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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

#401

Post by mkl »

bgroat wrote: post #202
andai wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an offline feature, to look up standard library stuff. I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect. This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a wi…

I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for bringing it back to me

It's the top result on DDG and Google for [offline developer documentation].

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#403

Post by brianwawok »

arnold_palmur wrote: post #262
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…

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

Isn’t it great? Lol.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#404

Post by mdoms »

superasn wrote: post #160
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…

> 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. There is an amazing book called The Slight Edge which is based on this very principal and it can really change your life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated with me: It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something…

This passage strikes me as meaningless self-help dreck.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#406

Post by bgilroy26 »

notJim wrote: post #174
DicIfTEx wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in the exact same position, and I can't recommend Ruhlman's Twenty enough. It goes through 20 techniques/ingredients, from ‘Water’ and ‘Onions’ to ‘Roast’ and ‘Boil’, giving you all the information you might possibly need, and then provides a handful of recipes to explore all the avenues of each. The only downside is that a lot of the recipes include meat and the book never really touches on how to make sensibl…

Seconding Ruhlman's Twenty, it's the book that really taught me how to cook . By focusing on techniques, it allows you to understand that when a recipe says "saute onions on medium-high heat", it really means to sweat them, and what that looks like. So rather than mechanically doing what the recipe says, you understand how the ingredients respond to different treatments, and how to get the results you want based on y…

Thirding Ruhlman’s twenty, mentioned here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362053

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#407

Post by pilsetnieks »

arnold_palmur wrote: post #262
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…

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

Science thinks that a bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly. The parable is used anyways because woo teachers don't care what humans think is illogical.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#408

Post by mkl »

nkingsy wrote: post #83
WhompingWindows wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add meat to these bones, I've played piano on average 20 minutes a day for 22 years. That means ~2700 hours of piano practice. Probably an underestimate but it does match my intuition of thousands of hours.

I’ve lately been playing through the “real book”, sketching out each song quickly and doing a run through, maybe 8 songs per day. In just three months I’m on my third time through and have discovered probably 100 songs I just love to play that I’d never heard before (Ellington is a genius songwriter. “Cottontail” is one that I get excited to see when I flip to it, and I just have to play at least three times). Not ac…

There seem to be lots of Real Books. Which one do you mean?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#409

Post by TeMPOraL »

grp000 wrote: post #341
pkghost wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your argument powerful is tying it back to a natural phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're using a bad example.

Also, to the degree it's wrong, you can try to take that error back and see where the argument flows.

Like, compounding is magic, except realistically, one or more of the following typically happens:

- Interest rate is so small that it doesn't add up to a meaningful difference over your lifetime. See e.g. most people and regular savings accounts.

- You aren't able to keep systematically saving / learning / etching a canyon for long enough for the compounding to matter.

- There's a natural decay process that is stronger than compounding.

Whether it's digging a canyon, learning new skills, or amassing wealth, it seems that concentrated but unfrequent actions are much more effective than a steady but weak trickle.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#410

Post by tharkun__ »

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…

Some of this might be great advice and the reasoning sound. Some of it I can't tell but the thing about water and salt makes me suspicious.

I suppose you mean to add salt after the water boils instead of at the start? Why would the water boil faster without salt with any significance to cooking?

I looked it up again and apparently

    The temperature needed to boil will increase about 0.5 C for every 58 grams of dissolved salt per kilogram of water
One teaspoon of salt is about 6 grams. So let's say 10 teaspoons of salt to increase the boiling point by 0.5C for a liter of water. I guess you will boil about 4 liters or so for your pasta? So 40 teaspoons or about 240g of salt to raise the boiling point by 0.5C.

How long does it take a regular stovetop to heat 4l of 100C water to 100.5C?

The good enough answer to that is that it's not noticeable for you even if you had wasted this much salt on your pasta or potatoes or rice or whatever. Never mind that nobody would/should eat this food any longer as you've just cooked your food in saltier than ocean salinity level water. With the proper amount of salt it would be even less noticeable of a difference. Less time than it takes you to get the salt and put it in.

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