danielna

Hi Mehr,

I'm a leukemia survivor (AML) and was diagnosed when I was 21 and in undergrad, roughly 8 years ago. I started www.cheekswab.org in 2012 to educate people, especially ethnic minorities, about the exact complications facing minorities who need bone marrow transplants. I also wanted to fill a need that I saw around direct communication around what it's like to be a donor, what the statistics are, what the process is like, and interviews with real people who have gone through the donation process recapping their experiences. I haven't done much with Cheekswab in the last several years but my new years resolution for 2015 was to figure out a path forward with it.

I live and work in NYC as a software engineer and have a lot of experience running these sorts of drives, particularly on college campuses. Feel free to reach out to me if you'd like to talk, whether about leukemia or bone marrow drives: username at gmail.

Please delete this. This is in poor taste.

I was being sarcastic, which admittedly is lost on the web.

Software dev is reduced as easily to an overly simplistic implementation as business savvy is. I think we're making the same point.

I had a lawn mowing business when I was 16. I had marketing, a service and collected payments.

What's the point of business school?

I enjoy photography but not enough (at the moment and foreseeable future) to sink a lot of time/money into it. I don't even consider it a "hobby" as much as I just like to carry a camera around with me when I know I'm going somewhere interesting.

Marco mentions them towards the end of the post but I absolutely love my mirrorless, micro 4/3s camera (Panasonic GF-1). [1] It's small/light enough that it's not a burden to carry (form factor is somewhere between a point and shoot and dSLR) and the picture quality, at least to a novice like myself, is excellent. I'm a big believer in the idea that "the best camera to own is the one you have in your hand" and I really wouldn't want to lug around anything bulkier/heavier, despite the added functionality.

[1] http://craigmod.com/journal/gf1-fieldtest/ - epic craigmod post that sold me on my camera, and has by his own admission given him a good chunk of money/exposure.

I am a pretty strong introvert, not in the sense that I have a problem socializing with others or even communicating in a leisure/professional setting, but rather that doing so takes a lot of energy. I don't actively seek out opportunities to get up in front of people and be the center of attention. Over the past year I've spoken a lot publicly for moderately lengthy periods -- maybe 45 mins at a time -- and I agree with the sentiment that you just get better/more comfortable with experience. If you feel nervous before you speak you are the norm and not the exception. To quote Jerry Seinfeld: "“According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

I prescribe to Malcolm Gladwell's method of preparation [1] in that I write out every single word of my talks beforehand and more-or-less memorize them. It's not my explicit goal to memorize every word, but I go over the words enough that that's essentially what happens. I actually end up memorizing key sentences and phrases more than words. Even moments that I seemingly "ad-lib" to the audience -- jokes, side comments, "random" anecdotes -- are written out beforehand. That way when I'm in the moment I can focus on delivery and not content.

I think the biggest driver to my anxiety of public speaking was the possibility of sounding stupid, but as long as I have the confidence that I've written out a good argument beforehand then that goes out the window. I stick to the script because I know the script will work.

As far as mentality goes, there is no better feeling than looking out into an audience of people and see them staring back at you, listening to every word. No smartphones out and no sleeping, just attention. While I still get a little nervous, it's nowhere near what it once was, and I actually look forward to connecting with those whom I've been invited to speak with. My excitement for that connection has started to trump my nerves.

Clearly I'm not in the camp of "don't prepare and just go wing it, it'll be more natural" because it really opens up the door for panic-induced disaster. And I really hate sitting in a talk that the speaker is clearly unprepared for. It's unprofessional and disrespectful. If people are going to give you the respect of their undivided attention, give them the respect of real preparation.

[1] http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com/2011/01/26/public-speaki...

I'm in the summer batch. I put in my notice yesterday at work and saved for many months to have enough money to live in NYC and not starve.

Attending hackerschool is not solely a matter of circumstance but intention. If you want something enough you'll do what you need to do in order to get it.

While it is a very easy "excuse" to hide behind, I believe in holistic admissions qualifications. I think charts of SAT score x race x admissions are as good of a metric of assessing a potential student as college GPA are of assessing a potential employee. To some degree there's a baseline expectation for the practical purposes of filtering (with lots of outliers for various reasons), but at the end of the day it doesn't say much about how intelligent or capable someone really is. Intelligence and capability can't be reduced to a test-taking skill.

