It's a term I heard a Minister tell the bride and groom during his speech at their wedding. He talked about how you're going to fight with your spouse, but the challenge is to fight fair. Hear the other person. Try to see their perspective with sympathy, if not empathy. Avoid trying to "win" fights, that's never the point.
I talked about this with my then girlfriend. She was a vicious fighter. I was too. We knew each other's weak spots and knew exactly what to say. But we spent a few years slowly getting better. And now our fights are almost always about a rational disagreement on perspective. They get heated. We get emotional. Because we both really care. But we fight fair now, and that means our fights are productive and usually rather short. For me it means forcing myself to stop the argument for a moment, truly process and soak in everything she's said, try to understand why she feels that way, and see if maybe she's got a point. On more than one occasion, we'll be a few minutes into a yelling match and one of us will just abruptly say, "oh my god you're right..."
It's easily the most powerful skill I've developed in my adult life.
I've been married to her for 2 years now. I've got 78 more years to go with her and I feel more confident every day that we're going to make it.
First fight where we both knew that we fought about something but it was no longer on a level of staying together or not.
And when I realized that my wife is the person for whom some standpoints on my side are worth changing.
Also doing something only for her or for us.
I think that my relationship with my wife thought me to care way more and to understand other people better.
'Understanding/getting' it and living it are two different things.
People often think of negotiation as business, however it can be much more personal than that and can be very useful for your interpersonal relationships as much as it can be for your professional relationships.
Understanding how you can leverage another person’s empathy (and your own) in your favour without exploiting the other person is tremendously valuable whether you’re trying to get your kid to eat their vegetables or trying to convince a terrorist organization to free their hostages.
I’ve learned a few simple techniques that have honestly improved my ability to not only negotiate but communicate and understand people better in general.
I bought Chris Voss’ book on negotiating and it’s been really pivotal for my understanding of, well, humanity to a certain extent. Highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make a stronger person out of themselves.
No affiliation with the book btw but I’m a huge fan of the author as a result of his book.
For people wondering, Chris Voss is the former lead international kidnapping negotiator for the FBI. Here's a podcast where he talks about negotiation [0] and the link to the book the above comment refers to [1]. His talk at Google about the same subject might be interesting too [2].
[0] https://fs.blog/2018/01/chris-voss/
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32444582-never-split-the...
This book (Never Split the Difference) was also pretty helpful to me, but it's easy to forget to apply in scenarios.
Sure, lots of us "learnt" programming in our bedrooms or whatever by doing our own thing and messing about in whatever language. I went into my compsci degree arrogantly thinking that I pretty much knew how to code already so please just give me the bit of paper saying I have the degree and I'll be on my way thanks very much.
I was very wrong.
Although I was pretty good at the coding (or at least I like to think so), I learnt so much more of the theory that is as relevant today as it was then, and as it was decades before that too. It stretched me in ways I did not even know I could be stretched - I dont think I would never have learnt the "hard" theory that transcends specific programming languages if I was just tinkering around on my own or reading a "How to program Python/Visual Basic 6/PHP/C#" books etc (aged myself there with VB6!).
More or less every day I still use those skills/knowledge I learnt on my degree, but not only that I came out beaming with confidence and the knowledge that I knew my stuff.
As a direct result of my degree I enjoy a pretty cushy, well-paid, well-perked, and secure job at a company that many people dream of working at, and have done for years. Sure it was 4 years and a few thousand GBP (at the time in the UK - more expensive now) but totally 100% worth it - I genuinely dont think I'd be where I am now if I had not done the degree.
One of the biggest things one learns is the ability to self-teach. Unfortunately college charges a lot of time and money to learn via their chosen methodology which doesn't fit many people. At worst it can build a dependence on teacher-pupil classroom settings to learn new approaches, hence so many training sessions and stagnation in their absence. As a tautology, it's not that one approach is necessarily better than another, but we must remember that one approach is not necessarily better than another.
Now, decades later, I despair at how poorly new and many not so new developers we hire really understand complexity theory. Complexity theory is the single biggest thing you can learn that you might not learn self-taught, but so very few developers internalize it. They write code that does network calls and database calls with abandon, never mentally multiplying out the complexity. And as the gap between testing environments and production environments grows (i.e. a lot more data in production), the cost increases. (I had learned and internalized complexity theory at 15, from a chance book found in a bookshop. This was before the web made such information easy to find.)
What has turned out to be more useful was knowing how to ship software that delivers business value without being an architect astronaught. I credit that to my few business classes in undergrad and my MBA studies before dropping out.
I'm currently finishing up my CS degree after having worked professionally as a dev for a few years. I got started with a bootcamp, maybe before they were mainstream.
Maybe my expectations were out of line from the onset, but I came in more to learn than for the sacred degree. And I don't mean for this to be specific to my school - I imagine it's happening many places - but the school seems to be going out of its way to push students away from what I'd consider the core computer science curriculum.
I don't think it was always this way but subjects like compilers, algorithms, operating systems, and computer networking are veering more and more towards optional. Taking all of them before graduating is rare.
Instead, the hot thing seems to be software engineering. It sounds so good on paper - and I'm sure students, parents, and school admins all want it - but my experience with it has been complete nonsense.
