
Stop looking at HN and go work that thing you promised yourself you'd work on - sharemywin
Please ignore if your not me..unless you&#x27;ll find it useful too.
======
gabalese
For me, reading HN is like reading the paper or reading books about subjects
that matter to me: it's not time strictly spent on the job I have to do, but
it's part of a healthy information diet. Crunching code without taking a look
at what's currently happening and being discussed in your professional
community is hardly a recipe for self improvement. (It's a thin red line
between healthy consumption and abuse, I know, but our job often _requires_
that we keep an eye on what's going on outside our compiler.)

~~~
mariusandra
Hacker News is the place where I come to learn about new technologies and to
see where the industry itself is moving. There is something here for everyone,
from CEOs to C++ programmers. Over the years, it has been a very valuable
source of news.

If you ignore the first 9 links about any new JS framework, it shouldn't take
more than than 10min/day just to keep up with what is happening.

Or is this just not true in your experience?

How long do you spend on HN on average per day?

~~~
tedmiston
I can spend a whole Sunday afternoon here if I really dig into 10+ articles on
the front page, read the top comments, and contribute to the discussion.

On an average workday though, I look at 3-5 posts and skim the articles. I
often find more value in HN's discussion than the article itself.

------
guelo
I'm just here because my compile times are slow. 3 hours later… after 12
tweets, reading 6 articles, filing a GitHub issue, and watching a show on
Netflix… what was I building?

~~~
im2w1l
Anyone have any tips for a productive way to deal with long compile times?

~~~
nazri1
ccache[1] works for me.

[http://ccache.samba.org](http://ccache.samba.org)

~~~
simoncion
Like all things, it's not a panacea:
[https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/07/debunking-ccache-myths-
red...](https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2010/07/debunking-ccache-myths-redux)

Of course, if you're rebuilding the same code over and over it can be a net
win, but -in the comments- it is mentioned that the obvious things -that one
might end up doing somewhat frequently in C/C++ development- invalidate the
cache.

------
SeanDav
But if I stop looking at HN, I won't get wonderful tips like: "Stop looking at
HN..."

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kaolinite
I've drastically cut my HN time in the past few months by following this one
weird trick:

Add "news.ycombinator.com##td.subtext" following to your Adblock/uBlock custom
filters.

You still get to read the articles and keep up with tech news, but you don't
end up in comment threads (unless it's an Ask HN/etc, hence why I'm commenting
now). Occasionally I load up HN in a different browser if I want to take a
break and read some comments but my idle browsing has been drastically
reduced.

There's lots of great content in the comments, but it's also a fantastic way
to waste time.

~~~
mattgibson
> There's lots of great content in the comments, but it's also a fantastic way
> to waste time.

But I learn more from the comments than from the articles!

~~~
hanniabu
I agree with this. I find it not only interesting, but also informative to
hear other people's take on articles, both for their opinion and added
knowledge of something that may not be in the article. Sometimes the
discussions veer a little bit which adds more background/relevant/related
information. At least for me, the more I know about a subject, the more angles
I'm aware of, and the more context I have, allows me to not only absorb it
better, but it also allows me to develop or realize the theory behind the
matter. From there, I can better apply what I'm reading/learning to other
situations.

------
vonnik
Go to your profile. Set your "noprocrast" to yes. Set you maxvisit to 15. Set
your minaway to 60. I'll be back in an aware to see if anyone replies. ;)

~~~
flycaliguy
Get a load of this guy, typo out in the open and helpless to save his proof
reading reputation.

~~~
vonnik
ouch! it's true.

------
miguelrochefort
12 years ago, I have decided that I would forever change the way people
communicate.

Today, nothing has been done. I'm struggling to get people to relate to this
need for a better communication system and language. I am convinced that this
is very important, but I fail to get the positive feedback I've always
expected.

Should I ignore people and blindly trust my guts? Taking on such a massive
task is very difficult for a single person.

~~~
olalonde
I went through your comments history and I'm not sure I quite grasp what your
idea is or what problem it solves. If I understand correctly, you have this
idea for a new type of human-computer interaction based on a visual
programming/interaction language? I suggest you start by writing down your
thoughts in a blog/wiki for others to better understand it. I'd also start
working on an MVP _now_ because in another 12 years, advances in NLP/AI might
render your language obsolete :)

~~~
tedmiston
I've been practicing something like this myself.

When I have an idea that seems like something people want, I force myself to
describe it in a 250-500 word blog post. Most of them I never ship, but it's
really about the exercise of conveying your ideas in a way other people can
digest quickly and easily.

~~~
miguelrochefort
I have described my vision on IRC, Reddit and HN multiple times.

People hate it because they can't understand it.

