I have a high powered blender. I try to get the fiber and the probiotics at the same time. Fruits and vegetables have probiotics inside the flesh, not just on the skin. The science is less clear on supplements. [1]
I'll second this. Zen and stoicism saved my sanity towards the end of the 2010s and through the pandemic.
For me it's not so much about the infinite list, because I've always had many thousands of tabs open and surf so much that there's no way I could ever bookmark everything (since the mid-90s).
It's actually about the opportunity cost of distraction and finally work itself. Beyond a certain level of experience and mastery (perhaps 10 years), no job has enough variety to satisfy the ADHD mind. We all become Mike Ehrmantraut from Breaking Bad: manning a parking booth that could be fully automated while we secretly plot ways to escape and "get real work done". Which is the central theme of movies like The Matrix.
The only thing that finally brought me out of burnout back to living was to realize that life is both a pointless game and the most sacred thing there is. Meaning that once I turned off my inner monologue completely and finally just observed, I found gratitude for all of creation through non-attachment.
Applied to HN specifically, it might help to step back from the rational and look at it holistically. You and I might be missing out, but the whole world is learning and growing together. We're part of a higher consciousness now, a virtual mind overlaid on us that will transcend us before 20 years is out and we enter the New Age. These are the memoirs of Gaia (insert deity of choice here).
Another way to getting what you want of course, is to think about what you really want and change that to something you can achieve almost immediately. The article alludes to this:
> Do you want to be self-employed? Or do you just need some time off from your normally-tolerable day job? Do you truly want washboard abs, or just to see an energetic, healthy person in the mirror for once?
And:
> There can also be things you think you want (a law degree; a Walden-like shack in the woods) that you mistake for what you really want (your father’s approval; a less obnoxious boss), which may be vastly easier, or vastly more difficult, to acquire.
You know what most people want? Happiness. Acceptance. To not have to deal with people who don't love or respect them, and to spend time with people who do.
Here at HN, the personality type that is most dominant is the maximiser - trying to increase productivity, income, live life a little more fuller or longer. Fine.
And yet, regularly, a thread emerges asking what it's like to ditch the progress so far and change direction. "How hard is it go give up being a Senior Java engineer and become a farmer?", is a question that will garner answers, attention and upvotes.
It's possible you've chosen a career or lifestyle or group of friends that aren't very you.
My take is don't choose goals - don't try and decide on the destination of what you want. Instead, choose processes, choose a way of living that makes you happy, and make small changes right now.
Another way of thinking about this is: don't choose outputs, choose inputs.
Choose your processes, your inputs, what happens when you wake up each day, the values you stay true to. Don't try and choose outputs and work backwards from them. Trust me, I've tried both, and the latter is miserable - you don't even get to be happy for long when you achieve a goal. The article touches on that, but I can't stress this enough:
When you achieve something that has taken you a long time to achieve, the pleasure of doing so lasts a short while. What you'll focus on when you look back is how you got there, so choose that carefully.
I'd also advise carefully considering how to measure progress. You might think you want to be rich (a goal), and think you need the lifestyle to get rich (the process), but you might actually just want financial independence - living a contented life spending less than you bring in - and they are not the same thing. You can have the latter without the former (especially as a tech worker), with a very different process to the one you'd choose to "get rich".
You might think you want to weigh X pounds or kgs, but you might actually want the things that you think are exclusive to that but maybe are not: better fitting clothes, being more physically attractive, better health. There things you can do today - different ways of being - that contribute immediately. Cut down on smoking, recreational drugs (including alcohol) and spending money on better clothes rather than takeaways means you'll be better tomorrow than you were today with just a change of direction on where you put your time, money and effort.
You might think you want to be on the front cover of Wired and touted as the next hot thing, but perhaps - like many of the people who have had that experience - what you actually needed was more people around you who like you just as you are right now.
That doesn't mean you should stop looking for personal growth and the big goals. Sure, get rich, get sexy, be likeable and get respected, do that work. I'm just saying the journey counts at least as much as the destination, and the journey can start the moment you get to the end of this sentence.
I basically found myself running out of things to try. My poor sleep quality was especially affecting me and I was desperate to get the reflux under control. And so I spent a lot of time thinking deeply about what could be causing my reflux.
It's difficult to explain why I thought to try this combination (fasting + cat vomitting exercise). It was sort of like I suddenly understood where the weakness was in my esophagus, and that this specific motion/exercise, in combination with giving my esophagus a break for 10 hours/day would relieve the reflux. I fully committed, and in not very long (3-4 weeks if I remember right), my reflux was mostly gone. Only had a few memorable reflux instances in the months that followed and now its been years since I've had any issues at all.
I still practice intermittent fasting 5 days a week but I don't do the cat vomit exercise. Part of me feels strongly that if I hadn't done both those things at the same time, I wouldn't have fixed my reflux, but obviously I have no evidence to prove that.
