

Ask YC: Quality time on the web - robmnl

I frequently find myself looking through reddit, news.YC and my RSS reader too often.<p>I was wondering, what can you recommend doing on the web that's educational?<p>I can think of watching TED. Do you know of any other good educational video sites?<p>Of course, taking a break from the computer is always an option which I also pursue, but what do you consider quality time on the web?
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nostrademons
CiteSeer. Or join an open-source project and learn enough about their codebase
that you can start helping out people who ask questions.

Almost everything that's relaxing in the sense of "feels like TV" isn't go to
be a good education. That doesn't mean learning can't be fun, but it means you
have to set aside a block of time and let yourself sink into the material
instead of glossing over it in 30 minute chunks.

I've also found time spent socially interacting with folks over the web - in
an "involving yourself in their life" sense, not in a "post on the same
message board" sense - to be very rewarding. Several online friends have since
become RL friends after a couple years of commenting on their LiveJournal and
talking to them on AIM. LiveJournal is great for this, FaceBook not so much,
since the culture on FaceBook is very much about taking pre-existing RL
friends and interacting with them online.

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izak30
If you're looking to kill time, but don't know how, help someone else out, go
to the forums for things that you're good at and answer a few questions.

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jey
I try to go read a book whenever I catch myself wasting too much time on the
web. My book queue is way too long and too interesting to be wasting my time
looking at cat macros.

I also have reddit, slashdot, cnn, kuro5hin, and fark pointing to 127.0.0.1 in
my /etc/hosts file. The only sites I allow myself to check now are news.yc and
nytimes.com

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robmnl
Thanks, those educational recommendations are nice.

Joining an open source project, or helping people out in a technical forum is
honorable, but not what I'm looking for, since coding is what I usually do.
Love citeseer and damninteresting.

I guess I'll go pick up some old books of mine too.

Thanks, keep stuff coming.

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DXL
Articles on history, phenomena, psychology, physics and more:
<http://www.damninteresting.com/>

