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Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

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161–170 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#161

Brush while in the shower.

> Brush while in the shower. Not sure how that saves time, unless you're so coordinated that you can wash your body with one hand while you're brushing your teeth with the other. Also, it would seem to waste a bit of water.

Most of the time when I shower I usually let the water run over me for some time. I use that time to brush.

Yes, it probably is using more water but I waste that water anyway.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#162
post #10

Putting myself in positions where I have to pull through. Like signing up to be a TA at the university -- now I know that I have to really master the course content. Or telling people that I do/will do x and y.. so now I have to do x and y or else I'm a hypocrite and that sure would be bad. I tell my friends that I get out of bed by counting down out loud from 5..0, and that I ALWAYS get out of bed at 0. And I've con…

I did just the same thing! I'm using BeautifulSoup for scraping.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#163
post #29

Sitting next to another person while writing increases my writing productivity by at least 400%. In retrospect it took me way too long to break down and try this. My shot at immortality costs me $120/year for membership in the Cryonics Institute and $170/year for $250K of 10-year term life insurance of which $50K goes to CI. I lost 20 pounds on Seth Roberts's fixed-point diet (aka the "Shangri-La diet") and gained 10…

Open relationships sounds good on paper but only works as long as you are not actually in love.

At the risk of sounding merely contrarian, I can offer a handful of counterexamples that I know personally.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open relationships sounds good on paper but only works as long as you are not actually in love.

At the risk of sounding merely contrarian, I can offer a handful of counterexamples that I know personally.

Are you sure? I mean it's very easy to see when it goes wrong but seeing that it's all fine is a different thing.

There is a reason why the experimentation with that kind of relationships have been on a decline since it's peak in the sixties/seventies.

We are talking about being in love not just being fuck buddies.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#165
post #37

1) Own a business suit. It hacks other people, because whatever problem you are trying to get resolved does not happen to the sort of people who wear business suits. It also hacks yourself - you'd be amazed how hard it is to sound like an absent-minded twenty-something when you look like the CEO of a multinational. (Trust me.) 2) Writing letters - on paper, physical letters - is the most underrated professional skill…

I agree completely on #2. Before college I has a lot of difficulty putting my thoughts on paper, and my writing style never earned me anything above a "C" in my writing classes. Because I wrote letters in college often (asking for funds, mostly), it is much easier for me to form thoughts and get them across when speaking to someone.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#166
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? What do you do instead of a resume? Just a cover letter?

Oh, you still need a resume but you don't start by delivering it. You start by talking to the person who is doing the hiring. the resume only comes out when they say "I'd like to hire you please send your resume to HR".

I can't emphasize this more. Do not hand out your resume like it's free. Value it. Don't give out more than what's needed. Create the "need to talk." Don't ever dump a resume into one of those corporate HR portals. It's a dead end. Make the HR guy work towards asking you for your resume. HR has to "earn" your resume -- 'cos it's tasty.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#167

As some of you might know, trains are very crowded here in India. I take a train to work. My simple hack is a marked position on the station where I stand when the train arrives in order to be the first one to grab the handle of one of the marked compartments that I always get in. After the people on the train alight, I can sneak in quickly. Using this hack, I am the first one to get inside the compartment 90% of tim…

Mumbaikar!! I do it too. :) Hey there.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#168

Get your self tested for ADD, I know this sounds weird but up 10% of people have it. And with treatment,I got tested and my coding started to become more in depth. My concentration is more then i can ever imagine. Before I would work 30mins 30 mins(a life hack I got from HN previously) off like a previous. Now I can work 2 hours straight with even better results from what I would do in 4 30 min work sessions.

Embrace the you that you are and don't assume your broken. Any differences you have can be turned into advantages.

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#169

I've got a lot of mileage out of this Employment Hack: Treat your job as an unimportant thing that's easily replaced, as opposed to your Career that's Important and Fragile and something that you should never ever mess with for worry of ruining your entire life. If you're not sweating your Career, you're more likely to do silly things like take too much vacation, even long sabbaticals. You're more likely to stand up…

Do you have kids or a mortgage?

Re: Ask HN: What are your best life hacks?

#170
post #169

I've got a lot of mileage out of this Employment Hack: Treat your job as an unimportant thing that's easily replaced, as opposed to your Career that's Important and Fragile and something that you should never ever mess with for worry of ruining your entire life. If you're not sweating your Career, you're more likely to do silly things like take too much vacation, even long sabbaticals. You're more likely to stand up…

Do you have kids or a mortgage?

Yes. At least, the kid part should happen in the next week or so.

I imagine you bring it up because losing your job is a much bigger deal when you have a family and expensive stuff. I'd counter that it's only a big deal if you're not certain that you can pick up a new job any time you want.

The best way to acquire that certainty is to spend the first several years of your career proving it to yourself.

  - don't sweat your career, make a name for yourself

  - find yourself on the market for whatever reason

  - immediately get snapped up

  - repeat
If you're provably good at what you do, jobs are plentiful. Enough so that losing one doesn't really do much aside from forcing you to grab a better one.
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