I also feel its important to mention that reflux has different causes. I felt like what I was experiencing, combined with all the reading I did about reflux, allowed me to settle on this particular regimen.
I am definitely not trying to suggest that this is some secret magical cure that big pharma doesn't want you to know about.
A software developer and football (soccer) fan who lives in an antipodean time zone, I enjoy watching games on demand the morning after they occur. Apart from watching the games of the team I support, I like to watch one or two of the most entertaining games in any given week, but score spoilers absolutely ruin the experience for me.
So, I created https://laterball.com: a web app the algorithmically determines the best games of the past 7 days without score spoilers, to let me (and you) know which games are worth spending time watching. There was also an associated twitter bot at https://twitter.com/laterball which occasionally tweets when there's been a high-quality game until the recent Twitter API changes.
Technical stuff: the back end is a Ktor server hosted on a linode instance which pulls statistics data from an API to determine the ratings. Factors used to determine ratings include goals (number, timing, swings in score, comebacks), xG, wins or draws against the odds, cards, and a few others.
Regarding rem <-> px conversions, I follow this intuition: _multiply by 4 gives you px value, dividing by 4 gives you rem value._
`h-8` utility is height of 8 * 4 = 32px or 8 / 4 = 2 rem.
Since design systems are supposed to be consistent, 4px is typically considered 1 unit of distance.
However, there are times when I might encounter values in Figma (or get inputs from designer) that won't allow me to use this easily.
Say, designer wants a max-width of 252px on an element. I usually use Alfred app on my work MBP to divide it quickly by 16 (since 1 rem is 16px under normal font-size settings), but you can use any calculator, even the one in Google search or DDG search.
It turns out to be a fraction, and in this case, it's 15.75 rem.
I use utility like `max-w-[16rem]`, closest consistent dimension that's a multiple of 1rem, and ship a pull request preview to the designer, asking for design feedback.
Chances are, designer agrees to stick to 16rem, and we ship it as is. If this width of 16rem, or closer values within the 250px vicinity, are used in other places in the design system components or our app; I'd typically add that to the Tailwind config as well.
Most of the time question of rem <-> px conversion comes into picture because we look at design dimensions in Figma / Sketch / Indesign etc. tools, and try to implement the same in our UI code.
But this would only slow down a developer, switching back-and-forth between design and implementation.
What I find more productive while prototyping a UI (or a smaller component), is to just "eye it", instead of getting actual pixel-values right at the first go.
From just eye-ing it, I can make a guess if it should be h-3 or h-4 (you can also guess the right value using a binary search style heuristic), and if my implementation looks bigger (or smaller) than the design, I'd adjust accordingly.
Only after I've implemented a basic prototype of the UI component, I'd cross-check with the design tool, and edit some utilities if necessary to get as close to the design as possible.
Failed my family in midlife, lost them all, lost everything. Here are my thoughts.
Find gratitude. Find humility. Give up ego. Shut down that voice that says 'but I deserve....'. You live better than almost all of humanity ever has. The King of France had a guy with a bucket follow him around and he would crap into it in public. You live better than the King of France. Find a way to make that enough, more than enough, to be something to be grateful for. Appreciate the gift that is your life every day. Try to not have resentment.
Impact the world through raising your child a little better than your parents did, and try to instill them raising their children a little better than you. That has true meaning, not knowledge in your head that will be lost when you are dust.
Go to any local public flower gardens and enjoy the beauty. It is as mind blowing a gift from the Universe as the principles underlying physics. And you can share the beauty of nature with your family and young child with much less effort.
Accept that NOTHING will be enough. Not understanding deep theories, not a Porsche Speedster. Not the vacations with family. Not academic praise, or 1% level riches. Turn your focus from those things you are trying to fill a hole with, and figure out why the hole is there and it's cause. You wouldn't just start putting dirt in a sync hole without understanding the cause.
Find a place where hopefully you are loved, but at the very least find a place within you to understand that you, as a person, are very much worthy of being loved.
As someone who failed the midlife crisis thing, I always go back to moments with family for strength, never to moments of 'ah ha' about some great programming algorithm or when I was in class and learned of some great discovery. General Relativity exists whether you study it or not, but those moments between Markus and those in his family that CHOSE HIM as their family, and CHOOSE to keep him family every day, those are very, very finite, and those others are choosing to GIVE their finite moments to be with YOU.
If you can not give those around you what they need, don't be a coward and wait until you fail them. Leave them now, stop stealing their finite time and energy. If that is the case, choose to be a failure, but not a failure and a thief :(
If you chose not to leave, then understand YOU CHOOSE this situation. No resentments in your head, this is your choice. You can choose to leave, but not to resent. Physical bodies change. Children come before our wants. Choose it, or leave. Don't pretend, don't steal the days of other's lives, and lie through omission.
