People get all worried about losing their followers & social connections. The social fabric is very adaptable. It does not require public technological codification. You realistically only need fewer than five good friends to be happy; text them. I can guarantee your followers don't care about you at all. The ones who do will reach out to you in other ways.

Since the OP also listed a fallacy, one in the same vein is the endowment effect - where people value things more simply because they already possess them. Consider the example of you holding a stock priced at $200. Now consider an alternate universe where you didn't own that stock but had $200 cash (plus some extra for transaction costs). Would you buy the stock? If not, you should probably consider selling it. This same thought process can be applied to nearly anything in your life: job, significant other, city in which you live. It's good for keeping you out of traps.

I worked hard to start reading longer form articles and books again, but my attention span was so crippled! It was a really weird experience to quit reddit and social media. I still get memes from my friends, and I would have found them funny before, but now I’m so out of the loop I find the majority of them to be so half hearted. I guess memes are funnier when you’re reading tons of them and get that quick jolt of amusement.

I've completely dropped twitter/facebook/etc, but have found that I keep coming back to HN and reddit primarily to keep some level of awareness of things that happen outside of my "bubble".

How would you maintain that level of awareness while still dropping those social media platforms?

Scheduled violations of the rules seem to paradoxically help you follow the rules. Tim Ferris advocates for one dietary cheat day per week, with the idea that it takes incredible will power to give up donuts forever, but almost anyone can put it off until Friday.

Schedule your cheats.

Edit: scheduling is also great for beating procrastination. “I will change my oil at 7:30pm Tuesday” is way more effective than “I need to change my oil soon”

He also spent a lot of time with me on understanding that motivation and discipline are most times just thin wrappers around what people actually want. Thinking less about "If I were just more disciplined I would be able to do this" and more about "If I actually wanted to do this I probably would", and then focusing on what you actually want, or why you don't want something, is probably a much more valuable of a use of time for some people than thinking about motivation or discipline.

I am not posting this to say "If you're a disciplined person, you're wrong" - but moreso "If you're a person that believes you struggle with motivation/discipline, maybe you can rethink those concepts".

He said "Be tougher."

To paraphrase the context: mental toughness is a choice, and if you aren't as tough as you want, you just have to be tougher. Choose it. In each moment when you are tested.

Thanks for your comment. For a while I had been wondering why I couldn't focus, wasn't able to accomplish some simple long term goals, etc. Be tougher was my fix, and your comment expands on some ideas in a way that makes sense to me.

I'm not going to debate you because there isn't a debate.

Awesome content, but if you read pay attention closely, you can basically write the story without reading, because you know what the answers will be.

The paper NYT and WSJ are a great way to go. You get clear editorial contrasts and lots of content. Science Times and other feature sections are always a treat.

Most of the time that side is going to be the free market technocratic solution, hence the parent comment about being able to predict where the article will go, but even then I feel like I have an idea what the argument is and where the sides are.

The Economist loves free markets and a more laissez faire. GOP types quack about that stuff but lack in delivery.

Well that's just the thing! We observe Trump attacked from all sides of the establishment - the left, (some of) the right, and the entire government bureaucracy ("the deep state").

There is a rift somewhere in the system, and we're not discussing it...

However, it does praise some actions that Trump and the Republicans have done with regards to covid19. I overall find that it greatly tones down the extreme takes / perspectives I see on Reddit, and finds lots of nuance

Nonpartisan, yes. Nonpolitical? Absolutely not. The reason for its foundation was (specifically) to campaign against a policy held dear by the government of the day, and (generally) to promote a specific politico-economic worldview, that of free market capitalism with a strong emphasis on cross-border trade. Sometimes this can make their positions appear a little more left-leaning than a classic US libertarian could stomach, such as supporting the existence of the EU, if not every one of its actions; and tending to prefer at least a light touch of regulation on the markets, so long as it keeps the wheels of international commerce turning smoothly. Also, they are at pains to separate their news reporting (usually impeccably balanced and impartial) from their opinion pieces. As an answer to OP's question, I would actually second the recommendation of The Economist as an excellent way to keep abreast of world events while cunningly sidestepping the hysteria and sensationalism of nearly all other media (yes, including most "serious newspapers" these days).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#History

Four years later he's gone, even allegedly called Trump a "fucking moron" on the way out.

