LorenzoLlamas

Hey man, there may be a LOT of things going on here, but I can relate. If I don't get my day STARTED by 6am (or so), I see it slipping away from me. Others below have alluded to it, also. Diet and exercise are important (but the world is jacked when it comes to 'exercise', pushing gyms and supplements and dumb sporting events. Honestly, just keep lights low at night before dusk, don't be on devices after dark, read only paper books after dark, and start getting up early (tons of info out there if you search). Get up at 5am, go for a walk and get a coffee (not a sugar bomb - just a small coffee like your grandfather probably would do) and be back at 6:30a to start work. According to you, you'll be done well before lunch. Make plans for a lunch date with friends/family (sounds like you can afford it) and have a healthy fun salad-ish eating out time. Then go do something fun - or go see a movie matinee - or go do things for other people (volunteer, visit your kids if you have any, go make some if you don't... ha ha, or go help other business owners solve problems since you sound like you have good ideas in that area, or go talk to wayward youth at schools... something! Switch it up so you look forward to that afternoon 'you-only' time. Then, do your personal errands at end of day (like the rest of us working stiffs) like groceries, laundry, house cleaning, etc... one last check of devices before dusk, then it's either date night, relaxing at home, maybe a night out 1/2 times/week on the town, etc... No coffee after noon, no alcohol before noon, walk everywhere you possibly can (and keep stretching that), no devices after dusk, and I promise you, no matter what, you'll be feeling at LEAST 3x better in a month or so. Happy holidays, dude.

I really don't see why anyone, including and especially programmers, use mice these days. That is, assuming you have a great (read: Mac) multi-touch pad. If you are in graphic design or animation/film, maybe a mouse is quite useful (I don't know, but watching others, it seems to have qualities useful to them in those fields).

But once you master your hotkeys and multitouch pad, why lug a mouse around? I haven't used a mouse AT ALL in over 3 years, except when I'm forced to use a Windows machine. And I do mean "forced".

Rats. I was hoping they would all go away within 5 years. Thought maybe the extra 0 was a typo. Disappointed. How can serious people still be on Facebook more than five years from now? This is demoralizing enough for me to subscribe to USA Today, the paper version, because it's an improvement. Pie charts and all.

Ugh. Why is everyone excited about yet another online directory? Is it because it is tech conferences and people here are just jazzed by lists of dorky things they can do besides mow their lawns (sorry, for folks outside SF who actually have lawns), or do their regular maintenance on their car?

This is not a problem that needs a solution. It's yet another developer (or wanna-be 'need a job in development' person) who needs a puff portfolio piece that shows he knows how to connect a few database fields with a front-end display - and mixed with search! Wow! (Well, it mostly works anyway).

I have yet to see one of these ShowHN pieces be anything but the latter. They should split ShowHN into ShowHNFluffYouBuiltToGetAJob and ShowHNStuffThatSavesLives, because I'd only be interested in the second one.

And of course, you have to have your submissions vetted by the guy who not only "promises" to always maintain this (I call), but who obnoxiously floats his Twit handle over the footer as you scroll... he either doesn't believe in crowd-sourcing genuinely or doesn't want to deal with a user-end database. Likely, he'll turn that "I don't charge to be listed" into "listings are only $99/year" pretty quickly.

Whoever said this guy was solving a "simple and actual problem" is sadly misleading this poor fellow. It was not a problem. Conferences are not concerned that there are not enough listing sites out there. Conference attendees are aware of, in their respective circles, where to go and what to attend. It's not a simple problem. It's not a problem at all.

What is a problem is the proliferation (i.e. clutter) of the internet of everyone and their sister building fluffy stuff with .co and .io domains. Can I just block all such domains from my browser? My internet would actually be better if I could.

Sigh... the death of the Yahoo Directory was heading toward this all along, wasn't it?

There is no "the US". There is only "we" (if you reading this are a US Citizen). And it doesn't really matter whether if we have a "right". Question is: Do WE go after data if WE think it is important to defend our country? And when you frame it like that, you suddenly realize we have been doing that since we sent out "spies" (basically farmers) to check on British troop movements in the 1760s.

Everyone else does it, too. So, go ahead: don't do it. See what happens.

Yet another post about "technology improvements" that basically is some company (Github) with an axe to grind that wants to reinvent the wheel but has nothing new to offer.

