ChanningAllen

Makes sense. This might sound counterintuitive, but my solution is to make sure that I'm always working on multiple projects, which I call a "project stack." It's a mix of professional, social, and personal projects, so the proverbial well never runs dry and I always have something to do with my hands.

For example, in my system, "travel to X continent" is itself a project, existing alongside multiple other projects. I find this pretty helpful not just for staying in motion, but also for avoiding that sense of guilt that I haven't been productive on days when I'm dealing with these kinds of environmental change. It's a reframing: "It's not that I've been unproductive while moving. It's that I have been productive on my moving project."

Glad to hear it. And yeah, your comment cuts right to the core of what makes it work: productivity wins, i.e. little elevations in dopamine.

Another thing I've found is that externalizing my plans takes a little stress off my working memory, which is also somewhat diminished in people with ADHD.

Love the concept.

One slight improvement that would push me to actually bookmark a site like this is if, rather than merely listing _entire blogs_, it listed a feed of the most recent _posts_ from the various blogs.

Posts are the level of abstraction that directly aligns with our reading habits. (Similar story for podcasts: give me an episode feed, not a podcast feed.) Twitter and other social media giants have cracked this code well.

I almost always get the "gist" of a book just by reading it (and even when I don't, I can quickly reference the Wikipedia page on it), so I'm not very concerned with outlining or summarizing works in their entirety.

Instead what I try to capture with book notes are memorable or densely insightful passages. I use Notion to store these notes, since Notion's database feature (similar to Airtable but more powerful) makes it easy to connect useful passages to other metadata for quick reference later on. For example, I have a database called "Quotes" where I create a new record for each insightful passage I come across. Each quote record is connected to records from the following other databases: Books, Authors, Topics.

It's not very lightweight, but the payoff is immense. I routinely think, "Damn, what was that Paul Virilio quote about second-order effects again?" And I'll quickly open my Authors database on <Paul Virilio> or my Topics database on <second-order effects> and find my quote: "When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck."

• https://www.indiehackers.com: community for tech bootstrappers with a bit of overlap with the HN community (full disclosure: I help run this community)

• https://www.designernews.co: community for designers

• https://www.wattpadwriters.com: community for aspiring storytellers

I run all of the content for Indie Hackers, and I recently hired James as our new managing editor for text-based interviews and a couple other content series. He is not Ajay Goel.

We actually roll in 0 dough as of 2017!

https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/acquired-by-stripe

> We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes…

There's an irony here: practices like meditation make us more aware of this constant unsatisfactoriness, but they also make us aware of the crucial distinction between the mental faculties that notice sensations (e.g. itchiness, hunger, jealously) and the faculties that react to those sensations. It's like the author learned a great deal about human mental life but didn't go all the way.

Pain and suffering, for example, are not the same thing. Suffering is a reaction to pain. And one can train oneself not to suffer, or at least to suffer less. Likewise, one can train oneself to have a greater appreciation for love, pleasure, and good fortune — to really "lean in" to positive experiences emotionally, so as to get more out of them.

So for someone to make a great sweeping gesture with their hand and say that life is a wholesale terrible experience is merely to betray that person's ignorance of how experience works in the first place.

Good move. It seems like a pro-consumer move that is also, and for that reason, a savvy business move. Snap and Instagram as far as I can tell are are largely used by young people who don't like the noise, visibility, and clutter of Facebook. So this is an effective way for them to further distinguish themselves.

Self-driving cars are high up on the morally-urgent technology list: car crashes cause more than 2% of annual deaths worldwide.

So good on Apple. I hope they get good PR on this, and I hope regulators factor in the very real human cost of gumming up the works. Don't get me wrong — they ought to do their due diligence, but they ought to do it swiftly.

Interesting, especially given the funding source. One of the parents described this potential conflict well:

> "We're not the constituency of the school," a parent of a former AltSchool student told Business Insider. "We were not the ones [Ventilla] had to be accountable to."

But I'm rooting for AltSchool. Educational institutions have a way of falling into orthodoxies of tradition and standardization that don't necessarily serve the interests of students — especially in a changing world. It's good to see a little bit of experimentation, so long as it follows the right incentive structure.

We have a lot of content: text-based interviews, a podcast, free-form articles, and a forum. And there's more coming down the pike.

Different visitors like different content, so the current homepage surfaces a curated list of all of it. To see just interviews: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

Good on Tesla for standing its ground and making its case publicly. Musk's pushback is nuanced and important.

