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Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#361

Post by Sachaniman »

antisthenes wrote: post #108
davelnewton wrote: post #101

Why are people listing random things they've done instead of what the moment was that led to whatever random thing is listed? Ugh. Edit I've asked a few people to describe their moments instead of just listing what the change was. YMMV, but for me, these are far far more interesting than random lists of things. I may have mis-interpreted the OP's intent, but it sure seems a lot more compelling when you know the catal…

My grandfather passed away. It inspired me to take more control of my life and to start enjoying things I was afraid of. I didn't realize I should have been using him as a a role model until he passed away, but when it happened, it was very powerful. It is also the first death of a relative I've had to deal with in my life.

Honestly, the same experience verbatim.

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#362

Post by erikpukinskis »

g0v wrote: post #271
andrepd wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a hippie, but you do meditation and fasts... Okay, that came out a bit incisive. Do you have any scientific backing to support those claims? I'm especially interested in fasting. Not eating for 3 days a month does not seem especially healthy. Then I see the claim that it cures cancer and forgive me if all my alarm bells go off.

I just so happen to be currently reading about this in The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. He says: "From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations experience [potentially high] variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans--we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundanc…

> we sprinted

Are you sure? My understanding is that hunting requires a lot of tracking, where you are following perishable clues, which means a moderate sustained pace. And sometimes you are invisible to prey, but sometimes you just need to keep up. Notably when you have injured your prey but not yet killed it. On top of that there's persistence hunting, which is more like an ultramarathon than a sprint.

Also, when gathering you often need to move quickly. My chickens don't just move lazily all day, they often move around quite frenetically. When you find some good stuff, it behooves you to move quickly to gather as much as you can before others catch on. And when you're moving through barren areas it also makes sense to not waste time.

The idea that early humans rarely spent 40 minutes jogging seems like quite a bold assertion to me.

And anyway, even if we never jogged, we certainly migrated. An hourlong walk several times a week is a reasonable exercise regimen too.

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#363

Post by davidsawyer »

japhyr wrote: post #34

Writing programs that people actually use. I was a hobbyist programmer for a long time. Then my father passed away, and I went through his computer and saw all these projects that would never see the light of day. That gave me the motivation to choose one project and see it through until it was good enough to have actual users. Programming is much more satisfying and meaningful now.

Did you finish that project yet? If so, would you mind sharing it?

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#364

Post by neurostimulant »

cookiecaper wrote: post #109
japhyr wrote: post #34

Writing programs that people actually use. I was a hobbyist programmer for a long time. Then my father passed away, and I went through his computer and saw all these projects that would never see the light of day. That gave me the motivation to choose one project and see it through until it was good enough to have actual users. Programming is much more satisfying and meaningful now.

After supporting a side project that had hundreds of users, I was actually relieved to go back to projects that had at most only a handful of users. Support requests and demands for bug fixes can get tiring if you don't have an apparatus to help control and triage them.

I can understand how you feel. I made a chrome extension for fun and one of the user claims my extension has malicious tracking code and ads injector out of the blue (perhaps he got the malware from other extension and blame it on mine). Way to kill motivation :/

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#365

Post by justbees »

superuser2 wrote: post #327
umbs wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with all three, but #2 for me has now become the very important due an incident last week. I pulled an all nighter and next day rear ended a vehicle near a traffic signal because I dozed off for a second. The impact was minimal and no one was harmed. It was the first accident with my fault in 15 years of driving. I am approaching 40 and have 2 young kids. I cannot get my priorities wrong at this point. Many liv…

+1. I had a similar experience - my one auto accident (though I am much younger than you) was when I clipped a mirror on a parked car after sleeping 5 hours. I wonder if we as a society will ever come around to treating insufficient sleep similarly to drunkenness or distraction for drivers. My intuition says it's similarly dangerous.

I know that in North Carolina (I lived there a year and had to get a new license during that period) there's a section of the driving handbook that covers drowsy driving.

Here's some info from drowsydriving.org > "According to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, people who sleep six to seven hours a night are twice as likely to be involved in (such) a crash as those sleeping 8 hours or more, while people sleeping less than 5 hours increased their risk four to five times."

http://drowsydriving.org/about/facts-and-stats/ http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/summaries-of-cur...

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#366

Post by cookiecaper »

rconti wrote: post #316
cookiecaper wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used Linux full-time for 11 years; booted into Windows about once or twice a year to try out a game, and had a Windows VM for photo editing (DxO doesn't work in WINE, and afaik, there are no good replacements for it). Just a couple of months ago I switched to Windows as the host OS and Linux in a VM running in the background 24x7 (off the raw disks, so I am virtualizing the same system that I ran as my host OS,…

Seems like OS X is the perfect solution to this. I used Linux on the desktop exclusively from 1995 to 2002 but haven't run it on the desktop since. (I still manage fleets of Linux servers of course). I simply don't see any value in desktop Linux for my job, and using Windows makes it too hard (like trying to build a ship in a bottle). YMMV, of course, depending on your work.

