41 ms·

Ask HN: Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?

• xyzelement 4y ago
  I used to assume the religious people were missing something and missing out on the latest and greatest. Now I am seeing that often it's us the non-religious that have lost something of value and are trying to replace it with things that don't work as well.
  • HDThoreaun 4y ago
    I really wish I could be religious. I know that the community and meaning it provides would bring me a lot of happiness, I just can't look past it being untrue.
    • Starwatcher2001 4y ago
      You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.
    • acjohnson55 4y ago
      Unitarian Universalism is a church without dogma. Basically, people who generally believe there's a purpose to life, that nobody has any sort of monopoly on the truth, and that there's value to congregating.
  • hbn 4y ago
    I was raised in a Christian community and went to a private Christian school all the way until graduation, though really stopped believing all the stuff by 11th grade or so. And it's wild the parallels I see between the modern political climate and religion. It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. They've wrapped around to enforcing censorship of art and being against free speech just like the Christians did when they were in charge. But I recall most people in the actual church at least had some form of a community, and many seemed happy and selfless. This modern church that pretends it isn't a church only breeds toxicity, selfishness, vitriol, and depression. Everyone is holding each other hostage, knowing that if anyone steps out of line and questions the status quo they'll be burned in the village square as an example to whoever might do it next. The actual church community I was in was more accepting in almost all regards than this new system. I honestly wish a lot of these people would just find a normal religion. It's way easier to get along with normal religious people than the types people being getting hooked on these new systems of thought.
    • lelanthran 4y ago
      Meet the new Puritans, same as the old Puritans.
    • alphabettsy 4y ago
      > It really seems that in the process of masses leaving the church, they've gone on to adopt the exact same behaviors but worshipping other things - government, advertising, virtue signalling to show you're the most "on board" with the movement. I think that's because these things aren't from church, they're part of human nature. One of the churches I went to as a child was toxic, the other wasn't. The religious community isn't immune to human nature. 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious and you’d encounter people saying they’d never let their child marry a democrat and vice-versa according to my grandparents. To them, things are mostly better and what we have is the appearance of greater division.
      • titzer 4y ago
        > 50-60 years ago the country was much more religious I think religion adapts and changes; religion was more mainstream, less toxic, and uniform than it is now. The median person is probably less religious (in terms of sticking to an established religion) but the upper 1/3 of the spectrum is more religious, in that they believe more extreme things, with less evidence, and are less likely to compromise. The past 40 years of the evangelical movement, which has been coopted by the conservative movement, has been extremely polarizing.
        • petsfed 4y ago
          I'm not sure that it was any less toxic, just that the background level of toxicity has decreased. My mother clearly remembers being called out in front of her church for the unforgivable sin of attending a school dance, and that was in the mid-60s. Don't forget why the Southern Baptists broke away from the Baptists.
          • hprotagonist 4y ago
  • joemazerino 4y ago
    Amen to that.
  • laura_g 4y ago
    There are a lot of things religion provides that modern society is really dismal at providing: community, care, socialization across class/career lines, relationships with people who live near you, a support system for sick/hurting people, and other benefits The thing is, none of those are innately tied to religion. We've abandoned churches for what I feel are largely good reasons, but we haven't found something else to fill that void in community and care. We're more insular, more online, less of us know our neighbours or really have a stake in our community welfare in the same way. I don't think the solution is going back to religion.
    • xyzelement 4y ago
      Thanks for the response - yes and no. I think you are right in that in theory you could have "all that stuff" sans religion. And in fact I think Atheism in the boomer generation benefited from cultural inertia - like, you could say you don't belong to a religion but still marry, have kids, participate in community etc simply because that's what everyone else (by the virtue of their religion) was doing around you. But today it seems like critical mass is elsewhere, and it seems like the religious folks now have a huge advantage over everyone else in terms of marriage, family formation, community and maybe even mental health. So while in theory it's possible, it seems like in practice all of those things declined among the non-religious, just perhaps with a lag of a generation. The reason I think it might make sense to reengage with religion is the crux of this question: does life have a point, a meaning, etc. Not even "what" the point is but does it exist at all. The idea that the universe is a total accident and nothing is relevant takes you in a certain direction in life and society, while the idea of "there's meaning and purpose" in another. I think it's hard to anchor your life in the value of meaning without logically accepting a creator of that meaning. So I think there's an element of faith - either you chose to believe there's meaning or you chose to believe there isn't, everything else is implied by that choice of belief.
    • serverholic 4y ago
      I think you’re right. Religion isn’t the only answer, it’s just the answer that people are most familiar with.
  • ralmidani 4y ago
    I was born into a Muslim family and have remained a Muslim my entire life, but I have had ups and downs in how observant I have been. I’ve had periods where I was less enthusiastic than my parents. On the flip side, I’ve flirted with extremism a few times and even started alienating my immediate family members. Now, over 40 years old, I feel like I’ve found the right balance: a strong relationship with God, without being seen as obnoxious or dangerous. It feels amazing both personally and when subtly sharing what I believe is the most important factor in having a happy, fulfilling life. Interestingly, Muslims believe most messengers began their missions at or around 40, so maybe everything before is “formative years”. The one known exception is Jesus Christ, whom we believe was raised to God at 33 but still has a huge role to play in shaping the world.
  • chasing 4y ago
    Not all non-religious people suffer from some kind of spiritual or ethical deficiency. I get saddened when religious storytelling fills people with fairy tales and arbitrary hate and makes them incapable of seeing things about existence that are truly beautiful.
    • username3 4y ago
      What are examples of things about existence that are truly beautiful?
      • Night_Thastus 4y ago
        Not the person who you replied to, however: I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but the seemingly infinite level of "detail" or "texture" or "complexity" to our universe. No matter how small or large you go, there's always some patterns, some structures, some details to be seen. There's always some other perspective or way of grouping and organizing to reveal new information. The complexity is infinitely deep, wide and layered. Some of that I think is inherent, and some of it is what we create as living entities - which is a great privilege we enjoy. Take a white painted wall made of drywall. Relatively uninteresting most of the time. But the potential amount of information about it is almost infinite: * What are all the layers of construction needed to make it? * What did it cost? For every cent of that money, where did it eventually go? All of them can be tracked from its creation until the end of the currency. * What people designed the methods to construct it? What were their lives like, what led to them doing so? * What does the surface look like if you were to look at it at 10x, 100x, 10,000x, etc. scale? How does all of that structure change when it's under pressure? Or wet? Or on fire? Or crushed? Or at different temperatures? * What does it look like as molecules of air bounce off of it and it insulates the room? * What are its physical properties? What does it look like in all the different wavelengths of light? * What is it history, from the retrieval of the materials to its final destruction some time in the future? What is its eventual fate? Will it be destroyed to make room for a newer building? Or in a war? A natural disaster? * What people were near it? What were they doing and why? Office workers? Secretaries? Programmers? Nurses? Was it separating people who were friends or hated each other? * What's the history of the design of the pigment used on the wall? What previous pigments did it replace and why? * If you look at the pattern of bumps and valleys on the surface, does it match some existing pattern? What mathematical formula would most closely re-create the surface variations? What's the closest match to that pattern anywhere in the universe, at any scale? Maybe there's some sand on a beach or a cluster of stars that when viewed from just the right angle matches the pits and valleys on the wall. * What does the surface feel like? Not just for one person, but for all humans? If you were to take every single human who has ever lived and let them feel the wall, what would happen? Which ones would tell jokes? Which ones would remember something from their past? Which would have some interesting specialist perspective on it? Which ones would like it? Hate it? How would they all describe it? We only have access to a tiny fraction of that information. But it's all there! You could spend an eternity studying a single blade of grass and it's relation to everything else and all of the history. There's always some new abstraction or perspective or way to look at everything.
  • nerddadnear40 4y ago
    Most of us suffer a kind of nihilism that mankind has never really faced before due to modern science. Materialistic understanding of the world has broken our ability to recognize patterns of being that were once obvious to our ancestors. They would find a modern atheist and fundamentalist equally blind in these areas as they saw the reality of the world much more alive and predictable over vast time periods than we do now and they had the language to understand it. John Vervaeke and the Pageau Brothers are working hard on this front. I'd highly recommend John's Meaning Crisis Videos, Mathieu Pageau's book on Cosmic Symbolism and Johnathan's educational videos. If you are new to this, it can be a bit mind bending, but it's duly needed in our time. https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIJuIN6kUcU https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-Commentary/dp/1981549331 https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Symbolism-Genesis-C... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtmLCK1keFI&t=1874s
  • psychomugs 4y ago
    "There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness." - DFW Academic science resembles religion with its dogmas, nepotism, bureaucracies, and favor-currying shibboleths. Deep learning in particular is akin to modern alchemy [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7psGHgatGM
    • rubicon33 4y ago
      Everyone is always quick to tell you why you need to be religious, and I don’t even disagree with most of the reasons. What’s frustrating is nobody tells you how to reverse a life of agnosticism bordering on atheism, and suddenly be catholic,Buddhist,etc
      • DoingSomeThings 4y ago
        Further. Religion requires something to assent and belong to. That will always be a choice to some degree. As someone who is formerly deeply Christian and left for intellectual/theological reasons. I miss the communal binding of organized worship. But reversing or getting back to that place requires either 1) letting go of intellectual integrity, or 2) finding a group who is similarly interested in dispassionate community organizing without supernatural theology. The 1st has proven personally impossible. The 2nd seems very unlikely. All the attempts of secular church I have seen never pick up steam and trail off over time. Thus, the person who sees religious association as a broad good is left without a natural landing spot.
  • viggity 4y ago
    You've discovered a (large) group of people who have torn down Chesterton's Fence without fully appreciating why it was there to begin with. Same with people who "smash the (patriarchy|capitalism)", they end up extremely discontent to realize that other things end up filling the vacuum and they're often worse, much worse. https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Chesterton%27s_Fence
  • eatsyourtacos 4y ago
    The real question is it better to lie to yourself and believe in something that is simply not true? Or to be true to yourself and deal with the loneliness that is existence. To me the choice to clear- be true to yourself. In that sense, organized religion has no place in this world.
    • Rury 4y ago
      I think you're mistaking (along with many people including many religious people themselves), what religion's purpose actually is. IMO, religion isn't really about truth, or "there is an afterlife", or "there's a magical almighty person(s) out there". Rather, it's mostly just a bunch of advice, principles and curated wisdom passed down from generation and generation to help people live a happy, meaningful life. Like "you shall not kill", or "you shall not steal" or "treat your neighbor like you would yourself" - are arguably good principles to follow if you want to live in a peaceful society free from violence, as obeying these rules minimizes desire for anyone to have vengeance upon their neighbor. Or take Buddhism, which preaches that nirvana is absence of desire and craving, which shows that sometimes your own greed and ambitions can be the cause of your suffering, and by simply being grateful, can bring you happiness. In this sense, I think it's valuable and has a place in the world. I mean, are we alone in existence, and is death the end? I think so, but if it makes some people feel better thinking otherwise is possible, then what's wrong with letting them believe or put hope into that? So to me, religion isn't so much about "what is true and not true", but more rather: "here's some wisdom on how to lead an enjoyable life".
  • AlwaysRock 4y ago
    Community is the main thing religious provides. But in exchange, you typically have to believe in some type of sky magician. It's too bad because I enjoyed the community aspect of religion growing up but never really was able to buy into the sky magician part.
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    As a religious person who has deeply considered leaving it, I've never understood the arrogance of some atheists. For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. Even the original "God is dead" quotes from Nietzsche sound mournful, not arrogant. From what I understand he was trying to convey the same thing you are: that by turning away from religion, we are undoing many of the basic moral underpinnings of our culture. Now we have to rebuild them with something new, and quite obviously, people can't agree on one set of ideas.
