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robertjwebb

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The funny thing about this is that this also appears in bad human writing. We would be better off if vague statements like this were eliminated altogether, or replaced with less fantastical but verifiable statements. If this means that nothing of the article is left then we have killed two birds with one stone.

Land-line telephones are awful because the majority of people who will pick up the phone during the day on Monday-Friday are old or disabled, i.e. easier to manipulate. I don't think I have received a single legitimate phone call during that time. In fact, legit callers know this and know that if they do call for a good reason, the person at the other end will distrust them.

The thing is, these topics have already been discussed by philosophers! Questions of authenticity, human subjectivity, reproducibility etc are not new. But for the average joe and the non-philosophically-inclined techie, the thing has to actually exist before they start really talking about it.

Hi HN,

Getting started in open source software development can be intimidating to newcomers - but a lot of great projects highlight "good first issues". I wanted to make something that allows you to see all these issues in one place (for Python). I'm thinking of extending this for other languages depending on whether this is of any use to anyone...

I implemented it by creating an AWS Lambda function that pulls the latest tagged issues from GitHub for a number of repositories, then saves these as JSON files on S3. The website itself is coded in React.

- Bob

I did a MSc in computer science, got burned out. Learned where my limits were. I learned a bunch of academic things, sure, but also was filled with doubts about what I should do next...

Spaced Repitition 12 years ago

Spaced repetition is great, but be warned - it's no substitute for really learning the content.

It won't let you draw connections between concepts, because the information is presented in bite sized chunks in a way that each concept is considered independently, not parts of a whole. I've found that I learn things much better when I see how they are interconnected and AFAIK this is supported by research.

For this reason, if you're considering using spaced rep for university courses I recommend that you write your own flashcards, not use somebody else's. The process of converting the knowledge in the course into appropriate flashcard sized pieces is a pretty handy way of learning the information itself.

Maybe people think that if everyone believes Facebook is dead then it will die. Facebook has information on everyone and it's really hard to leave because everyone else uses it. If it just fucking disappeared one day I would be so happy.

Why would your employer want you to start a company or work on side projects? Think of this from the boss's perspective - they want you to dedicate all of your energy to their work, not something else that won't even make them money.

Procrastination happens when you reject a large long-term reward (the joy of finishing a project or solving a problem, or becoming successful in business) in favour of a smaller short-term one (partying, playing video games).

The latter activities are often more enjoyable while high so by introducing the option of smoking weed into the mix you are effectively increasing the appeal that the short-term rewards have, making it less likely overall that you will choose the long-term ones.

I suppose you can always use it as a reward ("if I work hard Monday -> Thursday evenings then I'll get high and chill out on Friday"). I'm sure that a lot of people who are successful do something like that (replace weed with any other vice or enjoyable activity).

In a way Hacker News more insidious than Reddit, because a lot of the articles are about people being productive and successful it tricks you into thinking it's more "wholesome" than Reddit/Buzzfeed/etc. It is, but that doesn't warrant the hours and hours of idle browsing that you can potentially spend on it.