VladimirGolovin

Awe. It happens very, very rarely, but when it does, it's unforgettable. For me, it happened when I was learning Haskell.

(As for the Lisp enlightenment, I havent yet learned Lisp deep enough to feel it, and maybe I'll never will; but I certainly appreciate Lisp's "idea efficiency". It's amazing how much Lisps can do with basically a single piece of syntax).

Heroin is already way past a reputational point of no return, but people are still using it.

Also learned the same thing in my late 40s. It is surprising how many days that I would previously deem as useless (hangover, tiredness, "not in the mood", other "reasons") turn out to be really productive. All I needed is to disregard the internal excuses and start doing.

Alliteration makes the names more catchy.

I did a complete 180 on my approach to personal productivity, and that change is similar to the transition from Productivity 2.0 to 3.0, as described in the article.

Before that U-turn I kept everything in my to-do list and had lots of recurring tasks. However, after several years I realized that I've become a slave to chores -- a very conscientious, diligent slave who has no time or mindspace for projects that really matter to me.

Nowadays, I use an opposite approach -- I don't keep a "general" to-do list at all, and I do chores only when they become really obnoxious. I do, however, keep a Zettelkasten with a dozen projects in it, and several stream-of-consciousness journals for ongoing projects.

Not the GP, but what works for me is taking long, low-effort hikes around a small resort town in the mountains.

I absolutely do that, and I noticed that I do it to compensate for 'autonomy deficit', as I dubbed it.

When my day was dictated by external demands, I play PC games in the evening, because they provide the illusion of autonomy and control, and because "I'm doing what I want to do" and having "me time" which I was lacking during the day.

In Russian, it’s the same word, transliterated as “баг". And the same is true for “feature”: it’s also transliterated directly to “фича".

You never finish a to-do list. They are endless. You will always have stuff to do, and it literally never ends. My solution is to be at peace with the fact that it's endless and I'll never be able to stop and say, "that's it, I've completed my to-do list."

My maximum is about 8 hours for a creative / cognitive task, but that requires pushing / forcing yourself on a level comparable with Apollo Creed's training montage.

As for now, the development is paused. Currently the only way to "sync" is to export the database on one device, and import it on another.

We're looking for ways of implementing a proper sync though. Synching is not an easy problem, especially between different platforms. For example, Obsidian, who recently released a mobile app, states that "Currently, there is no known support for the following sync services on iOS yet: Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Syncthing" (https://help.obsidian.md/Obsidian/iOS+app). iCloud Drive seems to be a viable option, but I'm not sure it will work on Android.

Founder here. 6 years ago, in 2015, we set out to build Matterlist (https://matterlist.com/), a to-do list app to replace Wunderlist (and Astrid, if anyone still remembers it). Here’s my old HN comment about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=VladimirGolovin&next.... We formed a team (self-funded out of my pocket, no venture capital), built the mobile versions, released them -- and failed to get any adoption.

To cut our costs, we’re releasing Matterlist as a fully free app (no up-front price, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases) with local-only data storage -- Matterlist now stores data on your device only, and you can export and import the database for manual backup.

The updated mobile app is now available for both iOS and Android. Unfortunately, the desktop / web version didn’t make it, and currently there are no plans to release it, so Matterlist will remain a mobile-only app.

If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer.

I noticed the increased frequency of mentions, but who is pushing?

115 soviet rubles is approximately what my mother and father, both engineers, received as a monthly wage. Their wage was 120 rubles per month.

So if I wanted to buy an MK-52, that would mean that our family income would be halved for a full month.

https://www.sonantic.io/ voices which Obsidian used in The Outer Worlds sound pretty decent to me. I wonder, would that be affordable in a small indie project?

Workflowy is fantastic for keeping project journals, which are my form of incremental note taking. It's great at "behaving like memory" and documenting "a story of how I arrived at the ideas".