The establishment institutions outside of Silicon Valley in America — the media and Capitol Hill — have united recently to spin a decidedly anti-civil rights narrative about large tech companies. Some of it is valid, but much is not, and relevant complexities and subtle moral distinctions are lost on a general public which only has the bandwidth to digest memorable headlines and themes.

And what could be more complex and morally thorny than how to mediate social issues — particularly those involving race — in a highly visible tech company employing tens of thousands of people? Speaking for myself as a black tech co-founder, I agree with the cliffnotes of Musk's message entirely: those of well-represented groups should consider the challenges they never had to face, but no one from any group should have free license to be a jerk. And for god's sake: when you misrepresent facts to serve a handful of minorities you end up undermining all the other minorities.

It's such an interesting discussion to me because it's kind of an open question: is the problem really with exploiting human psychology per se? Or is it with exploiting human psychology to achieve non-constructive ends?

The time investment that Facebook exacts from its users far outweighs the benefits it provides — e.g. social cohesion. So we feel much less comfortable with the platform's effective psychological hooks. But take an app like stickK[1], which cleverly recruits social and financial pressure to incentivize user-defined good behavior, and the effectiveness of the hooks don't make us so uneasy. Nir Eyal recently discussed this distinction on the Indie Hackers podcast[2].

I suppose a part of this is due to consent; stickK users consciously sign up to be manipulated. But consent can't be the entire equation, or else we'd let modern-day cigarette companies off the hook. It's 2017 — smokers know what they're signing up for, and yet they sign up.

[1] http://www.stickk.com/

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/023-nir-eyal-of-hooked#...

In general I'd keep an eye on the articles and interviews on indiehackers.com.

Specifically, I recommend checking out these articles: How Seth Godin Would Launch a Business With a $1,000 Budget[1], A Guide to Running a Minimalist Startup[2], How to Launch a Product With No Money and No Customers[3], How to Ship Side Projects[4].

For something a little more comprehensive, check out GrowthLab’s Ultimate Guide to Starting an Online Business[5].

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/@Louis_Grenier/2cc8c6c79c

[2] https://www.indiehackers.com/@pjrvs/1187274e54

[3] https://www.indiehackers.com/@cmason/how-to-launch-a-product...

[4] https://www.indiehackers.com/@lambtron/b04914b36f

[5] https://growthlab.com/guides/ultimate-guide-to-starting-an-o...

We publish a few marketing articles a week at Indie Hackers, and that rate will only increase as we attract more authors. I'd suggest either checking in with our site a few times a week or subscribing to our newsletter.

I'm surprised there aren't any honorable mentions here for chess, which is impressively strategic and compelling at the higher levels[1].

It doesn't have the complexity of Go, but Go doesn't have the ubiquity or accessibility of chess. And what good is a dance if you can't find dance partners?

1. John Bartholomew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3naU3axvP6Y

Take heart: it means we'll spend less time managing ads and experimenting with business models, and more time cultivating the community and improving the interviews and podcast!

Location: San Francisco

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Front-end; HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Ember.js, Angular.js, React.js

Resume/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/channingallen

Email: channingallen[at]gmail.com

I have meaningful full-stack development experience but my focus is on the front-end. My body of work includes a web game which recently went viral (http://www.flexboxdefense.com), becoming the #1 game on producthunt.com and receiving unsolicited praise from several distinguished voices in the developer community, like Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks.com.

There is a "?" button in the top right of every stylesheet that brings the modal back up, but I'm also in the process of adding tool tips that are more obvious and always available.

Just put in a fix which works on Mac OS X and should work on Linux as well.

Hm, I see what you mean. Others have brought this up as well. I'll move the fix up in the queue.

Fixed!

There's now a "Cancel Wave" button that should address the first of your issues...

The input boxes run a validation check whenever the user presses enter or focuses out of them; if this check determines the input value to be invalid, the stylesheet will shake.

In your case, you were probably typing some input before you clicked the hint box, thus focusing out of the input and invoking the validation check.

Aye — implementing a "Restart Wave" button as we speak.

Ah, thanks for the tip. Looking into it.

Thanks! Yep, the idea was to get about 10 or so basic learning levels in and then to add some "challenge" levels, with features like the one you mentioned.

Hey, author here.

I've always been a big fan of tower defense games so I thought it would be cool to make an open-source version of the game for teaching basic Flexbox properties. It's also a project that's helped me learn Ember.js.

The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/channingallen/tower-defense

Really love the iPhone app! Would be cool to see them connect your email to others apps as well.