    • timeon 4y ago
      For me believing in omnipotent and good god seems arrogant as well. Is good that some people were born disabled?
      • vlunkr 4y ago
        Sure, anyone can be arrogant about anything, I'm just saying I don't understand it.
    • 13415 4y ago
      Just like some atheists need to the corresponding lesson about theists, it's worth taking a step back and remind yourself that not everybody was raised in a religious way. Don't forget that to some of us religious stories contain nothing of particular interest or are similar to ancient fairy tales, and the history of various churches and religions is a mere part of the general human history of power struggles between elites in various countries. When you haven't been raised in religious ways, you feel no guilt about making blasphemous remarks and do not fear the wrath of supposed supernatural entities.
    • The_Colonel 4y ago
      > For me it was disturbing to try to internalize the ideas that the universe is uncaring, that good and evil are made up, that your consciousness is basically like the contents of a stick of RAM that will vanish when it loses its power source. How is that arrogant? It seems humble to me to acknowledge that I as an individual and a society on the whole don't actually mean much.
  • spacedcowboy 4y ago
    I don't think they're missing out. I just think they're deluded. It's not the worst thing in the world to be deluded - and frankly I just don't care what they do and say unless it starts to impact me and mine. It's not religion per se I dislike - people are free to live their lives as they see fit, it's the control-structure scam of an organized religion that reels in the gullible, the poor, the disadvantages, those who believe what they're being told. That is disgusting, IM(ns)HO. These megapastors (and even not-so-megapastors) bilking their flock to pay for the latest Learjet... I think they believe in religion as much as I do, tbh.
    • ralmidani 4y ago
      You’re using the most extreme example to condemn essentially all organized religion. Many religious scholars and preachers live modest lives, sometimes even by choice. Of course “religious” folks who tell people they should simply endure, rather than resist, injustice and inequality are disgusting. But sometimes despite your best efforts, the bad guys still win (temporarily). Telling people that this life is not the end-all-be-all is only manipulative if it’s meant to make people passive. And I know that not everyone informs people about the afterlife out of malice.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      I think you'll find many of them believe more in values than in what you're calling delusions in their own right.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    Same. I met so many religious people who were smarter, more widely read, and wiser than me that my childhood prejudices about them had to be drastically re-evaluated, even though my fundamental position on the existence of God is unchanged. Faith is now on an entirely separate axis from intelligence or wisdom for me.
    • xyzelement 4y ago
      That's kinda my process as well. The next step was to be curious and ask those people - you are so smart how are you engaging with this thing that makes no sense to me at all. They may give an interesting perspective.
    • acjohnson55 4y ago
      That's interesting to me because for me, it's kind of the opposite. I was deeply religious the first half of my life. But eventually, I found it was the non-religious people in my life who challenged me to grow. And I find that many of the most religious people I know are frustratingly limited in the things they're willing to learn and think, to things that don't significantly challenge the particular edifices of their faith. To be clear, this can be true of non-religious people, too.
  • drumttocs8 4y ago
    Absolutely. I wish there was secular community that offered as much.
• j_m_b 4y ago
  Not sure if I was doing it wrong, but I recently started putting the pizza out of the oven and into the frozen pizza box it came in. It's much cleaner!
  • bruce343434 4y ago
    I can't understand what you're saying, do you not bake the pizza and keep it packaged(??) Or do you bake it then put it back into packaging(how do you eat it?)
  • high_byte 4y ago
    my cousin taught me that frying cold pizza in a pan is 1000x better than microwaving. I could only think of the hundreds of microwaved pizzas I've lost the opportunity to do this to. it's even better than when you just order it!
• thenerdhead 4y ago
  Just about everything. Not a single thing I do is the right way. It is a way.
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  Sleeping on my stomach. I'm pretty sure it makes my back/neck pain worse, but I'm just unable to change this habit.
  • intrasight 4y ago
    I had a cold last week, and started going to sleep on my stomach because I was able to get more comfortable and relaxed.
  • glacials 4y ago
    Depends on your back. I’m a back sleeper with back pain and my physical therapist told me to start stomach sleeping. It helps a lot.
  • nativespecies 4y ago
    I've tried changing from stomach to side sleeping for probably the last 5 years and have completely failed. I have resorted to the "rotisserie chicken" method where I have to turn every which way multiple times all night to get sleep.
• Arkanosis 4y ago
  Shoe lacing. Then I found out Ian's fantastic website: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm Small, but life-changing discovery.
  • Mordisquitos 4y ago
    After years and years on my mental backlog, having first seen it ages ago, I finally started using the Ian Knot (World's Fastest Shoelace Knot) to tie my shoes and similar bow knots: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
• mattpallissard 4y ago
  I used to be a smoker. I started at a very young age. For the longest time I would carelessly flick cigarette butts. One day it dawned on me that I was littering. Odd thing was I never littered outside of that. In fact cleaning up litter was part of my job at the time.
  • high_byte 4y ago
    good for you. if you gonna smoke at least don't litter :)
  • raldi 4y ago
    Unlike most litter, though, cigarette butts disintegrate almost immediately and completely in the rain.
    • ptman 4y ago
      "It has been estimated that cigarette filters will take between 500 and 1000 years to decompose" https://eradicateplastic.com/how-long-do-cigarettes-take-to-decompose/ https://eradicateplastic.com/how-long-do-cigarettes-take-to-...
      • raldi 4y ago
        Sounds like we've found my thing I've been getting wrong the whole time.
• car 4y ago
  Realizing that the food we commonly eat, like butter, meat and dairy, are the main source of cardiovascular diseases that are the prevailing cause of death in our society.
  • smilliken 4y ago
    Elaborating for those that don't know: In the US, sugar is the leading cause of cardiovascular disease. Butter, meat, and animal products were Coca-Cola and others' scapegoat to deflect attention away from their sugary products. This was bad information that originated from a PR department. Like much of the common nutrition knowledge we have.
• Throwawayh89 4y ago
  Self-doubt. Assume I was always the least intelligent person in the room. Operated like Clarence Thomas did at oral arguments for close to a decade... Assumed that if something was worth asking someone else would ask it.
• KVFinn 4y ago
  You aren't supposed to rinse your mouth with water after brushing your teeth. You're supposed to spit excess, but leave the toothpaste on to absorb.
  • throw1234651234 4y ago
    Or rinse and use mouthwash with fluoride and leave that. Brush from top to bottom, not side to side. "Scrape" your tooth when flossing. Seems like way too many never learn these basics.
    • lm28469 4y ago
      > "Scrape" your tooth when flossing. Seems like way too many never learn these basics. Nothing proves flossing is beneficial actually
      • g3e0 4y ago
        Smell the floss ;)
      • BizarreByte 4y ago
        A nothing proves it isn’t, so you might as well spend the extra minute or two and do it.
        • lm28469 4y ago
          Well: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-floss-harmful-chemicals/ https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/dental-fl... Also, nothing doesn't prove eating twelve apples per day cures cancer so why not try it ?
          • BizarreByte 4y ago
            Because I would probably feel sick if I ate that many apples per day. Flossing is low effort, why not do it?
• jethkl 4y ago
  I thought colorblindness tests were designed to be tricky and subtle, so I always passed them through very close inspection. I'm just colorblind.
  • abetusk 4y ago
    Have you tried using those colorblind glasses? Maybe something like Enchroma [0] or dichroic filters? [0] https://enchroma.com/ https://enchroma.com/
    • bragr 4y ago
      I can't speak for OP's colorblindness, but for me those do basically nothing.
      • tstrimple 4y ago
        I bought some for my son for his birthday. His response was "meh" so I returned them and he got some cash.
      • solarmist 4y ago
        Yeah, they only help a specific subset of color blindness. But for the ones they do help it's significant.
    • rbt5009 4y ago
      I'm highly red/green colorblind. I got a pair of these as a gift and they allow me to differentiate between reds/greens much more clearly and to see red where I wouldn't notice without them. I know for some people they don't do much, but it makes hikes and such much more colorful for me!
      • solarmist 4y ago
        Ooo! Good tip. Hiking with them.
    • vegardx 4y ago
• silverwasthere 4y ago
  You-buntu vs oo-buntu, Something coworkers from years ago still like to give me grief about.
  • mtlynch 4y ago
    Wait, which one is right?
    • altdataseller 4y ago
      Jinx
      • mtlynch 4y ago
        Wait, which one of us is the real me?
    • mgomez 4y ago
      The one without the "y": > Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It can also be interpreted as ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computing. And one last extra question for the road… > How do you pronounce Ubuntu? Many people don’t get it right the first time, but it’s pronounced: oǒ’boǒntoō. > There’s no ‘y’ at the beginning! https://ubuntu.com/blog/top-10-questions-about-ubuntu https://ubuntu.com/blog/top-10-questions-about-ubuntu
      • mtlynch 4y ago
        Thanks!
      • ngumuntu 4y ago
        Just a little correction. The word ubuntu is not ancient. It's still in use today and more than 100 million people subscribed to the spirit of ubuntu. What qualifies me to correct an FAQ of a conglomerate? I belong to a group of people who are classified as Bantu and own the word. While Mark Shuttleworth is originally from South Africa, where bantu people originates, he was not classified as a Bantu by apartheid government. Which is strange because the word Bantu means people. During our dark days of apartheid, as in less than 30 years ago, areas designated for black only were called bantustans. umuntu, also(muthu, motho) = person bantu, vhathu, batho, etc = people ubuntu, vhuthu, botho, etc = normal behaviour of a human being. We are still called bantu(people) and ubuntu is our way of life. Ok. Theoretically.
• cafard 4y ago
  Several years ago, I was reading the NYRB selections from Thoreau's journals. Somewhere well into it, he wrote of talking with a friend, and the two deciding that perhaps they were tying their shoes wrong. They switched the order of the first cross-over, and found the results much better. I tried it (age 50-something), and discovered that I no longer needed to double-knot my shoes.
• prometheus76 4y ago
  Do you have to tie a double knot to keep your shoes from coming untied? Do your loops end up pointing down at your toes and up your leg instead of pointing to the sides of your shoe? Do you shoes come untied all the time? You are probably tying a granny knot instead of a square knot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA
• pedrow 4y ago
  There was a thing about tying shoelaces a few years back, for example this from the BBC [1]. Apparently I was doing it wrong but anyway I prefer the extra back exercise I get from bending down to retie. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT2XiPgiZK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT2XiPgiZK8
• hgomersall 4y ago
  A common one is the tying of one's shoelaces. It's pretty common to tie the knot in an unbalanced way. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
  • songshu 4y ago
    Yes and then spend a lifetime with annoying workarounds. A friend has been double knotting forever :(
  • daRealDodo 4y ago
    Worthy of the best TED talk ever: https://youtu.be/zAFcV7zuUDA https://youtu.be/zAFcV7zuUDA
    • WithinReason 4y ago
      That is now outdated: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm Another view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBtqhq5P28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBtqhq5P28
      • hgomersall 4y ago
        It's quite hard to maintain tension with the Ian knot and it also doesn't speed up the initial twist. It's a good party trick though!
        • WithinReason 4y ago
          You can just leave the initial twist on the shoestring
      • hirenj 4y ago
        I've been using the secure version of this knot for a few years now, and I've been entirely satisfied with how it holds up in the real world! https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
• dgunay 4y ago
  I hold spoons kind of "wrong"; basically put your palm facing down, make a fist, and then support the spoon with your thumb. That's how I eat soup when I'm not actively thinking about it. I just control the angle of the spook with my thumb. It's objectively not as flexible as the traditional spoon grip but I can't seem to shake the habit. Gets me strange looks sometimes
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    Flatware grips and even orientations (tines up vs. tines down on a fork) can vary with culture and is also a bit tied up with class. What you're doing may be "correct" somewhere :-)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• prometheus76 4y ago
  This is for people who lift weights. Do you get calluses along the pads of your hand, just below your fingers? You are probably gripping the bar incorrectly. This also applies to pull-ups/chin-ups grip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OK-S3ZJZxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OK-S3ZJZxQ. TL;DR: grip the bar across the joint at the bottom of your fingers instead of across the middle of your palm. This doesn't apply to bench pressing (a push), but applies to all moves that involve pulling/lifting the bar.
