I will need a follow up blog title "How to be productive" or something similar.

But seriously, I can't fathom myself doing half the stuff being listed in the post in a year.

I've read in the region of 250 books across 4 years and managed to develop some good habits for getting through books.

1) Aim for one book a month or one book every two weeks. Divide the number of pages by the days in your chosen time frame and commit at all costs to reading your set number of daily pages.

2) Take opportunities like going to the toilet, catching the train, being driven somewhere, waiting for food to cook and the 20 minutes before you sleep for the night to get some pages read. 3) Get an ebook version and listen to this while shopping, walking the dog, driving to work or any other redundant time where holding a book is not possible.

Getting a couple of pages in here and there every day adds up very quickly and before you know it, it's become a habit. I do stress though that you must be really interested in the content of the book or the motivation just dips and if your forcing yourself to read through it anyway, the information doesn't sink in.

When I see these end-of-year book lists, I wonder if I'm the slowest reader on the planet.

Arrange it so your commute is by public transport. I get through a few books a month without really trying; having a routine where you read a bit every day is how you do large amounts of reading.

Yeah, I'm lucky enough to commute by transit. I usually get through at least a couple books a month, but I have trouble reading beyond the pace of speech. I'm a total book junkie so it's a constant source of frustration :)

Deliberate practice. Make sure you're not subvocalizing the words as you're reading; you should be just looking at them and understanding them. There are gimmicky approaches to reading faster, but I haven't found them to be helpful.

One approach that I learned was to use your fingers to underline the current line that you're reading, going at a "normal" speed when you're tired and then trying to "drag" your eyesight along when you want to push yourself.

The reason given is that it prevents you from accidentally rereading a line or skipping over one or changing lines midsentence.

This seems like one of those gimmicky approaches, and I remember being sold on this approach rather than being entirely convinced. Have you seen this before?

Over the past year, I've restarted the book I'm trying to read three times because too much time will elapse.

The thought of ever finishing it at all is beginning to feel satisfying.

I've been there for sure.

I've given considerable thought to taking a 3-month sabbatical to focus on nothing but reading.

> Norwegian Wood, The Contortionists Handbook

I hope he reads both these books consecutively. These two books are worlds apart but both equally excellent. It would be an interesting contrast.

I'm disappointed that these are two different books, rather than the title of one.

Surprised to see that my blog post about Lwan made to such list.

This may sound strange since it was mostly a technical post, but your blogging about Lwan inspired me to really delve into HTTP servers. So much so that I grabbed a copy of the HTTP/2 draft spec and am working on implementing it (in a very non-serious way). I've always been fascinated by HTTP servers and realizing that I knew very little of what you were writing about motivated me to find out more.

Awesome! If you ever open source it, Show HN. Or write a blog post about it, maybe I can get around implementing HTTP/2 in Lwan as well. :)

That list seems more than mine of my life.

"Favorite code read ... Z3 (Verilog)"

As someone working in ASIC design and verification, that code is not a good read IMO. I am stunned it even synthesized. The use of "initial" and "task" is not generally for describing hardware.

I really liked Read-Eval-Print-Loop, I hope he goes on to publish a few issues in 2015.

I love going to some random page [1] and seeing a photo I took. :)

[1] https://leanpub.com/readevalprintlove002/read

Interests and tastes obviously differ vastly. I haven't noticed any of those "best things and stuff of 2014" and I feel no impulse to click on one of those links after skimming the list.

Written last year maybe?

That would be the most likely answer... and is indeed the correct answer. ;)

Why should we trust you ?

LE: don't waste time downvoting people, I was obviously absurding.

A better question is... why shouldn't we?

There's a great zen adage: Master Sui was sitting with two boys who had recently entered his abbey, Won, and Feng. They had just recently been over taken by a robber while performing an errand for the abbey.

Master Sui asked Won what he had learned from the experience: "I'll never trust anyone ever again!" said Won.

Master Sui asked Won to go, and never to return.

Master Sui asked Feng what he had learned from the experience: "I've learned to exercise caution around those I do not know".

Master Sui said "You may stay Feng. Does a carpenter mistrust all nails because one bends?"

Here, we have a wealth of information about the poster. He writes, reads, and blogs about Computer Science. Sure some of his opinions may turn out to be a bent nail, and because of that you should always exercise some caution while reading anyones views. But you'll gain far more by reading, examining, and adding (and subtracting) to (and from) your worldview, in my opinion at least, then you will by spending that energy worrying about trust worthiness. (Generally you'll find out whether or not a source is trustworthy by examining the views espoused for yourself, again, in my opinion. I'm a software engineer with a bit more than a year of professional software development experience, in the process of obtaining a masters, with degrees in Computer Engineering and Mathematics. At this point, while I am no expert, I can often at least find information to be skeptical of.)

"looks at site in the OP" "looks at username of parent" I'd buy it.