Twitter and Reddit are flexible enough that you can use them strictly professionally and be better for it.

I do agree with you overall though. I have a virtual desktop dedicated to social sites, and a separate desktop for work, and I keep myself always aware of what "mode" I am in.

Facebook is utterly useless, I deleted my account years ago.

Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.

For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.

Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.

I do a lot of "reddit [thing I want to know about]" in DDG, just to kick the Reddit results to the top over all the webspam. Not "!reddit [thing I want to know about]" because Reddit's internal site search is, like most, worse than DDG or Google.

The technique they mention (AVRT addictive voice recognition technique) is actually useful for all sorts of things. “That’s my anxiety speaking. It is separate from me and I don’t have to listen to it”, etc.

You can personify and diminish all sorts of negative personality traits. “That’s my impulse to complain / interrupt / lash out / etc”

One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place.

As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.

The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.

If I do post on Reddit I'll disable inbox replies and just check once a day or something for any replies.

Edit: Also since HN doesn't have a 'disable inbox' type (that I know of?), 75% of the time I'm not logged in. I'll log in if I really have a comment and then log back out.

HN gives me a treasure of information in so many areas I have found invaluable when I need it.

Just use something like Zotero so when you see something interesting, you just give a quick look at it, and save it without spending a significant amount of time.

And also learn to manage yourself. Without it you will not need facebook to waste your time, you will fantasy dream while looking at the window or staring against the wall.

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well."

http://www.bikeboom.info/efficiency/

This is among my favorite devices of all time. It is quick, nimble, and lightweight. It has completely replaced walking, a car or a bicycle for my local trips. While there is a learning curve, unlike a bicycle, it has required almost [2] no maintenance in ~4000 miles of riding, and both hands are free to hold things so I can carry much more than I ever could on a bike. I've transported a desk, groceries, a 50 lb box of firewood, gardening tools, and so on. Plus, riding one is just plain FUN: it feels like skiing or flying. You really have to try it to know.

A pessimistic estimate of the V5F monowheel's efficiency:

* Battery = 320 Wh = 275335 calories

* Weight = 12 kg for the device, so with a rider around 95kg

* Range = 20 km on the low end (25-30 km is typical, manufacturer claims 38±3 km)

Efficiency = 275335 calories / 95000g / 20km = 0.14 calories/g/km

An optimistic estimate given my actual riding experience:

Efficiency = 275335 calories / 91175g / 30km = 0.10 calories/g/km

[1] https://www.myinmotion.com/products/solowheel-glide-2

[2] It still works just fine despite me beating the hell out of it, but the battery has worn down to ~70%

So, that seems low to me. I would expect you to burn more than 10 kcal, but it seems the right order of magnitude at least.

I wonder whether this will still hold true when the costs of building and maintaining

    1. a bike 
    2. a flat road to ride the bike on

Take all the transportation conveniences a regular bike can without getting sweaty.

https://www.pinterest.com/naturallymitchell/cars/

Static typing. It's like having a secretary who is doing all the writing, and you only have to think big things. It's a relief.

Higher-level abstractions such as query languages (SQL, LINQ) or markup languages (eh...). Forest for the trees etc. Also DSLs (consult someone with experience first - far too easy to get bogged down).

The most productive way to write software is to borrow something already written. Don't hesitate to buy components from professionals - you're paying for better support, longevity, and less version churn.

Funny. I see this as exactly the opposite.

To me static typing is a bureaucratic delay where you have to tell the computer what it already knows (but thank the deities for "auto" or the walrus operator in Go) and dynamic typing as the computer just doing what you tell it to do without bothering me with trivialities.

Yeah, maybe static typing makes the IDEs smart, but I dislike IDEs being "smarter" than compilers, I mean, the compiler should be the smartest one. If your IDE knows x is an int, why can't the compiler know?

It sounds like you haven't used something Hindley-Milner based - I'd recommend giving it a go, so that you can feel what it's like. Much as Typescript gives you incremental typing over JS, so too does type inference give you incremental static specification of the types over the fully inferred program. When you don't need to write down the types, the inference engine gets out of your way; when you want to use the types to constrain the possible programs you could be writing, the inference engine puts up the guardrails to stop you making mistakes.

This is exactly it. Thank you.

