Did You Hear We Got Osama?

It is really, really, really, really, really hard for me to find a good temporary distraction nowadays. The noise is so monotonous, so repetitive, so completely devoid of intellectual stimulation that I go between four websites in a loop looking for something interesting to read.

HN has maybe one article every two hours that pops up to the top that I find worth reading, and maybe half the time worth upvoting. And that's the only good source of noise I have. Everything else is shit.

I don't care about politics. I don't care about the tech scene, or gadgets, or games, or celebrities, or sports, or this quarter's fiscal projections for a multinational corporation. You name a "news" story and I probably would hate to read about it. Even if I want to read it, it has almost no background information or anything more than the re-cutting of a press release with a paragraph describing why the press release was released. Regurgitated stock information with nothing of value.

Here's some choice excerpts from Google News, which I guess is supposed to be some representation of what's happening in journalism today:

  * Microsoft unveils new, more window-like logo for Windows 8
  * Robin Thicke Arrested for Pot Possession
  * The mostly good and sometimes bad Top 10 moments of Tim Wakefield's Red Sox career
  * [John] Glenn worries the US is ceding its space leadership
  * Ohio AG DeWine switches from Romney to Santorum
  * Identity Theft Tops IRS's 2012 "Dirty Dozen" Tax Scams
  * GOP candidates fighting over Michigan
  * Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, dies at 43
  * FDA Still Wary of Diet Pill's Side Effects

I don't want noise, but sometimes I need noise. And when I want it, I want it to be worth while. It seems like nothing on the internet ever is.

This is a topic that I've thought some on in that my company is in the recommendations space, and some thoughts on what make news recommendations difficult:

The function of news is to facilitate smalltalk.

I am reasonably convinced of this. News, as such, is mostly just something that you're supposed to have read so that you can get by in usual social interactions. What we read (and are supposed to have read) is very tied to our place in the social hierarchy. Most folks don't actually want news to be too personalized because then it loses its social function.

I stopped reading the news at one point -- for a couple years -- because of its persistent lack of depth. I realized that reading 100 BBC articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would leave me knowing virtually nothing about it, other than some factoids, whereas the same time spent reading books would be worthwhile.

There's an interesting problem to be solved here -- one that's been on my mental back-burner for a while. I'm not sure if Pandora's box can be resealed and we can work our way back to mediums with more depth and less distraction, but I both hope we can, and have much interest in the mechanism for such.

Reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes quote:

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

“You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.”

“To forget it!”

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

“But the Solar System!” I protested.

“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

John Irving nailed it in A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life."

Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions.

If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not.

Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring person.

Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?

It's actually funny reading your post, because you sound exactly like me when I was your age. As you get older, I think you'll learn to appreciate relationships with people more. The 18+ hour startup days lose their appeal.

If you work in a tech startup, obviously you don't have to read every political story but I believe you absolutely should be aware about the Path situation, Kickstarter, and all other trends and most companies in our industry.

If you're not aware of these things, your boss is, and they are going to ask you to implement a screen that informs the user you are uploading their address book. If you've seen a large breadth of products and companies like Kickstarter, you will easily pick up on macro trends like UI/UX paradigms and significant technologies.

If you had some sophisticated filtering like a user has in another popular HN post today to get rid of things you don't like, you might miss out on trends like NoSQL or Node or Redis or Clojure, or you might upload a user's address book without permission and get caught.

If you are not up-to-date with your industry, I think in reality you will always be an employee of or a laggard to the person who knows about those things.

Wow. This really hit me in the face. This is exactly my situation, my issues right now (and I am also a college/university freshman). I am spending so much time consuming information that I am behind on essentially everything I should and could be doing. I think I needed to read this.

"What followed were the most productive three years of my life."

It's become an addiction for sure, but I have had enough. Seeing someone else with the exact same issue, stating the above about productive years, is inspiring. I'm done, it's time to do things, get my life back on track. I don't need to know "everything", and I shouldn't try to build my world around that.

Thank you for making me realize it.

How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news?

For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?

The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.

