Ask HN: What things do you wish you discovered earlier?
Where things = products, services, tools, strategies, books, systems, etc.
For me:
* Internal Family Systems made me more peaceful
* "The Sleep Book" by Meadows made me sleep better
* Apps: Otter for taking notes, Superhuman for email
* Websites: Wirecutter
* Books: How to Get Lucky, Self-Therapy
252 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadDon't be that person. Learn to type and invest in your hardware early on.
I'm wondering if there are keyboard set-ups people really like? I'm enjoying my Gigabyte mechanical keyboard, but would be willing to give it up for something that'll let me get more mileage out of my hands/arms.
So, for all these, I think the natural solution is to use a split mechanical keyboard with extra/configurable keys. The position of the hands seems to be more natural with these,
https://ergodox-ez.com/
https://ultimatehackingkeyboard.com/
https://www.dygma.com/product/dygma-raise/
http://www.mistelkeyboard.com/barocco-series/
I haven't tried any of those since I can't seem to decide on one of them yet, but the hand pain is real after years of heavy use, so better try and become familiar with other layouts and find out what works best for your hands. The sad part is that you might not know that something doesn't work until it's too late.
As for the mouse, switching hands helps. So try learning how to use the mouse with the other hand.
I also recently learned about proper desk posture - I now sit with my stomach just touching the desk, and my keyboard is way further forward. My forearms rest on the desk almost all the way to my elbows, and my wrists rest on the keyboards wrist pads. I find that this greatly reduces the strain on my arms and wrists.
The only downsides were some initial soreness (I think my shoulders were used to being hunched/turned in), some initially missed keys (it turns out I used to type the letter y with my left index finger, which isn't possible with the split), and more difficulty typing one handed.
Side benefit is that I have a good place to put my coffee and snacks.
Related to shoulders, I found that raising my monitors with arms (budget option: programming books) greatly help reduce the natural leaned-over hunch I'd get from looking down at my monitor. These two in combination have greatly helped my default posture.
Also related: highly recommend Anki. It feels like magic when the spaced repetition works!
We have a whole field of science that deals with human behavior, wouldn't it be useful if we had that as a basic part of school?
Thank you for the recommendation! I am looking forward to reading the book. It is good know that someone who started off their education assuming they cannot do well in STEM subjects, can actually pick up the skills much later in their carrier, is refreshing. I belong to the camp that I did well in STEM subjects through formal education but then lost touch with math later on. Am looking forward to regaining this skill.
Tim Ferris still promotes a “life hack” of paying other people to read books for you and provide a summary. Of course, this entirely detracts from the entire reason to read a book or any complex piece of information that might affect people differently depending on biases and past experience (so anyone who’s interested enough to read said information / content).
* Diffuse mode vs. focus mode. After focusing hard on a problem, letting your brain wander can do wonders for coming up with insights and ideas. The classic example is coming up with something in the shower after working on it throughout the day. I've focused much more on giving myself some of the non-focused time after focused periods (ex. going for a walk/run/swim, taking a nap or shower, etc). I've started doing this more for work, as well.
* How memory works (short-term vs. long-term) and along those lines, spaced repetition. All through undergrad I would cram, but spacing it out (with the help of Anki for flashcard-focused topics) really does wonders.
* Importance of actively quizzing yourself, practice, and working through problems as you're learning something.
To learn form of complex lifts of squats or deadlifts, check out “So you think you can deadlift/squat” on YouTube.
books: thinking fast and slow, black swan/antifragile, why we sleep, the organize mind
How is this helpful?
My diagnosis of depression and ADD inattentive-type (my parents were great, but denied that mental health was a factor until I decided to at age 22). I don't fault them, but I know for a fact my years in highschool and college struggling to learn / focus but knowing I had cognitive ability will irk me until the day that I die.
Worked to find the right stimulants and antidepressants (fortunately I no longer take antidepressants) and most importantly focus on what I really valued in life which oddly made understanding how to learn more effectively much easier.
I understand there are arguments against ADD / ADHD being "real" ailments, but I can personally attest to being at least 50-70% more creative / productive as an engineer when I'm using stimulants in low-doses and eating right.
I'm not saying that ADD/ADHD aren't a thing (as it happens, I'm pretty on the fence about that), but I just wanted to point out that pretty much everyone will be more productive/creative when using stimulants and eating right.
Most people don't know this, in the US, a doctor can only prescribe medication for therapeutic use. A doctor can't prescribe someone a low dose of stimulants because that person genuinely enjoys using them, but has no medical need.
