lurker137

“There are studies showing that, for example, it is really hard to get dementia when you are a university professor, and the reason is not that these people are smarter – it’s that until old age, they are habitually engaged in tasks that are very mentally demanding.”

That’s an interesting point. I wonder if that applies to any knowledge work in general. As a developer I do feel that I engage my memory pretty often but I’m not sure it counts as a wholistic exercise including spatial memory, recalling events, reasoning, etc.

Don’t forget to drink enough water

There is this surprisingly effective feature on a browser extension called Leech Block where you can add a short delay (like 15 seconds) before the distracting sites load. It basically forces you to go through the process you mentioned. That small extra friction is enough to break the habit of randomly visiting those sites.

For anyone who is hesitant to spend time learning the git cli like I was, just spend an hour on this interactive tutorial [1] and I guarantee you all of these solutions would have come to you easy

https://learngitbranching.js.org/

The closest I know of are https://hackaday.io/ and https://osf.io/

Since I started working remote, I don’t feel as tired after work as I used to. It’s not just the prep/commute, I always felt there was this baseline mental overhead from working and attending meetings in an office compared to at home. I also feel more comfortable to take short breaks and move around. It only takes me ~2 hours to recover after work and get to my own projects.

Thanks for this, I'll have to try it first but this looks like exactly what I hoped for (it's a shame that it is only for .NET and Visual Studio though)

The thing with profiling tools is that they're more focused on the details than the big picture at the system level. I'll definitely be using flame graphs more though, thanks for the tip. Also you are absolutely right about waiting for others to make the tools, but sometimes the tools don't exist for a good reason that I wouldn't have realized otherwise.

I've since been convinced that what I had in mind initially (generating a bunch of static diagrams with each build) is not very useful. Your site comes closer to what I think would be the better solution, an interactive diagram, but at the level of classes/functions and their interactions instead of files/folders. Your project looks great for exploring a Github repository though.

That tool from Microsoft comes closest to what I think would be ideal, generated diagrams that aren't static and where you can include/exclude and move around components. It would definitely have to be language specific, but once things catch on IDEs implement language specific plugins soon after.

I'm starting to see all the problems with static diagram creation. I still think there can be more work in this area, maybe a full dynamic solution separate from the IDE that just helps you navigate the maze and make your own diagrams. With all the work that's been going into making developers' lives easier surely someone could focus on the exploring codebase part.

That's a great point, I doubt there can be one single modeling solution for all systems. I imagine a modern tool would be more like a suite with many options for common use cases. And it would be essential to be able to narrow down on specific subsystems maybe using something like a gitignore file

It's more the layers of wrappers around the black box I have trouble with. Maybe it's just a Java problem

Seems like someone asked the same question just 3 days ago. Here is the discussion if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31569646

Here is a list of indie browser games you can search through: https://itch.io/games/platform-web

A persistent sandbox like mmo world with full 3D physics, maybe with low poly graphics. The game is based on free form crafting (like in a CAD modeler) with no preset items at all. Is that too much to ask?

Unix: A History and a Memoir By Brian Kernighan

Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré

Reading about the personalities of mathematics really widened my perspective of the motivations behind the math and the wide range of people involved in pushing it forward. It’s what inspired me to learn math for fun in my free time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_of_Mathematics

It sounds like a HN discord server would fit your needs. Maybe you could start one

Zotero is specifically built for this

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield

It's written in the same concise format as The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and it's just as dense with insights. I would encourage anyone to spend just 5 min reading the first few pages of Book Two here: https://aimeeknight.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/the-war-of-a...

Ban Reddit and Youtube, then spend the dead time in boredom thinking of what you want to do instead.

Try working backwards. If there are specific things you want to learn in those fields, work out what their dependencies are and focus on those. It would be best to have baseline level of understanding on the fundamentals though.

The new

If you want to learn embedded systems at a lower level than arduino, I would highly recommend this book:

https://leanpub.com/mastering-stm32

My biggest pitfalls were reddit and yt. I couldn’t outright ban them since they’re also a source of enrichment. The simple solution that finally worked for me was using extensions to hide everything I didn’t go there for. By that I mean, all yt recommendations and the reddit main page.

1. Yes and it’s quite useful. I use [1] to categorize it automatically. It helps to get a sense what I really spend my time on. As for only measuring time online, I find that less useful

[1] https://activitywatch.net/

I don’t know how it would be implemented but I always thought it would have been better if there was more meaningful separation of domains, and that you need a different browser to connect to a different domain. That way the net could be divided. There could be a domain for only verified information. A domain for public use. A domain for only educational content, etc. I have no idea how it would be moderated though

I don't think there is a problem with monitoring his activities as long as you make sure to tell him so. It may seem obvious but not to my dad apparently

There is an option for 5000 snips per month for $5. If you annotate the pdf every time you convert to latex, it should be much cheaper