What helps me get off the news pipeline:

No one is remembered for being well read. - some blog post I've lost, but the quote is still written on my chalkboard, luckily.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. _why

EDIT: I know it's ironic that these came from online sources. I guess the point is about balance and focused, purposeful consumption you later use.

I changed my habits a few months ago after reading http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage. I'm really happy I did that.

    "RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites"

I have 6-7 feeds in my Reeder.app and check them weekly.

(Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928

Let me be the contrarian here. If you limit yourself to a few content sources, you won't be able to make the leaps that come out of having access to information outside those sources and will eventually fall prey to group-think.

Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.

If you have zero interest in the news I think there is something wrong with you not the news. If you don't educate yourself about the issues going on in the world you're contributing to the ignorance of the American (and global) public. Would your life be virtually unchanged if you didn't know about SOPA? Saying that politics doesn't interest you is like saying you don't care about your society and those around you. Imagine if people hadn't watched/read/listened to some form of "the news" during Arab spring, during Prop 8, during the Civil Rights movement, during the height of the fight for women's rights, during apartheid? I guess you would just go on living right? This really reeks of a super young person (which the author outed himself as). I'm all for finding alternative sources of information rather than traditional media (which is biased no matter what source you use). In UG I took a course called "making the news" and learned some very valuable information, namely don't trust what you read--you've got to dig deeper and find several sources in order to truly understand an issue and the various bias of content producers--authors, publications and even geographic regions.

That's why I love http://daytome.com

About 4 paragraphs of international news every day, saving you both your time and social dignity.

I agree that removing noise and consumption for the sake of distraction is a fine goal, but we cannot pretend there are no consequences from going to one extreme to the other. It's tempting to look at an isolated event like Osama Bin Laden's death and think "who cares? doesn't affect me" but these events form the fabric of the world.

Democracy requires and educated and informed electorate [Jefferson], and if you don't know what the dots are, you can't connect them. Sure, willful ignorance will give you more time to be productive, but when society at large chooses this route, don't be surprised when things go downhill.

"But this post isn’t about politics, it’s about noise."

No! It is about politics. Note that most of the examples given are related to political events.

The OP does have a great point (I waste too much time on HN, perhaps); however, the kind of political aloofness desc/prescribed in the post is what, I think, is the root of the biggest political problem (not just in the US, everywhere): the best people who should be involved in politics are not. It is a common adage that the word idiot was used in Ancient Greek for a person who was not interested in politics (unless of course you were a woman, slave, or farmer).

I fundamentally disagree with the author, and yet agree with him at the same time. I don't have MPD, but he makes two different points.

On the one hand: no, my life would be considerably less richer if I did not pay attention to the world around me. This includes knowing who the President is and understanding why that matters, particularly in the case of the US's first black President. I grew up in Texas, and it matters to me to know that he and my father (or his predecessor) would not have even been allowed to attend school together. Regardless of one's political affiliation or outlook, the issues at that level matter, and our opinion matters. To 'embrace embraced not knowing anything about current events and the world at large' is willful ignorance, and that's a value I find distasteful.

That said: of course one should manage one's intake of information. Of course one should counterbalance that with productivity. Of course one should be a source of value and not merely a sink for the news-as-entertainment complex that has gripped our society. RSS and other technologies should enable us to get control of those things for ourselves rather than watch Walter Cronkite for half an hour every night along with the rest of the nation and then go off and do whatever the party bosses say.

I agree with the problem, but the proposed solution makes things worse. Education - formal and informal - has value in making better citizens of all nations.

To me this is the crux of the breadth/depth issue. Matt Might deftly distills the problem in his visual description of a PhD program [1]. The SEALs getting Osama, or knowing what the company Path does, or seeing Christopher Hitchens and William F. Buckley sit down together [2] won't affect most people's daily lives, but for someone working in the intelligence, startup, or political criticism arenas, respectively, missing these events could potentially be career suicide.

I struggle with this a lot, as active filtering takes work [3] (and I'm clearly not the only one [4]). Curated news aggregators and preferential browsing suggestion (StumbleUpon) try to address the problem. Mostly I think it's a matter of dedication and of degrees. To what extent do you maintain a laser focus (but are boring to hang out with) versus being a worldly-wise life-of-the-party type (but spread to thin to innovate on any one thing)?

