[HN Gopher] The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up ev...
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The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
Author : karterk
Score : 1158 points
Date : 2021-07-14 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (typesense.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (typesense.org)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Very helpful learnings, looking forward to seeing TypeSense grow!
| pcbro141 wrote:
| See "Turning Pro" and "War of Art" by Steven Pressfield. Good
| books on this topic.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I really disliked the War of Art. I found nothing actionable in
| it. I only made it to the end because so many people recommend
| it and I expected some enlightenment. Unfortunately there was
| none.
| threeboy wrote:
| 20 minutes a day is over 100 hours a year. 0 minutes a day is 0
| hours a year.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| 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.
| nkingsy wrote:
| 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 actually a big jazz fan. I like simple consonant sounds
| and cute melodies, so I skip the bop, Mingus etc. My absolute
| favorite is when the whole song is cute and tidy except for
| one accentuated bit of dissonance that comes smashing in when
| you're not expecting it, then waltzes right back out,
| transitioning perfectly into the next section and leaving you
| shaking your head in awe. The Beatles were masters at this.
|
| My sight chording/inverting and rhythm reading has gone
| through the roof. It's like an endless jigsaw puzzle.
| joshhogg wrote:
| Are you using the leadsheets to improvise accompaniments on
| each pass or, just enjoy the melodies as written?
| nkingsy wrote:
| On a song like cottontail, I still can't play it
| perfectly at speed, so I'll stick to what's written until
| I can.
|
| I fudge together a metronomic base line in the left hand
| and voice all chords with the right hand so the melody
| note is at the top (I don't play the root in the right
| hand unless it's the melody note).
|
| Once I can do that easily without any halting or
| mistakes, I'll start to improvise.
|
| Wouldn't dare to play with "real" players as I often
| haven't heard the recording and am blissfully unaware of
| the missing comping, licks, etc. Most of the time when I
| finally listen to the recording of a song I love, I don't
| even like it. No one plays the melody and everyone's
| showing off. It's fun to experience live, but often
| sounds too busy and aggressive as a recording.
|
| I guess that's a matter of taste. I enjoy sparse music
| unless it's rigorously orchestrated (eg I love listening
| to Cuban music, which is quite busy, but everything fits
| together perfectly)
| mkl wrote:
| There seem to be lots of Real Books. Which one do you mean?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I feel like this notion is complete trash if you want to be
| anything but mediocre.
|
| In IT, I constantly have to work OT and take on challenging
| projects to advance and improve. This has NOTHING in common with
| showing up and closing tickets, which I can easily do with
| existing knowledge.
|
| Same with the gym - I constantly have to change up the routine,
| adjust to injuries, think about diet, etc.
|
| That's not even talking about doing something significant like
| learning a language outside of work.
|
| It's also the reason things like "atomic habits" are complete bs
| - you aren't going to get anything significant done in a minute
| OR an hour a day.
|
| ---
|
| "It feels like a superpower when you see it start compounding."
|
| Lie / marketing gimmick. There is start up time and cooldown time
| that people who have never done anything completely neglect.
| There is also the fact that one big chunk of time is far more
| efficient than little chunk of times.
|
| Aka you can shoot a bow for 10 mins a day or for an hour once a
| week and you will see zero improvement, let alone "compounding"
| improvement.
| _hao wrote:
| I'd say the manner in which you use the time is as important as
| the habit itself. It's not "practice makes perfect", but
| "perfect practice makes perfect" etc.
| mkw2000 wrote:
| You are suggesting that working a little bit at something
| everyday is 'complete trash'. Do you really believe that?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I do. I have accomplished a lot of petty things (at risk of
| humble brag, which this is not) - decent lift numbers, few
| skills at competitive level, new things like
| GCP/AWS/Azure/K8S certs at work, etc. None of them are
| achievable through anything other than hours a days for
| months. Even things that seem basic like "do a handstand" or
| "drive a stick".
|
| I also have friends who have accomplished petty things - none
| got results until they started sitting down with it for 3+
| hours a day.
|
| I will be more concrete - if you sit down to learn a language
| for 20 mins a day, it will fade before you get anywhere
| (without constant repetition, the amount of material for
| which builds up). If you workout, you need warm up, cool
| down, travel time, shower, nutrition - it can't be a micro-
| habit. Even if you WALK for fitness, that's 40 minutes right
| there. Coding? No one here is going to tell me you will learn
| all the search algos and such without sitting down for 40
| minutes a day. Hell, it takes 40 minutes to do a difficult
| hackerrank/codewars problem that you don't really understand.
| Not talking FizzBuzz here.
|
| A failed example? I spent an hour a day for several months
| learning ML. Passed that famous Andrew Ng Machine Learning
| course. Because I don't apply it, I barely remember anything
| other than a general understanding of the overall process.
|
| edit: Another obvious example that comes to mind - working on
| cars. If you don't dedicate an hour to it, you won't even
| have the time to get your tools out. It takes something like
| a day to just change out calipers, pads, and rotors on all 4
| wheels, and it's about as basic as it gets in terms of
| repairs, other than an oil change, which is maintenance.
| redisman wrote:
| So you're saying putting 40 minutes to things every day
| works wonders.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I am saying 40 minutes a day is an absolute minimum
| sufficient for simple maintenance tasks (aka walking,
| cooking healthy meals, etc) and a far greater amount of
| time is required to actually accomplish anything
| meaningful, let alone novel or groundbreaking.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| All your comment seems rather contradicted by the article,
| doesn't it?
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| I did make assumptions about the article which are invalid
| and replied too generally, admitted.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| They started in 2015 and wrote their first blog post in 2021.
|
| My unreasonable admiration of remaining focused and get stuff
| done instead of social media bragging.
| d_burfoot wrote:
| I feel like HN should have a special flag called "survivorship
| bias" that we can use to tag posts like this. For every project
| like this one, there are 1000 others where someone spent 15
| hrs/week for 5 years, built something really cool, but never got
| any funding or traction.
|
| Now, that time was probably better spent on a cool project than
| on playing video games or watching TV. But you shouldn't think
| that consistent engineering effort alone will have any payoff
| bigger than personal intellectual satisfaction.
| ipnon wrote:
| Not all hardworking people are successful, but all successful
| people are hardworking. Success is not guaranteed, it has an
| element of randomness. Attempting to be successful involves
| risk, and "survivorship bias" should be accounted as part of
| that risk. But still success is not entirely random, because
| only playing video games or watching TV will not result in it.
|
| It's not that you should think that consistent engineering
| effort alone _will_ have any payoff, it 's that you should
| think consistent engineering effort _might_ have any payoff.
| Splendor wrote:
| > all successful people are hardworking
|
| That really depends on your definition of "successful".
| munchbunny wrote:
| I don't think it's just about successful startups or successful
| projects.
|
| Personal example: growing up I practiced the piano for about a
| decade, 30 minutes at a time, usually 4-ish days each week. I
| got more disciplined about it as I got older. After 10 years, I
| went from not being able to play at all to being able to play
| genuinely impressive stuff. I'm not especially talented, but
| the consistent application of 30 minutes at a time really did
| add up to something wonderful.
|
| No survivorship bias needed here. Anyone with access to a
| keyboard or piano could have done the same thing. Yes, you
| would've needed to want to learn to play at least a little, and
| yes, you would've needed to practice at least a little
| intentionally, but given those things, just showing up
| consistently over a long period of time can do wonders.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| > where someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something
| really cool, but never got any funding or traction.
|
| I just created an "Ask HN" to try to gather any anecdata about
| projects that ended that way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27838479
|
| I'm really curious to see what people say.
|
| (I just started my own 15+ hours/week project last month.)
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| Welp I posted. I am the poster boy for this. 10+ years of
| consistent failure.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > I feel like HN should have a special flag called
| "survivorship bias" that we can use to tag posts like this
|
| Pointing out the possibility of survivorship bias doesn't add
| anything to the conversation on articles like this. The author
| never claimed that everyone who works consistently will have a
| successful startup. The article is barely about startups at
| all.
|
| We get it - Startup success isn't guaranteed and following
| someone else's actions isn't a guarantee that you'll get the
| exact same results. Startups fail and advice isn't one size
| fits all. I really don't want warnings that "results may vary"
| appended to every article about someone's success when we all
| already know that success is variable.
|
| It's also missing the point of the article. The founded startup
| was just an example of something that was accomplished by
| consistent daily effort, but it's obviously not the only thing
| that can be accomplished with consistent daily effort.
|
| The core idea of doing a little bit of work every day adding up
| into something bigger over time applies to more than just
| building startups, survivorship bias or not.
| baby wrote:
| Let's stop assuming that everybody here has been here for a
| long time and knows all the recurrent posts and culture of HN
| ibizaman wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| pattrn wrote:
| How does survivorship bias relate to this post?
|
| > Looking back, I cannot believe how much I've been able to
| ship over the past 6 years by just following this one rule.
|
| This seems to be his only conclusion about the effect of
| working a little bit every day. And I don't think survivorship
| bias applies here. If you work a little bit on a product every
| day and don't ship a lot over six years, then you're probably
| in the minority.
| tryptophan wrote:
| >For every project like this one, there are 1000 others where
| someone spent 15 hrs/week for 5 years, built something really
| cool, but never got any funding or traction.
|
| You're probably right, but care to name some examples? I can't
| think of a single blog or article about failed companies or
| projects.I think they would be interesting to read and dissect.
|
| It seems that people who have that sort of persistence and
| choose to do something are quite rare, making the survivorship
| bias of posting successes even harder to balance out.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Someone I follow on Mastodon just posted this interesting
| look back on hist first ten years as a software developers,
| with a couple of technically-failed (though still educational
| and fun) endeavours: https://noeldemartin.com/blog/10-years-
| as-a-software-develop...
| floxy wrote:
| Lisp? Smalltalk? One Laptop Per Child? Maybe not exactly the
| things you are looking for?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Ted Nelson's Xanadu is what comes to mind immediately for me:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
|
| The Bulletball guy is a close second:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOw2yWMSfk
| sebmellen wrote:
| Aha! But had the Xanadu folks showed up every day, they
| might have created something more than vaporware, and
| people might've used their software!
|
| From the linked Wikipedia article:
|
| > _Wired magazine published an article called "The Curse of
| Xanadu", calling Project Xanadu "the longest-running
| vaporware story in the history of the computer
| industry".[3] The first attempt at implementation began in
| 1960, but it was not until 1998 that an incomplete
| implementation was released. A version described as "a
| working deliverable", OpenXanadu, was made available in
| 2014._
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Sarcasm?
|
| Ted Nelson is pretty consistent here and has put
| thousands of hours into it.
| dimal wrote:
| I think it's still worthwhile even if you don't have "success".
| I spent about two years steadily cranking away on a side
| project almost every day. At a certain point I realized,
| "Whoops, this isn't going to work," and just stopped. I had hit
| a dead end. Was that two years wasted? Nope. I taught myself a
| huge amount of stuff about data structures, functional
| programming and application architecture in the process that I
| wouldn't have had the freedom to try in my real job. I learned
| a lot from the mistakes that lead to me coding into a dead end,
| about how to validate ideas more quickly and cheaply. It was a
| "failure", but the lessons learned have proved to be hugely
| beneficial in other projects. The payoff was far greater than
| just personal intellectual satisfaction.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Sure, but there's also tons of people who worked full-time for
| years without anything to show for it, I'm not sure that short-
| term intense focus is any less subject to survivorship bias
| than long-term regular focus. I do believe that at least one of
| them is necessary but not sufficient for most types of
| "success".
|
| At the end of the day, I think outliers (across all axes) is
| what makes for interesting articles that get upvoted, and so if
| you squint hard enough probably every article is subject to
| some kind of survivorship bias.
| robscallsign wrote:
| I think that sentiment is a function of the HN startup/hustle
| culture, where anything less than becoming a unicorn is seen as
| abject failure.
| rchaud wrote:
| The only time we even listen to stories about failure is when
| they're told by people who are outsized successes.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I agree, but IMO that is missing the point of the post. For me,
| this lesson transcends software engineering and applies to
| nearly every quadrant of life.
|
| Yes, progress does not guarantee success, but progress for its
| own sake is still worthwhile.
|
| And even if your ultimate goal is to succeed, applying these
| principles makes the success _more likely_ , which is most of
| what matters in any kind of entrepreneurial enterprise.
|
| There's a great quote: _" The harder I work, the luckier I
| get."_ Showing up every day is another way to create this luck,
| and if you do it consistently, you accrue a kind of compound
| interest on your work.
| tacLog wrote:
| I agree, he barely talked about his startup at all.
|
| The focus was on the habit that has nothing to do with the
| fact that he did well.
| jelling wrote:
| Shout out sleep, bc that ~33% of our lives is actually not wasted
| time in any way.
| brm wrote:
| Everyone always writes these and yet I've seen very few ever talk
| about how to decide what's worth showing up for or how to get a
| working hypothesis of an animating principle for your own
| existence. It'd be remarkably useful to have a working framework
| for how to figure out what to want, especially targeted at smart
| people with top level talents in several areas.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| If you love multiple things totally equally as a total
| novice(aka haven't put a ton of time yet into it but shows
| initial talent), pick one (with rng if needed) and stick with
| it for an hour a day or so for a while. If you like it and it
| works for you keep doing it.
|
| And FOMO can be paid off with a therapist ;)
| chubot wrote:
| "What's worth it" varies so much by person that you can't
| generalize. Tons of people have written about that, but they
| all write different things, because they're different people.
|
| That said, I've noticed that there is a pretty big split
| between short term success vs. long term success, with this
| site skewing toward the latter. (Primary short term example:
| work hard at a safe, high-paying career)
|
| If you're reading this site, PG (original author of it) has
| written extensively on these things:
|
| http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html _Live in the future;
| build what 's missing_
|
| I think this is a great slogan because there seems to be an
| implicit myth that everyone has access to the same viewpoints
| and knowledge (or should), e.g. media narratives. In reality
| knowledge is very unevenly distributed, and the viewpoints of
| people and communities are more diverse than you can imagine
| (traveling and/or listening to random people is a good way to
| see this). If you're not living in "the future", your idea of
| "new" or "good" might be skewed or simply pedestrian.
|
| http://paulgraham.com/genius.html _Have a disinterested
| obsession with something that matters_
|
| http://paulgraham.com/worked.html -- some "implicit" advice, a
| great read
|
| The advice in this article is good too:
|
| > Pick an idea in a large market that will always be in demand
| and work on a product that caters to a subset of use cases
| exceedingly well.
|
| I think it depends on your appetite for drama. To me, startups
| have a lot of drama and often fail spectacularly. They have
| good characters and bad characters. So if I just want to enjoy
| my life, then I'll work on something steadily, learn, improve
| my skills. After working on a bunch of things close to the
| state of the art, it's hard not to think of ways the world
| could be better.
|
| I liked munificent's statement in this thread that "humans are
| incredible generalizers". That is, just do things and you'll
| get ideas. Certain work smells good and other work smells bad.
| (IMO the biggest bad smell is prestige:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html _If it didn 't suck, they
| wouldn't have had to make it prestigious._)
| hallqv wrote:
| Good stuff! How many hours per week did you put in on average?
| hinkley wrote:
| Working from home, I discovered that my evening commute was part
| of my shutting off the work at the end of the day. I have a set
| of about four things I do when I lock my computer at the end of
| the day. Early dinner with the family, watch entertainment,
| engage in a hobby, play computer games.
|
| Before it got hot out I was at about 50% for hobby stuff, and I
| made so much progress over the last year that it's difficult to
| look at, in the sense that when something stops being a struggle
| you can experience feelings of loss for the past. Why didn't I
| figure this out before?
| slowwriter wrote:
| I don't see others mentioning it so I thought I should. This
| reminds me of DHH and the creation of Rails. He followed
| essentially the same method: chipped away at it over a long
| period of time, little by little, day by day, with no specific
| deadline in mind. Works like this can have a huge impact on a
| person's life and the world around him.
| musicale wrote:
| I just wish people on the internet would discover the difference
| between "everyday" and "every day."
|
| (Bonus points for "setup" vs. "set up" - a common foulup.)
| Noos wrote:
| One weird trick for techies nonsense. "I just showed up everyday
| and built this company, so can you!" All of what, 500 words of
| content, too.
| boxerab wrote:
| Nit pick: I think they mean "every day", not "everyday" which is
| a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against
| inane Coca Cola slogan :
|
| Treat The English Language Well. Everyday.
