Mozilla accepting Bitcoin donations - <AUTHOR> https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/content/give-bitcoin <comment><USER3> A little offtopic, has any of the major Bitcoin heists been traced to spending yet? Would be funny to see a portion contribute to a project like this. Especially in the case of Silk Road where no one can really come forward and claim their bitcoin..

<comment><USER4> I don't think there's any good reason to speculate wildly about the interests of a smallish segment of the market.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, was this a reply to the wrong comment? Can you expand?

<comment><USER4> Sure. Thank you for asking. No, it was directly addressing speculative conversation.

I'm aware this might be a contentious statement, but frankly I'm tired of the same old conversations about the value of Bitcoin compared to traditional fiat. I much more appreciate conversations about the value of the technology behind the blockchain, and the challenges we can surmount wielding it.

Conversations that incite conflict, including (perhaps) your original comment, make me bored and sad when I think about how people approach and understand crypto currencies. As the 'technical luminaries' for the the less technical in the world, I think we owe it to ourselves to not incite FUD here in this forum and then carry it out with us into the world.

It's the holidays as well, so it's a time when families gather and tell stories. If we are having a good time bashing on Bitcoin value or relating it to some two bit drug market that the FBI knocked down, we aren't educating on it's value. You are just catering to the fear that is always present with new technologies.

Anyway, you are allowed your own thoughts regarding the matter. I apologize if I came off overly aggressive about it. It's important to me!

<comment><USER3> My comment was out of genuine curiosity. I agree they're not of much technical value and for HN it's closer to "trash" material, however I don't see why we must limit our comments to purely technical concepts.

I find the events surrounding Bitcoin, specifically the criminal aspects fascinating. I mean come on, who doesn't love a good heist? Especially one that's been committed anonymously and thus far turned up completely untraceable. No, the content of the discussion generally isn't very intellectual, however it does incite and bring about thought-provoking and technically interesting arguments.

I never really put forth my thoughts on anything relating to Bitcoin when I posted that comment. I was merely asking if there'd been work done around tracing Bitcoin theft.. I don't think I'm inciting FUD whilst asking a question. I understand that the talk of crime and theft in Bitcoin could become tiresome for you and other technically and academically interested parties, however my fascination with such topics isn't limited to Bitcoin. I just don't think you should accuse me of speculation or inciting FUD when all I posed was a question.

Also to be fair, I had labelled my comment offtopic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Contributed to Mozilla for the first time ever with Bitcoin. Very fast/easy.

<comment><USER6> Okay honest question: How did you get bitcoins? I've looked around and my options seem to be to give my CC number to a shady website or to meet someone in person and give them cash. Is there really no safe-sounding option?

<comment><USER7> Have you tried Circle? They're funded with over $17 million [1], so I don't think they qualify as shady, and I'm pretty sure they let you buy with a credit card.

[1] edit. Double checked and the looks like it's $17 million: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/26/bitcoin-gets-another- boost-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/26/bitcoin-gets-another-boost-as- circle-internet-raises-17-million/)

<comment><USER8> Completely free with ACH purchases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When you hit the "Donate" link, it asks you for your email addy. IANAL, but why not accept anonymous donations?

<comment><USER10> When Coinbase gives the option to donate directly to a Bitcoin address, "1GnkMmEjTHHrw8BaWzBxEzuNweUwhmwGrg" in this case, is that a wallet Mozilla owns?

<comment><USER11> It looks like a new address is generated for each transaction.

<comment><USER10> Oh, good to know. I wish we knew Mozilla's permanent Bitcoin address.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's how it works. From my understanding, a new address is typically used for every new transaction. What you are interested in is their wallet which would be the sum of their addresses.

On the other hand, it appears that they are using Coinbase. In that case I'm not sure Mozilla would have direct access to a wallet. Instead I imagine that Coinbase keeps track of their balance which is divided among Coinbase's wallets (sort of like a bank). I'm not too well versed however, so maybe someone else can clear this up.

<comment><USER13> Correct. Bitcoin addresses are more like invoice numbers than account numbers. You're expected to use a different one for each transaction so that you can tell them apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> is anyone else seeing a broken image in the middle where I assume what should be the "pay with bitcoin" button is?

[https://i.imgur.com/9oAmKDl.png](https://i.imgur.com/9oAmKDl.png)

<comment><USER15> It looks like Coinbase's CDN uses unique identifiers for static assets to prevent caching, and the one Mozilla used for that image is out of date.