  • sedeki 4y ago
    I recently started lifting weights. I just bought gloves. I like this tip though - thanks.
    • prometheus76 4y ago
      I would highly recommend not using gloves. They reduce the feedback you have on the bar and can lead to entrenching bad habits with regard to grip. Chalk and the technique in the video are a time-tested approach.
      • sedeki 4y ago
        I took too much chalk and "ripped" part of my skin under my hands. Where can I read more about the techniques and/or bad habits? Interesting.
    • dhd415 4y ago
      In the theme of the OP and by way of response, I've been lifting weights for decades but only in the last couple years realized that gloves were detrimental to lifting. They add a layer of material around the bar that increases its circumference and thereby increases the effort required to grip it for pulling movements. They reduce your tactile connection to the bar which is important for engaging secondary muscles in certain lifts (e.g., lats in the overhead press) as you progress in strength and for very technical lifts such as the clean. The only time hand protection may be beneficial is for movements in which your hand rotates relative to a bar. That is never the case for a (properly performed) barbell exercise but may be the case in certain gymnastic movements on a pullup bar and in that case, you might consider gymnastics grips.
• hbn 4y ago
  Not really "wrong" but at some point in the last couple years I was using my microwave, putting something in for a minute, and for that I've always input 1:00 but suddenly I realized how obvious it was that I can just be inputting 60. As long as you can easily modulo the time, this works for the range 1 minute (60) to 1 minute 39 seconds (99). Technically you could also do this for times like 2:65 instead of 3:05 but at that point you're not saving a keystroke. And on most microwaves they have an annoying delay between when you can do another keystoke after doing the last one, so I've appreciated the little bit of time saving I get with this knowledge.
  • mhb 4y ago
    Hmm. Maybe there's more opportunity for you to optimize even a bit more. On my (cheap) microwave, I can push 1 through 6 and it just goes for that number of minutes. And pushing Start adds 30 seconds. More resolution is seldom needed.
  • coldpie 4y ago
    66 is close enough to 60, and lets you just mash the one key :) Though I just mash the +30 seconds button until it gets in the ballpark, and it turns on the microwave immediately with the first press. 15 seconds either way isn't going to make a difference, and I usually pull it early anyway once it starts to smell/sound/look cooked.
  • mabbo 4y ago
    The bigger "Why wasn't I doing this sooner" with microwaves is using lower power modes. They don't actually reduce the 'power' of the microwave, but they turn it on and then back off again for a proportion of time, over and over. It takes longer to reheat stuff this way, but it comes out much more evenly heated, I find.
    • throwanem 4y ago
      Stir or otherwise rearrange what you're heating every so often, too. Microwaves deliver energy mostly to the outside of what they're bombarding, so it improves heat distribution to mechanically move the heated parts toward the center and vice versa - this helps prevent the "burnt outside and still cold in the middle" problem.
• thn-gap 4y ago
  Not telling my friends that I love them. I was 28 the first time a friend told me "I love you" in a pure friendship way (and while sober), and without being a part of a special situation. I've also done it afterwards, and because I had never told my friend i love them, it made the message even stronger. It feels wrong that we don't do this more often.
  • RobertRoberts 4y ago
    I recently remembered to tell my kids "I like hanging out with you" or "this was nice being with you today". I did it a while back when I had a realization that my parents didn't like spending time with me and I didn't want my kids to feel that. But then I forgot for a time...
  • nlh 4y ago
    This is truly wonderful. I do the same (even if it's sometimes just "love ya man").
    • bckr 4y ago
      The difference in feeling between “I love you”, “love you”, “love you guys”, “love ya”, “all my love”, “much love” is actually striking.
  • intrasight 4y ago
    Same. But specifically not initiating. I had a couple friends from way back who would say that and I would respond in kind. My change, later in life, was to be the first to say it - and with any good friend. For me the change was to be in a friend group of mostly women - who are generally more likely to share their feelings. Share the love.
  • e40 4y ago
    I completely agree. It wasn't until my best friend got terminal cancer that we started saying it.
  • lame-robot-hoax 4y ago
    I don’t feel comfortable telling people I love them outside of a serious relationship, so this always makes me feel a touch weird. Like, my best friends, I love them in a sense I guess…but I wouldn’t say that. It just doesn’t feel natural to me. I’d characterize our relationship as close, and that I care about them a lot, but “love” isn’t something that comes to mind outside of my parents or someone I’ve been in a long term relationship with. I’m not sure why. Maybe it has to do with being an only child. Maybe it has to do with all my grandparents dying when I was young, and not being that close with extended family, so there was never really anyone to love outside of my parents for the vast majority of my life prior to any long term relationships.
• tombert 4y ago
  I too kind of hold my pencil “wrong” when I write. I tend to rest my wrist on the paper, which leads to smudging of the text and graphite building up on my hands. I never really learned a better way; I am just a really fast typist now and I type everything.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  Thinking that most people have good intentions.
  • loa_in_ 4y ago
    Even if they say they have your best interest in mind, they might not, or they might be misinformed about you and act on un-truths. Either way it can be very detrimental.
  • dandanua 4y ago
    Most people just follow the trend. But there are leaders that promote the worst in people. And they have a huge part of attention nowadays.
  • muzani 4y ago
    I saw a documentary once where a cop said that 10% always have bad intentions, 10% always have good intentions, and 80% are situational. We don't normally encounter the ones with constant bad intentions because most end up in prison. But it stuck with me because my father was always around really nice people and I realised he faced the opposite of the prison effect. If you're consistently nice to people, you end up in the crowd of people with better intentions. It's a selection bias.
    • tarotuser 4y ago
      The 10% bad and 10% good is also a strong proxy for poverty/plenty. Desperate people do desperate things. Also, be careful how you assign "bad". It can either be unethical or illegal, as they are not the same thing.
      • muzani 4y ago
        Poverty/plenty is in the 80%. Bad means someone who would molest a child because it's a new experience or run over a stranger with a car. A business owner who is proud that the people he hires don't make enough money to eat. Hitmen who consider the people they kill as rats so they don't get emotional scarred by the murder - they're in the 80%. A tyrant who orders a city pillaged and raped to assert dominance, also in the 80%.
• muzani 4y ago
  Pasta and sauce are not meant to be separate. Once you cook the pasta, drain it, and immediately toss with the sauce. This is part of the reason it was meant to be al dente, to absorb and deliver the flavor of the sauce better. Unlike rice, it's fine to "soak" pasta in the sauce; it expands when freshly cooked but not when cool. Also most sauce recipes are probably overcomplicated. Most need less than 5 ingredients. You probably don't need all that onion and garlic, but one of them. Definitely not two tablespoons of dried oregano. The way you cut onions and garlic changes the flavor a lot too. Finely minced garlic, from a food processor or garlic press can be overpowering yet not deliver the flavor. One trick is to crush the garlic and let the oil it's in carry the flavor. Half an onion can work really well in a sauce you cooking for half an hour.
  • jacknews 4y ago
    Also, you don't have to boil the pasta for the full 8 minutes or whatever, just the first couple of minutes, then let it sit, eg https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking https://www.barilla.com/en-gb/passive-cooking
    • jdmtheNth 4y ago
      I cared while I thought it was a way to better pasta. Very disappointing.
      • jacknews 4y ago
        It's pasta, in boiling/hot water, so I'm not sure there are many variables apart from time. I don't believe there's a 'gourmet method' or anything like that which can get better results than just 'correctly cooked' pasta. But, you can measure the perfect cooking time/hydration by measuring the length ratio of cooked/dry (assuming spaghetti): https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2201/2201.09621.pdf Perhaps you could use this to devise a protocol to parboil the pasta, and then finish hydrating it to the perfect consistency in the hot sauce.
    • dgacmu 4y ago
• mtlynch 4y ago
  Staying warm. In the winter, I used to stay warm by turning up the thermostat. Then I discovered (via HN) the Low-Tech Magazine article, "Insulation: first the body, then the home." [0] The article argued that it's much more efficient to focus on heating yourself rather than your whole living space. I invested in high-quality wool clothes that I wear in layers and warm slippers. Now, I keep my home about 5 degrees F cooler than I used to for the same comfort, and it's a big reduction in oil and wood consumption for home heat. [0] https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-thermal-underwear.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-ther...
  • danjoredd 4y ago
    That reminds me of a Calvin and Hobbes comic. Coincidentally, this was also how I was raised: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/12/30/ https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/12/30/
  • rompic 4y ago
    You need this calculator: https://comfort.cbe.berkeley.edu/?eyJ0YSI6MTgsInRyIjoxOCwidmVsIjowLCJyaCI6NTUsIm1ldCI6MSwiY2xvIjoxLjU0LCJ0cm0iOjI1LCJ2ZWxfYSI6bnVsbCwid21lIjowLCJ1bml0Ijp0cnVlLCJjaGFydFNlbGVjdGlvbiI6InBzeWNodG9wIn0= https://comfort.cbe.berkeley.edu/?eyJ0YSI6MTgsInRyIjoxOCwidm...
  • ashz8888 4y ago
    I put some heating pads in socks, gloves, and sometimes jackets, which I found to work better and much more energy efficient.
  • RobertRoberts 4y ago
    Add moisture to the air also as it conducts heat better and the same temperature will "feel" warmer. (especially important in some climates more than others)
    • odiroot 4y ago
      Perfect recipe for growing mold :)
• mabbo 4y ago
  My father said to me: "I like a shower better than a bath, but ugh, that first blast of cold water when you turn it on is always a bit shocking." Me: "Why don't you turn on the shower, wait for it to get warm, then get in?" Him, realizing he'd been using a shower wrong for over 6 decades: "... huh."
  • sockaddr 4y ago
    I think that blast of cold water might have done good things for his endorphin levels. Just curious about this anecdote, was he generally a happy person?
    • beznet 4y ago
      for me, I take showers at night close to bed time. The last thing I want to experience is a cold shock to my system at that time of day. I can see it being useful in the morning though
  • punkbit 4y ago
    Haha! Thanks for sharing! I had a good laugh :D
  • number6 4y ago
    I like your dad's way better; also don't turn on the warm water
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      But that would ruin the best waking part of 95% of my days.
      • Radim 4y ago
        Reminds me of an old joke: > The best part of having cold showers every day? You'll never get arthritis! > The worst part? You'll have cold showers every day.
• RobertRoberts 4y ago
  Ask my wife what she prefers and tell her what I prefer. Years of marriage before we figured out I hate cleaning small things (silverware and glasses) and she hates cleaning big things (pots and pans). We permanently changed how we clean up after meals. Not exactly in line with your premise, but changed my entire outlook about expressing what I want or prefer about almost anything.
• prometheus76 4y ago
  Chef knives are designed to be held by pinching the blade between the forefinger and the thumb, and wrapping the rest of your fingers around the handle. I used to wrap all my fingers around the handle, until Jacques Pepin showed me how to do it properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMA2SqaDgG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMA2SqaDgG8
  • throwanem 4y ago
    An ex with commercial kitchen experience taught me this. My own experience is that, having held and used a knife the right way even once, the wrong way feels wrong forever after.
