139 karma · joined December 10, 2018
Ironically, this pandemic has made me much happier as I don't have to drive everywhere. I finally have more time to think and pursue my curiosities instead of burning gas and yelling expletives. It's quite refreshing.
I don’t really care much about winning or losing. I play them because they’re fun and because I can try novel approaches to solve novel problems.
The reward for me has never been about winning. It’s about being able to trying new things and see how it works in the game.
If I win great, if I don’t I’ll try again or play something else. If the reward is winning for you and you’re average than you’re statistically likely to be sad ~50% of the time. That probably will sap your motivation.
If the game is challenging for you, it will likely help.
Check out neuroscience books if you want to be deep in this stuff.
Play video games that require intense focus for prolonged durations to perform well like Starcraft 2, CSGO, DOTA 2 helped me build mental endurance.
Reduce social media. I’ve found that this was the most productive. Social media was fragmenting my attention by making me anxious and addicted. After I reduced Reddit and Facebook usage, my mental discipline increased drastically.
Keep a journal. I’ve found verbalizing my thoughts in a simple and concise manner is hard and requires a lot of focused thinking.
Aerobic exercise helps; more circulation for your brain means it can work better
I’ve been dealing with the same problem too so I’ve been finding ways to engage myself.
I got a full ride to a decent state university but I wasted the first 3/4 trying to figure everything out myself because my high school college advisors were useless and because my parents had never been to college so they couldn’t help me out either.
Going to community college first is cheaper and oftentimes, some professors I had at university showed up in community to teach The same courses so it’s better value too.
That is because PG sets clear rules and actively experiments with techniques to keep HN’s integrity intact, and since HN discussions are usually of the more intellectual variety, it’s harder for shit-posters and bottom-feeders to find traction here with low effort comments.
If you want to read his thoughts, check out his essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
I think you offended someone. HN really needs to show the flaggers username so there can be more checks and balances against this kind of emotional censoring.
As for the blog, the guy does sound self-indulgent but he still makes a reasonable point.
Vietnam still is a communist country in that respect.
The government still owns all the land and is legally leasing it to its citizens and foreigners. In reality, now that Vietnam is increasingly open to the world economy the government has to treat property rights better or else it'll scare foreign investment away.
The lack of private property rights and the Vietnam's Communist Party stranglehold on the economy with their state owned enterprises is a huge drag on productivity and innovation.
Fortunately, it seems like things are improving.
It’s simplicity was what helped my parents transition to the digital age considering they grew up in dirt-poor rural villages and did not get to use smartphones until their early 60s.
As for me, I got one so I could teach them how to use the OS, but now I’m considering switching to Android because I don’t have a Mac, Android phones have caught up in quality, and I’m getting sick of Apple’s unnecessarily restrictive ecosystem.
Also, I’m kind of salty that they removed the 3.5mm jack.
My machine learning professor who was from CMU would allow us to put anything we wanted on both sides of one piece of printer paper to bring to exams.
No amount of notes helped if you had no understanding of the algorithms and formulas.
I almost failed that course too, but it was also one of the cornerstones of my university career. It made me realize how much I had been optimizing for the wrong thing: grades instead of understanding.
One of the best professors I had at university for a Linux course always said: “If you don’t know something, google it!”
He backed up his words by allowing googling on the actual coding part of his exams. You had to understand the underlying concepts but you never had to memorize syntax. One time, he had us write a small program in C that involved threading during a proctored timed exam. Everyone ran out of time for that part.
His course and exams were _rigorous_. You could never cram for his class and expect to pass and indeed I know of one student repeatedly failing his course.
This was one of the courses in university where I gained the bulk of my useful knowledge and practical skills I use to this day. I can count the courses that were of similar quality I took at university on one(1) hand. The rest of my degree involved hackable tests, apathetic professors and were massive time-wasters. I learned nothing from them, obviously.
The good professors made me realize how bad the rest of my degree was and how much of a racket higher education could be.
I look back at my undergrad days and wonder how much more I would have learned if I had not focused so much on grades. I’m still actively trying to unschool myself.
The probability of me stumbling upon this informative gem would have been pretty low if I hadn’t been lurking around HN.
Context cannot be ignored.
I’ve experienced these toxic environments where good sleep and healthy food was almost impossible to obtain and it can be crippling.
