nudge

Build a pdf reader that can replace background/text colours. It would be incredibly useful for many people (including myself) who find black-text-on-white-background unpleasant to read.

The only reader I know that does this is Acrobat Reader, but it's such a huge program for just this little task.

It's pretty, but I don't think it's an improvement. The problem with the highly visible login boxes is that they distract from the other actions available - watch a video and download the client - which are exactly what you want the first-time visitors to be doing.

It should be very clear for first-time visitors what to do. Existing users already know what to do, so it is fine for their action (login) to be tucked away in the corner.

Dropbox doesn't want first-time users to decide what (if anything) they should be doing with those login boxes.

But then again, the true test is of the A/B variety!

Why would it be a problem? You don't have to code through the night with your buddies every night. It is possible to start and run a successful business without giving over every waking moment to it - in fact, it's almost certainly better if you don't. And for when you have to, as long as your spouse is understanding there's no problem.

Is it just Django, or will other Python frameworks work?

Why don't you ask the people in your team? They're more likely to give more to the project if the idea comes out of a discussion of theirs, rather than something you just present to them.

I would be interested to know, simply because I wonder about it for my own projects, how you deal with (the possibility of) server/db/other problems with your site when you are going somewhere that has no internet access.

Wonderful.

I would like to propose, in addition, the use of 'Zucker Punch' to denote a terrible, unexpected blow (emotional, usually) experienced by someone after being zuckered into sharing information intended to be private.

Some very good articles on self-improvement.

Also some totally insane nonsense on spirituality and enlightenment. Which is probably what happens to you if you make your career out of self-improvement.

The early articles are excellent, including the first article I ever saw describing what we would now call a conversion funnel (only it was for shareware)

Don't be disheartened. You came up with a product, and it does not fit your market (tax cheats, apparently).

I would search for customers who do not have such a problem with being honest about their financial situation.

You don't want to get into the business of helping people evade tax. That's a good way to spend a long time in prison.

This is probably the least correct thing I've ever read.

Fact? Or just something that makes you feel morally superior?

Work less. '7 days a week up to 16 hours a day'? There's no way you're going to be able to relax working those kind of hours. How could you? Do you think that should be possible?

You need to seriously cut down the amount of time you permit yourself to work (probably taking advantage of parkinson's law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinsons_Law).

The only thing that's going to allow you to relax is making time to relax.

I'm looking forward to 10/10/10, or 101010, or '42'.

It's hard to say without knowing your idea and the criticism, but you shouldn't take one person disagreeing with you as a reason to give up. There's always someone who'll disagree that your idea is good / workable.

Do you agree with his comments? Are they convincing, or just dispiriting?

You'll hear the word 'pivot' around here quite a lot... very rarely does an idea become a business without being altered by feedback.

It's fine until your garage burns down / floods, or someone digs through your street's connection.

Those things are unlikely, but even with a backup you're going to have pretty horrendous amounts of downtime. You could lessen the impact by having some off-site secondary system ready to go at any moment, but then at that point you might as well be renting a server.

The problem with this reasoning is that, in simplifying everything, you may get more users but you may make your product less useful for some, because you've removed features. And what if they're the most valuable customers? What if Adobe made Photoshop much, much simpler, by removing lots of tools that aren't used by everyone?

There are many ways to make something successful. Simplifying for the masses is one way. It's not the only way.

I had the same idea - you should do it! There are some fantastic blogs out there with amazing content that are totally overwhelming because you're coming at it after years of writing, so if you could rewind the RSS (great way of describing it by the way), that would be really fantastic.

Don't worry about tags so much, but you need the dates, because your user should be able to play back the RSS at a speed greater than the speed the posts were actually written (so that they have a hope of catching up one day).

If you need to do it from the html, you could use something like beautiful soup - it would be able to gather the date, I'm sure.

This is much harder. You should start with things that are every day, for your first month or two, so you are already doing well and motivated to continue. And even then I would pick the days of the week beforehand, so you're not tempted to put it off through the week.

I wouldn't know, I'm not a lawyer. I imagine it's perfectly okay to use the word 'Flickr' to describe what your product does. "Sell your Flickr photos!" Just not to name your product.

