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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?

#431

Post by hinkley »

davej wrote: post #240
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.

> Do you have any scientific backing to support those claims? Not OP but this is a good summary: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3946160/ > Then I see the claim that it cures cancer and forgive me if all my alarm bells go off. I think OP was implying that it may decrease your chances of getting cancer not cure it. Everyone will get cancer if they live long enough (based on the current state of medicine, t…

There was also some research suggesting that normal cells were insulated from some of the effects of chemo by a period of fasting. Tumor cells don't turtle up the way healthy cells do and so they absorbed higher relative doses.

I'm fuzzy on the details but I believe they were trying to explain why outcomes were statistically better for early morning treatments (people coming in with an empty stomach to deal with nausea)

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

#432

Post by erikpukinskis »

andrepd wrote: post #261
k-mcgrady wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "How dumb is it to fix cars?" With that one you're learning skills which will benefit you IRL. Car breaks down? Don't have to pay a mechanic. Skills may applicable to other machines too. Plenty of hobbies have real benefits. Sports for example - health & fitness.

Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it (much like sex :)). We do hobbies in our spare time, for their own sake, and for our own gratification. Whether they accomplish anything is totally irrelevant, in my view.

If that's true, I don't have any hobbies. I just have like four careers, most of which I do pro-bono.

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

#433

Post by schoen »

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 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.

There are some regulations about minimum amounts of sleep for airline pilots.

https://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsId=1...

I guess it would have a high cost and intrusiveness to try to document individual motorists' sleep, but I can imagine that if self-driving cars catch on as broadly and as quickly as many people have predicted, fatigued driving could become much more stigmatized and punished than it is today.

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

#434

Post by ScaryRacoon »

OP asks for moments, gets things people started doing with no description of the moment.

For me it is taking extensive notes. Over the past year I started pay attention to the mannerisms, behavior, and personalities of the people whose position I wanted to take in the near future. One commonality among almost all of them: they take notes during almost every conversation and write notes throughout the day as they think of things.

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

#435

Post by erikpukinskis »

llekn wrote: post #184
mason240 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar epiphany when I started to learn programming (I was about 27 at the time). I realized I was spending all my time just incrementing numbers in a server. Since then I've dropped almost all gaming, reducing it to about 4 hours a week of phone games and shifted to doing outdoor activities like running, biking, ect. PokemonGo has been a way to meld the two.

Well... isn't everyone basically spending all their time (working) to just incrementing numbers in a server (bank account balance)?

Yes! And it's just as sad. I think we will look back on this style of social organization as profoundly wasteful. I would much rather people spent their work time doing something that has intrinsic value beyond the salary.

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

#436

Post by rashkov »

markus2012 wrote: post #263
adam12 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to get myself to enjoy gaming again. I can't seem to just relax and play a game without thinking I'm wasting my time. It's also hard to get the same high in a game that I do when I solve a bug or add a feature to whatever project I'm working on.

Yeah, I can't help but feel like I'm just 'walking the spreadsheet'. I do find helping my kids to 'save the world' is still enjoyable! Losing to my 12 y/o daughter at Rocket League (seriously trying my hardest) makes me wonder WTF is wrong with me. Lol... sometimes I think 12 year old kids should be tasked with figuring out the hardest problems.

Check out the article "Learning Chess at 40" published by nautilus. It's just like you describe with the author's kid.

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

#437

Post by geoffreyhale »

TL;DR:

Stop working out. Blasphemy, I know.

Summary:

A decade long love-obsession with "health and fitness" has taught me that 99% of what our health industry says is nearly-useless or unhealthy.

Half the battle of "health" is to stop self-destruction: drug-abuse (obvious), working out "hard" (less obvious).

Replace gym and repetitive activity with natural exploratory movement. If you are "supposed to stretch" after, the workout wasn't healthy.

The other half is basic. In gentle regular moderation: sleep, eat decently and drink water, go for a walk outside, have some friends and some activities you enjoy.

Everything else is minutia and can be left to bodybuilders, professional athletes and fighters, and military personnel.

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

#438

Post by JamesBarney »

keyboardhitter wrote: post #368
patrickk wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Keyboardhitter is right, the vast majority of meditators recommend trying to observe and let go of thoughts that pass as opposed to trying to stop thoughts. The problem with trying to stop thoughts is similar in trying to not think of pink elephants.

Mindfulness one of the key skills(if not THE key skill) exercised by meditation is the ability to be aware of one's own thoughts and feelings, and this is practiced primarily by listening to what thought's were having, and letting them go.

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

#439

Post by elorant »

rdegges wrote: post #358

For me, it was 100% weight lifting and dieting (aka: exercise). Pretty much everyone here has mentioned this, but I don't think anyone has really explained just how incredibly life-changing it can really be. I've been programming since I was a kid. Spending most of my time at a desk eating Doritos and fast food wasn't really the best choice. I spent most of my 'good years' as a young guy being really overweight and h…

Body builders look like that because they swallow a ton of protein pills and other shit that eventually take a toll in their health. I hope for your sake you're not going down that path.

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

#440

Post by vendakka »

ovatsug25 wrote: post #249
patio11 wrote: post #9

Every time I start seriously exercising this hits in about week ~4. Sadly, I only generally keep it up for 6 months before falling back to old habits. Professionally: email lists. If you have any reason to have a blog, you should have an email list. It surfaces the identities of the people who are actually interested in what you have to say, and ties people to you much, much tighter than "Oh yeah, that thing you wrot…

Hey Patrick, I posted this on another thread, but try focusing on flexibility first. Strength will come later. You can pretty much always stretch and will start seeing feedback. If you get into a routine, you will feel MUCH better and more alive. Click through for my last comment.

This is very good advice. I've had trouble with flexibility for as long as I can remember. I've recently started some light exercise again and including yoga for just 5 to 10 min has made an enormous difference.
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