arrel

That sounds like the reason Apple refused to use a hardware button to trigger the camera shutter, but thankfully they caved on that one and I can take a photo without having to guess where I'm tapping the screen.

I'd rather see companies trying out ideas that might work instead of just sticking to their metaphorical guns.

The engineering world would be a much better place if more people built beautiful, easy to use GUIs on top of the confusing command line apps we all rely on. I switched to Tower for git a couple years ago, and seeing people struggle with diffs and rebasing on the command line makes me sad.

This software may be version one and still have some kinks to work out, but I love it anyway. Nice work!

I get the same problem, and I use my calendar as a weapon against it. If you have three things you need to do, pick one and block a time off on the calendar to focus on it and ignore the other two. After that it's the calendar telling you what to do, not your own self doubting brain.

San Francisco, full time

Soldsie - Full stack rails engineer

We have a small team working on a new form of social commerce that actually works for our customers. We're growing fast, and looking for someone to take over the tech lead position. We have three engineers including me (co-founder) and work in a great space out of the mission.

Our app runs on rails on heroku with Postgres and Redis, and we are looking to do some interesting machine learning. The front end is a multi-page app with jquery and backbone.

You will be making technical platform decisions, leading the engineering team, and working with me on product decisions, including talking directly to customers and working with the sales and marketing people on what we think is possible. We move pretty fast, and try to make decisions that will be good in the long term. Plus, it's a pretty fun group of people.

If you're interested, just email me personally at arrel at soldsie.com.

Alfred can do that if you're on a Mac. http://alfredapp.com/

I usually have a hard time ignoring the Joneses and feeling content with what I have, and I don't think that's a necessarily bad thing. Those who accomplish the most, from Thomas Edison to Bill Clinton, often do so because of this drive to be better than the rest of us and have it all. Progress depends on discontent, and it's easy to read feel good articles and exchange "happiness" with "laziness".

Let's not mistake entertaining with fluffy. If you want benchmarks, redis.io already has that pretty well covered. Everything I've read about redis made me think of it as either a database or a replacement for memcache, but it's be helpful to think about it as something more abstract. The scratchpad idea is something I hadn't heard, and seemed worth sharing.

I'd guess the higher ups at Twitter have run the cost benefit in their head (and probably many spreadsheets) plenty of times, and in most cases spending your limited resource on disaster recovery preparation just isn't worth it. Their site being down does not qualify as a "disaster" - they'll be back up soon, then we'll all be tweeting away again within minutes.

It's hard to agree with this as vigorously as I want. Every year I look back at where I was the year before and realize I was terrible back then, and when I look back at today in twelve months I'll realize that what I'm working on right now is not nearly as good as it will be then.

To anyone frustrated with their own mediocre work, keep going! You will be so much better next year.

I think this misses the point for getting software into congress - it has to be something they want to use, not just something we want them to use. These are awesome ideas, but once we get into the "force your legislature to start using..." then it's pretty much dead in the water. We need to make software that makes parts of their jobs 10x better, and unfortunately that'll have to include a few ways for politicians to obfuscate and make decisions behind closed doors.

From my friend Evan Smith, who's a lawyer and couldn't be bothered to sign up for HN:

I believe the author is slightly incorrect.  First off, there is no "optimal" slip angle for all situations.  Putting on your physics hat for a second, think about a race car tire at the Indy 500.  As the car enters turn 1 at 200 mph, the driver turns the wheel.  The tire, due to rotational and centrifugal forces, will slightly change shape under these pressures.  As a result, the contact patch of the tire can be pointing in a slightly different direction than the tire itself during the turn.  The anglular measurement of that difference is "slip angle."  A small amount of slip angle can be good, as it can increase grip up to a certain point. However, beyond that point, grip is no longer improved and you can transition from a slip angle to a slide angle, where the tire has lost grip. Depending on whether you want the back tires lose grip first (oversteer, where the back end comes around) or understeer (where the front tires lose grip first and you lose some steering, think driving in snow) you can use the slip angles to tailor the car's handling to the driver and the racecourse.  The optimal slip angle is that angle which maximizes grip without inducing momentum-sapping slide angles or creating too much drag.  Optimal slip angle depends on all sorts of things: chassis set up, tires, racetrack temperature, etc.  While the author may know more about this than I do, I've never heard of seven degrees of slip being optimal for all situations.

Also, I think the author's metaphor is inelegant: driving beyond the limit means you are not allowing the full power of your engine to be transmitted to the tires. The fastest drivers are those who drive at the limit of available grip.  If you drive beyond the limit of available grip, the power of your engine will not be transmitted efficiently to the road because the tires are not gripping it fully. 