    • softfalcon 4y ago
      Tell that to my wife and in-laws. They’ve asked to be taught, been shown how to do it, shown why it’s safer and faster, have timed their speed and found it to be faster. They still refuse to do the proper technique. They cut themselves regularly. Their stubbornness knows no bounds. Even when it involves literal blood at least once a week.
      • solarmist 4y ago
        It isn't just about the grip. The stance also matters. I had trouble using a knife well for a long time because I would position myself parallel to the cutting board, which meant I would bend my wrist when using a knife. Once I realized my wrist should be straight when using a knife and adjusted my stance to be slightly angled away from the cutting board, my knife skills leveled up a ton.
  • dfxm12 4y ago
    The assistant in that video talks about holding the knife around where the center of the weight of the knife is. This spot is different knife to knife. So, knives with a heavier handle are designed to be held by the handle.
    • 4y ago
• mhb 4y ago
  Ice might not be the best treatment for aches, pains, muscle sprains, etc.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34051860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34051860
  • hammock 4y ago
    This is relatively new, I wouldn’t classify it as “wrong” but “changing science/protocol” The new protocol is MEAT instead of RICE. The knowledge hasn’t reached every medical provider yet
• francisofascii 4y ago
  Wrong in thinking that being a nice guy and always doing what women/partner want would make them desire me more. Robert glover's book was eye opening.
• Nesco 4y ago
  I realised most of my basic health routine was useless to detrimental: - Soap: it disrupt the skin microbiome. Only useful for hand washing and to clean private parts / the bottom. Even then use high quality soap like Marseille soap or Aleppo soap. Note: Also as mentioned in the comments if you avoid soap / deodorant you *will* probably need to shower two times a day even without doing physical activities. Three times with physical activities. You may also need to particularly rub the smelly parts of the body (e.g. the armpits) with a clean sponge, use mild to hot water (cold water doesn’t do it without soap) and trim your body hair. There is no magic. People use soap for a reason: it’s more “practical” and it requires less care to stay clean And if you are used to wash yourself with soap and you brutally stop you may smell a little the first month until your microbiome is able to handle all the waste and your skin to balance its oil production. Even if you shower multiple times a day. - Shampoo: Most shampoos are very a agressive for your scalp / hairs and should be avoided. Especially if you have fragile / curly hair. You can wash them with plain water or conditioner instead. Note: Using a gentle shampoo without silicones and surfactants can still be useful from time to time. Especially to reset the pH of the scalp. Also using a shampoo rarely and co-washing instead can be impractical if you have long hair as it’s way harder to clean and takes far longer to dry - Toothpaste: it can be useful but it’s not so important. What really is important is to brush your teeth energetically to remove by mechanical friction the dental plaques and to change toothbrush frequently. Avoiding for a time to use toothpaste and using dental plaque revealer can be a great way to learn how to properly wash one’s teeth Note: As someone else noted “energetically” means speed and taking your time. *Not* applying pressure on your teeth. Also toothpaste helps the teeth by providing fluoride. It’s just that using it every time may not be so useful and do not replace brushing your teeth effectively
  • beepbooptheory 4y ago
    Is Dr. Bronners a good one?
    • accrual 4y ago
      I had a bad experience using Dr. Bronner's as body soap. It really disrupted my natural barrier. However, for non-skin purposes, I think it's an excellent general purpose soap.
• jacknews 4y ago
  What is the new writing grip and what were you doing before? I always assumed dynamic tripod grip was what was taught, and the best, as it's how I write, but a couple of my kids used a cross between lateral tripod and quadrupod - and their teachers would complain about their writing. I had to restrain myself when I realized this is what they'd been taught, and next met the teachers responsible.
• unzadunza 4y ago
  For 30 years I sang "whoa-a, head waving" instead of "whoa-a, we're halfway there"
  • unzadunza 4y ago
    And my favorite one from my wife: A modern day warrior Mean, mean stride Today's Tom Sawyer Mean, mean guy
  • ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
    ooof but the syllables don't match! It didn't make your brain hurt??? you just stretched out the -'ing'?
    • ask_b123 4y ago
      I can hear head waving by ignoring the we're (pretty easy to do). Stretching the -ing is even easier. Oooo-uh head waveang
  • jerf 4y ago
    The term for this is mondegreen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen The ones I still hear despite knowing the correct lyrics are the first itemized one in the bullet list in that article, "there's a bathroom on the right". My personal favorite one though is "I want to rock and roll all night, and part of every day" (instead of "party every day"), mostly because unlike most mondegreens it sort of works, but changes this confident declaration of desire into a bizarrely flaccid one. (Listening directly to the audio in a pristine listening environment like I'm in now I don't hear this, but in a normal day-to-day environment with other life happening I can still hear this.)
    • TravHatesMe 4y ago
      My friend thought brown eyed girl started with "hey there amigo" instead of "hey where did we go"
      • 4y ago
• leet_thow 4y ago
  Taking a number two without the use of a footstool to get into a more natural squatting position. I look forward to the ritual every morning and usually achieve 'poophoria'.
  • toyg 4y ago
    Hugely underrated tip. Standard toilets are just that, a guesstimated average of the height one might need to poop relatively comfortably. Because it was originally derived from chairs (the first toilets being actual chairs with a hole), with no respect for how human anatomy developed over millions of years, in most cases it's way too high for anyone under 6 feet / 180cm. Someone should run studies on whether this influences the rates of colon cancer. The most naturally-ergonomic toilet is actually the seatless "turkish" hole. Unfortunately it's often not the easiest to use in a hygienic manner, and it requires a lot of space. I wish someone would invest in evolving that model into something better.
    • muzani 4y ago
      I grew up with the turkish holes. IMHO they're not ergonomic at all, and don't actually need much more space than a typical toilet. Eventually most of them get replaced by the typical Western toilets, because old people have problems squatting.
      • toyg 4y ago
        They might not feel more ergonomic to our increasingly-underused muscles, but they are to our colons. > old people have problems squatting. They shouldn't be required to, but everyone else should have the option to preserve their bodies better.
  • scns 4y ago
    To make it explicit, the colon gets straightened that way, business becomes easier.
  • aaronax 4y ago
    Wouldn't leaning forward accomplish the same thing?
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I've been playing guitar on and off for 30 years. I'm holding the pick completely wrong and it probably negatively impacts my playing - but I've struggled to correct it (I hold it with thumb, index and middle finger; if I try to hold it with just two fingers, it inevitably slides out after a few strums; I don't know how people do it). I've also been trying to snap my fingers wrong for 20 years until somebody finally explained to me that it wasn't my fingers rubbing / clicking / pouncing against each other that made the sound, it was the finger snapping/clapping on the meaty part of your wrist. Doh!
  • spit2wind 4y ago
    Many fine players use the three finger approach. Steve Morse comes to mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= EDIT: link to Dixie Dregs in case you have no clue who Steve Morse is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrAa6K_28NU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrAa6K_28NU
    • scns 4y ago
      Hillybillymetal, Hell yeah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD9j0VfX7QU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD9j0VfX7QU
      • 72deluxe 4y ago
        Steve Morse's Cruise Missile track is also a great track
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      Thanks, note that your first link came up empty (it's missing the video tag in the URL)
  • Zanfa 4y ago
    > I've been playing guitar on and off for 30 years. I'm holding the pick completely wrong and it hugely negatively impacts my playing - but I've struggled to correct it (I hold it with thumb, index and middle finger; if I try to hold it with just two fingers, it inevitably slides out after a few strums; I don't know how people do it). Try orienting the pick slightly so that when you strum the strings, it plucks the string with the leading edge, rather than with the flat side of the pick, so you don't need to press as hard. > I've also been trying to snap my fingers wrong for 20 years until somebody finally explained to me that it wasn't my fingers rubbing / clicking / pouncing against each other that made the sound, it was the finger snapping/clapping on the meaty part of your wrist. Doh! I've found snapping to be louder and fuller sounding if I don't use my thumb to "tension" the middle finger at all, but instead just smack the the middle finger against the "meaty part". Plus you can get a lot more snaps done in much less time if snaps-per-minute is an important metric.
• zander312 4y ago
  For the past 15 years or so, every night before bedtime I would proclaim “Time to hit the shack!” or “I’m going to hit the shack”. In reality it is a “sack” that you hit, not a “shack”.
  • daveslash 4y ago
    For all intensive purposes, they're the same. (I'd been saying "intensive" instead of "intents and" until my mid 20s) *edit: Fixed a spelling mistake. It's still early here... :-p
    • circlefavshape 4y ago
      It's actually "intents and"
      • daveslash 4y ago
        oof!! yes, embarrassing on my part for sure... it's still super early on a Monday here. I do know that it's "intents", that was just my fingers typing out the wrong word... corrected my comment.
        • mrguyorama 4y ago
          I thought you did it on purpose as a nod to the OP making the same kind of mistake. Should run with that story
          • daveslash 4y ago
            My original comment was "I'd been saying "intensive" instead of "intense and" until my mid 20s" I even had the "correct" version wrong! The first was a nod to op, the second was a goof on my part. :-p
    • mhandley 4y ago
      Um, https://www.grammarly.com/blog/for-all-intents-and-purposes/ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/for-all-intents-and-purposes/
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  Not using an electric toothbrush. First time I used one it felt like I'd had a proper dental cleaning. An extremely half-assed effort with that kind of brush beats a thorough one with a manual brush. I thought they were a gimmick, but no, they're amazing.
  • champagnepapi 4y ago
    THIS! I used to get like 5 cavaites a year, costing me between $300-$900 a year with insurance (US). Then i spent like $120 on an electric toothbrush, nothing ever since, and my gums are so much healthier according to my dentist. I learned this at age 29. Wish i used them years earlier!
  • e40 4y ago
    Try using a water flosser after regular floss. You will be genuinely surprised how much crap comes out. Since I started that routine, my hygienist has become extra friendly and chatty and say she loves working on my teeth.
  • xyzelement 4y ago
    Yup! Also the Phillips ones are just based on vibration (as opposed to some rotation in oral-b) which is also much better for your teeth and gums.
    • BilalBudhani 4y ago
      I'm about to order one for myself. Which model are you using? I'm thinking of getting 5100.
      • fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
        One word of advice: The more expensive ones are better. You dont need to spend 200$, but the 80$ one is much better than a 30$ one.
        • guskel 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• thyrox 4y ago
  Worrying and arguing about things in the future. I wasted so much time and energy on this but as I get older I've realised there is so little of what we can actually control vs what we think we can do. Most of the time just saying Yes and waiting for things to actually happen is so much easier. A lot of time what you worry about never happens and if it does it isn't always as bad as you make things out to be in your head. A lot of times it turns out to be actually good and it would've been a shame to avoid it. Also when you say yes to people, a lot of time the other person never actually follows through the thing you didn't want. Otoh if you would argue or say No beforehand it always has the opposite effect. I guess for most people this is common sense but I did this wrong for a large younger part of my life.
  • cloogshicer 4y ago
    I feel this strongly, but it's very hard for me to stop worrying anyways. Any specific tips?
    • spoiler 4y ago
      I would recommend therapy. It's helped me loads. Meditation can also help (but if you suspect you had a traumatic childhood, discuss meditation first with your therapist). The reason I suggest therapy is because it can be a number of reasons for the underlying anxiety. I think it's mostly a symptom of something else, rather than a standalone issue.
      • cloogshicer 4y ago
        Thanks for the suggestion!
      • solarmist 4y ago
        Therapy is great, but it can be very slow to get started because there can be a long ramp up process. There are many techniques that don't require a counselor/therapist. I highly recommend the youtube channel healthygamer_gg. There's a great community and many suggestions for well understood steps you can take on your own. Also, realizing you're not he only one feeling this way can help a TON!