The best programmers I have worked with always pay attention to this. They quickly address any barriers in the way of an easy and simple build.

Do you call it dynamic because of the delay in getting error feedback, because the RDBMS you use is genuinely loosey-goosey with types, or for another reason?

For my part I use LINQ2SQL and the whole thing becomes statically typed.

Sleep, diet, exercise, attention, focus, productivity, knowledge, workflow, socializing -- anything we do repeatedly is a habit. Right now, in each and every moment, we are all the average/sum of the daily habits of the past few years.

So, the "level" we achieve in each domain is a lagging indicator of our habits; fat stores up over time, dirty dishes stack up, lack of knowledge is the result of lack of learning habits, etc.

If you make weekly improvements to your habits, that means small changes are sticking each week. While 1% better doesn't seem to matter much in the short run, if you stack 1% every week, in one year you're now 50% better in your routines.

How to do so? Here are some ideas:

-Make the bad habits harder to do. Keep the snacks, games, distractions out of reach, so you have to expend extra effort to get to them. You want high-effort barriers to beginning bad habits.

-Make good habits easier to do. Prepare yourself for workouts in advance. Commit yourself to things that will be helpful. use daily streaks, motivation, positive thinking, and imagination to encourage your good habits.

For more information, check out James Clear + Sam Harris' conversation on the Making Sense podcast (or the Waking Up app).

Try this for 5 days, it'll give you everything that the book gives you and it is very low commitment.

Also, if you find that it works, you can move on to the book.

Since many of us are taking online calls now, this is a great time to record your side to hear how you really sound like. You may be quite surprised - it's not just that your voice sounds different, how often you use filler words, repeat yourself, ramble and the tone that you used can be quite different than what you thought it was. From there, you can identify your weak points, practice (speak on your own and record it) and improve.

I'm currently between roles (COVID layoffs), and I got feedback on my webcam interview demeanor and speaking style.

My approach for this was to practice my answers to common interview questions out loud while recording myself with Photobooth and then watching the recordings.

There are a couple of dimensions in which I've found this helpful:

   * Sheer number of reps. These help me get more comfortable with telling my career story up until this point, and I've found that my comfort has a direct impact on my interviewer's comfort
   * I spot tics and habits that I wouldn't have otherwise. I noticed that I had a tendency to start my answers with "so, uhhh...". In some cases simply realizing the presence of a tic/habit was enough to get rid of it
   * The recordings reduce the channels from 2 (output + input) to just 1: this helps me analyze what I'm saying and how I'm saying it without having to also think about what I'm going to say
   * Recordings also provide a historic record that I can look back on and see improvement, which helps keep me motivated when the job hunt gets me sad

2. Read smarter material.

3. Write more and edit your writing more than you normally would. That will force you to think about where you can improve your verbal expression.

I guess the opposite is true if you're the one dominating conversations :-)

https://sambleckley.com/writing/church-of-interruption.html

I can use my tech skills to MASSIVELY enhance the trades side of the business. While i can do enough of the trades myself to cover my employees sick days, emergencies, etc, i dont do it day to day. I run the business and make sure i'm using my primary tech skills to grow us. Its working well so far.

When we started we did anything, painting, small handyman jobs, fences, carpets, gardening, etc. But I ended up just concentrating on kitchens and bathrooms, as they are generally the most investment worthy home improvements a homeowner will want, which means larger profit per job and also they're more room to take away a homeowners problems. Typically if they project managed it themselves, they'd need to bring in a large list of separate trades. Labourers for demolition, plumbers, electricians, joiners, tilers, cabinet fitters, flooring fitters, decorators etc.

The people i hire, with backup from myself, can do everything the job needs, which means they only need 1 company to do it. We have a wonderful woman in the office that does all the customer service, we take away all the old crap we've removed, we help them pick the new bathroom suites and kitchens they want, etc. Its a full service. I think in America, the term for this is General Contractor, over here in the UK, its not typically used.

My advice for you, if you're starting from scratch, is to get some DIY skills to begin with, start with your own home. Try things, Youtube is the second best tool for learning anything in my opinion, only surpassed by actually doing it. If at all possible, whatever you are trying for the first time or are unsure of, try it, then pay a professional to inspect your work AS your doing it and sign it off at the end. Get them in before you start too. Any tradesperson that wont do give you advice that you're willing to pay for isnt worth knowing IMO. The ones that are, are the ones you hire when you do bigger projects that you need help on. Plus anyone that can explain their own job to an outsider, generally is pretty good at what they do.

