfully. i.e. Communication with this guy will be pretty clear.

Having seen several of Adam Curtis' documentaries, it was impossible not to read this whole piece in his voice, which I found had a tremendous influence on the reading tempo.

Nowadays I am used to skimming and speed reading and jump reading and chunk reading and generally doing anything other than actually properly word by word reading a piece as an intact ordered playback...but here, for once, I could and did.

"he will appear and disappear intermittently"

How frustrating a taunt to those in the NSA who would rather make him disappear permanently.

If I follow correctly, you believe that non-polluting energy would loosen constraints on production and the acceleration of growth this would cause would have a net negative environmental effect because the increase in non-energy-creation-related pollution would more than counter balance the savings from non-polluting energy. Is that an accurate summary?

It took me a little while to even get what this is. I understand the public votes on "the biggest problem" and then whoever "solves it" (or, I assume, makes significant progress on it) receives £1 million.

The best case is a carefully constructed short list for voting and the whole thing being essentially an orchestrated PR stunt with a winner (probably a known strong candidate even at this announcement stage). The worst case is this quietly fading out until no-one remembers it and there aren't even many real records of it ever having been a thing.

Or perhaps I've got "best" and "worst" the wrong way around there.

I think that's pretty much spot on.

What I would like to see is coordination between the two by delaying the release of the comic and/or Tycho submitting his piece sooner so they're released in unison.

This is going to sound extremely unreasonable but whenever I read the comic and click to the article only to see what Tycho wrote about the comic of two days ago, I find myself thinking "Gabe's done his part! This art didn't draw itself! Where's the accompanying essay then?!".

JD(GM) out.

♬ Like an angry English teacher getting in a strop at a student for not bringing his coursework to class on the day I made them all write in their planners weeks ago.

I was amazed to see this on the front page, assuming it was a link to today's comic, which would possibly have been the first time I witnessed a non-xkcd submitted to HN. That would've been cool, it's a good one.

The fact that this is actually a link to the accompanying article from Tycho is great as his pieces are usually quite interesting but I miss out because they don't come up on the Penny Arcade website until a good few hours after the comic. It's infuriating actually, as the comic frequently makes me want to read what Tycho has to say but it's not there yet. I don't understand why they do that. Anyone?

Needless to say, it's a little unfair of me to so casually and easily remark "the page out of context seems faintly scam-like" without pinpointing exactly why, and offering "ideas for how to make it seem less sketchy". This kind of thing is also very subjective, anyway! However, in my opinion, it might be an improvement to drop the caps on "FREE" and perhaps the exclamation marks on the two quoted sentences too. The comment around here by "stfu" about the buttons is also interesting, and hadn't even occurred to me, but seems like a good observation.

"tsaou...tour pants...???... tsao u to ur pants??? ... ts a out our pan ts... TSA out our pants! Got it!"

PS. In submitting this - your Web page (!!) - I was hoping to get some feedback from wise old HNers as to whether it was legit or not. Though the page out of context seems faintly scam-like ("We will mail your request for FREE!" "We've got a lot of printing and mailing to do, and can only do it with your support!"), it seemed to check out with the other pages on the site and all the information about you so I figured it was fine, but still was interested in what other folks made of it. I wasn't expecting the author himself to be the first to assure people with his previous HN credentials! Great stuff, and keep up the awesome work.

"...the agency can charge for the time it takes to search for records and for duplication of those records"

In the spirit of absurdist satirical works such as Brazil locally relevant in light of recent events, here's an immediate lunatic conspiracy theory:

This whole Snowden leak business is an elaborate and wholly orchestrated "make work" scheme to boost the economy by flooding "the agency" with requests for records. In three months four out of every five Americans will be hired in this line of work. Brilliant, government economists, simply brilliant!

I too am sick of seeing medium.com links on here.

However, I stress seeing medium.com links. I really like how HN puts the domain after a link, and having so many and so varied articles listed under the "medium.com" umbrella is irritating when the quality is, to put it mildly, rather mixed.

There are a few writers on there I wish would choose to publish on their own space, rather than in this - ahem - "medium".

