tristian

Wow, I just saw this nugget in one of the comments: VI mode for the standard Terminal.

Add "set -o vi" to your profile and you get access to same modality and commands of VI. Damn, I wish I knew about this option earlier.

Hmmm. I don't think that a completely profile-less site would work. Users would be too worried about meeting a weirdo, someone they found deeply unattractive, or someone with highly different creed. Er, think of a strongly Christian person "dating" a staunch Atheist. Users would want at least some way of weeding out dates that would be time-wasters.

But if the profile and the date were intermingled somehow, then yeah, that might work.

OpenOffice.org: Calc (spreadsheet)

I keep a running cashflow listing with a row for each day and columns for each of my major accounts. Plus totals and a moving average.

Along with that I track all of my incomings and outgoings, with monthly totals.

I update all of it about 3-4 times a month. I find it gives me all the information I need to keep on top of things. I can see how various accounts fluctuate over time, where the big expenses are, and it givens me enough info to plan the next few months ahead.

Yeah, I agree with you. Given the great talent in the Asian region we're sitting on a people gold mine. Also given the already short-supply of housing it would invigorate the property sector as well.

But I don't think the media and public would respond well to it with companies like pacific brands and the mining companies laying of so many in the last few weeks. It's probably best if the government doesn't rock the boat on immigration, lest we get a public reaction against it.

Well actually the labor government in Australia is currently reviewing the migrant intake policies mentioned in the main article ... http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/18/business/ozjobs.2-410... But it looks like we're going to keep up the high intake for the most part. We're certainly not losing any from what I've observed.

As an aside I have to say I haven't seen much of anti-immigration sentiment here even with the economic downturn. Sure, there's been a fair bit of talk against moving jobs overseas, but barley a whisper with regards to immigration.

Through HN I have learnt that sophisticated discussion with a large number of participants is achievable. Which, up until this point, is something that I didn't really consider to be possible. Certainly not over a long term.

Moreover the site doesn't require an oppressive method of control to keep the conversation in line. It is as much the communities common virtue as it is the technical merits of pg's system which brings that about.

This could be an attempt by companies to become more efficient by replacing positions in HR and Support with software solutions.

So while this might be representative of the SaaS industry I strongly doubt that it would represent the tech situation as a whole.

Actually I think the tech sector is going to be slowly winding down for quite a while to come. There were lots of big contracts locked in before the recession hit, and that existing work is going be finished off over the next year without much to replace it.

Well by "corrupt" I mean to alter it from its original form or intention. Probably not the best choice of words I must admit.

"Decoupling" is a very useful tool. I think Joel's point of view was that unit testing often takes it to an extreme where the work to manage it outweighs the benefits. I personally don't agree with him. I think the benefits are too great to ignore. But I can certainly empathize with where he's coming from.

I find that unit testing can really corrupt a program's structure. Especially dependency injection which takes a normal top-to-bottom flow and flattens it out to a degree that makes it hard to decipher what is actually happening. So instead of A calling B calling C, C will be injected into B which will be injected into A and then the whole thing will be unwound. On a large scale it can start to look like interface soup. Perhaps interface-oriented programing would be a more fitting name than object-oriented. It certainly doesn't look like the classical OO style.

Having said all that, I would be loathe to give up all my regression tests. The freedom I have to change major parts of the program knowing I have all the tests watching my back is invaluable. As is the benefit of being able to codify my hard won knowledge about edge cases and the like which I'm bound to forget and lose track of.

I just wish I didn't have to give up a more natural coding style to get the benefits of unit testing. Perhaps a language designed from the ground up to support unit testing is the answer?

Adventure.

Although it isn't commonly ascribed to people now days, throughout history it's been quite common for a young man's life choices to be driven by their desire for adventure. Be it running away to sea, joining the army, becoming an explorer, etc.

I think the current startup scene, with it's fast pace, constant reinvention, and unknown future is certainly able to fulfill that desire.

I don't understand how this would work. If you had a form of currency that was continuously losing value, wouldn't you simply exchange it for something equally liquid that wouldn't lose its value? Such as gold or silver?

I don't find this at all. Most of the .Net tools and things I use are free and open source: NHibernate, Rhino.Mocks, NUnit, CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, Wix, Windsor, Quartz, log4net.

Admittedly good profilers aren't free, and nor is the obligatory ReSharper. But for the most part all the extra utilities and things I've needed are readily available and open source.

If it's an investment property the tax advantages are very nice. Deductions for interest, depreciation, insurance and maintenance can seriously add up. Add rent to that and the yearly cost compared to the medium-long term capital gains turns out to be quite nice.

Of course it depends on the state of the market, but if it's a long term investment, and you don't buy out in hicksville, that shouldn't be to much of an issue.

As for owning and occupying a home you're paying a mortgage on... well that's more of a lifestyle choice. I would agree that it's not really the best investment.

Note that I live in Australia, so much of this may not apply to other regions.

My take:

If you are starting a business which will make a profit from the outset, in which you have complete control:

- After a while you may want to do something else other than run the business.

+ A good way of doing this is to sell the business to a public company.

- It may take some time to do this depending on the market and size of the business. During which you may not want to be there.

+ Since the business is making money you don't need to rush the sale.

That all sounds pretty good to me.

Beyond the mentioned freedom and security, a lot of people start business so that they can be more in control of their own lives.

If you start a business with the intention of keeping full control, then you're going to be responsible for the continued control of it.

I'm wondering if there is anyone here who could refute the claim in this article: that once a chronic procrastinator, always a chronic procrastinator? Someone who has managed to overcome their innate procrastinationess and can be a source of hope for the rest of us.

I'd be happy to pay for Rescue Time and Hacker News, but having said that I'm not sure that I would pay for either if I hadn't used them for free first.

Cool. This has come at a good time for me. I've been working on a problem where I've been going down quite a few dead ends. Conceptually the problem shouldn't be that hard to solve, so I've been berating my self a bit about failing to hit on the solution correctly the first time.

So where the article mentions: "To arrive at that goal, the craftsman at work has instead to dwell in waste, following up dead ends". That perfectly describes how it feels to struggle through this problem, with code strewn around and thrown away in different approaches.

"Maybe it is only my problem because I frequently don't sleep very well and on some days am almost too tired to work."

If I was you I'd see a doctor about that. Motivation, focus, and energy are heavily influenced by your hormone balance and not sleeping well can affect that. You could have sleep apnea or another medical condition which is causing your fatigue. If you're not doing much exercise that wouldn't help either.

# no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

# no. fuck no. I am a fucking

# moron.

I love this comment. It reminds me of the times where I had been banging my head against a problem for a while, trying out different solutions, but none of the ones I came up with were any good. So I left it in a crummy state.

Then a few days/weeks latter I came back to it, and knew straight away how to solve it, and how bad all my previous attempts had been.

Ahh, but was the diagram created while procrastinating, or is it actual work?

Really nice. It does suffer from a lack of keyboard shortcuts. Just for simple things like holding down shift while drawing an oval to get an exact circle.

I can't see it replacing any of my current tools yet, but it's well on the way.

I've always wanted to be able to write notes on top of emails I receive. So say I receive an email about a new bug, I could just jot down more details into another layer on top that email in transparent font/colour. I've noticed other people often print out emails and do something like this with a red marker.

I use Thunderbird and I've thought about digging around in the source to see if this is possible. It's not something I've found time to do though.

If I'm just working alone: ToDoList by AbstractSpoon Software http://www.abstractspoon.com/

For small projects it's enough to manage all my tasks, including bugs.