saturdayplace

Your muses drop inspiration just as your head hits the pillow, but they don't manufacture an irresistible drive to create. In an emotional inspired burst, you leap into your project, only to peter out as the novelty wears off. "Fanatic" implies emotional involvement, but you've noticed that when the ardor cools you've got no impetus. And the thing you so lovingly begun turns into drudgery. Into work.

You're not, ex nihilo, going to create within yourself some sort of relentless will to create. Worthwhile endeavors are hard. Becoming more fit. Building a product or company. These goals aren't fully achieved in one inspired surge of energy. And our brains seem to be wired towards amusement after our basic needs are met. Intentionally doing hard things is the evolutionary equivalent of repeatedly touching a hot stove; your brain's going to keep telling you to knock it off.

So, you've got to take advantage of what we know about our brains to "trick" them into doing work. Here are a couple things to read that might help you figure out what "hack" will work for you:

1) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... is an article about shopping habits, that contains a couple of interesting gems about how companies actually do the same thing ("hack" your habits) in order to bring about desired consumer behaviour. It's adapted from the book: http://charlesduhigg.com/the-power-of-habit/ which I haven't read but suspect just has many more examples.

2) http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/06/ff_feedbackloop/all/. Figure out a positive feedback loop that you can take advantage of. For me, when I was working on a book, one thing I did was build a script that would count the words, make a note of the count in a journal, and post an update of my progress to my Facebook wall. I'd get encouraging comments from my FB friends, presto: positive feedback loop. Related: What gets measured improves. What gets measured and reported improves again. I'm not sure where I'd heard that quote, but its proven true for me.

3) Along those lines: "Don't break the chain". http://lifehacker.com/5886128/how-seinfelds-productivity-sec....

Good luck. It's a lonely lot of work becoming productive.

From Joel Spolksky's "Camels and Rubber Duckies" (which is a great read in its own right):

>The joke of it is, big companies protect themselves so well against the risk of buying something expensive that they actually drive up the cost of the expensive stuff, from $1000 to $75000, which mostly goes towards the cost of jumping all the hurdles that they set up to insure that no purchase can possibly go wrong.

Personally, I'm just not interested in playing that game.

*Edit: Yet. Not interested in playing that game yet.

So, it's probably not realistic to assume this particular app will help. The chance that it will make an actual difference is probably pretty low. Is that reason enough to dismiss the idea? Or to dismiss "apps" entirely as a possible tool for helping suicidal people? I said this below, but unless suicide is an area where you have more potential to cause harm than to do good, it seems like a worthwhile direction to spend resources.

I'm definitely willing to be labeled naive. Would suggesting a call to a suicide hotline be as insulting? What if the app carries out similar functions as a hotline? Please, I'm not trying to troll, just trying to understand why the idea of this app is so repugnant.

Also, while this specific app may not be able to help, doesn't it seem at least possible that some app, some day might? It seems prematurely dismissive to write apps off as wholly ineffectual. Unless suicide is a case where you're likely to do more harm than good?

I find your reaction... odd? He's won a grant to develop a tool that has the potential to help out people with a real problem. Why should that disgust anyone?

It's not a direct answer to your question, but a while back I ran across http://www.introtopython.org/ which in a beginners introduction to programming using Python as the first language. It has a github project[1] full of IPython notebooks used in the course.

[1] https://github.com/ehmatthes/intro_programming

That works too. Actually, I should probably re-word the advice along the lines of "know programming, and know something else really well too." Puts you at some pretty lucrative intersections.

Related: It occurs to me more and more that programming is a VERY valuable secondary skill. If you find your interests drawn to another domain, it will likely be useful to gain expertise in that domain. Once armed with knowledge of how people do things in that area, you'll be poised to apply programming skills towards solutions to their obvious problems. Like Patrick says above, to laypeople, someone who bangs out code that makes people's day better appears to have superpowers. My general recommendation to kids going to college these days, is to jump into a field you're interested in, and pick up programming on the side.