Currently, however, I'm drifting away from the journal format to a Zettelkasten, which I keep in Obsidian, a plain-text / markdown desktop app. I guess I could keep my Zettelkasten in Workflowy, but I rather like the dedicated desktop app approach for it.

To borrow a definition from Andrei Konchalovsky, art is that which imparts feelings. If a game does that, it's art. Many "gamey" games don't, and this is perfectly fine.

Consider two games, Inside (a great art game) and Overwatch (a great "gamey" game). Inside is much less rich in terms of gameplay, but (in my subjective opinion) does much more with feelings. Overwatch, on the other hand, is enormously, ridiculously rich in terms of gameplay, but when you're actually playing it (as opposed to viewing the art), it's more of a dopamine binge.

I've been there a couple of times. I haven't found a cure, but I do have some bits of advice that might help:

1. A student once asked his teacher, "Master, what is enlightenment?" The master replied, "When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.". Maybe you're still hungry or tired?

2. Richard Feynnam and his spinning plates story deals specifically with his burnout: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2291773

3. Refill your creative tanks. Expose yourself to experiences -- e.g. take a hike in scenic nature, or maybe travel to Rome for a week (edit: haha, not so easy these days!). Re-read books and listen to music that worked for you when you were younger. Some experiences won't resonate with you, but some might -- and that's why you're doing this.

4. Some passions / hobbies / occupations burn out for good. Don't be sad about that. I had it myself, and I have a friend who changed his career completely after a burnout.

As someone who has been designing stuff in native file-based apps for 30 years, I consider Figma a godsend -- because of their collaboration / multiplayer features. And I don't miss files at all, though of course I understand that I do not control my data stored in Figma.

My pet armchair theory: that's because nuclear power requires humans to be consistently superhuman (smart, precise, meticulous, thinking ahead). Solar, wind, oil and gas don't -- a normal human can run all these things perfectly fine.

The article talks mostly about lighter-hearted movies, but I'd still want to recommend my favorite examples of "burdensome beauty" (as they put it) by Tarkovsky:

"Зеркало" (The Mirror): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYZhXm02kN0

"Сталкер" (Stalker): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGRDYpCmMcM

"Андрей Рублев" (Andrei Rublev): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6kqlveBhVY

And, if you're into Slavic cinema in general, I'd also recommend "Life is a Miracle" by Emir Kusturica: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322420/ -- he's not a Russian director, but he is fantastic.

Takeout is NOT great, at least in my case. I never once managed to fully download my photo archive, despite my repeated attempts. I gave up, so my current "strategy" for keeping my photos safe is "Never ever do anything that might make Google algorithms think that I'm violating their ToS".

Interesting. One of the blurbs got my attention:

"Brilliant....It works the brain in a way that is nothing short of exhilarating." ― Richard Dawkins.

A quote from the article: "Network-attached storage (NAS) devices hold several large hard drives and quietly do their work safely storing your files. You can keep using your favorite OS, but you don’t have to worry about bit rot anymore."

How exactly does a NAS protect data from bit rot? Data scrubbing?

I’m also in my late forties. I did learn myself some Haskell, and it was literally mind-blowing. The last time I had so much fun learning a language was in my late teens when I was learning class hierarchies in OOP.

Russian here. Guys at my company still use Far (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager) as their primary file manager, and I'm not aware of any people other than us Russians who are still using Norton-like file managers in their day-to-day work.

BTW, does anyone know why there are so many good Depeche Mode / Dave Gahan remixes? Does the band specifically encourage remixing by providing samples, voice records etc.?

This is exactly why I love airports and flying -- and I always buy the window seat too.

The Man in the Hole structure is essentially Joseph Campbell's hero cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey

"A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man."

Have you seen the recent launch? A ship the size of the Soyuz rocket, built literally in a shed in the desert, which flies to 25km, turns off the engines, glides to the landing site -- then performs a 90-degree turn, in the air, in a second.

How is that a 'hype machine'?