461–470 of 591 posts
I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got any funding or traction. Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think that consistent…
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Meh I don't think you're doing anything wrong unless you suffer some kind of condition or attention deficit. One thing about these motivational speeches or techniques is that sometimes we just think we'd like doing something new, but deep inside our mind we really do not want to have that new habit. In those cases what we typically really want instead is to be the person who had already cultivated the habit for a lon…
I know exactly what this feels like. I have been making digital mini-magazines about music subgenres for years. I have never finished a single one. Shoegaze, Garage Rock, Post-Punk ... I always move on to a new issue before I'm even done with the first. I want to already be the guy with a boring 9-5 by day, and a 'cool' punk historian by night. But I'm not, and the older I get the more I'm sure I won't ever be. And y…
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Not all hardworking people are successful, but all successful people are hardworking. Success is not guaranteed, it has an element of randomness. Attempting to be successful involves risk, and "survivorship bias" should be accounted as part of that risk. But still success is not entirely random, because only playing video games or watching TV will not result in it. It's not that you should think that consistent engin…
> all successful people are hardworking That really depends on your definition of "successful".
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> It's impossible to build any medium to high complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day. Both of the books I wrote, one of which includes two complete implementations of a programming language, were mostly written in sessions of less than an hour. Occassionally I get longer ones and very often they are much shorter. Learning to task switch and suspend efficiently is also a really valuable skill that impro…
Do you count only writing time, or also the time you spent constructing the book and associated programs in your head?
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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.
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I don't know, I appreciated the correction and additional information. There was also an acknowledgment that it doesn't change ops point. Seemed like a useful comment to me.
Also appreciated by those who prefer to work in torrents, rather than consistently. ;)
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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…
As a proportion of Earth’s water it is ‘tiny drops.’ As a metaphor it is reasonable as ‘tiny drops’ is not a scientific unit. And a boulder is any non-monolith greater than 256mm…seventy feet is not particularly large in a scientific sense just in an ordinary tourist talk one.
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Scott Adams book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" touches on a similar theme, "systems vs goals". Have a system that takes willpower out of the equation - so you can do simple repetitive tasks everyday, to achieve big things over time. A goal might be - lose weight! But a system might be - batch cook steamed veg with some healthy condiments, and eat that only during the day by having it always wit…
This is definitely not the right comment but as a vegetarian… steam vegetables are disgusting! Grill/bake is so much more delicious. And, after committing the sin of telling you that I’m a vegetarian in my first sentence, I hope it can be useful for someone :)
Gee. Steamed veges (potatoes, corn, broccoli, beans, carrots, brussel sprouts etc) with a lil vegan butter, salt, and herbs or minced garlic on top is one of my favourite things in the world.
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Writing code w/o a pedantic frame ~= buggy code.
Writing code with pedantic frame makes you ship slower which makes bug discovery slower
but the fact that her code comments were all about how she was feeling at the time, and were completely unhelpful with discerning what the code meant/does...
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…