To be more clear, no one is writhing in their sleep, or bemoaning to their team mates, this: "We have no good way to edit text in the 21st century". No one. At best, it's a nice idea to see "what if" we could build an emacs-like text editor using modern day web technologies, just to see what browsers and HTML5, etc, can do these days, and hey, maybe we will learn something and push the browser technology a bit, too. At worst, it's bunch of people with no other interesting ideas and who need to bring attention to their company.

What's next for this Electron crowd? Let's see if we can build a whole operating system into a browser? Oh wait. That's also been done with a lot of noise and no real-world impact. Well then, what about a new kind of spreadsheet? Or maybe we could do some cool photo-processing using only a TI-84 calculator!

Ugh. I'm so tired of this, and this massive post by the dev team at Atom proves the insanity of all this.

They have spent thousands of man-hours "improving" their text editing rendering for their slow text editor (but hey, we saved time by building it on top of Chrome!), and yet they are nowhere near text-rendering speeds of 40 years ago.

But never mind that. They will continue to plug ahead and write more posts about it. Meanwhile, emacs (and Vim) plug along as always.

How bad is it (to me)? I'll tell you. Even though I alter between Sublime (written in real code and not on 'borrowed' code) and BBEdit sometimes, along with Vim (still learning), and even MacVim (the horrors!)... THIS is how bad it is. It's so bad... that I would use TextEdit to edit code before I used Atom. I promise you. I actually like TextEdit and often use it anyway. I sometimes wish Apple would just add a few tiny improvements (but I'm daydreaming) and I would use it for 90% of files and projects.

But Atom? Like a lot of modern day projects (React, Bootstrap, WordPress, Facebook, etc), it's a total step backwards to reinvent what we already had. So that basically "new" people can come along and play - with less understanding, IMHO.

Maybe I missed it, but did someone point to the actual site with "millions of visitors and 5 PETABYTES of traffic per month"? Is that right?

Don't want to seem harsh, but I don't care for unqualified rants against a named entity, when the "accuser" doesn't name his own source.

And using vague words like "inappropriate/troublesome" seems a bit mysterious. Were they ISIS propaganda posters, nudity of celebs, or penguins making out? Might make a difference.

And as others have already stated, it's pretty SOP for hosting and domain companies to have this standard in place. Hate to say it, but it's in the User Agreement. Else, run your own servers and domain name registrar (oh, and also be liable for those same posts possibly).

Why we insist on not understanding that DNRs and hosts are, basically, publishers, who have some rights, is beyond me.

Let me guess... this guy is upset because he might have not gotten the email within 24 hours (in 2017... yeah, right). Is he off-the-grid hunting sea lions in the north sea? And if his site is so big, he has no one to help him and no backup staff except... only him?

This same crowd will balk that FB didn't remove that last murder video in 12.3 seconds, but demand that THEIR host or registrar give them 30 days.

Sheesh... internet shenanigans never stop, do they?

Totally hilarious. Exaaaaactly.

O.M.G.... 25 ways to reach someone, and no one is home. What is wrong with folks? Is this guy desperate for contact? And yet, is there an actual contact form on that mess of icons? What are even half those networks?

This guy must drink a lot of coffee (I didn't check out his Amazon Wishlist... one of his icons).

Seriously, can I just send the guy an email? Nope... I still have to decide between work and personal.

I could reach the President of the USA with greater ease.

And how he thinks 16kb is an achievement is beyond me. That's 16,000 bytes roughly... of nonsense.

Heck, if you really want to save even more bytes. Just put an email only (no HTML). The spammers will still figure it out and the rest of us and can do some cutting-and-pasting to help our caloric offsets after reading through that pile of self-promoting krap.

That's true of your name, your address, your DOB, SS, and your phone numbers. Nothing stopped those things from being given out and collated by third parties. Nothing will stop email being given the same treatment.

All the tech tricks to try and figure out who gave who my email address are pointless exercises in time-wasting. Adding various words to your email (like with Gmail aliases) does no good because anyone can figure out your real original email. Only machines are (somewhat) fooled by this.

Of course, if you owned your own domain, or paid for quality email, you could have many multiple email addresses to partially address this, but since everyone switched over to so-called free email with social graph companies, what's the point.

Email will never die. Why should it? It's fast (instant, nearly) and you can send nearly anything to anyone - limited only by size (and with a few tricks, not even limited there). It's worldwide (not limited by who's on what 'network' or what is popular in whatever country).

If anything, I think we are seeing (or will see) a resurgence of email as the 'de facto' way of contacting and communicating with people. It even holds up pretty well in court. Email newsletters have made a come-back (a little bit) and with the stagnation of FB and G+ (did it ever grow?) and Twitter on the verge of Ch 11, how will you communicate with others? How will companies reach you?