• gtf21 4y ago
  Putting a teaspoon handle-down into a bottle of champagne when putting it in the fridge in order to "retain the fizziness" which I did unquestionably as something we just "did", until I had to tell someone else to do it a few months ago and realised that there was no reason this should work and, lo and behold, it makes no difference whatsoever.
  • tiagod 4y ago
    I imagine that could actually make it worse, as it would provide more nucleation sites for the bubbles to form.
    • maverwa 4y ago
      I dont think the spoon handle is actually supposed to touch the liquid. That would be hard to achive in a classic bottle of champagne, even if its full, I guess. Teaspoon handles are not that long.
  • Pr0ject217 4y ago
    This works for pop/soda. I'm not entirely sure why, but if you pour a glass of coke/pepsi/whatever, and put a steel spoon or fork in the glass, and put it in the fridge, it won't go flat (nearly as quick).
• themandalorian 4y ago
  I always overengineer and min/max things. Simple and some progress is better than none. No, grandma doesn't need a fibre connection with a NAS server with plex, using usenet, when she just wants the basic gardening channels :D
• mhandley 4y ago
  Tying my shoelaces: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm I was doing what Ian calls the "Un-balanced Shoelace Knot". Reversing the starting knot makes all the difference.
  • intrasight 4y ago
    I tried switching when that first showed up on HN a couple years ago. Tried it for a few days but the habit didn't stick. I should try again.
• Trufa 4y ago
  Eating. I’ve stressed and binged eaten all my life without knowing. Removed the two, started surfing and 50kg (110 pounds) later I’m happier and more active than I’ve ever been.
  • andrelaszlo 4y ago
    How did you stop? That sounds like a difficult change to make.
    • didgeoridoo 4y ago
      I had the same problem, and the answer was a bit of therapy and a lot of rethinking my mind’s relationship to my body. I used IFS methodology, which encourages you to investigate what “part” of you is doing the overeating, and why that part seems to think it’s necessary (is it protecting you? Distracting you?). I don’t really buy much of the IFS framework, but there’s some stuff in there that subjectively helped me. I also suffered from a tendency (probably common here) to over-intellectualize things and generally feel disconnected from my actual body. Exercise and mindfulness practice helped that part. All those things together helped me feel like I could stop fighting my body, and I could find better outlets for my furiously running mind than trying to calm it down by eating chocolate chips out of the bag at 10pm.
    • HDThoreaun 4y ago
      New weight loss medication works. Both the big ones are showing 20% loss over a year versus 3% with placebo. It's crazy expensive, but a lot of the tech workers here could afford.
      • AlwaysRock 4y ago
        Like what? I know some do but they are basically just suppressing your appetite and speeding up your metabolism. Like meth does. I've used methods to control hunger in the past but basically felt like my heart was racing and had hard times sleeping when using it.
• pcdoodle 4y ago
  Elon Musk mentioned the "Elevate the head of your bed by 3"" a few months back. Had an open schedule that day so I said "f-it, let's go look at my lumber out back". Long story short, I put a 4x4 (3.5" actual) across the head of the box spring and a 2x4" (1.5" actual) across the middle. I have been sleeping a whole lot better even since.
  • high_byte 4y ago
    I just tried this. it does actually feel better already just by lying down! can't wait to sleep tonight :)
    • pcdoodle 4y ago
      Please report back :) I haven't been able to convince anyone else to try it.
• ralmidani 4y ago
  Putting off an annual checkup with a PCP (I’m 42, and the last PCP I had was a pediatrician). I had long suspected my cholesterol and triglycerides were high due to family history and my excessive love for cheese, and last week that suspicion was confirmed. I’m now more resolute than ever on lifestyle changes (exercise, less red meat, getting most of my calcium from 2% milk). On the bright side, I also got reassurance that outside the lipid panel, everything else (sugar, kidney and liver function, PSA, etc.) seems normal. Other than laziness and procrastination, a huge part of me was dreading being told I need a prostate exam and colonoscopy, but fortunately I don’t need either for at least 3 more years.
  • Loughla 4y ago
    I learned from my father's generation that regular check-ups were vital. My oldest two uncles died from heart issues in their early 60's. The next two and my father have made it to their 70's and show no signs of stopping. There isn't really any difference in lifestyles between the dead and alive ones, other than going to the doctor regularly, and taking whatever medicine they are prescribed. I guess one uncle quit smoking. So that's probably good for him.
  • hacker_junky 4y ago
    That's great news that your cholesterol and triglycerides were high and that everything else looks normal! Are there any other tips that you would suggest for making lifestyle changes to help lower cholesterol and triglycerides?
    • ralmidani 4y ago
      I’m not a Physician or Dietitian, but my dad is a Gastroenterologist and my wife is a Registered Dietitian, so some of their knowledge rubs off on me. And my PCP gave me some tips last week that are still fresh in my mind. - Exercise can help lower cholesterol slightly. But try to have a reasonable balance between cardio and resistance training. Too much cardio risks having some muscles actually weaken if you maintain a large calorie deficit. - Diet-wise, you want to go for sustainable weight management, so no extreme or gimmicky diets. Avoid Atkins and Keto (unless a professional tells you you actually need to avoid carbs), extreme fasting, etc. - 3 moderate meals a day are better than 2 or 1 large feast(s) because they keep your metabolism going for most of the day. Your body can adapt to feast/famine and can go into ketosis, but these are survival mechanisms and harmful, even counterproductive, if you keep your body in these modes for long periods of time (you might even gain weight in feast/famine mode because when you do eat, your body converts as much sugar into fat as it possibly can, in order to prepare reserves for the next “famine”). - Some fasting is good for spirituality and to teach self-control, but it should not be a permanent state (I plan to fast Mondays and Thursdays as much as possible, leading up to Ramadan in about 50 days). Fasting every single day for the rest of your life is not realistic and probably does more harm than good. - Eat raw nuts (raw almonds have been observed to lower total cholesterol, lower LDL, and raise the HDL/LDL ratio) as much as you can within your calorie allowance. In general, more plant-based protein and fats, and less animal-based is very helpful (but watch out for high saturated fat from coconuts, and too much soy can mess up men’s hormones). Edit: the soy evidence is not conclusive - see comments below. - Keep your calorie allowance reasonable and sustainable, and try to eat a good variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, legume, meats, etc. with moderation in everything.
• paulbjensen 4y ago
  Peeling bananas. I used to open them from the hard stem bit which was not always successful, but it turns out that if you pinch them at the other end, they open up much easier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8svUCSuMS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8svUCSuMS4
  • Topgamer7 4y ago
    Grab with two hands, break apart in the middle.
  • benhurmarcel 4y ago
    But then you need to remove the nasty dark bit.
    • solarmist 4y ago
      Devil's anus
    • gwbas1c 4y ago
      It's called the "bananas" https://theoatmeal.com/comics/bananus https://theoatmeal.com/comics/bananus
      • solarmist 4y ago
        I prefer devil's anus. :)
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      When in Poland, I learned of one urban legend there which was that your head to remove the end of the banana because there are some small livings (?) there (I think they called them "lamblia"). Some folks (usually older) strongly believe that.
    • d13 4y ago
      Exactly, which is why I also think starting from the stem is better.
  • 4y ago
• toyg 4y ago
  Typing. I've always been a self-taught hunt-picker, but for some reason, as a teenager I picked up a terrible technique that involves using thumbs for keys to the side of the spacebar. Later in life I trained myself into touch-typing (and then to use Colemak), but for some reason I can't seem to shake off this annoying thumb bit.
  • truculent 4y ago
    How did you train yourself into it?
    • toyg 4y ago
      I used GTypist but it was a long time ago. These days there are excellent tools online: ratatype, typeracer, keybr, keyzen-colemak, typelit.io, typing cat, speedcoder, etc etc. The main approach is: 1. don't look at the keyboard. Print out a layout, better if color-coded to indicate which finger should be used, and put it near the monitor. Whatever happens, don't look at the keyboard, ever. 2. index fingers on the two central keys with the little rubber bit (F and J in qwerty). 3. accept that it will take weeks to be as productive as you were before, but then it will (should) be much easier to go faster.
      • truculent 4y ago
        Thank you, that is really helpful.
  • thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Is using your pinky really any better? The only way to truly get an economically "correct" typing posture is to use a keyboard that actually has keys under your resting hands' fingers. That means using a keyboard that was designed to match the shape of hands, not the shape of a 19th century typewriter. There is no ergonomical way to use a traditional keyboard. All you can do is pick your favorite compromise. Using a better layout (like Colemak) helps a lot, but it can't fix the whole problem.
    • 4y ago
• makach 4y ago
  It was when I was younger, I was independent and living alone that I realized that I had the power to change myself. In order to succeed there was only one person responsible for my happiness and good fortune, myself. I had to stop waiting for good things to happen, and make sure that I took faith in my own hands. This has led me to change employment, often, but not that often. It has made me approach many challenges from multiple angles. Maybe it didn't made me rich (so far) but I feel much wiser and I observe people on the other side, they are stuck in their beliefs and loyalty. So many clever people, smarter than me, but lost to ideas, opportunities and self- improvement.
  • beznet 4y ago
    I like to remind myself that the society that we live in is/was created by people generally no smarter than you or I. People accept things as if a higher power is imposing their will against them to fit into these mental and physical constraints but once you start questioning the status quo, it feels very freeing.
  • high_byte 4y ago
    I had a similar experience. I was independent fairly young, lack of experience is expected but without well-defined goals and mentorship I didn't leverage it to the fully. tip for others in similar situations: being independent doesn't mean you go alone.
  • seneca 4y ago
    > In order to succeed there was only one person responsible for my happiness and good fortune, myself. I had to stop waiting for good things to happen, and make sure that I took faith in my own hands. This is the best response here. Too many people are stuck in a self defeating mindset of expecting life to happen to them, and blaming others when it doesn't, rather than taking charge for themselves.
  • RGamma 4y ago
    Ech.. the "everything's your fault" view is typically American, but it's also pretty unbalanced. Sure you have to do things, yet interdependence exists. Also there's plenty situations where shit's stacked against you by heritage/law/social order quite unnecessarily.
• rjmill 4y ago
  When my then-gf/now-wife and I first moved in together, I got really mad at her because she kept "hiding" my stuff when I left it out for more than a day. I couldn't find anything! At some point, I yelled, "It's like you don't even want to see any of my things when I'm not using them!" Then I stopped for a second. For the first time in my life, it made sense. The whole point of putting things away is to hide them! No one wants to look at your crap when you're not using it.
  • asah 4y ago
    Our place has a ton of different storage locations... we solved it with a spreadsheet.
    • balderdash 4y ago
      This seems like the solution is worse than the problem!
    • moffkalast 4y ago
      When you need a WMS for your place it may be an indicator that you have too much stuff.
      • ilyt 4y ago
        Or just hobby with many required SKUs. I dabble in electronics and that is in hundreds different parts.
        • moffkalast 4y ago
          Can relate, I also dabble but a few of these[1] sort of organizer sets plus handful of full sized drawers are enough to hold just about everything I've got. With labelled drawers and sets split by semantic type I'm not sure there's anything I could need a spreadsheet for. Unless you've got a truly absurd amount of parts there heh. [1] https://images.thdstatic.com/productImages/a34bd723-d555-4290-8928-b17916f49906/svn/black-clarified-drawers-akro-mils-shelf-bins-racks-10164-64_1000.jpg https://images.thdstatic.com/productImages/a34bd723-d555-429...
• lr4444lr 4y ago
  Arching my lower back as a default position for sitting and standing and avoiding rounding my back at all times. I always thought that slumped posture was the most important thing to avoid, but this created maladaptive muscle fixedness around the spine, confirmed by imaging taken by orthopedists. The spine is adapted to bend multiple ways, including rounding, as a matter of good exercise form. It's a major function of your abdominal musculature, in fact, to compress the spine forward along the transverse plane. Just don't pick up heavy stuff that way or hunch over a desk all day.
