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Comment by nuttinwrong | Hacker News Reader

As someone who at one point grew up without the internet, I think I can safely say that my attention has gone out the window with the web. There are just too many things to look at now and browser tabs are constantly competing for my attention. In fact, I would blame inattention for the lack of personal success in my life. Hell, it was even hard getting through the entire article, I just wanted to skip to the end and read the comments. Ugh... sad. Also, it doesn't help that we have news feeds like Hacker News, Designer News, Reddit etc...spewing info left and right. Before the sharing of information you'd be familiar with the work of a few, now everything is out there and your access to information is pretty much unlimited - that's a lot of info competing for limited attention.

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I have an interesting anecdote. When I started my CS degree almost a decade and a half ago, my dad refused to get me an Internet connection for our home. To give you an idea how uncommon this was already, during the first week an interview amongst the 375 enrolled students was conducted. I was the only one without a DSL or fiber connection at his disposal.

I was furious, but in retrospective it may have been the reason behind my success.

No connection forced me doing lots of things differently. For programming work, I relied only on offline documentation (man pages, MSDN...) and I set up my own servers instead of telnet-ing to the uni machines. The learning curve was a lot steeper, but after some struggle I was way more productive than my peers.

For freshman and sophomore theoretical courses, I simply cherry-picked top books with extreme care cause I knew I couldn't rely on help coming from the brand new forums for TAing our school had set up. Students hacked around exercises, but I had to fight the Dragon Book, Concrete Mathematics and a few others.

It ended up as a huge success for me. I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time. This made me appreciate the value of deep and hard knowledge good books provide. Now, many years later I am struggling to return to that lifestyle while keeping some online presence...

> I ranked as student #1 not only in my fairly large school, but in the whole country where a few thousands graduated from CS at the same time.

Congratulations! I've never heard of a cross-university ranking of individual students before. Out of curiosity which country is that and how does the ranking work?

I'm experiencing the same thing. It's gotten so bad that I've had to train myself to concentrate by forcing myself to read books and watch movies without interruption. It's kind of ironic that I'm using what was once entertainment as homework. I call it Internet Brain because of a "Computing Forever" video that I watched on youtube. The fact that I live in a very noisy environment doesn't help at all.

Do you have any suggestion on how to fight it? I mean apart from those "block held" ideas that won't work for me.

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