You are halfway done with the period of time in which you can give and receive hugs. Some stupid Reddit that made me cry pointed out, at some point, you will pick up your child for the last time, then set them down and not in the moment realize that you will never pick them up again :( Make every time you pick your child up count. It is a special, finite thing, along with every other moment you have as the consciousness known as markus_zhang on HN.
I do my daily journaling in a markdown file anyway (Today's Daily Note is `2022-08-22.md`).
I have a simple script to create today's Daily Note with `$ jrnl` and open it in my editor of choice (Which happens to be vim).
The Daily Note is created by copying a template file.
The first header of that template is a simple markdown table with a column for each hour and 6 rows (each row for 10 minutes).
The table legend indicates a list of symbols (~/>/@/...) for each type of activity.
As I organize my day by work-units of 1H (I work the Pomodoro way...), at the beginning of each 1H working session I just fill in the column of the previous hour with symbols representing how I spent it.
Hint: It should be filled with '>' symbols because that symbol represents the ONE most important task I need to achieve that day.
The second header of the template is a very short list of questions I force myself to answer every morning to reflect on my previous day (Which I call my 'Warming Routine'):
- What do I want to achieve today?
- Was I able to achieve my goal yesterday?
- What happened yesterday? - What am I grateful for?
Subsequent headers are the entries of my journal...
This minimalist tooling suits me perfectly because I tend to be very lazy so a lot of what I do isn't always properly logged. But entering 6 characters each hour (Remember the symbols for types of activity) is achievable even for a lazy dude like me :)
Another reason it suits me so perfectly is that I tend to live in my terminal anyway so it presents very low friction.
On top of that it's very easy to automate certain tasks: For instance, I tend to use a very light version of Zettelkasten to organize my thought/knowledge.
So I have vim scripts to search my Knowledge base and to follow links to notes.
So everywhere in my Zettelkasten notes, you'll find links to Daily notes in the form of `[[yyyy-mm-dd]]` which I open with a hotkey.
My favorite quantitative metrics for engineering teams:
- Avg time from code review requested to code review picked up
- Avg time to complete code review
- Avg time from eng done to first customer using it
- Avg time from eng done to full production release
- Fraction of tasks started that never reach a customer
These are loosely based on the Japanese concept of Muda (waste), as personified in the physical logistics world via the acronym TIM WOOD (or TIM WOODS)[0] and are similar but not identical to the DORA metrics.
The time to complete a code review is there (for example) not to focus on the amount of time actually spent performing the code review but to focus on all the waiting around the actual code review, which is typically much much longer than the time spent doing the review itself. It's not uncommon to see organizations where an engineer will submit code for review and then have to wait a day or more for someone to pick up their request and then another day or more for that other person to get around to reviewing it. If there are comments on the commit that need to be responded to, you can see additional delays. These "minor inefficiencies" can have huge impacts on the poor dev who is trying to get their code merged, and cumulatively they result in significant increases in feature latency, the total calendar time required to ship a feature.
I feel you Man! There are no quick answers but there certainly is a "Discipline" which if adopted can effect change.
First off, DON'T quit your job without having another already lined up. "A Bird in Hand is worth two in the Bush" and all that.
The "Discipline" comes from the "Yoga Sutras of Patanjali" which you can freely adapt to your life, like so;
- Yamas - Regulate your interaction with the external environment. Change what you can and ignore (completely from your mind) what you can't. Make a list of both.
- Niyamas - Setup personal habits to automate your daily needs. These are things like maintaining fixed work hours, eating at proper time etc. Make a list to follow.
- Asanas - Daily Physical exercise (whatever suits you).
- Pranayama - Daily Breathing exercise (learn to slow down your breathing and breath more deeply)
- Pratyahara - Practice withdrawing your mind from unnecessary things.
- Dharana - Practice repeatedly focusing on one thing.
- Dhyana - As a consequence of the above, Concentration on the object of study arises and the mind becomes steady.
Note that the above listed activities must proceed in parallel and not sequential.
You have to Act and Do and not merely Read and Think. But the latter provides the fuel for the former. So in that spirit read and adapt what you need from Yoga and Western Psychology: A Comparison by Geraldine Coster - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.189086
I've been saving interesting threads and comments in my favorites (they are in my profile). Many old-timers are surprised that Hacker News has a favorite feature. Comments are tricky: to favorite a comment you need to first show its details by clicking on the timestamp.
Now, for the links. A lot of freelancing and consulting advice threads have a good discussion and stories from the trenches:
The night before I soak:
* chia seeds (1 tsp)
* psyllium husks (1 tsp)
* quick oats (1 tsp)
* almonds 17g
In the morning I add in:
* a frozen banana
* kefir / fermented yogurt drink (1/2 cup)
* frozen berries
* protein powder
* kale / spinach / broccoli
* cinnamon (a lot)
* creatine
* collagen
* water
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/08/probitoic...