I got a full-ride to university, but could not take full advantage of because of a toxic domestic environment and impoverished family.
I got to learn from smart professors and supportive friend which greatly improved my life because they helped me develop better learning and social skills. I’m using everything I learned to better my family and the immediate environment.
Good education is a powerful force for betterment. It’s troubling that access to opportunities like the I had one was based on luck.
Fortunately, educational opportunity has increased. Resources like Khan Academy and other MOOC platforms can help you get a top-notch education cheaply. Our society just need to make sure it’s accessible to those who need it most.
Money is a medium of exchange and price is the subjective measure of how the market values wealth.
As some comments stated, most of the money Jeff owns come in the form of stocks which is priced at a certain amount, paper wealth, and is not spendable until it is sold and turned into cash.
The real wealth is Jeff’s ownership of all the things that actually produce goods and services for the economy.
Examples are the distribution centers, data centers that run the site, and the army of engineers who produce software and hardware for the company. Arguably, he and his company have contributed a lot to the economy.
Yes, he is obscenely rich but saying it’s not possible to make X amount of money a second is naive because monetary value is a subjective measure.
In Zimbabwe dollars, Jeff makes like a trillion a second.
Remember when the stock market lost trillions of dollars or whatever during the 2007 depression?
That was paper wealth, monetary value that was reflected in the price of actual assets until it all evaporated during the housing bubble.
Borrowers and stock owners lost a lot of paper wealth but lost their dignity more than they lost real assets as borrowers never owned anything and stock owners owned absurdly price stocks that were bound for a correction.
Some rich people killed themselves over this too, which is funny.
JavaScript and CSS can add a lot of bloat, unnecessary load times, and add massive security vulnerabilities. Sometimes you just want information, you know, without waiting forever and getting hacked.
I have decent bandwidth and I still find myself turning it off a lot.
Removing standardized tests removes a useful metric admissions can use to analyze applicants as part of a holistic process. Is it a perfect metric? No, but the scores are good predictors for diligence which is crucial for college success.
If you need to go to college to develop fundamental critical thinking skills, then something is very, very wrong with your basic education system.
Wouldn’t it be more optimal to develop those skills from the beginning of life, through the family, bolstered by a rigorous basic education BEFORE you start college?
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but you might have forgotten about the Opium Wars where no sides treated each other well, the Brits included.
This method seems to help your brain work more because it increases its metabolism but that might also cause your brain to age faster right?
The harder you work something, the faster you wear it down.
Is my logic flawed or am I missing something? Just curious.
I’ve always enjoyed games like Pokémon, Age of Empires, WoW so my friends and I schedule time to play together.
We played AoE II together recently and it was super fun, even though we repeatedly get stomped by the hard AI.
According to The Male Brain, by psychiatrist Louann Brizendine, males have 2.5x the space devoted to sexual drive in the hypothalamus compared to females.
By the time males reach puberty, guy’s sexual occupation and fertile female tracking circuits run in the background non-stop like an unkillable daemon process.
That’s absolutely going to divert brainpower.
I would like to be able to play games on LAN and not be required to connect to the web all the time.
That would have been cool.
Blizzard’s world editing tools helped players innovate new genres like the MOBA but its restrictive IP terms killed innovation dead in its tracks.
All Blizzard does now is make reskin of old game(but excellent games) and release classic version of MMO’s.
What happened to the company?
You should take into account that some whole plant high sugar or high starch foods like fruits and beans come packaged with fiber and other nutrients as well that serve to balance the nutritional profile and glycemic impact of the food.
That being said, if you do have a problem with sugar, stay away from sweet or high starch foods that lack fiber like ripened bananas and cooked white potatoes. Beans are healthy because they contain resistant starches that act like fiber.
You should be eating a variety of whole plant foods with high fiber and high nurtrient density.
Dr Fuhrmans list of foods you should consume everyday for a healthy immune system. G-BOMBS Greens Beans Onions Mushrooms Berries Seeds
Consuming refined sugar is inherently unhealthy because it’s consumption causes insulin spikes and eventually insulin desensitization which leads to diabetes which is a strong predictor of inflammation. The same logic applies to any refined foods with concentrated amounts of fat or salt.
No whole plant-based food has the concentrated amount of macronutrients that are in processed food. You could argue that honey might be one, but honey’s been refined from pollen by bees.