[1]: http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ [2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0LR2mxqMNM [3]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470282 [4]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407

Isn't not caring about current political issues the basis for the dystopia that underlies Brave New World?

Not only does too much information create boredom but it can also interfere with your day to day life if you're not careful.

This habit of information snacking totally screwed up my sleeping schedule as well. It got so bad that sometimes I used to stay up till 5:00 in the morning checking one board after another and then sleeping till 12:00 pm next day.

While it did not affect my business, it did take a toll on my health (my lower back) and also because of this I used to find nothing of interest any longer because my brain had started picking up patterns in stories, funnies, and everything else i could find online. Worst part was I could see that what I was doing was not good for me but like every addiction I really didn't have enough motivation to stop it on my own.

Anyway, last year I had to shift my house. And for some reason the only ISP in that area took over a month and a half to install the damn internet connection (some legal issues over digging with the gas pipeline company). On top of that the 3G sucked so bad that even opening Gmail took 3-4 minutes to open.

Long story short, call it a forced rehab but because of that one month of life without internet my life totally got back on track. My sleeping schedule was fixed. I found my old guitar again, and now I spend time on a tonne of other interesting stuff instead of hitting F5 one random sites.

News might entertain us but its chief goal is to sell advertising space. Advertising ultimately pays for almost all news* (esp. newspapers) and so news media focus on getting your attention today, and tomorrow, and using whatever techniques they can to achieve this. Entertainment is just one of these techniques. Disquiet (some might say fear) is another - the sense that things aren't quite right and the associated need to know what isn't quite right.

*BBC (UK taxpayer) and Economist (subscription) are among the exceptions.

Here's a 2008 article pointing out that news' focus on the moment is also a significant failing: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/03/against-news.html

This 2008 article also points out the social function of news: as a common topic for discussion, particularly for determining compatibility with others (whether of belief, intellectual interest, etc)

The HN article makes a great point about how much this info effects you. If news media let their audience know that nothing happening right now was likely to effect their lives in any way for at least a week (at best, more likely never), then audience would only tune in once a week, which drops viewing figures by 86%. Also, only checking news once a week lets the information settle, and often key details emerge which negate previous reports.

Another useful trick, if cold turkey is too much, is to put a one-day or one-week delay on all incoming news (ie waiting a week to read newspapers). If nothing much is lost by a weeks delay, then its easier to go cold turkey.

I find myself venturing off to all my favorite online outlets when I'm doing a task I'm not particularly interested in. I guess I should step back and ask myself why I'm really doing something. If it plays an important part in helping my start up be succeed, then I should be stoked that I get to make my company better. If I can't find a good reason to be doing it, then I should move on to something of value and importance.

I use a combination of IRC(active) and Twitter/Tweetdeck(passive) for most of my online "reading" these days. It tracks the most social things: people, global topics, and "meeting places," rather than "bloggers", "pop news", or "discussion forums", which have a service/task-oriented feel to them. It is addictive, of course, so I do have to turn it off occasionally, but on balance, I get a lot of benefit out of it, since it's low-maintenance and fairly high-signal, albeit a bit prone to "what i ate for dinner" type spam.

I still go on web sites, obviously, but increasingly I see them as less relevant. Forum-style discussion in particular, whether it uses flat or hierarchical threads, encourages a combination of pedantry and the lowest-common-denominator. OTOH real time - or near real time - communication tends to motivate a link to useful long form content instead of a bad attempt to replicate it in context. This post is a great example of such. It should be done up as a full article and then linked around. As a comment, it'll probably be "lost" forever within a few days.

I think a balance is necessary ...

I budget between one and two hours of my self-directed workday to skimming various tech and business blogs. I save HN for last and scan every new title line. I usually read about 15 - 30 articles during this period.

Furthermore, while I'm waiting for a build, or for a test to reach the point where my interaction is required, I go back to HN and check the page or two of new title lines.

