supersrdjan

Word. I learned Orthic recently. It's easy to pick up, unlike the other system (at least that's my impression after a day of investigating)

I agree. I think it comes from school and parents instilling the notion that reading books is virtuous. The idea of being "well-read"

I used to keep a list like this (more modest though) but I stopped once I realized it's demeaning both to me and the books.

The problem was that the list had no other purpose except as a kind of trophy case. I felt proud about my list, as if finishing a book is an achievement, as if reading is a sport, as if reading a lot makes you better than those who read less. I was disgusted by my own vanity, and moreover, considered it as proof that I haven't really improved my character from all that reading.

Now I stopped maintaining a list and I stopped keeping a mental account of how many pages or books I read.

The result is that, though I rarely finish any book I pick up, I probably spend more time in total reading, and I learn way more because I don't hesitate spending a lot of time appreciating or grappling with, say, a single paragraph of text.

#itsnotarace

(BTW I don't want to imply that this is true for everybody. And I mean if your list has notes that's totally different)

I had read it only once but since then I frequently recall episodes from it more so than from any other novel I read

I came in to write exactly what you wrote. +1

Authors of the excellent "Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose," Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, have this to say about Elements of Style:

Strunk and White’s disarming treatment of what everybody really needs to know about writing has been treasured by genera￾tions of people who are occasionally forced to write something and view the prospect with a sinking feeling of dread. As a guide to writing, The Elements of Style, being little more than an apparently arbitrary mixture of grammatical digest, handy list of common mistakes, and expert hand-holding, is drastically incomplete, but it is a masterpiece of psychological insight. Its attractions derive, we suspect, first, from its implicit, cheery, and optimistic promise that if you just read its few pages and work those few surface tricks it teaches you (“In summaries, keep to one tense,” “less should not be used for fewer”), you will not embarrass yourself; second, from its exhortatory cheerleading that seems so assured and upbeat; and third, from its tone of common sense that masks, at key points, an essential vacuousness: “Choose a suitable design and hold to it.”

Edit: oh and by the way, the two authors recommend this as a better alternative (I haven't read it): Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, by Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb

One sentence per line can paralyze your writing. It invites you to over-scrutinize each line and lose sight of the whole. It's a view that's better suited for analysis than synthesis. So it's better for editing than composing.

Combining #7 and #5 leads to:

Often write the first sentence of a paragraph last, after you know what is the paragraph's main point.

huh... sorry, I don't know how to use hacker news to show you what I mean... it keeps squishing my lines.

