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Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

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41–50 of 75 posts

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#41
Keep on making releases of my shell, to the point where people actually use it. Right now I see that there are some downloads, and a lot of people read my blog, but there's not a whole lot of usage.

Latest release: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/12/22.html

A few people have asked me what it is, and I answered with some links and comments here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/7lsajn/oil_shell_03_...

tl;dr It's a bash-compatible shell that treats shell as a real programming language.

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#42
I love making resolutions.

• In 2014 my headline resolution was "have a pint in all 48 ceremonial counties of England"

• In 2016 it was "go/be abroad at least once each month" ️

• In 2017, "be under 90kg on Dec 1st, or drink no alcohol in 2018" ️ (phew!)

For 2018 it's "do something 'cultural' in every borough of London".

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s&p 500 + real estate if you can.

Real estate is not a passive investment and not something to get into casually because you have money and want to grow it.

You can passively expose yourself to real estate if you wish - there are plenty of real estate ETFs for example.

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#46
post #9

This is the year I'm finally going to learn front end, just enough to prototype. Don't roast me alive, but I'm thinking of starting with jQuery. It seems much more learnable for a web stack beginner, and probably serviceable for a long time to come for someone who mainly prototypes ideas that need an elemental gui.

I would learn react or angular first. I think the barrier to entry is the same (depending on your background) and you will get much more out of it. Beyond that, I would suggest learning how to take a psd website design and turn it into HTML. This is a great skills to have. Adding functionality on top of the HTML with react or angular is easy once you know how to break a website down into digestible pieces. That being…

I think jQuery is better for a beginner because there's less stuff there. It's closer to learning raw HTML/CSS/JS, which will serve you well in the future, once the next thing replaces react/angular.

You can also just drop a single CDN URL into your web page without worrying about a JS dev environment, which is not simple to set up these days. That stuff is useful eventually, but I think it's distracting at first and obscures the fundamentals of how the web works.

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#47
post #24

I’ve found that committing to a single meaningful word for the year works better than resolutions. Two years ago the word was “space”. I made more room in my life for growth and change that year. This year the word was “presence”. I went on quite a personal development journey and being more present, particularly with my emotions and physical body, was definitely a strong element of that journey. For next year I’m th…

Slow. This will span many years for me. Check out [0]. Applying slow to reading, thinking, eating, etc. invariable leads to good results. It is also a great heuristic.

Also things inimical to slow are usually bad: social media (esp twitter), most politics / religious debates, advertising, tv and radio, etc ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_movement_(culture)

Edit: things that slow me down the most are classical music + jazz (mostly piano or guitar solos) and mathematics.

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#48
post #39

Adhere to a filesystem... Right now all my files are a mess — often getting saved in random places... I know I can find them with a quick spotlight search, but it tends to bite me a bit when I need to locate a document from several months ago. That, and keeping a journal of some kind.

You should do it! I just looked at mine and I've been keeping notes since June 2007, so earlier this year was 10 years. Hard to believe. I just set a calendar reminder and each sunday I jot down a few things from the week. It really forces me to look back and reflect on the week and helps everything seem like less of a blur. I'd just write what happened at work, or health/fitness updates, what I was listening to or watching, how my relationships were going, that kind of stuff.

Anyway I'd highly recommend it, it's not only cathartic in the moment but it's also a lot of fun to be able to look back on ten years of it. What a different person I was 10 years ago!

Re: Ask HN: What Are Your New Years Resolutions or 2018 Goals?

#49
I want to have the goal "be more accepting of things I can't change", but I'm not sure how to make it actionable or measurable. How will I know if I'm achieving it?

In past years I've had very measurable goals and have generally achieved them; things like "have a conversation in japanese with someone in japan" or "get a new job".

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