sidsavara

I like using Toodledo:

http://toodledo.com

I like it because it's free, and I can even sync it with my iphone free - just have to pay $1.99 for the app

Nice clean interface, has a nice Google Chrome extensions, and for me it is intuitively how I order things - by date and importance. I just use "Project -> Task" to signify next actions within projects

http://www.sensational-seo.com/ Free firefox plugin for basic SEO ;)

Surprised that HN likes this. I wrote a post on this topic too:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/today-is-your-gold...

Since people enjoyed this video, here's the HN link - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112797

I just finished a ton of great books, some that immediately come to mind:

The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris - Really made me think about life and the work I do

Tribes by Seth Godin - Love this book.

The Dip by Seth Godin - read it before, reread it again this year

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina - really had to struggle to get past the beginning, was fantastic once I did

Find Your Great Work by Michael Bungary Stanier - I liked this one a lot, motivational

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta - no surprises here, I enjoyed the book, it reads like you would expect it to. Some new insights that aren't on the blog

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Dubner

Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (I liked The Tipping Point the best out of those 3)

Free by...Chris Anderson (?) I forget. Very interesting.

Team Up by Pete Mockaitis - Great read about accountability groups, subset of a mastermind group IMO.

Collapse by Jared Diamond - Very interesting looks at patterns in civilizations. Some people I spoke to get bored after a few examples, it is a little repetitive but I enjoy the parallels

My old faves are of course Gettings Things Done, 7 Habits, Greatest Salesman in The World, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

More details here: http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/best-personal-deve...

I regularly (and will be posting a bunch in the next couple weeks) post reviews of books I read here: http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews

I like to Use ToodleDo and Evernote on my iPhone.

Both apps sync with the web, and offer offline modes. This makes it easy to use no matter where I am. I used to use my blackberry and outlook, but really wanted web integration.

Thanks chipsy, I think you answered the question perfectly =)

To expand, bananas may be relatively high sugar/energy compared to other natural foods (green vegetables), but they cannot compare with the super concentrated foods we have created such as Twinkies =)

RescueTime!

http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews/review-of-rescuetime-fr...

Of course if you're using Unix, you can get the linux version (which I don't believe is officially supported).

Just knowing where I am spending my time makes me more productive and less likely to randomly web surf etc

I wrote an article regarding dopamine as well, I saw a couple recently on HN on the subjects of dopamine and self discipline, if you guys are interested. Much more in depth than the articles I've seen make it onto HN - but I didn't really think this was the appropriate place for them, that's why I never submitted them. Kind of off topic IMO, but for readers who like it here they are:

Dopamine, rewards, pleasure center of the brain -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/personal-developme...

Willpower research -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/will-power-how-to-...

I use my netbook whenever I travel - I can write articles and do moderate amounts of software development

It is also cheap enough that I am not too concerned with it getting lost or broken

I get a legitimate 4-5 hours of battery life (tested - I fly Hawaii to Los Angeles)

Genius headline though. Caught my attention. sigh

I call it metawork. Perhaps "metaworkers" ?

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/are-you-really-wo...

My favorite feed is still this one:

http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi

Grabs the full content of the article, and contains links at top and bottom to the comments. Beautiful!

Tried it out, biggest complaint is that I can't do "in place" editing -

Example: As Mark Bao mentioned, have to edit to the side, rather than in place. Pressing enter to head to the box, and then hitting enter (or escape) to go back isn't bad, but it is not as ideal as if I could double click and edit in place.

Second (more irritating for me) I can't grab something and drag and drop it.

I know these are challenging technical problems (with solutions) but they do make the experience a little difficult for me.

Also, in Chrome Alt+up and alt+down shortcuts are not working for me. No idea if this is something I've changed as a setting or not. Other shortcuts appear to work fine - but why is it one button (?) to open the help and another (space) to close? I don't see space used elsewhere, perhaps just use space for both?

For exporting, I was not too pleased with how it exported to HTML. I was actually expecting a bunch of nested lists, but it gave me lots of divs and styled it as an outline via CSS. I don't know how other people feel about it, I was looking to use it to outline blog posts: so for me being able to export and then import a list of lists would have been dynamite.

The abridged version:

I use Google Reader and delicious. I make liberal use of starring articles (rather than reading them inline) and then as a secondary filter I also will tag them as "Read tonight", "Read this week" and "Read someday" in delicious on the second pass.

I have had to let go of a lot of temporal "breaking" news since it's just so hard to keep up with it, but this process lets me still see the headlines and see what's going on, without getting sucked in

And discussion in the comments definitely take more time than reading the original article ;)

I have a full discussion of my process here:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I like the gist of the article, but disagree with the opinion of dumping the RSS Reader. It seems to me that it's a mental shift that the author finds possible when using Firefox, but can't do with GReader

The "neutered RSS version" of the content is exactly what I want. I don't want ads. I don't want to see other headlines in the sidebar. I want to get through the content as quickly as possible, pick out the gems I like, and share them with friends. Opening up 15+ tabs is not my preferred method, though I can understand that it may work for others.

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I also submitted it to HN just now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591690

This is a follow up to this posting (except, I wrote about this almost a year ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590135

Nirmal that readability service is incredible. I tried it on my blog - I hate to admit it, but it does look a lot better. One thing that makes it much easier to read is that it strips out the comments. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I suspect for 80% of readers (and likely many of the people who use the bookmarklet) the comments are just noise.

Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.

I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.

Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.

Awesome! Thanks Nirmal! Talk about customer service.

Now, if only it had better twitter integration ...

I use TinyMCE, but that's mainly because it came built into Wordpress and I think was easy for me to set up in Joomla at one point.

