To add a bit of insight: most Payment-Service-Providers actually pay big retailers to be listed on their site, as it improves trustworthiness and brand awareness. So the Amazon deal might not be as favorable to Stripe as it might sound.
What percentage of that is phone and computer related? If you were unable to visit particular sites (maybe during particular timeslots), how much would that solve the problem? What other things could solve the problem without changing your actual habit?
Hard to say currently, as my phone broke about a month ago and I intentionally didn't order a new one until just recently.
I'm also just bad at quantifying anything as a whole. I generally have trouble getting distracted whenever important things aren't attention-grabbing and shiny things are few clicks or taps away...
Really good advice. I tried blocking some sites but whenever my 'bad side' comes up again, I always find a way to get around the block and visit the site anyway. Any recommendations on blocking a site indefinitely?
I have a weird alternative strategy. First a backstory, when I quit smoking, I tried what you did, making my vice less accessible/desirable using the sort of strategies you'd find in top 10 ways to quit smoking article. After failing at that for the umpteenth time, I did the opposite. I bought my favourite cigarettes, bought some very nice cigars, fresh pipe tobacco and put it all on my desk where I have to study all day.
Now that it was in my face it wasn't about working around myself, bit rather deciding if I actually wanted and had the will power to do what I had claimed I wanted to do.
So, if you really want to reduce mindless browsing and find you can't and little strategies end up being ineffective, perhaps the opposite might be a worthwhile strategy.
This is a good point. Those moments where you are ambivalent about a course of action are self-defining moments. If you want to quit smoking, you need to become a person who chooses not to smoke when they have the opportunity to. The problem with habit is that you're no longer choosing. By keeping your cigarettes close, you gave yourself many ambivalent moments in which to build the self that you wanted to become.
When the object is out of common sight, you only encounter your self-defining vice moments when you're at your most vulnerable (because you willfully sought the thing out).
When you bring yourself into more frequent contact, you provide yourself with more training opportunities when your willpower is greater (because maybe you're already busy, or happy, etc).
Thus, even if you fall victim to the poor choices you're trying to avoid the same number of absolute times, you've drastically increased the number of times you make good choices. And the percentage of times you choose good choices over bad.
When I was 18, I worked at a produce clerk at a middling grocery store. Day after day of stocking fresh fruits and vegetables while watching the same customers (and even my co-workers!) come in and eat the same horrid prepared slop really motivated me to lose weight.
I lost 50 pounds in 2 months.
And also, speaking from experience, please, never attempt to lose 50 pounds in 2 months; my lung popped. Fortunately, I survived.
Block it in your router. Make the router's GUI accessible only on a static ethernet port, so that you have to walk a laptop over to it to configure it. Your urge to goof off will be lower than the cost to unblock it, and your laziness will end up protecting you.
i actually did some pretty extensive research on this. there's very few high-quality apps in this area. the only software i found to be genuinely effective is this very obscure program called sprintworks (windows only). dunno how it works but so far i haven't been able to figure out a way to bypass the block.
to my mind, an effective blocker is extremely important and far superior to using willpower to resist your bad side. the fact is that when gratification is impossible or really difficult, you don't need to spend any willpower at all, you can just count on your other bad side, i.e. your 'lazy' self, to kill off the social media impulse. when a little person inside you says "go check out facebook!", previously you yourself have to step in and say "no, f* off*!" but now you can just sit back and watch with quite amusement as another little person (your lazy self) steps up and say "nah man, it's too much trouble" —— and bam! the impulse is gone.
the ego depetion theory in psychology may have turned out to be less empirically well-founded than people think, but personally i found it to be very useful. avoid using willpower as much as possible. instead, cleverly design your environment and play the little bad people inside your against one another to your advantage.
Another story here, when I started working in an internship, the environment was conducive for me to work but I still didn't. What saved me, was a repetitive strain injury preventer app. Whenever it said to take a break I would sincerely take a break. This makes your mind more relaxed and I could work for 8-10 hrs a day without any mindless browsing. Hope this helps :)
San Francisco seems like a terrible place to open up anything to do with bicycles. Everyone will just ride down the hill, park the bike, and get an uber later. Some poor asshole will have to take them all back up.