| http://www.happyrobot.net/words/thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385
| dgs_sgd wrote:
| I learned this lesson in a completely unrelated domain. I started
| lifting weights seriously about two years ago. Since then, I've
| averaged at least 5 days of training per week and now my physique
| is that of a completely different person. The lesson is if you do
| something everyday for years, whether it's body building,
| learning a skill, or bootstrapping a company, after several years
| you will see outstanding results.
| jstx1 wrote:
| It's good to point out that it works with bad habits too - if
| you repeat behaviours that you don't want every day, you're
| making your life worse in a very reliable way.
| munificent wrote:
| They used to say "you are what you eat". That's still true,
| but I think it's even more true that you are what you give
| your attention to.
| kabdib wrote:
| 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.
| iamricks wrote:
| Whats the best place to search for and read papers?
| tsumnia wrote:
| It can depend on your research interests, but Google Scholar
| is my go to first dip into any topic. Then its a bit of
| rabbit-holing by looking at cited sources and reading them or
| reading other papers that were a part of the same
| journal/conference.
| kabdib wrote:
| The Usenix conference proceedings and other publications are
| usually very good: https://www.usenix.org/publications
|
| I was an on-and-off-again ACM member for 40 years, and one of
| the better publications was ACM Computing Surveys:
| https://dl.acm.org/journal/csur -- even older issues are
| pretty high value, and there are tons of references to
| follow.
|
| [edit: update Usenix link to something much more current]
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| 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 interesting papers, and read the statements of
| the theorems,
|
| * Finally, devote a little more attention to those papers that
| had interesting theorems that seemed to fall within the domain
| of what I was working on.
|
| I did this with math papers, but there's no particular reason
| you can't generalize this to other fields. CS in particular can
| use almost the exact same methods. For less mathematical
| fields, you'd need to make some substitutions, such as "section
| headers and key topic sentences" for "statements of theorems,"
| but you can make it work there, too.
|
| Doing this, in a decade, you end up reading 1560 _abstracts_ ,
| which is probably more useful in terms of "Oh, wait, I've seen
| this before" type insights than reading 520 entire papers.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Honestly I don't think I could keep up one paper a day. I had
| a reading course which as 3 per week (in detail) and that was
| enough work for me. It could take 45 minutes to read a paper
| 542458 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| karatekidd32v wrote:
| I mostly agree with this sentiment - with the added note that
| there is significant value in 'going deep' on a small subset
| of those papers. In my opinion, best bang for the buck there
| is to focus on the well known and impactful papers in that
| domain. I think there are big benefits to really digging into
| what makes a particular solution work, and how the authors
| really 'prove out' the full idea in the paper.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Right. That's why there are 3 steps to the process. The
| more interesting the paper is, the deeper you go with it.
| domador wrote:
| What does a "Hacker News launch" refer to? Is that simply
| announcing it in a Hacker News submission?
| moreoutput wrote:
| Add a little to a little and there will be a big pile.
| dt3ft wrote:
| I also had a failed HN launch, glad to see that pushing through
| pays off. I'm not giving up, that's for sure :) Happy for
| typesense founders!
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I agree this is the way to do something, keep at it consistently.
| But at the same time the story tells me it took a long time, many
| YEARS, from 2015 to 2020.
|
| It takes a long time and but it also helps that you don't use the
| whole day for it every day. That means you have time to think
| about what you're doing while riding on a bus or doing something
| else.
|
| The end-produce is beautiful and simple, but it took a lot of
| effort to make it simple, to know what exactly it should be.
|
| Now had there been a clear spec to start with I assume it could
| have been done much faster. But then again creating the spec
| takes its own time.
| mattwad wrote:
| Picasso said this, "Inspiration exists, but it has to find you
| working"
| temporama1 wrote:
| Counterpoint to this: a lot of the programmers I admire all have
| an uncanny ability to just sit and work for long periods of time.
| Like, sit down and hardly move for 10 straight hours. They
| achieve a huge amount in that time - much more in a single 10
| hour stretch than they would in 10x1 hour sessions.
|
| And that applies to other things they do: playing video games,
| reading a book...when they do something they go 'all in'.
|
| I feel like this level of focus is much more of a superpower than
| small amounts every day (although that too is powerful, and both
| approaches are infinitely better than what most of us do, which
| is very little)
| jnovek wrote:
| This was exactly how we built OwnLocal before we quit our day
| jobs. In a sense, it was very easy because when you don't know
| how big the problem is, everything feels like progress.
|
| Now I see 40 barreling towards me and it's hard to just do a
| little bit every day. Because I have experience, I can form a
| much bigger picture of an idea in my head and it's hard to peel
| off a tiny bit and make that feel like a success.
|
| This curses me in my startup attempts but it also curses me in my
| work. It's hard to think like a founder anymore. I always
| overspec projects because I can easily guess _what demons lie on
| the horizon_.
|
| I miss my early startup days when I could just write some code
| every day and feel successful. I want that back.
| galfarragem wrote:
| Few things are impossible to get back once you loose them:
| naivety is one of them.
| dasil003 wrote:
| On the other side of 40 here, I definitely know what you mean,
| but I also think you can cultivate a beginner's mind and
| openness to ambitious ideas while still leveraging your
| experience to see around corners and avoid dead ends. Two
| ideas:
|
| First, remind yourself that software is malleable. You don't
| need to build it perfectly the first time, and in fact you will
| always need to modify it as you go, so don't get stuck in
| analysis paralysis. You're good at writing code, so leverage
| that skill to iterate quickly.
|
| Second, don't equate growth with chasing more and more powerful
| abstractions. Remember, "all abstractions are leaky" in the
| same way that "all models are wrong, but some are useful". IMHO
| valuable software comes from concrete use cases. So as you get
| more experienced you should be able to write simpler code that
| provides more value. Let the abstractions emerge from practice
| and experience rather than obsessing over them before you
| understand the problem.
| asmos7 wrote:
| the industry may have changed too - in my early days I remember
| more fantastical failures where the whole website would be down
| for an evening or other tragic mistakes.
|
| As more and more ppl got involved and things started to be
| worth more and more money we were more or less forced to put in
| more safe guards as there is less tolerance for
| failure/mistakes. I think the trade off between speed and
| safety will always be there and business folks will always want
| both despite them being at direct odds w/ one another.
| johnnyApplePRNG wrote:
| It worked for Seinfeld, too! [0]
|
| [0] https://jamesclear.com/stop-procrastinating-seinfeld-
| strateg...
| alex504 wrote:
| He did not actually create or do this
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...
| rchaud wrote:
| "Don't break the chain" is an urban myth, Seinfeld himself said
| in a Reddit AMA he did not follow that method, it was just
| attributed to him [0]
|
| The top search results on the topic are unfortunately full of
| links all repeating the same myth.
|
| [0]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...
| zerop wrote:
| For me this habit is going to hackernews every day for sometime
| and it is working great!
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| These kind of stories should be on the front page more often!
|
| It's always about hypergrowth, hyper-everyhing, billion dollar
| exits, and seems like everyone chasing those dreams.
|
| To me personally, this way is much more appealing!
| k__ wrote:
| Consistency is a super power if applied right.
|
| Most people don't do things consistently and of those who do only
| a few do the right things.
|
| In the long run, you outrun everyone who doesn't keep doing the
| right things.
| scarmig wrote:
| Is it generally easy for people to get permission from their day
| job to code on the side, without assigning all rights to the
| employer?
| veonik wrote:
| These days, many companies are cool with it as long as you use
| your personal machine, on your own time, avoid using any work
| resources, etc. Usually it's baked into your employment
| contract.
| ntrz wrote:
| This definitely depends on the employer and your geographical
| location; for example, in California, clauses like this are not
| legal except under certain conditions:
| https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
| walshemj wrote:
| But they are fairly wide conditions it has to be "unrelated"
| to your day job.
|
| OK if your a semi pro musician but a generic developer sie
| gig not so much.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Of course, what you've said is true as far as it goes. But,
| consider this: if your employer has a product with any sort
| of search capability, your hobby/side project search engine
| then falls under the heading of things "relat(ing)... to the
| employer's business."
|
| If you work for a big enough tech company, like, say, Google
| or Facebook, it's likely that _a lot_ of things will
| "relate...to their business." And, note, too, that there's no
| requirement that you actually _know_ that it relates to a
| part of your employer 's business.
| eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote:
| Side note: It is depressing that the question winds up being
| asked this way (EDIT: while ignoring how depressing it is that
| it is an existing question in the first place) !
|
| Instead it should be: "Is it generally easy for employers to
| get permission from their employees to be assigned all rights
| for code they write in private?"
| wonderwonder wrote:
| This is just as depressing. Employers should have zero rights
| to code their employees write on their own time unless the
| employee is using employer specific IP / resources or
| creating a direct competitor. Needing to get permission
| should not even be a thing.
| eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7 wrote:
| You're absolutely right, I had left this out for
| simplicity.
| honzzz wrote:
| Could you please explain to someone who is not from the US what
| is the justification behind this? It seems that it is not
| uncommon in the US that the employer has some rights to stuff
| you do in your free time - to me that seems as "reasonable" as
| "you sold me your house so your car is also mine now". What I
| do in my free time is none of my employer's business, why would
| they have any right to any of it?
| walshemj wrote:
| Because employment laws are based on old laws relating to
| "Masters and servants"
|
| And European law is just the same.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| It's because in the US the theory is that by hiring you
| salaried, they hire your mind and creative output, not a set
| labor. This means they pay you for anything your mind
| produces and then try to claim ownership for anything your
| mind produces whether you were in-office or not.
|
| (this is usually not enforcable unless you actively build
| competing services)
| walshemj wrote:
| That is the point of salaried jobs
| brabel wrote:
| It happens in Europe too. The rationale is that the employer
| gives you a lot of knowledge and tools which you could use to
| your own benefit... there are clear cases of abuse, some
| leading to litigation. I guess the employers want to defend
| themselves against IP theft basically.
|
| What I normally do is ask for an agreement that projects
| unrelated to my employer's business is ok for me to work on,
| which I have always been able to get (sometimes they ask for
| authorization on a case-by-case basis, but usually it's just
| common sense).
| honzzz wrote:
| > It happens in Europe too.
|
| Does it really? I am from Europe and I have lived and
| worked in 3 EU countries, many of my friends have
| experience from other countries and I have never heard
| anyone mention this is. Obviously, my personal experience
| is limited. In what country do you live if I might ask?
| walshemj wrote:
| Its very common the work normally has to be related.
| nly wrote:
| > The rationale is that the employer gives you a lot of
| knowledge and tools which you could use to your own benefit
|
| You also bring experience and knowledge to your employer
| that may benefit them while you're on holiday, or off sick,
| or even after you leave the company. Maybe we should send
| them a bill for these incidental benefits?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Don't ask for permission if you can get away with begging for
| forgiveness ;)
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I'm not sure if that's good advise in this case. The case
| where you don't get forgiveness in this case might mean that
| you put a ton of work into something and now much of it is
| owned by someone else.
| scott_s wrote:
| This is one of those times that this adage applies. In the
| worst case, "begging for forgiveness" does not mean asking
| your manager for an exception. It means losing an expensive
| court case with your former employer about who owns your IP.
| scott_s wrote:
| I intended to say "This is _not_ one of those times that
| this adage applies. "
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| Move to California and stop worrying.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Generally, your company only has rights to that if you've
| signed away your rights in your employment agreement. People
| have found success negotiating that out of the agreement by
| bringing it up.
|
| Haven't tried it, but I'd be interested to try the argument
| that the company doesn't want to own my side projects, because
| liability. If I infringe someone else's copyrights on accident,
| but the company owns the work, then the company is liable, not
| me. Sweet protections of corporatization. :)
|
| Or if I make a decisions on a side project that others want to
| "cancel" on twitter - that'll look bad to the company because
| legally theyre the owners, right? Wouldn't want the company
| being to blame for something I did.
| sigstoat wrote:
| i've never had a problem. but i'm not working for huge
| companies where the contract change would have to go through a
| legal department.
| nly wrote:
| Most employers couldn't care less whether you cease exist once
| you leave the company, let alone track what you're up to.
|
| As long as you're not competing directly with them just leave
| your day job just as your side project ramps up commercially,
| and it'll likely never be an issue.
|
| Most are only worried you'll leverage their IP, insider
| knowledge, steal employers, or somehow cause reputational
| damage to them - they don't actually want your IP.
| klausjensen wrote:
| This is dangerous advice. Depending on your contract and
| jurisdiction, your code could belong to your employer.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| I read my contract and ensure you know what you are signing. If
| possible make them add a line about side projects off work
| hours.
|
| Much harder to win in court when they knowingly added a line
| that lets you work on your own projects.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Code something they would have zero interest in (or would even
| actively avoid being associated with.)
| Clubber wrote:
| Depends on the state. You definitely shouldn't use work
| computers or do it on work time.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Depends on your specific contract. Mine just bans me from
| machine learning related work.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Depends on jurisdiction. In places with reasonable copyright
| laws, you'd have to do weird things to end up in the "employer
| takes rights" situation in the first place.
| walshemj wrote:
| Copyright isnt really important here this is labor law
| scott_s wrote:
| I live and work in NY. It was standard in my contract with my
| former employer.
| [deleted]
| javier10e6 wrote:
| True that. Also we all plateau at it. That is where time and
| effort stops yielding satisfaction or usefulness. Unless, unless,
| you are really in love with yourself and thing that everything
| you know is amazing...just kidding.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Cool.
|
| But why is it unreasonable?
| austincheney wrote:
| I had a tool I worked on a little bit every day for over a decade
| and for a while it was pretty popular with a large following.
| Persistence is what got me from nowhere to somewhere, but after a
| while persistence offers a diminishing return.
|
| Persistence is necessary to build something from nothing to
| establishment. That is more than just working. It means you have
| pushed through into something that works well enough that other
| people will use it and strongly recommend it.
|
| That is the point where a trickle becomes a flood, but the flood
| analogy is a bad analogy. Actual flooding, with water, is an
| explosive phenomenon where a large area achieves maximum
| saturation in unison and so the trickle becomes a serious concern
| almost instantly. When all water over a large area has nowhere to
| go suddenly at the same time there is an immediate change like
| the flip of a switch.
|
| Growth and adoption don't work like that. It takes time to build
| adoption. By the time a product reaches critical mass many early
| users may have already moved on. The very thing that made your
| product special or unique may be gone and you probably don't know
| it. This means the thing that cause adoption could be code while
| you are still building traffic because of a lag between network
| effects and incentives. That means adoption could be dying while
| you are building traffic and you won't know and until the future
| once traffic catches up and begins to decline at which point you
| are having to catch up.
|
| If you are passionate enough, beyond mere persistence, you will
| figure the traffic/adoption cycle out to keep forward momentum,
| but only if you are properly incentivized. It takes tremendous
| effort to reach a large critical mass, especially for a small
| team (in my case a single developer). To want to pivot past your
| personal motivates to keep your product alive takes something
| more, something different. Persistence won't buy you that.
| nathias wrote:
| The unreasonable effectiveness of 'The unreasonable effectiveness
| of "The unreasonable effectiveness..."' title.
| Raineer wrote:
| I highly recommend this same approach for schoolwork/studying.
| Just simply doing _something_ , everyday, keeps topics fresh in
| your mind. It's so much better than forcing activity into giant
| chunks. I feel it reduces stress as well.
|
| It keeps feeding your brain to subconsciously churn over topics
| during downtime like showers and sleeping.
| echlebek wrote:
| This site triggered an XSS warning from noscript for me.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I made a similar decision nearly two years ago when I bought a
| fixer-upper of a condo: just do a bit of work every day, doesn't
| matter if it's half an hour of sweeping, make sure you show up
| every day. Time will pass and work will progress.
|
| It's been a massive project (fully gutted, subfloors removed and
| joists levelled, whole new floor plan, the works), it's still
| ongoing, but what kept it moving was that simple commitment. An
| hour or two in the evening, each god damn evening, for 682 days
| in a row. New drywall is up in a few places already, and the end
| is in sight.
|
| I am a firm believer in this approach now. The march of time is
| ruthless and inevitable, the little effort that you regularly
| weave into it will pay off big in the end.
| andrewtbham wrote:
| Reminds me of the book atomic habits. It emphasizes the
| compounding gains of small wins.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| If you liked that book, Power of Habits is the 10x better
| version.
|
| It's less of a 20 year olds book of lifehacks and more of a
| science based approach.
|
| Power of Habit book changed my life, quit all drugs and video
| games. Now I just read nonfiction books.
| floxy wrote:
| Other books in a similar vein that I liked:
|
| _One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way_ by
| Robert Maurer
|
| _Mini Habits: Smaller Habits, Bigger Results_ by Stephen
| Guise
|
| Both are short reads, and the Kaizen book is also in a nice
| small form factor that you can stick in your back pocket.
| These books emphasize the importance of making even the
| smallest change possible.
| [deleted]
| sergiotapia wrote:
| What author?
