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Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

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Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#151

Post by da3da »

graeme wrote: post #101

Not a programmer, but may be of use: Life: continuous learning, whether it be a new language, a new skill, travel. Whatever I learn usually produces benefits in unexpected ways, years down the road. Runner-up: barbell weight-lifting, three times per week. If you've never been strong, you owe it to yourself to try. You get a physical sense of capacity to match whatever mental sense of capacity you've achieved. Work: T…

I want to second your weight lifting suggestion. Also, when you're strong, people treat you better. It's probably related to the halo effect surrounding attractive people. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#152

Post by scottmagdalein »

scottmagdalein wrote: post #148
huhtenberg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would've been a great comment if it hadn't have your real name attached to it.

Why? What if someone is going through it and wants to talk about it with someone else who's experienced it? I'd LOVE to help them. My wife would LOVE to help them. We can't do that very well if we keep it a secret or speak about it anonymously.

Why would you feel awkward? She made a mistake. She stopped, asked for forgiveness, and we are very happy. The "sin" has been rectified.

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#154

Post by frostmatthew »

Life: switching careers from hospitality management to software development (I don't think any developer who has never been anything else can really appreciate how great we have it)

Programming: learning C++, even though at work we use Java and Ruby, I feel the more I learn C++ the better I become at higher level languages

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#155

Post by Throw654- »

Life: Trying LSD. Gave me a new perspective. Allowed me to fix relationships.

Programming: Reading research papers and the academic basics, and learning functional programming. Gave me the ability to go far beyond simple apps on frameworks, and tackle problems I thought out of my league.

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#157

Post by digitalWestie »

marcamillion wrote: post #128

Life: Doing my MBA - hear me out before you guys go all nuts. I have a BA in Computer Science and I wanted to learn more about business, so I chose to do an MBA in Finance. Best. Decision. Ever. The reason being is that I now see the world through a different lens. For instance, when everybody blames bond markets for trashing the bonds of Greece or Argentina - I understand why it is the fault of the government and th…

Hey, I'd like to know a bit more about how you look differently with a finance foundation. Are there any resources you could recommend for a laymen? I have some basic economics but not much else.

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#159

Post by namank »

Taking a year off school to do a startup.

Didn't work out but allowed to filter life and actually figure myself out. This allowed me to restructure my degree/education/learning to support the rest of my life and not just my next startup.

You'll ask this again in 5 years and hopefully my answer wouldn't have changed much.

Programming: never saying no. Biting off more than I thought I could chew.

Re: Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

#160

Post by rwallace »

nsm wrote: post #88
jeremiep wrote: post #31

Life: dropped the TV subscription, stopped reading newspapers and generally disconnected myself from the mainstream world. Thinking outside the box becomes natural then. Programming: Teaching myself Lisp and Emacs, dropping Agile methodologies, ditching OOP for functional, writing my code as if I'm replaceable and the next guy needs to pick up where I left without any trouble. The last point actually gives me more va…

Not questioning your choice, I disconnected myself from the mainstream world once as well. But now I'm starting to think that our tendency to do this (specifically stop reading newspapers) may be leading to a disconnect from participating in the community. Which leads to a lot of decisions being made against the interests of the community due to people not participating in local governance issues. This combined with…

There is positive value in participating in the community, but negative value in reading newspapers or listening to the news on TV or radio; those things will make your decisions worse not better. (An analogy: news media are like a bottling company that takes a thousand liters of slightly dirty water, separates it into 999 liters of pure water and one liter of concentrated poison - and throws away the pure water and sells the poison.) Much better to spend your time instead doing something that will bring you into contact with people in real life.
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