For this kind of stuff there should be a way to flag a submission as 'sensationalist title' or 'likely false'. I just don't have the time to read all the comments for all submission just to find out if the submission is true or not.
I know of one mountainbike forum which from time to time put interviews with famous users (for example because of very good riding video, etc) on the main page. I think this is a good opportunity for good riders to find sponsors and so on.
Translated to something like stack overflow this would be a good way for top contributors to get new clients/project/whatever and do some general advertisement for their own company.
In a first step you really have to find out _why_ you are wasting time!
I thought for a long time that I am kind of addicted to the internet and that this is the reason I am wasting a lot of time there. Over the years I tried a lot of stuff to cut down consumption but nothing really worked.
What finally helped was the realization that the excessive internet usage is really just a sympton of more underlying problems and not the problem itself . (For example if there is no internet, I use books instead):
I use (and still use) the internet as a way to flee from reality and all its associated problems. Especially at work when I have a difficult project I automatically open the browser to hide from all the problems which comes from the project.
So in order to get to work I have to make a list of smaller task I have to do for this project and then start with the one which is the easiest one because this reduces the likelihood that I distract myself.
It seems that I am one of those rare people that love the ribbon (at least in Word and Powerpoint). I don't know exactly why I like it, but after using the new Word/Powerpoint for just a few minutes I never want to switch back to the old menu systems.
I wish there would be a good/convenient way to open several independent browser instances for different purposes. There should be a way to name each instance.
For example at work I really wish I could have one Chrome instance for research on project 1, one instance for project 2 and one for private stuff. When I close on of the them there should be a way to reopen it later exactly in the state I left it.
On startup I want to see a main browser window which list all my instances. When I click on one of them, a normal Chrome broswer opens with all the corresponding tabs (and perhaps specialized bookmarks).
Right now I have about 100 tabs open for different projects and private stuff. With the proposed systems I could put several browser instances on different workspaces next to the editor/console of the specific project.
Thanks, that looks very interesting! I wish I would have used this years ago, but (un)fortunately I switched over to Python (and some C for extensions).
I use some kind of Hungarian notation in which I do not describe the type of a variable in its name but instead its unit. Since I do a lot of medical image processing I have to deal with a lot of different coordinate system. For example, one is the "real world" which is measured in mm and one is the image as an array which unit is given in pixel. By appending _pix and _mm to variable you can see that some things are just wrong. For example
pos_x = curr_pos_x + diff_pos_x
is not clear, but from
pos_x_mm = curr_pos_x_mm + diff_pos_x_pix
it is clear that something is very wrong in this line.
edit: I just saw that this is basically what [1] is about.
Actually I stopped looking for the cause a few years ago because I found it ;)
For me, finding the cause was very important, because for years I only knew what I did wrong but not why. I read a lot of books and articles about procrastination and never felt any connection to the explanations given there. Am I afraid of failure? Certainly not. am I presured from the outside into doing stuff I do not like? Yeah, sometimes, but this only explains 10% of my procrastination. There are a lot of explanation but none of those I read about did fit my specific behaviour.
Only after I found the explanation I gave in my original post, everything felt in place and I understood why I am procrastinating. This was a very liberating moment since everythin suddenly made sense and enabled me to work on changing my self.
"[...] therefore making the saying "just do it" or "suck it up" an appropiate response, which as you rightly discovered, got lost on modern parents"
I had a discussion with my mother about this. To make a long story short she raised me this way because her father was a very very strict person. She had to work all the time in the household and therefore did did not have a nice childhood at all.
When I was born she decided that i should have a much better childhood... The result: I had a perfect childhood (from the viewpoint of a child) but now I am plagued with some serious procrastination problem. In contrast my, my mother is one of the most organized and reliable persons I know.
- I am always very lucky. Even if I put almost no effort in any kind of project it always comes out at least ok.
- My bachelor course was more or less a joke. The description of the single classes always sounded totally impressive but in the end most it was just rubbish and very easy.
- The master course I attended was a pure joke. If I had put any effort in it it would have been possible to pass it with almost perfect grade.
- I got my PhD position through pure luck and some personal connections.
- I am VERY good at pretending that I am actually working
So all in all I just perfected the art of procrastination. For example, when I was in the military service (not US), I more or less had to smuggle myself into a local military base for a few weeks because I was just to lazy to get a new id card.
Actually I think in my case all the stuff you read about procrastination does not really aplly to my procrastination:
I think I am one of the worlds worst procastinators and it took me about 10 years to figure out what might be the main reason for my behaviour. It has nothing to with all the stuff you read in all these procrastination books. It's not about the fear of failing, it's not about the fear of winning, it's not some kind of rebellion against some outside force as you pointed out. It's something completly different:
I never learned to do (unpleasant) stuff!
When I look back on my childhood now, it's very obvious what went wrong: I grew up as a very very spoiled kid which never had to do anything "unpleasant". Did not want to clean up my room? No problem. Did not want to help my parents with preparing lunch? no problem. Did not want to do homework? no problem.
From all those years growing up I can remember only one occasion at which my mother tried to force me to do something. But since I was already 12 or so that this time, she gave up after 10 minutes.
I never learned to endure the "stress" or "pain" of all those unpleasant things I have to do (washing clothing, cooking, ...) so it's very hard for me to do them intstead of just browsing the internet and get instant satisfaction.
In combination with some above average intelligence and a very big portion of luck I was still able to study with good grades and I'm currently in my second year of a PhD thesis. For me it's hell on earth! Giving lectures, preparing papers, filling out forms, applying for grants, ... I postpone all of this stuff all the time not because I am afraid i could not do them or because they are pushed on me from the outside. I postpone them because I never learned to actually _do_ unpleasant stuff.
Does this makes sense? English is not my first language and the topic is quite hard to describe.
> The location bar has to go. It has many problems. For one, it’s always visible and constantly takes up a large amount of space
Not a problem on my old 4:3 laptop screen but I dread the time when my current laptop dies and I have to deal with one of those 16:9 models.
Right now I have 1400x1050 but in the future I would have to deal with 1440x900 or 1600x900. The height difference is more than the height of the location bar.
Lately I have thought about a filestorage like this which consists of two parts: 1) some kind of database in which you can put binary files and attach tags to them 2) a FUSE (?) driver which let's create different 'views' on this database which then can be mounted as part of a normal filesystem.
For example this would be nice for music and pdf collections. You could create different 'views' and then go to one folder to see your music/pds sorted by year and then to another folder to see them sorted by author/artist and then to a third one which is sorted by type_of_music/artist/album.
this way you would get the best of both worlds: 1) a powerful database to store and organize binary data and 2) downward compatability since you can just use the command line / bash to 'export' files to mp3 players and so on.
> That said, what really interests me is the mechanisms behind addictions. Why do smokers smoke, knowing full well by now that it will kill them earlier than non-smokers? Why stuff obese people themselves, knowing full well that it will cause serious health issues down the line.
Let's take this one step further: Is the reason/mechanism a smoker smokes the same why I browse reddit and HN all day instead of working on my PhD?
Yeah, thinking of the exp() part as a spirals in three dimensional space (the imaginary plane + the time/space line) finally helped me to understand what's really going on with the Fourier transform.
No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money.
I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro.
I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did.
So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".
http://jonls.dk/redshift/
Everybody should try a program like this, during the night/evening it is so much better then the normal color configuration!