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Charles Duhigg
| criddell wrote:
| Why don't you like video games or fiction anymore?
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Waste of time. At least comparatively speaking.
|
| Plus these get boring, I climb up the hedonic treadmill.
| Movies and video games get boring.
| criddell wrote:
| I can understand somebody not enjoying video games, but
| movies is a tough one for me. Does the same go for plays?
| If so, is there any narrative media you enjoy?
| deregulateMed wrote:
| "History is crazier than fiction"
|
| This year I read/listened to 30 nonfiction books in
| philosophy, History, and science. It's been extremely
| enjoyable and rewarding.
|
| My best advice is to put down bad books after 20 or 30
| pages.
| criddell wrote:
| Personally, I think John Lennon was on to something when
| he said "time you enjoy wasting was not wasted".
|
| That said, I agree 100% about giving up on books early
| and often.
| rchaud wrote:
| I don't know about that. I have the book here in front of me
| (Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit), and it seems like the
| whole thing can be summarized as:
|
| Cue - Routine - Reward
|
| With an additional 300 pages of weak, mostly theory-driven
| anecdotes about how corporations apply this at scale.
|
| I'd be really interested to know how you applied this to your
| personal life.
| war1025 wrote:
| I don't have a side project, but this is basically the approach I
| take at work. Try to do one useful thing each day. Doesn't even
| have to be a big useful thing. It adds up.
|
| I guess that's really the whole point of the tortoise and the
| hare, now that I think of it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Absolutely this works. I've been doing it for decades.
| didibus wrote:
| 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.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| This is excellent advice. Just by doing something, the habit gets
| created and the longer it gets, the easier it is to get started.
| kiba wrote:
| That is effective, though I found that ramping up the amount of
| work being done is even more effective, provided that it can be
| sustained.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| This has literally never worked for me with any habits I've
| tried intentionally cultivating. I'll pick something and do it
| every day for several weeks. Then I stop.
|
| Am I doing it wrong? Am I just weird that I can't seem to form
| good habits? I sincerely think I wouldn't remember to brush my
| teeth in the morning if my mouth didn't feel so gross, and I've
| been doing that every morning for over 30 years!
| apsurd wrote:
| Another thing is to expect a mess. A weeklong streak feels
| good but then pressure builds up to not miss and inevitably
| we miss and it makes us feel terrible and we throw it all
| out. The streaks thing seems really popular but it amounts to
| negative pressure for me and it's not sustainable.
|
| So expect a mess. It's ok if you go off the deep end for a
| week so long as you try again eventually. I wouldn't say
| "daily" habits so much as I'd say consistent habits. over a
| bigger time span, the idea is to feel better and better about
| more and more frequency.
|
| Virtuous cycle vs stress cycle imo
| j1elo wrote:
| Meh I don't think you're doing anything wrong unless you
| suffer some kind of condition or attention deficit.
|
| One thing about these motivational speeches or techniques is
| that sometimes we just think we'd like doing something new,
| but deep inside our mind we really _do not want_ to have
| _that_ new habit. In those cases what we typically really
| want instead is _to be the person who had already cultivated
| the habit for a long time_. Thus if you think about your
| objectives and realize this description matches how you feel,
| that 's a signal that you don't really want to do that, it
| maybe just feels cool to imagine yourself doing it.
|
| A practical example. Not sure if here on HN or where, but I
| heard once this principle applied to playing the guitar,
| which I've always wanted to do. After asking myself I
| realized that I don't want to _learn how to play_ the
| guitar... what I really want is to be the guy who _already
| knows_!! :-) And that explains why I tried learning guitar...
| like 5 times already in my life. And always ended up stopping
| practice after some time. I was just misguided by the cool
| imagination of me taking out a guitar and playing a song, but
| in the real world that takes practicing regularly, which I 'm
| not willing to do (even though when I'm at it, it feels fun,
| but clearly not enough to keep me persevering).
| rchaud wrote:
| I know exactly what this feels like. I have been making
| digital mini-magazines about music subgenres for years. I
| have never finished a single one. Shoegaze, Garage Rock,
| Post-Punk ... I always move on to a new issue before I'm
| even done with the first.
|
| I want to already be the guy with a boring 9-5 by day, and
| a 'cool' punk historian by night. But I'm not, and the
| older I get the more I'm sure I won't ever be.
|
| And yet I've been doing this for several years. Maybe I
| never finish them because I'm scared I'll feel the exact
| same way I did before I embarked on this hobby.
| briefcomment wrote:
| I think that just means that your subconscious cost benefit
| analysis concluded that it wasn't worth it. I think that's
| normal. You'll probably try out a bunch of hobbies/habits in
| a lifetime, and only choose to stick with a couple.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I can't form habits of any kind either. There are days when
| "brush teeth" has to be a checklist item as I can easily go
| to bed without doing it. Same with eating even.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| +1 from me, but also add on "go to bed at a reasonable
| hour."
| KittenInABox wrote:
| Have you considered you might have some disorder that affects
| your executive function capacity like ADHD and therefore
| requires alternative strategies to organize and cultivate
| habits?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I am, in fact, diagnosed with ADHD, and my previous
| therapist says I'm a fairly extreme case. I do have
| alternative strategies for organization, but have not heard
| anything about problems with cultivating habits (indeed,
| many people have recommend cultivating habits as a coping
| mechanism).
| KittenInABox wrote:
| It may be difficult to cultivate habits with ADHD because
| of the need to do it consistently, and the struggle to
| perform something consistently while getting consistent
| necessary associative dopamine if I understand it.
| nocman wrote:
| A lot of advice I hear is that it takes about 30 days of
| doing something daily to form a habit. Perhaps you are
| stopping just short of the necessary number of days?
|
| Also, given that you have been diagnosed with ADHD, maybe
| it would take you longer than others to form the habit. I
| don't have any outside info to support that -- it's just
| a possibility that came to mind.
| loopz wrote:
| Depends what it is. If it's something creative, this can
| become pretty much like writer's block. Ie. you know there's
| something you want or need to write, but it's such a huge
| task, it's hard to get down to it. This can lead to
| overindulgence in research and distractions.
|
| One solution is to set yourself a goal to just do this one
| thing, to get started, and do that thing. No matter how bad,
| just make that draft, POC, whatever. Start breaking up things
| into smaller pieces, and set yourself to accomplish one piece
| at the time, no matter the state of results. Iterate on this
| to improve quality and scope, and keep your focus on the
| smaller, managable things, while getting more clear about the
| whole over time. If something is too much, just break it up.
|
| Another take is how to manage your expectations and
| associations. If every time you visit the dog is to give it
| medicine, it'll become suspicious of you. So every time you
| visit your projects, make sure to leave room for some cuddle
| time, while making sure it's also supporting progress on that
| same thing. For very difficult goals, transform it into a
| spike and celebrate it no matter what the results. No matter
| what, you learned something new. You want to associate with
| progress.
| munificent wrote:
| I think often it takes longer than a few weeks for it to
| really become automatic.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've gone 6-8 weeks without missing a day. People have said
| "don't beat yourself up if you miss one day here or there"
| and I've gone up to 6 months without missing 2 days in a
| row. It has never become automatic.
| handrous wrote:
| The only thing that works for me, at all, is putting
| things directly in my way so they're practically
| unavoidable, and physically removing distractions in
| advance. Modifying my environment to make the things I
| want to do extremely easy to do, and the things I don't
| want to impossible or difficult, is the _only_ thing that
| works.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| I recommend checking out Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. He runs the
| Stanford Behavior Design Lab (previously known as persuasive
| tech lab). One takeaway from that book that might be relevant
| to you is that we tend to repeat actions that are rewarding
| in some way, so if you can think of ways to engineer reward
| into whatever activities you want to repeat, you have a
| higher likelihood of doing them.
| volkk wrote:
| i think if you truly hate doing something, it can almost
| never become a habit, unless you can somehow shove tiny
| things you really love into it to dilute your hatred for said
| thing. for instance, i love the act of going outside to buy a
| cup of coffee. little prep rituals like that can help.
|
| but the main question is: if you truly hate something, why
| are you trying to make it a habit in the first place? listen
| to your mind/body. i HATE working out, specifically i despise
| HIIT workouts like those one hour classes of nonstop go go go
| go go. but turns out that i love strength training (i.e
| lifting weights). both sort of get the job done in terms of
| getting your body into healthier shape, so i just choose what
| actually brings me more joy. no need to force yourself to go
| through miserable situations just because society and
| everyone else says "you have to do this to be smart, or fit,
| or more productive, etc"
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I will second this with my own "I hate working out"
| example.
|
| In my case, I've figured out that what I actually "hate"
| about working out is the fact that I'm doing physical
| activity that seems to have no immediate purpose. I've
| often said you probably won't catch me running, unless I'm
| actually running _away_ from something.
|
| I didn't actively seek to accomplish this, but getting a
| dog is what's lead me to start enjoying a moderate amount
| of physical activity. She needs to go outside every day,
| rain or shine, about 3 times a day, and, ideally, needs
| some time to literally just run around. Walks take up the
| first need, and trips to the park take up the second. And,
| when I'm at the park, you can bet you'll see me running
| around with her, loving every minute of it. :-)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Sure if we are talking about doing the dishes or organizing
| my desk or whatever.
|
| But I like running, yet do it infrequently. Those 30-60
| minute HIIT workouts? A blast. My gym offers a 30 minute
| one every weekday during lunch and is a 5 minute walk from
| work.
|
| There's a 3rd category of things I don't particularly like
| doing (but don't hate) and I'm always happy to have done
| them afterwards. Journaling would be one example. I'm
| actually worse at these than the necessary things that I
| hate (the sink eventually gets full of dishes, preventing
| me from avoiding it).
| ghaff wrote:
| For me, doing something literally every day (often) doesn't
| seem necessary. Rather, for something like various work-
| related writing I do, it's more about keeping _some_ sort of
| cadence so that I don 't wake up some morning, realize it's
| been a month, and go "well, one more day won't make a
| difference."
| nostrilwig wrote:
| try something like ticking off/writing down your successfull
| tries eg in a calendar or a (bullet) journal. helps to keep
| yourself committed to it, as you probably do not want to
| break your already created streak.
| c22 wrote:
| I use a giant sheet of graph paper on my desk with days of
| the month marked off horizontally at the top and a column
| of daily habits on the left. I put a big fat _X_ in the
| grid for each day I accomplish a given task. It 's
| incredibly satisfying and very obvious when I've missed a
| few days. Also the paper acts as a nice desk protector.
| eigenhombre wrote:
| One thing not discussed much here is time of day -- I have a few
| daily practices (exercise, meditation, painting) I do every
| single day, and I try to do them all before work. Occasionally
| something comes up and I have to do them in the evening, but my
| focus is usually diminished then.
|
| Of the people featured in the Daily Habits [edit: Daily Rituals]
| book mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many described doing
| their most important work in the morning, though there were
| notable exceptions (night owls, no consistent pattern, etc.).
|
| What works best for you?
| cweill wrote:
| I'm taking a course on how to build and grow a YouTube channel.
| The main advice they give is "just commit to making a video once
| a week, every week, for 2 years, and you're life will change."
| It's a tautology, no guarantees on how well your channel will do,
| but it's such a simple idea, and nice motivator to build momentum
| and keep going.
| rchaud wrote:
| > "just commit to making a video once a week, every week, for 2
| years, and you're life will change."
|
| That's probably the best advice. These courses can't do
| anything about Youtube's algorithm changes, which is ultimately
| what will determine virality.
|
| If your channel is not about toys, makeup tutorials or culture
| war commentary, it's unlikely your content will ever break
| through. So you might as well just go for a "good enough" video
| instead of a perfectly manicured one, because the algorithm
| doesn't seem to care either way.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| Tom Scott's 3-part series (on YouTube) a few years back on "How
| to be popular on the Internet"[0] has similar advice. There are
| higher-cost and lower-cost ideas, but given the amount of
| randomness inherent to getting popular, quantity tends to be
| the more important factor. He of course says it much better
| than I can.
|
| [0] URL of first part here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AMaW4XRCI
| ghaff wrote:
| It can also be really hard to judge quality (or at least
| popularity) a priori. I write for various publications that
| track traffic. Invariably I'll have posts I think are unique
| and interesting, which I really like. And they get middling
| views.
|
| So it often makes sense to not tilt too far into finely-
| crafting a low volume of work. Then I'll slap something
| together a "5 things people get wrong when doing $X." It's
| not _bad_ but it 's pretty cookie cutter. And it will blow
| up.
| ianwehba wrote:
| The Matt D'Avella course?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| It's a way better mindset to just expect to work on something a
| few hours each day than to try to set milestones and deadlines
| because you won't burn yourself out moonlighting
| spideymans wrote:
| The trick is to aggressively dive headfirst into a project, such
| that it becomes unconscionable for you to give up :)
| deepsun wrote:
| But what to do later with that dozens of unfinished projects I
| dove headfirst into over the last two decades?
| arkj wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| I sometimes tell people this idea as a the good news and bad
| news of learning.
|
| The good news is that you don't need to "try" to learn. Just do
| something, pretty much anything, for a while and the
| learning/remembering/synthesising happens automatically. The
| bad news is that there's no shortcut, it will take time no
| matter what you actually do.
|
| Even quicker. Bad news, it takes time. Good news, it only takes
| time.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I wouldn't call the effectiveness unreasonable. I would instead
| say that incorporating something into your routine is the most
| reliable way to make sure it gets done.
| dfsegoat wrote:
| This crosses into many aspects of life:
|
| I train Brazilian jiu jitsu and MMA. In our gym, we have a giant
| sign that says:
|
| _" A black belt is a white belt who refused to give up"_
|
| Basic translation: You can achieve the highest possible rank
| [Black belt] if you just keep showing up and enjoy the process.
| HPsquared wrote:
| It's necessary, but not sufficient.
| lordleft wrote:
| The power of consistent effort over time is staggering. Small
| choices compound into dramatic gains.
| laurieg wrote:
| I like the advice but it always seems to backfire for me.
|
| I started jogging everyday. Maybe 2 or 3km. But recently I
| struggle to do 500m a day.
|
| Same with programming. I'll start with a few good days but then
| it devolves to opening an editor, writing a comment or one line
| then closing it straight after.
| Benjammer wrote:
| It's important to self-motivation to not beat yourself up over
| these "bad days." For example, without these bad days, you have
| nothing to contrast with the "good days," so it's possible it
| makes you appreciate those times more. It can also give you
| insight into what produces a good or bad day for you,
| personally, if you start to monitor the circumstances around
| good and bad days in terms of how much sleep you get, your
| diet, general mood/feelings, etc.
| solatic wrote:
| Physical exercise is an exception because the body needs rest.
| The "just show up" goal with exercise is to begin with 3x a
| week and then gradually increase that as your body grows
| stronger.
| yreg wrote:
| Why is non-physical activity any different? To me 3x a week
| sounds like a good idea for starting mental exercise as well.
| munchbunny wrote:
| I found that I tend to get backlash if I start with too
| ambitious of a goal. Instead, I'll aim for something stupidly
| easy and just focus on getting started at all. I've found that
| works much better.
|
| At first I aimed for 1 hour of exercise a day. That failed
| within a week. So then I aimed for 10 minutes a day, which
| barely felt like exercise, but it got me to the starting line
| consistently! The trick for me was treating anything past 10
| minutes as beating expectations, rather than treating anything
| under 1 hour as falling short. In practice it means I'm able to
| get about 20 minutes per day consistently, which is still much
| better than 1 hour never.
|
| The key for me was making it so I could consistently feel good
| about a reasonable goal instead of constantly feeling like I
| was falling short of my own expectations.
|
| Now if only I could apply that to flossing.