Something I find helpful is abandoning the idea of goals (at least for a while), and instead simply focusing on habits.

What do you want to be like? What kind of day would you think was a good one? (here you can include things like "think silently, with no distractions, for 30 minutes" - NOT things like "have 3 good ideas"; also things like "End each day by listing 3 things I want to do the next day, and make sure they get done", rather than "Get lots of stuff done - be incredibly productive")

Design an ideal day. Better yet, design the day you want your 27 year old self to have. Now, you know what your 27 year old self does with his time. You've got 2 years to become that guy.

This means you make gradual changes to your habits. The 30 day method works well for people. Pick one of these new habits that you're aiming to have - only one, seriously - and stick with it for 30 days. Then keep that one going, and add a new one.

If you can do that, you can introduce 12 new habits in one year, and 24 in two years. That's an enormous difference, and it's entirely achievable. Three steps:

1. List the habits your 27 (or 26) year old self has.

2. Pick one for August (but you can start early this month). Do it for the whole month and start a new one in addition in September.

3. That's it. And I don't mean that I'm done. I mean you're done. Stop looking for advice. Don't read productivity blogs. Don't ask any more forums for help. Don't try and perfect this system. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and doing the good enough beats reading about the perfect. So just do it.

And come back and tell us how you're doing!

You might want to get a new name / domain. You may have problems using another company's name as part of your own.

Too much caffeine will definitely do weird things to your sleep patterns.

Cut down to just one or two cups a day at most (none at all would be best), and none at all after 4pm. Wait at least a week to adjust to the different sleep schedule that will come from taking in less caffeine.

If the problem continues, see a doctor. HN is not qualified to give medical advice, except medical advice of the form "Go see a doctor."

Downvoted? I honestly don't understand - what was jules' observation supposed to mean? I wasn't being snarky - I was trying to make sense of it!

Okay, then you've done the equivalent of 20 minutes of jogging better. You know what I mean.

My best tip is to equate the foodstuff to exercise equivalent. Ask yourself: How much exercise would I have to do to not gain weight by eating this junk?

A chocolate bar is roughly equivalent to, say, a 30 minute jog. If you think that what you're about to eat is as bad for you as a 30 minute jog is good (or that they basically cancel each other out), it doesn't seem quite so appealing. Then if you choose the apple instead, you've done the equivalent of a 30 minute jog better than the quantum-choice-alternative-less-disciplined-and-slightly-fatter-you.

Before you eat any junk snack, take a long look at the nutritional information and think about what it is going to do to your body.

I think exline's comment about todo lists is helpful - I find it psychologically satisfying to strike off the last item on a list. There's extrinsic rewards of the finish, like getting paid, having something to show on your portfolio (depends on the work, obviously), not getting fired, etc. I quite like getting things I don't enjoy finished because then they're gone, the mental energy devoted to them can be reallocated.

There is no easy fix for this. You need to be disciplined enough to keep working when you've done all the fun parts.

The good news is that if you can get better at being disciplined just by practising it, and the rewards are very high, because you become a finisher, and people like and value finishers.

Also, the act of finishing is immensely enjoyable, and is therefore its own reward. With practice your mind will begin to be motivated by that reward, once the little rewards of the early parts of projects have gone.

Text file. Write it down and move onto something useful. Don't waste time trying to find a better way to do this. GTD, in particular, is way too much for just this.

This looks fantastic, congratulations!

You might want to remove this weirdness at the bottom of the front page: "Start GOOGLE ANALYTICS<--> End GOOGLE ANALYTICS<--> Start CHARTBEAT<--> End CHARTBEAT<--> Start ZENDESK<--> SupportEnd ZENDESK<-->"

In my case I submitted my simple online timer to Lifehacker Australia, on a hunch that it would feed through to the US site. It worked, but I wouldn't know if it would work again, and I don't know if they write about iphone apps.

I didn't submit it to unaffiliated smaller blogs simply because it wasn't really a business and after the lifehacker article I was happy enough.

You should read the blog of the Balsamiq mockup software creator. He has a great post - I forget where, I'm afraid - about exactly how and what he wrote to bloggers when he was launching.