I am Asian-American and I went to an ivy league university. I think (hope) that essays hold particular importance for admission to the most competitive schools because academically there's very little variability between most serious applicants. Everyone was the valedictorian, everyone had a 4.0+, everyone had 1500+ on the SAT (out of 1600). Everyone played an instrument, everyone was in every honor society, everyone performed hours of community service. When you get that far as an applicant you know how to play the academics "game." So in the midst of a lot of redundancy -- "“Another piano playing, hard working kid, with perfect SAT scores" -- you have to stand out for other reasons. Like the passions that will ultimately lead to a student body that enriches itself rather than one where everyone is constantly holed up in their room studying non-stop for the next exam.

There's an unbelievably popular froyo franchise in Northern VA called Sweet Frog[1] that markets effectively enough to stand out among seemingly a zillion competitors. They have a religious angle (Frog standing for "Fully Rely on God"), frog mascots that make local community appearances, merchandising that young kids actively wear, and are cheaper per ounce than competitors while offering unlimited toppings.

I was always skeptical of cupcakes because they were (1) annoyingly expensive and (2) blatantly unhealthy, but SF seems to have addressed both of those concerns.

[1] http://adage.com/article/news/crowded-fro-yo-pond-sweet-frog...

FWIW, a friend who writes for a popular online food publication says gourmet donuts are the new cupcakes.

Cool idea. I'm a diehard Washington Wizards fan (sad, I know) and tend to unfollow a lot of players in favor of reports/beat writers/bloggers. The tweets are just more substantive for basketball junkies. A couple of random thoughts:

1) Remove the directed tweets -- i.e. "@user blah blah blah"

2) Beat writers/bloggers act as a filter and tend to retweet interesting player tweets anyway

3) It'd be awesome to see a real-time, in-game twitter dashboard like how you're displaying things now, but with those bloggers/reporters. It can be hard to keep track of it all on a single-line twitter feed... maybe a tweet that gets a lot of "action" somehow (retweets, replies, not sure how you'd measure it) could be displayed more prominently.

I think part of the problem here is that many devs often don't understand how much power they yield over their own situation. If you're good enough to be depended upon in every panic situation, that means you have more say than you think in the circumstances surrounding your work -- specifically regarding pay, scope creep, working environment, etc. If you don't assert yourself nobody will coddle you, because that's how capitalism works. The goal of the company is to maximize profits, but the cost (both time and $) in finding a talented, hard-working employee is huge and employers know that. So you have to stand up for yourself because you hold more cards than you think. If you have a passive personality where you never push back and don't stand up for yourself you will get completely rolled over.

I've met devs who only consider one side of the employee-employer agreement -- "don't get fired, don't get fired, don't get fired." What about the other side? "If ___ quits, we are screwed."

This is the reason why we invest in our skills, this is why we read things like HN, this is why we make ourselves indispensable. Because a higher level of skill, both technically, socially and in business, not only makes you a greater employee, but it gives you more autonomy over your own circumstances.

I don't agree with the comments here that encourage people to half-ass their 9-5 because "you owe the company nothing." I encourage you to do the opposite -- become so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. Be such a valuable perspective/contributor/asset that they shudder at the thought of losing you. Be great and the power will follow.

And if they still treat you like shit, leave. If this doesn't apply to your industry, leave the industry. Good, smart devs are hard to find and someone else will pay good money for you.

I have a strange sense of sadness for my friends who are "stuck" on Wall Street. Strange because it's weird to feel sad for someone making $250k+ per year, but I've heard their first hand accounts of how much they hate their jobs. If you're the type of person who can step back from the ego-driven culture of investment banking I feel like everyone reaches the same meta-conclusions that Nick did. It's just unbelievably hard for them to step away from the money.

I mean, I'd like to think I would be able to make that choice and that purpose and meaning would ultimately trump a large paycheck. But nobody's putting $250k+ in my pocket so it's genuinely hard to say.

Kudos to Nick for leaving. It took guts.

I still remember the all-consuming dread I felt as an intern when I ran an UPDATE and forgot the WHERE clause. I consider it part of the rite of passage in the web developer world. Kind of like using an image or text in a dev environment that you never expect a client to see.