When the 'Hong Kong Baffled by Snowden's Hideout' WSJ article was posted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5853397), one paragraph that leaped out at me and also got some attention in the comments was the following:

"Hong Kong is the worst place in the world for any person to avoid extradition, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom," said one lawyer who’s worked on a dozen extradition cases both in the U.K. and Hong Kong"

I don't know what to make of that or how to put it together with this Home Office alert, but it is all rather interesting.

Shamelessly stolen from kottke.org (http://kottke.org/13/06/physicists-on-money), who also links to this one: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbourj/money1.htm.

But, as a vehicle for me to ask HNers: anyone know of any money with a Computer Scientist on it?

I enjoyed this but on the surface reading didn't like his "it makes me think an octave higher" line, and on reading the context from Sivers (an excellent article that, btw) I even more didn't like it. The analogy just didn't seem appropriate.

However, after some thought I felt the paragraph after with the bulletpoints does actually line up quite nicely (albeit rather obliquely) with what Sivers was talking about and I think I get it now, the finer points just weren't immediately obvious. This a minor niggle but I think that he could have explained that part better, and without requiring a whole other article for context (no matter how good that article is!).

Did most other folks here know what "Muse" is? I confess, I clicked hoping it would be something to do with the band (er, rock band not headband) and then read bits of the article without really being pulled in, and closed the tab after a skim.

Everything I have just described (including the name and band/band confusion) seems like really slick mindfuck marketing:

1. Get an interview out there with cool pictures, colours and the like, the whole thing of which is pretty much an advertising piece for your rather-sneakily-named product.

2. Submit the link to HN in a way that is kinda misleading but makes the reader (this dope) think he is just a misinformed outlier among a tech-savvier community.

3. BAM. Deep placement of your brand from like 5 different angles in said dope's brain.

Glibness aside, I'd sincerely remark on how effective this was on me. I'm even commenting here and about to go back and actually digest the article to check I haven't just said anything inaccurate, and to reflect on probably reading to much into all this. Also, I can't get that top image out of my head. The band makes her look like a 70s flower child, but with 21st century teeth.

One thing did stand out and that was the repeated use of the lone word "Olympics" to describe the 2010 Winter Olympics. Is that normal? The word "winter" doesn't even feature in the article! It rather feels like when people do that trick of knowing one thing is more prestigious so using a catch all term ("I went to Oxford [Brookes]"). Or, more likely (?) "The Olympics" in Canada MEANS "The Winter Olympics". I could understand that.

There is a reason people sell their time: they need money to live. Advising new graduates (most of whom will have student debt) to eschew a "job" and go it alone "making something" is dubious advice.

A professional-level graduate career gives a ground to hit running after college, and in terms of steps in the direction of one day managing one's own affairs it provides experience, connections, and a chance to build up savings.

Going straight from school to no job and making "an app, blog, table, YouTube channel, or video tutorial" is very unlikely to lead to equivalent success, and don't let survivorship bias trick you otherwise.

The people I admire are those who have worked professionally but even in cases of soul-destroying office politics, bureaucracy, and mismanagement, have never given up on their "plan", slowly moving in the direction they want and eventually being in a position (e.g. financially, domain-experience, network) to break free and do it their way.

In the case of many HNers, I observe a movement from salaried employee to consultant with the freedom to work on their own stuff to...well a tonne of interesting things. I think that kind of approach is much more likely to succeed than the extremism and anti-"job" mentality of the submitted article.

I don't know anything about the law, I just assumed that this kind of thing isn't something big companies really want being spread around and I've gotten used to living in a world where legal action or at least the threat of it is a default response. Good to hear it's not like that in this situation!

If I understand the page correctly this is a description of a talk that will be presented in just under 2 months.

What happens in this situation? Would Apple try to get them not to give the talk? Will Apple patch the problem in the meantime? Does anyone get sued?

Thanks.

I've just done a google and the only person I can find describing Soylent as 'delicious' in the first few hits is Rob himself, who even says "I'm not trying to make something delicious; there are already a lot of delicious things" - that's defending Soylent's taste in this Gawker article http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-fut.... The piece contains the following:

"Soylent tastes like the homemade nontoxic Play-Doh you made, and sometimes ate, as a kid. Slightly sweet and earthy with a strong yeasty aftertaste."

