550 karma · joined April 17, 2014
I found this after pulling my hair out for 4 hours a month ago.
HN and QuantifiedSelfers find this as a niche site to record correlations and habits for self improvement.
https://betterself.io/ (Open sourced)
2. AdBlocker Extension
3. Modify your /etc/hosts to block a lot of malicious sites.
4. Signup for https://haveibeenpwned.com/
5. VPNs on all wifis not your own.
6. 2-factor wherever you can. But also a place where you can print out your backup 2-factor keys, since losing your phone happens.
7. Have a email for newsletters/spam/signup, another that you use for friends.
8. Use credit cards that can generate on-demand numbers. IE. Both Bank of America and Citi let you generate one time use credit card numbers with set limits.
9. Signup (one time) with your credit cards to warn you for sudden changes in your credit score (ie. to prevent someone opening a loan in your name).
There's probably a lot more that I forgot I do ... it's amazing how little people do here.
It proxies a lot of improvement to productivity and sleep, (which are somewhat flawed as metrics).
If there's certain types of learnings that I really appreciate --> I'll add it to Anki, but just a little snippet of Q/A.
Q - How should you view SSDs when scaling high traffic sites? A - "Think of SSDs as cheap memory, not expensive disk" - This was from an article from High Scalability about Reddit.
Site : https://betterself.io/ GitHub : https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself
Someone posted this quote a while back, and it stuck with me. "Think of your mind every morning as a clean desk, and every time you get distracted via social, game, etc, you put something on it. It then gets progressively harder to do work with a messier desk. The best way is to just always have a clean desk."
I logged habits and supplements for over a year. Things that were effective were having a lot of strong routines that pull you in the right direction.
So things that helped were
X) Have some type of metric you are measuring to. For me it was RescueTime and WakaTime. How productive was I for this week compared to last?
1A) Have your phone on DnD or Airplane Mode.
1) Start the day off with SelfControl app. Add the timer to lock out all disractions until X PM every day.
2) Use a cold shower to wake up
3) Meditate
4) Eat the same foods that won't make you groggy / crap. This sounds masochastic in some way, but it's much easier than it sounds once you get used to it. For instance, the same oatmeal for breakfast is a great way to set a routine.
5) Track what supplements and food you were taking that improved productivity.
6) Inversely, see what supplements or diets you might be taking that does the opposite.
7) Set up a sleep routine. Melatonin at 3mg is a sweet spot. Getting six hours of sleep every night is the perfect amount for me. Everyone varies. The point is don't take "one size fits all advice" for something so crucial to your life. Less than 5 and I was easily distracted. More than 7 and I was groggy. There's a lot of information about how to sleep better. The point is to find a way to maximize sleep quality ... six hours in a city is going to be very different from six hours of sleep in a quiet area.
8) I've tried a lot of supplements. The most effective ones on productivity were ones that helped me with anxiety (so the opposite of caffeine). I eliminated a lot that didn't do anything.
9) Have a track / music that you listen to that starts you in a groove. For instance, I have a EDM Mixtape that I've probably listened to over a thousand times this year. You'll find that a lot of high throughout writers do something similar. The music helps build a habit of "okay, it's time to do work now"
10) Find the right setting / environment that makes you productive. Face a wall. Accept the fact if you can't work from home, then don't.
11) Go for walks when you're bored. Admit to yourself when you're not being productive and you're just spinning your wheels.
12) Exercise. Missing gym workouts (even though it was like 1-2 hours) was a sharp drop in total productivity.
13) Pomodoros. Start with 25 minutes and keep on going up (I average hour long Pomodoros now). When you get distracted in a Pomodoro, have a note card called "Distractions" and write what you want to to do there. That way your mind can stop obsessing about "New Avengers Trailer" if it knows it's going to get there after the break.
When you first start with Pomodoros, have a notebook of how many Pomodoros you did. Make it a goal to do just five pomodoros a day. You'll be impressed how hard that is initially.
14) No lying to yourself. Everytime I've said "this time is different for a YouTube video about anything mildy interesting", I've regretted it.
15) Plan for a social night at least once a week. You do need some rest. Self flagellation about not having earned it is almost a recipe of more anxiety and procrastination. (I'm not great at following this yet)
16) Have a deadline to finish something.
To give some backdrop, this has made me really productive throughout the last year without burning out. I've worked 60+ hours before at startups and just BURNED out, whereas now I can definitely push that easily without hitting that same wall. I integrated all these habits one by one when I was certain through quantitive evidence it was working.
Can't say much about helping social life though. This definitely takes a hit when you try to maximize productivity and flow at the expense of social life.
I'm not sure what it is - certain personalities are just so easily addicted to video games. I'm one of them, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I find myself so easily addicted that I'm sometimes worried that I'll fall back into a video gaming binge. Every now and then, I'll mentally trick myself into thinking I have enough willpower to play just "one" game and I'll get the craving out. Nope. It's always six hours later and I'm late for whatever I had planned for the rest of the day. More frequently than not, the next day I'll trick myself again into one "last" game. I'll blow through another six-eight hours that'll feel like minutes. Day 2 is normally when I have enough angst to uninstall and purge the game. I'm older now (29) so I'm better at realizing the mental tricks of the "one" game fallacy, but even this weekend I played six-seven hours straight of Starcraft 2. (The mental justification was I was "thinking" about AI/ML strategies to play SC2, sigh.)