Worked well enough for me, never felt the need to change

I actually think people on HN will enjoy it, because it takes a rather emotional topic and breaks it down into what are the primary reasons he has seen for marriages failing in what, I assume is, his professional opinion.

I think people like me enjoy hard problems, finding out the root cause, and determining a solution. From that perspective, I thoroughly enjoyed this article as it presented some salient causes for a fairly difficult problem (keeping a marriage/relationship going).

It wasn't full of platitude and suggestions to "date once a week" etc - it was a solid breakdown of causes. Coupled with the recent discussion of the bachelor paradox, I really enjoyed the diversion.

Have you guys heard of http://www.sugardaddyforme.com/ and is this a competitor to them?

One of the guys I worked with knew the guy who ran that site. I thought it was a pretty funny name and concept, yours sounds much more refined. Took a quick peek at it, can't really give feedback since I'm at work but upvoted and may take a look later =)

Agreed, it really should be something like

* Dark greed good

* Light green not so good

* Light Red Bad

* Dark Red really bad

It sounds like they've done some research to back up their 5 second logic.

I had my own method of "undo" that I've been using - I simply put GMail in offline mode when I am batch replying to emails. Then before I send, I do a quick glance at my outbox. If everything looks good, I go back into online mode

Before this I was just saving as drafts, but that seemed a little messy.

I do wish this was configurable though. It would be nice if I could set it to perhaps 10 minutes with some sort of override (e.g., I am on the phone or chatting with someone right now and I am trying to send them directions or something). Most of my emails are not that time sensitive anyway.

I read one study that showed having eyeballs (e.g., a picture of someone looking at you) next to the cash box increased deposits by some N% (I don't want to spout facts as I can't recall the number, but it was n > 10 - double digit percentage increase). They controlled for there just being a picture by alternating pictures of eyeballs with pictures of flowers.

I suspect part of it may be due to people showing up just for the novelty of it, but going back to the eyeball study (which I am too lazy to look up the reference for) I wonder if there is another thing at play too. Perhaps people think oh cool, let's show up and game the system, and they make plans to go there intending to perhaps pay 20% less than market.

Then they have to look the owner in the eye and tell him what they think is fair, and for whatever reason their mind changes. So rather than paying .8x, like they originally intended, they end up paying instead x - 1.2x

So you get increased business because people who were willing to pay .8x (lets say x = $10 based on the article, so $8) show up, and end up spending x - 1.2x ($10-12, per the article). Some portion of new customers may see that their game won't work (because they don't want to lie to the owner) and they just leave. No harm done - these people weren't eating at the cafe to begin with.

So I chalk at least part of this up to a neat psychological trick - but I wonder if many of those people will be repeat customers (some portion obviously will).

Anybody have references to back this up? This is just what I suspect may be happening, as it's what I susepct happened with folks who may have intended to steal bagels/candy from the office kitchen, saw the eyeballs and ended up paying for them instead.

I'm not sure I like this. Let's suppose that this does become standard practice.

Now we could end up in a situation where users and corporations disagree on the wording in the terms of service, or about definitions of terms.

As a simple example, let's use Apple's Itunes "software updates" that attempts to push safari onto my machine.

Now lets suppose they add into the terms of service that if you use itunes, they can use this updater to add safari without your permission.

In legalese it might read something like "add or update installed or new programs onto your device" while in english it may read "Installs software updates automatically."

I'm not saying Apple would do something like this, or that this article and company it uses as an example has such intentions - but this is how I would abuse the system if it became widespread, and if I wanted to abuse it.

I do think it would be better to have terms of service that users actually read - and in fact, I would assume many terms of service do start of being readable and understandable. However, in the end its about CYA (covering your ass) and for that reason I think it's best to have everything spelled out. Perhaps the summaries would be useful though to draw attention to what is discussed in each section ,as it it in the example provided, so that I know exactly where the privacy information is, I can quickly see where the SLA is, etc.

Can someone who is good with greasemonkey please hide the very right hand column, and perhaps expand the middle one

;)

I have to get back to work, but if someone else manages to do it I will gladly tweet and update my facebook and spread the word =P

This is interesting, why an iPhone application rather than something that can be perhaps web-based?

I am working on (and by "working on" I mean, I created some messy code 5 months ago and then abandoned it but cling to the dream that I may one day finish it) something similar, but wanted a web based UI - I have the same issue whether it is on a mobile client or at my desk. I want a twitter client that is smarter than a linear display of what's going on - and instead figures out the context of tweets (like replies and retweets) and intelligently gets me that context

It looks like you are trying to solve that issue with replies, kudos to that.

[Edit] I just realized this reads as if I think we should only save people who are worthwhile hackers. That is not what I meant. What I mean is that I think it is appropriate to post to HN, because based on his CV, many of his peers would likely see it if it was on HN. We are not an amber alert service, but if a well-known developer is missing, HN is where I would turn to. [/edit]

Why this matters to Hacker News (in addition to it being a person in need):

http://cv.tmorris.net/

A small sampling from that page reads as follows:

Tony actively participates and contributes to the open source software community.

    * Scala core libraries §
    * ScalaCheck §
    * Scalaz §

Why this matters to Hacker News:

http://cv.tmorris.net/

A small sampling from that page reads as follows:

Tony actively participates and contributes to the open source software community.

    * Scala core libraries §
    * ScalaCheck §
    * Scalaz §

I reposted your submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512587

I think your original is too old, so it's fallen off the new page - which means not in front of enough eyeballs to get voted up and likely won't make the front page at that rate.

It appears the original submission was lost in the mounds of Erlang submissions. I do not know much about it, but it looks legitimate to me, and I don't mind looking foolish if I'm wrong: but I would feel terrible if I did nothing when someone's life was on the line.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512491

I am reposting because I think the other submission is so old it fell off the new page, and will have a hard time making the front page at this rate.