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The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

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Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#301

Post by mywittyname »

BeefWellington wrote: post #176
kjerzyk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.

The Joy of Cooking is a bit old but describes the practicalities of cooking fairly well. It's full of recipes yes but there's essentially an entire chapter at the start of each section that outlines different techniques and even how to select cuts of meat, etc. It's fairly basic advice but that + Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will basically cover "intro to cooking" and give you a good set of the basic recipes to cover off.

I love the Joy of Cooking because it teaches cooking in layers. So it will start off teaching you how to make a simple dish, then the next pages are all permutations of that dish where you add a few ingredients, or slightly change the cooking technique.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#302

Post by binarysolo »

macksd wrote: post #274
dheera wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so maybe true effectiveness would be achieved by having a torrent of work once a week instead of a few minutes a day.

I think at this point we're reading too much into specific units to compare very distinct things. The point of the analogy either way is the compounding effect of seemingly small things repeated.

Right, even a day or suncycle is kinda arbitrary and human-scale. Point is just that consistent repeatable practice rewards compoundingly over time.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#303

Post by karatekidd32v »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #81
kabdib wrote: post #58

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.

Based on my experience reading academic papers, I would suggest that you would often be better off skimming 3 papers in a week than reading one closely. I would often do this in grad school: * Go search for papers that broadly had to do with some structure or other mathematical gadget I was interested in at the time, * Read the abstracts of those papers to find the ones that looked most interesting, * Take the most i…

I mostly agree with this sentiment - with the added note that there is significant value in 'going deep' on a small subset of those papers. In my opinion, best bang for the buck there is to focus on the well known and impactful papers in that domain. I think there are big benefits to really digging into what makes a particular solution work, and how the authors really 'prove out' the full idea in the paper.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#304

Post by pkghost »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #293
arnold_palmur wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News comment.

And to expand on what I would like to hope your point is, comments like the GP are exactly why I and many others come here :)

And this is the great thing about threaded comments — everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of conversation can do so without derailing the others (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX).

Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their tangent.

Normalize polite pedantry!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#305

Post by nine_k »

astrange wrote: post #289
nine_k wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not underappreciate the subject area expertise of people who analyze stocks in a particular business area. Many of them learn the subject area at a serious depth, exactly for the reasons you state: the balance sheet does not tell the whole story.

Being a serious researcher is only good for stock picking if everyone else is going to come to the same conclusion, just more slowly. This is not true recently, what does meme stock performance have to do with serious peoples' opinion on Tesla? Actually, value investing hasn't worked for a lot longer than that, and it's probably because everyone else can see what you can for a public stock.

Knowing the meme environment is a part of the subject area knowledge :)

I mean, understanding a bit about CPU architectures and chip production processes is needed to e.g. choose between INTC and AMD, and some knowledge about cell structures and mRNA is needed to decide whether to invest in MRNA. This knowledge is important, on top of understanding the balance sheet.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#307

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

shoemakersteve wrote: post #168
kjerzyk wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind sharing what you used to learn cooking? My main struggle is recipe books that teach you the recipe rather than cooking. But I'd love to learn HOW to cook, not WHAT to cook.

There's a ton of great content on YouTube to learn the basics. There's a channel called "Pro Home Cooks" that's definitely more focused on teaching you the basics as well as techniques, tips and tricks, etc. That's what I watched to get me started. They have a couple of "Basic tips & tricks everyone should know" type videos and I definitely recommend those. It's stuff like, "pat down your chicken before cooking it or…

Hands down the best cooking channel on YouTube for me at least.

The thing I most appreciate about Mike's work with Pro Home Cooks is that he shows what _doesn't_ work and what he would do different next time. I find that's the most important skill to hone when learning to cook.

He also does a ton of improvisation during his videos. Things like, "I was going to put broccoli in this but all I had was kale, but I still want a little more substance so maybe I'll make kale chips and roast some cashews too." Creativity in the kitchen is a huge part of the fun, and I haven't seen other cooking education sources that demonstrate it effectively.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#308

Post by devoutsalsa »

thehappypm wrote: post #299
telchar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probab…

That's not true. You might be thinking of the Missoula floods that carved out the channeled scablands of Eastern Washington. But the Grand Canyon's river is generally the same size it always has been, and slow erosion forces created it.

Why not both?! It's not ridiculous to allow for constant, steady erosion and the occasional 10,000 year flood shenanigans!

Example from in our great-grandparents lifetimes. There's a cool place called the Bridge to Nowhere in Southern California => https://goo.gl/maps/XMerBpT3J2caLJ696 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel.... The bridge was built as part of a massive project to build roads through the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid 1930s. Only a couple years after the bridge was completed, there was a massive rainstorm washed away most of the newly built roads. The bridge stand about 120 feet, roughly 36 meters, above the river below. I was talking to a park ranger who said there were reports that the flooding nearly reached the bridge. While this bridge stands over a river that's been slowly eroding the valley below for (millions of?) years, every now and then Mother Nature says "I'm bored, let's hit the biblical flood button and see what happens!" What kind of boulders could a violent rush of 20m-30m+ flooding move? Big ones I'm sure! Who the heck knows what kind of freakish rain storms or natural damn bursts have happened in the time that the Grand Canyon has been forming!

For anyone in the SoCal area, the Bridge to Nowhere is a fun day hike. It's about 5 miles (8km) one way from the trailhead. It's a very cool hike. If you're going in summer time, bring plenty of water, sunscreen, and some head protection. It gets toasty in that canyon.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#309

Post by omgJustTest »

telchar wrote: post #161
munificent wrote: post #40

I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most vital lesson I've learned. There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding. The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing off rocks for millenia. Cons…

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probab…

Like every problem, it depends on the resolution of the scale you examine it! How much did you zoom? Looks like drops to me!

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#310

Post by hu3 »

distribot wrote: post #291

I think the worst part about being clinically depressed is how it feels impossible to do a little bit for a few days at a time, and then all my context/momentum/enthusiasm burns up by the time I come back to a project.

Been there. Luckily my mother managed to drag me kicking and screaming to a psychiatrist as I didn't have the energy. If you can, try to call a parent or a friend and ask for help and be very clear to them that you can't do it alone (I know it's painful to admit).

Turns out I had ADHD and Vyvanse changed my life. I did stop medicating after one year because it wasn't easy on the body (accelerated hearth rate) but medication gave the kickstart necessary to drag my ass through dark times and have impetus. Understanding my problem allowed me to manage it.

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