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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

#141

Post by phkahler »

deeviant wrote: post #79

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…

There is a lot of luck in starting a successful company, but the ideas are NOT all equivalent and don't have equal probability of success. One thing that may be easier than picking winners is avoiding losers. Ever read the book F'd Companies? Most of those are absurd on their face, yet people invested a lot of time and money into them.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#142

Post by tnorthcutt »

kjerzyk wrote: post #84
spideymans wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…

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.

Another vote for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat as well as The Food Lab

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#143

Post by didibus »

Just showing up everyday to work on a side project on top of a day job and your other life commitments is no small feat, and personally that kind of consistency and perseverance is not something I find easy to do.

On the other hand, procrastinating from a task by overly planning and reading/thinking about the best way to get it done, now that is much more natural

Seriously though, this is a hard thing to keep up, so congrats to them. Most people fail to even consistently show up each day to brush their teeth.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#144

Post by 542458 »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #81
kabdib wrote: post #58

Reading one paper a week is 520 papers a decade, and there's your "Oh wait, I've seen a solution to this problem before..." superpower as a senior dev. Not your only one, but one that's easy to acquire.

Based on my experience reading academic papers, I would suggest that you would often be better off skimming 3 papers in a week than reading one closely. I would often do this in grad school: * Go search for papers that broadly had to do with some structure or other mathematical gadget I was interested in at the time, * Read the abstracts of those papers to find the ones that looked most interesting, * Take the most i…

I absolutely agree with this. A lot of what’s in papers is boilerplate - stuff to say “yes, I’ve read the other relevant works. Yes, I understand how qualitative research works. No, my study is not based on the opinions of my four closest friends”. In my field I’d usually skim the abstract, and maybe from there read the description of the apparatus, conclusions, and further work if the study looked particularly interesting. But you can get 60-90% of a paper’s value from the abstract.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#145

Post by joshhogg »

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…

Are you using the leadsheets to improvise accompaniments on each pass or, just enjoy the melodies as written?

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#146

Post by arkj »

I really am out of words to describe this article. The title should be made the first commandment in the laws of programming (or any field).

It is so effective that you don’t need to read the article the title says it all.

Most people fail at keeping this rule because their mind perceives it to be too simple to keep and falls prey to overconfidence.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#147

Post by xiphias2 »

closeparen wrote: post #108
deeviant wrote: post #79

This type of sentiment generally makes me feel that literally nobody understands why business work or don't. I remember pitching the idea of a fantasy financial league to a friend who is a teacher, as a way of teaching kids about the stock market and finance. His reply instantly gelled with me and let me know they actually understood much more than I about both teaching and finance: He said it will teach exactly the…

While of course doing a startup is very hard and subject to a lot of unknowable, uncontrollable factors I don’t think it’s quite as dire as a retail investor picking stocks. There’s no “efficient markets” for software products; it’s much more likely that you can spot and exploit an unmet business need near your domain expertise than that you have unique insight into Walmart’s quarterly earnings.

As a sofware engieer I disagree: most software engineers have an edge over dumb analysts in analyzing companies, like Amazon / Apple / Tesla / Google / Walmart / Bitcoin / Ethereum / Goldman Sachs. We may not have a deep understanding in the balance sheet, but being able to read the code, APIs, and protocols (SWIFT vs BIPs, lightning protocol, cryptography books, testing infrastructure for example) we can see and understand how well products will work years in advance. The trick is to go deep into technical details.

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#149

Post by andai »

kjerzyk wrote: post #84
spideymans wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…

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.

I learned a lot from Usborne Beginner's Cookbook, which is still in print: https://usborne.com/gb/beginner-s-cookbook-9780746085387#

Re: The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

#150

Post by CPLX »

kjerzyk wrote: post #84
spideymans wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. Knowledge usually works like this. When I first got into home cooking a few years ago, the learning process was painfully slow. It must've taken several attempts spread across a week just to learn how to make basic scrambled eggs the "proper" way. Now after a few years of experience, every ingredient I learn to work with seemingly unlocks a dozen more dishes that I can easily assemble. The rate of learning accel…

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.

Two recommendations that I think will be especially suited to the personality type that’s already matched to software development:

1) The Professional Chef - This is the textbook used in culinary schools. It’s advanced but it starts out from first principles assuming no prior knowledge and just methodically walks through literally every concept one could ever encounter. Not for everyone but if you’re the type that likes to just RTFM this is it.

2) Cooked by Michael Pollan - This is basically the opposite of the textbook I recommended, it’s all high level and narrative and conceptual but as someone who was just starting to cook seriously I found it life changing, it did so much to contextualize what I was doing, so it wasn’t just procedural recipies. This helped me a lot in learning how to open up the fridge pick some ingredients and just know what to do next. Also it’s a breezy read.

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