Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

As some of you might know, trains are very crowded here in India. I take a train to work. My simple hack is a marked position on the station where I stand when the train arrives in order to be the first one to grab the handle of one of the marked compartments that I always get in. After the people on the train alight, I can sneak in quickly. Using this hack, I am the first one to get inside the compartment 90% of time, no matter how large the crowd is.

Your brain is a very elastic thing. I've found over the years that I can reprogram (for want of a better word) my head and my personality.

Case in point - Up until 5 years ago I was petrified of needles. My mum used to have to inject herself twice a day due to diabetes until she moved to a pen when I was a teenager, so you think I'd be happy with needles. Oh no. I was scared out of my wits by them. Petrified that they'd hurt more than anything going in. Of course, when I had to have an injection for anything I'd look at it, tense and terrified so the experience would be horrific. I reprogrammed my mind to avoid tensing up, not to look at it, to focus on something else and to accept that this is going to hurt, but not as much as my mind thinks it would, and after a few injections I'm now able to have them without freaking out. A couple of months ago I developed pericarditis and had to have a catheter - normally this would freak me out, but I knew that along with drawing blood samples it had to happen and I had to let it happen so I dealt with it.

I also used to get very stressed out very easily and had a quick temper. I realised that I needed to do something about it as I could flare up and it would upset those near to me. I in effect forced my mind to realise that when I got angry, upset etc. over something that I could not change, all I was doing was upsetting those around me and raising my blood pressure over something that I had no control over. Getting angry at this point has absolutely no chance of any form of positive outcome. Thus, if getting angry doesn't help solve the problem, but not getting angry at least makes you feel better about the issue and better prepared to address the problem, it's much better not to get angry. It took several months of working on it and I do occasionally get wound up easily by some things but I'm definitely a much calmer person as a result.

I've done heaps of other things to my mind and personality in the hopes of making me a better person - becoming more sociable, more comfortable speaking in public, no longer wanting 'stuff' in my life, all with pretty good success.

Too lazy to create reviews for a final? Create a google doc with a chapter number on each row and email your class asking x people to signup to do y chapters each. When done have em paste it into a master doc. Boom! You have a crowdsourced study guide!

Use a vertical monitor for your code editing. Having twice as many lines of code in front of you at once makes a big difference. Most skeptics haven't really tried it.

Stop wasting time obsessing about the best coding setup and the best editor. I've seen very poor developers with incredibly advanced typing shortcuts that they spend hours perfecting. They still write shit code (maybe they do so faster...). I use the standard configuration for an editor I like, which is a text editor only, not an IDE. I think the extra seconds here and there I spend typing repetitive parts of code give me time to think about what I'm going to do next. If you've ever spent half a day writing macros that save you milliseconds, then you're fooling yourself into thinking that you're increasing your productivity. And as I've mentioned, "lost time" isn't lost if you're spending it thinking about the problem you're solving.

Limit your use of debugging tools. I'm self-taught and in my early years of programming (Pascal) as a teenager I just didn't know how to use a debugger. It's given me a 6th sense in figuring out where the problem is in the code when I encounter a problem. Developing that ability makes you work faster because most times you know immediately where the problem is, instead of hunting things down in the debugger in a systematic fashion. Next time you're tempted to immediately fire up the debugger, just don't and try to figure it out only by looking at the code.

Have a little chime that goes off every five minutes. If you're not doing something worthwhile when the chime goes off, then start doing something worthwhile (for me that's whatever's next on my to-do list.).

www.online-stopwatch.com/interval-timer/ works great.