I'd be able to give you more specific advice with more information, happy to answer any questions.

What does your software business do (if you dont mind telling me!)

Also what's your profit margin on say a bathroom or a kitchen?

There are people out there that provide a very specific service cutting kitchen worktops, explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux3EZhhYdZo

Its typically done with a jig and a router, its not that hard IMO, but a lot of kitchen fitters either cant do it well or hate doing it and they hire someone to do this (as well as other things like sink cut outs) and they get paid DAMN GOOD money to do that, especially if you can show up at a new housing development where you can bash out 30-100 homes as one job.

Personally, while i have no experience with CNC's, i know what they are and how they work and i reckon theres a way to make this job more efficient by having a CNC machine in the back of a van that can be setup to cut these joints. I've not tried this idea, but i may do it one day.

This is the kind of different persepective you can have from completely different skillsets and experiences that people who do the same thing day in day out for years just dont arrive at.

For hobbies: I do Karate, I do aquascaping, and play guitar (acoustic, electric, bass) and sing (mostly church related weekend gigs).

For languages: Indonesian, English, Japanese (still not proficient but I can get by, Kanji reading is still working on it).

Not sure how I combined all of those. Totally unrelated lol.

That assumes the essentials of proper sleep, nutrition and basic fitness are taken care of [3]. Aside from this meta 'help' stuff, the one tool that was a 100x force multiplier for me is Karabiner [4]. Share it on HN all the time but no one uses it. :|

1: https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public/

2: https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden

3: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/health

4: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/macos/macos-apps/karabiner

See https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/downloads/ or https://www.autohotkey.com/docs/scripts/ for a larger collection.

For example, I would have never thought of AltEdge ("Sends Alt-Tab when the mouse is on the left edge of the screen and keeps cycling through the windows") or Barnacle ("A programmable toolbar that fits inside any window") or MonitOff ("Turns off the monitor at user defined idle times during the day") but it took 10 seconds to download the executable and try out one of these (AltEdge).

https://www.dcmembers.com/skrommel/download/altedge/

For me, Windows' programmability, especially AutoHotKey, has been a major reason to find Mac OS rather unattractive. Over the years, AutoHotKey has solved several minor-but-daily annoyances for me.

It uses Lua for its scripting engine.

Not sure there's quite an equivalent for the executable feature, but it does support publishing and installing modules written by users, which are called 'spoons', IIRC.

Ha, never knew you could do that. Pretty cool.

That's it :-)

I think the people who are inclined to be constantly learning are probably less inclined to focus on broadcasting their life to others.

That's not to say that there aren't people who learn in public and create valuable content in the process, they just seem rare.

[1]: https://timothyandrew.net/learning

I also hope more people make an open learning repo [1] where they test out new technology in the open. It's been a nice productivity boost for me.

1: https://github.com/lpil/learning & https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/learning as examples

I have a notes SVN repository dating back about a decade with over 600 text files. I could split them into many more files as these notes aren't "atomic" as Zettelkasten folks say.

The main barrier to release at this point is that many of these notes contain private information, or have brutally honest assessments of certain things that I don't want to be made public. If I had written them with public consumption in mind from the start then I would have done things differently.

Another problem is that the quality of many of these notes is not at a level I'd be comfortable releasing. If I had intended to release these notes in the first place I would have spent some extra time to clean them up earlier on.

My current plan is to slowly ramp up a public repository once I revamp my personal website, but as with many plans, I keep pushing that into the future.

I have a huge problem with this and I'm not sure how to fix it. When I start researching something, I don't write about it, because I don't feel like I know enough and I don't want to repeat the same "generic advice" that many people already presented. Then, when I reach my desired level of understanding, I start writing a blog post. I start with "fundamentals" I had to grasp before I could understand the topic. Then, after 6000 words, some diagrams, and several tens of hours put in, I start writing about the topic, but at that point it's almost guaranteed I'm already interested in something else. So, obviously, I leave the previous topic to rot in the "unpublished" folder forever.

