I took a month-long sabbatical last Fall to learn a new skill (machine learning). I had a project goal to keep me focused on making progress and staying practical: making an ios app that will use ML to "recognize" the letters on a Boggle game grid and "solve" it, printing out all the words on that grid. I made large strides during the month but the project wasn't quite working at the end. After the sabbatical it was back to work at my dayjob and I had a lot of motivation but little time, so I kept telling myself, "No time to work on it today, but I'll try tomorrow."
After a few weeks thinking this and not doing any work, I despaired that my project would end up as vaporware, blowing away in the smoke of my good intentions. So I started a new habit: Committing to work on it, every day, for just 15 minutes.
I use a pomodoro timer (Vitamin-R) and note-taking app (EverNote) to do my daily 15 minutes. Each time I start, I write down my goal for that session, and keep a running list of things I think of to do but don't get to in that particular session. Every day I successfully put in 15 minutes I mark off that day on a 365-day hanging wall calendar that is on the back of my apartment door.
Results:
* I have worked on the app for 90% of the days this year.
* I absolutely got it to a "working" state (I am now facing a diminishing returns problem where I'm putting in too much time fiddling with UX and UI polish, but that's a problem I'm happy to have).
* On over 50% of the days I end up working more than 15 minutes.
* On days when I feel like going longer, and have the time, I'll still occasionally hard-stop at 15 minutes. This gives me something I'm eager to come back to tomorrow, and also (I think) helps to engrain the habit. I want my subconscious to always think: yes, the cost of starting my session today really is only 15 minutes, I will do this even if I don't feel like I have a lot of willpower today.
I think the last bullet point you listed must be really helpful. I don't remember where I read it, but I recently heard Hemingway used to do something similar where he would write to a point that he really wants to continue, then stop for the day, so tomorrow morning he excitedly picks back up and finishes what he was so excited to write the day before. I feel like that's probably an incredibly effective habit for keeping a streak going
Not exactly brain fog but I often find myself in extreme left-brained mode after a challenging day of coding. If I meet friends after work I am a horrible conversationalist for up to an hour while my brain slowly (and reluctantly) stops actively churning on coding problems.
Related to the right-to-left thinking mode changes, sometimes the words that I am using at become eerily meaningless or unfamiliar. I've spent a few moments asking myself "is that really the way 'else' is spelled?". I recently learned this phenomenon is called semantic satiation [1].
Left-brain mode after coding all day is certainly a thing.
I thought it would go away once I got into management, but the truth is I solve those problems with the same analysis, so even though I'm problem solving people, I'm still a horrible conversationalist right as I leave work.
Oh yeah! I have had that phenomena pop up on occasion. Didn't know it was a thing.
It isn't a result of repetition for me though. Since I have practiced meditation enough, I can watch how my consciousness shifts and changes. I remember watching a creeping doubt enter, and then a word loses meaning, or I'd forget how it is spelled, even while staring at it. Knowing that jusf a few seconds ago, I knew what it was. I also chalk it up as a state change. I sometimes google it just to be sure and if it shows up, let it go and move on. I don't remember if I ever tried sitting through and seeing how the consciousness shifts back -- would be interesting to watch what happens.
I've been experiencing language difficulties since I started programming more, usually during the workday, when I'm actually working on the code. I thought I was going crazy, but it sounds like you have similar experiences. Is this somewhat normal?
Yeah, I noticed I have trouble conversing or paying attention to what the person is saying to me, particularly if the talk isn't geared to resolving a problem.
I worked at a company that hired a developer who was slightly consumed by his regret at being an early employee and then getting out of Groupon pre-IPO. We'd be at a bar and the conversation would die down and he'd look sort of glum and say, "I should be on a yacht right now...". I felt bad for him.
The past year or so has really seen a resurgence of browser-based text editors. Off the top of my head I can think of 4 editors/editor-frameworks launched in the past year (Mobiledoc-Kit, ProseMirror, Trix, and now Draft.js). Browsers are creeping toward exposing all the events that are necessary for interpreting the meaning of a user as they input text. (Some notable exceptions remain, such as an event that would be fired when a spelling correction is accepted, but mutation observers provide a fallback for cases where it's not otherwise possible to catch the input on the way in.)
A major focus of Mobiledoc-Kit, which seems to have some overlap with Draft.js, is on exposing an API that allows programmers to programmatically interact with the internal (structured) document. Our goal is to allow developers to be able to construct editors that fit snugly fit their use case, whether that's building their own UI for a toolbar, or more complex procedural rules for document (e.g., add a constraint that there can only be one "H1" section in a document and disallow adding a second one).
