Also a more interesting question would be, are people working in startup, especially single software vendors more susceptible to depression? Look at Aaron Schwartz guy, all those times he was depressed, look at his increasingly erratic and tendency towards martyrdom. The pressure from idiot zealots finally tipped him.

I'm the author of the article and I asked myself this question before I wrote it. I posted some data here which came out of that research: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272763 but it didn't get much traction. When I compared across disciplines in the original dataset (using software programmer as the discipline) there wasn't a strong indication that they were more prone to suicide than other professional jobs. I don't remember exactly but doctors, lawyers, dentists were toward the top of that list.

One challenge is that the dataset I reference doesn't have data post 1998. Since our discipline has grown and changed since then a more recent dataset might show something more interesting.

I think the actual software programmer job working for a company is different than someone working alone erratic hours, building apps, marketing, selling, and breaking even. It's quite challenging in itself to produce good software product let alone selling it and breaking even so it'd be interesting to see some statistics for single founder startups or micro software vendors.

I would say the stress is the biggest for SaaS type of software products, as someone posted a video here about "Constant Contact", it's described as the slow ramp of death because it takes so long and hard to reach that magic upward slope.

These are all just my magical assumptions based on my own situation and experience. I'm sure there's ton of positive, empathetic, emotionally intelligent coder/hacker/entrepreneurs although there's lot of Aspies, who studies have shown to be greater risk of depression.

Stress (and financial instability) has its own set of health problems, but that's not depression. Depression has more mundane physical and neurological causes, whereas stress disorders are caused by the pressures of difficult lifestyles like running a business on your last nickel or being ultraompetitive in your career or being a soldier at war.

Heroin helped me beat my bouts of depression, although the downside being extremely addictive which seems to bring you right back where you started but in all honesty, depression is caused by fixation, ironically heroin taught me how to relax and "let go" of the angst caused by fixation while at the same time my mind was completely fixated on it. To each his own, you gotta stop reading about how to cure an illness, you have to act, find meaning even though it's meaningless.

Ah yes. My early days in junior high school were spent trying to infect the school library computers so I could use free internet. Nostalgia.

This, this. Much of our Western culture is centered around the individual and their ideas which must be respected, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, if it's someone wearing hipster glasses.

Yes, quite literally there's more library than we developers/hackers can play with. I've spent a lot of time just browsing through all of them and they are all excellent. But there seems to be 3 types of npm modules on github, 1) active and mature 2)fairly new, stagnating, seldom active 3) abandoned.

How is this any different to the status of other projects in other environments?

Nice try, not going to point specific fingers at certain environments out of risk getting flamed.

Pretty much the same case here, I've abandoned LAMP stack completely. There's no need anymore, I am tired of having to google how to setup Apache config on some esoteric distro to see it fail when traffic spikes, I am not getting the best bang for the buck but with NodeJS, everything is so much easier.

(Though, of course, there are plenty of other alternatives to LAMP -- I find Nginx, Postgres, and Ruby or Python preferable in pretty much every way).

I think having NodeJS serve up static content is a waste of time, and that's not its intended use case. So I'm with you. I set my server up with nginx serving up static content, and when an API call is made nginx proxies to my Node app.

Why is it a waste of time? There are plenty of good solutions now like Hipache.

Perhpas he means it's a waste of cpu time :)

All very good alternatives of course.

What about for Canadians? Are we left out in the dark again? God damn it.

We are seeing more and more Canadian companies these days, due to the tax incentives and whatever they're putting in the water in Waterloo. We'll definitely look into what we can do there!

How does Streak work? Is it a browser add on I need to install or does Google let developers create their own hacks? Btw, you should also consider putting up ads of Steak on your website. I misread Streak for Steak, and have been craving for some medium rare steak. I wonder if Streak.com could become the Amazon of steak delivery.