Go to bed earlier at night.

To go to bed earlier

1) get up earlier

2) You can only shift your schedule about 1 hour per day. You can try shifting it more, but you're going to have sweater-head, nausea and hot flashes. If you go from getting up at 11 to getting up at 5, expect five days of feeling like crap.

3) The pineal gland is activated by light incident on the retina. So calculate when you need to go to sleep based on when you get up, and stop using the computer one hour prior. AND use Flux, or do something to turn down the absolute amount of light coming from your screen(s).

4) The sleep-wake cycle is naturally about 25 hours. It takes discipline to go to sleep at the same time every night. Or exhaustion.

5) Recent findings suggest that starvation can suspend the diurnal cycle 12 hours or more. So eat a good dinner.

6) Additionally, fats, proteins, warmth, and bulk activate the parasympathetic nervous system (rest and digest). Simple carbs offer none of these things. So fatty snacks are better. Unsalted nuts are a great snack (salt stimulated the cephalic phase of eating. So, sorry, but bacon is not a good snack).

7) Caffeine. Metabolized in the liver at a second-order decay rate by CYP1A2. Effective half-life is 3-7 hours.

Coffee: 30-170 mg/8oz Espresso: 30-50 mg/oz Tea: 10-50 mg/8oz (more with black teas) Soda: 30-60 mg/12oz Dark chocolate: 20mg/oz

Minimum effective concentration is around 0.05 mg/dL. Total body water is 40L for a 5'10" male (5'10" male has about a 70kg lean body mass regardless of total body weight and 40L of that is water. The 70kg and 40L vary linearly with height for adults). So those two cups of French pressed Sumatra you stopped drinking at 8:30 after a 7pm pasta dinner could easily keep you wired until 1 or 2 in the morning. Go on, have that chocolate ice cream, too.

8) Calculate when you want to get up (remember, you need to phase in the change, one hour a day). Establish a routine that starts at dinner. Eat. No more caffeine. Work. Have a small, fatty snack. Work until an hour before you need to go to sleep. Brush your teeth, change; lay down. Read something good. I recommend the classics. Doesn't really engage the problem-solving areas of your brain, but you've been meaning to start reading those things. Start with Plato. Very readable.

9) If you just absolutely have to go to sleep with noise, I recommend white noise. A beat, rhythm, or lyric will capture your conscious mind.

As for getting up, the only thing I've found that definitely will get me up without relying on sunrise is a social commitment. If surgery starts at 7 am and I need to round on patients before then, it's relatively easy to get up at 4:15. If I'm on a "research month", um, yeah.

The main thing I felt at first was relief. For the whole three years we'd endured one disaster after another. There was literally some new mortal threat every few months. When the deal finally closed, the feeling of finally being able to relax was so strong (and so unfamiliar) that I was practically high for several months on it.

When I was in grad school I once had a kidney stone so bad that I ended up in an emergency room on Thanksgiving Day. They gave me some fairly strong opiate intravenously. If you've ever had something like this, you understand the appeal of heroin. Especially coming after a week of being curled up into a ball with pain. The feeling when we sold was a less intense but longer lasting version of this.

In retrospect, we could have made Viaweb a lot less painful by spending/raising less money. That was what made it so stressful. But startups were more expensive then. Or at least, everyone thought they had to be.

There is no "think". There is "do" and "do not".

Sounds like you've made your decision and you just want a push. And since you've asked here, instead of anywhere else, you know that we will push. And that's what you want. You are just a tiny bit insecure and want someone else to say it, but you've subconsciously guaranteed you'll get the push you want.

Ok then, I'll oblige.

DO IT! It sounds like you can afford it. Bad economic times are a good time to start. If you can survive through these times, you'll be positioned to explode when things take off. You don't have major financial obligations. You'll never regret quitting your job and taking a friggin chance. Take the chance. Embrace it. You only live life once.

> "Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle."

That's pretty damning. Google has always had a very developer-centric environment - and backing up design decisions with data definitely seems like a logical extension of that.

> "I can’t fault Google for this reliance on data. And I can’t exactly point to financial failure or a shrinking number of users to prove it has done anything wrong."

It's probably a big reason why Google hasn't had a truly innovative design in a long time. It seems like it's far too safe for them to go with what they know and what's been tested rather than something new and challenging.

A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.

Wait, you hate your day job, but you've already lined up both your next big idea and the means to fund it while it gets going? And now you're here asking for permission?

Seriously, dude or dudette, what more do you need? An engraved invitation to follow your heart from Cupid?