Thus, I suspect that some doctors will just write down ADD as a diagnosis because someone wants legal access to amphetamines.
Whether there would be benefit in allowing access to amphetamines is an interesting question, but there are definitely stimulants available.
If it can keep the airforce flying planes for 40hours straight it can probably help people learn more and be better educated.
So fast-forward to my 20's and I pretty much had ignored that speed makes me clear, when I have some issues and the doc tells me I have ADD, and wants to put me on meds. I opted to not do it, and just kept on abusing nicotine.
Anyways, in my late 20's I have kids and decide they are not going to have a smoker for a dad, and quit cold turkey and that is where things went to crap. I could not focus on work, could not get stuff done around the house and the worse it got, the further behind I fell and it started to look like depression which is what can happen with ADD when you get overwhelmed by not being able to get started on anything. I went back to the doc, they put me on a low dose Meth Amphetamine and it's night and day. I don't think I could have ever quit nicotine if it where not for ADD meds.
Funny part is, I am not really into speed, the few I took in my 20's I never really liked, I don't do drugs but I am pretty sure if I did, I would be a heroin junkie as the few times I have had to have morphine or other opiates (medically) where quite pleasant. Point being the lack of desire for speed seems to be a common sentiment among those with ADD/ADHD
I can also relate to having to nearly abuse caffeine and energy drinks just to reach a point of relative mental clarity for difficult problem sets or serious programming work before I was able to be professionally diagnosed.
Keep in mind that if you are taking ADD meds and looking to switch meds, some doctors can be pretty funny about Desoxyn, it's an old drug, not many know about it, and some docs see Meth and freak out. That being said, it's no more dangerous of a drug than Adderall is.
I've found personally that switching between the two every 5-6 months seems to be a productive course of action. I have not encountered any need to increase my dose due to building up a dependency.
Edit: Saw your response below.
Like you, I don't blame my parents. But I do wonder what I would've been able to accomplish academically when I was in high school and a majority of college if I'd had my diagnosis. Many of my friends in college (both ADD and non-ADD) assumed I had a diagnosis and was just distracted by personal projects to perform academically.
How'd you make up for lost time / improve your work habits after your diagnosis?
Managing your investments
Eating right and exercise
Risk Taking - take big risks early in your life, ones which have the biggest upside. The terror of the unknown and leaping into it and coming out at the other end multiple times makes you fearless. The journey is all that matters, the destination is not in your hand. But the journey teaches a lot.
Some of the above, I was fortunate to learn early on from good mentors, and I've reaped big rewards, the rest I only wish someone had told me earlier.
There have been plenty of times in my life I was 'cash rich' but I left my money in the bank, as I didn't know what to do with it. I used to then over pay my mortgage, which was crazy as I had a 1% interest rate and the stock market would have been a better place to put my cash.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a 'rich' man - but I've always put money aside (out of a fear/memory of being broke) I just could have worked that cash harder - and that was money that I could have taken some risk with.
The importance of keeping a clean sleeping environment.
For the rest the timing was not that bad
Even in my own adolescence I watched the most 'gifted' child eat batteries and jump off the roof of the school.
Sadly later on I was stripped of my potential by math teacher in primary school. I solved all exercises by writing the result outright, and she forced me to write down every. single. step.
I got so used to that over course of 3 years, that now I'm slower than average at mental calculations. i cannot do algebra efficiently without a piece of paper anymore.
That teacher is probably the only person in my life i genuinely hate.
Maths ability varies widely, and I don't think being able to do things a couple of years earlier than your peers is that uncommon or really predicts your later achievements, except for the encouragement of early praise pushing you in that direction.
If you really want to be good at mental calculations, practice that. You haven't lost anything you can't regain. However, pen and paper is more accurate, more permanent, and can often be faster, though it feels slower because you're physically moving a lot. Your hatred is beyond futile, achieving nothing but hurting you and holding you back.
I love solving problems and am very good at it but writing things down makes me hate maths, the act of moving the pen is much more effort than the problem itself. I used to stump my professors by solving the problems they were explaining in my head long before they would have gotten to a solution. But then I got diagnosed with ADD after I completed my masters, I can write down things no problem when I'm on medication, but if people forced me to write down everything in school when I were undiagnosed I likely would have dropped out of middle-school and maybe even committed suicide. Several of my siblings dropped out of middle school so that is not an exaggeration.