It would, thinking realistically, take someone paying me for the extra time to finish one of these posts, which would become either a really looong article, or a short book/pdf. That won't happen, because most of my enquires about how to be paid for writing something like this lay in the same "unpublished" folder... That's on top of the topics being rather peculiar (most recent example: "Using Haxe's Lua target to script my (Awesome) Window Manager" - started from quick intro to OCaml, two fixes I made to the Haxe compiler (which is written in OCaml) to get Lua target really going, quick intro to Lua and LuaJIT, plus AwesomeWM architecture and class library... at which point I stopped, and switched to the next topic: "Wiring and writing a Home Security-like system with RaspberryPis and Erlang/Elixir", which will turn into another abandoned try at a write up.)

Basically, I start writing at the point I'm pleased with the solution to a problem (eg. the state of my WM, the monitoring around the house, or most recently a working Tizen Studio for native devel on non-Ubuntu Linux), which rids me of the problem, so then I have no motivation to write about it, or its solution anymore. I could go back, change the title, and generally edit whatever I have already scribbled, but that feels like work, and at that point I'm already learning about something else entirely...

This is why this:

> I think the people who are inclined to be constantly learning are probably less inclined to focus on broadcasting their life to others.

seems plausible to me, at least. Though whether my broadcast would be more valuable to others than the "generic advice" (or more specifically, shallow posts on some tech, in "3 things you didn't know about IEx"-like style) is doubtful.

HammerSpoon: https://www.hammerspoon.org/

For me, the two biggest improvements were:

1. App switching (hold F then use all keys under the right hand, each key bound to launch and/or focus a particular app)

2. Window management (hold W then use right hand as arrow keys to snap windows)

Paired with a keyboard that lets you remap held keys to modifier combinations (I use Ergodox) has been great.

My config: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...

Article to explain how to achieve this: https://medium.com/@nikitavoloboev/karabiner-god-mode-7407a5...

I know this one seems a bit obvious, but in the workforce, I rarely see people with them.

Work journals are not very exciting. But just writing things down really makes a difference somehow. Those boring meetings become slightly less boring when you take notes. That thing from six weeks ago doesn't slip by you as readily. That person's name on that one call isn't a mystery. Your year end report is chock full of stuff, not just a few .ppt bullet points of a few highlights.

It's pretty straightforward, and just takes about two weeks of practice to get into the habit. For the effort, it really does multiply.

My journal is a simple org notes file in emacs. I have a to do list on top and a daily log at the bottom and use search to find old info. The more I try to organize it, the harder it is to use, so I keep it linear now!

In practice, I list the name of the 'activity' (a meeting, a work session, some forms filing, etc), the people at the activity, and then note whatever it is that needs notes to be taken. To be clear, I'm not taking minutes in a meeting, just more like action items for myself, and anything really important that came up.

Like I said, it's not 'hard' stuff or very complicated, I may only have like two bullet points for an hour meeting sometimes. The habit is what matters.

[0] http://lsc.cornell.edu/study-skills/cornell-note-taking-syst...

Achieving ambitious goals is much easier when you break it down into weekly or daily habits.

Practicing something once per week means 52 times per year, or 520 times per decade.

Practicing something every other day becomes 182 times per year, or a massive 1,825 times in a decade.

Just imagine how your life would be different if you had 500 x 30 minute workouts over the next decade. Or 1,825 x 30 minutes of reading another book.

Putting 30 spare minutes to use once a week isn't as difficult as it sounds if you make it a priority. The results add up over time.

Don't think in goals, think in consistent habits.

Don't think in weeks or months, think in years.

Most people will fail at everything that takes more than half a year to see success.

Losing weight, getting fit, learn a language, learn an instrument.

Most workflows can benefit from multiple monitors. it's a silly thing to be bottlenecked by screen area on a fancy computer when used 1080p monitors are nearly free in 2020.

Take regular walks and use that time to think. There is something about a steady walk that seems to improve problem solving, especially for more abstract/creative things.

When working, put the cell phone out of view and out of reach. It's too easy to subconsciously pick it up and start scrolling a feed before realizing focus had been broken.

Maybe some people benefit from this but I’ve always found it distracting and in some cases a bit annoying. I’ve always preferred simply having multiple desktops and switching between them instantly with a keystroke which is great in most Linux DEs/WMs but a terrible experience in Windows. It’s gotten to a point where even though I have 2 displays, I just turn one off 99% of the time.