I consider myself a productive Java programmer, writing about 30K lines of code per year for my startup project. I could create more LOC if I did not read the tech news, but I would face two issues: (1) burnout, and (2) the need to stay current with the technology.

My project is heavily leveraged with open source Java /JavaScript libraries, nearly all discovered from tech blogs. For example: Jenkins, JQuery, JSON, JavaCV, OpenChord, Netty, Sesame, the Chrome web browser, Lubuntu, etc. I build my own development & server machines so I need to keep up with hardware.

Additionally, I have steered away from possible infrastructure dead ends by observing trends, such as the move to mobile HTML5 apps.

I don't know. I guess this is like swimming in a lake. Your head is down in the water most of the time, but every once in a while you lift your head to see what's around you and if you're swimming in the right direction. Swimming with your head down is like doing your work and being productive. Lifting your head up is like reading the news and know what's happening around you. I only read about 10 minutes of news each day, but that's enough to avoid trying to go through a wall blindly while not being aware of the door 2m away.

For example, I changed career because I read about how Banks screw people over and how Big Data is becoming important. Also, I decided not to work for a company, because I read it in the news how it's basically slave work and how the owners have it exceptionally good. So now I'm starting my own company, doing machine learning in finance.

I can relate, i've been on both extremes of the news comsumption spectrum at various phases in my life. As a political writer, i try to read the op ed of a national paper every day. After that, i like to skim the wsj fro t page, the nyt biz section on mondays ("media mondays"), nyt science section on tuesdays, and the nyt magazine on sundays. I am from a family of newspaper editors so i look at it somewhat critically, but i save online reading & gossip mags for certain days/moments when i want to zone out and not read critically. The la times is a fantastic paper these days, website still a tad wonky on mobile but no paywall & amazing writers/content on every level. If i read nothing else i read their op ed. Also for entrepenuers i have heard anecdotally that reading a financial paper daily is a must.

My own personal primary source for news has become twitter. I've realized I don't need to always the know the full details of what has happened. I just need to know that it has in fact happened. Let's say I follow different personalities: tech journalist, celebrity, personal friend, random person living in my town, CNN or NYTimes or WSJ - just by quickly scrolling through my feed I get a pretty good idea about what is going on. And I also get a sense of how important it is: if all the people I follow, who come from different career paths, are reporting on the same piece of news, it's probably something fairly important.

It's relatively quick and keeps me informed. I don't watch any of the cable news channels and don't listen to talk radio. And since I've stopped watching CNBC, my stock portfolio has been doing better as well.

well, what do you want to be? a narrow-minded, ignorant human or civilized man?

seriously.

the world, life, is much more than work, work, work. understanding broader contexts, understanding where we are going and why is important. even as a founder, to come back to this extremely narrow narrative within these halls.

how do you understand you market, your consumers, your customers? a contracting economy bears different potential than an expanding one. how will you know where we are if you do not inform yourself?

how about reading a book or two, not the daily babble? you mention you've read the news but didn't understand anything. if you do not inform yourself, you will repeat the mistakes of others.

you sound like one of those pretentious fucks that don't watch tv, don't listen to current music and are proud of it. it bears of ignorance, of disregard of the output of other human beings.

Sure, knowing that Osama was killed isn't a life or death piece of information but staying informed is important to many people. It doesn't have to be binary - read it all or read nothing. You can quickly stay informed if you pick news sources that respect your time.

IMO, reading several short summaries of current events is a better solution than limiting yourself to 1 or 2 stories a day. That's exactly why I created a website[1] that crowd sources summaries of news articles. People come in, read the news, and get on with their day.

[1] http://skimthat.com - Crowd sourced news summaries.

Another source for news summaries is http://www.newser.com and if you like videos you can try http://www.newsy.com/

He didn't seem that much addicted. He seems to read a short amount of RSS compared to, well people like me, didn't even vote. And now he's reading 2 posts/day on HN? I don't think it's even possible, if you were really addicted to RSS to shrug it down to that small amount.

Back in the days I was writing for a news blog so I used to subscribe to 100+ blogs and news website, in french or english, I was alerted of a post more than twice a minute.