Broken: [https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large-36ee93618...](https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large-36ee936185fdf9a88e3a28cc685fb9b7.png)

Working: [https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large.png](https://coinbase.com/assets/buttons/donation_large.png)

<comment><USER16> Ugh. Thanks, will get folks to look at what happened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No Dogecoin? Requires an email address? Why not just post a BTC and/or Doge address and be done with it?

<comment><USER18> I would hope Mozilla's ethics prevent them from promoting scams by accepting Dogecoin.

<comment><USER17> They're already accepting scams like bitcoin, why not accept the crytpocurrency that doesn't try to pretend it isn't a joke

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not on the main donation page. If it's hidden away in a nook it doesn't count.

<comment><USER20> When Wikimedia started accepting Bitcoin, I was utterly unsurprised that the _very first_ reaction from Bitcoiners was to complain about how WMF was doing it. You'd almost think their interest was in promoting Bitcoin rather than in donating to the charity in question.

<comment><USER19> No, seriously.

Bitcoin users donate more to causes. Why would they require a separate Google search just to donate in a widely used currency? What's the point of creating a separate page? It's simply bad practice.

It seems to me you just want to jump on a soap box. Go blog about it. But when I want to donate to something I go to the website and click 'Donate' and I USE THE OPTIONS THERE...

<comment><USER21> > Bitcoin users donate more to causes.

No evidence of this.

> Why would they require a separate Google search just to donate in a widely > used currency?

It's not "widely used" for any fair definition of the term, it's an upcoming niche _at best_.

> But when I want to donate to something I go to the website and click > 'Donate' and I USE THE OPTIONS THERE...

Fair enough. It's really up to you to decide what's more important, donating to the cause or bitcoin evangelism; if you're more concerned with the former rather than the latter, it shouldn't matter where the bitcoin option is located so long as you can use it to make your contribution.

<comment><USER19> This is what I mean. This isn't a debate and I've no interest in your lack of research and bad arguments.

Mozilla says they accept Bitcoin and has A page for it. But beyond this single story, people are never going to see it. If they started accepting feces and didn't put it on the donation page I'd still say it doesn't count.

If you want to rant about Bitcoin and act like you're on some sort of higher ground because you don't care about what currencies are accepted, blog about it. I don't care. It has nothing to do with my point.

<comment><USER21> > This isn't a debate and I've no interest in your lack of research and bad > arguments.

This is a common tactic used by individuals with no evidence to support their claim. Rather than substantiate _your_ claim that "bitcoin users donate more to causes" or provide numbers to explain _your_ subjective assertion that bitcoin is a "widely used currency", you shift the onus on me to provide evidence for statements made by yourself. Its your responsibility to support your own claims, not mine.

> Mozilla says they accept Bitcoin and has A page for it. But beyond this > single story, people are never going to see it.

...

> _people are never going to see it_.

Don't you understand that _nobody cares about that_ except bitcoin evangelists. The bitcoin donation page is functioning as intended, anybody who cares about supporting the Mozilla foundation has the option to donate funds using fiat or bitcoin. If your only complaint is related to the visibility of the bitcoin donation option, then it's pretty obvious to everyone that all you're really after is publicity for bitcoin.

> If you want to rant about Bitcoin and act like you're on some sort of higher > ground because you don't care about what currencies are accepted

What's with the persecution complex? "Not caring which currencies are accepted" doesn't mean I feel like I'm on "higher ground", it literally means what the sentence says: I don't care, and nobody else does except people who have a bitcoin promotion agenda.

<comment><USER19> > nobody cares about that except bitcoin evangelists

I haven't evangelized anything. I said Mozilla does NOT accept Bitcoin though their donation page. Get over yourself.

<comment><USER21> > Mozilla does NOT accept Bitcoin though their donation page.

Wrong.

[https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/content/give- bitcoin/](https://sendto.mozilla.org/page/content/give-bitcoin/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious why Mozilla needs contributions.

Previously they were getting $300M a year from Google and they were required to spend that every year, from what I've been told from employees that I know. Everything I've heard from them is that Mozilla is a very wasteful company. They spend a bunch of money on things like boondoggles to Europe for the staff, apartments in Paris that anyone can book, employees sitting around with almost no work to do, etc. They also have really lucrative bonuses (>40%/yr) for employees that push salaries over $200k for senior engineers, so I'm just wondering why they even bother with donations? I'm assuming that their contract with Yahoo is even more lucrative than $300M/year, so they must have a lot of money to spend, why worry about donations that might only reach a small percentage of that?

<comment><USER23> Major points: donations are used for projects working on things like web literacy, rather than on large engineering projects like Firefox. The more Mozilla get from donations, the less dependent on Google/Yahoo they have to be and thus they can be more independent - even fairly small absolute amounts will 'push the needle' here.