  • hammock 4y ago
    Neutral back
• jjk166 4y ago
  Buying alcohol based mouthwash. For years the burning sensation was always terrible and I'd often cheat, either not using as much or not swishing as long as recommended. Accidentally grabbed alcohol free mouthwash one time and it was wonderful.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's alcohol, but the worse offender on "mouthwash that burns" is Listerine. Alcohol or no, there's no need to get an aggressive one
• tashoecraft 4y ago
  Wearing modern shoes. As a society, we have somehow led everyone down the path that feet must be wrapped in socks that constrict the feet, then placed in shoes that are designed for looks and not anatomy. It's led to generations of people that have weak feet, and unnecessary pain all throughout their body because the base of what they stand on has been weakened. Wearing toe socks and minimalist shoes, combined with going barefoot as much as possible, has rescued my feet, ankles, and knees from pain.
  • JTbane 4y ago
    In a similar vein I found flat-soled shoes like Converse sneakers are a dream to wear during daily activities, rather than arch-supported shoes.
    • jeltz 4y ago
      Converse require you to have narrow feet or else they will just hurt your feet. They are also not very durable.
    • tashoecraft 4y ago
      Definitely a good start. It can be difficult for many to transition as you are trying to use muscles that haven't been engaged properly for decades.
    • detritus 4y ago
      Hrmm, I've long been a fan of thin-soled, low profile shoes, but having experienced my first ever pair of Converse just last year, I'd suggest 'avoid'. They're not expensive, but they're certainly not cheap - but they certainly don't last very long at all. I walk a couple of miles a day to and from work and they barely lasted 6 weeks. Soles were worn down and the uppers were just knackered.
      • driverdan 4y ago
        Are you very heavy, drag your feet, or otherwise cause a lot of abuse to them? They aren't the highest quality shoe but they should last much longer than six weeks. Most of mine have lasted years with daily use.
• katspaugh 4y ago
  Pronouncing "February" with an r after the b.
  • _da_ 4y ago
    Either way is correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February#Pronunciation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February#Pronunciation
• LVB 4y ago
  Not using a bidet. I was enlightened the first time I traveled to Japan, and an affordable ($50) add-on has been installed in our master bath ever since.
  • alainchabat 4y ago
    which $50 one do you recommend?
    • LVB 4y ago
      Haven't looked in a long time, but I've had this one for almost 10 years with no issues: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A0RHSJO https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A0RHSJO (only $35).
    • qorrect 4y ago
      $34. I've recently switched to the handheld ones because the seat attachments require you to shift your butt around to catch the stream. Friends seem to be more weirded out by this one though. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076G9M9JG/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076G9M9JG/
      • gardenhedge 4y ago
        How do you install that though?
  • nlh 4y ago
    +1000000 I used to think bidets were weird European things. Now I know that wiping your dry poopy butt with paper is a weird American thing :) Bidets for life!
    • bckr 4y ago
      A weird American thing that caught on because bidets were considered “sinful”!
      • 4y ago
• bradwood 4y ago
  Being a smart-ass and saying to my kids: "I don't believe it, I know it" without first stopping to realise that knowledge of something additionally requires that one believes it to be true.
• MarcoSanto 4y ago
  Worry about what other people think
• egberts1 4y ago
  Working on social interactions and refining nuances would have gone a long way for my career but my sheer technical aptitude has managed to carry me pretty far as I am happy to go.
• throwawaysalome 4y ago
  Monopoly. If the player elects not to buy the property he lands on, it gets auctioned to the other players. This oft unfollowed rule makes the game 100x more fun when followed.
  • peeters 4y ago
    Not following this rule is also almost singularly responsible for Monopoly's reputation as an extremely long game.
  • LanceH 4y ago
    That and free parking doesn't pay anything. Number of houses/hotels is also limited to the number that came with the game. Play by the rules and the game will actually come to an end.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • xahrepap 4y ago
    And the person who originally chose to not buy it can bid on it. Potentially buying it for less than list price!
  • SimonPStevens 4y ago
    On the subject of monopoly, it's also interesting that it's roots are in a game created to teach the negative aspects of monopolies. The original game that modern monopoly is based on had two sets of rules, one that rewarded all players for wealth creation, and a second with the goal of creating a monopoly to crush opponents. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)
    • thundergolfer 4y ago
      I think the is a nice specific case of the general problem with mixing education and entertainment. Many have addressed this, but I like Postman’s ideas the most. If you give children educational television programs, you’re not teaching them to love learning, you’re teaching them to love television. The Lindy-effect blessed methods are still just pen, paper, books, discussion, and debate.
• ce4 4y ago
  Binding your shoe laces wrong with an easily loosening granny knot instead of a proper square knot. Not answering strictly according to "you've done your whole life", but I see this often when deliberately looking at other's shoe laces. I just recently tried to correct someone's 40yr old habit :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_knot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granny_knot
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • intrasight 4y ago
    I only do that on some shoes that just won't stay tied with a "regular" knot.
  • tetraca 4y ago
    I've been using this one ever since a discovered it, like ten years ago: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm
• nmeofthestate 4y ago
  I previously used to rinse my mouth after brushing my teeth, then was told not to do this. Not rinsing is a big improvement.
• mikosty 4y ago
  Avoiding and suppressing uncomfortable emotions and feelings instead of fully accepting and acting on them. This is of course a huge topic in itself and easier said than done but I'm confident that investment on this area almost always worth it. You are fortunate if you got this already in childhood! Another thing would be flossing with dental brushes. Gum infections can ruin your health in many ways.
• sebastianconcpt 4y ago
  Cutting onion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwRttSfnfcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwRttSfnfcc
• z7 4y ago
  I don't know to what extent it's wrong, but I've been drinking tap water for years. Here in Germany it's generally said to be of high quality, but apparently 1 litre contains 100 nanograms of hormones (via birth control medication).[1] Even at such concentrations the hormones are said to have an effect (the article quotes a professor for membrane technology and describes a new filtering process aiming to solve this issue). [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.de/umwelt/2022/03/hormone-im-leitungswasser-deutsche-forscher-entwickeln-neues-filterverfahren https://www.nationalgeographic.de/umwelt/2022/03/hormone-im-...
  • tbonesteaks 4y ago
    We live in the US, in an old house and generally the tap isn't good. But, in combination with the old pipes, it was gross. I have a friend who is a pipe fitter, and he told me "Poison kills you quickly. Bad pipes do it slowly." So, we got a Berkey Walter Filter [1] and it's great. They are heavy duty and apparently it even alkalizes the water. [1] https://www.berkeyfilters.com/ https://www.berkeyfilters.com/
• wallflower 4y ago
  How to text if you would like to date someone. Not: “What’s up” Not: “<open-ended question>” Not: “<this is what I did over the weekend>. How was yours?” Yes: <Logistics of meeting up>
  • nerddadnear40 4y ago
    Get agreement of Time, Agenda, Outcome -- up front and in that order. Helps with all meetings not just dates.
    • layer8 4y ago
      You could call it the TAO of meetings.
    • maximus-decimus 4y ago
      What do you mean by Agenda and Outcome?
      • solarmist 4y ago
        In my experience. Agenda - What are we going to do? Outcome - How do we know if the agenda was successful? / Or when to end the meeting (more for exploratory stuff, dates included).
    • raldi 4y ago
      When is this meeting? What is this meeting? Why is this meeting?
• giantg2 4y ago
  "Something you’ve done your whole life that you realized is wrong?" Worked hard believing it would be rewarded.
  • praveen9920 4y ago
    I would have missed this because of lack of enough upvotes but.. here’s my perspective. You should work hard but on yourselves not for others. I did working hard for others for a decade and ended up in the same place after. I started working for/on myself, I am happier now if not richer.
    • dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
      Thanks, that does add some nuance to the parent comment.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    Yes. Something I learned from contractors on how to fix a big part of this is good communication (this is not self-promotion). People pay much less attention to others than we expect, so most don't know what we're doing or what we did. 1) Say what you're going to do. 2) Do it. 2a) Bonus: If something changes, immediately say what has changed and reconfirm the agreement. 3) Say what you did. Those three steps go a long way toward being recognized for your contributions.
  • AussieWog93 4y ago
    >Worked hard believing it would be rewarded. Even if you're not seeing the rewards of your hard work now, they will come one day. Let's say you've spent the last 10 years working your arse off for a shitty boss who doesn't appreciate you. At least you're far more competent than if you'd been lazy for 10 years under the same shitty boss. Go find a better situation and you'll be grateful for the skills you've picked up, even if it hurt to acquire them.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      That would be true. But my situation was that I worked hard in an area that didn't have any real external opportunities (FileNet, then Neoxam). It had been about 8 years for me, and I still don't see any reward on the way.
• skrebbel 4y ago
  Turns out there are two ways to tie your shoelaces (the direction of the top knot wrt the bottom) and the one I didn’t do never went untied. (Also turns out you can buy perfectly good shoes without laces so extra win)
• throw7 4y ago
  Supposedly you're not to rinse after brushing so the flouride can "apply" to your teeth. I think that's gross so oh well.
• lisper 4y ago
  Not using a meat thermometer, especially when cooking fish, and extra especially when cooking halibut, which is ridiculously touchy and easy to overcook. Now I used a thermometer to get the interior to exactly 120F and it comes out perfect every time.
  • Cub3 4y ago
    Completely agree with this, I got one recently and my chicken is so much better
• gregors 4y ago
  It's been awhile, but learning to set my side mirrors correctly on my car. Once set correctly my blind spot isn't 0%, but it was dramatically reduced by 95% or so. That's also when I learned only the passenger side mirror is convex (in the States) the driver side isn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIkodlp8HMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIkodlp8HMM
  • causi 4y ago
    Adding little round stick-on mirrors can vastly improve your situational awareness.
• bloomingeek 4y ago
  Assuming. As in, others understanding, maybe not believing, what I'm trying to get across. Others get a reasonable argument or are open minded. (Of course what's reasonable to me isn't always to others.) Others can walk their own life path instead of being led by others. (This is still very difficult for me as I try to understand how people are led by others who don't always have their best interest at heart.) Now I've learned to take almost nothing for granted, which makes me happier.
• Dowwie 4y ago
  One of the worst thing I did for many decades was drink bottled water and/or tap water. For many years I bought bottled water for home consumption. I eventually learned about under-sink reverse-osmosis water filtration systems and invested in one. For the last ~15 years, I've used such systems, following scheduled filter replacements. The water tastes and feels better than bottled water. Last year, my county water utility issued a boiled water alert due to high levels of e-coli. This wasn't a problem at all for me because of my water filtration system.
  • charlieflowers 4y ago
    Can you recommend a brand? They are expensive and there are the usual low quality, planned obscelesence game playing techniques to sort through.
    • solarmist 4y ago
      AO Smith works well from what I've tried. > there are the usual low quality, planned obscelesence game playing techniques to sort through Umm, a water filter is mostly a reservoir, tubing, and a pile of chemical reactants. This is not planned obsolescence. This is just pure chemistry. The reactants become saturated and need replacing. All water filtration systems require periodic changing of filters. That said, there are many stage filtration systems, and you don't need most of them. A three-stage reverse osmosis system will give you the cleanest water possible. Like mine was a 4 stage with a final remineralization step that I just didn't hook up. If you want to understand it better watch this [1], just skip the deionization step because drinking deionized water is very unhealthy. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1w15DHO4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb1w15DHO4g
    • Dowwie 4y ago
      I own an iSpring under-sink RO system and it's been working fine for the last 8 years. I'm replacing filters every 6 and 12 months, and RO membrane every 3 years. I also replaced the RO tank once when pressure couldn't be restored. I don't think you're going to be able to sort through planned obsolescence schemes for water filtration systems. The money is made in the filters, not the under-sink systems. There are generics for just about every part.