"It tasted like when you're baking and you taste the ingredients even if there's not sugar or vanilla in there, you just have a compulsion to taste wet food."

"My mouth tastes hot and like old cheese."

"It tasted like someone wrung out a dishtowel into a glass."

As a health food Soylent had my curiosity. As a 'delicious' food it has my attention. However, that attention appears to have been misallocated.

It is not clear to me from the article their relationship with YC. It begins "YC accepted our original idea, to build affordable wireless networks for developing countries, for the summer 2012 batch", before explaining how that didn't work out and they moved to "working on a handful of projects. Sometimes collectively, sometimes independently".

Then the article begins on Soylent and, aside from a few appearances from Paul Graham, YC isn't mentioned again (literally, I even used the find function to check I hadn't read too quickly and missed a crucial paragraph).

From when "YC accepted our original idea" has everything these guys have done been under a kind of YC umbrella? Did they break away then re-establish with YC when Soylent started taking off? I have no idea how any of this works. Could someone fill in what is between the lines here please?

On another note, I've enjoyed the passion and controversy of the Soylent topics on here and avoided commenting because someone has always said what I was going to - except they've said it hours ago and four people have made good rebuttals, and four more have made rebuttals to each those, and so on, to the point where I just want to drink it all in rather than join the noise. However, this part seems a new one on me:

"Rob would simply go to the pitcher, shake it once, and pour a delicious meal for himself"

Delicious? I was under the impression Soylent was either fairly tasteless or mildly unpleasant-tasting. Is it really delicious? In what way? Why? How?

At many of the crossings in Ise, Japan there is a button to call for assistance crossing the road. Or give more time to cross for old people. Or something like that, which I didn't quite understand.

I remember going there with a friend who was absolutely furious with me for pressing the button, twice in fact. This was on one of the most sacred days of the year to visit Ise, one of the most sacred places in Japan, and it punctuated a long string of hilarious/egregiously-insensitive etiquette blunders I had made throughout the day.

Superb. Thanks!

Has anyone found this? It sounds great, but I couldn't get a URL from googling the obvious stuff. Please post if you know it!

It's not really what you described, but this is quite jolly: https://howsecureismypassword.net.

The exchange in the comments between Bill Gasarch and the author is excellent:

BG: "When I hear idiocy like this I wonder--- does Coburn KNOW he's wrong and says it as a thing one says as a politician (like when I say 'I know you can all prove this by induction') or does he actually believe it?"

HL: "That is a good question. My guess is he knows it isn't true, but it is political populism, spouting unscientific folk nonsense to be one of the people -- when it serves his political purpose, which is in this case to pooh pooh the need for government regulation. But it is also possible he really believes it -- he sounds convincing in the video, but of course that is how politicians make a living."

In particular, "he KNOWS he's wrong and says it as a thing one says as a politician" is a phrase look forward to using in future conversations.

I was going to ask the exact same thing as shriphani. Thanks for such a detailed reply. Fascinating. I especially enjoyed:

"Apparently Israeli fighters were told "it's up to you if you want to scratch off the swastika marks on the old proofs"; I suspect most of them either didn't care, or appreciated the irony that the Nazis had lost and now Israelis were using their weapons to defend themselves in Israel."

This would be easy if I were still living with the folks as my old bedroom is virtually a vintage computing museum.

Since moving out - and abroad no less - I have to think a little. Probably a 2GB USB memory stick I brought with me. I shudder to think how much it cost new at the time and perhaps because of that still sentimentally use it over the 16GB+ sticks I've acquired since. Good ol', reliable 2GB USB stick!

This was submitted nearly two weeks back, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5682367 but it must have slid off the front page and into obscurity so I am glad it has come up again and received the attention it deserves.

However, I am curious that the URL seems identical so how was it possible for a new submission to be made? I thought HN just added another vote to the original for duplicates.

I believe the corresponding joke goes something like this:

"To get your pornstar name, take your mother's maiden name and first pet's na--"

"Let me stop you there. You realise those are both common security questions for authentication if you forget your password, right?"

"Argh! You mean my bank knows my pornstar name?!"