In practice, these, and similar classes, have just been watered down versions of what is done in bootcamps, but executed poorly by folks with little industry experience. The result seems to be no actual computer science knowledge, a superficial experience, and bad habits.
There's so much more hard computer science I want to learn. And while I'd love to continue on to grad school - I have learned a fantastic amount here - so I can actually get to the good stuff, I don't know if it's realistically the best path.
tldr, I'm a bit bitter that I've had to take so many "filler" courses during my cs degree. Are CS degrees getting watered down? Is software engineering as a domain like this everywhere?
Things like dependency injection work the same in most languages so it's more helpfull to understand what it solves than how to solve it in language [x]
except for baking—-precision and reproducibility are key there.
Hint (it works for me, YMMV): cook only once a day, only when you're rather hungry and preferably on evenings after work. It will help you to relax.
P.s. I’ve flipped through ‘The French Laundry Cookbook’, and if you can take that on, I’ll call you a chef. :)
Sample cheat sheet:
https://readline.kablamo.org/emacs.html
You don’t have to learn it all, but mastering the basics like moving to the end/beginning on the line, moving/deleting by word, yank, history search and the like will pay off handsomely.
set editing-mode vi
set keymap vi-command
Building speakers look complex from the outside, but are pretty rewarding once you know the basics (Thiele parameters, enclosure design and tuning). You can put together your own speaker with just a couple of parts from eBay or anywhere else on the internet really and sometimes can end up with really high quality boxes that can outperform much more expensive commercial ones available in the market.
Speaker design is one of those things that the more time you put into it, learning, studying, testing, the better rewarded you'd feel. To add to the mix there's also amplifiers - Class A, B, C, D and even tube amps and each combination of amplifier and crossover sounds totally different.
Each speaker box I design, I feel is like good food. Different flavors, different combinations, different possibilities. You will never feel bored and never feel you've hit an end. You're always discovering something new.
The ability to quickly and efficiently understand and mentally absorb large amounts of the written word, and the ability to write clearly, simply and coherently about subjects both simple and complicated.
Being good at reading is a force multiplier in everything academic I have ever done, and continues to be a huge advantage in both learning and simply doing my job, and in so much of life in general. So much information about how everything works, physical devices and procedures and interacting with governments and organisations, is provided as the written word. If you can do it quickly and correctly, you're ahead of the game.
Being good at writing helps me transmit knowledge and instructions across time and space to other people, helping them understand faster and better. It also saves me time; I work with people who genuinely struggle to express precise technical information through the written word, spending large amounts of time producing text that really isn't adequate. Often they write as if they're speaking, which just doesn't work.
A lot of people go through life with just functional literacy; being good at reading and writing is a force multiplier across so many activities in life, right from early education all the way through such a huge range of jobs and careers. The return on investment spent on being good at reading and writing is huge.
I'm very familiar with this situation. Since an ever increasing amount of important communication is handled in written form, via mail, slack, in todo lists and project management tools, I noticed how many smart people reduce their writing to several loose thoughts, if not barely connected nouns, that hardly count as sentences, resemble spoken language and almost always require additional discussion and questions to understand the actual meaning.
I think to many people it just feels too cumbersome to write and explain in detail. However the time saved during writing is, of course, lost when the almost inevitable clarifying discussion afterwards is due.
Writing and reading is critical. Take your time to do it well.
During interviews I would force myself to smile. It helped get rid of some nervousness. When I get stuck on a problem I would smile stupidly and usually the interviewer would help me out.
When I feel like conversations are getting heated I would take a step back and smile, it helps me direct the conversion to a more positive place.
Sometimes when stuff happens outside my control and life just sucks I'll force myself to smile and handle things to the best of my ability
I still haven't gotten used to strangers on the street suddenly smiling brightly at me, it always takes me a moment to realize it was me who smiled at them first.
The secondary effect of receiving unexpected smiles definitely also helps to improve my mood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman#Contributions_to_th...
We used to have Sanskrit months and weeks when we were supposed to interact with each other pretty much entirely in Sanskrit. It had such a solid grammar and I'd say it was flexible too. I wish we were introduced to it in a flexible manner. I remember myself being able to rad Sanskrit books with relative ease. But, now? Last time I tried I couldn't. I kind of blocked this language out. I talked to couple of friends and they had similar experiences.
It might not be the same for everyone. However, I have noticed that I rarely drink water. It is interesting that I only noticed that this year (late twenties). The effects on my body and mind were phenomenal. I used to drink less than 1 liter a day.
I don't feel thirst. So I don't drink water when I'm dehydrated (because I almost never feel it). Instead, I have a prescribed quantity that I drink everyday. Also when I'm out for food/coffee/bar I always order a bottle of water. I might not drink all of it, but it'll help me drink.
You should drink 3-4 liters per day to feel the difference. The difference will be massive only if you are dehydrate it without realizing it. In my case, I was severely dehydrated, but I never noticed it.
The effects: I feel fresher. Smarter. More active. My eyes are much less sore and I suffer less when I'm looking at a screen. It is interesting I have never noticed or thought that water dehydration was the cause. The first days that I started the water dosing, I felt that the exhaustion was relieved.
To give you an idea of how serious this is. Look at this chart: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3e/ed/4a/3eed4ad01533479b473e... My pee color was always on the extreme side before. I have never questioned it. Talk about ignorance.
