Ask HN: Do you feel overwhelmed by the amount of information?

You would not believe how many daily social events made it into the local newspaper in my home town. There are accounts of my recent ancestors comings and goings, the family party that likely resulted in my Father's birth 9 months later... ;-)

There are whole swaths of things that never got recorded, and never will. The gatekeeping functions of publishing have been replaced by the savage and random fates. History of my family from Europe is gone, blown up, bombed, etc.

The internet makes sharing widely possible. It changes the forces that limit the availability of information. Sometimes getting rid of the gatekeepers, and replacing them with propaganda spewing fountains of drivel, sometimes enabling the common person with a knack for telling stories to connect with an audience that would have never found them before.

I'm glad the Internet Archive is here, trying to compensate for the loss of the wildly generative early internet.

>Btw. you could say, just turn off the Internet and buy a book, but can you really pretend it doesn't exist? And how long can you stick to it?

If it weren't for my current eye surgery issues... yeah, books are cool. Could I turn it off, and do without? Only if it's a challenge... and surely I can outlast anyone who grew up swimming in the internet. ;-)

Example: I still know how to drive from coast to coast using only paper maps and written directions.

But I find myself reading constantly. So much so my wife keeps asking me to take a break and rest my eyes.

As a result, I feel like I actually know a little bit about a whole lot, which isn't that useful other than maybe trivia. Also, my memory has become pretty bad, which I attribute to reading too much, but it could just be age catching up with me.

Learning with video series/online courses rarely works for me also. Although I do like good Getting started tutorials for topics with flat learning curve

But I can't do more shallow reviews, I always have the feeling that I'm missing something out, and I won't get intuitive understanding of a paper.

Is there a good heuristic/middle ground of consuming such information?

Either way, it's a struggle!

Btw. I've been toying with meditation and mindfulness on and off for a few years now. It's definitely hard work. So far I haven't succeeded in sticking to it for more than a few days at a time.

> It seems you're a beginner programmer; you could do worse than "Eloquent JavaScript":

Oh, sorry for not expressing my thoughts clearly enough. I'm a senior dev, I self-taught myself almost everything from books, starting before I even knew what Internet is, and later from early-Internet-era websites. Again, never considering it a chore, not preparing for a job, it was just a fun way to spend long winter evenings!

I only mentioned JavaScript as an example, slightly ironic, because you used to learn it from a few page long tutorial. The tutorial didn't need to be longer, because JS was mostly used for creating hover menus and animated snowflakes. You could go over it in 30-60 minutes and call it a day. And frankly, there were years when knowledge in that tutorial would be enough to land you a well-paying job. Today you have to push through 21 long chapters (of that book you mentioned), and it's still only the beginning. I feel genuinely sorry for people who are starting these days, web-dev in particular became so complex.