With some regularity people on HN are wondering if they are burnt-out or the suggestion is made that someone is burnt-out.

To make it a little easier to see if you may be suffering from burn-out or not you may need an outside reference. The reason why this matters is that burn-out is a serious condition, and ignoring it when you are suffering from it may cause longer term problems of an even more serious nature, including heart trouble and mental health issues.

If there ever is going to be a tool-freaks anonymous I'll probably be a founding member.

This started when I was very young, at the ripe old age of three I came in to the possession of a screwdriver (and a garbage found typewriter, which I both got from my dad for my 3rd birthday).

Pretty soon other tools followed, pliers, a small hammer and a universal wrench. By the time I turned five there wasn't much that I couldn't demolish!

Resdirector on Hacker News asked a very interesting question: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511104, how did your life change after fuck-you money?

For the jargon challenged, fuck-you money is defined as the amount of money that allows you to maintain your lifestyle at some desired level.

I've been trying very hard to enumerate my shortcomings so I can work on reducing or eliminating them. Of course you can only know yourself so much, so in order to get a better grip on this I decided to ask the people nearest to me to be frank and to tell me what I should improve.

One thing stuck out, not because it was a 'big thing' but because it was mentioned several times.

When you're a small company and you get a large competitor in your niche that starts to go after your customers it can look pretty scary. Goliath approaching is an awesome sight, and some people tend to give up right there and then in order to avoid the confrontation.

But that's a mistake, in my opinion.

One of the sentences that used to be bandied around to describe the 'worst case scenario' for a start-up company is the 'what if microsoft enters our niche', today most of the times when you hear someone say that sort of thing microsoft has been replaced with google.

In a recent hacker news thread a person asks for some advice on how to fix the underperforming sales division of a newly created start-up ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1380381 ).

At some point in the thread he writes: "We are working on that now. It might give us more breathing air but still will keep us with a CEO (him) that I cannot trust professionaly."

I practically fell off my chair when I read that. A three letter title in a two man company ? What does that make him ? CTO ?

Getting better at estimating is hard, but first, a word of warning.

Before the estimation can even begin you have to have at least a limited draft of a specification that both you and your customer are willing to sign off on, you because you are confident that you can build it and your customer because having that implemented will make them a happy customer. Happy customers are repeat customers, repeat customers is where you will make in time the most of your money.

When you're a techie founder of a start-up, one day you wake up and you realize that starting a business is great, but that the more successful a business gets the more mundane the work that needs to be done.

In the end, the biggest pay-off is not in the initial idea, the spark of genius that drives the company forward initially, but in the enormous machinery, the life-support system that brings that spark to market and that makes it profitable.

According to this article (dutch) scientists working for the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have succeeded in showing physical evidence of the presence of burn-out symptoms in patients.

For those that don't read dutch, a rough translation:

"The universities call this a break-through because so far there are plenty of countries where burn-out is not recognized as a real phenomenon, one of those countries is the United States.