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Yeah, this distinction is important. Recently in Germany this report made the news how nearly a quarter of professional football players are broke at the end of their careers. Considering that these are all people who make a lot of money I was pretty shocked about this.

I did hit the "Report" button. Let me know if you did not get the report or if it is useless and you need further testing.

I can confirm this first hand. Two pickpockets tried to get my stuff in Barcelona. One had his hand in my left pocket with my cell phone, the other one in the right pocket with my wallet and passport.

Sorry, folks, but my jeans pockets are like monkey traps. If you grab anything in there you won't be able to get your hand out. They pickpockets figured that out quickly and ran off without any loot. Tight jeans saved my vacation.

This is pretty amazing because just yesterday I was wondering if such a site exists. I am always trying to find more adventures wherever I go.

Too bad that the Android app crashes on my MyTouch 4G when "Loading Challenges". Is there any way I can help in debugging this?

Since that website is for scheduling tweets, I have to assume that the post is serious, but if I followed anybody who tweets every 30 to 60 minutes I would immediately unfollow him for polluting my timeline.

Now, if the tweets do not show up in my timeline it's different of course. A company can tweet every single minute on Twitter if they reply to people and start conversations since this does not show up in everybody's timeline. See Hipmunk for a company that gets this right, for example.

When I was a TA in college I gave similar advice to my students: If you are the best person in your study group, you are in the wrong study group. Now, the problem is, on a purely meritocratic level, the better study groups do not want to have you because you are slowing them down. You gotta bring something else to the table so they let you in. What that special something is, everybody has to figure that out for himself. I can't help you with that.

I am definitely seeing lots of parallels to work and other aspects of life here.

I used to think like him in the past. But these days I am already so occupied with executing on things at my job and in my free time that I thank the high heavens every time I realize someone else has executed on "my" idea.

Every time this happens, someone else solved a problem for me for a fraction of the cost that would it take me to implement. I can just pick another thing from my ideas.txt file and work on that.

This happened quite a lot recently because I want to break into Android development with a friend of mine. The first three ideas we came up with have already been done. It turned out that one of the ideas is an amazingly popular apps in the Android store already. Too bad it was not us who did it. But then, now we have finally found an Android app idea nobody has executed on yet and we will start working on it today.

The one product I was mostly involved in needed to be rewritten because it was the result of a quick proof of concept hack that kept growing because people actually bought it. There was literally no separation between GUI, model, or DB backend. Adding to the code was like swimming through molasses.

I took the product over as lead developer and saw no way to save it. It helped that only maybe about 10% of the features we wanted to have were implemented, so two of us managed to do the rewrite in less than six months.

The main focus of this rewrite was indeed to make sure that we would never have to rewrite the product ever again. We kept a very close eye on identifying what went wrong, what design principles can help us to avoid doing things wrong in the future, and how to design for extensibility considering that 90% of the features still have to be added.

In the end the rewrite turned out to be very successful. Until the day I left the company (three years after) no rewrite was ever necessary again. Rather, we managed to keep up the good principles laid down during the rewrite so we could just work on the code incrementally. The product was also the commercially most successful piece of software the startup sold.

I used to work for a startup that rewrote its products all the time. It was a huge mess with all the consequences outlines in the article.

The problem was not the rewriting itself but the lack of understanding how things went wrong the first time. From my experience it is absolutely mandatory to have many deeply introspective and self-critical thought sessions to figure out how you got into the mess. Only if you have clearly identified what went wrong in the past, you will be able to successfully rewrite a project and avoid the mistakes.

For some of the products we did this and rewriting was a huge success. For some others we did not and the rewrite turned out to be just as terrible as the original version. Then we rewrote it again and it was still a mess.

I always resented traveling to the US too because of border controls. Recently I moved to the US and felt relieved that I do not have to go through immigration there anymore. Seconds after that thought I had the epiphany that I now have to go through immigration whenever I am going anywhere else in the world.

