1. “Sometimes, you just have to trust people.” Said to me by the owner of a shop at a farmer’s market after I explained I didn’t have cash on hand to pay for an item so I couldn’t accept it, but would go to an ATM to get it. She gave me the items anyway, and I promptly went to an ATM to bring her the money. I grew up in an environment where I was constantly told about all the bad intentions everyone around me had, and how dangerous the world was. It was unnerving, so that moment was refreshing and eye-opening.
2. When I was buying my first bed, I talked with an older salesperson who did a great job helping me find what I was looking for. During our long conversation, he said, “You never know what someone you’re interacting with is going through. Keep that in mind and try not to assume bad intentions.”
3. The less time I spend on the computer/looking at screens/sitting down, and the more time I spend out in the physical world, allowing myself to explore, the more my subjective well-being increases. Similarly, the more time I spend interacting physically with people, the more meaningful, nuanced, and empathy-building interactions I have. I learned this when I quit my first job and spent a week in an hostel in Alaska, and just immersed myself in _life_ for a week.
4. It’s okay to not be productive all the time. I don’t have to side hustle if I don’t want to. Not doing so doesn’t mean I should withhold compassion from myself. Remember, there are other aspects of life outside of work, and in fact, time, relationships, and health are more important than work. I learned this during COVID when I had family in a coma for multiple months.
Hi HN! This is just a recent project I'm working on and thought others might be mildly interested in. It's still a work in progress, but I've had a lot of fun working on it so far, and wanted to share :)
Wow, so much this. I literally got my dream job this year and I’m just amazed I get to freaking _program computers_ every day. Like what??? It’s been 7 months and I still don’t believe it.
Life really could’ve turned out totally different. But I feel that same sense that nothing is ever really guaranteed/secure. So, why not relish the good things while I have them, try my best, and follow my own path?
I love the idea of using a dice to randomize the tasks you choose! Does using a physical object to “ground” your productivity practice make it feel more “real”/tangible-feeling than, say, running an RNG program on your computer? I’d imagine it does, but I’m curious.
Ha, it's funny I'm seeing this now! I'm doing a cross-country trip from Charlotte, NC to San Francisco (technically Emeryville) by train later this month (June 18th-21st). It was something of a spontaneous decision. I have an on-site with my team in SF later during the week of my arrival, so I felt this was a good excuse to experience something different! I'll be in a sleeper car for a short leg of the trip (DC to Chicago, iirc), then coach the rest of the way. Hopefully I survive, lol.
There’s a good episode [0] on Jane Street’s Signals and Threads podcast in which the creator of MirageOS talks a fair bit about the inspiration behind and origins of it:
I made a Firefox web extension [0] that makes it relatively easy to extract and download references from Wikipedia pages. I call it Wikiref.
I made it to scratch my own itch mostly, as I’d often visit Wikipedia pages and find myself wanting to save multiple references (text and links included), but didn’t want to manually copy + paste all the little details.
EDIT: I think at one point, when I was close to releasing the initial version, I really _did_ care about whether or not it “succeeded” (as judged by how many people used it), and I tried to write the code/docs to make the project as easy to use as possible. But then I realized it’s a bit niche, and I was just happy with the fact I made it. There are still multiple improvements to make, but I’m currently focused on a different project.
I didn't know either, honestly! I only discovered it while trying to learn about what "rootfs" is when I saw that term in the "Getting Started" section of the Firecracker microVM documentation here [0]. That led me to this [1] Debian wiki, which eventually led to me a Debian ramfs wiki here [2]. That wiki contains the link that is attached to this submission.
And I totally agree with you on the difficulty of making documentation like this! I recently had to create documentation for a project at work that also required not assuming prior knowledge, and it took multiple revisions for me to get it into a state I was happy with. Doing it for the Linux kernel is certainly much more difficult, but I think that speaks to the skill and dedication of the maintainers who do it!
Hi, HN! My side project ideas are often inspired by problems I encounter in my day-to-day life. In this case, I was browsing a specific Wikipedia page and saw some interesting-looking references. However, there was not a straightforward way for me to copy the text and external links associated with those references. So, naturally, I built a web extension that does it for me!
Features:
- Extract the text and links associated with a reference by clicking on that reference item on the page
- Extract an entire section of references at once
- Display and edit titles of currently extracted references
- Download references as JSON
- Delete previously extracted references
The version currently on GitHub is v0.0.1. I welcome constructive feedback and bug reports!
Just FYI, the alarm functionality is live now. I think that in the future, I'll enable customization so that one can choose what sound (if any) they'd like to use.
Oh no haha, it's not quite production ready yet! :) I still need to add the alarm mechanism (and have actually received a PR for it that I will likely merge when I get back to working on this later today). Thanks so much for trying it out!
Definitely, thank you for that great suggestion! I think I made the common mistake of assuming that others would understand what that was about because I was the one who built it, but from the outside looking in, it would be difficult to understand the connection between the timer and the counter. I will make sure I rectify this when I work on it again later today/tomorrow.
Ah, I see! I could see why that would be a more intuitive behavior (as it's more in line with the standard 25 minute Pomodoro). I added a link to the repo, and the README includes information about how to use it, but I will add some hints like you describe so that people visiting for the first time aren't caught unawares.
Ah, that is a good idea! :) I think that adding a text field wouldn't be that difficult, though I like the idea of it being an optional thing. Tracking it and sending a report might be another matter, but I'm sure I could figure something out. I will add the text field to the list of other features to implement. Thanks for the idea!
Thank you for your feedback! Did you try entering in a time value and then pressing "Start"? Without entering a time, the default behavior is for start and reset to be no-ops. I'll add a link to GitHub and add some usage docs soon.
Thank you for your feedback! Did you try entering in a time value and then pressing "Start"? Without entering a time, the default behavior is for start and reset to be no-ops. However, as I described in another comment further down in the thread, I'll link to GitHub (and also add some usage docs).
I don’t have access, though :/