Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 839 posts

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

#621

Post by icer2312 »

pqdbr wrote: post #444
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…

I watched Ira’s video probably 9 or 10 years ago. And while I didn’t notice it back then, this message had a huge impact on me and resonated heavily with my world view over the years, serving as a great motivational driver on my most challenging times. The funny thing is, as time went by and I valued this lesson more and more, I couldn’t, for the life of me, find this video again, nor the author of the quote. I remem…

Reddit's "Tip of my tongue" is great for finding things you remember, but can't name. People manage to figure out exactly what the poster is asking for, no matter how obscure the description.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/

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

#622

Post by mam2 »

The trump 2016 election (and even the whole presidency) was a slap in the face for some people, but if you look objectively there seem to be a bunch of unconventional truths / ideas in it. Like

- "Become a good person doesn't matter and can even look weak, being aggressive and though is more important". (I still remember jeb bush offended saying to trump that he will not 'bully his way to the presidency' while he was doing exactly that)

- "The person who talk the louder set the stage"

Funnily i was visiting "the red pill" subreddit.. it has become a very toxic subreddit but some of the concepts (like the concept of "frame") described on the sub explain trumps election. They basically say that women are basically only attracted to any display of "strength" and "dominance", wether it's good or bad. Kinda shocking, and you don't want to believe it until you try it

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

#623

Post by kmmlng »

koonsolo wrote: post #585

As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea, someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it, etc. As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing ) You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the…

SA for your own life sounds intriguing. Do you have a concrete example that elucidates how this could be implemented? The concept still seems a little slippery to me.

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

#624

Post by mam2 »

groby_b wrote: post #235
darkerside wrote: post #192

This might be super basic, but... assume positive intent. Your parent is not your enemy. Your teacher is not your enemy. Your boss is not your enemy. The other team at work is not your enemy. The corporation is not your enemy. The other political party is not your enemy. Or, more accurately, YOU are not THEIR enemy. At best, you're an NPC in their game. Many of them probably even want to help you, because you are ano…

Assume good intent until proven otherwise . Because there are plenty of people who'll repeatedly treat you like shit, and then continue to demand you assume good intent. To which I say, pardon my french, fuck that noise. People are entitled to the benefit of doubt only as long as there can be doubt. Once that is gone, act accordingly.

where was the french in this ?

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

#626

Post by mam2 »

kmmlng wrote: post #623
koonsolo wrote: post #585

As a kid: Everything that you see was made by somebody. Someone had the idea, someone started a business for it, someone designed it, someone assembled it, etc. As an adult: Simulated annealing for your own life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing ) You start something by going all over the place, trying even crazy ideas. Then you start refining and refining, getting better at the details. This is the…

SA for your own life sounds intriguing. Do you have a concrete example that elucidates how this could be implemented? The concept still seems a little slippery to me.

Dating: it's better to try many partners to know what you like / don't like before commiting.

Imo it's a better way to keep people together than religion.

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

#627

Post by friendlybus »

hexaga wrote: post #379
didroe wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there are obvious flaws with the analogy (like any analogy), I think the comparison with eyesight (or touch, etc.) is about making people think of the mind as more of a sensory organ. One that gives you input that may or may not be useful to you, rather than as something that defines you. I don't really see that as a dissociative practice, but more as the prerequisite for being able to start on the long term jo…

From my perspective, thoughts are the sensory experience of 'my mind moving'. Similar to arm movements - when you move your arm, where does the motion come from? I'm reminded of a time in my childhood when I realized that I could consciously direct my eyes without turning my head. I was struck with wonder at the time, having not known such a thing was possible, because nobody told me . I still remember it vividly by…

You describe thoughts as if you are in receivership of them, like a mom receiving a work of art from her child.

I can direct and focus my thoughts beyond their capacity to perceive the world, like channeling attention and sculpting potential words when I am typing out this comment. I can direct myself to imagine worlds that never existed and solve problems in the future, which requires directed thought.

Your mind is trivially easy to improve, conceptually. Focused improvement on a hard skill will drag your mind along. Deciding to get better at cello will require you to learn higher concepts of music reading, fine motor skills and playing in a band that will form a structure in your mind. That will make thinking and directing thoughts in new directions much easier. It's much easier to ask someone to imagine what it's like working in a construction team building a shopping mall when they know how people work together in a band, compared to a blank slate that knows nothing. That imagination can be used to prune off bad ideas and thoughts that go nowhere.

The educational institution that is supposed to be good at this is the humanities. Philosophy will train you to express your mind through language at such an articulated level that you will know yourself better and be able to navigate a very wide array of arguments with precision. Thus giving you a much better source of material for your mind to sculpt it's thoughts with.

The mind simply has to be pure to sort signal from noise, that's a fundamental part of what it does. The mind is also incorporeal, it has the least matter. The higher you think, the less quantities of properties and details you can focus on. Their totality is summed up as categories that start doing all that heavy lifting for you in implied abstractions. Keeping track of hundreds of different sized numbers and the properties of each item you are counting in one holistic picture is difficult. Purifying that into abstractions and relations between them is incredibly powerful.

Do you centre your being on the spine, rather than the mind? Framing and receiving the output of the mind is what a lot of people do and I hazard a guess the ability to balance the difference between quantities and directions is a lot easier when you hang that task on the spine, with limbs that protrude out from it.

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

#628

Post by DoingIsLearning »

carapace wrote: post #195
aerovistae wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What

First the mountain is a mountain, then it is not a mountain, then the mountain is a mountain. https://terebess.hu/zen/qingyuan.html

"Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch and a kick, just a kick.

After I learned the art, a punch was not longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick.

Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick"

- Bruce Lee

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

#630

Post by kybernetikos »

worldsayshi wrote: post #558
analog31 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dec…

I don't see how you can learn anything without such taste. To learn you have to be able to know what can be done better. Or someone tells you. I think the point here is diminishing returns. When you're younger or rather a beginner you can make bigger leaps because you're learning the rough basics. When you're an expert and you can still tell that it's not good enough it can take months or years to make you reach that…

I think the suggestion is that at the earliest levels of mature fields where you've got a lot of basic and technical skills to develop, you're not really able to do much useful with your taste, and it's more likely just to depress you with how far you have to go.

You will need that taste to progress eventually, but in the more mechanical early phases it can be a distraction.

Post reply on HN