aaroniba

That's an interesting question.

In my model of human psychology, when a person is passionately driven to achieve an ambitious goal, he gets stressed out about obstacles that stand in the way. Does passion necessarily cause stress? I think so, but if you know a way to have passion without stress, please let me know.

As for being freedom-limiting, startups take a lot of time, and you generally have cofounders, investors, employees, and (hopefully) users relying on you. These external factors are big responsibilities. Does responsibility necessarily limit freedom? I think so, but I would be interested in counterexamples.

Thus, if you want to avoid stress and limits on freedom, you would have to avoid passion and responsibility. I suppose you could start something not very ambitious, that you aren't very passionate about, avoiding cofounders, investors, employees, and users. I would have a hard time calling such an endeavor a "startup".

"Optimizing for happiness" seems like a hard idea to argue against. The author defines happiness as:

"I'm a hacker; I'm happy when I'm building things of value, not when I'm writing a business plan filled with make believe numbers."

That's a pretty narrow definition. The rest of the article implies that what the author really means by happiness is freedom and lack of stress. He writes:

"When there are fewer potentially catastrophic events on the horizon, you'll find yourself smiling a lot more often."

That's actually an argument against doing a startup at all. Startups are extremely stressful and freedom-limiting endeavors. Servers crash in the middle of the night. Smart people launch competitive products that try to kill yours. Users get pissed at you for removing their favorite feature. In my experience there are always catastrophic events on the horizon in a startup.

Personally, I try to optimize for things like excitement, challenge, personal development, impact, and fun. Raising a VC round may or may not contribute to these, depending on a lot of things.

I think the messages from client to server always had to do an HTTP post, so we did incur the overhead of all the HTTP headers with each post from client to server, which happened at most twice per second.

You can view the client-side JS code for handling these 3 connection types here:

http://code.google.com/p/etherpad/source/browse/trunk/infras...

I didn't write this, but that's my understanding of how it works.

You can also get around the overhead of HTTP headers by using a Flash shim, but we never got that to work well through weird proxy configurations and misbehaving ISPs.

The problem with stress as the root cause is that after I resolved my RSI pain, I have been through tremendously stressful situations during which I was typing a lot, but these have not triggered any RSI pain. So I think there's something more going on unconsciously, and yes I agree with you it sounds pretty far out.

As for exercise, I should have mentioned in the article that I have always exercised regularly and exercise is a big part of my life, even while I was typing a lot, so in my experience exercise (while having may other benefits) did not help my RSI pain.

At the time, MSN search was so bad that this proposition was ludicrous. In fact, every Office developer I knew used Google with a "site:msdn.microsoft.com" restriction to search their own API docs.

I wonder if Bing is now good enough that employees feel pressure to use it instead of Google.

We haven't figured out a way to let people undo other users' edits. (We can perform the manipulation on the document, we just haven't figured out a sensible UI for it).

http://etherpad.com/ep/newsyc

For the curious, I added this URL to our running web server in 5 minutes with 12 lines of JavaScript:

  function render_newsyc_get() {
    function countUsers(p) {
       return getCollab().getDocument(p).getNumConnectedUsers();
     }
     var body = BODY({style: 'padding: 20px; font-family: monospace;'});
     body.push(H3("Welcome news.ycombinator readers! ",
   	       "Join us in an EtherPad of your choosing:"));
     pads.forEach(function(p) {
       body.push(A({href: p}, p), '   ('+countUsers(p)+' users)', BR());
     });
     response.write(HTML(body));
  }

A natural extension of this was to write a guide to teach people how to program. AppJet is still the only place I know of where you can learn to program and actually build an app that you can share with friends via a URL, all without downloading any software or configuring a development environment.

Now we are working on addressing all the limitations of AppJet as compared to having your own server, and therefore make it a platform that you'd use for more "serious" apps, not just 1-pagers. Hopefully when we release the next version, you'll give us another look and decide we compare favorably to the alternatives for general development.

We'll definitely charge money at some point, but right now we're focused on improving the platform for developers. Also, we have a spiffy virtualization engine for hosting apps that allows us to do it at negligible cost. So it costs us next to nothing to host our current load of 2,249 apps and ~3M combined monthly pageviews.

  ; Prizes
  ; These are shoved into players; left-bottom justified in 8x8
  ; There's some confusion as to what to call the damn things....so I'm
  ; gonna do what I like, here...
  ...
  ; The "Birthday Cake" [I think...]
  ...
  ; The Purse ["...omigosh...that's not a /Birthday Cake/???"]

I thought this whole thread was about bodybuilding. That would be the target market for the app that was posted. I claimed that a logbook is useful for bodybuilders.

Originally I thought you were saying that logbooks were bad for bodybuilders, but now I suppose you are saying that bodybuilding in general is a bad activity. That's a whole different debate. Personally I like the appearance of a lean, muscular, and proportional physique, which is what bodybuilding is all about (not that I've attained this yet, but it's a goal).

> They're also slow and have diminished hand speed and explosive power

Bodybuilding won't slow you down, but it's not the optimal way to develop speed, since it develops slow-twitch muscles more than fast-twitch ones.

I don't understand at all your advocating "brief and intense" routines as an alternative to bodybuilding. Most bodybuilding routines are brief and intense sets, with some rest in between.

Genetics also controls things like metabolism and how well you respond to weight training, so you need to adjust your diet accordingly. I do agree with you that motivation and a good routine can create superior results in anyone. I was just pointing out that some people will have to work harder than others, diet harder, or eat more, or whatever.

In my experience, most successful bodybuilders take a scientific approach to their training. The main variables that affect physique are genetics, diet, and routine. Different diets and routines work for different people, so to achieve the best results it's important to experiment. A log book gives you data to learn how to improve your routine.

Even your point on the importance of varying routines is best achieved by using a log book. Try a steady routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Then try "dramatically varying" your routine for 3 months and measure your gains. Now you have data to support your own optimal workout plan.

Finally, to your point about picking up the pace: most routines involve rest between sets, so if you log while resting then it doesn't slow you down.

A typical session's data includes 6 exercises, 4 sets each, weight and rep count for each set, so 48 numbers altogether, all related to each other in different ways. Plus I like to keep notes in the margin like "grip the bar wider" or "slower negative movement".

If you can create an iphone app with a user interface that makes it really really easy to enter workout data, then I think you would find a large market. I payed for gyminee.com because I thought it might deliver this, but the data entry was still too annoying. The built-in Notes program on the iphone was actually better.

Also, as other people have mentioned, "overtraining" has negative connotations, so I'm curious why you picked this name.

Best of luck. I think this is something people want.

AppJet was designed to be easy and make it possible to write cool little web apps with a small amount of code and a small amount of knowledge. From this perspective, it becomes obvious why we chose JavaScript as the server language: it reduces the number of languages you need to learn by a factor of 2.

I think it's succeeding at what it does. There are lots of cool apps in the app directory, and most are <500 lines of code in a single file. Many of these apps are written by high school students who learned programming with AppJet. Some of my favorite include {pxl,outliner,files,wikijet,agglodex,dict,livescore}.appjet.net.

We are working on improving the AppJet Framework to be good for large apps. We're also working a lot on our platform. (mrtron makes a good point about platform vs. framework elsewhere in this thread). One day, we'll tell the hacker news community that we think AppJet is a suitable replacement for PHP, Django, RoR, or whatever you're building your startup on. But we're not there yet.

In the meantime, if you want to hack up a simple database-backed web app without worrying about hosting or setting up SQL or anything, AppJet is your platform. Or if you want to learn programming with a platform that will let you do a lot knowing only a little, AppJet is your platform.