Minor point: I strongly contest that Mozilla is a wasteful company - <USER2> are low by large-tech-firm standards and spending (on travel, equipment, etc.) is fairly frugal. I have never heard of employees having almost work to do - it is nearly always the opposite. Travel is nearly always for coordinated team work since many employees and volunteers work remotely. For a (relatively) small budget, Mozilla produce an awful lot of results - the entire company is run on vastly less than the marketing budget (!) for Chrome, for example (sorry, can't find a source though).

<comment><USER24> The "marketing budget for Chrome" is something thrown around internally at Mozilla, but that number was pulled out of calculations on how much it would cost somebody else to advertise Chrome that google does on its own properties. Google does not have to charge itself to advertise itself.

<comment><USER25> They have to give up the revenue advertising for someone else, to advertise for themselves.

<comment><USER26> In theory; in practice most of the places where Chrome is advertised they wouldn't advertise a third-party product. (Like on the Google search engine homepage, for instance.) That said, I suppose they could be advertising a different internal product there, so there's certainly an opportunity cost regardless.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is life expectancy a flawed measure of health care quality? - <AUTHOR> http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/how-flawed-is-life-expectancy/

<comment><USER2> Poor scientists. Their conclusions are correct, but a significant portion of the reasoning which would allow them to get there is politically off limits.

That's ok, I'm politically incorrect. I'll stick to the comparison between the US and Japan, since numbers are easy to come by[1]. On the face of it, it looks as if Japan has us beat: 82.6 years to 78.4 years.

Now lets break things down by subgroup:

People of Japanese descent: 84.5 years in the US, 82.6 years in Japan. This long lived group makes up <5% of the US (too lazy to look up exact #, but east Asians in total are about 5% of the US), and about 99.4% of Japan.

[http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2...](http://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/templates/browse.aspx?lvl=2&lvlID=53)

People of European descent: 78 in the US, unknown (but irrelevant) in Japan. This group makes up about 80% of the US, and < 0.6% of Japan.

People of African descent: 72 in the US, unknown/irrelevant in Japan. This short lived group makes up about 12% of the US, and as far as I'm aware Japan only knows about this group via video games.

<http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_15.pdf>

So if the US had the same demographics as Japan, our life expectancy would be 2 years longer.

[1] Japan is the only industrialized nation with the property that the (possibly great great) grandchildren of Japanese immigrants is classified by the census a "Japanese American".

<comment><USER3> >>People of Japanese descent: 84.5 years in the US, 82.6 years in Japan.

What if someone was to add something like "People of Japanese descent: $85 000 average family income in the US, $50 000 in Japan." (I've made up the numbers from personal experience) Obviously richer ppl live longer.

<comment><USER2> If you assume Japanese Americans are average for Asian Americans, the actual number is $65,000 (see my link).

In any case, I agree with you. Income is a major effect, although it's far from clear that this is due to income buying health care. In fact, most of the evidence suggests health care has nothing to do with it. For instance, during the RAND experiment, richer people were healthier than the poor regardless of which category they were randomly dropped into. (Observational studies since then draw less clear conclusions, since observational studies are crappy in comparison to randomized experiments.)

Another fun fact. The shortest lived people in the US are the Lakota, who live _35 years less_ than Japanese Americans (not a typo, life expectancy = 50). This group gets free health care via IHS (I believe it is structured similarly to Britains NHS), so it seems that there are other factors at work.

Huh, imagine that. Life expectancy is, in fact, not a great measure of health care, since it is affected by so many other factors.

<comment><USER4> > This group gets free health care via IHS (I believe it is structured > similarly to Britains NHS)

IHS is pretty much a horrorshow. It's one of the best arguments against govt- run healthcare.

It doesn't much matter if some govt somewhere can run healthcare well. The US govt runs healthcare badly. Fix that first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yummyfajitas' argument regarding life expectancy of different ethnic groups that have come to the US is thoughtful.

I've always felt that the life expectancy stat only works in a statist, hyper- controlled system. Once you let people make personal decisions about their health, the utility of the stat declines.

The scientists in this article try to distinguish health-related from non- health-related causes of death. But even our health-related causes of death are not exactly under the control of the medical establishment. People eat food as if they had an active death wish.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've always thought that life expectancy was a poor measure of health care quality. My reasoning is simple, the US is the most obese country in the world, and obesity is known to cause numerous health problems and shortens life expectancy. The health problems and shortening of life expectancy ends up having very little to do with poor health care quality (poor health education maybe).