Getting up in the morning used to be one of the central struggles of my life (seriously), but I rarely think about it now and I'm almost always up by 430am, which is something I never thought would happen. Here's my story, if anyone is interested.

I've struggled with getting up my entire life, and so has my entire family, immediate and extended. My 18-year-old brother regularly sleeps until 1pm, as do many of my cousins and their parents. I was homeschooled growing up and the day didn't typically start until 11am. In high school, I got suspended numerous times for missing my first few classes. I joined the Navy out of HS and I pretty rarely had issues with being late because I overslept, because the military is very effective at putting the fear of God in you regarding the consequences. I still always slept until the last possible minute before getting up. After the Navy, I went back to finish college and ended up taking about 30 hours worth of classes every semester, which helped some, but I still overslept and was always jumping out of bed and rushing to class at the last second. I very often would sit down in class about 5-10 mins after having been sound asleep before. My wife was very frustrated, and I was frustrated with myself. I was sure that I had some kind of sleep disorder, especially since my whole family is like this.

So what changed? Mostly what changed is that I realized what you've realized: life is too short to sleep it away. My central problem has always been the actual act of getting up; once I'm up and awake, I'm fine. So I started looking around and I found this article by Steve Pavlina:

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-ea...

Basically, his method is to practice getting up, in the middle of the day. Bizarre (and embarrassing), but it works. I did this every day for a few weeks, and I immediately noticed a difference.

The other big thing I did was go to bed early. Not earlier, as I typically went to bed at 1am or 2am, but early. Like 8pm. I'd go to bed at 8pm for a week and get up at 5am. That was more sleep than I usually got, and since I was doing it consistently, it got easier over time. Then I started going to bed a little later and now I usually get to bed between 9pm and 10pm. Because I'm consistent, I get better quality sleep and I can get by on 7 hours consistently.

I know it's frustrating to have someone tell you to just go to bed early, but I found that it's a lot harder than it looks, especially because you've almost always got way more to do than you have time for and it feels like you should work on some of it rather than go to bed. The key for me was realizing (after some "split-testing") that I get probably 2-3x more accomplished in the four hours from 5am - 9am that I do from 10pm - 2am.

A few other things that I found vital: - no caffeine after noon - no computer or tv within an hour of bed - keep room as dark and quiet as possible while sleeping - try to keep the same schedule on weekends - alarm clock in different room - once you're up, immediately splash water in your face - exercise several times per week - track your progress!

Try this for a month. Most people I know who have become early risers would never go back. There's something incredibly rewarding about hitting 8am having already had breakfast, worked out, showered, knocked out a bunch of emails, read all your blogs, and built two new features. In San Francisco, that means you're about two hours from when most folks even start working :)

Good luck!

> A real shame. Google is losing some major talent - which appears to have only been squandered over the last three years.

When I started at Google Nov. '06 Doug had created some awesome Gmail mockups that really took the design and functionality above and beyond and -- having heard about how ground up Goog worked -- I was thinking those designs would be acted upon and built in the coming months and I was excited about using that Gmail.

When I left end of last year, the mockups were still being iterated on, and the only thing that had been built based on those mockups were the buttons. Gmail's just too big, as are search and ads, and UX is too disorganized and outnumbered to have any say.

I'd recommend sleeping in a room that gets sunlight as early as possible. As the room warms up (and gets brighter), you'll naturally wake up less groggily.

If your schedule can handle it, try just going to sleep when you are tired and seeing when you wake up (ie. don't use an alarm at all).

I tried this for about six months, and the following happened.

The first week or two I slept upwards of 10-11 hours a night, and woke up in the afternoon.

The next couple months, my schedule kind of rotated around the clock (I'd wake up about 30-45 mins later each day), but I only slept 8-9 hours.

By month four, I was only sleeping 7-7.5 hours at a time, and my schedule rotation had slowed to where it was only shifting about 15 mins a day.

The best part was that I always woke up extremely fresh and ready to go. I never felt like the walking dead, and generally was happier.

Before I tried this, I thought I was a night person, just because I always seem to stay up too late and dislike waking up... but I realized what I really liked was the quiet, and found that early morning quiet time (4-7am) was actually more productive, just because I wasn't worn out from a whole day of being awake.

Sadly I had to return to a day job for a bit before grad school, so now I survive mostly on coffee, but it was fun to try when I had the chance.

I don't like vulnerability markets. It seems to me like a flaw is more valuable before it's patched, and more valuable before it's disclosed. Like plutonium, anything done to make it safer makes it less valuable. If you're going to pay top dollar for something like that, you bother me.