Oh, even hackernews ignores single line breaks. I wrote this coment like this:

``` Pandoc ignores single line breaks when exporting pandoc. So all of this would be treated as a single sentence [sic, I wanted to write "line"]. ```

Pandoc ignores single line breaks when exporting markdown. So all of this would be treated as a single sentence.

But an empty space in between indicates a new paragraph.

If for some reason you require to have separate lines, perhaps when enumerating something, you can leave two trailing spaces after the line, that preserves the break.

Interesting take. On hackernews I also learned about an approach called "ventilated prose" or writing with "semantic line breaks." That is, when you write, say in vim or emacs, you put one clause per line. Then when you are done, you can use pandoc or something similar to convert what you wrote into standard prose. But the artificial line breaks, which results in thin lines, make it easier to edit, and also easier to comprehend diffs if you use git to track changes.

Can someone here give me guidance on neutering? Seems to me like such an abhorrent act. But experienced dog owners tell me that not doing it would be a disservice to the dog. Please discuss.

Wow. That's an uncharitable interpretation. The way I see it it's just a guy sharing his ideas on his personal website while making it clear that the ideas are not to be taken as scientific claims.

The author, by the way, has a separate explanation about why he promotes pseudoscience: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_Guru_promotes_pseudosc...

What is Adda? How is it different from people discussing about a topic? I don't understand from this article, but it sounds like something I'd like to know more about.

Ah yes I am a cyclist and I approve this message. Reminds me of this saying from an Indian monk:

Where would I find enough leather To cover the entire surface of the earth? But with leather soles beneath my feet,It’s as if the whole world has been covered.

Just replace leather soles with sufficiently wide rubber tires

Actually advertising works best when it exploits the needs and desires you already feel. The farther away it gets from those, the more expensive it gets. That said, ever since the sixties it does sell things based on people's need to project their status and image, as a way of defining oneself to the outside world. People buy things for what the thing does, plus what owning and using the thing says about your personality. And people seem to be prone to accept these symbolic identifications less critically then they do performance claims about what the product does. Bob Dylan said it best:

  Advertising signs that con you\
  Into thinking you're the one\
  That can do what's never been done\
  That can win what's never been won\
  Meantime life outside goes on
  All around you

But umm, I don't think it's always a bad thing. Or rather, it's not bad by default.

What are your most frequently recurring points of criticism and what type of ads you find elicit the least criticism?

Yup. Particularly the part where the sculptor modeled one of the minis after a lego prototype constructed by the son.

Prototype: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomarLego.j...

Sculpt: https://www.radgostforest.com/images/creatures/besomar3dMode...

I have a friend who will love to hear this. He is an engineer who spent the last six years of his spare time (together with his family) developing an ambitious board game[1]. It started as an after-school project to do with his son... then it snowballed into something big... as he started hiring sculptors, designers, illustrators... outsourced testing to board game clubs... and now he's about to face D-Day... A launch on Kickstarter to determine whether all the effort was in vain or not.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/309625/forest-radgost

Ironically, I like this author's style. It has a nice rhythm.

MF DOOM used language in such a unique way. Whenever your thoughts seem to settle into well-worn ruts, you can listen to some MF DOOM and all those weird bars and rhymes will stir things up in your noggin. There's nothing quite like it :) Glad to see the man appreciated here on HN. RIP!

Good observation. Writing lore romanticizes dysfunctional writers,fashioning them into martyrs of the craft. But among famous writers, plenty were well adjusted people. A book called "how writers journey to comfort and fluency" is a great treatment of the subject.

I was hoping the link would be for Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz, which is actually on Gary Halbert's (the author of the linked book) list of essential reads. The more advertising/copywriting books I read, the more I discover how much out there is derivative of Eugene Schwartz, who wrote Breakthrough Advertising in the sixties. Although you might not want to get it from Amazon.

Whenever a srs thread appears on hn, I hope that the mythical little fish will appear, the famed supermemo user of ten plus years who learned many languages with srs, then disappeared into internet obscurity

When I was a kid my dad prohibited me from using cheats in Civilization I :D And if I remember well, the cheats were readily available through a toggl in the dropdown menu

Our culture frames our relationship with our body as a struggle against weakness. This encouraged me to spend years trying to hack a solution that would allow me to eradicate the mid-day slump. I tried sleeping more, exercising, eating this or that way. But always there would be an inevitable dip in alertness at some point.

The many articles on SM Guru taught me that trying to coerce your biology into submission is futile. One should learn to work with the circadian rhythm, not against it. Ride the waves, don't try to plow through them.

Organizing your life that way is hard if you live by a 9-5 schedule. Especially because organizations tend to perpetuate the disrespect of our own biologies.

But maybe now with so many switching to remote work, a brighter future awaits!

SuperMemo, the spaced repetition software for learning that's the equivalent of photoshop in that space compared to the more popular Anki that's more akin to MS Paint.

When you get hooked on SuperMemo and embrace the idea of incremental reading, it becomes the primary software on your computer. You end up spending more time in SM than you do in the browser. People use it not just to memorize flashcards, but to read articles and books... even to write and edit their own articles and books... track their sleep... plan and execute their daily schedule... keep track of tasks and priorities. It's a quirky piece of software but quite a mature one. After all, it has been in continuous development since the late eighties!

Oh there's a small but thriving community of SuperMemo users that sprang up recently. Here's a Youtube channel created by members of this community to help new users: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMdkN_8gHPn5vlYDe2ScrxQ