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nate
7,926karma·1,070submissions·October 10, 2006
about
YC alum. Founded Inkling and Draft. Ran Highrise. Founding engineer at Census (acquired by Fivetran)
https://ninjasandrobots.com
I'm working on https://allihat.com, https://pageforth.com, and more. If I can be helpful at all with anything, please hit me up on X (@natekontny) or email me anytime (nate.kontny+hn@gmail.com).
recent activity (1,070 total)
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I think most of the time this is just Parkinson's Law playing out:
"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" Things get over-engineered because too much time i…
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It's wild what constraints can actually open up for your creativity. I love making videos but ran out of the time I used to have to spend on it. And so largely gave up trying. But I decided inste…
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Practice being terrible. I think a lot of us have some idea of what "practice" means, but very few of us do it. Instead, we "play to win". Because it feels like practice but it rea…
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I hate running. I'd do it because it seems like the easiest way for me to get a cardio workout to hopefully live longer. But I couldn't get past some kind of 4 mile barrier in my head. It wa…
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It's funny, I'm a huge proponent of remote teams and working, but yeah, having a physical constraint of a whiteboard is a nice forcing function to keep people ordered when all these online c…
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If you're into finding more video blogs: I'm at http://youtube.com/natekontny I cover running businesses (successfully and unsuccessfully), software design, science experime…
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A corollary to this I include in my life is "Do your worst." I get stuck a lot creatively: this feature I'm building is too hard, this design in my head is too vague, my article idea su…
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I used this constantly for things like making demo "videos". Great tool. The only thing that drew me away was using a cloud based screen capture tool so that after capture the gif/video…
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Yes, but inspecting source, those are nofollow links. So that should eventually deter anyone trying to actually keep using that as a method.
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Reminded me of a quote from Paul Arden: "All creative people need something to rebel against." It's why things were simple and easy to understand in 1999. But then we all rebelled makin…
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Cool! Nice work on this!
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I've been fooling with some giant CSV files for model training and yeah Google Sheets and Excel just freeze up or stop importing. So what I've found really handy to play and filter those gia…
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When I was using a typical doctor it would take me at least a month to get an appointment. But OneMedical I can get super fast response times. The staff is fast to reply to questions you text using th…
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I'm totally in agreement that that would be discriminatory. And no doubt hiring managers are sadly looking for quantity and crazy amounts of open source wizardry. But I have a slightly alternativ…
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Very much yes. For years I started getting this fluid buildup in my ears. At best, I felt occasionally dizzy. At worst, it felt like my brain was in constant "I feel like I have a cold and I'…
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I got into long distance running during this morning-not-eating period. Totally distracting to any hunger thoughts. Also, you start to find it's actually a huge benefit not to have a stomach full…
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Oh wow, thanks for the reference. Any good histories of Roku out there you recommend?