The very first days of hydration, I felt almost 10 years younger. By continuing I certainly no longer feel the effects since I'm used to the new standards. But I'll never forget the day I discovered that I was in severe dehydration. I also will not forget the almost instantaneous change in my body after the few hours of drinking.
Do you have the same problem? Is there anything I can do about it? For a while I thought I just had a small bladder measuring the amount I urinate showed normal values of roughly 500-600 ml when waking up with a stronge urge to pee. This does make sense to me because the 3 to 4 liters from drinking plus the extra water from food has to go somewhere after all, so I am wondering why other people do not have this problem.
Now I drink 2 gallons of water every day, it's become a habit and I feel sharp every day.
You mentioned your pee colour is on the extreme side. You should probably get yourself scanned for kidney stones. Kidney stones can go undetected for ages.
Also note that your diet makes a huge difference, the veggies and fruits you eat, the more water you put in your body without drinking.
(I feel like that might be cheating on HN...)
I started programming about 16 years ago (I think), when my Dad bought a basic introduction to HTML for himself, which I ended up "borrowing". I super geeky teenage life followed where I learned various languages, including Python, Delphi and an obscure language called RapidEuphoria (honest, that is a programming language, with some interesting features actually). Fast forward through a Maths degree and 2 internships, I'm now a happy Engineering Team Lead at Bloomberg, generally utilising JS, Python and C++ as appropriate.
Of course, there are a bunch of other skills needed to be a successful software engineer, but I think turning my hobby into my career has been the most richly rewarded skill so far.
Through this, I've learnt product and market fit that made tangible changes in peoples lives - the coding remains a personal rich reward, but the product outcome has been the true 'reward' so to speak.
I value the personal rewards higher than anything however. There are not many things better than a good hour coding session when things go well and everything works. I've fond memories of many good hacks or idea that were so perfect that they pivoted other peoples ideas and changed a product outcome.
No one else in my life has my back, protects my confidence, and shares this wild adventure like my wife does. We have invested a LOT of time and money into getting better at overcoming disagreements, digging deeper into what is actually causing a rift between us, defining the company we want to keep, etc.
We are both athiests, so we didn’t have access to church or religious marital counciling (probably for the best). We took it upon ourselves to study all we can, to treat our marriage as a foundation to improve our self-awareness and help each other see their blind spots.
Some education that has been helpful: - Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. Great foundational book. His other book “Speaking Peace” is a how-to manual for conflict resolution between warring communities/tribes/nations. Both are VERY powerful and cheap. Both have audiobooks.
- Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin. Great book about building a foundation in a partnership.
- “Deep Psychology of Intimate Relationships” course (DPIR) from RelationshipSchool.net and the free “Smart Couple Podcast.” DPIR is a “masters degree” in building a rock solid partnership, and the podcast offers some great ongoing commentary. What secular relationship books or courses or events do you recommend?
The most annoying thing I hear often is that if you use Hibernate you don't need to know SQL. Last time I checked, Hibernate's manual had something like a thousand pages. It's better to just learn SQL.
W3Schools has a good SQL tutorial I recommend to new engineers. After that just try to use it and use stack overflow when stumped. Easy things are easy, but some harder things can be difficult for some to grok.
In terms of investment, it is not as expensive as private training and it keeps you on track. The real investment is in you. Your most important asset is your ability to produce income. Having a healthier body helps maintain that ability. The damage that I do through typing is only barely counteracted by these training sessions. I don’t take typing for granted, having had soreness and pain for many years, and going to the gym and lifting weights has been the best action I’ve done towards addressing that. For you young and older people out there, do not take your ability to pound at a keyboard for granted. One day, it may start to lead to soreness which goes away after some rest. Eventually, the soreness does not go away.
The true returns are the cumulative effects of sticking with a healthy habit. You may not become “jacked” and super muscular but you will become fitter.
After almost two years, the benefits of regular exercise are so apparent that I have to hold back getting on my bully pulpit to encourage other friends to do so.
I get to the gym pretty much every day before work. The benefits are huge - more energy, better concentration, and of course just looking and feeling better in general.
Edit: for the deleted comment - I'm late 30s, not sure if that's young or not and I'm a night owl for sure. Also see a noticeable difference in those busy "I should skip the gym" periods if I don't go, as oppose to prioritising my exercise over my work (which yields far better results).
If you want to get started, find a group or a program and jump in. I like nSuns + regular cardio, but the choice is going to depend on age and overall goals. I see my improving PRs and workout sets I've completed as both motivating and addicting.
StrongerbyScience has fantastic guides to most movements, and excellent, peer-reviewed training methodology.
But it’s also about discipline, this sort of thing can only be accomplished with discipline, which is what really lets you accomplish things.
Let's add one more word:
Your most important _material_ asset is your ability to produce income.
It doesn't even have to refer to working as that value generator. If you have enough money in a bank account to live off the interest then that is your most valued material asset!
This book is a good start: https://www.reddit.com/r/overcominggravity
For people looking to get started, I would suggest Starting Strength, which is a book on Amazon (pretty lengthy, but extremely thorough) or Strong Lifts 5x5 (google it to find the program it’s free on the web).