| brabel wrote:
| You can try to convince yourself that the activity you want to
| perform is a given, just like eating and showering... you don't
| think whether you should do it, you just do it.
|
| It works for me. I can go to gym religiously 3 days a week, and
| been doing it for years. Sometimes there's a company online
| after-hours or something... sorry, can't go , it's my gym day.
| If you start allowing certain things to stop you from doing
| what you want, then anything starts becoming a good excuse to
| not do it. Don't let that happen.
|
| Regarding programming: I can keep up for months but sometimes I
| run into a problem that is really annoying to fix... I know I
| can fix it given enough determination, but then I think I am
| not getting paid for this, so what the heck... which results in
| me starting a new project and leaving that one aside until I
| actually need it (which happens every now and then).
| oarsinsync wrote:
| > _You can try to convince yourself that the activity you
| want to perform is a given, just like eating and
| showering..._
|
| I wish these activities were a given. It's 5pm and I've not
| eaten since breakfast at 8am. I had to force myself to
| shower.
|
| Note: showering wasn't a problem pre-pandemic and perma-WFH
| hermit life. Eating, however, still was difficult to remember
| unless food was brought to me. And even then, sometimes, it
| just sat going cold on my desk
| joshhogg wrote:
| It can help to set more strict 'triggers' for yourself.
|
| ie: - When it is 12, I will take a break for lunch. - At 3
| o'clock, I will take a break for a snack and stretch
|
| I get what you are saying, in that once you are in a flow,
| you don't want to stop. But, you need to be strict about
| it, like the user you are replying to is saying. Don't let
| yourself off the hook.
|
| Also, it helps me to realize there is value in stopping and
| stepping away from something. It helps me recharge, and
| step away from any problems I am trying to solve.
| m0llusk wrote:
| The related alternative that has worked wonders for me is to
| commit to getting something done every day, that is all the way
| to completion. This may be a well defined partial bit of work
| like defining a data structure or implementing one part of the
| CRUD code that will be needed. Targeting some level of
| completion doesn't always work out but has an effect on goal
| setting and chunk size of work parceled out which improves the
| hit rate for every short working session.
| [deleted]
| davidw wrote:
| It's all fun and games until they take your red Swingline
| stapler, though.
| sylens wrote:
| This is great advice and has made me think how I can squeeze out
| 30-60 minutes every day to do something similar. I think one area
| might be just making my setup more portable - instead of having a
| fully built out development environment that is on my desktop
| tethered to my desk, it may make sense to move to a laptop that I
| can move around the house, take with me on trips, etc. so as to
| not break the streak. Or even using one of the browser-based code
| editors or IDEs so that it's available anywhere, even from a
| tablet.
| mattlondon wrote:
| I ended up setting up a "development server" on a Raspberry Pi
| 4, and then using VS Code's remote tools to connect to it from
| anywhere (you can use tailscale etc if you fancy it to make it
| easy to connect remotely when not at home).
|
| I've found this to be really convenient - even just whipping
| out a chromebook you can turn on the chromebook and be coding
| in literally seconds. Makes the barrier to entry pretty low.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| Would a portable VR computer be useful here?
| https://simulavr.com/
| tshannon wrote:
| This is one of the reasons why investing in learning a terminal
| "IDE" / editor like vim / emacs can pay off. You can ssh from
| anywhere and have your development environment waiting for you.
| tester756 wrote:
| thus, consistency is a key
| Kluny wrote:
| I wonder if this is an argument in favor of the five-day workweek
| - at least from management's point of view.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great
| advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you
| need to subtract time from some other activities.
|
| Trading sleep for extra productivity is a losing game in the long
| run. It's much better to swap out some time waster activities
| like watching TV or, yes, browsing HN. It can be tough to reduce
| time spent on vices, but after the habit is established it's much
| more satisfying to do something productive with that time.
|
| I found it helps to streamline other parts of my life to recoup
| free time. Simple things like meal planning, using flex schedules
| to commute during low-traffic hours, working out at home instead
| of the gym, and doing grocery shopping in bulk only once per week
| have been great ways for me to recapture 30-60 minutes every day.
| andai wrote:
| A few weeks ago I started unplugging my internet when I go to
| bed, so it's off when I wake up. Then I work for 2 or 3 hours
| before plugging it back in. I use DevDocs.io, which has an
| offline feature, to look up standard library stuff.
|
| I actually delay going online for as long as possible because I
| know productivity will drop off a cliff once I reconnect.
|
| This is the most productive I've been in my life, by quite a
| wide margin.
| teddyh wrote:
| For offline documentation, I use these in order of
| preference:
|
| * Info1 documentation, which I read directly in Emacs. (If
| you have ever used the terminal-based standalone "info"
| program, please try to forget all about it. Use Emacs to read
| Info documentation, and preferably use a _graphical_ Emacs
| instead of a terminal-based one; Info documentation
| occasionally has images.)
|
| * Gnome Devhelp2.
|
| * Zeal3, using up-to-date documentation dumps provided by
| Dash4.
|
| * RFC archive5 dumps provided by the Debian "doc-rfc"
| package6.
|
| 1. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/info/
|
| 2. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Devhelp
|
| 3. https://zealdocs.org/
|
| 4. https://kapeli.com/dash
|
| 5. https://www.rfc-editor.org/
|
| 6. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/doc-rfc
| bgroat wrote:
| I found devdocs years ago but lost the link. THANK YOU for
| bringing it back to me
| mkl wrote:
| It's the top result on DDG and Google for [offline
| developer documentation].
| tigershark wrote:
| If you really work hard at your day job you just don't have
| enough energy at the end of the day if you have also a family
| to care about. It's a great advice for when you are young, it's
| pretty much useless when you value the time that you spend with
| the people that you love much more than any amount of money.
| 55555 wrote:
| Sorry to be a downer, but at this rate of speed isn't it possible
| that their tech will become outdated before it becomes widely
| used? Maybe they're 5-10 years away from being widely used?
| Machine learning is advancing rapidly.
| karterk wrote:
| True, but when we started we bet on certain trends that are
| just getting mainstream now. Having said that, large markets
| tend to have a lot of niches. You can certainly carve your own.
| It might not be a billion dollar niche, but that was never the
| point :)
| debt wrote:
| People hate this because it's not the all-in-one all-nighter
| over-the-weekend hacker stereotype I think we all want to be;
| rather it's a slow movement towards success over a much much
| longer period of time.
| asah wrote:
| This is a terrific model but it's not the only model - another
| highly effective model is to develop useful skills+resources,
| then strike with full force at the perfect time.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27835163
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| I hope your (really good) point gets more visible as this
| thread matures. I wanted to add that these are not mutually
| exclusive strategies: a project/business/startup can go from
| single focus to part-time and back multiple times.
|
| Two other strategies I'm a fan of:
|
| - Quitting before you overcommit. Sometimes it's just not worth
| it any more.
|
| - Taking a step back or time off. At minimum can give you
| perspective.
| bgroat wrote:
| 2 Questions:
|
| 1. I see you're on v.0.21 - how stable is this? I know the point
| of the article is that you don't set deadlines, but I'm anxious
| to implement something that may have breaking changes.
|
| 2. How can I pay you? I'm implementing search now, considering
| Algolia or PG_Search. I want to give you a shot, but I also want
| to pay you.
| karterk wrote:
| 1. Typesense is pretty stable and we are really careful about
| retaining backward compatibility. Our release cycles are slow
| (we give RC builds for people wanting a feature urgently) and
| we test a lot. The version number is just a number: Terraform
| just hit 1.0 last month :)
|
| 2. We've a hosted cloud version: https://cloud.typesense.org/
| -- and we also added a Sponsor button on Github because so many
| people have been asking us for it.
| bgroat wrote:
| I love how you work, how you communicate, and I fully expect
| to love your product
| jobsort wrote:
| I'm using Typesense on https://www.jobsort.com and haven't had
| a single crash; it's quite stable.
| distribot wrote:
| I think the worst part about being clinically depressed is how it
| feels impossible to do a little bit for a few days at a time, and
| then all my context/momentum/enthusiasm burns up by the time I
| come back to a project.
| hu3 wrote:
| Been there. Luckily my mother managed to drag me kicking and
| screaming to a psychiatrist as I didn't have the energy. If you
| can, try to call a parent or a friend and ask for help and be
| very clear to them that you can't do it alone (I know it's
| painful to admit).
|
| Turns out I had ADHD and Vyvanse changed my life. I did stop
| medicating after one year because it wasn't easy on the body
| (accelerated hearth rate) but medication gave the kickstart
| necessary to drag my ass through dark times and have impetus.
| Understanding my problem allowed me to manage it.
| samoyy wrote:
| No more zero days.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_ju...
| deeviant wrote:
| 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 wrong
| lesson. Even if you do it for an entire school year, there can be
| really only one type of winner: the investor that stuck all their
| money into a stock that happened to blow up, the opposite of a
| solid investment strategy.
|
| I bring up this example to point out that feedback can be a
| poisoned apple. Start-ups are basically this exact scenario. The
| only optimum strategy is to go "all in". Either in the short term
| by quitting your job and warming up your pitch deck, or in the
| long term by have some multi-year side project draining all
| available free time.
|
| So that's the bar, the vast majority of start-up likely had
| founders that went all in, it's table stakes. So what's the
| secret sauce? It is the equivalent to the fantasy financial
| league of picking an overperforming stock, it's not going all in.
| dalbasal wrote:
| A lot of things work like this. Call it "the lucky chancer
| game." The winner is likely to be a fortunate risk taker, with
| a side effect of survivorship bias... the "wrong lesson."
|
| Two thoughts...
|
| First, it's not necessarily the wrong lesson. It teaches a real
| reality, and results could be interesting... especially if real
| money was involved. I can see why an accelerated game of "play
| the market" isn't what a schoolteacher wants to teach. But...
| if you did want to teach it, I would make the game high
| repetition. High risk-reward strategies and games are a real
| thing in the world. I don't think it's bad to learn how to play
| them.
|
| From the POV of _playing_ such strategies /games, it's a short
| path to internalizing that "secret sauce" is generally an
| ingredient in a sequence, and therefore not really one thing.
|
| Second thought... One relevant way to teach kids about compound
| interest & saving is via "subsidized" interest rates. You might
| start with 10% per week with very young kids and recalibrate
| before financial meltdowns happen. This _might_ be the way of
| getting your teacher friend 's "right lesson" across.
|
| Anyway... That "just showing up" is surprisingly often the
| missing ingredient is also often true, and worth remembering.
| It just often isn't the ingredient for regular work/school
| life. We do "show up" for our school and work careers. That's
| the baseline. The reason, IMO, "just show up" is effective,
| where it is effective, is that most people don't show up.
| Everyone is showing up for work, for class. We _do_ have
| something to show for it, it 's not something that's an
| outlier.
| schnevets wrote:
| I really like this analogy, especially while WSB-style "YOLO"
| has become a life philosophy over the last 5 years.
|
| That said, I wonder if the "fantasy financial league" game can
| become a lesson by selectively choosing a handful of stocks
| over a 30 year period. Tell the kids about the economics of the
| period (let's say the 1960s - 1990s) and provide a few
| companies with the tickers, names, and descriptions replaced.
| Watch as the "blown up" stock subsides, but the conservative
| investor wins in the long-run.
|
| EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a
| philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about life
| has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market plays
| "won" if you are in the green, your tweet "lost" if you did not
| get effective engagement, your latest commit "won" if the
| established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then there
| are the implications in machine learning, where everything
| becomes a binary "correct or incorrect" assessment...
| roland35 wrote:
| I think it is a great idea, but if you want to reward a more
| sane investing strategy (ie low-cost broad index funds) you
| could maybe accelerate historical or simulated data and
| anonymize the ticker IDs?
|
| Obviously there will probably be one lucky YOLO player but
| you could rank everyone and also factor in risk-adjusted
| returns.
| astrange wrote:
| If you want to end up with the normal retirement strategy
| you probably want to simulate regular contributions and
| occasional emergency withdrawals.
|
| If you just have a simulated pile of money and want it to
| go up, but don't actually need it in the meantime, then the
| risk isn't important and diversifying too much will just
| guarantee you lose. The usual math in MPT makes strange
| assumptions like a normal distribution anyway, so it thinks
| an asset is bad if it has too much upside risk.
| ryandrake wrote:
| My class did almost this exact exercise in junior high back
| in the early 90's. Teacher gave us a menu of stock tickers of
| companies that have been around since 1960, complete with
| some rudimentary financial info as of 1960. Told us to
| research the companies and come up with a list of stocks to
| pretend we bought and held for 30 years. This was before the
| Internet so we couldn't just sneak a peek at the current
| prices. The goal of the exercise was to learn about research
| and ultimately diversification, but our team "won" by simply
| guessing the stock that was most well-known today, and
| YOLOing the entire fake money investment into it. Taught
| entirely the wrong lesson.
| sombremesa wrote:
| It would've been so easy to avoid this, even in the
| internet age, by just replacing the actual tickers with
| made up names...
| icelancer wrote:
| "EDIT: I cannot stop thinking about how ubiquitous YOLO as a
| philosophy has become in the last decade. Everything about
| life has become a binary of win or lose. Your stock market
| plays "won" if you are in the green, your tweet "lost" if you
| did not get effective engagement, your latest commit "won" if
| the established metrics succeeded after deployment. And then
| there are the implications in machine learning, where
| everything becomes a binary "correct or incorrect"
| assessment..."
|
| Much of this is reinforced through perceived and real rampant
| income inequality. If people think they can't advance without
| taking disproportionate risks - and they're mostly correct
| here - you'll start to see that action, and then it gets
| amplified in the social media atmosphere that we live in
| today.
| neural_thing wrote:
| Is it _necessarily_ the wrong lesson?
|
| Stanley Druckenmiller: my risk management strategy is to put
| all of my eggs into one basket and watch it very closely.
| neural_thing wrote:
| For those who don't know: Druck compounded capital at over
| 30% for 30 years. Never had a down year.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| The point is that for the purposes of the lesson the time
| horizon is too short to know if a student got lucky or made
| a good decision based on research and the like.
|
| Anecdotally I won one of these leagues in school by picking
| penny stocks and moving in and out of them a lot. Not the
| lesson in long term investing the teacher wanted to
| convey...
| rchaud wrote:
| It is the wrong lesson, but to prove that to the students,
| you have to rejig the experiment where their picks are
| compared to those of a primate picking stocks at random.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| No idea what you're trying to explain here. A business works
| when revenue exceeds expenses, not whatever you're trying to
| talk about here.
|
| I'm pretty sure "literally everyone" understands that, and not
| "literally nobody."
| nine_k wrote:
| If it were so simple.
|
| A pizza place may generate more revenue than it consumes in
| expenses _all the time_ , and barely provide enough for the
| owners to get by.
|
| A unicorn startup can have its expenses exceed revenue _all
| the time_ (see Uber) and make its owners very rich in the
| process.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It is that simple.
|
| Neither a pizza place nor a startup exist in for very long
| without revenue exceeding expenses.
|
| Even in your own examples, both businesses work. It doesn't
| matter whether it's from low revenue and low expenses or
| high expenses and high capital injection.
|
| Show me a business where revenue was ahead of expenses, had
| no debt, and it went out of business because it couldn't
| pay its bills.
| lisper wrote:
| I actually had this exact experience in a civics class in
| junior high school -- in 1979! We pored through the stock
| listings in a physical newspaper every day for several weeks
| and recorded our buy and sell decisions. The "winner" bought a
| penny stock which went from 1/8 to 1/4 in a day (or something
| like that). And I did in fact learn exactly the wrong lesson
| from that because 20 years later I lost a fair bit of money in
| the dotcom boom trying to replicate that strategy.
|
| It is very hard to come up with a teaching strategy that can
| overcome survivorship bias.
| tudelo wrote:
| I don't think that is the "wrong" lesson. It's a lesson in
| risk. But it's not a viable strategy long term for most. I
| think if you teach the concept of ruin, the chance of going
| bust, you can help develop a healthy relationship with the
| concept of risk and investing. It's also pretty easy to show
| real examples of what risk can cause... "guh"
| lisper wrote:
| It was the wrong lesson because the focus was entirely on
| who made the most money. And because it was funny money,
| the losers didn't actually suffer any real consequences
| other than the psychological pain of not being the winner.
| It flattened the risk-reward curve to the point where there
| was no real difference between losing 90% and simply coming
| in second. IMHO that is the wrong lesson (though I also
| note in passing that it is a philosophy that many Americans
| seem to subscribe to).
