I have the same experience as you and the author. Chrome extensions with timers such as StayFocusd have not worked for me. I just disable it or use firefox or something.
What if the user had to enter a predetermined answer to the question prompt in order to continue? By making the user actually type something that they themselves chose the prompt becomes more powerful.
You are being needlessly modest. Your posts are always insightful and often valuable. I personally would not mind if you built a bot to spam the front page with your old articles.
Dear Craiglist, please let Padmapper continue to scrape your data for free because I find Padmapper super useful and much better than your shitty site. I'm not going to address your interests at all, because they are directly threatened by the existence of Padmapper. In fact, I'm surprised that you haven't shut down Padmapper a year ago.
I get FAR more tired running 2 real miles than 2 "miles" on a treadmill.
On a treadmill, both of your feet are in the air for a significant amount of time, and you're not being carried backwards. Yet, I bet that distance still gets counted.
I walk into a restaurant. They charge me $10 for a meal. Yet they only paid $2 for the ingredients!
Now I don't know a lot of math, but even I know that 2 goes into 10... FIVE times! They are charging me FIVE times what it cost them to make that meal!
Sure, they came up with the money to open the restaurant, and the time to make the meal, but does that give them the right to rip me off? Because I spent my life earn my money, and by stealing my money THEY ARE STEALING MY LIFE!
Now you could say that I could always go and open my own restaurant, but that would require credit which THEY wouldn't give me, and ripping off other people, which I refuse to do.
Because when Marco Polo returned from China, he brought with him fantastic stories of meat pies, mythical pastries with the meat INSIDE of the bread.
How did it get in there? Nobody knows. Many tried, but none could discover the secret. Defeated, the Italians put the filling on top of the bread, and so invented pizza.
Spending 10,000 hours on something is incredibly common. Everyone spends 10,000 hours on multiple things. But we coast. It's what we do by habit. It's habit itself.
To break our own habits over and over again in order to improve, to get into a positive feedback loop of ever increasing ability, for 10,000 hours, is genius.
There are some things that you cannot help BUT teach your children. It's part of who you are, your daily habits, your aspirations, your worldview of what a parent should be.
Just by being your son, he is guaranteed 1000s of hours of practice and exposure to these topics.
For example, for me, it was Chinese math textbooks from an early age. I ended up attending Stanford, but my social skills suffered. For your son, I would guess reading, writing, math, and programming are covered.
Other things are invisible to you, and will be nonexistent to your son unless you identify and pursue those topics despite your unfamiliarity to them. For example, I didn't know what "sports" were, and still do not to this day. It's such a large part of society, but does not exist to me.
You should figure out what's "free" and what's "missing" for your son simply as a result of growing up in your household, and plan your educational priorities with that knowledge in mind.
One last thing: expose him to as many different people and social situations as possible. Camp, church, sports, etc etc etc. Whatever involves heavy interaction with other kids and people. The more the better. You may have to get heavily involved yourself to do this properly. Social skills, just like any other human ability, is simply 1000s of hours of practice.
Get 10 packets of 8.5 X 14 printer paper. (8.5 X 11 works too, but not as well)
Make a tower for your keyboard. Make another tower for your mouse. Tilt your monitor back by putting something underneath it.
Adjust the height by adding or removing packets.
I have no idea why people don't do this immediately when they're considering a standing desk. Everything you need is in the printer room of your office!
This is like saying that car designs should be more "mechanic friendly" and less "closed" because every car owner is a potential mechanic, and mechanics learn by working on their parents' cars.
How would you feel about a car company that offered a model that is easier to maintain and operate but harder to modify?
The author met the prerequisite for getting lucky, which is several tens of thousands of hours of failure and iteration. Sure, if he were more mature, or wrote more coherently than a fifth grader, or had any kind of formal training whatsoever, MAYBE he could've done better, kept his site going, created DuckDuckGo, etc.
But those things are all secondary. He, unlike 99% of anyone who attempts anything, put in those 10K, 20K, 30K hours, and through those countless iterations made his own luck.
What if the user had to enter a predetermined answer to the question prompt in order to continue? By making the user actually type something that they themselves chose the prompt becomes more powerful.