I've had occasion to use OS X here and there over this time period, and unfortunately I don't think it's a great solution.

The first problem is that I'd be locked into Apple hardware, which is not something I'm interested in. Nothing personal against Apple hardware, as there are certainly pleasant things about it, but it's not what I want. For example, one of the only reasons I can do this is because I have a custom x86 build that accommodates it with a lot of disk space and a lot of RAM.

The second problem is that I've found OS X kind of inhabits an uncanny valley, where at first glance it looks great, but after using it for a while, you find a lot of small tics that are offputting. It does provide some nice traditional star-nix utilities and has some POSIX compatibility, but many things seem to have a bunch of little problems and incompatibilities that one has to get in there and address if the project doesn't already provide a Mac installer that does this for you. This may not sound like a big deal, but sometimes these "little incompatibilities" are showstoppers and sometimes they just take extra hours to get working. And each year, OS X is getting worse; the compatibility takes a hit, the system gets more and more locked down, and sometimes management scripts have to be totally rewritten.

The end result of that is that many of my colleagues that use OS X end up with a very similar setup to mine, where they have a Linux VM running in the background 24x7 to provide those needs.

Thirdly, OS X is a neglected middle ground in terms of testing and application compatibility. Devs prefer to work on Linux and users prefer to use Windows. That means that user-oriented applications, like new games, always work on Windows and that most dev-oriented applications work on Linux (and many depend on Linux-specific functionality like the proc subsystem which make it more difficult to port BSDs or OS X). Even if the code is compatible as-is on both Linux and OS X without changes, OS X is often the least-tested platform for relevant applications. I know there are a few vendors that release Mac versions of their games, so there is frequently a bit more availability on OS X than there is on Linux, but it's far less than there are on Windows.

I don't really see what I gain by using OS X instead of Windows. With Cygwin, I have star-nix utilities in Windows too, and I get immediate compatibility with practically every user-oriented application out there.

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#367

Post by GFischer »

willempienaar wrote: post #94
bemmu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What finally got you to dive in?

I had a lot of "why doesn't this work" and "why does this work" moments. I knew there were gaps in my understanding, especially when I started developing NodeJS applications. After I read "You don't know JS" I was really kicking myself for going so long without having a fundamental understanding of the language.

Thank you for your recommendation. Do you know if the github repo include the entire content?

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#368

Post by keyboardhitter »

patrickk wrote: post #280
andrepd wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a hippie, but you do meditation and fasts... Okay, that came out a bit incisive. Do you have any scientific backing to support those claims? I'm especially interested in fasting. Not eating for 3 days a month does not seem especially healthy. Then I see the claim that it cures cancer and forgive me if all my alarm bells go off.

Anecdotal, I was like you, extremely skeptical of meditation. Seriously, try it, it's free! Immediate benefits: * Clear, focused mind. I stop hopping from topic to topic in my mind "oh should I tidy the apartment, work on my website, etc etc" to a far more focused state. What you should do next is there with extreme clarity. You stop reading random junk on the internet too, and get down to it * Much better sleep (thi…

For those who are not familiar, or new to, meditation - I want to offer an alternative to "try not to have any thoughts". The reason why I never started meditating for a long time was because I felt it was too hard, and nearly impossible. Well... because it is very difficult. After years and years of meditating and practicing mindfulness, perhaps this is possible, but IMO not a good starting goal.

I prefer to just become an observer of my thoughts; to acknowledge and let them flow; I focus on accepting that they are only thoughts - little impulses. The imagery I often have is that I'm sitting in a clear bubble, and my thoughts are swirling around me: I can see them, and I know they're there, but I do not let them in.

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#369

Post by erikpukinskis »

sova wrote: post #306
iamben wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Count. Count each breath as you do it. When you get to ten, start at one. If you feel your mind wander, start your count at 1 again.

My 80-some year old long-term meditation practitioner says count from 1..4 and visualize the numbers as you breath in and out. He said ten is just too many, but four works rather well!

I do four, and I consider myself lucky if I get to 4 once in the 15 minutes I allot. If I could reliably get to 4 I might try 5.

Re: Ask HN: What was your “why didn't I start doing this sooner” moment?

#370

Post by tjl »

cableshaft wrote: post #61
swalsh wrote: post #31

Learning Python! I've been a C#/Windows developer for years. I then switched to Ruby, which for some reason inevitably means you switch to a shiny mac, and then your work paradigm changes revolving around the command line. One day a quick task came up, and I decided to hack it out. The only library I could find was a python library, so that's what I used... and it was so quick to get something. 10 lines later my bori…

Python is so great for getting small tasks done in less than 30 lines of code that would take 5-10 times as much code in most other languages. I wish I had learned it earlier too. Still my favorite language to code without an IDE (C# is pretty great as long as you're in Visual Studio).

I remember when I first learnt Python. It seemed so similar to the pseudocode that I was taught to write first when I was working on a problem. As a result, I will often prototype an algorithm first in Python before I try it in something else.
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