Example for my desktops setup for web application development over the last couple of years:

1. Browser with the product I'm currently working on, nothing else

2. Shells for all sorts of small tasks like tailing a log to REPLs for quick experimentations

3. Application IDE(s)

4. SQL IDE

5. Music player

6. Communication (Mail, slack, etc.) and secondary browser for miscellaneous things

The greatest thing for me is, that what I'm currently doing is in full focus and everything else basically doesn't exist. No notifications dinging in peripheral vision or other distractions. Also it is nice, that when I switch to laptop only, the workflows are exactly the same just with more limited screen space = less tiles I can use.

If for a given tasks it is beneficial to have things side by side, it is just a couple of key strokes to re-arrange windows and or create an ad-hoc desktop until the task is finished.

Of course I could use multiple desktops and tiled windows on multiple screens, but from my experiments it added more complexity that benefits.

I would rather go for a bigger, higher quality screen than adding another.

So, you could use a 27 inch 4k display at 16:9 aspect ratio (which is 3840 by 2160 pixels) in a way that gets you the native resolution which results in much more usable space but the displayed quality isn't all that great. You can run them at 2560x1440 rendering which sacrifices some pace for much improved quality. Works well when you don't sit super close to your screen. Or, if you like more space but still have a little better quality than the jagged mess that is the native resolution, you could run it at 3008x1692. Close to fully usable space but still way better in terms of quality.

The scale of your computer rendered interface and text versus the actual pixel size and density on your display gives you a balance to choose from for space vs. quality. Which one works best is a combination between physical distance to the screen and personal preference (which mostly forms based on cognitive load).

I kinda regret not getting 2x 1440p monitors with similar picture quality for less money.

Meanwhile it makes using Linux a giant pain in the ass, unless you go all-in on a major desktop on a major distro, and then also get lucky. Possibly I'd have a better opinion of it if I were using it with macOS rather than Win10 and Linux.

[EDIT] and OMG lacking auto-temp-control based on surrounding light has me really wishing I'd just put the monitor cash toward an iMac. Way more eye strain.

Everyone seems to prefer it. They don't have to stop what they are doing at exactly 10am, and they can re-read things that are relevant and skip things that are not easily. There is also a bit more personal accountability because everyone can see what was said in previous days.

With every recurring meeting no matter the frequency you have to be quite careful in my opinion and constantly re-evaluate and tweak to keep it useful most of the time, instead it being a dogmatic ritual that has to be done a specific way because somebody learned it as such from an "Agile" book, certificate, course, video.

People rarely understand the point of agile and, specifically, standups. Using it as a daily check in, especially as status updates, is contrary to agile's intentions. The real purpose is to make sure that people on the team frequently expose problems. If people are already doing that consistently, then standup as a practice is fairly moot.

I think there is an useful status update component to standups. Not to your boss, to have a shared view among the team what the state of the product is. But this has to be aligned with how fast to product is meaningfully changing. Some times this might indeed be daily, but otherwise it quickly becomes just noise.

Of course some managers think the product has to or can meaningfully change every day.

I agree, that if you do them you should make them about exposing problems.

One monitor for code, one for the browser (and devtools window) and a third for everything else (an API document, or a spec, a control for the music I'm streaming or a chat window etc.)

I've found the same setup works really well for any workflow that involves making a small change and immediately seeing the result.

sloppy focus is way more helpful than multiple monitors. You can have your editor largely obscured by documentation (or the other way around) and still type. This is especially nice with modern UIs which seem to think wasting screen real estate with white space and ribbons is an important recent innovation.

Then I upgraded to 3 displays, it's much better. Because I have an explicit main display.

So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them. Put the main one in the center, and pretend the other doesn't exist. Once you really want to use the other display, instead of for the sake of utilizing them only, you'll know it.

Main task in the main display, docs and other references on the left display and email/messages on the right. Works wonderfully.

I’m so used to this setup that when I go to my real job and am constrained to a single monitor I feel like I’m looking through a periscope at my work.

I did that before switching to single display after having multiples from the first day of my career onwards. But I didn't even had to try. By the end, because of how my work and setup has evolved, the second display was switched off 99% of the time.

So when I have the choice I put the entire budget into an ever better single monitor, rather than splitting it.

