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Did You Hear We Got Osama?

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Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#151

Post by peterwwillis »

Sukotto wrote: post #128
peterwwillis wrote: post #20

It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read. HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And tha…

I suspect you're trolling. But just in case you're not, and the problem really is that you cannot find interesting, educational and/or enlightening material... have you tried: Random Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random Ask.Metafilter (with accepted answer): http://ask.metafilter.com/home/answered Hack a Day: http://hackaday.com/ LifeHacker Top posts: http://lifehacker.com/top/ or http://lifehacker.…

I appreciate the attempt but these are examples of what I find uninteresting. Toys, gadgets, household tips and trivia are not the kind of noise I want when trying to optimize for value.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#152

Post by ihh »

if you think this is all noise why did you post your own noise to hacker news and with a obvious link to your thang at the bottom? Just trying to create noise in your favor. this post is not genuine.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#153

Post by AtTheLast »

I find myself venturing off to all my favorite online outlets when I'm doing a task I'm not particularly interested in. I guess I should step back and ask myself why I'm really doing something. If it plays an important part in helping my start up be succeed, then I should be stoked that I get to make my company better. If I can't find a good reason to be doing it, then I should move on to something of value and importance.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#154

Post by movingahead »

farnsworth wrote: post #67
Zirro wrote: post #14

Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this. "What followed were the most productive three years of my life." It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing some…

You sound like me 3 years ago. I used to go into zombie-mode for long periods of time just reading every single link on Reddit, Google Reader, random news sites, etc. and afterwards I'd hardly be able to remember any of it. I still do this on occasion, but it's much less of a problem now. I had to take a tough approach with myself to build some better habits, but it worked. I decided was that if I was going to take t…

I do something similar with adding a description of what I have read on Pinboard. It makes you think about what you have read and in turn read less.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#155

Post by csomar »

peterwwillis wrote: post #94
ThaddeusQuay2 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays." You sound like a typical bored teenager, with too much time on their hands, wearing their boredom as a nihilistic badge of honor, expecting everyone to entertain them, while simultaneously acting as if they know everything, thereby supposedly being superior to the entertainers. If you can't find anything good to…

Yes. I am 16. I stay home from school because learning civics and history and math and science are super boring, so in between sessions of wallhacking on legacy counter-strike servers I refresh a startup tech news site looking for intellectually stimulating articles. You're right. I do know everything. Everything except how best to use my time when I occasionally want to waste it broadening my horizon with unusual an…

Yes. I am 16. I stay home from school because learning civics and history and math and science are super boring, so in between sessions of wallhacking on legacy counter-strike servers I refresh a startup tech news site looking for intellectually stimulating articles.

No, they are pretty interesting. The teachers are boring, may be. History? The civil war? The Isreali-Palestini conflict? The poverty in the world? Water distribution in the world?

Go and look for the interesting parts. There are lot of interesting stuff in the world, apart from the tech scene. I wish I spent more time when I was your age reading about politics.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#156

Post by yread »

vnorby wrote: post #42

If you work in a tech startup, obviously you don't have to read every political story but I believe you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry. If you're not aware of these things, your boss is, and they are going to ask you to implement a screen that informs the user you are uploading their address book. If you've seen a large breadth…

> you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry.

I don't think so. The Path situation is a problem precisely because we know that it is a wrong thing to do. So if you haven't heard of it you would probably decide not to do it like them.

I would even argue that this is actually the stuff you should ignore. The latest Sillicon Valley affairs, bloggers bickering between each other and so on. That's not even news, that's more like celebrity gossip.

The articles that I appreciate the most on HN are about how somebody has done something (which I perhaps thought of doing myself) and writes up precisely how.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#157

Post by batista »

wheels wrote: post #97

This is a topic that I've thought some on in that my company is in the recommendations space, and some thoughts on what make news recommendations difficult: The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk. I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very…

I stopped reading the news at one point -- for a couple years -- because of its persistent lack of depth. I realized that reading 100 BBC articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would leave me knowing virtually nothing about it, other than some factoids, whereas the same time spent reading books would be worthwhile.

Not to mention that you would have read 100 articles from a single source that is a government-controlled channel of information from a country that is partly responsible for starting the Israeli-Palestinian mess in the first place.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#159

Post by commenting123 »

I don't know. I guess this is like swimming in a lake. Your head is down in the water most of the time, but every once in a while you lift your head to see what's around you and if you're swimming in the right direction. Swimming with your head down is like doing your work and being productive. Lifting your head up is like reading the news and know what's happening around you. I only read about 10 minutes of news each day, but that's enough to avoid trying to go through a wall blindly while not being aware of the door 2m away.

For example, I changed career because I read about how Banks screw people over and how Big Data is becoming important. Also, I decided not to work for a company, because I read it in the news how it's basically slave work and how the owners have it exceptionally good. So now I'm starting my own company, doing machine learning in finance.

Re: Did You Hear We Got Osama?

#160

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

zalew wrote: post #16
pooriaazimi wrote: post #10

I changed my habits a few months ago after reading http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage . I'm really happy I did that. "RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites" I have 6-7 feeds in my Reeder.app and check them weekly. (Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928

I ditched rss readers a long time ago and refuse to use any service with an 'unread' counter except email.

I actually find RSS extremely useful for keeping up on scientific journals and blogs. For instance, there's no way I'll check every journal that might have papers of interest to me, but if I subscribe then I'll get thirty papers or so every month. If i haven't seen anything of interest in a few issues (or blog posts) then I remove it. I also subscribe to R bloggers, stats.stackexchange.com and the R tag on Stackoverflow. I've learned a huge amount from these sites, and for me RSS is a way to avoid pointlessly surfing news/political/science sites for hours. YMMV.
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