Luckily the company I was at (like any rational company) backed up their db and worked in different environments, so it was more of a thing my coworkers teased me for than an apocalyptic event.

Sort of off topic, but I wish there was a better tool for pinboard user discovery. I love the self-selection bias of pinboard in that it's highly tech and the popular links are right up my HN/nerdy alley, but I'm starting to really enjoy the "network" view with the 6 or so people I follow. Trying to parse the list of user profiles for interesting folks at random is way too time consuming.

Anyway, I''m following you now, so there's the super tangential tieback. And nice work!

When I hear about the overinflated cost of medicine I can't help but think of ties to the overinflated cost of education. While I believe in paying specialized, skilled laborers a rate commensurate with the value they provide, pretty much every med school grad I've ever known (specialized or not) shrugs at the notion of graduating with upwards of $250k+ in debt like it's this inescapable force of nature. They know how the system works, and they'll make it up soon. But therein lies the problem, as the costs of that $250k loan are already baked into inflated salaries across the board.

If there's a financial disincentive (aside from just greed) to drive down costs of care because you're looking at so much debt right out of the gate, it doesn't set much of a precedent to look for cheaper alternatives.

God I love this. I like browsing the popular pins once in a while when I have time to kill, but it gets kind of boring when it's just a rehash of the HN frontpage or after the 100th jQuery plugin demo page. This has streamlined that kill-time process like crazy. Thank you!

I really like the design of both the app and the website. Nice job!

If you don't mind me asking, how did you manage the cross platform dev?

Teespring does some really cool work with non-profits, launching kickstarter-esque campaigns for them (at no cost) and giving a cut of the proceeds to that organization. A few friends of mine who run an education non-profit in Philly (http://www.12plus.org/) did it a few months ago [1] and it really helped them out a lot. Coupled with this blog post, TeeSpring seems like good people.

[1] http://teespring.com/12plus

I don't know if I'm more surprised by his English fluency, earrings or open-mindedness. To be honest I'm kind of worried for his safety after giving an interview like this... given what he's saying and his general demeanor, something makes me doubt it was vetted through "official" North Korean sources.

And in response to "propaganda comments" on the article, as a Korean American I know that the strongest sentiment in Korea is still towards unification. I've never understood that (and still don't, to some degree) but watching this video gives me a glimpse of that. When I hear this kid speak, I see me. It leaves me unexpectedly hopeful for the future.

I saved a link to my pinboard a while back about a couple who sold all their possessions and took a VW van through North/Central/South America and in and around Africa. Super interesting read: http://www.vwvagabonds.com/

Seconding this!

Haven't thought this through very much, but it'd address some frustrations I've been having lately. If someone can come up with a means of getting around domain squatters, that'd be amazing. Kind of like a redirect service for legitimate businesses.

myBalsamiq is by far the most simple/cost-effective tool I've used for wireframing. Being distributed with version control was particularly unique and helpful, as far as potential competitors go.

As a random usability thing, they also handle renewal notifications without being annoying. I don't need an email every hour that my subscription is expiring, and the earth doesn't shatter once it does. If I decide not to renew, I can still download all the mockups I made when I had the subscription. If I decide I need to get back into the program, a couple clicks and I'm back in for $12/mo. Small stuff like that makes feel like they're not trying to suck every penny out of me, which is why I don't hesitate to go back to them when I need to.

I don't see why a post like this provokes criticism. I think it was more "I've used WP for 7 years, here are some potentially helpful tips that I learned within that time span at some point." Not "I've toiled with WP for 7 years and it's taken me exactly that long to learn to cache/backup/etc my site."

Anyway, thanks for the post. It was full of helpful reminders.

I love how even simple adjustments can make a twitter-bootstrap site appear more personalized. Maybe it's the black bar, but I tend to groan a little bit whenever I see it on new sites I come across. This design, on the other hand, I really like. Nice work!

The more I experience it, the more I think the "pinterest-style" layout is absolutely the best way to consume visuals. Great idea and great execution! I would definitely use this.

From the perspective of a dev who occasionally buys from Themeforest, I find a few of the pieces of default TF metadata really important: price, browser support and # of sales (in decreasing order of importance). Don't know how accessible that info is via the API, but it'd be great to access that info without many (or any) clicks.