The basic gist is to do full body barbell movements for 5 sets of 3 or 5 and increase the weight by 5 pounds (2.5 pound plates on each side of the barbell) per session.
The basic barbell movements are
Squat
Deadlift
Overhead press
Bench
Bent over row
(I don’t do power cleans)
YouTube channels I watch to keep motivated and to learn stuff like form and nutrition (they limit the bro science as far as my untrained eye can tell):
Alan Thrall
Jujimufu
Eric Buggenhaggen
Jeff Nippard
Scooby1961
Omarlsuf
-no one is looking at at the gym
-lift only what you can lift, start slow, you will progress very quickly
-Commit to going every week three days a week, except for illness and injury
-Carefully watch form videos on YouTube for the lifts (Alan Thrall and The Art of Manliness are the best)
-If you do sustain an injury, let it heal for a weak or two, but continue lifting around the injury
-strength training is not body building, but it is the ideal place for creating a foundation of strength and overall health, you will lose weight, you will gain muscle and you will be out of the gym in under an hour with the basic barbell movements.
I’ve been lifting for 7 months now and I love it. I suggest everyone do it.
http://imgur.com/a/uzUzP http://imgur.com/a/BuwKp http://imgur.com/a/q61eH http://imgur.com/a/1lp9O http://imgur.com/a/OyMWI http://imgur.com/a/iVhUq http://imgur.com/a/4zv43
What's a "high degree of proficiency"? Obviously somewhat subjective but I'd argue its one of:
1) being able to play intermediate to advanced pieces in the standard repetoire. In the case of my instrument, piano, it's being able to play Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Bill Evans, T Monk, etc.
2) being able to think of a musical phrase and then play it on your instrument without much/any guesswork.
My parents forced me to take piano lessons - classical - for 6 years starting when I was 9. I hated it. When they finally let me stop we moved across the country and I fell in with some new friends, one who played bass and the other drums. They would regularly get together to do something called 'jam', which I'd never heard of. They invited me and although I only knew one non-classical piece - a simple blues - the feeling of playing/making music with other people was electrifying.
I ran home and asked my mom if I could start taking lessons again - this time jazz. I went on to attend a music school for undergrad and have never stopped playing, picking up guitar, bass and drums along the way.
Playing/making music has been one of the greatest sources of comfort and pleasure. I don't often get depressed but on those rare occasions when I do, being able to sit at my piano and play something like [0] is the best medicine.
I wouldn't say I've mastered it, but after 4+ years of study and practice including several 5-7 day retreats I can honestly say I'm far more emotionally balanced, calmer, happier, more insightful, more confident and comfortable in my own skin, better at dealing with setbacks and difficulties, ...
There's many things that call themselves meditation and as far as I can tell the majority of them are legit. I'd advocate picking one large and well established school / method and sticking with it for a few years rather than attempting a breadth-first search of the space or going into some niche branch that really just has one charismatic instructor.
- reading "Smashing the stack for fun and profit": I learned so many things from that article, that I felt like a god when I finally understood all the things. And all of those things are still relevant today when debugging stuff.
- learning ruby: when rails came out I jumped on the hype train and started learning ruby. I was mainly a java dev, so learning all the new ways of doing things made me grow a lot.
- javascript: I hated the language, but once I bit the bullet and overcome my hate for it and started learning it, I now love all the things I can do.
- learning git: it was an uphill battle at the beginning, but now I can't live without it.
I am sure there are a lot of other things I am forgetting, but these come to mind now.
I think going a couple of steps lower, learning electrodynamics (from a book like morin&purcell), and then electronics (art of electronics), will give you even more satisfaction.
I had never danced before, had no coordination, and was petrified of looking stupid in front of others.
Then five years ago, I saw an ad for beginners' flamenco dance classes and decided to give it a go. Right away, I got hooked on the physically demanding athleticism, the precision of the complex rhythmic structure, the way you make the music with your feet stamping on the floor, and the way it requires total concentration. After a high-pressure day in front of the computer at work, I love leaving that behind and walking into the dance studio...
The most rewarding part is I now take classes taught by the top Spanish dancers. It's a real buzz to see them perform on stage on a Friday night then spend the Saturday and Sunday in workshops with them teaching the same choreographies.
Incidentally, that You Tube link above is of Marco Flores and Manuel Linan, two of my favourite male flamenco dancers. I will be doing a workshop with Manuel Linan this Christmas and one with Marco Flores in Spain next February.
I read a weight loss book called "the Gabriel Method" and it changed my life. Besides all kinds of food related things, it teaches a sort of goal-oriented meditation/visualization technique that I found to work for many more things than changing eating habits.
I've felt more like good food and less like bad food so I eat healthier without needing to muster discipline. Lost 10 kilos so far without really trying all that hard.
I've been procrastinating less because I changed the way I feel about many of the tasks I'd keep postponing.
My relationship has never been better, despite our lives having become more, not less, busy during the same period. We fight way less because I'm less annoyed by things and I'm better at not letting things escalate when she's annoyed by things.
Frankly it's been pretty spectacular.