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| The OP's advice is reasonable for pre product-market fit
| startups/businesses. You're adding a lot of risk for very
| little benefit if you go all in on a product that doesn't exist
| yet or that customers don't want.
|
| Plus most people never ship anything, which this advice helps
| to fix.
| cjsawyer wrote:
| I'm no business expert, but this approach seems like a huge
| gamble to me. Why spend years building a project before the
| usefulness and public reception is quantified? I'd rather spend
| a hard few months building something that fails rather than an
| easy 6 years.
| karterk wrote:
| I don't disagree with you, and which is why I qualified my
| thoughts with a filter of a "large and growing market".
| Impossible to fail in such a market if your goal is not to be
| a billion dollar company.
| zwkrt wrote:
| That's not the dichotomy though. Most businesses start with
| one or a few people making someting useful and building a
| larger business around it. Like a plumber who learns to
| specialize in new urban construction and makes enough
| connections as clients that he decides to hire two people to
| help with his work.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| 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.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| 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.
| rmah wrote:
| Engineers may have an edge in analyzing company _products_.
| But that 's not the same as analyzing the _company_. Not
| understanding the difference has burned a lot of investors
| in the past.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Can you give recent examples of investors overestimating
| public tech companies with great tech?
|
| In the private market we had Theranos, which was
| completely opaque, but most of the big public failures
| were business innovations with unimpressive tech, like
| Groupon and WeWork.
| nine_k wrote:
| You should not underappreciate the subject area expertise
| of people who analyze stocks in a particular business area.
| Many of them learn the subject area at a serious depth,
| exactly for the reasons you state: the balance sheet does
| not tell the whole story.
| astrange wrote:
| Being a serious researcher is only good for stock picking
| if everyone else is going to come to the same conclusion,
| just more slowly. This is not true recently, what does
| meme stock performance have to do with serious peoples'
| opinion on Tesla?
|
| Actually, value investing hasn't worked for a lot longer
| than that, and it's probably because everyone else can
| see what you can for a public stock.
| nine_k wrote:
| Knowing the meme environment is a part of the subject
| area knowledge :)
|
| I mean, understanding a bit about CPU architectures and
| chip production processes is needed to e.g. choose
| between INTC and AMD, and some knowledge about cell
| structures and mRNA is needed to decide whether to invest
| in MRNA. This knowledge is important, on top of
| understanding the balance sheet.
| SubuSS wrote:
| I think you may be over-defining what 'work' means.
|
| The OP is a clear example of something that actually works,
| s/he even mentions some money being made.
|
| If you set the bar for success at 'only an unicorn' - I can see
| how these can be considered failures. But that's a self-
| fulfilling prophecy by itself considering the tag unicorn :)
| hinkley wrote:
| I've had two bosses/mentors who aspired to write project
| management books. Then they would tell me the thesis and I
| would think, "What? No, that's not why we are effective."
|
| Nobody sees the times you didn't fall down. Someone swooped in
| and fixed something before it broke. Maybe just in the nick of
| time, maybe far ahead. The forward thinking person is important
| to that process. If your management skills may keep that person
| around or drive them away, then that's material to your
| discussion. If it's neutral, then there's a whole lot of
| iceberg below the surface that you're not seeing.
|
| People can copy your theory and totally fail because they can't
| motivate the people who keep the wheels on.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There is an alternate strategy and it's what V persue: rather
| than going all-in on single bets, they diversify their
| portfolios.
|
| That, combined with stop-losses and favourable terms tend to
| assure winning-on-average.
|
| Individual founders face vastly greater risks, and poorer
| average returns (in part due to those stop-losses and
| favourable-to-VC terms).
| ineedasername wrote:
| SEO tactic: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of using the phrase
| "unreasonable effectiveness" in a blog post. ;)
| tajul7 wrote:
| Excellent advice.
| 094459 wrote:
| I love this post and the approach. It's worked for me during my
| life on lots of things.
| simonw wrote:
| Duolingo taught me this. I started doing ten minutes of Duolingo
| a day... 959 days ago. It showed me the enormous power of doing
| something small every day.
|
| Since then I've tried setting myself other streak targets. My
| most successful has been publishing weeknotes (just published
| number 92) since that forces me to focus on what I've got done -
| and through that incentivizes me to get stuff done, so I can put
| it in my weeknotes.
| OJFord wrote:
| Me too, about half that. But I'm painfully aware it's no longer
| getting me anywhere (I completed the 'tree' hundreds of days
| ago) - what I really need to do is sit down with my textbook in
| order to progress further with the grammar, and widen my
| vocabulary beyond what's in Duolingo. But that requires more
| time commitment, so I do it much less often, and do Duolingo
| instead.. _fairly_ pointlessly - sure it probably helps stop me
| slipping backwards.
| simonw wrote:
| Did you complete the first level of the three, or have you
| got to purple status on every lesson?
|
| I find that getting all the way it purple on every lesson has
| been massively more effective for me than just doing the
| lower level lessons.
| OJFord wrote:
| The three? Purple? Maybe it's different for different
| languages. Each lesson (as in topic badge type button) done
| through 5/5 crowns (1-7 stages per crown iirc), I just go
| through fixing the broken ones or practicing ones I know
| I'm rusty on now.
| simonw wrote:
| Yup that's what I'm talking about - the Spanish track
| added a concept of "purple" which is an advance on the
| broken ones - you can now take an additional set of
| lessons for one that shows up broken and it will never
| break for you again.
|
| I think the Spanish track is likely one of the most
| advanced in terms of number of lessons and quality of
| teaching - though I expect the "learn English" tracks are
| equivalent or more advanced, I've just never looked at
| those.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh nice. Mine (Hindi) definitely doesn't have that, it's
| also shorter than a lot of other older/more mature ones I
| think. (I've dabbled in the French one.) I'll certainly
| do it if it becomes available, but for now I've done all
| that is.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Spanish track recently was updated... So my nearly
| complete to 7th milestone tree (had just 4 circles left
| at 3/5) turned into a tree with 9 milestones and all
| progress beyond milestone 5 was wiped.
|
| I was pretty mad! It'll take a lot of time to complete it
| all, it hurt my achiever feelings pretty hard. Of course,
| more content is more learning, but with later milestones
| it gets very repetitive.
| presentation wrote:
| Depends what your goals are - but if you wanna be very
| capable at talking you'd be better off listening to a lot of
| native content intended for natives (as well as talking with
| live people). I recommend Language Learning with Netflix, or
| the more heavy duty/Anki driven Migaku family of tools (can
| use with Netflix, YouTube or any video with subtitle files),
| for studying in that form; plus language teachers through
| something like iTalki (encourage the teacher to not dumb down
| their speaking for you even if you get lost); as well as
| talking with random people on services like
| HelloTalk/immersing in the place that speaks your
| language/finding a native speaker to befriend and talk to in
| the language. Duolingo is a beginner tool in my opinion
| (there are far more beginners to sell to and the barrier to
| entry is low).
| OJFord wrote:
| Absolutely agree it's a beginner tool, and through studying
| a textbook/Wiktionary, films, talking to a bilingual
| speaker I've surpassed it. But just as you say the barrier
| to entry is low, so is the barrier to practice.
|
| Thanks for the tips though, I will give them a go.
| Especially the Netflix one I keep meaning to; I watch a
| fair bit in target language (Hindi) but always with (only)
| English subtitles. Keep meaning to give it a go. (I do
| sometimes go back and put Hindi subtitles on if there was
| something I was particularly interested in / wanted to
| check, but it's a pain to do often.)
| lupire wrote:
| Likely what you need is an immersion experience, the best way
| to learn a language.
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes.. I've wanted to for years, even before learning the
| language. The pandemic is a solid excuse at the moment, but
| I only have myself to blame really.
|
| One day I'll go, ek din jaauuNNgaa!
| chris_j wrote:
| What results do you find you get from using Duolingo every day
| for 959 days? Do you find that it's working for you, in terms
| of gaining better language proficiency?
|
| I ask because I personally became disillusioned with Duolingo's
| streaks and leaderboards. I found that I was forcing myself to
| use it every day but I lost the love of learning the language.
| Ultimately, I stopped using it because I had a lot of extrinsic
| motivation to hit targets in the app but little intrinsic
| motivation to keep learning.
|
| It sounds like your experiences were different from mine and
| I'm curious to learn what made them so.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| I'm currently on 890 day streak learning Spanish, i can read
| tweets getting ~90% and understand _slow_ Spanish speech.
|
| I think i can have a basic conversation with a Spanish
| speaker and understand him, if he'll make some effort for us
| to understand each other.
|
| Duolingo gamification stopped working around day 150..200 but
| by that time spending 10-15 minutes per day with it became a
| habit. If I have to wait for someone or I'm drinking tea in
| an idle mood, i just pop up Duolingo and do a lesson.
| simonw wrote:
| I've tried learning Spanish theee different times - a course
| at university, a course at an employer and now with Duolingo.
|
| The results I've got from Duolingo have been by far the best
| - a little very day works way better for me than a larger
| commitment of time in shorter bursts.
|
| I can now read tweets from Spanish language Twitter accounts
| and understand them 90% of the time (CNN and BBC News in
| Spanish are great).
|
| I took some in-person lessons via video chat to practice
| conversational Spanish which was also useful, and I'm hoping
| to spend a few months fully embedded in a Spanish speaking
| country some time in the future - but I don't feel the need
| to rush things. I'll be happy getting incrementally more
| vocabulary and grammar in 10-15 minutes a day for a long time
| to come.
| chris_j wrote:
| That's really fantastic - good work. I'm glad to hear that
| my experiences with Duolingo aren't the only ones possible.
| sweetheart wrote:
| Hey I made leerly.io for people exactly like you! Check it
| out and see if you get any utility out of it. We are in the
| early days so your feedback would mean a lot; you're our
| target demographic :)
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Duolingo is great, because learning a language (and many
| other skills) is a matter of doing it consistently. If you
| have a 4 hour class once a week but don't study or read
| anything in Spanish outside of the class, you will forget
| things before the next class.
|
| Of course, Duolingo is not magical, but it gives you enough
| vocabulary and understanding that you can start following
| people on twitter/instagram and know what's happening. Then
| you start trying to reply and interact, and then at some
| point try a book, then a TV show..
|
| Also, many people plan on starting something (like learning
| a language) later on, when they have more time. Many people
| I know that wanted to learn English (Im Brazilian) didn't
| start years ago because they `didn't have time`, so now,
| after a few years, they still need to start from 0
| [deleted]
| munificent wrote:
| I've written two books over the past decade as well as learning
| some other skills and hobbies and this is absolutely the most
| vital lesson I've learned. There is an _incredible_ power in
| simply pouring a little time into something every day over a long
| period of time. It feels like a superpower when you see it start
| compounding.
|
| The Grand Canyon was created by little drops of water bouncing
| off rocks for millenia. Consistent effort over time is one of the
| greatest forces in the world. Persistence beats focus,
| inspiration, and genius 90% of the time.
| superasn wrote:
| > There is an incredible power in simply pouring a little time
| into something every day over a long period of time. It feels
| like a superpower when you see it start compounding.
|
| There is an amazing book called _The Slight Edge_ which is
| based on this very principal and it can really change your
| life. Here is a small excerpt from it that really resonated
| with me:
|
| _It sure would be nice if, somehow, you could do something
| dramatic. If you just wake up tomorrow and have it all turned
| around--snap your fingers and change it. That might happen, in
| a movie.
|
| But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you add
| one small, simple, positive action to the success side?
|
| Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more? Nothing
| you can see. What happens if you keep adding one more, and one
| more, and one more, and one more ... Before too long, you see
| the scales shift, ever so slightly. And then again. And
| eventually, that heavy - failure side starts to lift, and lift,
| and lift ... and the scales start swinging your way.
|
| No matter how much negative weight from the past is on the
| other side, just by adding those little grams of success, one
| at a time (and by not adding more weight to the failure side),
| you will eventually and inevitably begin to shift the scales in
| your favor.
|
| The Slight Edge is about your awareness. It is about you making
| the right choices, the choices that serve you and empower you,
| starting right now and continuing for the rest of your life,
| and learning to make them effortlessly.
|
| It's not a question of your mood or your feelings. And it's not
| a question of will power. It's a question of simply knowing.
|
| Simple things you do every day, in fact. Or, as the case may
| be, don't do every day. Time will be your friend or your enemy;
| it will promote you or expose you. It's entirely up to you. If
| you're doing the simple disciplines, time will promote you. If
| you're doing the few simple errors in judgment, time will
| expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing right
| now._
| woo_neurons wrote:
| Hey! I got the book after reading your comment. Great book,
| exactly what I was looking for.
| burnt_toast wrote:
| > But this is your life. What can you do? What happens if you
| add one small, simple, positive action to the success side?
|
| > Nothing you can see. What happens if you add one more?
| Nothing you can see
|
| Having been on a journey to change the direction of my life
| for a few months now this perfectly sums up how I've been
| feeling about it.
|
| I'm gonna give the book a read because I think it's what I
| need to hear right now. Thank you for making me aware of it.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| James Clear writes in his book Atomic Habits, that making one
| small change and performing that change consistently every
| day is the compound interest of life. I like how James'
| description and the one from your book suggestion are so
| similar.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Losing weight, there's never been a day I felt perceptibly
| different from the day before, but looking back a year some
| things are certainly easier or more comfortable already after
| about 80lbs. Slow by most measures but that has its own
| benefits.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I started lifting weights two years ago. First time I've
| ever really succeeded in developing an exercise habit in
| 50+ years. Progress is slow. Every few weeks I can add
| maybe 5 lbs to a particular lift. Or maybe not. I have no
| specific goals. But the accumulated progress is remarkable
| to me. I have a better body now than I did in high school.
| It's still not "fun" but I do it every other day and rarely
| miss, and it does give me a sense of satisfaction to
| complete a workout.
| stank345 wrote:
| I also enjoy lifting weights and I recently started doing
| high-frequency, low/moderate intensity training
| throughout my workday. I'll just choose an exercise for
| that day and do it many times per day. It's always around
| 50-70% effort so pretty easy (eg. if I can do 10 pullups
| I'll only ever do a set of 5 max). That way I have
| perfect technique for each rep and set and I never get
| close to failure. I always feel refreshed and never
| beaten down and I don't have to set aside specific time
| to lift (I'm currently trying to just maintain while I do
| technique work). Yesterday I did it with front squats for
| 10x3 of very high quality reps. I plan to increase the
| reps/weight slightly once it gets super easy and repeat.
| mdoms wrote:
| This passage strikes me as meaningless self-help dreck.
| patrickk wrote:
| Scott Adams book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still
| Win Big" touches on a similar theme, "systems vs goals". Have
| a system that takes willpower out of the equation - so you
| can do simple repetitive tasks everyday, to achieve big
| things over time.
|
| A goal might be - lose weight! But a system might be - batch
| cook steamed veg with some healthy condiments, and eat that
| only during the day by having it always within reach.
|
| By having a system for preparing easy, health food, you
| compound the effect instead of having a seemingly impossible
| intimidating goal that you keep putting off.
|
| Other stuff that resonated with me were doing things that
| keep your personal energy as high as possible, stacking
| skills (be in the top 25 percentile at multiple things), and
| the idea that your brain is a moist computer that you can
| actually program in a desirable direction. The book really
| resonated with me.
| king_panic wrote:
| The Slight Edge is an amazing book about an amazing concept.
| Dramatic change happens one percent at a time at a consistent
| cadence.
|
| Also great chapter in The Psychology of Money about Warren
| Buffet. He's been investing since he was a child and is now
| in his 90s -- He's been compounding returns on a longer
| timeframe then anyone else alive.
| robocat wrote:
| > Warren Buffet
|
| That is selection bias at its worst: he really is an
| outlier. There are plenty of investors that beaver away
| every day and do not get his returns. I suspect you could
| pick one of his decades and only find a few people that
| exceed his ability.
| colonelanguz wrote:
| Yeah. And he also hasn't beaten the market in over a
| decade.
| chejazi wrote:
| > If you're doing the few simple errors in judgment, time
| will expose you, no matter how well you appear to be doing
| right now.
|
| Like smoking pot. I love smoking pot, but wow can it cascade
| errors in judgment (only realized upon looking back)
| querez wrote:
| I'm curious, because I sometimes worry of stepping into
| this trap, as well: what kind of error cascades?
