<story><title>Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>firefoxd</author><text>* Five co-founders are too many.&lt;p&gt;* If you are working on someone else&amp;#x27;s crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea.&lt;p&gt;* Call people you might need later when you don&amp;#x27;t need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them.&lt;p&gt;* Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You&amp;#x27;ll make money, lose money, then understand money.&lt;p&gt;* Build as many projects as time allows. It&amp;#x27;s nice to have the option to pick and choose.&lt;p&gt;* If you don&amp;#x27;t do the thing you want to do today, 5 years from now you&amp;#x27;ll remember and wonder how different your life would have been if you did.&lt;p&gt;* Don&amp;#x27;t ask people what they think about your idea. They&amp;#x27;ll either be supportive or mean to you. None of these are about your idea.&lt;p&gt;* Have a conversation with someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t speak your language. Make the effort to understand them. Mr Tereso, came out of nowhere and taught me life lessons that changed my life. He spoke no English, and i spoke Duolingo level Japanese.&lt;p&gt;* I&amp;#x27;ll end with this. If you are bored, create something. Make a clay pot, a drawing on paper, a JavaScript file, a wooden structure, a shoe rack, a sand castle, a matchstick home, a story. Make something you can look at the end result and you&amp;#x27;ll never get bored again...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chiefalchemist</author><text>&amp;gt; &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;ll end with this. If you are bored, create something. Make a clay pot, a drawing on paper, a JavaScript file, a wooden structure, a shoe rack, a sand castle, a matchstick home, a story. Make something you can look at the end result and you&amp;#x27;ll never get bored again...&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This might be the best single sentence I&amp;#x27;ve read on the internet so far this year. Kudos.&lt;p&gt;In short: Boredom is a function of creativity &amp;#x2F; creating.&lt;p&gt;Thanks again.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>firefoxd</author><text>* Five co-founders are too many.&lt;p&gt;* If you are working on someone else&amp;#x27;s crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea.&lt;p&gt;* Call people you might need later when you don&amp;#x27;t need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them.&lt;p&gt;* Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You&amp;#x27;ll make money, lose money, then understand money.&lt;p&gt;* Build as many projects as time allows. It&amp;#x27;s nice to have the option to pick and choose.&lt;p&gt;* If you don&amp;#x27;t do the thing you want to do today, 5 years from now you&amp;#x27;ll remember and wonder how different your life would have been if you did.&lt;p&gt;* Don&amp;#x27;t ask people what they think about your idea. They&amp;#x27;ll either be supportive or mean to you. None of these are about your idea.&lt;p&gt;* Have a conversation with someone who doesn&amp;#x27;t speak your language. Make the effort to understand them. Mr Tereso, came out of nowhere and taught me life lessons that changed my life. He spoke no English, and i spoke Duolingo level Japanese.&lt;p&gt;* I&amp;#x27;ll end with this. If you are bored, create something. Make a clay pot, a drawing on paper, a JavaScript file, a wooden structure, a shoe rack, a sand castle, a matchstick home, a story. Make something you can look at the end result and you&amp;#x27;ll never get bored again...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>crankybear1337</author><text>&amp;gt; If you are bored, create something.&lt;p&gt;This is a bit rambly and tangential, but one thing I&amp;#x27;d really want to emphasize is the &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; part.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it&amp;#x27;s good to decompress by just making something that&amp;#x27;s neither conventionally useful nor well-engineered, but absurd, like an inside joke taken to the extreme.&lt;p&gt;A personal example: My friends and I have built an IRC bot that stores most of its code in Redis and is almost entirely developed on IRC by stuffing a bunch of incomprehensible JavaScript on a single line. It can pull data over HTTP and mangle it in various ways, it had a neural network trained with our IRC logs to generate random text, it has a Twitter client, can be used as a REPL, has a simple wiki-like database, etc. All these features are composable using an ad-hoc scripting &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; with a parser that sometimes breaks in hilarious ways. And most of the development happens when we are bored and just want to take a break.&lt;p&gt;None of the code we&amp;#x27;ve written for it or the technical &amp;quot;design&amp;quot; is pretty or robust. But we have a ton of fun hacking on it because we get to build something while completely disregarding whether it&amp;#x27;ll be useful or even work properly. That&amp;#x27;s why we work on it.</text></comment>