1,235 karma · joined September 26, 2009
I blog about software, startups, and running at https://www.davidtran.me
Most of the studies I've seen on improvements in blood plasma volume from passive heat are usually done with sessions in saunas with temperatures > 150 degrees F (60 C). Steam rooms usually only get up to 120F (~49C) even though the humidity probably makes it feel warmer.
Copying and pasting some of my reply to another comment above
I actually dug up a video from a class project when I was 20 and created a voice clone in ElevenLabs (and also gave it current voice samples with prompts to make it sound younger), but hearing it didn’t add anything to my introspective experience, so I stopped before creating a video clone in Tavus/HeyGen/Simli to do a call via Pipecat/Daily.
Didn't quite hit the criteria for 100 points, so didn't submit a PR (just have a single submission with 69 points: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=davidtran.me)
Signed up and waiting on a video :)
Edit: here's a 58s explainer video for the concept of body doubling: https://video.golpoai.com/share/448557cc-cf06-4cad-9fb2-f56b...
What I'm curious about is whether we also get specifically good at say, task-switching between a code editor and say, Stack Overflow, over time
I've been trying to eliminate multi-tasking as much as I can, but the nature of startups day-to-day and even what seems like a single/monotask when zoomed out now often involves context switching (For say, investigating and fixing a user-reported bug, I might have to toggle between VSCode, localhost in browser + the DOM inspector or console, our bug tracker, our support ticketing tool, Slack, and sometimes the Cody window in VS Code/ChatGPT/Claude:
RT in pure trials: 448ms
RT in mixed trials: 710ms
Mixing cost: 262ms
RT in task-repeat trials (in mixed blocks): 710ms
RT in task-switching trials (in mixed blocks): 975ms
Task-switch cost: 265msRegarding mobile phones going to sleep, Wake lock [1] might help, unless you can reduce to 59s since I believe 1m is the threshold (make sure to request within the context of the user hitting "start"). Unfortunately on older mobile browsers [2], the best workaround I found was using this NoSleep library[3].
Source: ran into this same issue when building https://www.phonefreehour.com
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WakeLock
In the early days of what is now Flow Club, my co-founder and I had built several apps to try to help us stay in touch with busy 30+-year-old friends. It was tough to get any friends to even install the apps we made on Testflight, much less use them. They were busy with work or family (and the apps just weren't compelling enough).
We started asking friends to come work together on Zoom (during the pandemic) like we used to do at coffee shops. We wanted to add some structure to these, so we made them 1-hour co-working sprints with a screen-shared pomodoro clock and agenda (5 minutes to share goals, 50 minutes of working, 5 minutes to check in), sent out the Zoom links to friends, and then started pre-committing to times at the beginning of each week and sending that out to an email list. Within a month, we had hosted a couple hundred of these sessions between the two of us and couldn't keep up with the demand or requests for more times of day as it spread to friends of friends. When an early user who we didn't know IRL and then my partner each separately asked if they could also host sessions, we were blown away. We didn't think anyone else would want to volunteer to host. Then when we realized both of them were actually better "hosts" than we were, a lightbulb came on for us that we could stop doing the unscalable thing we had been doing and build for hosts.
Since going back to being primarily a maker after organizing my days around being a manager[1], and being an avid runner, I've redefined my relationship with "motivation" in a way that can be summed up succinctly by author Brad Stulberg: "You don't need to feel good to get going. You need to get going to feel good." I know that I am long-term very motivated, but day to day or hour to hour, "motivation" is a tricky word, because my energy and creativity waxes/wanes.
Agree with the author that structure is the most important thing for me to work around this. Even though makers dream of an open schedule, on the days where I'm off my usual routine, it's really tough to prioritize all the many things always on my plate. It's even tougher trying to decide to peel myself away from work to go for a run that I know will help me focus better after. Making the decision can be emotionally and mentally taxing, whereas if I rely on the default that I just go out for a run as soon as I wake up, the rest of the day just flows from that without the decision fatigue. Time-blocking or even just very simple structure like the OP has has been really effective for me. This includes a hard stop time each day even if it feels like I'm on a roll— my younger self would often borrow against my future energy, and that seemed to rarely work out in the medium-to-long term.
> This is combined with a lack of co-workers. Comrades in the trenches, if you will. And finally there's the ability to not do anything, which can be quite nebulous and dangerous if not managed.
For anyone who is a solo-creator struggling with this, "body-doubling" is a term from the ADHD/neurodivergent community that simply means "doing a task in the presence of another person". Surprisingly, they don't have to be working on the same task to help you feel like you have "comrades in the trenches". If you're interested, check out Flow Club in my bio.
I've started leaving my phone in a different room, using it as a continuity camera, or literally tossing it on my chair or bed before sitting down to work, but inevitably I'll need it for 2FA via Google Authenticator— maybe it's time to move 2FA to another device, and once it's on my desk, it often gets picked up out of habit.
On browsers that support it (iOS 16.4+, most versions of Android Chrome), it uses the Screen Wake Lock API [3] to keep the page open, and falls back to nosleep.js [4] otherwise. From testing on my iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 16.6, battery life only went down 3 or 4 percentage points after an hour with the wake lock.
Made this as a web app as a quick demo to be compatible across all mobile devices. As an app, we can probably save more on battery + not have the screen on. One caveat is that on iOS this will actually increase your Screen Time (although hopefully reduce your other category usage). I currently only track time on page through Google Analytics 4. No other calls are made to a server, although if we actually wanted to verify that you kept the page open vs. javascript/inspector-system clock-fu, we could add a verified mode that pings the server every X minutes. As a PWA, possibly due to an iOS/Mobile Safari quirk, neither wake lock nor nosleep.js appear to work .
[1] https://www.asurion.com/connect/news/tech-usage/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2124106 [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen_Wake... [4] https://github.com/richtr/NoSleep.js
I believe we originally got the idea for a paid workweek trial from David Rusenko of Weebly. I know it doesn't always work logistically, but when it does, we believe it gives a much better signal for both the company and candidate in terms of what it'd be like to work together. Plus, it's fun to actually launch it if it's useful to people!
For #2, the exercises that seemed to help me the most were the various towel stretches, rolling with a lacrosse ball, and doing a lot of calf raises. I even briefly went to a few barre classes on a friends' recommendation, which was kind of fun (and very humbling), but probably helped because we did tons of calf raises with what I thought were tiny weights, but was super challenging.