I wonder if an argument could be made that given the USs propensity towards unhealthy lifestyles that the US is in fact great at healthcare because the life expectancy is as high as it is?

Finally, the best measures I've seen to date on healthcare quality are looking at individual outcomes. For example, if you get prostate cancer what are the odds of living in the US versus other countries. I can't find the exact article now, but various countries do better at various health issues with the US leading many of them.

[http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival- ra...](http://www.webmd.com/cancer/news/20080716/cancer-survival-rates-vary- by-country)

 _The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports._

<comment><USER7> >I wonder if an argument could be made that given the USs propensity towards unhealthy lifestyles that the US is in fact great at healthcare because the life expectancy is as high as it is?

This is no argument to be made about the US having great health care. I don't know how a place where a random illness can wipe out your _and your family's_ finances can even be considered first world.

To address your specific claim "we must be good because we make horrible life choices and don't die!" I would point at the UK and alcohol consumption. Their bad life choices are driving costs up to the point that they'll probably have to make some big changes to deal with them but so far the system is doing a reasonable job of keeping them from dying from it.

<comment><USER6> _This is no argument to be made about the US having great health care. I don't know how a place where a random illness can wipe out your and your family's finances can even be considered first world._

I didn't claim anything and simply wondered aloud. Also, the article was about life expectancy and quality of healthcare and spoke nothing about costs.

Your statement does bring up another question. Would that same hypothetical family prefer to have their finances ruined or have their loved saved from some random illness? Of course the best solution is perfect care at zero cost, but I think we can agree that it is impossible. If the US is actually getting better health outcomes than other systems perhaps the cost is worth it?

And to address your specific claim, I've always thought that the government should provide health related catastrophic fallback insurance similar to the way they do for floods. I don't think the government needs to be involved in the day to day healthcare or insurance matters, but I agree that getting cancer for example should not ruin your families finances.

<comment><USER7> > Would that same hypothetical family prefer to have their finances ruined or > have their loved saved from some random illness?

False dichotomy. The US isn't so much vastly better that the choice is go there and be saved or stay in e.g. France and die. In fact all the sources I've shown seem to indicate the US isn't the best even if you can afford it. Keep in mind that doctors tend to make 3 times more than the average salary in their European "socialist" countries, just not 5 times like their US counterparts.

>but I think we can agree that it is impossible

Of course, it always costs, the question is just how much waste is going into giving huge bonuses, etc., to CEOs of insurance companies who make even more money by cutting people's coverage (insurance is a profitable business in its own right, these guys just want even more).

>If the US is actually getting better health outcomes than other systems perhaps the cost is worth it?

It it were we could discuss it. The reports from both the WHO and Berkely indicate pretty clearly that this isn't the case.

>And to address your specific claim, I've always thought that the government should provide health related catastrophic fallback insurance similar to the way they do for floods. I don't think the government needs to be involved in the day to day healthcare or insurance matters, but I agree that getting cancer for example should not ruin your families finances.

This sounds like something reasonable to look at. Just keep in mind that so many people are living paycheck to paycheck that even a surprise bill of $5k can be enough that they never recover from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I take what this guy writes on statistics with a large grain of salt; despite the domain name the author is not an economist. He is an MD and it goes without saying that he's very smart and accomplished -- but not in the field of statistics.

This is relevant to this particular article, because he may be missing subtle, but important factors that a lay-person would miss. For example, see yummyfajita's post in this discussion.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm sure I'll get clobbered for this, but I am wary of economists using statistics to make political arguments. Between "economist","statistics", and "politics", that's three yellow flags right at the outset.

Unless, of course, they agree with me, in which case they are simply wise academics trying to share their wisdom with the unwashed masses. :)

There is a logical problem here, and it's much deeper than life expectancy. It's a problem with this form of argument. The problem is that, if you use statistics to make political arguments, _you're going to be arguing forever_. Whatever this guy wants to do -- and god bless him I hope he gets his way -- next year the same guy will be using statistics to tell us to do something else. That's because you can slice statistics in an almost infinite amount of ways, and I can guarantee you that one of those ways will show some kind of imbalance or injustice that needs addressing.

That's all fine and dandy if the entire country could turn on a dime. I wish it could but it can't. Not reality. Instead we live in a system where it takes decades to make even one change, and it's extremely rare to stop doing things that don't work -- we just do more new stuff. I hate to rag on the IRS, but take a look at the tax code. It's so bad that I'm willing to wager nobody alive knows how to file taxes exactly correct.

This puts us in an infinite cycle of where we're always measuring things with statistics, finding some social cause worth pursuing, painfully making changes, then making more measurements. Each time through the loop the system gets more and more unwieldy and complex. It's a feedback loop that increases government dysfunction.

