He did a better job of addressing this issue than Noah Kagan, who was talking about mild fatigue rather than real depression (yes, there's a huge difference). Let me add:

6. Exercise, with a mix of activities: swimming, running (outdoor is better) and strength training. He mentioned that the brain interprets social isolation as a sign of low status. It also interprets physical activity (or the lack thereof) much in the same way. Using your body (running, swimming, hiking) tells the brain that you're an alpha and that it needs to step it up a notch. Mild depression is when the body and brain go into gamma mode (more severe depression is a biological dysfunction of that system) which would be a form of hibernation, as observed in medieval mountain communities during winter, but society isn't tolerant of that, so it leads to misery. (Some mild depressives would be fine, aside from the loss of time, if they could sleep 11-14 hours per day.)

7. Avoid cigarettes at all costs. Use alcohol sparingly: one drink is fine, but it takes a week to recover from a night of serious drinking... and if you're coding, you actually notice the loss. Avoid drugs like cocaine and heroin like the plague. Jury's still out on occasional use of LSD or shrooms (but people with any history of mental illness need to be very cautious) but they certainly shouldn't be a habit.

8. Relax. Sometimes it's necessary to spend time in the woods and just (sorry for sounding hippy-dippy) be mindful. 24/7 Internet connectivity is not always helpful.

9. Read novels and watch movies. There's something healing about narrative that isn't provided by (as much as they are enjoyable to read) books about formal semantics of programming languages.

10. Music. It helps. I have a lot of friends who say they never would have gotten through their teenage years, or a bad turn of business, without music.

11. Go somewhere new, do something different. It doesn't have to be an "exotic" or expensive vacation; if your goal is to heal, it's better that it not be. Just a trip to visit friends 50 km away can help.

12. 2 weeks of real vacation, as an absolute minimum, per year. Take unpaid leave if you need to. Four weeks is best. Total productivity is maximal at 3 weeks of vacation and per-day productivity is maximized at 7-9. Europeans have it figured out: you need two types of vacation: exploration vacations to new places (Alaska, Cambodia, Andes) where difficulty and stress are OK and relaxation vacations where stress levels are low and variation of activity is not required. Unfortunately, Americans get stuck having to choose one or the other, and generally do only the first kind of vacation when they're young and only the second kind when they're old.

For the record, if you only get 1-2 weeks but can take unpaid leave without it hurting your career, you probably should. A 2% pay drop for an extra week of vacation is worth it IMO.

13. Fruits and vegetables. The casual arrow is unclear and probably goes both ways, but depressed people tend to eat a lot of white carbs. Americans tend to get dieting wrong, as if it's some set of religious prohibitions that have to be followed to the letter, when in reality there are few foods one should never eat. Instead of dieting negatively ("I won't eat X") it's better to diet positively and replace unhealthy foods with better alternatives (e.g. 70+ percent of your desserts should be fruit).

14. "Don't fuck crazy". High-power programming/technology, as a career, is only 10-20% more time-intensive than the average job-- you haven't seen bad hours till you've worked on Wall Street-- but it's 200% more energy-intensive. You need a supportive and decent partner who will be your rock of stability, not someone who will drain you.

This is rather an attack on a strawman. No one thinks that ideas don't matter at all. Obviously you have to have a good one at some point.

When people say that execution matters more than the idea in a startup, what they're really saying is something fairly complicated: that you need both a good idea and good execution, but that (1) since good execution is rarer, you should worry more about that, and (2) good execution will tend to fix bad ideas, because if you pay attention to users and iterate fast, you will in the worst case end up with a good idea by successive approximations.

Link to the full article in PDF which is also NOT under a pay wall.

http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf

I think anyone who knows more than one language implicitly realizes the conclusions of this paper but she has some fascinating examples.

Copyright terms in the U.S. did not always run into the 100+ years category.

Here is a rough summary of how the terms have evolved under U.S. law (the details of which are nicely summarized here: http://ipwatchdog.com/2011/05/27/copyrights-last-for-a-limit...):

1790: maps, charts, and books - 14-year term

1831: 28-year term with option to renew for another 14 years (musical compositions, prints, dramatic compositions, photographs, works of art and music added to list of protected works in 1800s)

1909 (a major act): 28-year term from date of publication, renewable for another 28 years (applied to "published" works only, with state laws governing unpublished works) (motion pictures added to list of protectible works)

1976 (another major act): newly published works (life of author plus 50 years); works copyrighted before 1978 (term increased from 28 to 47 years, for 75 years total with renewal) (applies to all works, whether or not published, once in a fixed medium of expression; state laws preempted and no longer valid; computer programs also protected by the 1980s)

1998 (Copyright Term Extension - "Sonny Bono Act"): works created after 1978 (life of author plus 70 years, with joint works tied to life of longest living author, and with works-for-hire, i.e., corporate authorship, getting the shorter of a 120-year term from date of creation or a 95-year term from date of publication); works created before 1978 (total term increased from 75 to 95 years)

The rough summary above is just that and many nuances exist. If this all makes your head spin, there is a nifty "public domain calculator" to assist you, found here: http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/calculator.html

The trend is pretty obvious: wildly long terms for copyright are in fact a relatively recent phenomenon, as are legislative efforts to go back to early works and give them ex post facto term extensions. It didn't always used to be this way. The focus seems to have moved away from protecting primarily an author's rights to a creative work during his lifetime to protecting a "franchise," often corporate, that lasts well beyond the lives of those around when a work is created. These are policy decisions, of course, albeit (and sadly) much influenced by lobbying today.