Ask HN: What are some available force multipliers that most people don't know?

I don't see it this way at all.

- In MS Word, OSX TextEdit, and most other editors/word processors, search and replace is front and center. Heck, search itself (both within local files and search engines) is the ultimate example of automating and scaling the repetitive, and it's everywhere.

- In OS X Finder, you can batch-rename files by highlighting them, right-clicking, and clicking "Rename [N] Files..."

- Mail merging has been a thing in MS Word and other processors for a long time.

- In Excel, all kinds of repetitive, menial tasks are immediately discoverable to even a complete beginner: highlight more than one numeric cell and the status bar instantly displays the average, count, and sum. Conditional formatting, number formatting, sorting, filtering, and all kinds of data-reshaping tasks are baked into the UI.

I also hope more people make an open learning repo [1] where they test out new technology in the open. It's been a nice productivity boost for me.

1: https://github.com/lpil/learning & https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/learning as examples

I have a huge problem with this and I'm not sure how to fix it. When I start researching something, I don't write about it, because I don't feel like I know enough and I don't want to repeat the same "generic advice" that many people already presented. Then, when I reach my desired level of understanding, I start writing a blog post. I start with "fundamentals" I had to grasp before I could understand the topic. Then, after 6000 words, some diagrams, and several tens of hours put in, I start writing about the topic, but at that point it's almost guaranteed I'm already interested in something else. So, obviously, I leave the previous topic to rot in the "unpublished" folder forever.

It would, thinking realistically, take someone paying me for the extra time to finish one of these posts, which would become either a really looong article, or a short book/pdf. That won't happen, because most of my enquires about how to be paid for writing something like this lay in the same "unpublished" folder... That's on top of the topics being rather peculiar (most recent example: "Using Haxe's Lua target to script my (Awesome) Window Manager" - started from quick intro to OCaml, two fixes I made to the Haxe compiler (which is written in OCaml) to get Lua target really going, quick intro to Lua and LuaJIT, plus AwesomeWM architecture and class library... at which point I stopped, and switched to the next topic: "Wiring and writing a Home Security-like system with RaspberryPis and Erlang/Elixir", which will turn into another abandoned try at a write up.)

Basically, I start writing at the point I'm pleased with the solution to a problem (eg. the state of my WM, the monitoring around the house, or most recently a working Tizen Studio for native devel on non-Ubuntu Linux), which rids me of the problem, so then I have no motivation to write about it, or its solution anymore. I could go back, change the title, and generally edit whatever I have already scribbled, but that feels like work, and at that point I'm already learning about something else entirely...

This is why this:

> I think the people who are inclined to be constantly learning are probably less inclined to focus on broadcasting their life to others.

seems plausible to me, at least. Though whether my broadcast would be more valuable to others than the "generic advice" (or more specifically, shallow posts on some tech, in "3 things you didn't know about IEx"-like style) is doubtful.

[1]: https://timothyandrew.net/learning

For me, the two biggest improvements were:

1. App switching (hold F then use all keys under the right hand, each key bound to launch and/or focus a particular app)

2. Window management (hold W then use right hand as arrow keys to snap windows)

Paired with a keyboard that lets you remap held keys to modifier combinations (I use Ergodox) has been great.

Ha, never knew you could do that. Pretty cool.

It uses Lua for its scripting engine.

Not sure there's quite an equivalent for the executable feature, but it does support publishing and installing modules written by users, which are called 'spoons', IIRC.

My config: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...

Article to explain how to achieve this: https://medium.com/@nikitavoloboev/karabiner-god-mode-7407a5...

I wish there were more options for ratios in the stand-alone display market. Rumor has it, Microsoft will be creating a line of Surface displays. [2]

In my opinion 16:9 is unappealing for productive work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Surface#Model_compar...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117584/microsoft-surfa...

I also started taking 1mg melatonin an hour before I want to sleep. That works wonders for me.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th...

... and, umm, mindfulness, I guess.

- Temperature control. I sleep with the AC set at 65, a fan and a BedJet device.

- Blue light control. I wear blue light blocking glasses at night time

- Wind down routine. I am careful not to exercise, watch exciting shows or do anything that raises my hearth rate at least an hour before bed.

- No alarm clock. I have found that when using an alarm clock I invariably get anxious about it going off.

Hope some of that helps.

- Exercise, even if just 10min daily

- Sleep in a colder room

- Maybe is a lot of noise around you, and night is the time for your brain to work cleanly. Reduce it (I find this recently)

- Stop being worry about not get sleep. The more you worry, the less you get.

- If can, sleep when you feel it, get up when not. Not force to get sleep if you know you can't. I think this help to reset the clock. After a while things start to settle.

- Substances amplify what is wrong, maybe. I think is better to fix the macro stuff, the routine, and then maybe use something.