Or did you want a fax machine?

What? Really? No one but one other uses TextEdit? At least among Mac users? And before that, I used NotePad on Windows.

It's notes. It doesn't need to 'sync' to your mobile device and be in a cloud somewhere. It's just some notes. What is with everyone these days sharing their whole lives on a server somewhere?

Is everyone paranoid of data loss? So what? If you lose it all, it was meant to be. Relax. You guys are supposed to be geeks and yet you are giving the NSA more data than they could ever hope to get from the average Joe.

If I see another Org-mode or wiki "note" demo on YouTube, I'll croak. Get a life. Or a girlfriend. Or go play with your children. Or visit some nature. Get away from the screeeeen.... Not even the president has to organize notes.

I saw one Org-Mode clown rant about how he had 1000+ lines of notes for various things in one file. That's not notes. That's the fringes of madness.

Delete it all. Start over.

I'm starting to think that the days of hard drive crashes were actually a good thing.

I can understand if you are a real science researcher or investigative journalist (for work). Or if you want to ensure you have copies of your tax returns or medical records.

But notes? NOTES? Grocery lists? Who makes grocery lists and needs to sync them everywhere?

Go live on a farm for a while or something. Uh, it's cheese of some kind, milk of some kind, coffee of some kind, produce, fish, meat, and avoid the candy and canned item aisles. There's your grocery list.

Do you same folks have list about what order to put on your clothes each day? (Don't answer that).

Madness. If you want black and white dashboards in your office or home, or if you want to mount it vertically and read PDFs, just get a matte HD monitor, and set it up for B&W on your software settings. Then, you can turn it into a fish tank display when you aren't reading or viewing your dashboard (which sounds lame to me, but geekiness knows no bounds, I suppose). What is e-ink for? The "powered off" viewability? A real monitor left on all year takes almost no energy. I mean, if you can consider $3000 to put a dashboard up to monitor the weather (what is happening to the human race?), you can swing the extra $20/year by just leaving a real monitor on 24/7, especially when you'll only pay $250 for it. Madness. Maybe go out and spend time in the rain and not know it was coming? Or just talk to people and get to know them? Or explore new places in town with using a mapping tool first? Sigh... we are all doomed.

It's crazy to think that hackers/developers/etc are using all these cloud-based things with slow interfaces and controlled schemes by third parties. I'm not even a true geek and I find this behavior a bit bewildering. Where are the heroes?

Export your bookmarks to HTML, modify your HTML page to be as many sub-pages as you want, add descriptions under each, and you're done. Put your main page with your chief faves as your only "saved" bookmark on your browser.

No clouds. No one can erase your data. No one can charge you for your own bookmarks (the absolute height of insanity).

Modify as you see fit in your fave code editor.

Oh my... you must use Cmd-D because you are in a rush? Trust me. If you're that in a rush, you aren't even cataloging or archiving the source correctly. And honestly, probably 90% of bookmarks aren't worth saving anyway. You do know about search engines, right?

I also like to add notes as to Why I Saved This: because if I can't really drum up a good reason, it isn't worth it. Things that do NOT count for that field are "for later", "because", "it's cool", "maybe so-and-so might need it" (what are we doing? saving for other people too?).

You can use tags if you want in your descriptions by putting a hashtag in front of the word, but why bother? You can Ctrl/Cmd-F your whole bookmark page and fly through your options far faster than other methods. All text is searchable, right? Must we insist on the insanity of prefixing certain words with #?

Look ma! You can even change your fonts and get all hackathonish with CSS, if you get bored.

Need to send a collection of bookmarks to someone else? (Warning above about this, but still....)... Just cut and paste part of your webpage into your email, etc. Look at that. Your descriptions are already there, guaranteeing that they will be more likely to look at your links, or causing you to be noted as an intrusive link-pusher, but either way, goal accomplished!

Now, some HN readers will insist on mobile-sync. That's where they are wrong and you'll be right to ignore them. Anything worth reading or noting is on the real web, not the mobile web, and standing around with your phone collecting and sending links is about as inhumane of a task as you can do. It was bad on your laptop; it's downright madness on your phone. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

If you must save some links for mobile use only (I don't know... the website of your local library so you can look up its hours? Oh wait... Google/Apple maps instead), then just save them ONLY there for quick access. You don't need to sync. Repeat after me. Sync is a lie from the devil to give clouds the power. Stop doing it so much. Also, stop printing stuff (another lecture for another time).