With that being said, I ended up with 3 monitors in my apartment because I bought them incrementally across 3 years(though they're the same model). And also I play video games from time to time, for most of the games, it's better to have 3 monitors instead of an ultrawide one.

https://rectangleapp.com/

Though when a task only needs one screen for more than a couple of minutes to stay focused shutting off the other screens does help.

I agree with the grandparent poster that the Windows situation is very bad compared to something like i3.

I highly recommend using multiple desktops with dedicated hotkeys over alt+tab to switch between applications. Much much faster to press fn+cmd+<h, j , k, l> and immediately bring up the application you want than to tab until you find the application you are looking for.

Also very useful: the windows-key shortcut overview that the PowerToys added (keep the windows-keypressed for a second or two to bring it up).

I only use W10 as a secondary OS and never used windows as main since XP/2000. So far never got to dig deeper into this. It seems to me that out of the box a lot of the functionality is there, but there are also a lot of related third party (often paid) tools.

What are some good combination of tools (third party, paid or not) and settings for a more keyboard centric i guess you could call it, setup of Windows? At the moment to me it feels a bit like, that I could do everything with just keyboard but I'm not meant to.

I used to believe this but not anymore. Way back in 2007, I spent $2500 for 2 Samsung 30" 2560x1600 monitors ($1250 each). I envisioned a massive productivity increase with scenarios such as:

- email inbox one screen with main "task" window on another screen

- video tutorial (e.g. Photoshop training) on one screen while following along on Photoshop on the main screen

- debugger on one window with the code output on another screen

Eliminating all the Alt-Tab window switching would be supposedly be gone. That was the theory. The problem is that I didn't realize that my eyes hated having these giant lightbulbs in my peripheral vision. It was uncomfortable enough that I often powered off 1 monitor which negated the point of multiple monitors. The other thing I didn't like was the extra heat 2 monitors would add to the room.

I went back to 1 monitor and Alt-Tab is minimized if the single monitor is big enough (at least 27") to have multiple windows of reasonable size. For me to go back to multiple monitors, I'd need the "wing" screens to be color e-ink panels[0] so that they don't act as bright flashlights in my peripheral vision.

I recognize the productivity benefits of multiple monitors -- especially for "dashboard" and monitoring[1] such as stock trading, devops IT corporate/cloud systems monitoring, SpaceX rocket launch monitoring, etc. Having your peripheral vision notice an abnormal activity is useful in those scenarios.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=e-ink+panel+&tbm=isch

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=multiple+monitors+trading&tb...

On macOS, a utility called HazeOver makes working with three monitors much nicer.

https://hazeover.com/

[1]: http://multiscreenblank.nookkin.com/

I use tiling window managers to help make this work. (Currently, xmonad on personal laptop, and trying out i3 on my work laptop to see if I can get is as productive for me as xmonad.)

When docked, the laptop's screen usually displays my first virtual desktop, which is for email, chat, misc monitoring. All the other desktops are for Web and tasks.

There are two many tools, setups, and conventions to get into here, but I'd just like to say I'm currently a fan of the approach that all I need is my laptop and Internet to do all my work.

(Well, sometimes I need other specialized hardware. But I don't need to be at my desk for the big monitors.)

I'm using 3 monitors - the two main are right in front of me, the one on top of the other, and the 3rd is on the side, rotated vertically. I tried several arrangements and I found this one working great for me.

> The other thing I didn't like was the extra heat 2 monitors would add to the room.

This has probably changed with modern monitors. I don't think I've ever felt that a non-CRT monitor was hot, but even it might have been true a long time ago, it definitely hasn't been the case since at least 2015.

However, keep in mind that the 16:9 aspect ratio is better suited for movie watching and somehow the whole industry (except for Apple, and Dell also seems to have picked that up in its latest XPS line) uses that, even in professional settings. 16:10 is way better. 1920x1200 displays do exist and I recommend that. Used ones are a bit more expensive than used 1920x1080.

I'll forever miss the 1400x1050 display that I had on my ThinkPad T42. It was awesome for displaying content vertically (think code and/or documents).

I wish there were more options for ratios in the stand-alone display market. Rumor has it, Microsoft will be creating a line of Surface displays. [2]

In my opinion 16:9 is unappealing for productive work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface#Model_compar...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117584/microsoft-surfa...

