Hacker News Reader

The most productive and successful individuals I know oscillate between multi day 16+ hour sessions of hyper productivity and multi day sessions of total procrastination.

It’s never chugging along at a consistent marathon pace. It’s always a series of sprints.

This is me but I'm totally procrastinating on code so I can hang in my garden as the sun goes down learning about myself through other instances with different circumstances in this thread. I need a break from the physical work to try to get my head space back to thinking about computers.

My sprint is not now, my sprint starts later.

The sprint toward my spirit starts now. Reading this comment, reflecting this thought. And another is below.

Upvote the comments that you can relate to and see what bubbles up

I've found the same. When you have things to done you get them done. When you don't, you can sit around browsing the internet all day. It tends to be when things pile up that you are most effective at getting through them!

Ah, that old dilemma: Do I work best under pressure, or do I work only under pressure?

Yep. Over the last two years i've been fortunate enough to have a lot of time on my hands. In that time i've built 3 and a half successful products. 6 days of (thinking mostly, some research) about what to do. 1 day of actually doing it. It's so easy to spend that one day completely and productively - I already know what i'm supposed to do, I just have to sit down and do it.

The 6 days (not always 6 - maybe more, maybe less) let me come up with and throw out stupid ideas before i've coded them. By the time I come to build something it's a carefully considered thing that'll actually be useful most of the time.

It's not just feature ideas either, it's code design, data design, anything that might be complicated enough that I used to spend multiple days experimenting. It doesn't always work out, but when it doesn't, i've thought it through enough that I have a head start on coming up with a better design.

Want to share your 2.5 successful products built this way?

I'd rather not, only because they're in a market that relies on the good will of the users (who usually think that people should build these things only because they're passionate about it) and they kind of play off each other. Nothing unethical, but i'd rather not link them together if I can help it.

This is me. I always thought it was some kind of undiagnosed ADHD, ngl.

The dumbest thing you can do is try to be hyper-productive when you have no idea what you should be doing.

Of course, there are always five other things you know that need to get done besides the problem in front of you, but it can be a challenge to find the correct level of engagement, versus just sitting and 'marinating' in the problem in front of you.

I think the paradox is that if I spend all day doing nothing but reading documentation and farting around on Hacker News, nobody really notices. Not in the same way they notice if I spend a day on 'the wrong thing' (because I know for certain what needs to be done on this other thing). It's seen as wasting resources, because certainly I could have put that energy into the 'right thing'.

Okay, I've got a month of procrastination pent up, now if I could only release the hyper productivity! When I did my last masters, I somehow managed to get into a hyper-productive state, hacking on an app to collect participant voice data for a fews sessions close to 20 hours straight. (much to the annoyance of the guy who slept in the graduate lab) I don't think it was healthy, but it sure felt good at the time.

as an ADHDer, one thing I've found key is figuring out what things in my environment and mind are the things I want to signal "you're doing the right thing, keep going."

Essentially, what is your 'reward model'? -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYylPRX6z4Q

Test-Driven-Development is one example of this.

That was an interesting watch but I don't get how it's supposed to illustrate your point. Can you expand a bit?

A dopamine deficiency will cause you to seek out more frequent reward. So if you find a way to make your brain recognize reward that is on your intended path, you win.

Oscillating between high distractibility and hyperfocus rather than fluidly directing attention is essentially the core symptom of ADHD.

As someone who has inattentive-subtype ADHD, I must say that this sort of pattern can result in a great deal of loneliness. It is far better to watch the course "learning how to learn" and use something like the Pomodoro technique to explicitly decide whether to be in

- focused mode

- exploratory mode

- actually relaxing and paying attention to your relationships mode

I'm trying to build something which tackles this problem. The idea would be delegating the decision of what you consume to an algorithm (that you can control), and you'll be delivered a subset of news/content daily.

Basically a giant filter through which you consume the firehouse of FB/reddit.

Although it works for me, I've no idea how practical this is on a wider scale. Would you use something like that?

Isn't that pretty much what all platforms these platforms do these days, with algorithmic feeds? What level of control do you plan to add on top of it? And more importantly - how do you plan to monetize a model that's pretty much dependent on dopamine hits, without making it _more_ addictive/a time-waste?

Well, I've been building algorithms which explain _why_ something was surfaced, not just being a black box. Everything is controllable from data sources, ranking/filtering weights and a feedback mechanism to tweak this.

As for monetisation, I've thought about this a lot - and I don't think the time wasting is needed to create a good product. Google Search certainly isn't fueled by dopamine hits, and from an ads standpoint, our users are saying exactly what they want to see every morning.

Feature request: When I find an article that the algorithm did Not suggest — but I like the article.

Then, it'd be nice to know how I could tweak the algorithm and its config values, so it would find such articles, thereafter.

And to dry-run the algorithm to verify that now it does indeed find that article.