My day was, literally, to sit in front of my computer and read, filter, subscribe, unsubscribe.

The only way I found to stop this addiction after a year of up and down was just to stop using NetNewsWire and Google Reader (don't ask me why I was using two of them, more filters...).

3-4 years after, I just check reddit, HN, couple of french websites and know more about american politic than my country's politic.

This echoes a lot of the ideas from Clay Johnson's book "Information Diet: a case for conscious consumption". That book has a few good actionable ideas about how to modify your sources and methods of getting news so you get better information and learn to identify bias.

I lived in the Philippines for two years and aside from emailing my family once a week, usually, I was completely ignorant of the outside world.

Someone mentioned in passing that Michael Jackson had died and I thought they were just teasing our lack of worldly knowledge.

I liked this post and I think a concept at play here is that people are afraid of the quiet as they're afraid of themselves. I experimented with different teaching methods and that while I was over in the Philippines and using silence and good questions were the most effective methods I came across outside of having genuine understanding of the person/group.

Silence.

In "The Four Hour Work Week", Timothy Ferriss claims to not have read a newspaper for years. It's all about maximum output. Minimizing input is one great way to free up time and energy to drastically increase output.

I disagree with your fundamental point that all news sources are not trying to educate or inform you, but are instead trying to entertain you in some bias way. Of course nearly all of them are in order to make a profit (Fox News for instance), but I'm frustrated that you don't see the value that organizations like The Associated Press offer to a free society. The AP is a non-profit, un-biased organization that provides a service that our constitution guarantees. I hope see this is powerful and important and try out AP Mobile.

Once you've generally sussed out how all of the different perspectives view issues, and thereby understand the patterns by which the world operates, the news starts seeming repetitious.

While I agree with the idea that, "consuming has a more immediate reward than creating," the need to be distracted isn't the only reason. We do want to be informed and reputable media outlets, for the most part, do want to inform. It is our inability to effective process the ever increasing amount of information out there. Maybe we need to take on less interests or maybe we need better filters (Google isn't cutting it?).

This reminds me of that Bill Nguyen article, where he revealed he had never even used Facebook until recently, claiming he doesn't keep up with tech. If you're a startup founder, you can't afford to be uninformed about your competition and the industry. The answer is not reading less, but reading smarter. I don't know what the solution is, but it sure isn't limiting my consumption to 1 or 2 articles.

You actually treats the social shame as small piece into this huge puzzle, but it's wrong.

Almost everything we do in adult life is to make social life easier. We go to college, learn new language, we read news, we buy things. All this has an small practical value but huge social impact. Knowing what's going on the news is a HUGE part of our relationship with others.

Hmmm, some of the ideas to get rid of noise could be: 1. to have some good, fun books that you can pick and read (not a laptop book) when you need a break. 2. to have some real sport / game thing going - could be as simple as a table tennis game or a brisk walk. 3. to have a musical instrument around (of course you should know how to use it).

More ideas?

I've had quite a few e-mails expressing similar thoughts in regards to programming news and my e-mail newsletters. Some people are getting sick of the trawl around Reddit, HN, Twitter, and the various sites, and instead prefer a curated, once weekly e-mail. It's not for everyone, of course, but it seems some people love trimming back!

Like everything, it's all about moderation. It's very useful to have something to say in social and work situations.

Spending 10-minutes a week reading pop culture or sports news, or keeping up on what concerts, events etc are coming to your area payoff huge in meeting new friends, dating, building relationships at work and so forth.

Nothing is frivolous except excess.

I've found a great way reduce the amount of news and media that you consume is to travel.

Travel forces you to be offline most the time. You don't watch tv or see "news" much at all. After a while you don't even miss it and actually prefer life without it.

At least that;s what I've been doing for the last three years. Works pretty well.

Borges once commented that newspapers should be printed once in 100 years, and should only have articles about the "real" news like "Christopfer Columbus disovered America". I couldn't agree more, but still I read them every day and always with a feeling that I'm about to discover something new :).