I'm averaging about six-seven months between each relapse, so it's not like I have some absurd problem - but back in college, I could easily spend a week of non-stop playing some forgettable RTS, sleep, drink and then repeat. There's some pang of sadness as I wish I had done something a little more useful, but in hindsight a lot of those failures made me realize how bad video games were to my personality.
I do this similarly but with supplements and medication. I track a lot of my supplements that boost productivity and sleep and disregard anything that's negative. I've been continuing this over the course of a year.
I haven't added anything like a RNN to it for recommendations though. Some fears about missing up the gradient descent component scare me :)
Site - https://betterself.io Open sourced - https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself
If your defaults are currently on "Legacy", empirically we saw 10-30% speedup by switching to "KVM".
One of our loved features was the Screener - we modeled to make it as easy-to-use with setting your own custom metrics and really good timeseries information.
It's cheaper than FactSet and Bloomberg, and you can try a free trial from the site pretty easily.
http://factoryboy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://github.com/vandersonmota/model_mommy
If you think of a blender, the healthiest person might use it twice a day. At a restaurant, a blender has to last being used all day for a few months.
So it's why a lot of teams will use either Vagrant / Docker to setup local developer environments.
However, you do get the "diamonds in the rough" who go the extra mile and do the research to find the right groups to relate to though.
I created https://betterself.io/, open-sourced at https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself, but the gist of it was -- how do I find out what supplements are really just the placebo effect versus having a strong correlation (positive or negative) on my productivity/sleep?
Aggregating data across either 7/14 periods removed a lot of noise and let me improve on the supplements I was already buying (and let me dump out a lot).
Some of the supplements choices are a bit on the edgier side, so I'd recommend looking at places like Reddit and Examine prior to trying them. Speaking from my prior experience, a stack (nerd term for collection of supplements) that works anecdotally for one person rarely works for anyone else.
Disclaimer: I also commented this on the HackerNoon article, but I created an open-source / free project for those interested in tracking supplement and activities and how they impact sleep and productivity.
https://betterself.io Examples : https://imgur.com/a/jXyhJ
The writer brings up meditation, which is something I observed also from tracking it - https://imgur.com/a/l377Y. Meditation has made one of the biggest impacts on my life, but it took me forever to sit down and finally make it a habit. I meditate close to an hour to the start of most days.
1. Zero. The goal is to maybe do it but provide a recommendation engine based off of X class of medicine/supplements have worked for you, and you fall into a bucket of Y people that respond to X, then recommend based off of that. (So simple machine learning clustering). I'm not going into that until I hit a minimum of a certain threshold of users (which maybe never, not willing to compromise). I care much more about information leakage and making sure that IF I do this, it's incredibly well-thought out. The last thing I want to recommend is microdosing/modafinil/research chemicals just because X% of users are using it. Nothing against them, just safety and privacy are always going to come before cool features. I've given a bit of thought into this, and I could write for pages on what a proper analytics engine should look like. I'll spare you the snore :)
2. YES. I haven't made the iOS or Android app yet. (but React was specifically chosen for this reason). Right now it's super mobile friendly for entering in data. I use it on my tablet and phone about 30-40 times a day. Yeah. I try a lot of supplements ... It's a weird thing. For charts and stuff, it's mediocre for mobile.
3. Yes! FitBit integration is done and works really well with sleep data. Next on the vendor list is Garmin. The problem with HealthKit is the SDK isn't as export-friendly (I understand why Apple is paranoid), so it's harder for me to move data from there, into the analytics engine and back.
4. Don't have a definite answer just yet. It actually will come in the next few months, but at the time being - people are coming in generally knowing exactly what they're taking. I'd also like something that just goes HEY, WHAT YOU'RE TAKING INTERFERES WITH Y! I also want to bring in decay effects, ie. if you start consuming caffeine at this hour and showing decay effects.
There's a lot here that I'm super passionate about, but work's been super crazy so it's all a balancing act of what do I add.
Sorry for the GitHub link changing, but before it was right at the bottom (where it now says demo), but when I showed it to a friend he was like "you understand that everyone thinks that's the signup button is 100% of the time right?" So I had a lot of people clicking on the page, clicking onto GitHub and then disappearing.
Love the questions!
https://betterself.io/ - I'd love feedback!
I too also found Magnesium to be really helpful. But taking it with food made it much more effective.
I wrote https://betterself.io/ in response to this (but I've been a little intimidated to put this on HN since it doesn't do at least five more features (it's always five more ...) before the critics rip it to shreds.
Write {{c1::$PATH}} on separate lines: "{{c2::echo}} {{c3::$PATH}} | tr ':' '\n'"
The card above will be 3 separate cards, but takes only about 10-20% more time than creating regular cards.
For a job like president, the circumstances are almost always ongoing a crisis or political anomaly. I imagine re-elected incumbents also had to face exceptional political circumstances, just were able to navigate through them with luck and skill.