• veganjay 4y ago
  Breathing through my mouth. I trained myself to breathe through my nose during the day. And at night, I put a little piece of tape on my mouth to make sure I breathe through my nose.
  • alainchabat 4y ago
    where is your tongue position? The proper position should be on the roof of your mouth then you'll automatically breath with your nose.
• trinsic2 4y ago
  I realized that blaming the The world and other people for my misery was a waste of my life. http://scottrlarson.com/books/book-most-improved/ http://scottrlarson.com/books/book-most-improved/
• mooreds 4y ago
  I used to always cut open packages in the kitchen with a sharp knife (typically a steak knife). When I got married, my SO was a big fan of kitchen shears, so I was introduced to them. Using shears is a far better experience, and they're useful for pizza too.
  • ask_b123 4y ago
    Yeah! I really like (prefer) to cut tortillas with scissors. Specially when they are stacked (to use them for chilaquiles).
  • bruce343434 4y ago
    An actual pizza knife (sharp wheel thingy) will be undoubtedly better.
    • mooreds 4y ago
      I've used the sharp wheel thingy (didn't know it was called a pizza knife) in the past. It's nice but only good for that one purpose. Kitchen shears are far better than a regular knife because they give you a lot more control, it's easy to cut different sized pieces. Plus, shears are useful for other things too (butterflying a chicken, for example).
    • tome 4y ago
      Definitely not! Cutting pizza with scissors/kitchen shears is far more effective. I'd never cut home-cooked pizza with a wheel if I had my way. Unfortunately it tends to upset Italians and other sticklers for tradition.
      • bruce343434 4y ago
        I can only imagine the cheese layer getting plaqued onto the shears.
  • Leftium 4y ago
    Try a Slice micro ceramic blade! https://www.sliceproducts.com/products/safety-cutter https://www.sliceproducts.com/products/safety-cutter
• intrasight 4y ago
  When I was about 12, I sprained my thumb and started holding pencils very differently because my thumb was in a splint. It took decades to go back to the right way.
• micheljansen 4y ago
  I think I was in my late twenties when I found out I had been tying my shoes wrong all my life. There is a correct and an incorrect way to do it. This affects not just how the knot looks (straight vs crooked), but also how easily it becomes untied: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/theres-a-better-way-to-tie-your-shoes-according-to-science.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/theres-a-better-way-to-tie-...
  • colordrops 4y ago
    This has been a huge game changer for me since I switched as well
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • andrewl 4y ago
    For more on how to lace and knot shoes, see Iain’s Shoelace Site: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/
    • digianarchist 4y ago
      Great website
  • ansible 4y ago
    The linked article mentions that the "strong" knot is unlikely to come undone. This knot will not come undone: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm And you can still untie by pulling on one of the ends. Though you have to make sure that while untying, you don't allow the loop to go over the other end of the shoelace.
    • explorigin 4y ago
      I second this. I've been using this knot for years. It's a bit tricky to tie but still the best.
• ariekachler 4y ago
  Dismissing people as undesirable without any thought of why they became the way they are. It's very easy to quickly make up your mind about someone who you don't like without asking yourself "why did this person became such an a-hole or someone you just don't want to have any relation with". I have realized that most of these people have had lives that have made them whatever negative adjectives I would give them.
  • MourningWood 4y ago
    I try to think everyone is a product of their environment.
  • ornornor 4y ago
    Everyone has reasons for being the way they are, but I don’t see why I should suffer assholes even if they’re the product of their circumstances? It feels like it would be a huge energy leech with no benefit. What am I not seeing?
• jameal 4y ago
  Expecting other people to reach out to me without making any real effort myself. At some point I heard this thought experiment: If you could only have one, which is more important: To love or to be loved? Now I understand that if I want to receive love and connection that I have to be able to give it. This shift has strengthened so many of my relationships and helped me build new ones as well.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• notacoward 4y ago
  Multiple people beat me to the shoelace one, so here's one I don't see yet: running. At 48, I had hated running practically since I had first been able to do it, but I was in a situation where I decided to give it another try. I quickly figured out why I had hated it. I had been doing it wrong all my life. A little reading taught me about pacing and body lean and foot landings, and then ... well, it still kinda sucked TBH. But it sucked a lot less, in the way that anything hard will suck, and I've been able to stick with it year-round for almost nine years since. Still amazes me that I spent more than four decades doing something so basic so wrong. So much for being a smart guy, I guess.
  • donohoe 4y ago
    Do you recall the reading material? You just overcome my biggest barrier to healthy living.
    • notacoward 4y ago
      I don't recall specifically, but it's pretty easy to find articles e.g. on Runners World. Practically everyone seems to recommend Born to Run but personally I've never read it. For me it was getting my body lean and foot landing more forward, pushing more than pulling, and sacrificing a bit of stride length for higher cadence. And not being afraid to take breaks, especially when I was first building up to 5K. Any halfway decent running store should be able to help you understand about foot landings and get you the right shoes for your style. In fact, one of the things that has really helped me stick with it is being able to geek out about training and gear and stats. Plenty of room for that, and without it I might have had more trouble especially in the winter months. Good luck!
  • DarkTree 4y ago
    Along with this, the thing that helped me the most was learning to run much slower. I would always run at an uncomfortable pace that would jack my heart rate up and have me huffing and puffing. Then I learned about "Zone 2" training which essentially boils down to running at a pace where you could comfortably have a conversation and more easily run for extended periods. This now only made it so I could run more miles per week, but it turned running from an exhausted effort to a more meditative, enjoyable one. Things I think have helped me the most: 1. Correctly fitting shoes (I always wore shoes that were too narrow and short for my feet) 2. Wearing a heart rate monitor so that I could run at a pace that allows me to stay within the heart rate range that improves aerobic fitness while being easy enough to sustain (heart rate zone 2) 3. Increasing my cadence to the 170-180 steps per minute range, which has allowed me to improve my form/efficiency and avoid shin splints.
• aliqot 4y ago
  Not liking how Ask HN is turning into AskReddit
  • muzani 4y ago
    Reminder that you can flag topics that violate the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  Care about what the company I'm working with is making. If I'm not heavily in equity and it's just a job then I shouldn't be giving a dam about they are making. I should only be interesting in what they are paying me and the benefits I get from working at the company. I used to get real upset when the codebase I working on was shit and even left companies due to this. In reality what was more important was those companies where paying a shit wage that was why their codebase stank.
  • SeanAnderson 4y ago
    Surely you should also care what impact said company is having on society? :)
  • layer8 4y ago
    Pretty sad to spend half your waking time making something you don’t care about.
• adastra22 4y ago
  I apparently hold chopsticks incorrectly. I am a white guy so it’s not like this is my culture—I just started holding them the way I do as a kid in sushi restaurants and no one ever corrected me. I found out when I married my wife, who is from Taiwan. Here’s the kicker though: I’m more dexterous with chopsticks than even she is. I can pick and place a single grain of rice, or hold the most slippery noodles with ease. So she just laughed about it and told me to keep doing whatever the heck I do.
  • scythe 4y ago
    Do you hold the moving one like a pencil and let the other one rest on your ring finger? I had always done this and was eventually told that you're really supposed to use only three fingers. But after trying it that way for a while, I found it limited my dexterity quite a bit, and went back to the pencil method. Surprisingly, I did it in China for a month-long work trip and nobody batted an eye.
    • adastra22 4y ago
      Yup! So much easier than the “right” way of doing it.
    • hangonhn 4y ago
      My family is ethnic Chinese and I grew up using chopsticks. I hold it using the pencil hold and no one has ever corrected me. It works well like 98% of the time. I may not be able to delicately pick up a tiny grain of rice or an entire salt shaker like my uncle who was demonstrating the proper hold but honestly those are such edge cases. The pencil hold is just way more natural and easier adoption may outweigh the benefit of handling some edge cases.
    • tsukikage 4y ago
      Turns out different people were taught to hold pencils very differently. I use two fingers to hold the moving one, which is also how I was taught to hold a pencil, and let the the other one rest on my middle finger. I've met people who use four fingers to hold a pencil and find the instructions incomprehensible.
• whoomp12342 4y ago
  tabs, not spaces.
  • high_byte 4y ago
    you mean you were wrong to use tabs your whole life instead of space? ;)
• captn3m0 4y ago
  I walked wrong. When I was around 11 years old, a relative pointed out that my gait was weird because I placed the front-of-the-foot on the ground before the heel. I'm not sure if I'd done this for all my life, or if it was a recent habit, but once it was pointed out - I fixed it immediately, to the point where I forgot my old gait by the next few days.
  • blahedo 4y ago
    Not exactly "wrong", just nonstandard in the modern (western?) context. I've read that the toe-first gait was once relatively common before footwear became strong and universal---heel-strike walking is definitely harder on a bare heel, and more likely to hurt if you step barefoot on a small object. I'm able to walk either way, which was a lifesaver one time when I started developing shin splints (from a temporary job with a lot of unaccustomed fast walking on concrete floors) but couldn't really be off my feet—the toe-first walking was nearly as fast and used a completely different muscle pattern, so I could walk that way without triggering the inflammation. :)
  • timerol 4y ago
    Based on modern understanding of walking ergonomics, it would be better for you to go back to your 11 year old walking style
• throwaway019254 4y ago
  So I learned recently that I was tying my shoes in the wrong way my whole life. The classic knot has two versions, the weak one where loops are more vertical, and the strong one where loops are more horizontal. It took me about two weeks to re-learn tying my shoes.
• alainchabat 4y ago
  Having my tongue rest on the bottom of your mouth. Proper tongue positioning is when you rest your tongue on the roof of the mouth and away from the teeth. It's been 2 years I've been "mewing"[1]. A good side effect for me: Now I stop snoring and I believe I have better posture. Some claim that it will improve your jawline but not for me, I guess I started too late. If I had started in my teen, I believe I would have had a great face today ? [1] Check youtube videos for "mewing" or lookup JawHacks videos
  • fellerts 4y ago
    Hard to tell, but I think this is the natural resting spot for my tongue. Now I'm curious, where else would you rest it?
    • alainchabat 4y ago
      The other (incorrect) resting position would be the tip of your tongue touching , and not your full tongue. https://imgur.com/a/0BBXGUz https://imgur.com/a/0BBXGUz
      • Beaver117 4y ago
        Wow, I physically can't do this. I can only touch the tip of my tongue to the roof. Guess I need jaw surgery.
    • thih9 4y ago
      According to GP, incorrect: > on the bottom of your mouth correct: > when you rest your tongue on the roof of the mouth and away from the teeth
  • Nesco 4y ago
    ”Mewing” is just normal tongue posture. It will not improve your jawline. Usually it’s the reverse: if you need to “mew” / put your tongue on the roof of your mouth consciously and if you naturally snores it’s because of a problem. Problem that is often genetic or more rarely that appeared during your development: either your face lacks forward projection or a part only is recessed (malocclusion: your upper and lower teeth don’t perfectly fit). The only way to definitively cure it is to go through an orthognatic surgery. If not treated it might evolves into sleep apnea as you are getting older. You should check with an orthodontist or a maxillo-facial surgeon to make sure that’s what your are suffering from. If your are lucky like me, ie you have enough projection and no malocclusion, a genioplasty might be sufficient to naturally seal your lips without muscle contraction by bringing them closer. In my case it’s what created the pressure differential needed for my tongue to stay in the roof of my mouth. If you are unlucky a BSSO, a Lefort I or both (Bimax) might be necessary. Some extreme cases might even require the three surgeries.
• bufordtwain 4y ago
  Focussed too much on the technical side of things and not enough on the people side of things at work. I'm trying to change this but should have done it years ago.
