Hey Ivan, this looks great! What are the privacy implications for my data that I want to label with your tool? I’m assuming I upload it to your servers?
Great question!
Data privacy is a top-level priority for us. We actually offer both a cloud-based and on-prem solution. One of our clients needed a fully on-prem, air-gapped (no connection to internet) option. Many are choosing to use us because they can't send their data to outsourced, external parties.
I also did not find org-roam super easy to set up, but after a second try I have it running and am enjoying it.
Edit: I tried it a month ago - before installation was more than just (load)'ing the file. Now there are nicely documented use-package instructions and a layer for spacemacs
Yeah, I agree that is something that pretty much is not considered in the public conversation. But it seems like at least having the ability to control CO2 levels is much better than we are now.
In fact, they're still using Swagger 1.0[0] from 2011 which wasn't even formally specified, and currently-available copies of the spec[1] had to be unearthed from the wayback machine.
The last point about players in their thirties appearing in more professional matches needs more clarity. It’s not that “older players are dominating the sport.” It’s that “the two best players of all time happen to be over thirty.” This is not evidence that older players have gained an edge in professional tennis.
4 of the top 10 are in their 30s. If you include players who are less than 2 months from being 30 that would make 6 of the top 10 (and #11 is also in his 30s).
There isn’t a single grand slam winner who was born after 1988. All the 7 active grand slam winners will be in their 30s in 2 months. Currently 5 of the 7 active grand slam winners are in their 30s with the remaining 2 a couple of months away.
So it’s not just Nadal and Federer skewing the statistics. Then there is also the case of someone like Wawrinka, who didn’t win a single grand slam until he turned 29 after which he won 3.
The ageing effect in tennis is not a statistical anomaly but a real thing. I do, however, agree that technology’s impact in this has been limited to better sports medicine and fitness allowing older players to compete longer. However, the same players who are winning in their old age today are playing significantly worse games than they were 5-10 years ago. In addition to technology allowing older players to compete, the ageing of the game seems to have a lot more to do with the changing demographics of people getting into the game, cult coaching techniques, which at least in the US have destroyed any chance of an American competing (US coaches due to parental pressure for their kids to win so they can get a college scholarship instead of developing a good game focus on styles of play that work for undeveloped teens, but not at the professional level), and changes in the surface and balls that have slowed the game down and eliminated the styles successful in the 90s which many kids grew up emulating.
Investing in skills as a developer is a great way to benefit both yourself and your company. You have a great gift -- that of "free time at work". I had lots of this in a former life as a sysadmin, and I squandered 90% of it, and I deeply regret all of those micro-decisions to surf the web instead of learning a skill.
Find problems which interest you (for me, that's currently lexers, parsers, lisp, code visualization, tools to make tools to make tools, etc), or parts of the "stack" which you never fully understood (In college we never actually went over how a C function call works, how to read stack frames, etc).
If you don't have any problems at hand to fuel your curiosity, maybe try upping the signal-to-noise ratio of your junk food -- read a programming book instead of reading HN. Small, consistent investments are more important over the long run (30 min / day for months rather than a week-long fugue state).
If books aren't your thing, find a structured series of exercises which you can work through. Project Euler is great. Make-a-lisp is great as well (github.com/kanaka/mal).
Turn what you learn into blog posts, github gists, or flash cards -- distill your knowledge into easily digestible parts so that you can catch yourself up to speed quickly 6 months from now when you need that topic again.
These won't create immediate benefit, but five years from now you will be tremendously more valuable.
Any programmers here use pomodoro? I expect 25 minute interruptions would do more harm than good for my focus when writing code, especially the continuous expectation that I will be interrupted. I don’t have a pressing interest in finding productivity tips, just curious to hear about programmers who have tried this technique
I did use it for a while, because I had issues starting to work. It helped with that but like you said, 25m were not enough and the interruptions got quite annoying. I tried a 45m/10m work/pause ratio instead and it was a bit better, but I don't really use pomodoro anymore.
It helped me to form a "habit of starting" though.
I use pomodoro but with 45 mins instead of 25. I am usually tuned to deep focus playlist on YouTube/Spotify. In the five minutes, I listen to my current favorites song for full five minutes. Every day I aim for 10 pomodoros. Earlier I was able to do 3-4 and was left unmotivated. Now I have been able to crush 10+ everyday for last eight days.
25 mins is too short for certain types of work. I find 45-50 mins of work with 10-15 min breaks works the best for me. Starting with 25 minutes is mentally easier when you are first starting a task and then once you get the hang of it you can adjust. Sometimes I would go longer because I was really in the zone.
I did pomodoro for about a month once. It was actually helping a lot. I think I got lazy after a while and stopped doing the entire stop-watch thing, thinking I would continue doing it by just looking at the clock.
I think I will try pomodoro again today and see if I can get back that juicy tomato timer goodness.
I tried it and had that issue. Usually break time would happen while I really needed to keep my train of thought. Now I just try to do things in smaller sessions when possible and test often. While tests are running I go for a walk.
However, I have found it to be really nice for my Japanese language study. When I come back after a break I feel any new words or concepts I was learning have solidified a little better than if I were to just keep going.
First, 25 minute is a small, non-frightening investment of time that you CAN do; so it facilitates starting an activity.
Second, since 25 minutes is indeed a short span, the clock usually stops before you have completed the activity (meaning that you know what to do next) and also before you are tired. So after a little rest it is also easy to start another pomodoro. And so on. You keep momentum.
If you have no problem with focus, perhaps you don't need it.
I've found it useful at my work (consulting/team lead) where I'm expected to be somewhat responsive to email/slack. Rather than leaving Slack/email open (rookie move, I know), I use Pomodoro (currently at 45/5) just to remind me to open them, check for new stuff, and then close them again for my next chunk of work.
I use pomodoro and find it helps my productivity more than hinder it. Mind you I show signs of ADHD (working w/ a doc to get a diagnosis now) so pomodoro might no be for everyone but I find it allows me to slice out some time to really focus and not let myself get distracted.
When time is of the essence I simply skip the 5 minute breaks but continue to work using the pomodoro.
According to Russel Barkley (well known and central figure in the ADHD scientific community), you should definitely take short breaks every so many minutes.
He recommends 3 mins for every 10 minutes of work, but that's for children.
I have used it and it works quite well, for certain types of work.
The 25 is just a suggestion, a starting point. There's no reason it can't be any other number.
But in the end I lost most of the ideas of the actual Pomodoro method (e.g. if you finish your work in the first five minutes of a Pomodoro, you still have to spend the twenty minutes left on improving what you did, no switching tasks within a Pomodoro -- I don't do that), what's left is just setting a timer and staying concentrated for that long. That works well for me.
What's hard is keeping the breaks short. I often start procrastinating during them and then only start the next Pomodoro much later.
There's a phone app / browser extension called "Forest" that's nice, you can set a timer and add a tree to a forest if you manage to stay off the phone / away from bad websites for that long, and add a dead tree to your forest if you failed.
works well and doesn't have to be 25 minutes, it can be an hour. Experiment (test and learn)
The magic for me isn't seeing the timer as a distraction to my flow, but an enabler - that timer reminds me to go take a walk and let my "diffuse" mode thinking take over and all the sudden things start to click.
25+5 is too short but I found 48+12 worked well. With that said usually it's just about starting, once you start it's not nearly as hard to keep going.
This article makes it seem like the problem that separates BQP and PH is one the classical computers literally cannot solve, given any amount of time. I don't believe that is actually what's going on. If it were the case, this result would have falsified the Church Turing Thesis, and there would be a lot more hype around this.
