161–170 of 236 posts
You end up doing what people asked, not what was processed, as you say - in the shower, and lit up as the best thing forward
I've had more ideas come to me after hiding in my office to take a nap than sitting at my desk. It got to be such a gold mine of solutions that I still to this day allocate 30 minutes of my day to a nap. Non-negotiable. So many hard problems that have been brought to me, or complicated needs for architecture, etc were solved by simply turning my active brain off. When I was in graduate school I'd regularly get stuck…
Look how many comments here are something like: "Well, of course leisure is good - because it helps me work harder!" It's sad. It's that "work-is-noble" ethos. These people are effectively saying that they are at-lesiure in order to work better - they have it backwards! I don't know about you, but I work in order to be-at-leisure; I am only ever not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure. Refreshing and recharging is g…
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>In the context of such a short post, the fact the author mentions going for "a run" twice doesn't seem trivial to me. Gets the blood pumping and overclocks your brain. I too have been working from home since covid started. What I find, take a break from sitting and move around. Do some chores. It gets your blood pumping and when you sit back at your desk you receive a +20 IQ points temporary boost.
It’s more than that if you have ADHD or are on the spectrum. Repetitive activities help upregulate the brain in ways that allow for these sorts of random connections between seemingly disparate data to happen more reliably. Some people think better when fidgeting, walking, brushing teeth, washing their hair, walking through doorways. I went through a particularly dangerous phase in college where ideas would come to m…
I'm IT and not a doctor and do realize 'alternative medicine' is amongst my original post. I'm not against modern medicine, but I do also realize modern medcine is not perfect and has been corrupted in many ways.
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It often feels like “teams” of 1.5 work really well. Basically this is one person doing the work, with one other person who is very much in the loop but not actually on the hook. The worker is getting the job done, and the consultant is offering ideas, questioning some decisions, reviewing WIP, and generally supporting the worker. Having been on both sides of this, I think that the little bit of distance that the con…
Great insight! I always look back at my high-school internship at a real software company back in the 90's. I spent at least half my day sitting in the cube of the old unix greybeard (literally) just watching him code and once in a while asking what he was doing. It seemed like a waste of time, but 1) I became a really good c programmer from multiple summers of watching an expert, and 2) since I really wasn't in char…
I feel the one-on-one relationship can work well in both situations where the individuals are peers and when it is more of a mentor-mentee relationship. In grad school I had a close friend that was on more of a VLSI track while I was on an RF track. We had different expertise, but a shared a common background of electrical engineering. This allowed us to bounce ideas off each other where there was enough competence to provide meaningful feedback and just enough diversity to provide a different perspectives/approaches.
I recently gave a listen to the BBC podcast The Bomb and some of the work done in the era seemed to also follow pairing of minds. Maybe it was just the way the material was presented, but there seemed to primarily be a team of two tackling each of the major components needed for the various atomic programs to succeed.
There was an article linked here a while back about tacit knowledge that I feel applies in a way to the mentor-mentee relationship. Many comments about skills learned by observation and imitation from one-on-one work. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23465862
People tend to lash out at whichever one seems like a problem: "You can't get anything done around here without some stupid committee harassing you!" "The left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing!" They don't understand that yes, you have to balance these opposing values, and that "opposing" doesn't mean right vs. wrong.
the solution to a thorny problem is often conceived alone, and then refined with a set of motivated engineers.
Even as a business owner, sometimes I sit at my desk "working" but on nothing in particular. I should be walking.