... so yeah, as a married guy with kids and a job, falling asleep is hell basically every night.

Personally, I'm in the preferring-two-monitors camp. If I can't have two, I'll have three, please. And large ones. Particularly when I'm doing web work, the convenience of having an editor with ample space to open many source files at once on a main screen, an auto-reloading browser with accompanying dev tools on one side monitor, and multiple pages of documentation on the other side is a huge win.

I know other people who are also in this camp, and others still who for similar reasons to others commenting here aren't a fan of lots of monitors. They typically have very consistent patterns in how they set up their working environments and often multiple desktops that they switch between frequently.

I suppose the conclusion is not so much "have multiple monitors" but rather "invest a bit of time and if necessary money in customising your work environment to work well for you".

Which doctors, specifically?

If your urine stream has much color, you are dehydrated or perhaps sick:

https://media.healthdirect.org.au/images/inline/original/uri...

On macOS, a utility called HazeOver makes working with three monitors much nicer.

https://hazeover.com/

I use tiling window managers to help make this work. (Currently, xmonad on personal laptop, and trying out i3 on my work laptop to see if I can get is as productive for me as xmonad.)

When docked, the laptop's screen usually displays my first virtual desktop, which is for email, chat, misc monitoring. All the other desktops are for Web and tasks.

There are two many tools, setups, and conventions to get into here, but I'd just like to say I'm currently a fan of the approach that all I need is my laptop and Internet to do all my work.

(Well, sometimes I need other specialized hardware. But I don't need to be at my desk for the big monitors.)

I'm using 3 monitors - the two main are right in front of me, the one on top of the other, and the 3rd is on the side, rotated vertically. I tried several arrangements and I found this one working great for me.

> The other thing I didn't like was the extra heat 2 monitors would add to the room.

This has probably changed with modern monitors. I don't think I've ever felt that a non-CRT monitor was hot, but even it might have been true a long time ago, it definitely hasn't been the case since at least 2015.

Example for my desktops setup for web application development over the last couple of years:

1. Browser with the product I'm currently working on, nothing else

2. Shells for all sorts of small tasks like tailing a log to REPLs for quick experimentations

3. Application IDE(s)

4. SQL IDE

5. Music player

6. Communication (Mail, slack, etc.) and secondary browser for miscellaneous things

The greatest thing for me is, that what I'm currently doing is in full focus and everything else basically doesn't exist. No notifications dinging in peripheral vision or other distractions. Also it is nice, that when I switch to laptop only, the workflows are exactly the same just with more limited screen space = less tiles I can use.

If for a given tasks it is beneficial to have things side by side, it is just a couple of key strokes to re-arrange windows and or create an ad-hoc desktop until the task is finished.

Of course I could use multiple desktops and tiled windows on multiple screens, but from my experiments it added more complexity that benefits.

I would rather go for a bigger, higher quality screen than adding another.

Though when a task only needs one screen for more than a couple of minutes to stay focused shutting off the other screens does help.

Then I upgraded to 3 displays, it's much better. Because I have an explicit main display.

So a viable way is, even with two displays, don't try to utilize them. Put the main one in the center, and pretend the other doesn't exist. Once you really want to use the other display, instead of for the sake of utilizing them only, you'll know it.

sloppy focus is way more helpful than multiple monitors. You can have your editor largely obscured by documentation (or the other way around) and still type. This is especially nice with modern UIs which seem to think wasting screen real estate with white space and ribbons is an important recent innovation.

One monitor for code, one for the browser (and devtools window) and a third for everything else (an API document, or a spec, a control for the music I'm streaming or a chat window etc.)

I've found the same setup works really well for any workflow that involves making a small change and immediately seeing the result.

I am a runner and a weight lifter and a former Sergeant in the army. Dehydration is overwhelmingly more frequent than electrolyte depletion. Even when there's no physical exertion involved.

Scheduled violations of the rules seem to paradoxically help you follow the rules. Tim Ferris advocates for one dietary cheat day per week, with the idea that it takes incredible will power to give up donuts forever, but almost anyone can put it off until Friday.

Schedule your cheats.

Edit: scheduling is also great for beating procrastination. “I will change my oil at 7:30pm Tuesday” is way more effective than “I need to change my oil soon”

The technique they mention (AVRT addictive voice recognition technique) is actually useful for all sorts of things. “That’s my anxiety speaking. It is separate from me and I don’t have to listen to it”, etc.

You can personify and diminish all sorts of negative personality traits. “That’s my impulse to complain / interrupt / lash out / etc”

One thing which helped a lot was realizing just how slow things really move. People post very interesting technical things every day, but those are usually the products of maybe a year of intensive offline effort. You don't fall behind by skipping reading those. You do fall behind by endlessly reading those and doing nothing with your own time. Four hours sitting with a textbook in your area of interest is worth more than a month's worth of twitter posts. As a corrolary, you needn't worry about falling behind in general - because of how slow things move, you'll always be able to catch up. It takes probably two orders of magnitude less effort to understand a concept than to research & come up with it in the first place.