No, but I do avoid "articles" on Github pages if they still have the format of crankydev.github.com. I don't know why, but they all follow a similar format. I mean, buy a domain name and map it, right?

As for Medium, folks here have it right. I don't avoid them, but I go in 'eyes wide open'. Any place that allows super-easy 'publishing' should be viewed with suspicion. Editors are actually GOOD things. So, pretty much that means No Facebook Ever.

Goodness. Seriously? Another notes "app"? Longevity exists in ASCII text (UTF-8 if you must be a Modernist). Portability exists in simple plain text files. Privacy exists in keeping them on your own blankety-blank drive and backing up your own files somewhere that isn't a fluffy cloud. Or back them up there if you want.

Oh, now someone will say, but what about photos and images? What about "clippings" from the web? Images are to be in a properly tagged image library. And a dozen software solutions have already solved that. Documents are PDFs or TIFFs or JPGs or.... something like that. Put them in, gasp, a "folder" ("directory" for geeks) and call it something like "documents".

I don't know what "notes" people are so desperate to save, but if they are your own ramblings... plain-text. If they are writings, make a folder called "writings". Use markdown or ReStructured Text if you must, but trust me, the "must" is your must. No one else cares. It will all burn eventually.

Plain text will still be here as it has been for four decades. Your app, OneNote, EverNote, NoteyNote, and all the rest will all burn. Or be hacked. Or stolen. Or not be backwards-compatible with whatever new NiftyNote comes along.

Plain-text. Stop making these. The problem was solved 40 years ago. Solve something else. Maybe Cancer. Maybe how to install Windows 10 in 3 minutes or less. Maybe public transportation.

But for all our sakes, no more Notes apps. You are actually accomplishing the opposite of what you set out to achieve - further distracting people from an ancient standard which works Just Fine For Almost Everyone.

By the way, if you are That Guy (you the reader) who thinks your special (said with a lisp) notes deserve better than Plain Text, you probably are wrong.

Same with To-Do list apps. Plain-text. Just write down your tasks - and then go do them. Stop prioritizing, colorizing, making 'sub-tasks', attaching deadlines, putting time estimates, "sharing" them with others (oh for the love of all things holy, stop sharing anything), and adding javascrap drag and drop junk to it. Either buy Microsoft Project and use that or use Plain Text. There is no in-between - just clutter. Lots and lots of clutter.

I think saving to PDF is overkill and takes up extra storage. Unless it is necessary to save images and charts associated with an article. These days, most images associated with articles are just file images someone tossed in for drama's sake (i.e. "A woman despairs over her computer" in relation to an article about budgeting.

So, what about save to plain text? Of course, while you can cut/paste, that's time consuming. I've yet to see a Pocket-like tool to quickly just save to plain-text and copy the relevant title as the file name and maybe also put it and the byline and date at the footer. Would be nice.

A few people mentioned Python. Me, too. I left PHP (mostly) and can't stand the ascendency of JavaScript for everything under the sun (it's madness right now). I recently chose Python as my "go to" language for everything after reading a compelling post on Java for everything (not a typo). But I just don't like messy C-based languages like Java.

If someone would pay me big bucks one day for Java, I'd do it and program cool little machines and gadgets with it, but I love the web a lot and I am not about to continue the shoe-horning of Java and the Web (don't start with me).

So, I like Python for everything. Good web stuff. Great scripting and command line. Good for the Internet of Things (if you want to go down that path). Good for writing desktop. And yes, you could do games and mobile (although I admit the shoe-horning begins to show a little here). But I'm not in that space so much, so I accept that. And its pretty and stable (like Ruby) while not being quite as pretentious as Ruby.

Someone wrote WebAssembly. While not a language.... yes, yes, yes... I'm very excited about it. Because do you not SEE the reality that soon we could be writing web code on web pages with pre-compiled speedy fun stuff but written in our language of choice, including Python? Is no one talking about this? It will just take someone writing a Web Assembly Compiler (not sure if that will be the right terminology) in your language of choice. Oh. My. Goodness. Death to JavaScript. Maybe. Or at least an arm lopped off its torso.

Well... personally I have to discount your examples of hardware "innovation" since I was talking about software.

But on that note, my iPhone isn't that much better than a Palm Pilot. Let's see... notes, calendar, emails... it's all there. I even had map and nav on my Pilot back then. Granted, Apple Maps, Waze, and Google Maps are better and faster UI, but the basic functionality was there. We just keep improving speed and UI in the hardware world. Stuff like touch screens that actually work are nice - I once owned a touch screen way back in the 1980s (dating myself). Not very useful compared to an iPad.