The funny thing is that I have never had a bad experience with US immigration. The only time I had a non-smooth experience was in Canada, before a flight from Montreal to Atlanta. An officer waved me out of line saying "I'm sorry sir but you were selected for a random security check. You can thank Mr George W. Bush for that."

The two funniest experiences I had was when entering Dubai and Sao Paulo, In Sao Paulo the immigration officer did not speak a single word of English. I do not speak any Portuguese. We quickly realized this frustrating situation and I was waved through. In Dubai I was the first person in line at the customs and not knowing what to do I just kept walking. The customs people just stood there and looked at me. I was already quite far behind the customs people, nearly out of the airport, when I realized that I just walked past the customs officers without having my bags or anything checked. So I went the whole way back just to go through customs properly.

Thank you for information. Yeah, I was considering that you might be working hard on scaling these days. The site seems to work mostly well, so you seem to be doing a good job there.

Thank you very much for the email you sent me too.

I have been using Crowdbooster since last November (no serious reason, just felt like betatesting another YC startup) and until like two days ago when they improved their graphs a bit I honestly thought they are dead. In the last four months the website pretty much did not change at all.

Here is a suggestion. Maybe you can work on improving communication with your users so they know what is being changed and added to the site. I just checked out the blog for the first time like a minute ago and only once is a new feature mentioned (the #FF feature from 19 days ago). All the other entries seem to be focused on 'we are mentioned here! and we are mentioned there!'. Since I do not even read the blog, I even missed the #ff feature.

Back in November 2009 I was on vacation in San Francisco and decided to drop by the Google campus in Mountain View to visit some friends.

Of all the things they showed me there, Mondrian (of which Rietveld is a fork of) impressed me the most. More so than dinosaur skeletons, space ships, 3D Google Earth terminals, or free amazing meals.

I was working in a startup at the time and we did not do code review at all. After seeing the Google workflow and having their build processes explained to me in detail, I was trying to set up code review before commits at the startup too. I hoped to improve code quality with this. Unfortunately the tools we tried were terrible and so it never took off.

To this day, not getting the necessary processes in place remains one of the biggest regrets of working there. Now I work at another place where we don't do that either. Too bad.

Congrats. This is an awesome idea, simply because it takes people's laziness out of the equation. It's kinda like that popular financial 'pay yourself first'/'automate your finances' set it and forget it mantra but applied to charity.

I just moved from Germany to the US and my US visa expires after one year. Having no idea in what country I will end up next, things like a 401k or any other country-specific investment form makes no sense to me.

As such I have already given up on establishing a state-sanctioned retirement fund any time soon. Instead, I live frugally and save more than 50% of my post-tax income. Some of that is invested in funds because I can easily keep those wherever I will move to in the future.

Right now I am investing some of that in managed funds but I am not very happy with this and will probably move to index funds soon. I don't have enough confidence that my actively managed funds will beat the average market.

I used to work for a startup (employee) and I was wondering the same all the time. One of the perks of working at this company that you were allowed to speak at as many conferences as you wanted to and everybody who worked there made good use of it.

On the one hand, this was basically our primary marketing tool. We talked about our tools, other engineers saw them and convinced their companies to buy our software. On the other hand, our engineers were constantly in contact with people from big companies (Google, MS, ...) that tried to recruit them.

Curiously, only one of our engineers ever left the company voluntarily (that was me, after four years), so apparently the boss managed to create a work environment that was so great that even constant top-dollar recruitment attempts by other companies had no effect.

This is so true. I have a friend, fresh out of college with a Masters degree in CS from a German university, who has been unemployed for about a year now and in that time he has sent out maybe 10 to 15 applications. I carefully try to nudge him in the right direction by keeping an eye open for job offers that might interest him or by suggesting programming challenges/projects that could improve his skills.

But instead of working on things that could improve his chances to get a job, he just watches TV all day long. If he put in only maybe three hours of open source coding time a day, his chances to score a job should increase tremendously. If you are an unemployed software developer, it is much easier to stay on top of things than in many other professions but in the end you have to have the motivation for it.