But I have two problems with where you're going.

First, finding a bug in your own time and not telling Apple about it unless they pay you isn't blackmail. Charlie Miller bills $300/hour. His work product is worth money. Apple has no right to confiscate it. If the dilemma was, "pay up or it's going to the Russian Mafia", it'd be blackmail. But if you think Charlie Miller is selling vulnerabilities to the Russian Mafia, you're a jackass.

Second, the reason you don't see me at CanSecWest --- well, one of them, another being that Nils and Charlie and Dino would crush me --- is that I spent all day reversing protocols, writing fuzzers, and finding flaws. For cash. Vendors pay us, and so do large companies that buy from those vendors. It's my day job; it's a job; money changes hands. How is Charlie's proposal different?

I think it is different. But it's way more subtle than you're making out to be. It's also a common industry practice, so making him the face of it isn't a great play.

(You can see where we stand on this: http://www.matasano.com/log/mtso/ethics/).

The title will get votes, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of content in it. "Rails won". OK, why? What's good about it?

I wish the author at least postulated some reasons why Rails became popular:

* It launched before the other web frameworks of its nature (in fact, many were inspired by it).

* It hit API stability many years before Django did.

* It's a lot more flexible than most PHP frameworks.

* Ruby makes pretty, domain-specific languages easy.

* Rails, while allowing you to override defaults, doesn't ask you if you don't care.

* The features have kept coming in Rails with regular releases increasing its value. Many of the additions have come from real-world, high-value projects. That can't be said for many frameworks which were built as "we can make Rails in (Java|PHP|Python|etc.)".

Rails has hit a tipping point, but the interesting question is why. The author hasn't put anything forward there. In fact, the author has some downright weird statements. He can't find anything bad to say about Django? Rails just plain sucks? Yet Rails wins? Even some of the things he mentions - such as coupling data objects to the database - are done in Django (and most of these style frameworks) in a similar fashion. So, that sucks in Rails and doesn't in Django. Hmm.

It's a great attempt to create one of those articles people love to read that say, "this sucks, but it's still what you should be doing because it doesn't matter that it sucks".

Write a little script that pulls http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>; and does some magic to pull out the info into an RSS feed (yes, ideally pg can add this as a real feature, but I'm being pragmatic here ;-)).

Just a messy Ruby-based example I threw together. Works for me.

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'open-uri'
  require 'hpricot'
  
  username = 'petercooper'
  uri = 'http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=' + username
  doc = Hpricot(open(uri))
  
  puts %{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
  <title>Hacker News responses to #{username}</title>
  <link>#{uri}</link>}
  
  (doc/'td td table').each do |post|
    content = post.inner_html
    next if content =~ />#{username}</       # skip if we posted it
    next unless post.inner_html =~ /vote/    # skip if it's not a post
    id = content[/\_(\d+)/,1]
    comment_text = (post/'.comment').first.inner_text
    commenter = content[/user\?id=(\w+)/,1]
    puts %{  <item>\n    <title>Comment from #{commenter}</title>}
    puts %{    <link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=#{id}</link>}
    puts %{    <description>#{comment_text}</description>\n  </item>}
  end
  
  puts %{</channel></rss>}

It'd be better, but the HTML on Hacker News is from 1996. I was too sloppy to bother fetching the title of the current thread ;-)

With just adding a shebang line and a content-type header line, it works no problems on Dreamhost as a CGI script. Example: http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi

Anyway, thanks for giving me the idea. I'm using that now myself.. lol.

That's what happens when a company has more assets to protect than to conquer...

Our ramen was rice and beans. In fact the rice and beans I used to make during Viaweb became the basis of the dishes we make for founders at YC dinners. (I say we because we now have a cook make the dinners, but I made them for the first 7 cycles.)

Rice & Beans For 2n

   olive oil or butter
   n yellow onions
   3n cloves garlic
   n 12-oz cans Goya white beans
   n cubes Knorr beef bouillon
   n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
   3n teaspoons cumin
   n cups rice, preferably sushi rice

Put rice in rice cooker. Add water as specified on rice package. (Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.) Turn on rice cooker and forget about it.

Chop onions and fry in oil, over fairly low heat, till glassy. Put in chopped garlic, pepper, cumin, and a little more fat, and stir. Keep heat low. Cook another 2 or 3 minutes, then add beans (don't drain the beans), and stir. Throw in the bouillon cube(s), cover, and cook on lowish heat for at least 10 minutes more. Stir vigilantly to avoid sticking.