SwellJoe's comments on caffeine and sugar are true. My doctor told me that caffeine has about a 10-hour half-life. After noon it's generally something I avoid.

If you try these things (or at least a good portion of them) and you don't see any improvement it's time to start looking at health conditions rather than merely poor habits. Sleep apnea is a major cause of chronic exhaustion. Restless Leg Sydrome is another. With both of these you are constantly waking up during the night and never attain the deep sleep needed to rest.

My father had sleep apnea - when he did an overnight EEG sleep study the doctors determined that he was waking up over 80 times an hour due to airway blockage. He started using a CPAP about two years ago. The CPAP is a face mask which generates positive air pressure to keep airways open. The difference was dramatic. He's much more energetic, much less grumpy, and has in general been much happier since he started using it.

I personally had awful sleep for years. I was perpetually exhausted. The only way I was able to sleep was to stay awake for 24 to 36 hours and then pass out for 12 to 18 hours. I was miserable. I finally broke down my pride and went to see a sleep specialist. I implemented the sleep hygiene strategies and saw slight improvements but no major gains. I didn't have RLS or apnea, so the possible suspects were narrowing down. On a long shot we decided to try a medication called Rozerem. It's a synthesized melatonin available as a prescription. In most people the pineal gland regulates the sleep/wake cycle via the production of melatonin. As it turns out I have extremely low melatonin production, so my body never got the signal to shut down and sleep. With the introduction of melatonin in pill form about an hour before bed I was actually able to get a good night's rest. The difference was astounding. I had forgotten what being rested even felt like. Interestingly the melatonin had an immediate dramatic effect on me. It doesn't force drowsiness like a sedative does. It allows me to feel sleepy (rather than just tired or exhausted). Rozerem won't do anything for someone with normal melatonin production however. Past a certain level the body just metabolizes the extra melatonin and it is neutralized. For the same reason increasing the dosage of the medication won't have any effect.

For me the combination of improved sleep hygiene and the synthesized melatonin made a dramatic difference in my quality of life. Treating my father's sleep problems made him a much happier individual. If your doctor thinks that a medication for RLS will help you attain better sleep, I highly recommend that you at least try his suggestions. There is no substitute for being well-rested and you owe it to yourself to find out what will allow you to gain a good night's sleep.

        -- Winston Churchill, famous Mac user

No you don't. This may be what you think you want, but it's not what you really want.

Why do you want to join an ambitious startup rather than creating your own?

Why does the startup you join need to be ambitious?

Why does it need to be a startup?

For that matter, why do you want to join as a programmer rather than, say, a graphic designer?

If the answer to the above questions is "because this is a route to making lots of money", then what you want is to make lots of money -- and you happen to have identified "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer" as a way to pursue that goal. Similarly, your goal might be "to change the lives of millions of users", "to become a world-famous hacker", or "to work with a bunch of really cool people".

But whatever you want... well, it's almost certainly not "joining an ambitious startup as a programmer".

--------

Now that I've finished ranting about desires vs. routes towards satisfying those desires: The above is actually relevant to your question. The skills looked for vary dramatically from startup to startup -- a startup which is likely to make you a millionaire isn't necessarily going to be looking for the same skills as a startup which is full of really cool people. Once you've identified what you find attractive about startups, then you can start thinking about which startups currently exhibit those traits, and what skills they look for.

2. Never use the same login for 2 websites

The fact this has been upvoted to top position is more worrying than any security worries.

1.) Yes, but...a little time spent refining your idea at the beginning can save you a lot of wasted time later. For example, my startup is a webapp to let people create their own casual games. We decided, early on, to start with an arcade proof of concept, because arcade games are what everyone thinks of when you say video games. All our competitors did the same thing. But most of the growth in the casual games market has actually been puzzle and word games, which are also more personally compelling to me. A little thought might've saved months of work. (Or maybe not, since it's looking like the sweet spot for our app may be in multi-genre games that don't fit into any archetype.)

2.) Yes, but...it's often not clear what the right tool for the job is until you've explored the problem domain, and you need to pick a tool in order to do that. What if, after building that Window's GUI app in C#, you find that it really should've been a webapp? If you'd written it in heavily macro-ized Lisp, you could probably just change some macro definitions to generate HTML pages instead of Windows GUI forms.

3.) Yes, but...when you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, it's time to abstract it into a library. Otherwise you end up like one of my old employers, who found they were invoking some DNS call wrong and said, "Well, we can fix it...but we'll have to fix it in 109 places."

Another example comes from my current project - I've got this abstraction called a SpriteReference, which basically picks out one or more sprites, possibly in a context-sensitive way. I built a custom (JavaScript) GUI widget for this, which is used in lots and lots of places. When I went to clean up the GUI for this, I spent a day changing the widget and it's instantly reflected everywhere I use it, instead of hunting down the several dozen places where SpriteReferences may appear in the UI and changing each one.

4.) Yes, but...oftentimes, you need those tests and documentation to build the rest of your application. You can't build upon code that doesn't work. There've been several times that I went back and added unit tests simply because that was the only way I could make further progress. The alternative is "hope and pray programming", which is unfortunately quite common in real companies (both my previous employers have practiced it, and they were in security/remote-access and financial software).

5.) Yes, but...if you can do it in 6 months, so can all of your competitors. It seems like there's a wide variety in launch times of successful products, ranging from 3 weeks for Reddit to 5 years for the Apple Macintosh. I definitely agree that you should put something up on the screen as soon as you can though - I'd say more like 1 month. That gives you something to react to so you're not designing against a vacuum.

Really, this is why software entrepreneurship is hard. A lot of advice is right but incomplete, and could easily go the other way depending on circumstances you have no way of foreseeing.

I agree. Google is a good model. It's clear that even now they don't really get design. Their rule is just to make everything simple and functional. This means that even though they never manage to do anything inspired (Google has never made anything people would compare to the iPod) they at least avoid a lot of design mistakes. You can probably get 85th percentile design merely by avoiding mistakes.

(1) open the 'reply' link in a new tab

(2) compose the reply

(3) submit, getting the 'unknown of expired link' error

(4) go back -- you still have your comment, but...

(5) hit reload, figuring that will refresh your reply form's fnid validity -- after all, this works when commenting at an article's top level

(6) get the "unknown or expired link" error now on the reload, with no place to go further "back" to, and "forward" just leading to the same error. Your comment is unrecoverably lost.

I'm now in the habit of a textarea "select-all, copy" before ever hitting a submit button at News.YC. Thus, I can reclick a path from a fnid-less URL to a new reply box if necessary. But that's a pretty user-hostile workaround to expect of people.