(You don't have a website yet?)

Thanks for the suggestion. A Chrome Extension was my solution for this.

I have an MVP and real userbase which I spent time growing. Now I have a platform to experiment with the grander idea here.

That being said, I'm not willing to link to this yet because it's tied to my public persona and not yet my full time job.

Some platforms like Facebook and Twitter do, but HN and Reddit are (outwardly) based on votes, so you're seeing what the community thinks is important, not what you yourself do.

Mind you, there's a lot of people (myself included) who want to keep up to date on what others find interesting at the moment.

Reddit is arguably the original “algorithmic feed” - votes + the decaying algorithm make it way more “addictive” than if it was just a chronological series of posts, ordered by number of votes.

The popular/news sections of Reddit are also more heavily based on non-vote signals, like FB.

I am looking forward to more details on this.

I also think that allowing the user to track the changes made to this algorithm along with some metrics ( like how much time user spent on topics, time wasted etc) would provide a helpful feedback loop.

sometimes a person seemingly doing unrelated things is still 'working'. i know at least for myself, i run through various scenarios of the outcome rather than staring at the code before i make my decision to implement.

edit: and i'll typically run through those scenarios while doing seemingly unrelated stuff, like shitposting on reddit or sitting in a blacked out room.

In a similar vein I often like to try out a few avenues, because thinking about them won't get me any further, i need to interact with them to build meaningful scenarios.

Of course if you try three ways to get the right way, you've "wasted" time on trying to two wrong things.

E.g. when selecting a library it's often hard to find the one case that breaks, just from reading documentation, instead playing around with the library can get you there faster.

Even the best information has the same effect (maybe worse). If you’re reading this, you may have a problem (I do).

Possibly you have cause and effect backwards. What if the act of ‘thinking’ that you have a problem leads to the heightened distractibility?

Maybe... but as an ADHDer, my experience is that the bigger problem is thinking "I have this problem" but hearing from others "you're overthinking things" or "you don't need that, just get started" and consequently:

1. Never becoming confident enough in the problem to start solving it.

2. Never getting the rubber-duck collaborator to help you even imagine how you would solve it.

I agree - I have to consciously choose what I want to feed my brain. It's so easy to choose things that don't align with my goals, whether that be family, personal or business goals.

Do I find the non-stop inexplicable US politics fascinating? Yes. Is it helpful to my business? Nope.

Every week i have to revisit my goals, decide whats important, and remind myself that I don't need to learn everything, be all things to all people. It's okay to choose and to say 'no' to distractions, information sources and people.

The last paragraph is a conclusion I've arrived at independently as well. However, I'd argue that HN should be filtered as well.

The tough thing is figuring out what's the right stuff to filter out.

We all have had conversations with coworkers about some manager who just doesn't 'get it' and is out of touch. One way or another they are filtering out a bit of reality that it turns out is very important to us, or someone in the chain of command is filtering it out before they ever hear about it.

I wonder if the right solution is to 'audit' the information. Spend most of the time in your information bubble, with brief excursions in alternating 'directions' just to make sure that you aren't overfitting. Regular sanity checks where you turn on the firehose for a moment to see what comes out.

I think technically you have to ignore more than 99.99999% of the information that's out there.

Because I mean, realize how big Twitter is. Its much larger than the Twitter that you are generally aware of. The popular stuff for your language and interests is a tiny fraction of the total number of tweets.

Likewise, every subculture has thousands if not millions of web pages or whatever. Every city, state, country has their own news.

Depending on what you are interested in, there may be decades or even centuries of interesting things to study or play with just in that area. For example, if you are into C64, there are thousands and thousands of games, applications, demos, magazines, etc. You could literally spend 20 years exploring it if you were motivated. That is just one subculture.

If you are interested in world history then there could be thousands of years of documents and artifacts to study. Or maybe to understand some ancient literature you need to become fluent in written Latin. You could easily spend five years learning Latin to a high level.

I just feel that if you were to really give all of the interesting stuff that's out there a chance, it is many many lifetimes worth of information.

Which is to say that the number of potential distractions is actually effectively infinite.

agree with everything but havent gotten to know people who work 12+ hours but spend a lot on news sites

i have worked these hours in the past, plus my colleagues, and when there is so much pressure the least we wanted to do, and the least we did, was spending time on news sites because we were constantly tired and would rather choose to spend half an hour more on sleep

Very true!

> One of the only places for decent information.

HN is hit or miss. If you believe everything said here you’d reach the conclusion that only today in 2020 can we finally build websites all thanks to microservices, kubernetes, react and rust.

tbf you would also believe all this micro service, kubernetes, react, w/e is just another fad that will fade away and that “real engineers” know better. I see both opinions here.

Maybe both are true and we’re close but still not quite at the glorious day when we’ll be able to build websites