As you develop an area of interest and talk with other practitioners, you'll naturally hear about interesting things eventually. The rest is just brain candy you wouldn't have cared about anyway.

The only thing I find unique to Hacker News is much higher quality analytical comments about politics, economics and tech industry labor issues. Almost everything else is in one ear out the other.

For me, it's the exact opposite. In the case of Reddit, you can filter it down to only subreddits you are interested in, which increases the signal-to-noise ratio significantly.

Twitter would be the first thing I would get rid of tbh. It encourages shallow retorts and memes more than anything else. The only thing I still get from it is news, but Reddit gives you that with potentially interesting discussions on top.

Are these learnings useful in your daily life and career? I too have learned a bit from these sites but I really do not know if that knowledge is useful in practice. Sure one can argue that our ability to think and connect things improve, any knowledge is useful etc and there is some truth to it. But at what cost though? Looking at the amount of time I spent on Reddit over the years, anything I might have learned seems miniscule. ROI is so low.

When we started we did anything, painting, small handyman jobs, fences, carpets, gardening, etc. But I ended up just concentrating on kitchens and bathrooms, as they are generally the most investment worthy home improvements a homeowner will want, which means larger profit per job and also they're more room to take away a homeowners problems. Typically if they project managed it themselves, they'd need to bring in a large list of separate trades. Labourers for demolition, plumbers, electricians, joiners, tilers, cabinet fitters, flooring fitters, decorators etc.

The people i hire, with backup from myself, can do everything the job needs, which means they only need 1 company to do it. We have a wonderful woman in the office that does all the customer service, we take away all the old crap we've removed, we help them pick the new bathroom suites and kitchens they want, etc. Its a full service. I think in America, the term for this is General Contractor, over here in the UK, its not typically used.

My advice for you, if you're starting from scratch, is to get some DIY skills to begin with, start with your own home. Try things, Youtube is the second best tool for learning anything in my opinion, only surpassed by actually doing it. If at all possible, whatever you are trying for the first time or are unsure of, try it, then pay a professional to inspect your work AS your doing it and sign it off at the end. Get them in before you start too. Any tradesperson that wont do give you advice that you're willing to pay for isnt worth knowing IMO. The ones that are, are the ones you hire when you do bigger projects that you need help on. Plus anyone that can explain their own job to an outsider, generally is pretty good at what they do.

I'd be able to give you more specific advice with more information, happy to answer any questions.

There are people out there that provide a very specific service cutting kitchen worktops, explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux3EZhhYdZo

Its typically done with a jig and a router, its not that hard IMO, but a lot of kitchen fitters either cant do it well or hate doing it and they hire someone to do this (as well as other things like sink cut outs) and they get paid DAMN GOOD money to do that, especially if you can show up at a new housing development where you can bash out 30-100 homes as one job.

Personally, while i have no experience with CNC's, i know what they are and how they work and i reckon theres a way to make this job more efficient by having a CNC machine in the back of a van that can be setup to cut these joints. I've not tried this idea, but i may do it one day.

This is the kind of different persepective you can have from completely different skillsets and experiences that people who do the same thing day in day out for years just dont arrive at.

The way I have found mentors is by starting with taking lessons in a skill from people, which establishes the necessary boundaries in the relationship. If they are the best at what they do, mentoring becomes the effect of the relationship itself, since mastery above the skill is what you are learning.

Mentoring someone means sharing the right experience at the right time, which means you have to be around to do it, so it's less of a transaction than a way of relating, but it can start with the lessons/transaction based relationship.

2. Read smarter material.

3. Write more and edit your writing more than you normally would. That will force you to think about where you can improve your verbal expression.

I'm currently between roles (COVID layoffs), and I got feedback on my webcam interview demeanor and speaking style.

My approach for this was to practice my answers to common interview questions out loud while recording myself with Photobooth and then watching the recordings.

There are a couple of dimensions in which I've found this helpful:

   * Sheer number of reps. These help me get more comfortable with telling my career story up until this point, and I've found that my comfort has a direct impact on my interviewer's comfort
   * I spot tics and habits that I wouldn't have otherwise. I noticed that I had a tendency to start my answers with "so, uhhh...". In some cases simply realizing the presence of a tic/habit was enough to get rid of it
   * The recordings reduce the channels from 2 (output + input) to just 1: this helps me analyze what I'm saying and how I'm saying it without having to also think about what I'm going to say
   * Recordings also provide a historic record that I can look back on and see improvement, which helps keep me motivated when the job hunt gets me sad

For non fiction, I'd probably agree with your 80% number. I generally prefer print in those cases, where I can easily highlight important sections and take notes.