However, is Google Search that much better than AltaVista? No.

Is Facebook better than MySpace for keeping in touch with friends? Not at all. Facebook is better at monetizing you, and the UI is a bit nicer, but come on, if you want to collate your friends into a web-based "friend's list" and post on a wall/board/timeline, it's all the same. Next FB replacement will be no better.

Email? Surely you are kidding there. There isn't a modern email client worth a penny. Web-based AOL email and Gmail are nearly identical. Some extra filters in Gmail and better UI and JS, but it's the SAME. You send email from point A to point B and people read it. Hey, even attach an image! It worked then, it works now. Same exact underlying technology.

And if anyone had to PAY for Gmail to migrate from AOL, they NEVER would have. So free/freemium has become the expected demands of consumers now (and they are in for a shock).

So, oddly, you have kind of proven my point. All developers are doing is reinventing the wheel. They have no new ideas (mostly). It's only 'hey, how can we take existing product A and make it faster, cooler, shinier?'.

However, try to rethink the whole concept of email - and there is a dozen graveyards filled with a thousand tombstones of developer projects that swore we would 'finally' eliminate email or email overload. No one has done it. Not even the mighty 'give us your personal info' Gmail. I wouldn't even be surprised to see Google shutdown (or charge for) Gmail one day. They did it with Reader and no one saw that coming either.

So, go ahead and keep using your free services that aren't making any money and expecting it all to stay the same.

I'm not questioning that developers will be unemployed in general - of course real industries (like car manufacturing, textiles, POS, etc) need good developers to build and maintain systems. But the web-based side projects (such as the one on this original post) who clog up HN with "Show HN" posts about another database online with a few extra fields and some snazzy UI (or Bootstrap 3!!) are DOA and they don't seem to get it.

Surely you all jest. Simple script in Any Real Language to scan your HTML and, if desired by all you JS junkies, your JS and compare your CSS to each page and spit out report by frequency of us on each page.

From not-used to most used. So, example:

0 .hr

1 .dt index.html

7 .h1 index.html (5)

      about.html (2)

Something like that.

But seriously, does anyone really care about performance anymore? Nah! Just stick all your bloated code to the browser and someone else's bandwidth, right?

We lost the battle once Eric Meyer started extolling resets. Never mind that 99% of sites that use a Reset never even bother to delete the rules they don't use (and likely never would).

I just got done trying to view a simple five paragraph article on CNN which had three popups (thanks JS!): a TOS update which I didn't read, a "breaking news" banner about an arrest in Brussels (also not read), and on obnoxious video ad from AT&T. After three minutes and two refreshes, I gave up when everything on the page loaded, including the thumbnails and images to a dozen other "related" articles, as well as summary headlines in business, world, etc - everything but the last three paragraphs of what I actually came there to read. So excuse me if I'm jaded. Hating the poor performance of all internets right now, particularly on mobile.

And don't even get me started on the concept that CSS per-page exceptions could benefit from inclusion in the HTML code (gasp! inline!). Another whole pet peeve of mine. Don't even try and babble about browser caching "benefits" to me. We both know it's a wash and a lazy developer excuse. Fine tune, fine tune, fine tune. That's your job, so someone please start doing it.

As well noted, Glassdoor and other places already do this. Why do software developers feel compelled to constantly "invent" things we already have plenty of. Do something unique, original, or amazing. Stop copying everyone and just putting new UIs and a few extra database fields on stuff and calling it 'innovation'. So tired of the internet and all the noise clogging it up. Once the crash happens, we will have a glut of 'developers' who will claim they are disenfranchised and out of work and blame the economy... just like the steel-mill workers of the 70s/80s. We don't need this now, and we won't need it later when your main employer stops paying you because you don't actually BUILD anything interesting.

That means you were 'bought' into thinking it was a good idea by a mere $10,000. Maybe you should have actually been paid $30k more all along - and still.

I almost want to answer this as a more broad approach: X is falling apart - alternatives? And the answer is: If X is free, expect it to fall apart. Why would anyone host your content for free forever? What did you really expect? Eventually X could equal Twitter, Facebook, and even Hacker News. If you don't pay to play, you will go away. Or it will go away.

I routinely fail to understand how anyone can form a community of "links". It has no staying power in and of itself. Even Facebook and Google+ and Twitter are largely nothing more than a giant collection of links, albeit with comments. Curation is one thing. Following a group on Google+ or an account on Twitter is akin to saying, "show me more links on subject X". Fine and dandy.