I've been thinking about this issue for a while now. The term I like for what we are experiencing is "information obesity" (and I've written about it here: http://andrewoneverything.com/information-obesity )

I agree that the so-called "news" is entertainment, but being completely uninformed about current events will make you non-discerning in addition to more productive. Perhaps it would be better to consume better information as opposed to less information.

I had this same insight about a year ago, and while I didn't completely remove all my news, I made a point of reducing my RSS feed count to under 100 (it had been over 600.) I was indeed more productive, yet found myself missing knowing what, say, the latest Apple rumors were. But, it also didn't matter what the latest Apple rumors were. (Such rumors were wrong most of the time anyway..)

But I didn't write this comment just to agree with the OP. I wanted to add..

<i>Say that you somehow didn’t know we found and killed Osama Bin Laden last year, I claim that your life would be virtually the same if you did.</i>

That is probably true, but let me add something that takes even more of people's (or at the typical american male's) thought capacity and the knowledge of it is DEFINITELY meaningless: The fact that the Giants won the Super Bowl two weeks ago.

With the disclaimer that I am formerly a pretty big sports fan, it astounds me how much detail people know about pro sports. They can talk endlessly, for hours. The amount of time they spend just attaining that knowledge each season - it's gotta be comparable to the amount of time it takes to learn and become proficient in a new programming language. It's the same amount of time to perhaps take and do all the work for not one but several MIT/Stanford online learning courses. It's the same amount of time that, devoted to exercise, would transform an overweight person into shape. Every year! Yet they spend that time watching and reading about the NFL.. - and to what end? So they can be knowledgeable enough about the second-string tight end on the Packers that they can have a locker-room conversation about it?

Of course, the same can be said about entertainment in general - indeed, the OP's point was that news, while claiming to be important, is just entertainment. And while I didn't watch any news or football games this year, I'd be a hypocrite not to point out that I did watch a lot of Star Trek with my son. The consequence of this became clear to me this week - we punished him this week for something he did by disallowing all screens - which meant the TV didn't go on all week (and my wife and I didn't watch TV either.) Without thinking about it, by the end of the week I had come up with an idea and was hacking away at a whole new side-project. I haven't done that in a long time. Feels good. Any my son? He's reading. Got into a whole new series of books he found at the library and has set himself a goal to read every one of them.

tl;dr: if news is a waste of time, what about sports and other idle entertainment?

I tend to agree but offer this quote from CNBC / Becky Quick:

"Buffett generally reads five newspapers a day -- the Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, USA Today and the Omaha World-Herald. Make that six -- he reads the American Banker every day too."

“Hey my name's Roshan, I'm the Cofounder and CTO of Bloc.”

You got a high ranking hacker news story. I visited http://www.trybloc.com/ just now as a result of your story.

I am wondering what it is. The page didn't tell me.

The image in this post was stolen from "Rejected" - a short animated film by Don Hertzfeldt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJYxCSXjhLI#t=4m45s

I can't tell you how many times I've explained this to friends. You hit this spot on. Catchy title too, I clicked it probably as a result :)

The fact that I read your post means I've lost 50% of my daily news quota. Damn.

Good advice nonetheless.

I think this is the very definition of "ignorance is bliss".

Let me see... At first I agreed, then I said no. Even last week, I was lamenting my 14 hour days on HN[1][2]. If I think only for that day, I lost that day, but if I think over my time here, I'm net positive.

What I was failing to realize was I had the ability, just not the opportunity. Your ability can only be exercise only at max. 8 hrs if you have a job, and for the most parts it plateaus out, ie your first 100 hrs of programming provides more benefit than your second and so on[but not a excuse not to practice, I leave for another comment]. Your first hour of observing opportunity is good as your 10000th.

The thing about opportunities is that they don't appear to have any meaning at first, only when you go back and connect the dots. For instance, someone ask me how my resume looks so good. I would say I was helping a friend with their programming assignment who introduced me to their flat mate. Said flat mate studied philosophy. I knew a little because I hanged with a guy[while doing my undergrad] who had multiple degrees and he used to talk about guys like Hume and so on. Based on that commonality, we became friends. And what do you know, she was an expert at doing resumes, and helped me finish mines in no time flat.