One thing that prevented me from memorizing characters was the idea that it wasn't worth doing. However, this passage from the Self-Regulated Learning paper [0] that circulated around HN convinced me otherwise:
"We need to understand, too, that our capacity for storing to-be-learned information or procedures is essentially unlimited. In fact, storing information in human memory appears to create capacity — that is, opportunities for additional linkages and storage — rather than use it up."
2. Learning (even very basic) Chess has opened my eyes up to how interesting a "solved" game can be.
[0]: http://www.excaliburtsa.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Se...
That said, if you intend to live in China or have Chinese heritage or you have some other reason to study Chinese --- that's great! But it's not a bad idea to consider where you're going with something before dumping thousands of hours into it. (In fact, I quit chess for the same reason...)
It opened up a whole new area of the internet that I was excluded from simply because I didn't know the language. There are communities that I can actively participate in and learn from.
I picked the game up around the time when AlphaGo was on the up and up. My goal with it was to work on patience and fulfill my competitive drive. It proved to do so much more for me - a year in, I got to play solid games, experience success against players stronger than me, meet a lot of awesome people, travel a bunch and, most importantly - and probably the most cliche - learn a lot about myself, about my character and how to become a better person in general. People think it's impossible to improve significantly after a certain age, but, whilst I certainly don't have enough time or drive to pursue the highest echelons of rankings, I have been steadily getting better and better and the end isn't anywhere in sight. Can't get enough of playing in tournaments either - not only do you get to really duke it out with others, you get to learn a ton from them, form great relationships and sight-see a whole lot.
In my limited experience with classical board games and extensive with video games, I found Go (known also as Baduk and Weiqi) to be the most fun, the most challenging, the most social game out there. Simple, yet complex - you can learn the rules in two minutes, but learn all the intricacies of the board for years. I strongly recommend checking out a local club at least once - there's a strong chance you'll really enjoy playing the game with the people there.
This is so true: playing Go strips you naked, everything about your personality comes out in the game. It's completely terrifying. And awesome.
I’ve also learned to take a portfolio perspective to photography (building sets of pictures that tell a story) rather than instantly uploading everything in a competitive search for ‘faves’. I’ve rediscovered younger me’s joy in photography, whilst posting less than I have for years.
What do you think about modifying photos a lot after taking them? What are your views on photographs that are just those moments locked in time forever and otherwise when you try and modify them (esp. in the age of social media).
I have social anxiety. I try and call family and friends on a regular basis, but its all from my side. I start to feel like I'm just hassasing people.
http://web.mit.edu/6.055/book/book-draft.pdf
Basic physics principles combined with the above. Being able to not only see how something works, but to be able to at least estimate it's parameters is invaluable to designing anything new
Afaik he is currently working on a textbook on mechanics.
- english at C2 level - the current lingua franca. You really want to be able to accurately express yourself
- vi/vim. Available everywhere.
- UNIX networking
- shell and shell programming. Turns you into a power user
- at least one programming language and its important frameworks
- regular expressions. Super useful everywhere. Learn why they are slow/fast as well.
- low level computer stuff. It helps you analyze higher level problems
Was a long distance runner from 2012-2016. It was so fun, used to look forward for my morning run every single day - I'd once forgotten all my credit cards when flying to another city but not my running shoe. Almost never missed it for anything. Minor injury broke it for 1.5 months. Been struggling to pick up again since then. It's 2 years. Procrastination and complete loss of motivation.
It helped me keep in shape, improved stamina, and surprisingly it actually had kept my diet disciplined and healthy. I have 12 half organised marathons and one 38km under my belt.
(PS. Had stepped on a slightly bigger rock and had to abandon my first and last marathon - it was trail)
Being able to communicate effectively to a group of people has positive impacts in all aspects of my life.
Of course you need both, much like anything great, however a well engineered track will get you significantly further than a creative track with poor engineering.
If you can do both, you will be a rockstar, literally.
Its a highly structured way to learn about those things, so easy on software people - just read and follow the instructions, and was (is) very fun in its own right :)
So yes: I am also very thankful that I had the opportunity to learn a social couple dance (with 'social' meaning non-competitive and without fixed dance-partners)
The first lessons were hard and sometimes frustrating when you don't make progress as fast as you want to. But for me it paid out and changed my life. Today I go dancing twice or more a week. No matter how stressed I am after work: I always come home from dancing relaxed and smiling.
When dancing you have to deal with a multitude of things in parallel:
1) You listen to the music carefully and match your body movement to it.
2) You are creative and come up with figures/movements fitting the music in realtime (you cannot plan too much into the future)
3) You constantly "read" your partner: You only have fractions of a second to feel his/her center of mass, anticipate her/his possible future movements and react accordingly. Blindly forcing your partner into movements he/she can currently not execute (for example due to having the weight on the "wrong" foot) will not work.
Besides that it helped me to:
* Get to know interesting people outside of my bubble. I've been in CS academics for over 10 years now and it is so refreshing and mind-opening to talk to people of different backgrounds
* Get a boost self esteem. Nowadays I can stay calm and natural when talking to people that are new to me. This wasn't the case before. Especially when talking to people of the gender, I'm attracted to.
Bonus: You get healthy exercise (not a joke: most of us bring 1-2 additional spare shirts to the dance to change during one evening) and improved body control for free.
Here are some popular couple dances without particular order. Of course the list is not complete and a single video will not completely represent each dance and its subgenres.
