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Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

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Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#401

Post by mettamage »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #129
mettamage wrote: post #121

The Wim Hof Method. I never had any issue with: - snow - rain (being soaked was in rare cases still an issue) - anything cold really Before that I was unhappy with whatever was cold. Now I'm neutral at worst and super exhilarated and hyped like I'm taking drugs (but legally) at best. The adrenaline rush is very strong and very real, and a lot of fun :) How I would pitch this to my younger 18 year old self: want insta…

Can you explain the method simply? I Googled and all the websites seem to be full of marketing BS.

Some science behind it: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379

Disclaimer: I was one of the guinea pigs.

The method is found on YouTube actually. The hallmark of you performing the method well is that you can go longer without oxygen by timing yourself (my progression went from 20 seconds to after 16 rounds to 3 minutes -- by breathing out all air first and then not breath). I won't describe the method here as you're more helped with people overexplaining it than underexplaining it.

One wouldn't teach a full programming language to a novice in one comment either.

Disclaimer 2: I'm not a doctor.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#402

Post by relaxing »

ken wrote: post #363
aazaa wrote: post #193

Favor interrogative-led questions over leading questions. A leading question attempts to get the listener to agree or disagree with a premise you feed to them. An interrogative-led question often begins with the words: who; where; what; when; why. Imagine the responses to these two questions: - "Did you like the movie?" (Leading) - "What did you think about the movie?" (Interrogative-led) How do each of these questio…

I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly neutral questions, actually have a slant. Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and "No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would "displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

‘Like’ is a positive verb so it’s not a neutral question.

More importantly it directs you to frame your reaction on a simple like-dislike axis, when the full spectrum of your opinion is probably more complex, and eliciting that yields a better conversation.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#403

Post by sanderjd »

apengwin wrote: post #251
endymi0n wrote: post #150

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…

Five beats a day for three summers - Kanye West

I've never seen this quote and it is excellent.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#404

Post by jakequade »

abetusk wrote: post #137

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" More and more, I'm realizing this applies more broadly than just for code. Abstraction is a form of optimization and shouldn't be done before the space has been properly explored to know what abstractions should be built. Standardization is a form of optimization and shouldn't be proposed until there's a body of evidence to support what's being standardized. Failure to…

> Failure to validate a product before building it? Premature optimization.

I largely agree with your comment, minus this. Unless everything after the initial idea for a product is an "optimisation" - which is quite a claim - building something shouldn't be lumped together with optimising it.

My point is that it seems like you're attributing more to this idea than is fair.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#405

Post by smichel17 »

uoaei wrote: post #372
ken wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear suggestions like this occasionally, and I don't get it. Apparently sentences like "Did you like the movie?", which sound to me like perfectly neutral questions, actually have a slant. Which way is this question leading me to answer? How can I tell? "Yes" and "No" seem equally acceptable answers here. I don't see how either one would "displease the asker", without knowing more about the situation.

The framing suggests that the asker did like the movie. It makes it harder to answer in the negative because some (most) folks have an instinct to achieve social consensus. I think it's a society-wide learned defense mechanism against tribalism in the presence of allies. Maybe a good test for these sorts of questions is to add the word "also" at the end.

I think it can lean either way depending on how you ask it ("Did you like the movie??").

However, regardless of leaning, the non-leaning version feels like it will generate more interesting responses, while "Did you like it?" is likely to elicit a "yes" or "no".

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#406

Post by hnick »

kyoob wrote: post #17

My favorite thing about "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse is you can yadda-yadda the whole book: "There are two types of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. [...] There is only one infinite game."

> There is only one infinite game

It's World of Warcraft, isn't it? :)

Thank you for the quote. I get the point and it gives me something to think about as a gamer who often settles into the gamer equivalent of comfort food.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#408

Post by analog31 »

endymi0n wrote: post #150

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot o…

This is a cool thing about learning something as a kid: You have no taste to get in the way of learning. You just learn. This is true of six-year-olds learning to play the violin.

Another taste-bypass is to jump into a field that's new enough to have no established standards for taste. For instance when I learned programming, there were no beautiful websites or even software to compare my work to. Websites were a decade away, and I had no access to any interesting software other than what I wrote myself or could find in a magazine. I was having a blast, and felt like master of the universe, though my programs by today's standards would be laughable.

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#409

Post by mattlondon »

Not really an idea, but I guess something of an epiphany:

We were doing a basic physics class at school at maybe 12 or 13 years old. We were learning about Newton's laws of motion etc.

One day we had a test and there was a question about why playgrounds often have rubber matting or tiles around the climbing frames or swings etc. Cue a load of waffly nonsense answers about "cushioning impact" or being "soft so it doesn't hurt" etc from everyone in the class. The teacher berated us: Force = mass X acceleration - reduce the acceleration and the force goes down too.

A lightbulb went off in my head - suddenly science actually meant something in the real world rather than just being something your learnt at school. This was how the world worked.

The fact that this moment still sticks out in my mind suggests that it was probably quite a formative moment for me and I guess changed my outlook on the world quite significantly. (... but then there was also a sort of philosophical existential thought about the "tyranny of equations" we end up living our lives by if we like it or not!)

Re: Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

#410

Post by v64 »

paulcole wrote: post #386
mulmen wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think your example disproves Glass' statement. Surely students are in the beginner phases and their work does not represent their full potential. Glass' statement seems to say forgive students (and yourself for being one) instead of writing them off as hopeless.

Look at the first sentence of Glass’s statement. It is meant to be told to beginners to encourage them. He’s telling beginners that because you’re trying you must have good taste (which is clearly not true) so stick with it.

> He’s telling beginners that because you’re trying you must have good taste

That's not how I read the quote. I read it as him saying, you can't know whether or not you have good taste without first producing a lot of bad work, and that producing bad work is not necessarily a sign that you have bad taste.

If anything, those who judge themselves harshly are demonstrating good taste because they can see the flaws in their work compared to the works of others. It's those that don't feel any sense of criticism toward their own work that lack good taste, but they wouldn't feel this quote applies to them in the first place, because they wouldn't feel that their work is disappointing. They would instead be blaming others for not recognizing their superior work.

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