So instead of arguing about one cause or another, I'd like to suggest a rule for such discussions: if you want to make a case for some kind of social policy change, then make it in terms of a trade-off from whatever the existing status quo is. I realize there are a lot of problems with this suggestion, but at least it starts putting things in terms of trade-offs instead of wish- lists. Just from looking around, it seems to me that the real world is a lot more about trade-offs and compromises than moral crusades and justice. But that's just me. The only thing that I am observing is that this pattern can be repeated indefinitely, and each time through the loop conditions will continue to deteriorate. It's reactive leadership by statistics, and that almost never works.

<comment><USER10> On one hand you are suggesting "we can't know anything, let's not bother" but on the other hand you are saying "let's talk about things we should actually do".

Ok! I moved to Canada (Quebec) from the US. The healthcare system is overloaded, there are weird things like a) it's extremely hard to get a family doctor, b) you have to go to a clinic early in the morning to get a number + time of day and then come back at that time to be seen, and c) you still need to pay your own way (or get insurance) for dental / vision. You have to wait weeks/months to have a surgery, but you have to do that in the US and then promptly file for personal bankruptcy.

That's still a whole hell of a lot better than a random unexpected illness or injury sending an employed, insured person into bankruptcy. Seeing a doctor is now a possibility instead of a dangerous worst-case scenario that could ruin my life. No more hoping the pain/infection/whatever just goes away on its own.

Thus, I still think moving towards a government program / single payer / whatever you want to call it system is the best idea. Now, I based this all on personal anecdotal experience and not statistics, so I wonder if anyone will actually agree with me. :)

<comment><USER6> _You have to wait weeks/months to have a surgery, but you have to do that in the US_

There are many things messed up about healthcare in the US, but I've never had to wait for it. I had an emergency appendicitis surgery and from when I went to the doctor to when I was put under was about 2 hours.

I've also had a non-emergency knee surgery (replaced ACL). I went to the doctor one day and had an MRI that same day. I had to wait 2 days for the MRI results, but when they came back positive for an ACL tear I had the option of surgery 2 days later. I opted for 2 weeks later so I could get work all set up for me to be out a couple weeks.

Now, I have insurance and paid a bit here and there out of pocket, but waiting for care is one thing I didn't do.

<comment><USER11> _Now, I have insurance and paid a bit here and there out of pocket, but waiting for care is one thing I didn't do._

I think that may be key. I had insurance and appendicitis, and waited around 12 hours before surgery, but my brother was in a car accident without insurance, and was almost sent home. Luckily, a family member who is a nurse caused enough of a storm that he received the proper care.

Not having insurance is what really skews the statistics in the U.S. Cook County hospital is an example of a hospital which provides care for the uninsured, and the wait times are significant.

I haven't seen it, but I'd be interested to see the statistics on health care in the United States for the uninsured versus the insured: Wait times, costs, quality of care, quality of life, and life span.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Top Research Papers In Computer Science By Mendeley Readership - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mendeley.com/highlighting-research/the-top-10-research-papers-in-computer-science-by-mendeley-readership/

<comment><USER2> I'm one-third of the way working through Manning and Schuetze www.amazon.com/Foundations-Statistical-Natural-Language- Processing/dp/0262133601, so when I saw _Latent Dirichlet Allocation_ as the top ranked paper I headed straight to the index to see what they said about it, and discovered it was not referenced. Turns out the publication date of this paper is 2003. I knew this field was fast moving, so I've just added the first paper I have to read after I get through this book.

<comment><USER3> NLP is insanely fast-moving. Especially the machine learning side of things (like the EMNLP conference), proceedings this year have very little overlap from even 7 or 8 years ago.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources for basic accounting for small SaaS type businesses - <AUTHOR>

[This is my first post on HN; please excuse any faux pas]
I've been reading HN for a few months now and thoroughly enjoy the entrepreneurial spirit mixed with a zealous love for programming.
The "Launch an App Month" along with the articles from 21times.org are the most recent in a long list of resources I've been reading for answering a lot of questions I have had about having a go at starting my own software business.
I've read a slew of articles over marketing, presentations, investors, technologies, etc... but there is one area I've seen very little coverage of: basic accounting for startups and small SaaS business.
Given that HN is frequented by programmers, a number of whom run their own SaaS business, can anyone point me to a good resource for learning that might be written from the perspective of someone in our field?
Thanks!
(Yes, I realize I could use 'the Google' but my ignorance wouldn't provide a very good filter or measure of the value of what I found there) <comment><USER2> If you're a CLI kind of person, and want serious control over everything involved in the accounting process, check this out:

<https://github.com/jwiegley/ledger/wiki/>

It's an open source CLI accounting program, which works on text files in a simple, easy to write/generate format. The original program is in C, but the file format is also supported with python (beancount) and haskell (hledger) implementations.