| random_kris wrote:
| For me it cascaded to smoking daily and doing 0 health
| related activities. I could still code tho..
| random_kris wrote:
| I've been smoking daily for past 5 years, it cascaded into
| smoking from morning until I fall asleep. Decided to stop
| on my 25th birthday 3 days ago. It's really hard and even
| though I love this devil's lettuce I wish I never started
| smoking it. Any tips for a fellow smoker ?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've had a solid green GH activity log[0] for years. I try to
| write some Swift every day.
|
| Most folks seem to think it's fake. I have learned not to give
| a damn.
|
| Some of the days with the fewest commits are actually the ones
| where I worked hardest.
|
| [0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#github-stuff
| SamBam wrote:
| Do you explicitly try to keep it all green, like a "Don't
| break the chain" habit tracker?
|
| I can imagine committing code nearly every day, but what with
| the occasional travel day, sickness, etc, there would always
| be _some_ holes, unless keeping it green and making at least
| one commit was explicitly important to me.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There are some holes; not many. I work at home, so it's
| easy to be consistent.
|
| It's not about keeping the activity graph green; it's about
| constantly coding, so it is as natural as breathing.
|
| Best if you turn off Dark Mode on GH to see the empties.
| They look like faint greenies in Dark Mode.
| telchar wrote:
| Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read,
| the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of
| water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is
| ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado
| River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material
| moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve
| the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probably erode more
| continually though.
|
| And in geological time, an every-10,000-year event may as well
| be like every day to us.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Not sure about the Grand Canyon, but at least around the
| Alps, lots of wide, deep river valleys were carved into close
| to their current form at the end of the last ice age, when
| rivers carried hundreds of times their usual water for quite
| a while as the ice shield was melting away.
| arnold_palmur wrote:
| This is the quintessential example of a pedantic Hacker News
| comment.
| 6510 wrote:
| Let me help, you are suppose to say the torrents of water
| are made up out of many single drops on their journey
| around the world.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Did the torrent create it or the boundary layer of
| droplets?
| mywittyname wrote:
| What you're saying is the OP is missing the torrent through
| the raindrops?
| xwdv wrote:
| I'd much rather see pedantic comments that are technically
| correct than people just nodding along and perpetuating
| meme-like garbage facts. Too often when I scroll through
| social media I read quotes and posts that make me roll my
| eyes at how people will avoid critical thinking and
| reasoning as long as the words sound good and tell a good
| stereotypical story in their minds. In this case, the idea
| that vast canyons are formed by little drops of rain over
| time.
| [deleted]
| bobobob420 wrote:
| The irony considering your comment itself is an example of.
| A useless comment while OP made a valuable correction while
| respecting the original point made
| brianwawok wrote:
| Isn't it great? Lol.
| nend wrote:
| I don't know, I appreciated the correction and additional
| information. There was also an acknowledgment that it
| doesn't change ops point. Seemed like a useful comment to
| me.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Well, pedantry _is_ quite popular around here.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Writing code w/o a pedantic frame ~= buggy code.
| pvorb wrote:
| But writing code while being pedantic doesn't save you
| from bugs. Maybe writing code ~= buggy code.
| random_kris wrote:
| Writing code with pedantic frame makes you ship slower
| which makes bug discovery slower
| ziftface wrote:
| It was pedantic but that doesn't make it a bad comment, I
| definitely appreciated the information
| telchar wrote:
| Since this comment got some attention, my source for this
| was [0] Ranney, Wayne. "How Rivers Carve Canyons."
| Carving Grand Canyon - Evidence, Theories, and Mystery,
| 2nd ed., Grand Canyon Association, 2012.
| tobmlt wrote:
| Also appreciated by those who prefer to work in torrents,
| rather than consistently. ;)
| xattt wrote:
| What I get from it is that occasional cram sessions is the
| way to move boulders.
| askafriend wrote:
| For some people this is what's most effective. Many ways
| to approach life.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Science thinks that a bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly.
| The parable is used anyways because woo teachers don't care
| what humans think is illogical.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| And to expand on what I would like to hope your point is,
| comments like the GP are exactly why I and many others come
| here :)
| pkghost wrote:
| And this is the great thing about threaded comments --
| everyone who wants to follow the pedantic branch of
| conversation can do so without derailing the others
| (though this ideal is frequently thwarted by bad UX).
|
| Of course, it's nice when the pedants are self-aware, as
| is the case here, and acknowledge the pedantry of their
| tangent.
|
| Normalize polite pedantry!
| tobmlt wrote:
| Huh... Suddenly I want "comment code folding" up in here.
| I mean generally speaking, of course.
| grp000 wrote:
| I don't think it's pedantic though. If what makes your
| argument powerful is tying it back to a natural
| phenomenon, then it should be right, otherwise you're
| using a bad example.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Also, to the degree it's wrong, you can try to take that
| error _back_ and see where the argument flows.
|
| Like, compounding is magic, except realistically, one or
| more of the following typically happens:
|
| - Interest rate is so small that it doesn't add up to a
| meaningful difference over your lifetime. See e.g. most
| people and regular savings accounts.
|
| - You aren't able to keep systematically saving /
| learning / etching a canyon for long enough for the
| compounding to matter.
|
| - There's a natural decay process that is stronger than
| compounding.
|
| Whether it's digging a canyon, learning new skills, or
| amassing wealth, it seems that concentrated but
| unfrequent actions are much more effective than a steady
| but weak trickle.
| tobmlt wrote:
| Yes. With unsteady and infrequent but purposeful action,
| move the very bowels of the earth.
|
| I mean, accomplish a lot, politely, eh hem.
|
| Excessive steady and consistent work has rendered me
| delirious, clearly. I'll see myself out.
| pilsetnieks wrote:
| Using bad logic is building a house on sand. One might
| get lucky and the house might stand their lifetime but
| they're also likely to get swallowed by a sinkhole.
| 6510 wrote:
| How about cities by the coast?
| thehappypm wrote:
| That's not true. You might be thinking of the Missoula floods
| that carved out the channeled scablands of Eastern
| Washington. But the Grand Canyon's river is generally the
| same size it always has been, and slow erosion forces created
| it.
| bin_bash wrote:
| Missoula floods were probably more like a 1:100,000 year
| event since they were caused by the ice age subsiding
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Why not both?! It's not ridiculous to allow for constant,
| steady erosion and the occasional 10,000 year flood
| shenanigans!
|
| Example from in our great-grandparents lifetimes. There's a
| cool place called the Bridge to Nowhere in Southern
| California => https://goo.gl/maps/XMerBpT3J2caLJ696 / https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Nowhere_(San_Gabriel....
| The bridge was built as part of a massive project to build
| roads through the San Gabriel Mountains in the mid 1930s.
| Only a couple years after the bridge was completed, there
| was a massive rainstorm washed away most of the newly built
| roads. The bridge stand about 120 feet, roughly 36 meters,
| above the river below. I was talking to a park ranger who
| said there were reports that the flooding nearly reached
| the bridge. While this bridge stands over a river that's
| been slowly eroding the valley below for (millions of?)
| years, every now and then Mother Nature says "I'm bored,
| let's hit the biblical flood button and see what happens!"
| What kind of boulders could a violent rush of 20m-30m+
| flooding move? Big ones I'm sure! Who the heck knows what
| kind of freakish rain storms or natural damn bursts have
| happened in the time that the Grand Canyon has been
| forming!
|
| For anyone in the SoCal area, the Bridge to Nowhere is a
| fun day hike. It's about 5 miles (8km) one way from the
| trailhead. It's a very cool hike. If you're going in summer
| time, bring plenty of water, sunscreen, and some head
| protection. It gets toasty in that canyon.
| hammock wrote:
| The deeper the canyon gets, the larger its watershed and the
| more likely flash floods, etc. The answer is both, and it has
| changed over time. Trickle and torrents.
| unsui wrote:
| OP's comment is a vast simplification of what's happening
| underneath, but nonetheless still tremendously valid as a
| useful heuristic.
|
| Valuable work, like many things in the real world, is not
| normally distributed, but skewed or following alternate
| distributions, such as power-law. This is likely what occurs
| within "torrents" of work: work that is has significantly
| more leverage than other work.
|
| Nonetheless, the implicit bedrock of the just-showing-up
| heuristic is that the valuable work cannot get done without
| the consistency of simply showing up; indeed, expert
| performance is often a function of deliberate practice plus
| persistence (time); one without the other rarely nets
| positive results.
| holycrapguys wrote:
| This comment is a perfect representation of Hacker News
| discussions.
| dheera wrote:
| And so maybe true effectiveness would be achieved by having a
| torrent of work once a week instead of a few minutes a day.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Both. I am naturally a very "torrent of work" kind of
| person, but I've learned that one approach isn't enough.
| Some problems require a bit every day, some torrents.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Also the torrent maybe only comes, if prepared through
| little drops here and there.
| dreamer7 wrote:
| I think it depends on the activity. It's impossible to
| build any medium to high complexity software by working on
| it for 5 mins a day. But you can make a lot of progress by
| practising every day for very little time. For example,
| I've improved on my tucked planche progression by just
| leaning forward while holding a plank for 5 seconds every
| day.
| munificent wrote:
| _> It 's impossible to build any medium to high
| complexity software by working on it for 5 mins a day._
|
| Both of the books I wrote, one of which includes two
| complete implementations of a programming language, were
| mostly written in sessions of less than an hour.
| Occassionally I get longer ones and very often they are
| much shorter.
|
| Learning to task switch and suspend efficiently is also a
| really valuable skill that improves with practice. I have
| kids, so if I couldn't make progress while being
| interrupted, I'd never be able to do anything.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Do you count only writing time, or also the time you
| spent constructing the book and associated programs in
| your head?
| thorum wrote:
| My experience has been that a small amount of work each
| day builds mental momentum which can snowball into
| something bigger when my schedule opens up and I have
| some free time & an idea that excites me.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Yes, working on a problem daily means your subconscious
| is daily prodded to "think about the problem". As you do
| other things, your brain is 'working on it' so when you
| do get those few minutes or maybe an hour to work on it,
| you almost always know what to do - you've been thinking
| about it all day!
|
| There is an apocryphal story of what Newton said when he
| was asked, "How did you come up with the theory of
| gravity?" replying: "By thinking about it all the time."
| dheera wrote:
| Yeah I agree. For software I find the major
| infrastructure laying and overhauling should be done in
| "torrent" blocks of several hours to a full day, while
| incremental bugfixes and feature add-ons can be done by
| daily short amounts of time.
| fladrif wrote:
| to follow the example closer, you need to put in work every
| day, however small (continuous river flow), and that will
| carve the channels in your life (eh?) to enable the torrent
| of work that might come when conditions allow.
| macksd wrote:
| I think at this point we're reading too much into specific
| units to compare very distinct things. The point of the
| analogy either way is the compounding effect of seemingly
| small things repeated.
| binarysolo wrote:
| Right, even a day or suncycle is kinda arbitrary and
| human-scale. Point is just that consistent repeatable
| practice rewards compoundingly over time.
| omgJustTest wrote:
| Like every problem, it depends on the resolution of the scale
| you examine it! How much did you zoom? Looks like drops to
| me!
| _wldu wrote:
| I find writing to be like this. Write something, go away for
| awhile and do other things. Come back and refine what you
| wrote. Once you do that several times, you'll have something
| worth reading. But it takes time.
| yarky wrote:
| Agree, this is how I somehow ended up using bash/vim for all my
| needs. I realized it wasn't "normal" when I saw my boss' face
| as he watched me typing. And it keeps compounding :)
| mrits wrote:
| I can think of some counter examples. Golf is a big one. I have
| friends that play every weekend and never get better.
| Cd00d wrote:
| I don't think just doing an activity is enough - there has to
| be conscious effort at improvement.
|
| A person doing a drunken Saturday 18 isn't going to improve.
| A person going to the range and focusing on technique 20
| minutes a day will improve, with far less net time spent.
|
| I think of it in terms of the "10,000 hours to mastery" - how
| many masters of driving do you see on the road? Most people
| are just barely not crashing from place to place, not
| focusing on skill.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I started doing this with side projects a little while ago. The
| revelation for me was to create a monorepo out on GitHub and
| actually keep my hackaround projects under some reasonable form
| of source control and all in the same bucket.
|
| What I started doing was rewriting my projects over and over
| trying to chase down the core first principles. I would take my
| previous iteration - MyProject12 - and create a fresh one -
| MyProject13. The idea would be to use the prior copy as a
| reference point for the new one, and to only use it for the
| little nuggets of value I think I still want to carry forward.
| I have VS solutions with every iteration of that project in it
| so I can quickly do a sln-wide search for something I
| discovered previously.
|
| I repeated this process about 40-50 times for an application
| framework. Fast forward 3-4 years and we are now talking about
| setting up a license agreement between myself and my employer
| for purposes of using this IP in next generation products. It
| is incredibly nice to have permissive employment contracts so
| that I can freely explore my interests without fear of
| reproach. Seems this has very powerful win-win mechanics.
|
| It may sound strange that this is what someone would do in
| their free time after work, but I actually do derive pleasure
| from indulging the fantasy of being allowed to rewrite code
| piles. If I were to take this tendency into my professional
| work, everyone would have quit by now. It seems to be a good
| outlet for me.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I wish more employers realized this. If the contract says
| they own every piece of code you write, you are not likely to
| put your best ideas forward.
| agumonkey wrote:
| There might be a reverse principle that our natural tendency is
| to forget what a problem is or how hard it is unless we warm up
| back into it. Doing thing regularly gives us that.
| kashif wrote:
| The grand canyon was likely not the result of little drops but
| rather huge deluges - over time.
| nomy99 wrote:
| Also in dating.
| spideymans wrote:
| 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 accelerates evermore.
|
| Software is very much the same. And the cool thing about
| software is that the domain of knowledge is effectively
| infinite. No one person can ever _run out_ of things to know in
| this field. You can only learn more and get even better.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The number of domains of knowledge that are effectively
| infinite are compounding...this thought tends to make me
| hyperventilate if I think about it too much.
|
| It was very important to me to be smart so that people looked
| positively at me, now that I'm getting older, I'm having a
| hard time letting that go as I know more and more about less
| and less.
| Dangeranger wrote:
| And yet, "smart" is less about how much you know and more
| about how quickly you can become competent in something
| new. You can feel confident in the knowledge that when you
| need to know something you can learn it, just-in-time.
| reddiky wrote:
| Wisdom is knowing how little you actually know
| spideymans wrote:
| This is perhaps a root cause of the Dunning-Kruger
| effect.
| tomrod wrote:
| One of the greatest lessons I took from formerly subscribing
| to a high demand religion was exactly this. "By small and
| simple things are great things brought to pass."
| kjerzyk wrote:
| 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.
| ghgr wrote:
| Maybe the book "Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of
| Everyday Cooking" [1] is what you are looking for:
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3931154-ratio
| nemo44x wrote:
| The book "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat" is fairly modern still but
| also considered a classic by many. The entire goal of the
| book is to break cooking down to these aspects.
|
| Another person in this thread mentioned the Master Classes
| with Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller and I can concur that
| both of those are really great in teaching technique that
| is reusable across just about anything you cook.
|
| Cooking is pretty easy once you get enough of it under your
| belt and are confident with different techniques. It's also
| quite liberating as many things go with each other and it
| isn't a mystery if something will work. You can begin to
| target "profiles" you want your food to take on.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I learned a lot by watching way too much food network.
| After a while your brain starts picking up on the design
| patterns.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Delia Smith has done many series of cooking programmes;
| "How To Cook" addresses your question directly. It starts
| with the very most fundamental basics: how to boil an egg.
|
| I'd be surprised if these programmes can't be found on e.g.
| Youtube.
|
| I strongly suspect there is a book or two in print with the
| same title.
|
| Delia's recipes work. She's not a purist; she does
| shortcuts (but always from-scratch - no tinned Cambell's
| Soup).
|
| If "How To Cook" is too basic for you, her website is full
| of well-explained recipes for all kinds of standards.
|
| [Aside: One of the things that pisses me off about online
| recipes is the fifteen paragraphs of gush that seems to be
| required if you want to be a paid food "influencer"; Delia
| doesn't do that.]
| mattmanser wrote:
| There's a good chrome extension for that problem
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-
| filter/ahlc...