But how much is that worth to you?

Of course, you could just post and host your own link-base on your own blog/website but you'd have to (likely) pay for hosting. Even GitHub will one day have to charge for hosting. If 1 billion people open up accounts on Github for free GitHub Pages hosting, they will have to charge. Even probably if 10 million people did it and, assuming those pages were reasonably popular and trafficked, they couldn't sustain a zero-advertising model and a zero-free model. Can't be done.

So, why not own your own data and post them on your own site? Simple: Either the information really isn't worth $10/year for you to "share" with others (and let's face it: if you had true stats on how often anyone was actually viewing your 14,000 links, you'd never pay for it, since that number probably comes awfully close to zero), OR you are challenged with how to format/share the data en masse such that others can do more than simply visit a single link, but see and share the whole sub-collection of links you have on any given topic. XML feeds aside, there really isn't a good easy way to do that. You could have pages within pages on your site of the links (and your comments, thumbnails if necessary, and so forth) and then at the bottom of the page a handy "Capture all links to your own Favorites folder" - maybe some kind of javascript bookmarklet. Or a file standard if one exists (outside of HTML itself).

So we join these feigned "communities" and "contribute" our time - only to have them repeatedly fail over and over. Delicious itself is a poster child for the service that not enough people want (to pay for) but has a vampire like quality that won't let it die. Delicious is the Undead of the Internet. And yet, just about as isolated as Bram Stoker's Dracula, too.

One guy (1!) runs Pinboard. Just one. As soon as he (choose one), (a) dies, (b) gets sick of it, (c) discovers a better place to live than SF and moves to Uruguay, (d) has his site hacked/destroyed, (e) gets Alzheimers, (f) or sells it to some clown/company who will stop developing it... it's all over. You'll get maybe 3 months notice if lucky and then a bunch of people will complain.

But a 1,000 voices screaming out will be "suddenly silenced" even faster than millions on Alderaan. Because on the internet, thousands of users are, in effect, no users at all. If Facebook can alter TOS at will under the protest of millions, along with Twitter, G+, and dozens of other massive sites, do you think any screaming user will cause Pinboard to stay up?

Look at it now... it almost makes Craigslist look modern. Pinboard mentions alternatives - some of which aren't even around still - so it's questionable if anyone is even actively working on Pinboard.

But even if they were working on Pinboard, it's still a free service and one that stands no chance of continuing forever. I doubt it will be here five years from now. It has almost zero chance of being around ten years from now.

So, save your own bookmarks and stop posting 14,000 websites for free on the internet. Nobody cares. It's just a bunch of noise. Just like Twitter. It's all over; the asteroid of internet-doom just hasn't hit us yet, but it's shadow is... right... there.

If you want/must publish them (ego?), then do it at your cost and pony up some hosting fees.

I could say (since this is HN) that you should develop your own paid solution, but (a) that isn't innovation at all, but merely repeating something that has been done a hundred times and we, the world, need innovation, not repeats of past mud, and (b) clearly no one will ever pay you for such a service such that you'll break even, much less make $100/year.

So, can we all just move on?

Not sure why what app being used is relevant. Plain text is all we need to write anything like this. You could use Markdown if you must (and must you?), but whether you use VIM or emacs or sublime slime or something else, two things are clear:

You type in plain text (just like I'm doing here in this comments box) and jot down notes. Save it an ongoing text file (probably called 'ideas.txt' or you could separate them into 'personal_ideas.txt' and 'business_ideas.txt' and 'new_relationship_ideas.txt' (lol) if you need, and place all that 'org' stuff in a folder that auto-syncs to some service somewhere if you need cloud backup (dropbox, iCloud, gdocs, etc).

Standard iOS Notes app is fine if you are all in the Mac/iOS space routinely.

The only thing I do in terms of 'formatting' is to put bigger ideas in all caps and then indent (it's a tab!) for sub-notes and maybe put an asterisk if I'm feeling bulletproof.