At least PowerShell is taking over as the default. Should have been changed back in Windows 7. Copy & paste with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V is what made me switch to PowerShell.
Florin | Product developer | Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Full time | Onsite |
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I'm not sure to be honest. I know about 15-20 languages and have written at least a 500-1000 lines in each of them (most more), specialize in Python, trying to specialize in Haskell.
Did Django web development for quite a while. Now I'm working for a large company using Coldfusion (bleh), PHP, and some Python.
I frequently feel that I'm not good enough and that my knowledge is in the wrong areas though. I've learned a lot about accumulating domain knowledge and working with legacy codebases lately.
A huge blind spot I had was only passing familiarity with mysql, being used to only using ORM's. I've mostly remedied that however and it's something I feel most webdevs should know more about.
So... I can't really answer either of your questions and I'm not sure it would be economical for either of us to try and test it. However I'm open to ideas!
I am excited to dive into FP, however, there doesn't seem to be a 'good' language yet. I noticed that oCaml is running up but that's still a bit too much 'scientific' as you might say. eg it doesn't really come close to anything web/app related. If I'm wrong, please tell me! I'd love to do FP.
Common LISP is a great language, but it spoils you since it has so few restrictions, its kinda in a class of its own because its just so unrestricted.
Scala is a fine language, but limited, largely serves as gate way drug to other FP languages. Its a very good starting point.
Haskell is odd and the type system is I feel restrictive. Also the community is really addicted to big mathy words. I do love its notation at the same time :\
F# is pretty much universally loved (from what I gather, I haven't used it myself), and now that the .NET run time is unbolted from windows it might start gaining traction.
oCaml I haven't used so I can't comment.
Erlang is VERY popular, especially with the backend FP crowd since it does concurrency very simply. I haven't used it.
Tons of online resources. Books are all a bit dense. The ones I'll suggest are bit hard to get into, I'm a huge fan of The Art of Computer Programming Vol 1-3 all a master piece, but very very dense, very very mathy and challenging even if you've taken college level discrete mathematics courses. But a HUGE amount of the field is contained within them, and the information density is staggering. Donald Knuth's writing is just absolutely brilliant and pointed in places.
Simply searching on Amazon, "Your language of choice" + Algorithms/Data Structures I.E.: "Javascript Algorithsm", "Ruby Data Structures", "Java Algorithms", etc.. Will likely pull up a few options, check reviews, find something in your price range and read it.
A lot of it is self study. Just be willing to explore docs, watch videos, a lot of reading, try things out on your own.
If I were to recommend three of the four volumes of TAoCP, I would drop Volume 2: Semi-Numerical Algorithms in favor of Volume 4a: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1. Developers, junior or otherwise are simply less likely to find themselves in situations where there is a good reason to implement a psuedo-random number generator or a complete numeric system than to wind up dealing with problems of non-polynomial order or boolean functions.
Of course, I don't know why anyone would recommend three but not all four if that were an option, so I guess I really could just say, there's no reason not to get volume 4a too, for a person heading down that road.
There are tons of books on Data Structures, a lot of them are super interesting too. You can Google data structures and algorithm books, and you will get a crazy amount. I have a good amount because I just finished the class in school. One of the books I like is Introduction to Algorithms, 3rd Edition. There's also a lot of college's that have the course and all of their assignments are online if you wanted to do them. They are super interesting, like binary search trees are cool, hash tables and the hash functions, linked list, graphs and the algorithms that go along with them. Are so interesting and once you know them they can lead to so much stuff, its exciting.
I've dealt with the same problem as you have. In high school, I picked up programming and before I knew it, I was programming almost all of the time. It's great to be able to have an idea and build it instantly.
However, life is not just programming. When I was in my senior year of high school, I got multiple job offers from tech firms in my country to come work for them. This monday however, I'm starting a university course cs at UVA (university of Amsterdam). This is not because I love programming less than studying (the opposite, actually). It is because I'm playing a long-term game instead of a short one. In colleges, there is so much knowledge right under your nose, and you get to work with people equally smart. Starting this monday, I'll be on the frontier of technology.
From there, I can learn, experiment, socialize, and everything else that I couldn't do while I was building custom CMS systems or optimizing a SQL database for some lame company.
Your working life can last more than 50 years, so be wise about choosing your fundamentals.