In your case, I wouldn't worry too much. Leaving school with a CS degree, you'll have a skill set that many, MANY companies are willing to pay for. The ability to convince computers to do your bidding is a pretty marketable skill.

I don't think you're going to get the numbers you're after, and hopefully you can live with having given an honest effort if you fail. The truth is, having this kind of attitude, and doing the work that comes along with it, is necessary but generally insufficient for success. Meaning, you can get there with with work + (some Other Factors), but you absolutely won't get there without it. Which is why the stories you hear about successful people all include the "hard work paid off" bit.

Other Factors can include but are not limited to: having the right contacts, being in the right place at the right time, having a unique insight into the market, etc. Looking at a list like that might be dispiriting because the items all appear to be frustratingly correlated with random chance. And that's partly true. But what is also true, is that doing certain kinds of work often has the interesting side-effect of raising your chances for bumping into one of those other factors. Which is what you were saying above.

For example, working hard in, and paying attention to business in a given industry for a while might a) Give you insight into how something might be done better, and b) introduce you to people working in that industry who could help you out by b1) teaching you more about it, b2) directing you to others who can, b3) becoming a collaborator with you, or b4) pointing you to capital resources interested in solving relevant problems.

I mean, yeah in the end, in business you're likely to fail. Most businesses fail. Most people who have the right attitude and do the requisite work fail. But you can't get to the top of the mountain without hiking.

And people like me who don't drink can still happily grab a soda, hang with folks who are, and get all the social benefits.

Perhaps that reinforces the point even more?

Again, thanks for this. I've intended to get involved but never got around to figuring out how. Having this run across my screen motivated me to get a nick registered, and say hello in the channel.

Having no qualifications whatsoever about such things, I'd fund them. To me, this application (including video) make Lollipuff's success seem inevitable. Everything is stated just so matter-of-factly, but without bravado. They've found a market with customers, and have a product that appears to serve their needs, and to an outsider, it appears that the business will happen whether or not YC (or Silicon Valley at large) gets on board.

I don't know if the YC reviewer(s) for Lollipuff's application is hanging around, but it'd be interesting to hear if their reaction matches mine.

> I guess I should save what would now be a car payment

In your case I know it's not as applicable, but I often recommend to people that pay off their car loans that they should continue making that payment, just into a savings account. In less time than it took to pay off the loan (remember, you were paying interest too), you'll have saved enough to pay cash for your next auto. If you've been able to live with that money dedicated towards a loan payment, hopefully your budget can continue not to depend on the "extra" resulting from not having the obligation.

My favorite thing about these essays, is summarized by PG's remark in this one: "sorry, we think you're great, but PG said startups shouldn't ___, and since we're new to fundraising, we feel like we have to play it safe."

The card it gives to inexperienced players. This whole thing feels like a way to even out the information asymmetry inherent in these transactions.

Because some may not know the "There is no speed limit" reference: http://sivers.org/kimo. It's a great article.

I suspect that there's a lot of cross pollination of talent between ancestry and the church's familysearch.org there.

For the record, I (the commenter you're referring to) do flag a lot of what's on the front page. In the vein of introspective disclosure, I recently found myself flagging an article PG submitted and other that tptacek did, so it's likely I am missing some of the nuance in the guidelines.

I can't say I contribute much to the site in the way of links though. Usually, by the time I find something I think would be valuable here it's already fallen off the top end of the new page and doesn't get much discussion. Either I don't have the infrastructure in place to find stuff interesting enough to submit, or thus far have just had some unlucky timing. Honestly though, you're right. I just don't submit very much.

It concerns me. This discussion should not be on hacker news. These opinions are not mutually exclusive. Flagged the story.

I don't get a crap ton of recruiter mail. (Yay?) I'm in a good gig now, so I don't really respond to the ones that I do get. Sometimes, if I feel that they're not too slimy, I'll respond by saying "I'm OK now, I'll keep you in mind down the road if I ever need anything," and file away their contact info in the event my current gig goes south. My life is busy enough that I'd probably be annoyed at the presumption I've got time to deal with a work sample test on top of dealing with the spam in the first place. However...