It's definitely possible to design a great product with a very manual design process, but you can also write a great novel using pen and paper. Computers make a lot of things a lot easier, and you should leverage them when they make sense. (like for instantly making exact copies of designs you make, or even better making slight variations along the way.)

Once you involve a photocopier in your "sketching" process you've officially jumped the shark. I am a big advocate of sketching wireframes before moving to the computer, but that means paper, ball point pen, and a minute or less per sketch. What he is creating is hand-crafted design - it looks beautiful, it communicates ideas very well, but it is totally inefficient in reaching the end goal of a usable, functional product.

His intention was to get people to be a little more considerate when asking for people's time, not turning relationships into dollar-per-hour transactions. We in the nerd community often have problems empathizing with others, and thinking more about turning a request (check out my new startup) into a nice experience for the other guy (how about free lunch?) would go a long way toward getting people to hear us out.

Have you looked at grubwithus.com? Not many "famous" people yet, but definitely a start in the right direction.

These tools all work in different ways, but I would love if someone could write an app store for these (and others) to live in so we could one-click install and one-click uninstall dev tools locally. I'd definitely pay for that manager app, and it'd be way easier to give micro-donations to open source tools we use a lot.

It sounds like a poetic call to action that everyone on HN should probably heed. Too many talented people are pouring their efforts into the next location-based photo sharing app that nobody is going to use (trust me, I did it myself for almost a year) and not tackling real problems with positive sum solutions. We all need to get out of the SV hype machine a little more often to make sure what we're working on matters.

I'm fascinated by work methodologies, but they always remind me of the Atkins diet - something that probably works in the short term, so people rave about it, but breaks down over time. Even maniacs like Tim Ferris can't seem to stick with anything for the long run.

Has anyone been able to stick to a personal work technique like this for longer than a couple months?

I've had to build sync systems in the past for RoR + iPhone and was amazed that there was no industry standard approach to sync. Even syncing contacts on my iPhone still goes haywire regularly.

Is it just one of those "hard problems" that's still searching for a solution, or is there a tried and true online/offline sync algorithm that works?

This sounds like one more step to making push something that's expected on the web. BlackBerry did it to email when they created the "interactive pager", but it took a few years before people realized what was happening.

It's great to see hot companies like Instagram jumping onto a coming wave like this to popularize it sooner.

Tie in rotten tomatoes reviews and you've got a torrent butler with taste.

I'd rather see TED team up with another discussion forum (like Quora) insted of creating their own walled garden of conversation. Offering a way to talk with TED speakers on an already popular service sounds a lot more sustainable.

I assume you have some new take on what you're doing - otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. The main takeaway of the post is that you almost always need feedback to execute new approaches properly.

It sounds like you're assuming that your execution will be flawless, even something to be copied by competitors, but how can you know without testing it on the customer? If you're in a market like pharmaceuticals, where all user testing can be done in a lab, execution in a bubble makes sense, but if your startup is a web product it sounds like hubris.

For reference, Steve Blank has a great set of posts about needs of different types of startups: http://bit.ly/if6Okn

It's easy to get things done if you're a difficult bastard. People may not like it, but if you yell loud enough they'll often do it. At least as long as you're yelling.

Relating it back to Jim Collins's books (like "Good to Great"), the difficult geniuses create phenomenal successes that peter out once they leave, but the easy going geniuses build organizations that are great on their own and can generate success without all the yelling.

Inspiration is more powerful than browbeating, but it's also a whole lot harder.

The value of writing things down - details about finger pain and waxy skin surely would have been lost memories, but are the things that make stories like this so great.

Reminds me of the calacanis article about facebook's developer culture - continuous deployment not only makes updates faster, it democratized the process and gives every developer the power to make things better. Good for the product, and good for the team. http://launch.is/blog/launch002-what-i-learned-from-zuckerbe...

Did Arnold Schwarzenegger's face flash through anyone else's mind while reading this?

What a reflction of the attitudes of each company towards their customers. Zappos is all about coming down to the level of their users and having fun with them. 37Signals has finally built their ivory tower, and they want customers to think of their product as a door into that tower.

If they were political parties, Zappos would be the FDR Democrats and 37Signals would be the Libertarians.

Steve Blank has a lot of blog posts about entrepreneurship and the different types - searching through his old posts would turn up good info. I also recommend reading his blog from the beginning. It's a great read, not too long (a longish book, total), and covers a lot of ground about entrepreneurship.

I wish Taggar had addressed how this is going to impact the application review process. It sounds like the YC partners already have their hands full with the number of applications coming in each round, and I assume those numbers are shooting through the roof this round. Are all of the partners still going to read all of the applications, or are they going to need some triage this time around?