So, like this:

from business_ideas.txt

* increase Twitter to 180 characters * publish corporate drone-like rants on LinkedIn * command-line movie time tool * dog walking service combined with GoPro/Vine channel for owners to watch 'best of' clips * invent a new "to-do" app and try to monetize it since text files haven't worked in 30 years * See if WordStar is for sale and revamp it for the Mac with lots of shiny glossy new icons * MOSQUITO FARM order breeds online build security fence to hide farm from nosy neighbors what about a super-mosquito cross-bred with a hornet? sell to labs who need well-trained mosquitoes for zika testing * refurbish old consignment shop as an "eBay shop" * frozen yogurt, but only for pre-teen girls in a "safe" environment (no boys allowed) and only in girl-like colors, but where we teach them coding, laser tag, and play songs from the movie 'Frozen' all day long. Name: Frozen Yog-Her? * record online python coding tutorial for beginners since there is not much available now

A few thoughts:

1. This sounds and smells like 'bait'. The reason it isn't being upvoted is because people question the motive of the OP who hasn't explained why he wants to toss out $2500/month to someone else who retains all IP. Thus, naturally, people think the OP is just trying to get ideas for his own project(s). Or that he's just insane.

2. There are marketplaces for this kind of stuff already. Kickstarter, IndieGogo, etc. Leave us alone, quit trying to get HN points (why anyone cares about these, I'll never know) and go spend your own time hunting in those marketplaces and throw your money there.

Well, first let's not associate your 'depression' with 'work'. Sure, work can suck. Losing jobs and running through a cycle of them in a short amount of time can be sucky, too.

I've been in sales. Looking for work is the hardest sale. If someone doesn't want your vacuum cleaner, it's the product. If they think your life insurance rates are too high, it's the product. When job hunting, YOU are the product. And 95% of the time, you have no idea why you were rejected/ignored, and the few employers that tell you why either lie (unhelpful) or tell you things about yourself that you can't easily change (you're overqualified, your job history is not stable enough, you want too much money, etc.)

So, with a lot of job searches in a short amount of time, that can add to it. And I've had a LOT of jobs in my 20+ years of employment (some lasting only three days), so I know how you feel. Like you keep getting on the same roller coaster and you didn't even want to buy a ticket.

But let's be serious about one thing. This type of work - knowledge work - is detrimental to our overall health. You can do everything else right - fitness, eating healthy, pleasant and solid relationships, be a great parent (or son/daughter), have a great spiritual life - and sitting in front of a machine, no matter how much you love programming, and you and me are slowly killing ourselves.

Some people cope better at it. I happen to think grossly overweight people who consume large amounts of caffeine and sugary drinks and eat red meat are going to drop dead one day without warning, but in the meantime, they seem to excel at coping with such a sedentary lifestyle better.

For me, and maybe you can relate, it is incredibly unpleasant, increasingly, to be associated/tied to a machine. I love people. The "app-driven, put our life on social media, program your way to ninja/ping-pong coding guru" dream that we have been sold is hollow and pointless. And we all know it.

Balance is key. Finding it is hard.

My quick suggestions for you. Let me put it this way. Don't even think too much about these. I know, I know, you're an engineer/programmer mentality and over-analysis is all you know. But for once, since you're clearly struggling here, put some trust in someone else. I have a ton of children (way more than I can count) and have found this is hugely important stuff to maintaining balance. I hope it helps you, my friend.

1. NO devices after dark. Yeah, I don't care how crazy that sounds. You can watch TV, but no in-your-face devices, including Kindles, after dark. Shut them down. If true emergency happens, use F.lux for your laptop to keep blue-light at a minimum if you absolutely must email mom back at 10pm. Else, keep them off.

2. Walk 3 miles every day. Every single day. Throw your car keys in a drawer and walk three miles. Two miles is your 'off/easy' day. Three minimum. No device looking while you walk, except to play music or listen to a non-tech podcast. Learn a language, listen to American Life (stories about other people's problems), something. But no checking email. Go into airplane mode while walking. Ideally, have a PURPOSE or place to go to while walking. Could be work (once you get a job) if it is the right distance. Could be the grocery store. Could be a friend's house. Just try not to walk to/fro - it gets boring quick. Treadmills don't count. It MUST be outside.

3. Talk to one stranger every few days. About anything but tech. Don't compare phones. Ask him/her about their coffee, their outfit, the book they are reading, the car they drive, their child's funny hat... something. Get outside yourself, and reach out to others. Don't try and "collect data" on these people, even if they are cool and friendly. Don't worry about getting their email, phone, or Twitter handle. Just talk and let them stream past your life. My rule is this: if I stumble upon them a second time by pure chance (i.e. no stalking the barista girls), then maybe I try to make more of a connection, assuming the interest is mutual.

