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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?

#451

Post by [deleted] »

umbs wrote: post #144
chollida1 wrote: post #126

3 things for me: 1) Meditation, I used to think it was something hippies did. I now think its worth 10 IQ points. I honestly can't recommend it enough. 2) Sleep, I'm getting close to 40 and the last 2 times I pulled all nighters I ended up deleting pretty much all the code I wrote from 11pm onward. 3) Occasional Fasts. I normally fast from 6pm until noon the next day but I now do one 3 day fast each month. I think th…

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…

[deleted]

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

#452

Post by cmod »

Taking writing more seriously and approaching it with more rigor.

Everything and everyone interesting in my life from the past six years can be traced directly back to writing. Jobs I've gotten, deeper relationships with people whose work I love and respect — all tied together by words.

In my life, I can't think of a single thing that has a better return on time in to value out. (Outside of family / children.)

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

#453

Post by rocqua »

lopatin wrote: post #396

Thinking about hard problems in terms of lambda calculus. I took a day to read about all that stuff and at some point so many things fell into place. I learned CS theory in school, learned ML, but it's not the same as being confronted by a seemingly monstrous software project and then realizing ... omg, everything is relational and I can just write an interpreter. No longer asking "how do I write this in ruby/java/js…

Do you have any good sources for reading up on lambda calculus?

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

#454

Post by jacalata »

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…

Even in the Pleistocene humans were hunter-gatherers, and signs point to a lot more gathering than hunting. Gathering food is a remarkably steady exercise. Have you ever tried picking berries for a day? Have you ever tried doing so while 'walking around aimlessly'?

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

#456

Post by hinkley »

iamben wrote: post #164
OhHeyItsE wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any meditation tips? I've gone through multiple fits & starts but I just can't keep my mind from wandering.

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.

You can tell your mind wandered because you realize you're counting 14, 15, 16...

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

#457

Post by RealityVoid »

teddyc wrote: post #420

Listening to podcasts while I work. I used to be a music only person, but I have enjoyed mixing it up lately and listening to topics/people that interest me.

Can you really listen while working? i'm having difficulty listening to anything with words and working, I can't focus on both and I find I don't want to miss anything.

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

#458

Post by rayalez »

chollida1 wrote: post #126

3 things for me: 1) Meditation, I used to think it was something hippies did. I now think its worth 10 IQ points. I honestly can't recommend it enough. 2) Sleep, I'm getting close to 40 and the last 2 times I pulled all nighters I ended up deleting pretty much all the code I wrote from 11pm onward. 3) Occasional Fasts. I normally fast from 6pm until noon the next day but I now do one 3 day fast each month. I think th…

One cool tip - you can meditate while running in the morning. That way you can do two useful things at once, and meditation doesn't seem boring.

It's also much easier to stop the thoughts, focus on the present moment, breathing, etc when you are running in a park as opposed to staring at the wall.

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

#459

Post by nucleardog »

mattlong wrote: post #404
chollida1 wrote: post #126

3 things for me: 1) Meditation, I used to think it was something hippies did. I now think its worth 10 IQ points. I honestly can't recommend it enough. 2) Sleep, I'm getting close to 40 and the last 2 times I pulled all nighters I ended up deleting pretty much all the code I wrote from 11pm onward. 3) Occasional Fasts. I normally fast from 6pm until noon the next day but I now do one 3 day fast each month. I think th…

Question for you and everyone else that recommends fasting: What sort of exercise regimen to you maintain? Mine is fairly active (~5 days per week) and consists of a mix of cardio and strength training (mostly running, climbing, and weights). I feel that any level of fasting would quite negatively impact my performance in all of these.

I don't do the days-long fasts that others do, but usually try and eat something with a relatively low glycemic load about once every 24 hours. Generally that meal comes shortly after getting out of the gym, so my workout is usually after 22-23 hours of not eating.

Exercise regimen is 3-4 days a week of strength training. Usually a moderate pace, 1.0-1.5 hours. Start the day with high-weight/low rep major lifts (deadlift, squat, bench), fill the middle with other high weight/low rep lifts, and towards the end as my energy is tapering off move to about 50% of 1RM and high rep sets of the same major lift until exhausted.

Probably more than you wanted to know. :)

So that all said, I've got the benefit of having maintained a more-or-less consistent workout regimen since before I started fasting and having logged every set along the way. When I started I was waiting for my performance to fall off a cliff... but it never came. My performance has remained steady and continued rising at close enough to the same rate as it was before that I'll call it "unaffected within some margin of error".

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