Maybe it is becouse widescreens have more inches diagonaly for the same area as 4:3 that there was a push for consumer TVs with widescreen?

Think about it: when you're writing code or working in a shell or reviewing a configuration file or working on a word document you'll probably use vertical space more than horizontal space.

16:9

16:10

16:10.66 (almost 3:2)

16:12 (4:3)

I'm sure you can tell the difference between 16:12 (old TV) and 16:9 (widescreen).

On linux I like using a 4k display at 100%. I don't really care about window chrome, icons, etc. I care about text and mainly use a text editor, terminal and browser. They all allow me to set the text size. This way I get the best of both worlds: unobtrusive window chrome and legible text. This works great on a 24" display.

I am a runner and a weight lifter and a former Sergeant in the army. Dehydration is overwhelmingly more frequent than electrolyte depletion. Even when there's no physical exertion involved.

A lot of doctors and health professionals will say that this is bad advice and that it encourages people to obsessively flush electrolytes and minerals out of their bodies.

Which doctors, specifically?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=too+much+water+electrolytes

These results seem to indicate one has to drink a lot - not just enough for clear pee

But it's not hard to find warnings:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hyponatremia/...

> Drinking water is vital for your health, so make sure you drink enough fluids. But don't overdo it. Thirst and the color of your urine are usually the best indications of how much water you need. If you're not thirsty and your urine is pale yellow, you are likely getting enough water.

You see it all the time - young people drinking eight litres of water over an hour or something stupid like that during arduous physical activity because they think they should 'drink until their pee is clear', then wondering they their legs don't work anymore.

What does that even mean? If your body contained toxins that you needed to « detox », you’d be having a pretty bad day and kidney failure.

Detox is meaningless. It’s not like your body is « polluted » and and you can only clean it by « detoxing ».

Healthy skepticism that this makes a difference in day to day human health may be warranted, but skepticism that the claim is even meaningful in the first place is not. Your body does routinely contain a lot of toxins, and it has mechanisms to clean them out. “Polluted” is not a binary yes/no attribute anywhere else in the world and it hits not binary in your body either; it gets more or less polluted as it excretes less or more waste.

See https://duckduckgo.com/?q=detox+fallacy for more in depth explanations.

All good advice. You missed one though: get your ass into shape. You need to be doing strenuous exercise. The difference this will make in life can not be explained, it can only be experienced... just like The Matrix if you will.

Also, with 1 set of exercise you won't really start to sweat and you can do it every day.

The issue with three sets is muscle soreness. I want a fully functioning body every day.

I appreciate the fact that we all can't be athletes: having said that; there was a time in my life when I would open my eyes Every Morning to blinding pain from my workouts. But now, 30 years later, the benefit (I believe partly from having been in such awesome shape and I do still workout strenuously, but not to that level) is that even at 60 years of age I still have stunning reaction times, I can still do things most 35 year olds can not and my driving is still freaking crisp!

PS: I can still do over 60 consecutive pushups and planck for 4:30 minutes. Sure somedays I'm sore as hell but fuck that old age shit... ;)

Currently I am on a quest to like exercise for its own sake, and I am coming from a place where I strongly disliked it. I am surprised that I have found a way to like it at all.

I’ll be blogging about it in a month from now as I would be on month 3 then :)

Cheers!

I also liked the lectures on convex optimization by Stephen Boyd a lot.

Steve Brunton on Fourier analysis.

It's all very subjective of course. Andrew Ng would be mentioned by most and I've watch the series as well, but I find that suddenly I'm intrigued by a mathematical field via some connection I didn't make before.

For example, I experiment with auto-encoders, then I read some papers on using the Wasserstein distance as a metric. Subsequently, I'm watching clips and lectures on optimal transport.

The nice thing about math is that it's so self-motivating to me. The more I learn, the more I want to know. I don't know, maybe it's a type of addiction.

It’s now my default thing to do if I am struggling with a problem or just feeling slightly unfocused, even if it’s raining - I’m fortunate that my office pre-lockdown was on the ground floor, and my apartment has a large enough balcony that now I tend to pace up and down there rather than mess around locking up and going downstairs etc. I can see how having a lift to wait for etc. might make me less keen to do this all the time, but seriously, try it! (It’s good for you too :))