| hrydgard wrote:
| Nothing wrong with just following a bunch of recipes. If
| you do it enough you'll start to internalize common things
| and techniques, also play around with modifying them and
| substituting similar ingredients.
| teekert wrote:
| I think in this quantity is important, you'll learn how
| long to boil/cook/bake/saute/season to perfection with
| trial and error. You'll also learn what you like, it's
| pretty personal. I liked Jamie Oliver's "in 15 minutes"
| book, I never finished any in 15 minutes and I changed the
| recipes a lot but there are a lot of simple tasteful things
| in there. Also on his website. And you learn techniques
| that make you faster/more efficient.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| I _highly_ recommend Masterclass to get into cooking. The
| Gordon Ramsey and Thomas Keller videos jumpstarted me into
| serious cooking last year. 10 /10 would recommend.
| dominotw wrote:
| is it worth the price. seems a overpriced for the
| content.
| Multiplayer wrote:
| I think it's an incredible bargain to be honest.
| Everything is really well produced and the content is top
| notch.
|
| Thomas Keller explaining his techniques is more than
| worth the entire price.
| nemo44x wrote:
| Those courses are in my opinion.
| shoemakersteve wrote:
| There's a ton of great content on YouTube to learn the
| basics. There's a channel called "Pro Home Cooks" that's
| definitely more focused on teaching you the basics as well
| as techniques, tips and tricks, etc. That's what I watched
| to get me started.
|
| They have a couple of "Basic tips & tricks everyone should
| know" type videos and I definitely recommend those. It's
| stuff like, "pat down your chicken before cooking it or the
| water will make it steam instead of sear", "tenderize your
| meat so that it cooks evenly", "salt your veggies to reduce
| the water content, it will cook better and faster", "adding
| salt to boiling water doesn't just season it, it makes it
| boil faster too".
|
| Lots of good stuff that you definitely won't get from
| recipes.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Some of this might be great advice and the reasoning
| sound. Some of it I can't tell but the thing about water
| and salt makes me suspicious.
|
| I suppose you mean to add salt after the water boils
| instead of at the start? Why would the water boil faster
| without salt with any significance to cooking?
|
| I looked it up again and apparently The
| temperature needed to boil will increase about 0.5 C for
| every 58 grams of dissolved salt per kilogram of water
|
| One teaspoon of salt is about 6 grams. So let's say 10
| teaspoons of salt to increase the boiling point by 0.5C
| for a liter of water. I guess you will boil about 4
| liters or so for your pasta? So 40 teaspoons or about
| 240g of salt to raise the boiling point by 0.5C.
|
| How long does it take a regular stovetop to heat 4l of
| 100C water to 100.5C?
|
| The good enough answer to that is that it's not
| noticeable for you even if you had wasted this much salt
| on your pasta or potatoes or rice or whatever. Never mind
| that nobody would/should eat this food any longer as
| you've just cooked your food in saltier than ocean
| salinity level water. With the proper amount of salt it
| would be even less noticeable of a difference. Less time
| than it takes you to get the salt and put it in.
| norrius wrote:
| I suspect this is more about giving that almost-boiling
| water more points where it can break tension and start
| forming bubbles. So it doesn't make the water reach
| 100deg faster but makes it more visible.
| codemonkey-zeta wrote:
| Hands down the best cooking channel on YouTube for me at
| least.
|
| The thing I most appreciate about Mike's work with Pro
| Home Cooks is that he shows what _doesn't_ work and what
| he would do different next time. I find that's the most
| important skill to hone when learning to cook.
|
| He also does a ton of improvisation during his videos.
| Things like, "I was going to put broccoli in this but all
| I had was kale, but I still want a little more substance
| so maybe I'll make kale chips and roast some cashews
| too." Creativity in the kitchen is a huge part of the
| fun, and I haven't seen other cooking education sources
| that demonstrate it effectively.
| asquabventured wrote:
| The food lab by j Kenji Lopez alt is another cooking book
| (with lots of recipes) that really helps you understand why
| and what you are doing rather than just telling you a
| process to follow.
|
| Highly recommend anything Kenji does (previously he was the
| main force behind seriouseats.com) and also does a lot of
| first person point of view cooking videos on YouTube where
| he explains why he is doing things while he is doing them.
| niklasd wrote:
| Second that! He has a very scientific approach, sampling
| various ways (cooking dishes in six different ways,
| comparing them), which makes it far easier to understand
| why something is done that way.
| spideymans wrote:
| YouTube! My YouTube recommendations are always full of food
| stuff, so I just passively learn new foods/techniques as I
| browse the website.
|
| I recommend you check out Ethan Chlebowsk's channel in
| particular. His recipes are pretty damn tasty, while
| remaining approachable to the average joe.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDq5v10l4wkV5-ZBIJJFbzQ
| pjmorris wrote:
| My favorite for teaching cooking, not just recipes, is 'How
| to Cook,' Julia Child. We have our own and keep a copy at
| the in-laws for ready reference. We are also big fans of
| Alton Brown's 'I'm Just Here for the Food.'
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I also favour Felicity Cloake; there's very little
| introductory fluff, it's straight into the food.
|
| In the "How To Cook The Perfect"..., series, she tackles
| standards. She gathers the opinions and recipes of various
| authors and chefs, and tests them against a tasting panel.
| She then settles on her chosen recipe; but you get to
| decide whether you prefer to go with chef X or author Y, in
| respect of (e.g.) the capers.
|
| I've learned a lot from Cloake. And her writing suits my
| cooking style - I don't like to be tied to a recipe past
| the first attempt.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Another vote for Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat as well as The Food
| Lab
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of people recommend videos to get started. A lot of
| (as in most) recipes assume you know enough to tell when
| the stove is at an appropriate temperature, when a texture
| is "right," etc. Video isn't a panacea but written
| directions for many things tend to assume you kinda know at
| least the basics.
|
| ATK's best recipes and maybe some of Alton Brown's books
| (though I'm less enthusiastic than some are) are probably
| better than most at breaking down the steps and the reason
| for doing certain things.
| BeefWellington wrote:
| The Joy of Cooking is a bit old but describes the
| practicalities of cooking fairly well. It's full of recipes
| yes but there's essentially an entire chapter at the start
| of each section that outlines different techniques and even
| how to select cuts of meat, etc. It's fairly basic advice
| but that + Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will basically cover
| "intro to cooking" and give you a good set of the basic
| recipes to cover off.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I love the Joy of Cooking because it teaches cooking in
| layers. So it will start off teaching you how to make a
| simple dish, then the next pages are all permutations of
| that dish where you add a few ingredients, or slightly
| change the cooking technique.
| munificent wrote:
| I actually think starting with recipes and following them
| semi-blindly is a great way to learn to cook. For a couple
| of reasons:
|
| * It gives you successful experiences early in the process.
| It can be really disheartening to spend hours making a mess
| of your kitchen and end up with something unpalatable.
| Following tried and true recipes gets you to that amazing
| feeling of "I created something delicious" as quickly as
| possible, and I think you need that to keep motivation up.
|
| * There are definitely many systematic aspects to cooking.
| Things like the French mother sauces, the role of acid,
| Maillard reaction, etc. But also, a lot of cooking really
| is just "we put these ingredients together because we've
| always put them together". When you think of food you love,
| part of the reason you love it simply is history and
| cultural association. Rote learning of that lore is an
| important part of the process and recipes are good for
| that.
|
| * Much of cooking is _technique_ --literal physical and
| low-level skills. Knowing how much salt to add to meat
| based on how the salt feels in your fingers and eyeballing
| the size of the cut. Knowing whether your onions are a
| little smaller than usual so you need 1 1/2 of them instead
| of just 1. Developing good knife technique so you can cut
| veggies efficiently and safely, which makes all cooking
| easier. How quickly to stir a sauce to prevent it from
| burning. How much to mix a batter to get it smooth but not
| tough. Recipes give you a safe space while you learn all of
| those important fundamentals. We tech nerds tend to assume
| all knowledge is discrete and encodable in words and
| concepts, but so much of cooking is _not_ that. The
| nonverbal intuitive techniques are a huge aspect.
|
| * Humans are incredible generalizers. Trust that as you
| "blindly" follow a few recipes, your brain is hard at work
| spotting patterns and commonalities. Without even realizing
| it, before long, you'll start seeing connections. Once that
| happens you'll begin tweaking recipes, and then making
| bigger changes, and before too long you won't need them at
| all.
|
| Don't feel that you need to reinvent the entire culinary
| arts from first principles. There's a reason that
| generations of cooks have used recipes and watching each
| other cook as the primary ways of passing down that
| knowledge.
| kevstev wrote:
| Agreed- I learned to cook at first by just doing some
| recipes, and also just making some basic dishes like
| pasta with sauce (from a jar) but then jazzing it up by
| adding additional freshly chopped garlic, or oregano,
| basil, whatever.
|
| If you start making enough dishes, you will start to see
| the similarities. You start realizing that making
| something like chicken marsala is just like cooking
| almost any other protein and making a "pan sauce"- First
| you brown the meat with some oil (causing Maillard
| reactions) in a pan, then take the protein out and brown
| some onions, and maybe soften some garlic, then throw
| some liquid in the pan, typically chicken stock and/or
| wine, to get all the brown bits stuck to the pan up and
| unlock that flavor (called deglazing), then throw in
| other things to make it flavorful, whether it be herbs,
| mushrooms, veggies, whatever, and then you let that
| reduce down to a much thicker consistency, and then
| thicken with a fat like butter or cream, or maybe even
| mustard or roux- butter and flour mixed together and
| cooked briefly (finishing).
|
| This is the basic process for making a pan sauce, and you
| can start experimenting from there.
|
| For more specific advice, after cooking a bit, you can
| read a book like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bitman or
| Ratio by Michael Ruhlman that goes over some of the
| fundamental ideas of cooking. One interesting thing I
| have learned as I have gotten more adventurous is that
| many ingredients are often thrown together because of
| climate, geography and history- Tomato and Basil are like
| peas and carrots because they thrive in the same climates
| and are naturally harvested at the same time. Thyme
| rosemary and tarragon are heavily used in French cooking
| because they grow like weeds there, particularly in the
| south. With our modern supermarkets, you can get a lot
| more creative. But that's for later and you have to
| prepare yourself for a lot of failure in that process :)
| rmetzler wrote:
| I think cooking is very similar to programming. You need to
| basically do it with your hands otherwise you won't "get"
| it. The ingredients are one thing. The chemistry behind it
| is another thing. Both probably easily to teach through a
| book. Knowing how to hold the knife and how to dice onions
| fast is something you can only learn by practicing. Even
| better someone showing it first (eg through a video), but
| it won't work without practice.
| weaksauce wrote:
| watch J. Kenji Lopez-Alt on youtube. does the full recipe
| from start to finish while telling you the whys. he started
| doing that kind of thing semi-frequently at the start of
| the pandemic and now has a pretty large catalog of videos.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqqJQ_cXSat0KIAVfIfKkVA
| gilbetron wrote:
| The best part is that he does very little editing, so you
| see him screw up and make modifications on the fly -
| nearly all other cooking shows/videos don't show that and
| so you feel like everyone can cook perfectly. Kenji will
| forget to add things, or burn things, or do things out of
| order, but he keeps rolling with it. To add to the
| videos, he has the best articles on seriouseats.com that
| explain how and why everything is done in the recipe.
| weaksauce wrote:
| indeed... that and not following the recipe by the book
| and substituting or paring down the recipes for a more
| accurate representation of what cooks do at home. also
| suggests what you could add or omit all the time.
| andai wrote:
| I learned a lot from Usborne Beginner's Cookbook, which is
| still in print: https://usborne.com/gb/beginner-s-
| cookbook-9780746085387#
| CPLX wrote:
| 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.
| jfim wrote:
| > The Professional Chef
|
| It's a great book. Most of the recipes do need to be
| scaled for home purposes (eg. soup recipes are one US
| gallon, mains are "makes 10 servings").
|
| One of the neat things about the book is that many of the
| techniques illustrated end with "evaluate the quality of
| the finished product," which serves as a reminder to
| check what was done and how it can be improved.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I learned to cook in a restaurant setting (a nice
| restaurant, not Applebees or something), but the skills
| used to train line cooks apply to home cooks as well. You
| just have to be more deliberate with practice since you
| don't get the opportunity to cook 200 dishes a night.
|
| Essentially, you learn one dish really well. To the point
| where I'd understand every action perfectly. Say it was a
| dish with chicken breast fried with some veggies, sauce,
| then tossed with pasta. They'd show you what the chicken
| should look like before you add the veggies, then how the
| veggies should be cooked before the sauce is added. Then
| the rest would be adding the sauce, pasta, and plating.
|
| Once you had one dish down, you'd then learn the dishes
| which are permutations on that one dish. So chicken with
| peppers and onions in a garlic butter sauce, chicken with
| onions and mushrooms in a red wine sauce, chicken with
| tomatoes and peppers in a spicy sauce, etc. You get the
| picture. So every night for a week or so, whenever those
| four dishes would be called, I'd take them, that's all I
| did.
|
| Most proteins pan fry about the same, the biggest
| difference will have to do with thickness and appropriate
| doneness determines how much heat you use. But for the most
| part, food is forgiving, especially when served with a
| sauce.
|
| Veggies are tough. Cooking a veggie correctly is mostly in
| the prep and cutting, with moisture being the other big
| consideration (wet veggies macerate initially when fried).
| The good news is, you probably eat like five veggies
| regularly, so focus on learning how to cook your Big Five
| veggies first and you'll be good. You can use frozen steam
| veggies to supplement your diet while you learn.
|
| Baking dishes is fairly straightforward. Generally small
| things require lots of heat and short cooking times, while
| large things like casseroles require lower heat for a long
| time.
|
| Grilling is easy-ish. Commercial gas grills are hot up
| front, cool in the back. So you'll generally first oil the
| grates with an oil rag, then put a protein on the grill for
| 4 minutes, after which you turn it 90 degrees for another 4
| min. This will produce grill marks you get in nice
| restaurants. Then flip it over and move it to the cool side
| of the grill until it temps out. Very large proteins (like
| pork tenderloins or thick cut chops) will be finished in a
| hot oven or covered with a cloche to get to temp without
| burning.
|
| Pastries, breads, cakes, etc are their own specialized
| domain. If line cooks were JS devs, pastry chefs would be
| doing C++. My advice is to buy Duncan Hines and focus on
| decorating.
|
| Learning to cook is not that different than learning most
| other skills. Start with simple things to develop
| fundamentals, then slowly add more fundamentals to your
| repertoire.
|
| It is 100% okay to follow recipes. In fact, i highly
| recommend it because most recipes will use fundamentals.
| America's Test Kitchen is great. As is Serious Eats (the
| website), especially for foreign/fusion cuisine. I do a lot
| of cooking out of the Better Homes and Gardening cookbook
| as well, especially backed goods. If you're an American
| mid-westerner whose mom/grandma was a great cook, there's a
| good chance she was making dishes from that cookbook.
|
| Edit: oh yeah, buy a probe thermometer! Seriously, it's the
| best cooking investment you'll make. 90% of the compliments
| I get on my cooking are because I'm cooking meat to the
| appropriate temperature.
| ncrmro wrote:
| Alton browns good eats gives you some light hearted science
| and basic methodology for cooking things.
|
| Things like don't put things into cold oil/pan, don't over
| mix dough, here is basics for gravy etc
| appleiigs wrote:
| I disagree with the J. Kenji Lopez-Alt suggestions. He is
| too extreme/OCD for beginners.
|
| A much more accessible source is Harold McGee who wrote "On
| Food and Cooking - The Science and Lore of the Kitchen".
| McGee reviews the science but also some history. He also
| reviews some of the cooking tips your mom gave you and why
| they work or don't work.
| antognini wrote:
| McGee's On Food and Cooking is a wonderful book, but I'm
| not sure I'd call it accessible. :)
|
| For beginners I'd instead recommend his book Keys to Good
| Cooking. It takes all the information in On Food and
| Cooking and distills it down to the practical lessons a
| cook will need to improve their cooking.
| astrange wrote:
| > I disagree with the J. Kenji Lopez-Alt suggestions. He
| is too extreme/OCD for beginners.
|
| He's good for sous vide. You don't need much to do it at
| home (just an instant pot) and he's basically just
| telling you how to program it and leave it sitting for
| two hours. Not hard.
|
| Most other cooking is imprecise and you have to learn to
| read the spirit and not the text of the recipe, or
| something. (Not baking though. You have to actually get
| that right.)
| DicIfTEx wrote:
| I was in the exact same position, and I can't recommend
| _Ruhlman 's Twenty_ enough. It goes through 20
| techniques/ingredients, from 'Water' and 'Onions' to
| 'Roast' and 'Boil', giving you all the information you
| might possibly need, and then provides a handful of recipes
| to explore all the avenues of each. The only downside is
| that a lot of the recipes include meat and the book never
| really touches on how to make sensible substitutes, which
| depending on your dietary preferences might be more or less
| of an oversight, but I didn't find it too difficult to sub
| things out.
|
| I've not read _Salt, Acid, Fire, Heat_ so I can 't comment,
| but I assume it takes a similar approach.
| notJim wrote:
| Seconding Ruhlman's Twenty, it's the book that really
| taught me how to _cook_. By focusing on techniques, it
| allows you to understand that when a recipe says "saute
| onions on medium-high heat", it really means to sweat
| them, and what that looks like. So rather than
| mechanically doing what the recipe says, you understand
| how the ingredients respond to different treatments, and
| how to get the results you want based on your equipment.
| And when watching a cooking show, you can see what the
| ingredients are doing and understand why, so that you can
| fill in the inevitable gaps.