I know it just a resume, but other bigger gains follow the same pattern. You only notice them in retrospect. Each time, I think I was goofing off, helping people out with their assignments, sitting with some guy talking philosophy and so on.

Sometimes, I see people and they ask for help. Why am I so different than them. They think I'm working with a bigger brain. I tell them you need to relax; get your head out of the book. It's non-intuitive. They tend to respond with you don't need to study, you have an in built advantage since birth. But, really is that the truth? If you get your head out of the book, you start doing things you want to do. You become curious, a positive pulling emotion.

You guys know how it's done. You find something new and interesting on HN, you research it. Then you find something from that new and interesting, and you research it. By the time you would have finished, you would have covered something you needed to study for, all the while remaining curious and looking particularly like a lazy bum. The other way around, things are a drag.

You add on that, the community has common themes coming through[eg. meditation, stoicism]. Raise your hand if you read "A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy." through solid recommendations on HN. And by God, it was a good book. It provides a perspective on life most would never get. With these common themes you can connect with members here, who might not be able to help you directly but indirectly opportunities might come their way that they might not be able to exploit and pass them onto you.

Also, it is not only about taking. It is about giving. How many times have you read a comment that refined your perspective or perhaps you gave an insight. What about when people ask for help on HN. Even if you just gave an up click, that is a massive contribution if you did it in the first few minutes of a post. If you think hard enough you will know these up clicks save/change lives.

What I'm basically saying drinking from the firehose can seem like a waste of time, but over the long hall it works out. Working on your ability alone means that you are trying to create an opportunity, and in a weeks period you can only create one opportunity if you work really hard, and it might not pan out. On the other hand, reading one hour of HN provides you with hundreds of opportunity, most you will not explore, but still you know they are there and can share with friends who can thus building strong relationships.

For instance, you heard it mentioned that one of the ways to create value is to see what opportunities can be exploit from delivering old technology in a knew way. Before, publishing use to take longer. Now, it is short with kindle, people can exploit that. Instead of giving their book one title they can create the same book with different titles and layouts[is this against Amazon policy], maybe even different content to match a different audience to scope a bigger payout. They can now use stuff like A/B testing[looking at paraschopra.] You see what I just did there.

It's either that or you need to tell me Chester go finish up my weekend project and stop procrastinating. But my thoughts are I'm winning so far for the most parts, and I never change a winning team. We observe it in basketball, there is this one guy who doesn't seem to contribute anything, but you are winning and when he is not there you are not winning[HN/News is that one guy]. Some smartass might look at it and say we can do better; lets cut this loser out, he is not contributing, then you start losing. You got too smart for your own good, never change a winner. Some things might be so complicated that you don't even know what is contributing to your success.

If you are on HN, and everything is going fine for the most part, don't change it, don't lose your competitive edge you lazy bastard.[Sorry if I sound incoherent]

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/chegra/status/168805385447284736

[2] https://twitter.com/#!/chegra/status/168805177523048448

I've been there, over consumed, then shut everything out for a while. The truth is, the author still has a bit to learn, I think. Seems like he went through a phase and is now on the complete opposite end of the spectrum he was once on. It's definitely a good idea not to get so engrossed by all the noise but I've actually gained a lot by reading news. I've tried and learned things I wouldn't have had I not chose to read a bit of news each morning. The real trick is to find balance in your life. The ancient Greeks had it right: life is all about balance. Going too far in one direction or the other is never good.

So I must disagree with this post. The trick is to strike a healthy balance between consumption and creation, not to cut one or the other out almost completely.

"What followed were three of the most productive years of my life."

Well, normally college years are the most productive years of anyone's life up to that point. If they're not you're doing it wrong.

Plus, if all you used RSS for is to keep up with "Bush's latest folly", then of course you'll be more productive giving it up.

I would add that the media's job isn't only to entertain you, it's also to keep you worried. Read/watch the news, and ask yourself "what are they trying to make me worry about today?" You'll be surprised.

Osama who?