The documentation leads you through the basics of accounting, and is available here:

<http://cloud.github.com/downloads/jwiegley/ledger/ledger.pdf></comment>


Ask HN: How does project management work in your small / tiny startup? - <AUTHOR> For some context I work for a tiny startup where I'm the only tech person.  I am frequently handed a task that is unclearly defined and I work with the business owner to tease out the spec over time or am expected to come up with the "correct" solution intuitively.  We're so small that everybody has too much work to do so I understand the necessity to just hand off the work but because I don't deal with clients my "correct" solution on first pass frequently diverges from what the owner / stakeholder is thinking.  In addition the work sort of stacks up with the highest priority task being the one that has a client deadline attached or is a flashy "marketing" feature.  There is no clear direction from the owner describing what should go next in the pipeline with a huge list of possible projects both small & large.  The critical stuff is often left for me to work out outside of or in between the other requests but almost never has dedicated time to deal with it.  We don't really have the budget to hire another tech person and have tried outsourcing work which resulted in almost exclusively terrible / sub-par results (which was partly on us).  I also am not clear I'm given the tools to succeed in the sense that I feel like in a larger organization a CEO might tell a manager they want X feature and the manager is required to figure it out but they have more access to work out what a "correct" solution is (via access to stakeholder(s)).  I realize there is a lot wrong with this picture and I should probably have already moved on but I'd like to grow as a person and think this is an opportunity for just that.  I'm just not sure how to turn the tide in the direction I want.  Anyway TIA. <comment><USER2> IMO, ideally a minimal tech team consists of two people: a full time programmer and a full time manager.

To use a gaming analogy, one is the DPS and one is the tank. The programmer moves the needle, makes things happen. But someone has to absorb all the attacks, so that they can do their magic.

The job of a programmer is to focus, deeply. The job of a manager is to handle all the meetings, always pick up calls, cut out unnecessary features.

Without a manager, you tend to take on more than you need to, because there's nobody around to reduce the number of things that need to be done, or estimate the timeline properly. Sometimes you need stuff from the client - API access, and so on. This is the manager's job to keep following up.

<comment><USER3> This is how I view managers, iteration managers etc. not only do they "steer the ship" (i.e. set the strategy) they are a shield from the rest of the business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> These are very common problems to have, even with large teams that include project managers. The first problem is prioritization. One way to deal with this is to do a weekly meeting to hash out the product roadmap and prioritization. If you do this well, the business will prioritize your work for you. To do this really well, you need a few things. First a rough sense of how much effort a project is. A day, a week? Second, the business should be estimating a rough impact on the business. A good question to ask is how much impact will this have on revenue? You should be working on things that have the biggest impact on revenue with the tiebreaker going to what's fastest to implement. Importantly you need to make it clear what your capacity is. My general rule of thumb is that you should be scheduling a maximum of 3 tasks to do each week.

Let's talk about the ill-defined tasks. The short-term solution is to say that every task requires at least one meeting to gather the requirements and design a solution. Until requirements are defined AND accepted by you, you can't schedule the work. You need acceptance criteria.

You're going to need buy-in from the business. Talk to your favorite manager/exec and discuss the problems you're having and your proposed solutions. They May have their own ideas and solutions to suggest. Trial it out and adjust the processes as necessary.

As a side note, you'll recognize some of these practices as agile practices. In factory terms, you're the bottleneck/constraint and you're trying to protect the constraint so that it's used as effectively as possible. Good luck

</comment><comment><USER5> We use our own tool [https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com) for project management and it works great. You need one person who overlooks the tasks and reorganizes it when there is something wrong. The person organizing the Tech Team (like you) should know at least the basics of the technical stuff you use or what you (can) do. Is some info missing, you can just ask other persons via @mentions. At Zenkit there is a rule, that we need to answer to such mentions as fast as possible. The whole work becomes easier because you don´t need to call someone and you and the whole team can see what everyone is up to. For all these tasks we use the kanban view (like to-do, in progress, done) and many companies set a rule, that one person should only have for example three tasks assigned to him on to-do.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have tried trello, asana and google keep. And while they are useful the fact that my company is just me means I lean most on post it notes and a notebook. For example my entire sales pipeline is in color coordinated post it's on my office wall. And for now it works great.