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| Thirding Ruhlman's twenty, mentioned here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8362053
| nlclimber wrote:
| I haven't read _Salt, Acid, Fire, Heat_ but I doubt it
| can match _Salt, Coal, Fire, Heat_ , let alone _Smoke,
| Coal, Fire, Heat_.
| Leparamour wrote:
| ...or _Guns, Germs and Steel_.
| gms7777 wrote:
| "How to cook everything" by Mark Bittman was a book I found
| very useful. It has a whole bunch of recipes but it also
| does a great job of explaining the logic and overall
| structure behind each recipe. So you learn not just how to
| make a specific soup, but what the basic concepts behind
| making a soup are, as well as tons of alternatives for each
| recipe. It helped me quickly move from following recipes to
| being able to look at what I have in my kitchen and whip
| something up.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm just a hobbyist but I routinely get compliments. This
| is what I did/do:
|
| 1. Cook what you love
|
| 2. Continuously sample stuff before/after adding spices so
| you get a feel for what each spice does
|
| 3. Follow the recipe closely the first time. Make the same
| thing again several times and make small tweaks that you
| think will be better
|
| After a while I gained a really good intuition for what
| worked and what didn't, how things would be affected by
| stuff, etc. 3.
| robocat wrote:
| A friend of mine (who couldn't cook) learnt by buying the
| delivered raw food packages that have say four evenings
| dishes with recipes.
|
| The recipes are designed and written so that they are hard
| to screw up.
|
| It was a least effort path that worked for him: no videos
| or books (so a different option than the majority of
| answers so far!). Mostly I believe it is just the desire to
| cook - even if just making one _favourite_ dish. Good luck!
| ghaff wrote:
| I think they're interesting if (in most cases) you're
| part of a couple, you're fine with spending a fair bit of
| time multiple times a week to prepare, and you don't have
| much of a pantry at ho,e.
|
| Most of those don't really describe me, especially pre-
| pandemic, and the one time I tried Blue Apron it just
| didn't work for me. About half of three recipes were OK.
| Another one was incredibly fussy for a burger.
|
| I know there are a million services out there and some
| probably better align with my preferences though they're
| all pricy.
| Erwin wrote:
| In addition to Twenty and Food Lab already recommended,
| I'll mention Niki Segnit's books: Lateral Cooking and the
| Flavor Thesaurus. Lateral connects "adjacent" dishes -- you
| know of dish X, but Y is almost the same but from another
| food culture but everyone agrees on these basic things with
| just these slight pivots.
|
| The Flavor Thesaurus does the same for ingredients -- you
| want to do something with figs, what dishes have figs in
| them, what complements them? The books cover the Western
| world, and Niki is the most witty writer among the dozens
| of culinary books I have.
|
| Outside of that I like the "Perfect" columns by Felicity
| Cloak in the Guardian. Felicity takes a well-known dish and
| analyses all the differences in recipes, e.g. 6 cookbook
| authors have 6 different takes on coq au vin, what works
| best and how do they end up differently to each other? Like
| on Serious Eats, there's always well-spirited discussion.
| roganmurley wrote:
| I would recommend "Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the
| Elements of Good Cooking". It has a great focus on the
| fundamentals rather than specific recipes.
| covercash wrote:
| There's also a 4 part Netflix series of the same name
| featuring the author, each show tackling one of the four
| elements in the title. It's not a replacement for the
| book but it's a good visual companion.
| gloe49 wrote:
| Isn't there some chinese 4 character saying about water cutting
| stone?
| rkrishnaan wrote:
| Hey munificent, big fan of your work. Eagerly waiting for the
| paperback version.
| munificent wrote:
| ME TOO. It's getting close but, wow, what a pile of work it's
| been.
| curiousgal wrote:
| 0.99^365 = 0.02551796445
|
| 1.01^365 = 37.7834343328
| rjh29 wrote:
| Put another way, people overestimate how much they can do in
| one day, but underestimate how much they can do in a year.
| tra3 wrote:
| "The days are long but the years are short".
|
| Having the wisdom and patience to see something through to
| the completion is difficult.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Wow, never heard that one, but I love it.
| foobarian wrote:
| Reminds me of our attempts to get various contractors to come and
| do tasks. Sometimes they keep promising to come and don't show up
| repeatedly. Other times they show up, write down our
| requirements, plan the work, and then vanish. My builder friends
| who are actual general contractors also complain of this about
| their subs. Makes me think if I wasn't already doing well in
| software I would kill it in the trades just by showing up when I
| say I will!
| kureikain wrote:
| I learned this with my email forwarding app (https://hanami.run)
| as well. I have tried to bootstrap a few ideas, and just like the
| ops, I got married, I got kid, family problem, change jobs.
|
| Then COVID happens and I promise myself to wake up at 3-4AM
| everyday to write code and ship https://hanami.run during that
| period.
|
| I don't even worry about competitors, I just want to build a
| platform that I enjoyed to use and iterate every single day. Many
| small features were take for granted.
|
| Such as we auto refresh DNS constantly so users with like 100
| domains don't have to check DNS one by one to activate domain. I
| then supported cloudflare auto config dns to make thing even
| easiser. And auto refresh DNS means we're easily to got block by
| CloudFlare DNS servers, but I put the cost on me to make our
| user's life easiser.
|
| Another effects of this showing up everyday is you are allowed an
| unlimited time budget and can try out cool thing.
|
| Such as I recently expriment with OpenResty autossl to make our
| URL redirection work with HTTPS. Other day I experiment with
| leaky bucket rate limiting.
|
| With a time budget, I'm probably won't work on that, but sometime
| I feel down, and knowing I have tomorrow I can use today's time
| on something that make me happy.
| raunak wrote:
| I'd recommend getting someone to review your site a bit -
| obviously not sure if English-speaking countries are your
| target market, but some small mistakes here and there catch my
| eye (great supports are our norm over great support, never
| "lost" your emails over lose). Sounds very cool :)
| awillen wrote:
| Once I was taking a weekend trip down to San Diego with my now
| wife, and we decided to look at some open houses. It started
| raining - not super hard, but a fair bit. Most of the open houses
| we showed up to ended up not happening as a result.
|
| One of them did, though, and I spoke to the agent showing the
| house for a while about San Diego real estate. When I moved down
| to San Diego, he helped me buy a home and find a space to lease
| for my new business. I'm almost certainly going to have him help
| me find some real estate investments in the future as well.
|
| Unlike everybody else, he showed up that day, and it's made him
| tens of thousands of dollars with more to come.
| Clubber wrote:
| Joel Spolsky said something similar. Paraphrasing: You find
| motivation by just committing a little bit every day: 10 minutes,
| 30 minutes. Once you get into it, you'll most likely do more.
| papito wrote:
| You are referring to Fire and Motion.
|
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
| ModernMech wrote:
| I heard this advice in relation to doing chores-- don't think
| about the pile of dishes you need to do, then you'll never do
| the dishes. Just motivate yourself to do a single dish. Once
| you are in the context of doing dishes, the second dish comes
| much easier, then the third, and before you know it the dishes
| are done.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I take some dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the
| table. Then I feel compelled to take out the rest and then
| put them all away, so it's easy.
| digaozao wrote:
| This works for me with workout. I commit to workout 10min
| everyday. Sometimes I and up doing more like 40m, sometimes
| only 10m, and it's ok. And of course, I reduced the start
| energy for it. If it's only 10m, probably I will do it at home
| with some equipment.
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Reminds me of these equations:
|
| 1.01 ^ 365 = 37.78
|
| 0.99 ^ 365 = 0.03
| nly wrote:
| Yup, and the difference between putting your 401K in a fund
| charging 1% instead of 0.25% a year, over 30 years, is having
| about 20% less in retirement.
| jdhawk wrote:
| If the funds have equal performance*
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This is my life in unemployment.
|
| I really _do_ start doing all those things I didn 't have time
| for.
|
| But each day I get 1% lazier...
|
| Lesson: Never take more than 6 months off.
| glouwbug wrote:
| I voluntarily quit my job once and had the 8 most productive
| months of my life working on side projects. But, I can see
| being laid off as doing the opposite. Depression can be a
| real bitch
| [deleted]
| allenu wrote:
| This is great advice and one that I'm using in my own side
| project.
|
| I have a macOS/iOS app out in the App Store and spent several
| months of my spare time working on it. Once it was released, I've
| pulled back a bit on how much time I spend on it, but I do manage
| to spend a few hours here and there during the week to add more
| features to it and to fix up bugs. I don't have specific goals,
| like "must release new feature X by 7/20". I just tend to ship a
| new version every 2-4 weeks depending on how I'm feeling and how
| much work I've actually done.
|
| I've been amazed at the steady progress of improvements I've made
| on it. This pace feels a lot better than when I was working hard
| just to ship the darn thing. I'm not burnt out on the project,
| and the lack of pressure gives me time and space to reflect on
| what to do next and how best to achieve it.
| mattjaynes wrote:
| If you haven't read or listened to this book yet, I highly
| recommend it: Daily Rituals: How Artists Work[1]
|
| It's a collection of daily routines of many famous and prolific
| artists. The surprising thing about so many of the artists is
| that they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of
| the day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently
| show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing things
| over time.
|
| This reminds me of another great book about beating
| procrastination: The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for
| Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play[2]
|
| In that book, the author talks about his extensive work helping
| graduate students complete their dissertations. I can't cover all
| the great points here, but when working with these students he
| has them create an "unschedule" where they have to schedule
| guilt-free play activities as the top priority. Then he actually
| limits the amount of work they are allowed to do on their
| dissertation to only a couple of hours per day. The effect is
| quite amazing at turning students around from dreading and
| avoiding their dissertation to really trying to maximize the
| limited time they have to work on it. And having guilt-free play
| lets them really disconnect from the work and have true recovery
| so that they have the motivation and energy to hit the project
| again and again every day. Seems counter-intuitive at first, but
| as I've applied this to different projects, it's amazing how much
| more I'm able to accomplish.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15799151-daily-rituals
|
| [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95708.The_Now_Habit
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Thank you so much for these recommendations.
|
| I'm better now, but these procrastination problems have plagued
| me my whole life. To the point that I was suicidal while
| writing my Thesis, I'd spend 10-12 hours in the library every
| day and accomplish almost nothing except self torture.
|
| I can't imagine how helpful this "un-scheduling" would have
| been to me at that time.
| chegra wrote:
| I did a summary of that book:
|
| https://www.chestergrant.com/highlights-from-daily-rituals-b...
| mtberatwork wrote:
| > The surprising thing about so many of the artists is that
| they only work 2 or 3 hours per day, then spend the rest of the
| day walking around, socializing, etc. But they consistently
| show up and put in the work and it adds up to some amazing
| things over time.
|
| Artists don't have stand ups, team meetings, planning sessions,
| one-on-ones, commutes and whatever other office distractions to
| deal with though. I suppose figuring out how to survive as an
| artist is distraction enough.
| hinkley wrote:
| Someone blew my mind describing why some artists are not
| appreciated until they are dead.
|
| The theory as it went is that most artists aren't "ahead of
| their time", it's that they see Now in a way that nobody else
| will understand for years. Eventually, with the aid of the
| lens of nostalgia we see that they really "get us", as we now
| understand ourselves.
|
| Being out in the world is how they "get" us. It's material,
| not faffing about.
| knuthsat wrote:
| Of course, but then you have living examples like Bob
| Dylan. Some people have incredible pattern matching
| abilities and most artists I've met consume as much human
| culture as possible and great ones manage to conjure up
| something of their own.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It is also much safer to praise a dead artist. Famous alive
| writer might suddenly turn out to be big fan of some
| genocidal world leader, embarrassing everyone who loves his
| earlier work.
|
| Dead people are mostly safe from this, though not
| completely - some dirty laundry might surface years after
| death, forever tarnishing the image, but such occurrences
| are rather rare.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Any artistic people
| I've worked/associated with have a certain "clarity" about
| the world around them, that I think most people don't.
| Artists delve into culture and social things that are not
| easily recognized by people who aren't paying particular
| attention, I guess you could say. Not in all cases, and I
| think it depends on the type of creativity, but yeah...
| That's my simplistic way of describing it, anyway.
|
| IMO, artistic people often see the "true nature" of things
| and ingest/interpret them in a way that is pretty
| judgement-free and quite "open". It allows them to be
| inspired and influenced by those things, and grow their
| understanding of the world around them, and thus interact
| with it and contribute back to it in an organic way. Again,
| all my subjective opinion from many years of being creative
| myself and collaborating with creative people. :)
| jmilloy wrote:
| Do you know this to be true? Most artists that I know, which
| is most people I know, struggle with as many work-related
| distractions as I do. My sanctioned office distractions at
| least "count" to my employer (I get paid for that time).
| mritchie712 wrote:
| yeah, there someone still needs to sell the art. I'd
| imagine it's the artist until you're a massive success.
| nemo44x wrote:
| You have to do it every day - creativity comes in bursts and
| you don't know when it's going to show up so you need to be the
| one showing up every day to work on it.
|
| Hemingway would write (sober) every morning and then be drunk
| by lunch and for the rest of the day and early evening. But he
| worked every day for a few hours. People like to focus on his
| appetite for drinking but he got his work done first.
| jxm262 wrote:
| > creativity comes in bursts and you don't know when it's
| going to show up so you need to be the one showing up every
| day to work on it.
|
| This comment right here adds alot of clarity for me. When
| worded this way, it makes total sense why this is so
| effective.
| andai wrote:
| "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it
| strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp." -- W. Somerset
| Maugham
| slavik81 wrote:
| Frank Herbert was quoted in "Shoptalk: Learning to Write
| with Writers" saying something similar:
|
| "A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given
| moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing
| the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're
| just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration,
| or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down
| and working. I have never had the problem of a writing
| block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on
| some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd
| much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils,
| or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and
| reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the
| difference between what came easily and when I had to sit
| down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll
| write.' There's no difference on paper between the two."
| rchaud wrote:
| The Now Habit was a book I liked. Good descriptions of
| experiments and their insights.
|
| However, the Daily Rituals book I didn't find as compelling.
| The information sources are not first-hand, because most of
| these artists are long dead. Their routines as laid out in the
| book is at best only partially accurate. It's far more likely
| that these profiles are mostly apocryphal.
| reggieband wrote:
| One of the more interesting sayings I have come across lately is:
| People overestimate how much they can get done in the short term
| but they underestimate how much they can get done in the long
| term.
|
| I see this all the time with friends who pick up the guitar as a
| hobby. Often someone practices intensely for one week or one
| month and then gets frustrated at their progress. That
| frustration often causes people to give up. Now I see it as a
| mismatch between short-term estimation/expectations. The
| frustration is caused by overestimating how much progress they
| think they should make in the short-term. The quitting is caused
| by underestimating the progress they could make in the long term.
| tsumnia wrote:
| This is actually one of the reasons I like academia so much.
| You are effectively paying for a scheduled practice session
| (ignoring discussions on tuition or the other negatives of
| college for the moment). Six months isn't enough to master any
| topic, but it is a organized timeframe in which you focus on X
| topic for an extended amount of time.
| davio wrote:
| 2 crappy pages a day is the Tim Ferris standard
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