I'm definitely one of those people described in XKCD's nerd sniping strip.[0] If the sample problem actually flicked that little nerve in my brain, you might get a response from me just because I couldn't help myself. But here's the kicker. You'd only get my solution as long as I could email it directly to you instead of the recruiter. At that point, even if I'm not interested in working for you now the sample problem you wrote has sparked some interest. Now, I'm interested in striking up a relationship with that might not amount to much at the moment, but may prove fruitful in the future. If we've gotten this far, I'm not interested in dealing with the recruiter any more.

[0] http://xkcd.com/356/

Seconded. People often get overwhelmed at the scope of "become more fit" once they've finished a workout or two. Doing it one small accomplishable bit at a time is a totally valid way of building a fitness habit, and is NOT something to be ashamed of. And for the RPG nerds here this is exactly how you level-up IRL.

Well, if this isn't validation for my latest idea, I don't know what is. I know it shouldn't, but finding out about competitors always seems to take the wind out of my sails.

Two points stuck out at me here:

> We formalized a process to enable our customer team (account reps & support) to give anyone trial extensions if they had a real need... folks that received a trial extension were 2.5X more likely to convert and 5X more likely to upgrade at some future point.

I'm glad there's data (at least for one company) to support what was always my intuition. Many companies are hesitant to offer a trial extension, but the cost of doing so in most cases seems absolutely trivial. Now that at least some data is out there, perhaps more people will adopt this pattern.

> Another successful change was to change how we handled existing paid accounts that had a billing issue and were to be downgraded. In the past we would just downgrade those accounts to a Free plan, send an email and that was it. From talking to some customers we realized that some people would get downgraded and not notice that their functionality had changed.

I wonder, isn't there some way you could know ahead of time that the account might experience billing issues and send them a warning email before their account is downgraded? Assuming you have their credit card information, at least one issue you could anticipate is their card's expiration. As a customer, I'd prefer the heads-up notice as opposed to something after-the-fact. My takeway instead of "make it obvious when people are auto-downgraded" would be, "prevent people from being auto-downgraded at all," if you can.

It's probably your first reaction to try and sound like a big company, but personally I'd would avoid that if I could. Especially if it comes off unnaturally (which it appears to have done at least in this instance). In some cases you can play your small size as an advantage, at least for your first customers. Just as a single example, a small company can offer much more personalized customer service. For more about this, see the "Delight" section of pg's most recent essay: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

I imagine he was being sarcastic.

Thank you very much for posting this list. I'd cast about a while back looking for similar stuff, but not found much I enjoyed. Looking forward to giving these a try.

I'm pretty familiar with the attitude among hiring managers that certifications generally don't signal anything useful; my boss and I also hold that position (I hold an MCTS that I was forced to get so my employer could get a better partnership status with Microsoft). So I'm curious why holding Cody's certificate might actually mean something where a more established cert would not.

Seconding the recommendation for both of these books. They're both sitting on my desk here and they're both excellent. Tangled Web does a great job of explaining why browser and web app security is in the state that it's in, and each chapter includes a "cheat sheet" at the end of things a developer can do to further secure his web app. Web Application Hacker's Handbook contains exactly what's on the tin: a pretty thorough explanation of how to pull of many of the common exploits, along with the explanation for how/why they work.

What about the SANS SEC542 + GWAPT certification? It looks like Cody's course covers a couple areas that don't fall under the SANS one, but the high-level overview appears to be pretty similar.

Or, would you be willing to speak more generally about certifications, and which, if any actually DO get attention from hiring managers in the security field?

Is it just the customer account details that apparently make hosting companies attractive targets. If that's the case, I'm wondering why we're not seeing more breaches from all over the e-commerce world. Why just hosting companies?