</comment><comment><USER7> Taskwarrior.</comment>


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Show HN: Finite State Machines for PostgreSQL - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/michelp/pgfsm <comment><USER2> Some documentation would go a long way here</comment>


Show HN: Learning CSS Grids - <AUTHOR> http://varun.ca/css-grid/ <comment><USER2> There has to be a better way to work with templates than hand-writing CSS. Why isn't using an IDE for layout staple? Is it because of the low quality of WYSIWYG options? Or how entrenched data and layout in webapps is.</comment>


Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness - <AUTHOR> http://thinktrylearn.com/index.php/Main_Page <comment><USER2> Thanks for the great comments, everyone. My thinking is that any discussion is good discussion. I have a few replies:

@todayiamme (a fine and apropos, name :-) Thanks for the points. This is a Buddhist approach, right? The idea that attachment leads to suffering is one that's been with me for years; very influential. From the Think, Try, Learn perspective, I talk about attachment to experimental outcomes. If we desire and expect a particular result, we have a binary success metric, which makes the process an unhappy one. If things are going our way, we are unhappy because we are afraid it will change. Likewise, if things are not going like we want, we are sad too. Much better is to participate in unfolding events as a scientist would - by observing fully, which brings you into the moment. And mindfulness is a way to be happy (another time-tested idea).

So in fact I'm trying to create a philosophy that resonates with the rational mind, but ties in classic ideas for how to be fulfilled. This is opposite to the idea that eternal bliss is possible. (In fact I'm an atheist, and religion doesn't make sense to me. Jack describes this well. That's why TTL is athiest compatible)

Your experience of keeping a detailed diary is interesting to me. It seems to me that keeping a general record is periodically valuable, but in my work the recording is specific to experiments. The thought that I mention in my recent slidecast ([http://www.slideshare.net/matthewcornell/quantified- selfexpe...](http://www.slideshare.net/matthewcornell/quantified- selfexperimentdrivenlifenoanimation-5020668)) is that observation -> awareness -> change. The self-blame sucks, of course, but ironically, in TTL I argue that you get a "health sense of detachment" by looking at events as information/data, which might help with the negative feelings.

Also, I like your clarification to @DeusExMachina. Well put.

@DeusExMachina: I love your quote:

> "But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is > really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be > happy."

In TTL, the ultimate guarantee of success is that you'll learn something about yourself and grow your character. The process of experimentation will take you in a personal direction you like. Put another way, the focus is on being excellent at discovery, which we all have control over.

Dealing with pain and problems: As you say, they are inevitible, and it's how we cope (with grace, ideally) that defines us. With TTL, my perspective is that those situations are externally-imposed experiments, ones that provide data like such as feelings and pain. Still working this out...

@Jach: Re: brains being a function of ancestral environments - absolutely! I love this quote by Nancy Kress: "A belief in the afterlife [is] probably the single largest aberration of the human mind." (From "Steal across the sky.") In TTL my idea is to manage irrational thinking by modeling it, testing it, and working to make them consistent (AKA "cognitive dissonance," as orangecat points out). In science, throwing out pet theories in is hard, but the truth is ultimately more useful to discoveries. Doesn't work for everyone, though, and may not be as comfortable as other (unprovable) theories.

@todayiamme: re: radical life extension, I'm ready for it now (I'm soon to be 48 YO) but I'm certain it won't be in time. I don't fear death, but I very strongly don't want it. From a time management perspective (my other hat) it can be a real incentive. Just as you point out with the TV watching. (BTW, a "micro" experiment is to go without TV for a week. I guarantee they will have new experiences, even things like being bored, talking more, etc. This is an appropriate setting to have a diary.)

Your quote is poetic, and expresses how I feel too. Thank you for it:

> "I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making > their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful > things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly > beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when > shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will > always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?"

The way this fits into TTL is via collaboration with others, from which the best science comes. The idea is to love and help each other with our experiments, and to tune in (i.e., observe) to the great stuff we have going on in our lives right now. After adopting these ideas, I literally see the world differently. I spent 45 minutes one day last winter marvelling at sunlight reflecting off snow crystals. I found that as I focused I could see individual prismatic effects that varied greatly as I moved my head slightly. It occurred to me that this might have been the inspiration for Chrismas tree lights. Just a thought.