Since Mobiledoc-Kit was built for a publisher originally (Bustle), the ability to intersperse text with richer content was a goal from the start. So it has a "card" concept that allows adding any rich content (embedded tweets, videos, slidehows, etc.). In fact, the Mobiledoc-Kit demo page [1] has a demo where a Codemirror editor is embedded inside the Mobiledoc editor.
It's great to see so much new energy in the browser editor world. I am hopeful that as browser features and new editors and editor features converge, we'll see some exciting new developments that broaden the perspective on what sort of content is possible to author from within a web page.
I read Daniel Stenberg's (he is a maintainer of curl, I think?) "http2 explained" pdf the other day, and it's by far the best comprehensive explanation of http2 that I have seen. Well worth a read if you're curious what's coming with http2. http://daniel.haxx.se/http2/
The thing that made this click for me was realizing the "1" in the regex was not special. The regex is just looping through integers (starting with 2) and checking if the target number is divisible by any of them. It can use any digit if the target string uses the same digit. Ruby example using 5 instead of 1:
def is_prime(n); str = "5"*n; str !~ /^5?$|^(55+?)\1+$/; end
The regex essentially says, for integer n, "does 2 ones fit evenly into n ones", then "does 3 ones fit into n ones", etc., which is the same as "does 2 fit into n", "does 3 fit into n", etc.
To Be (http://tobe.us) is a new way to collage the Internet with images, music, and video. Our users create everything from personalized notes and mixtapes to private sketchbooks, all using HTML5. To Be launched in Japan last month, but our team is in NYC (the East Village).
We have an amazing, expressive app built with Ember.js and Rails. It looks nothing like any web application you've worked on before. Get in touch if you don't believe us.
We need an experienced JavaScript developer (or Ruby developer eager to learn Ember) to help us launch To Be in the US. Ideally someone comfortable with JavaScript, Rails and Postgres. Someone to worry about browser paint speeds, and not to worry about old browser support. To optimize CSS transitions and HTTP responses, not to optimize cubicle space. To move our tested, object-oriented codebase forward.
Come work with us, and push the limits of what browsers and the web can be. Email [email protected] with the words “Interested Developer” in the subject and a link to code
you are proud of in the body. You can also learn more at: http://tobe.us/developer
This is a full-time salaried position in New York City, with the opportunity for equity and leadership in a young company.
Hey HNers, I created a game / prediction net where people can tweet in final score predictions for the upcoming March Madness NCAA games. To play you have to post a tweet that includes "@scorecaster" or "#scorecaster", the hashtag for the game (they are listed on the site), and the score prediction (in the same order as the teams in the hashtag), example: "@scorecaster #UMvMU 65-55".
I wanted to make something that adds a playful, social element to watching sports. I tweet and chat with friends back home when watching basketball games, and I wanted to have a way to sort of trash talk/compete with one another. Something more casual and less formal than betting, and more social.
I'd love to get feedback from all of you. My biggest concern is that it might not actually be very fun to try to predict the final score of a game. Sometimes it feels quite arbitrary to me. I'm looking for ways to make that more interesting. If I get a critical mass the first thing I'd want to add is the ability to restrict the leaderboard and predictions list to people that are connected to you on twitter.
This is very cool. There's so much that could be done to better organize and run meetings. It's great to see someone taking a stab at it.
I wished there was more of a demo before signup. Even just some screenshots would have helped.
I made this. FF does weird things with non-text bookmarklets so I used the user agent to show a text-based link as the bookmarklet, only for FF users, but it seems it is still finicky. If you want to see the effect, I'd try Safari or Chrome.
After a few weeks thinking this and not doing any work, I despaired that my project would end up as vaporware, blowing away in the smoke of my good intentions. So I started a new habit: Committing to work on it, every day, for just 15 minutes.
I use a pomodoro timer (Vitamin-R) and note-taking app (EverNote) to do my daily 15 minutes. Each time I start, I write down my goal for that session, and keep a running list of things I think of to do but don't get to in that particular session. Every day I successfully put in 15 minutes I mark off that day on a 365-day hanging wall calendar that is on the back of my apartment door.
Results:
* I have worked on the app for 90% of the days this year.
* I absolutely got it to a "working" state (I am now facing a diminishing returns problem where I'm putting in too much time fiddling with UX and UI polish, but that's a problem I'm happy to have).
* On over 50% of the days I end up working more than 15 minutes.
* On days when I feel like going longer, and have the time, I'll still occasionally hard-stop at 15 minutes. This gives me something I'm eager to come back to tomorrow, and also (I think) helps to engrain the habit. I want my subconscious to always think: yes, the cost of starting my session today really is only 15 minutes, I will do this even if I don't feel like I have a lot of willpower today.