I don't think that not writing things down held me back, I think it forced me to become creative and learn things properly since I couldn't just follow algorithms blindly like my classmates. So maybe I should be grateful that I was diagnosed late and thus forced to invent my own maths throughout college. I likely would have gotten perfect grades with medication, but I'm pretty sure the things I learned and the intuition I built are way more valuable than grades.
But if someone like you came around and thought I did things wrong then you would have ruined my life. Please don't force that on someone else and when they inevitably fail you just say something like "I guess he wasn't that good after all, nothing I could've done!".
With the birth of my son, daycare, and a new job, I was finally forced to actually plan out a morning and evening routine. I wish I had done this in university.
Every day for the last 6 months, I have now a routine I don't have to think twice about:
* Woke up at 5 AM,
* Exercise hard, take a shower and have breakfast,
* Get to work before 7:30 AM with my day's tasks already in mind.
Similar for the evening preparing my breakfast, lunch and clothes. It's liberating to do these now without thinking. It took about a month, and my brain is now free to plan out the day or listen to an audiobook.
I struggle to get my kids up, fed, clothed and in kidnergarten before 8:30 myself (which means I can be at work around 9).
I don’t think the actual hours at which you start your day matter much, though. I find the value is in being constant at it.
#2 The power of compound interest. I was lucky to learn this one early, but I think a lot of others weren't so lucky. More than any other single thing, any skill, any stroke of luck, this is why I now feel comfortable about my financial future into retirement.
I don't think that's a sustainable or worthwhile approach. Exercise and training can be found in many forms and countless different activities - pick those you actually enjoy.
I have several thousand miles of evidence to the contrary. There's a lot of "exercise" not worthy of the name. For many people, especially at my age, the very heart/lung exertion that characterizes true exercise is at least mildly unpleasant regardless of how it's attained. Fortunately, one can harness competitive or goal-oriented impulses to make up for it. I count miles, I track my pace, I compare myself to other runners my age, I look at the scale, etc. Thinking about these results helps me keep going when I exercise just like it does when I'm hacking on some grotty piece of code at work, and I've been doing that continuously for longer than most here have been alive.
If I only ever did things that were fun in the moment, I'd be a bit of a failure, so I suppose learning the value of deferred gratification is another potential answer to the original question.
I can also recommend team sports - for me it's football (as in soccer), but specific sports are beside the point as those are very subjective. I'm just trying to say that I see no point in engaging in a sport I don't enjoy when there are so many options available that offer rewarding goals and provide enjoyment while you get there.
If I lived near a body of water, kayaking would be a good alternative in summer (or more if I move to a different part of the country). That could still happen some day, but not now. Cross-country skiing is an alternative, and one I intend to pursue more this winter since I now live near some good places for it, but of course that's only in winter.
Cycling is the kind of obvious alternative, but I'm not really sure I'd enjoy it any more at the same intensity. As I said, it's the intensity itself that creates discomfort, and I've seen too much mayhem involving intense cyclists too. Seems like that focus on results can have pretty serious consequences at bike speeds.
It's great that you feel like you have tons of options that both meet your goals and provide enjoyment at the time. Consider that it might not be the case for everyone, and some might still put the goals first.
Through training I repeatedly tell myself (and believe), 'it is the hard that makes it good.' Not everything worthwhile is going to feel like sunshine and rainbows all the time.
Specifically, even if you get the startup to match the base salary of the big company (which is almost always not true and comes at a 20-30% discount, but I'm willing to assume that it can be done), the equity that the startup will give you is effectively $0, whereas the public RSU the big company will give you are basically cash-equivalent (if you are really conservative you can adjust them by 20-30%?).
This last point is the major one for me: at least in the Bay Area, senior software engineers are offered equity grants that are effectively the same size of their salary every year, so by going to a startup you are immediately being paid at least half.
Well, for him that was too good a deal, so now he's working 60 hours for half the salary.
I kept having customers sign up for rsync.net citing "Hacker News" in the "where you found out about us" but I assumed it was the old hacker news that was run by a certain defcon/cdc personality and was sort of a clone of attrition.org ... it had been around since 99/00/01 or so ...
It took me several years to figure out there was a new hacker news out there ...
Also, ycombinator/pg essays. Before that I got my business advice from “the apprentice”.
The Pattern on the Stone.
My undergrad GPA would’ve been higher and i’d have gotten fit earlier in life.
If you insist you can find places that are not free, but generally loans are taken to finance housing and living