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My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

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Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#51

Post by whothehell »

Seba wrote: post #31
whothehell wrote: post #18

I find it strange that some people in this discussion thread are trashing about companies that make stuff like farmville or facebook. So they are making something on which people are wasting their time. Does that make these people are bad or "waste of talent"? It sounds like they woke up one day and thought "lets make repetitive but addictive game/site which will enable people to waste lots and lots of their time and…

Don't get it wrong. Everyone has to decide on his own if he wants to work on something useful for society or not. There is no general way to judge that, but it is always a personal decision based on ethics the person considers worth to follow.

I get that. But the point is you should not try to demean the choice of others.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#52

Post by johnx123-up »

wheels wrote: post #26

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm." Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient s…

Agreed. HN is truly addictive! I keep refreshing front page at least 10 times in 30mins... others might be doing it higher.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#53

Post by adestefan »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #7

I've been thinking about this lately, too. A long time ago, I spent almost no time on the internet, because there wasn't really much of an internet to speak of. Instead, I wrote code. Lots, and lots, and lots of code. Some of it in assembly; some of it, even, in hex, with tons of printed pages of processor instructions in front of me. Feats like that required a level of concentration that I find almost impossible to…

I have felt the same way for a while now and upon reflection I realized that one purchase in my past had pushed me over the top in my addiction: a laptop in 2006.

I was liberated from my desk to do creative things. Think of all the beautiful places I could take may new laptop and feel the juices flowing. The world was my oyster!

Instead, I just looked at crap on the Internet from all those places. I could sit on the couch and have the Internet. I could sit outside and have the Internet. The laptop led to an iPhone. The iPhone led to the Internet while standing in line. The Internet in the car...

I still flirt with the constant idea of selling that laptop, selling that iPhone and seeing what happens. But alas all I do is flirt; I just bought a new laptop last month.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#54

Post by adestefan »

officemonkey wrote: post #43

I like how he talks about "solving frivolous problems that ultimately contribute nothing to the betterment of humanity as a whole" and how it's a waste of talent. But meanwhile, there's a giant "HipsterVision" ad on his sidebar.

Every addict has to hit rock bottom.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#55

Post by robryan »

wheels wrote: post #39
robryan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working in PHP I find I could probably easily download the PHP docs and be nearly completely happy. Client side though is a different story, plenty of times I have look for something in the JQuery docs but needed to refer to something like a stack overflow question to really get what I need. JQuery/ JS seem to lend themselves to many different ways to do tasks and the selectors are a bit like regex for me in that I h…

Pretty much the full web dev stack is open source, including jQuery. If you really get stuck, you'll actually learn more by reading the source code than by getting a piecemeal info on Stackoverflow. I don't remember having to do that with jQuery (most of the JS I write is without a JS library, and I have the rhino book), but I've frequently read the source code to bits of Rails or MRI when I've not understood somethi…

Yeah you definitely can glean a fair bit from the source, something like selectors is fairly verbose though as it is a parser so often it's far quicker just to Google up the specific thing you need. You can also get a deeper understanding from the source so it does probably balance out.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#56

Post by rockarage »

Actually this is a bad idea if you want to improve your ideas. The internet is not the problem, the problem is how you use the internet.

You can use the internet to learn about 3rd world problems and expose yourself to different cultures and issues. What you will learn is the developing world major problems are not access to education, technology and infrastructure, access will come with appropriate use of funds. Corruption, mismanagement and large criminal organizations are major problems, they lead to a major misappropriation of funds. Every country has corrupt politician and criminals, some more than others, but when you're in a developing country the effects are really devastating.

And if you want to figure out ways to solve worthwhile first world problems you can use the internet to find people who are working on those things. There are plenty of people doing that.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#58

Post by mshron »

I just finished "Hamlet's BlackBerry," which is exactly about taking time to disconnect to get "depth." A little preachy some times, but thought-provoking.

Basically, we haven't developed the social norms needed to put some space between our brains and maximal connectedness, but we can look to history and personal experience to try and figure out what some of them would look like.

It's got some good historical bits about how different great thinkers have dealt with technological change (writing, printing press, telegraph were as disruptive as the Internet). It's also got some personal anecdotes of the author's decision to have an 'Internet Sabbath' every weekend, where from Friday night to Monday morning there is no connectivity in his house.

I'm not sure that engineering (including social engineering) is going to work in a situation like this, but it's probably not very harmful to try.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#59

Post by clistctrl »

johnyzee wrote: post #42
thaumaturgy wrote: post #7

I've been thinking about this lately, too. A long time ago, I spent almost no time on the internet, because there wasn't really much of an internet to speak of. Instead, I wrote code. Lots, and lots, and lots of code. Some of it in assembly; some of it, even, in hex, with tons of printed pages of processor instructions in front of me. Feats like that required a level of concentration that I find almost impossible to…

Perhaps you don't like what you're working on enough? I am generally in the same boat as you, constantly interrupted by the need for an easy information stimulus. But I have noticed that when I work on something that I truly and deeply love, then the allure of everything else fades and those "let me just check HN" thoughts are disspelled because that thing I am working on is so goddamn cool. We all like to hack on st…

You are almost entirely correct. I had severe internet addiction (or so i thought) when I was working at this web dev sweat shop. I found it nearly impossible to concentrate, I was on the internet more than I was concentrating on work. One day I did an experiment. I downloaded the database, and setup my computer to work completely unplugged from the network. I was completely off the grid. Yet I still could not get work done. I would stare at the code, not really caring about it.

I found, I wasn't going to the internet because I loved the internet. I was going to the internet because I no longer had ANY interest in my work.

I quit shortly after that, my new job is extremely interesting, and my web usage has minimized severely.

Re: My ideas are shitty so I'm going on an Internet diet

#60

Post by rapind »

wheels wrote: post #26

This isn't radical enough. Allowing one hour of Facebook / HN per day is kind of like saying, "I'm going on a diet where I only eat ice cream between 8:00 and 9:00 pm." Wikipedia is a huge time-sink. Needing online coding references is mostly laziness and habit. Download the docs you need, and if you still get stuck, read the source code of whatever it is you're stuck on. On the whole this is usually more efficient s…

I know right? It sounded like "I'm staying offline except for this, this, this, this, and this..." instead of "I'm going offline".

Not that I mean to be too critical or anything, but all the exceptions were a little disappointing for some reason.

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