4. Get up early. Google it. I don't have time to sell it. But do it. 5AM is NOT early. But that will be a good start.

5. Do not work out in a gym. I don't care how much you like it. Find a ropes or fitness course and replace it with that, if you were working out. If not working out, and are in okay shape, then leave it alone. Your walking alone will be a huge help.

6. Don't compare yourself to others. I'm sure you have amazing talents and skills. So does everyone else. Nobody cares. Quit trying to be better and reading tech books, or how-to books (if you do). Read for pleasure at least every other book. Unsubscribe to tech magazines if you get them.

7. Along those lines, unsubscribe to as many things as you can. Interuptus Annoyance. And that means (gasp) deactivating Twitter. Promise yourself you won't reactivate (if ever) when you are Truly Happy. Might be hard at first. Same with social media. Cut out bloat. More than 50+ friends are bloat. 100+ is insanity. Log into FB and other similar sites only twice a week. Ideally, never, but I'm not going to push you to be a scrooge.

8. If you have a loved in your life, (didn't sound like it), give them a kiss and hug everyday and tell them you love them. Maybe for now that's your parents.

I hope that helps, friend. And don't let Silicon Valley be your standard. YOU be your standards. No one laments not affording it there. It's a crazy place to live. Live where you want. Follow YOUR dreams.

I use a MacBook Air 11". Say what you will, but here was my thinking:

1. The whole point of a laptop is portability (but not to the excess of a device that doesn't sit on a table with an attached keyboard. You'll find tons of "power" users that justify their MacBook Pro with a docking station to a 27" monitor, an attached mouse, a bigger keyboard, and, and, and... why not just get a iMac or Windows-desktop at that point? They think it's the best of both worlds, but the reality (for me) is that my data is synced online (via iCloud, dropbox, and other tools) and that having 'one machine to rule them all' seems pointless if I'm trying to dock the thing and really make it two machines. Also, again, portability. No Pro comes close to the portability of an Air. I wanted as absolutely as light and small as possible (I hear the new MacBook (2 lbs) could also be good, but I don't know about it's power internally).

2. I did not want Windows. Why? Besides that it blows chunks on any sort of development standards? Because of two reasons: First, all development tutorials are almost always done in Macs with long convoluted exceptions for Windows. If I was doing .NET development, I would of course consider Windows, but unless I worked in an exclusive MS environment, with no outside coding interests, I'd still just install parallels or something and use my Mac. There are some naysayers who will point out minor differences between OS X and "true Linux". As far as I'm concerned, they might as well point out differences between Linux and Unix. Nobody runs a 'real' machine only on Linux except very obscure people with long beards who think the MP3 is the death of music. Sorry, but I can't relate. Which brings me to subpoint two... That I want my machine to "just work" for all OTHER aspects of computing that I use it for besides development. Meaning, I'm happy to hack around with Ruby on Rails, iOS development, WordPress plugins, and the like, but I want my music to "just work", my contacts to work (and auto-sync with my iPhone), and for the rest of my life to be as simple as possible so that I can save my brainpower for becoming the best programmer possible, not so I can spend a Saturday afternoon wondering how to sync my playlists on my laptop with my iPod so that I can listen to cool music while coding. Or having to hack some schema to see my family's pictures while I'm on a business trip. No, the simple matter of the fact is that Apple makes everything else super-easy. Some developers seem to think that its a weakness to carry anything but a command-line tool to create their offline blog posts - and hey, that's cool and all - but I have a life and my education and career is one thing, and the rest of my life I prefer the simple. Sorry, but basically, I've had it after 20 years of Windows.

3. After having a few 11" Chromebooks for a while, I realized that 11" is actually a BETTER thing because I can focus on just what's on screen. Big screens might be good for designers, or when working on storyboards in iOS (but really, how long are you in that mode, versus looking at code?), but for the most part, it's just more distractions. I love Mac notification controls - very precise and all in one place (unlike Windows). There is a 13" Air for the compromisers, but again, I have found the portability is the best factor. Most people don't even realize I have a laptop on my person when I whip it out.

4. I would say that if you can afford it, to get the better processors, more memory and storage. If you really want to multi-purpose it, get an external HDD and a Super-Drive for backups and Time Machine (but leave them at home when traveling).

5. They keyboard on the Mac is still hard to beat. The screens are okay (and you can go Retina now for the new MB), but honesty, you don't need Retina for typing code or reading. That's just crazy talk.

Bottom line: Keep it simple, stay with something strong (metal), highly portable, useful (in all other aspects) and from a company that supports quality development. You'll be using it a lot, so make it easy to carry, type, and get stuff done on it.