Samba de Gafieira: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9ia7iGVY-M
Forró: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhMHZsvGHlg
Zouk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_j8SiLBAoU
Salsa/Bachata: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-JofUEsbD0
Lindy Hop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GTrNLauLrs
Blues Dance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpPwmclBxiw
It takes literally half an hour to learn this, and of course you won't be taking professional quality photos, but your photos will go from crappy to OK or even good, even if you only have a phone (as long as it has manual mode). You know that time you took a random photo and the light and colors came out better than normal? You can achieve that consistently.
After learning this, I felt dumb for not having spent that half an hour years before.
Do not worry about which editor, there is something about the one you use right now that makes you using it, your best bang for the buck is to learn how to use this particular editor better. Returns will be immediate (no learning curve to learn a new one). Returns will be huge: Not learning advanced usage is literally wasting a bit of time every time you use your editor. If you work with computers (ops, dev, etc...), you spend a lot of time inside your editor.
If in six months you find your editor too limiting, or somebody convinces to use another one, so be it. The time you spent learning the current one isn't wasted, you have raised the bar to what you need from an editor, and, will learn the new one faster, because you now have advanced patterns that you need and will immediately look on how to do that with the new tool.
Not a huge time investment, but an indispensable skill or revelation I wish I had before starting college. Think I've found the book here on HN: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work
I don’t know what it is that makes music pleasurable, but when you get in the flow and the music is just coming naturally to you, it feels like you’ve been taken over by a higher power. Somehow, the next note and lyric just comes to you. You lose control, in a way, and the music takes over.
I know that’s a corny, irrational explanation and I’m hoping someone can back me up with more eloquent words, but goddamn it feels good play music.
For some reason I've often been focused on what the benefit from doing an activity is. For pure enjoyment I would just consume movies or video games. Somehow I missed the idea that there are many activities that might be beneficial, but that even without the benefits would be enjoyable activities to engage in.
For example many programming tasks are enjoyable enough in themselves, even if they result in no outcome. Maybe that's why "this guy made $10 million with this app"-type of stories might be harmful, as they makes you forget that programming in itself is often an enjoyable task, never mind the other rewards.
Besides programming, I would say messing around with music creation programs (Ableton Live is my favorite) and 3D modeling software (Blender) can be as much fun as gaming, even if you aren't any good. I've also experimented with drawing, but I find that a bit harder to enjoy while having no skill. Maybe there is a base level of competence you need to attain before an activity starts being enjoyable for its own sake.
And being able to play whats in your head on an instrument makes playing allot more fun.
And there are a some extremly valuable lessons to be learned from spending hours a day practicing.
1) I learned how to practice efficiently (which made learning porgraming languages and university for me allot easier)
2) I learned that I can do everything and it's just a matter of how much time I'm willing to invest.
3) I spend allot of time on my creative process which also helps allot with problem solving in daily life (and programming)
I don't even like the questions. They're mostly puzzles, which I'm not good at, in the guise of programming questions.
I think this is the most important question one can have for his entire life.
I am 28, but I have spent about 15 years to think about who am I? Where am I come from? Where will I go?
And gradually, I get clearer and clearer about it.
And knowing who am I is the greatest source of happiness, strength and calmness.
If you also do this, I think you may understand. You will have small enlightment day by day, and finally a big enlightment.
What you really need to do is keep thinking, and you body will take you to where you belong.
I believe the best way to reprogram yourself is to study yourself with no goal in mind.
In the end you save money, get some financial security and stop asking yourself “do I know what i’m doing?”
The other one was a summer course in basic accounting that taught the basics of double-entry bookkeeping, balance sheets, and income statements. That has paid off literally, ongoing, and well. Very good investment of time.
I’ve been meditating daily using the app Headspace for the past 3 months and have seen improvements in my focus and a reduction in anxiety.
My mind would previously wonder off in meetings and I would miss a lot of the discussion, but with meditation I’ve noticed that I’m alot more focused and my mind doesn’t wander off as much.
I’ve also felt alot happier and less anxious, as meditation has allowed me to notice my thoughts and feelings and let go of those that are negative.
1.Learning languages,
2.learning to play musical instruments.
They are both great for someone like me because they enhance your social skills and facilitate interpersonal relationships
Also, I think this has been mentioned, but learning to cook. I never really formally made an effort to learn but my mom is a great cook and I seemed to have absorbed the knowledge/natural ability and over a decade of trial and error I seem to have managed to be decent. Useful day to day and for special occasions. Only downside is eating too much.
In a world where millions of developers rush to compete to build the best, most sophisticated apps, Understanding user / audience / customer has become an overlooked field.
Understand your user / client's pain points so well that they love you so much by buying your products / continuing to hire you for consultation feels really good.
Until I started learning something as hard as the guitar, everything I'd had to learn in the past had come pretty easily to me, so I didn't need to study hard in school, etc, but that meant that I just passed on the really hard things (like advanced math). I think I lost out on the life-lesson about how effective diligent practice is at improving skills. I might have tackled even harder things earlier in my life.
