nrivadeneira's comments

I don't find that to be the case either. Anecdotal, obviously, but I've worked for companies that range in size and I never add anyone from work on Facebook. Same goes for my wife.

We joined Facebook in the early days when you needed a .edu email address to join, so I've got a lot of college partying photos up there. I've always seen it more of a private space. Not sure if the time you join and your original perception of the service changes your use.

I once tried drop shipping but the prices I was getting were worse than Amazon prices. I would have gotten better margins if I had just ordered on Amazon and shipped it to my customer. That said, this was for video games, which are already very low margin, and only one wholesaler would drop ship.

Why is caps lock your friend? I can't think of any situation where it'd be more useful than another key such as ESC or my personal preference, CTRL.

I actually use jj for the same thing. It's so much better than using ESC.

The thing I've found to be really effective at learning "what you don't know"is pairing with other more experienced vim users. You'll see some wizardry occur and you can ask them how they did it. I consider myself an experienced vim user and I still learn new tricks when pairing with other people. Obviously not everyone knows vim users to pair with, but you may be able to find people at meetups.

Normally I don't like comments that are just jokes, but this one was too perfect. Well done.

And to add just a slight bit more substance to my comment, while I was reading through all the comments here my wife asked why I was laughing so hard. I found it really difficult to convey why, but I guess that's the nature of this type of humor.

Basing all of your management decisions purely on statistics is a bad strategy. You're assuming that the weighting of good vs. bad candidate is the same, when they're not.

Hiring a good employee is not nearly as impactful as hiring a bad one. If you can have a strategy that filters out 100% of bad employees, but unfortunately also filters out 90% of good employees, this is preferable to filtering only 50% of good employees, but also only filtering 90% of bad employees. You may have more good employees with the latter strategy, but the bad employees can kill the team.

Reddit can be seen almost as an anonymous fork to some degree. Obviously it doesn't share the same network concepts, but the spirit of anonymous information sharing is there.

This works really well for me:

1) Meditation in the form of working out: The key here is the meditation. Having regular times that you clear your mind and focus on nothing but what you're doing helps focus in other areas of life. My personal preference is intense exercise with headphones in. The music gives a harmonic rhythm that helps drown out any other thoughts and prevents my mind from wandering. Lifting heavy weights gives me something to focus intensely on and not think about the outside world. It's also extremely important to not bring your phone to the gym or watch the TVs at the gym.

2) Systematically externalizing your thoughts: I find that my thoughts feel more cluttered and disjointed the more I try to keep in my head at once. It's important to find a good and reliable system for organizing and managing everything that might occur in your head on your computer. For example, I use OmniFocus to manage anything that I might want to do ever - small tasks to big long-term goals. I use Pocket to save any reading that I want to do later. I use YNAB to budget and manage my money. I use Evernote for any random notes that I have for myself. I use Google Calendar to schedule any event that might need my attention. By utilizing tools to augment your brain capacity, you can effectively offload a lot of the processing you would normally do. It's important that you use these systems regularly otherwise they'll atrophy and you'll go back to keeping everything in your head.

None of the ancestor comments are in the spirit of HN. They're much closer to the kind of comments found on Reddit.

See:

"The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial.

The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience." http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

Please don't turn HN into Reddit.

The comparison that is being made is the direction your thumb points when your fingers wrap in a particular direction. It's not merely giving it a name - it's specifically likening the vector to the relative orientation of your fingers. That's why the comparison is memorable. If it were merely a name with nothing that it is compared to, it would not be memorable nor helpful.

The point is that it's not a convention - it's a metaphor, as hnriot pointed out.

I once read something that Tim Ferriss had said in response to a similar question. I'm heavily paraphrasing, but he was basically asked how he had so much more discipline than most others.

He responded by saying that he doesn't have more discipline - he just creates environments that decrease his opportunities to fail (ie. get distracted) and increase his likelihood to succeed (ie. finish the work).

The idea is to not trust yourself and not give yourself the opportunity to fail. A concrete example of how I've personally put this to great use in my life is how I made it a habit to go to the gym:

When I was in college, I wanted to go to the gym regularly. Unfortunately I found that when I was in my dorm room and needed to get ready for the gym, I lacked the motivation to get out of a comfortable situation. What I began doing was taking my gym clothes to class and going straight to the gym after class. This required significantly less motivation on my part because I was already walking around campus, sometimes even passing the gym by on the way back to my dorm. The step leading up to that also required very little motivation - putting clothes in your backpack. The result was that I created a sequence of events that each had a small likelihood of failure. 10 years later, going to the gym is my favorite hobby.

Another example related to getting work done came about when I was trying to work on my side projects from home. It never worked. I'd always want to browse the internet, watch tv, play video games, or spend time with my girlfriend. Starting work when my Xbox was in the next room meant summoning a monumental amount of motivation. Instead what I started doing was going to a local coffee shop or coworking space. It doesn't take that much effort to just go to a public space with wifi (and if it does, you can use the advice above). Once there, you have put yourself in an environment where everyone else is working. Aside from noise, there are fewer distractions. In addition, you'll look like an asshole if you're sitting in front of your laptop playing on Reddit for 4 hours while everyone around you is getting shit done.

If you can make a habit of completing those small triggers that lead to bigger outcomes, you'll eventually have gained a much more significant habit.

> I wish my list would grow past 0 items.

> I honestly have no itches to scratch.

Looks like you do have an itch to scratch...though I can't think of any good solutions to wishing for more projects.

> You read two emails, then you're left on your own to figure out how to do stuff.

So, it's just like real life.

Assuming a standard vesting schedule, I doubt he vested at all in 9 weeks.

At my alma mater, we had a club named "Player's Club". Only the sketchiest of people ever went there, and thus the business suffered. One year, they made a single change - they renamed it "Indigo". Without changing a single thing besides the name, the club turned around and is now one of the most popular bars on campus.

Being a dance club, "Player's Club" might have been a more accurate name. Unfortunately, nobody wants to say to their friends "tonight I'm going to Player's Club". I'm sure you can make the connection here.

As accurate as it may be, it's terrible from a PR standpoint. The grandmother next door will be less likely to adopt its use if she associates it with darkness/nefariousness. You may be OK with it and understand its true meaning, but this isn't about just you.

I'm saying that Mayor Bloomberg has been highly proactive in pushing the tech and startup sector forward. It would be hard to deny that he's partially responsible for fostering the growth that's occurred in NYC. I don't know that the next mayor will be quite as bullish on tech as Bloomberg was. Also, I'm suggesting there may be a reduction in growth, not a decline. I wouldn't necessarily call a reduction in growth a 'negative impact' - just less of a positive impact.