@dan00: Re: happiness being a by-product - absolutely! I think of love that way too. Like happiness and humor, you can't force it, you can only make space and invite it in. [insert garden/seed metaphor, etc.] (Actually, forcing humor via "laughter clubs" is a cool idea - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_Yoga>)

@funthree: "Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that." I understand that the title seems obvious. Then again, it's a short name that is supposed to capture the spirit of the scientific method - treating everything in life as an experiment. (P.S. It's funny that you mention Captin Obvious. Check out The Personal Productivity Encyclopedia Of Superhero Powers - <http://is.gd/ezzfu>)

Thanks again, everyone! -- matt

</comment><comment><USER3> The irony is that you won't discover happiness until you realize that there isn't such a thing as happiness. Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

It's ironic because this encourages people to use the scientific method to delude themselves into thinking that eternal bliss is possible. I actually implemented something like this. I used to keep a detailed diary of the things that have happened and I used to analyze the shit out of everything on paper and then I would check the conclusions and do it again, but somehow it never worked. Upon hitting this I would blame myself and everything I've touched for it. Clearly there has to be something wrong with _me_ , but what I failed to realize was that I was fooling myself in the most logical manner possible.

It's amazing how twisted things are.

Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.

<comment><USER4> > Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it > should be.

While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why _should_ we have misery and pain?

<comment><USER3> I read a story about the Buddha as a kid and I never got it until a few days ago. Once Buddha meets a woman in pain because her new-born child had died. She begs him to bring him back to life and he agrees provided she could get him a handful of rice from a house without death.

Needless to say she couldn't find such a place.

The point is that eternal bliss would be such a wonderful thing, but it doesn't exist anymore than perpetual motion does. Let's face it everything alive today on this earth during this very second in which you have read these words will die. I am an atheist to the core and I will remain an atheist to the core. I don't think that there are any angels, or heaven or some kind of hell out there. I know that the only thing out there is emptiness. There is no doubt about it, and that's the beauty of it.

By accepting the fact that nothing truly ever lasts we can prepare ourselves for peace. It's a really twisted concept that I can't explain in words, but whenever you see the truth that happiness is not just another shot away then you don't crave for things. You don't seek to replace the pain with something else. All you do is focus on just being and that opens the doors for everything else. You learn to love and create for the sake of doing just that. You see beyond yourself and you actually care about other people. Most importantly you realize that just like life learning is a process that will never end till the day you die. It's amazing.

I hope that you understand.

<comment><USER4> I understand, I've read various texts of Eastern philosophy and I enjoy the benefits of being able to let go at times, but I was really hoping for a different argument than this one and the similar one given by Ardit.

I can imagine a world without pain, and a world without death (at least a world where people live a lot longer than 75 years, I won't argue for some physics that lets us live _forever_ ), and if I were a member of that world instead of this one, nothing you two have said would convince me to say "Yeah, pain and death are great, I want some of that. I need some of that!" Similar arguments have also been made for trying Meth and the like, that you just _have_ to experience it! No thanks. I also don't buy the whole "You need pain to experience happiness", but I haven't formulated an eloquent knockdown argument against that yet. While it's true pain and pleasure are related through endorphins, my idea of happiness isn't constant orgasm. I've wondered if these arguments for pain could simply be using an overly broad definition of pain that includes any struggle or conflict, any challenge or exercise... Being for death, especially if you're an atheist, is just ludicrous.

Anyway, I can also imagine being very not-bored in such a different world that knows no pain nor death for very many years, longer than any lifetime any human has yet had. I can imagine that in that world where life is valued oh- so-high, that people are constantly at work to increase it, to let people live even just one more day. I can imagine learning for the sake of learning and creating for the sake of creating, I can imagine doing those things for other ends as well, some selfish, some not.

The brain pattern making up "you" is fairly unique, and it's such a sad shame, a true shame, that so many patterns have already been annihilated even before a mere 75 years have passed. There may be nothing _out there_ that says your matter's state is worth preserving, but there is definitely something _in here_. In human brains. Unfortunately our brains were built by the ancestral environment, not by any benevolent being, and thus we have certain problems such as this contradiction of sometimes believing death and pain are things acceptable, even good, yet nonetheless having a very strong aversion to death and pain. I think the aversion is the saner part of our minds.

<comment><USER5> Very well said. Eliezer Yudkowsky makes similar arguments, most recently in his (outstanding) Harry Potter fanfic: ([http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_...](http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/39/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality)).

 _"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."_

 _there's this little thing called_ cognitive dissonance _, or in plainer English,_ sour grapes _. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers_ , pretending to be wise _as you put it, who found all sorts of_ amazing benefits _to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who_ wasn't _getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to_ start, _in exchange for those_ amazing benefits, _they'd say no. And if you_ didn't _have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even_ heard _of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an_ amazing wonderful great idea _for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum!_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can't directly achieve happiness, because it's a by-product.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is this something like being human 101? Captain obvious? Some other cheesy reference? Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that.</comment>