I am horrible at drawing, even doodling, but I spent a few weeks taking a drawing class that covered the basics (perspective, lighting, seeing shapes etc) and it's amazing how rapidly you can improve with just a little practice. It taught me that you could really learn anything (even things you think you are bad at) if you put in consistent practice over time. It also taught me that doing drills is not useless. It's best to do drills, get the hang of the small skills that you routinely use on a bigger project then take on the bigger project once you're comfortable.
Everyone should find an outlet to experience that slow and incremental improvement of skills especially hands on skills like painting and drawing. Be sure to keep your earliest works to look back on how much you've improved.
No matter where you’re at — even if you can only draw stick figures — working on drawing skills is an incredible, compounding investment that pays continual dividends.
At the starting point of my poetic journey, I was ignorant of the genre, very opposed to it (for I couldn’t make the sense out of it) and arrogantly sure that poetry was mostly a scam.
Fortunately for me, a teacher of mine at college had this whole class around Portuguese poets. We had to read them for each other and explain the meaning, while he provided solid interpretations to the texts we were working on.
Thinking I had something in me clearly broken for I could not make the sense of any of the readings we were assigned, I got myself to go the library, picked up one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms to read, and gave myself the task of reading at least a poem a day, trying to make whatever sense I could make out of it — whatever long it took for me to read the whole book. Also, if poetry was supposed to be this highly aesthetic experience, I would have to read the poem (or poems) out loud. And that I did.
When I had finished Pessoa’s book, I felt something was changing in me. Most of the poems still sounded nonsensical, but the ones that worked, the ones I felt I got a sense out of it, really made me feel that I was heading somewhere. So I drudged along.
After the finishing the first book (after a month or two), I picked up another. This time one Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s most beloved heteronyms. I can’t exactly pinpoint where the magic happened, but, suddenly, I was no longer the same self that started that journey. Now I was not reading out of obligation, but reading as a necessity. Poetry had gone under my skin, and I was starting to get this huge crave to read more and more poetic works.
To make a long story a bit shorter, nowadays I’m an avid reader of poetry, having read most of the great poets of Portuguese literature. I find particularly at home in the poetic genre and I’m even trying for a masters degree in philosophy working on... a poet!
This to me was the thing that I felt most accomplished by putting myself to master it. Looking back to how I felt before; knowing what I now know about poetry, my thoughts are the exact opposite of what they were in regards to poetry. Now I cannot even imagine how I managed to live my whole life at that point without giving poetry a try.
So from a career and safe job point of view it was great. But even more important is that somehow i am the go-to person when a friend of mine wants to build a brand new digital business, which today's always requires a website of some sort. Being able to bootstrap a digital business is an incredible way to increase my chances to reach financial independence.
Being able to build any kind of website has thus been the greatest advantage and has definitely shaped my life for the best.
All the time spent reading programming books, tutorials and debugging my early apps really has paid off. When i look back, i am amazed by how much each single hour i have invested into web development, has given back to me as financial return.
This however has shaped a bit negatively the way i relate to learning new skills. When i am comparing each potential new skill i have to invest time in, with the incredible returns i got from web development, i find tough to invest time in something difficult to monetize immediately. In the end i guess each skill you learn enrich you somehow.
But not for the reasons you expect. When you learn Judo you spend the first weeks learn how to fall, followed by people picking you up and slamming you into the ground alternating with you picking them up and slamming them into the ground. The amount of body control you learn is amazing - it's like doing gymnastics, but in a cement mixer. Turns out learning how to land safely in unexpected situations is amazingly useful and makes you a lot safer (I've never broken a bone), and things like falling off a 3 story building is unlikely to cause you too much damage. Unlike karate Judo is mostly harmless as there is no striking - it's best described as Japanese wrestling.
I've done a lot of other sports, some more enjoyable Judo, and sadly Judo is more of a young persons sport. All have something to teach you about teams, practice and persistence. Some like, swimming, teach you things a skill that is useful in the obvious places. But surprisingly to me, Judo was the one that always that unexpectedly saved me when I did something stupid, which in you younger days I did at least once a year.
And when they are violated you can be confident some sleight of hand is in play (I'm looking at you "the holes of semiconductor physics" and the RF "path loss equation".)
Learning to type - Enhanced productivity https://hkelkar.com/2014/03/02/learn-to-type-before-you-lear...
Writing a blog has been extremely rewarding. It takes effort to Blog Over the years I published a book based on the blog.
Understanding Compounding.
Learning Python for fun. Learning Python was really the stepping stone to learning other interesting things.
Learning to play a music instrument. I started playing the piano as an adult. I can highly recommend learning to play an music instrument if you ever felt like you wanted to play. It teaches you coordinate your hand and feet with your brain and you have to keep rhythm. Being able to play music is relaxing. Its humble feeling to be an improving beginner.
Photography being able to capture moments in your life. Being able to capture better pictures of your family and friends is rewarding.
Scuba diving, it is beautiful to watch the creatures and landscape of underwater places. Often if its beautiful under water it is also a pretty place above water. Plus you get to move around when on vacation so you see more of the vacation place. You usually meet new people when diving.
I used to have a "hunt and peck" typing style requiring me to always look at the keyboard. I spent about 40 hours practicing over the course of a month and went from ~ 20 WPM to about 60 WPM.
I can now be looking at the screen about 99% of the time.