------
justifier
i'll give you a recent anecdote

i was working on a project where i needed to convert linear motion into
rotational motion

i was working through some schemes and though functional by design they were
failing in the real world scenarios i was building for

frustrated i sat down for a break and doped up on some hn for a bit

this post came up:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714048](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10714048)

i clicked through and was surprised by how much i enjoyed the lists found
within,

so i clicked on the portrait in the corner to learn more about the person
putting the lists together

this led me to this page:

[http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/](http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/)

an almost goofy early web days personal page of this nobel prize winning
physicist

while scrolling though the personal page, clicking on random things and
skimming through them, i came across an animation in the 'unpublished works'
section

i looked at it for a second and thought.. is that a rotational motion being
converted into a linear motion?

i searched for 'Peaucellier–Lipkin linkage' and found this video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D30iFxhJTQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D30iFxhJTQA)

and there it was, linear to rotational motion and much more robust than the
other efforts i was attempting

i built it and it worked

i've since designed out the need for the conversion but it was an important
step along the way in the build

i'd err away from the charge to 'get to work' and suggest one instead: 'enjoy
yourself'

------
jacques_chester
It occurs to me that the folk most likely to see this advice are those least
likely to follow it.

~~~
sharemywin
you caught me

------
toyg
New Year Resolution: turn noprocrast on, with maxvisit 5 and minaway 240.

~~~
daveguy
And for those of you just tuning in (like me) -- noprocrast is a setting in
your hackernews profile (upper right corner). Turn it on and it will only
allow you on the site for a maximum amount of time (maxvisit) before
preventing you from using it for a minimum amount of time (minaway). It has to
be turned on manually. The maxvisit 5 and minaway 240 would let you visit for
5 minutes every 4 hours. I just turned mine on and set it to maxvisit 10
minaway 240.

~~~
aninhumer
I've used Leechblock (firefox extension) in the past for the same purpose. One
feature it has which I found particularly useful is the option to delay pages
instead of completely blocking them.

Instead of the transition being an abrupt stop that makes me want to turn the
blocking off to finish what I was doing, the delay makes it a gradual
frustration, and feels a lot more like getting naturally bored of browsing.

~~~
daveguy
Nice! Thanks for the tip!

------
SkyMarshal
Or just tweak things for high signal:noise ratio. Scan the front page for only
things relevant to your work/research/etc, ignore the clickbait. Read only a
selection of your favorite commenters. Etc. This works on other social media
like Twitter and Reddit too. You can minimize time spent while extracting max
value.

------
vinceyuan
I will keep looking at HN because I learn a lot about the technology and the
trend from it. And I also found the comments on HN are high-quality.

The only thing I don't like on HN is the UI. So I created
[http://hackernewsroom.com](http://hackernewsroom.com) based on HN API. Now I
read it everyday. But HN API is read only. When I want to comment, I have to
click a link to go back to HN to make comments. Another con of
hackernewsroom.com is some websites have the same-origin policy which are
unfriendly to iframe.

~~~
tedmiston
Having the article text and comments on one page is a great feature.

I'd also love to see the community move towards in-text annotations directly
on the article page, but it's hard to ease into that.

~~~
vinceyuan
Exactly. It's inconvenient to read the article and comments in separate pages.

------
joeyspn
As a professional procrastinator I'll definitely follow your advice...

... tomorrow.

~~~
Mz
...someday.

/better at it than you.

------
jtcchan
Ha! This kinda talk belongs in Reddit.

------
OJFord
I was foolish to expect this to link me to a Medium piece or editorial,
really..

~~~
sharemywin
sorry. I like to keep my advice to 20 words or less.

------
isolate
Do you mean... "Looking at HN" or do you mean "Reading and commenting on HN
and getting into arguments with people and checking your karma and replies and
upvoting / downvoting / flagging posts and making observations about the
correlation between username and karma and generally not even bothering to
read TFA or the front page and just trolling the comments section for
interesting things to respond to like this"

It probably doesn't make a difference, so cheers.

~~~
sharemywin
I wanted to get some code down so I wrote this out to make a statement to the
world for me to focus on code.

------
Mz
Or use HN to "sharpen the axe": focus on reading stuff on HN that is actually
useful to your goals.

Voila! Guilt-free slacking.

~~~
igravious
That's how I convince myself that the many man-months I have sunk into HN are
not in fact wasted but on balance a net positive. Humans are really good at
rationalizing away counter-productive behaviour. :)

~~~
sharemywin
it's like gambling. click on 10 articles get 5 not worth reading, a couple
that are interesting and might be useful later, and once in a while you get
something you can use now.

------
Aaronik
Your thing is too hard man, you need to break it up into bite sized chunks :)

~~~
sharemywin
that's really good advice. I keep avoiding this set of classes for
notifications maybe I should break it into a smaller goal.

------
aaronbrethorst
I was, but it's compiling...and now it's done. Back to work.

[http://xkcd.com/303/](http://xkcd.com/303/)

------
joshmn
I'm struggling to push the magic "launch" button.

It's a curse.

~~~
kaybe
If that's all that's left to do - great. You only need 5 seconds of
recklessness. If it only really was this easy..

~~~
joshmn
Sounds like something a cocktail can solve.

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igravious
Guffaw! Wonderful advice. Now what was I at again?

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onetimePete
Fine ill go back to shader writting...

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apryldelancey
Perfect! Thank you for the reminder.

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thuruv
To me HN is the weapon supplier

------
ericzawo
You're not my mother.

------
markmarrk
How'd you know!

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DrScump
TL;DR

------
stefantalpalaru
You're not my supervisor!