OTOH what are the things i have avoided learning because of perceived short-term value: ios development, android development, toolshelves of javascript gimmicks that only google needs, ORMs, various javascript frameworks, R.
Before I became a developer, learning to play music. There is almost nothing more rewarding than the ability to speak a non-verbal, near-universal language in order to express yourself.
Private pilot's license.
Podcasting.
Understanding more about cognitive bias. Rhetoric and logic.
Philosophy.
(Not sure you can master these last two within a lifetime.)
Fatherhood and being a good husband to my wife. These are easily the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Really. That's how you get accurate instruments out of mostly widely varying parts.
It's cooperative, not competitive (though choirs can optionally compete). Anyone can participate. While rough skill parity helps, stronger singers naturally help weaker ones, so it's less sensitive to skill disparity than many other activities.
The drawback is that it requires teammates. Basic music literacy, and especially choir singing, has been in decline in the West for at least four decades. All the best stuff to sing is Christian, so you have to get over that. I'm an atheist but somehow I love the lyrics (I would also love it if choir singing were revived and a new repertoire with inspiring humanist lyrics appeared).
One subculture that is relatively healthy or even growing is Sacred Harp singing. There are groups meeting weekly at many universities in the U.S. While the repertoire is somewhat limited, it's a good way to get started.
I think there's potential for choirs at tech companies. I nearly started one at Apple back in the aughties, but I was so busy with work and a new family that I decided against it.
I'm still terrible at it. But whenever I can refrain from destructive criticism, judgementalism, and general cynicism, I enjoy life more and I'm sure others near me do too.
Next goals: driving, a musical instrument.
You get so much respect when you have a party trick that can turn any gathering into an improv acapella concert.
Python - made programming enjoyable
it tells you how the world works. basically when i started high school i was a communist. if i had gone on with that worldview i would have found things very difficult, like why this person has x and other person has y. doing stuff like calculating the market price of a good kinda helps with that. and understanding the economy and what people do in business helped me understand things better. It gave me a healthy dose of cynicism and a better idea of what behavior can be productive and what things are ultimately admirable sentiments that lead to nothing. in terms of practicality i use some of these ideas to adjust the price of the rooms i let out. no doubt being able to keep them filled without being unnecessarily cheap is profitable.
Sports: Incidentally, that internship at a local governing sports association left a lasting impression. A two week course on sports training theory from a graduate was really inspiring and transferable to all sorts of learning, in spirit. It's probably meaningful that high-school (college) in German is called "Gymnasium".
Language: Understanding syntax and semantics helps so much. It's also a hobby that works in every situation. Just for a topical example: master, muster and pattern - I'm not very good at it, mind you - those words highlight different aspects of the same problem. A master piece is a prototype, a new pattern, compare "gold master"; And it is a work to be mustered. In fact, German "Muster" means pattern. A "Muster-Schüler" is a top notch pupil, a role model, you might almost call that a master student. IMHO this gives a different view on the master-slave-replication naming issue. Also consider the British pronunciation of master (ie. muster). If you look it up, it will say something different, but it will not account for the derivation of "magnus"-big to "magister"-teacher with any semantic aspect, other than the big cheese, although that may be explained by "monstrare"-to show which even explains "minister", too, usually given as "minus" + either "-ister", or the comparative suffix "-tero", but better explained with the Proto-Indo-European root men- (to think), whence indeed "monstrare". That doesn't exclude an influence of méǵh₂s (big), though. There is enough time for that to have happened before the classical Latin. Compare also "meist" (most), "Meister" (master), "most" and "utmost"; also "μύστης" (mústēs - initiated one), mewH- mew-, mey-. Classical Latin likely established the folk etymology. There's the lesson applicable to history in general - it is written by the masters.
Signal-Processing: Information science is often transfered wrongly in metaphors to the universe and everything. Still, as far as simple concepts are concerned it's illustrative of how we get a clear grasp of things. It re-appears in physics, music, art and statistics. It's a shame that it's not in the standard curriculum in the information age.
Maths: Logic fits in with language. Linear algebra and related fields (no pun intended) fits to signal processing
Overall I'm not a master of anything and wasting my live away and that of others. So if know anything, it's to be quiet. And I try to achieve that like everyone does, by being the loudest quieting everyone else down. Then enter a feedback loop and ultimately try to be an example staying quiet, adjusting my expectation of silence.
I think that's an incredibly sad way to view yourself and your life, albeit I bet that for many people producing income is the single most important thing.
I see that as a consequence and a failure of society.
After my startup got acquired, i ended up with lots of money (10s of millions, small start-up) and time. This created a vacuum in my life. I was very sad having finally made it.
I had no purpose in life.
Since then,
Self Acutualization - walking the path devised by yogic culture of spritualism.
Cannabis - The king of herbs, it helps me in self Acutualization and achieving state of trance aka ultimate ignorance.
Knowledge is only born out of something you don't know. If i accept my ignorance, suddenly it's no longer ignornance but something 'unknown'
If you already know something, then you won't gain any knowledge from there.
What did i gain? Finally, i am happy and content. My all questions about life have been answered. I've no need of traveling afar and exploring new places, I've no desire to travel back in past or future or to some distant planet.
You... may want to reconsider that one.
Guitar: I like being able to make music come out of an acoustic instrument.