• jstummbillig 4y ago
  Focusing on who is right. On average, when you want to improve any given situation, it's a lot less important then it intuitively should be.
• andersthue 4y ago
  Being arrogant for 47~ish years, did nothing good for me. Now I work hard on being friendly, curious and kind towards others.
  • codazoda 4y ago
    As my grandfather lay dying in a hospital bed he said, "I wish I had been a nicer person". I'm glad you figured this out with time to make adjustments and I hope that it brings you a smile in your final days.
    • simonswords82 4y ago
      I did lol @ Final Days. He's 47!
      • bgilroy26 4y ago
        It's a koan
      • codazoda 4y ago
        Sorry, I meant that he can be nice for years and then he can smile when those final days do come. I didn’t mean he’s in his final days. :)
      • OJFord 4y ago
        That's relating to GP's anecdote about his own grandfather's 'final days', who regretted not doing so - i.e. may GGP not have such regret when the time comes.
    • andersthue 4y ago
      It brings me nothing but good experiences already, and I for sure will smile at the end of my days here on earth knowing I at least for some time had a positive impact on others.
  • onecommentman 4y ago
    "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant." ― Elwood P. Dowd Main (human) character from the movie “Harvey” starring Jimmy Stewart, 1950. "Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened." ― Lawrence Durrell from the novel “Clea”, 1960.
• hypertele-Xii 4y ago
  Breathing. I was sucking my gut in on inhale, and expanding it on exhale. Once I tried it the other way around, it locked and I've breathed this new way ever since. It's obvious to give your lungs more room, couldn't believe to have been doing something so basic wrong.
  • thomastjeffery 4y ago
    The first part of learning to play a wind instrument (clarinet, flute, trumpet, etc.) is learning how to breathe. Muscles can only do two things: contract and relax. Lungs are controlled by two muscle groups: the diaphragm and the chest. The muscles in the front of the chest are the most obvious, and the least important: they only squeeze the air out, which doesn't really take active effort most of the time. The diaphragm is what pulls air in to the lungs. It does this by pulling the lungs straight down toward the stomach. Practicing this intentionally, by pulling your diagram down and holding it, is great exercise. Deeper slower breaths are more effective at cycling oxygen and CO2 through the blood stream, help you speak louder and longer, and can even significantly reduce your stress level. Breathing is something we do automatically well enough, but breathing intentionally is incredibly useful.
  • Laaas 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphragmatic_breathing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphragmatic_breathing
    • OJFord 4y ago
      Er, is it weird/bad that that's natural to me? I can do 'traditional relaxed breathing (eupnea)' if I concentrate on it (but it's very fast and shallow) or 'gut in on inhale' as GP describes, but neither without thinking about it. I was surprised enough to read that GP could change subconscious breathing technique (or have had it 'wrong' to begin with) - I'm even more surprised that this is supposedly a health/musicians' exercise, not just normal.
• ornornor 4y ago
  How to tie my shoes. If if loop around the other way than I normally do, the bow stands parallel to the ground plane instead of vertical and gets tighter over time instead of looser and undone. I don’t have to constantly retie my shoes anymore since figuring that out.
• michaelchisari 4y ago
  My doctor had me work on increasing the amount of water I drink in a day until I hit the recommended amount, and journaling the result. Turns out, I had spent most of my life dehydrated. I feel so much better when I drink a ton of water.
  • hoffspot 4y ago
    This. I thought I had allergies that stuffed up my nose and sinuses my entire life. Then I started tracking my water intake, drinking the proper amount, and boom, my entire head cleared up. I'm so mad at myself for not realizing this decades ago.
  • dangwhy 4y ago
    Curious. What changes have you observed from drinking more water.
    • wruza 4y ago
      For me it was better digestion and less headaches. The downside is kidneys aren’t ready for that amount of water (or are, depending on perspective) and you need to pee much more often, like every 1.5-2 hours. I use around 3l/100kg/day.
• c120 4y ago
  When making jam or cooking anything to keep for later, not touching the inside of the lid after to boil it to kill germs! I learned that when making jam with a friend who's a doctor in a hospital and it's so easy to accidentally touch something to then comes into contact with the food. Also, to properly kill germs, you need to cook stuff for 7 minutes...
• anthomtb 4y ago
  Proper hand washing. The only good thing about the pandemic. I wonder how many colds I could have avoided by spending 20 seconds soaping up instead of 2.
  • antipotoad 4y ago
    To add to this: don’t touch your eyes when you’ve been in public places and touched unsanitary surfaces. Your eyes are a really easy path into the body for pathogens.
• ajeet_dhaliwal 4y ago
  Almost everything.
• pm90 4y ago
  Not going to a therapist because of fear of social stigma.
  • wruza 4y ago
    Tbh, people can use this to reductively explain your behavior. I learned that easy way, but the therapist advised me from the beginning to stay, well, not silent, but selective about it. I didn’t and some people tended to ignore my arguments for “that’s anxiety and depression speaking” or something along the lines. Ask yours about it next time.
• jws 4y ago
  If when you coil a long cable or hose you find yourself fighting a twist as you coil… then you should learn to coil in an alternating overhand/underhand style. Google a video. Basically when grabbing the next hunk of cable you alternate between your thumb pointing away from you down the cable and your thumb point back up the cable to you and things just sort of happen right. When you uncoil the cable it will be laying flat on the ground with no twists. An alternative for massive cables it lay it out in a figure 8 on the ground. That will also pay out without twists. Extension: The upright vacuum cleaner you've been using that releases the cord from the handle by twisting the top hook down? If it is leaving you with a twisted mess of cord, that means you haven't been winding it up in a figure 8. Even more, since you got this far: Do this with your short cables too. Your USB and audio cables will last longer. When you have a twisted cable, a torque shows up at each individual wire where it meets its connector. The repeated twisting and untwisting leads to connection failure. And when you get a new cable that is rolled up (any Apple cable), unroll it instead of pulling the ends apart. Then you cable need never have twists put into it.
  • toss1 4y ago
    Yes! And it is absolutely critical in using climbing ropes to NOT coil by loop+twist, but double-loops without twisting (to the point where it is a firing offense in climbing schools to coil w/loop+twist method); it is critical that you can uncoil a rope instantly with minimal risk of tangling. This also works better for air hoses, water hoses, etc. If the thing isn't on a winding/unwinding reel, use the double-loop method; everything will last longer and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.
  • allknowingfrog 4y ago
    This genuinely makes a huge difference with extension cords, garden hoses, etc., but reversing my grip never made this "just happen" the way the videos said it would. For anyone else who struggles, the main goal is to twist every other loop in the "wrong" direction, which negates the previous twist. This still forms a spiral shape, but as you create loops, the loose end alternates between laying on top of the loop and tucking under it. You can accomplish this without reversing your grip if you just alternate your twists instead.
  • 4y ago
• heliophobicdude 4y ago
  Rinsing after brushing my teeth. This may be controversial, but keeping the fluoride on your teeth as much as possible helps prevent tooth decay. Rinsing immediately after brushing dilutes or removes fluoride. What was the point? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• charlie0 4y ago
  Buying fewer more expensive items of clothing > buying more items at a much cheaper price point. I've noticed this the most with outdoorsy equipment, like my pair of wool socks (Darn Tough). They are 3x more expensive that cotton, but they keep my feet warm without overheating them, are thicker so I can comfortably walk around the house with no other footwear, they don't hardly get smelly, they also dry really fast. That last one comes in handy when you need to cross streams.
  • pancrufty 4y ago
    Yes and no. Where I live I have a choice from dirt-cheap to "signature" garments. I like buying in the middle because I hate low-quality cloth and because I don't want to be wearing the same shirt 10 years in a row. Give me a good price for something that lasts 2-3 years and I'm set.
    • charlie0 4y ago
      To each their own. I've been wearing a mid layer fleece from a big outdoor brand for about 8 years now. Ironically, it was company swag that I got for free and is actually what got me into buying more expensive pieces of clothing. Not too much into fashion, but do buy some pieces that tend towards timelessness. Shirts and underwear are about the only thing I replace frequently.
  • jjice 4y ago
    A good thing, on top of working better, can beat out cheap things for price per use pretty easily. Darn Tough is a great example. Best socks I've ever had to wear, but also I have pairs from six years ago that are still kick (plus they have a life time warranty). A cheap jacket for $50 dollars or a (well researched) jacket for $150 is an obvious win. Warmer, more durable, more comfortable, and looks better. I bet it can last 3 times longer than the cheaper jacket in a lot of cases, plus it could probably resell for much more. We don't often talk about equity in smaller purchases (probably because it's not as consequential), but buying good items means they'll probably hold value better for resale (same goes with buying them used).
  • sgt101 4y ago
• linuxftw 4y ago
  I can't imagine dealers and manufacturers agreeing to fix these vehicles on their dime. I can't imagine the charging station owners offering to fix the vehicles on their dime. I think the only option for these people will be to file an insurance claim, let the insurance company sort out who's at fault and try to pursue them.
• tyincdyon 4y ago
  Using cannabis recreationally, regularly. I've voted twice to (successfully) repeal prohibition laws in states I've lived in, and would do it again. Cannabis dependency is real however, and it's the "safe" drug compared to, say, heroin; but I'd recommend taking breaks, or consider stopping.
  • ugjka 4y ago
    How bad are Cannabis withdrawals compared to tobacco?
    • tyincdyon 4y ago
      Depends on how heavily you're using. If you're smoking all day and quit cold turkey, you'll be cranky for a few days either way. The craving for nicotine never feels completely gone, unlike cannabis. (Neither were as hard as alcohol.) Quitting/pausing the use of cannabis has some immediate benefits compared to nicotine, more energy, fewer mood swings, your dreams come back.
    • Spinnaker_ 4y ago
      Cannabis withdrawals are worse initially, but easier over time. With Cannabis, sleep and mood are really effected, but it subsides pretty quickly. I smoked both for a decade. Haven't craved weed in years, but still crave tobacco pretty regularly.
    • high_byte 4y ago
      it's psychological so it is different. from my experience I could simply outright stop and be fine with it. I might want later on, I might not, but it wasn't physical dependency. what I realized many years ago is that getting "high" is, imho, actually overdosing. you should treat it like any other drug. let's say you wouldn't want to overdose on ibuprofen for example, or sleeping pills. you could but the outcome reverses to negative. so the same is for cannabis, you want to hit just the sweet spot. the problem is that every strain is different, it is also heavily based on your situation (e.g. same amount could have very different effects if you're hungry/thirsty or even just in a different mood; same with different strains) and these (more often than not) don't come with a prescription and well defined dose. you would be surprised how little it takes to "overdose" (according to my definition, ie. get high) and how little you actually need to gain the positive effects while avoiding negative effects. for that I realized smoking socially helps a ton, but you still need to be accountable for yourself. personally I rarely smoke weed now since I very rarely get net positive effects. when I do it performs miracles, but more often than not it's neutral or net negative effect. maybe it changes with age. a lot of people say they remember it differently from when they were younger.
• evilbob93 4y ago
  Tying my shoes: My knots would always come out, so i got into the habit of tying the loops together. A few years ago, in my mid 50's I realized that I was tying a granny not rather than a square not. I made the adjustment and have never tied my loops together again.
• bigwavedave 4y ago
  Not using a bidet. I honestly feel like the single biggest quality of life improvement I've had in my adult life was realizing how much of a difference a bidet makes. That, and using flushable wipes when at home instead of just 100% toilet paper.
  • gwbas1c 4y ago
    Flushable wipes aren't flushable. It's a bit of wishful thinking on the part of marketers. They really do clog sewars.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    No flushable wipes in the toilet! Those destroy plumbing! If you want to use them, then throw them in the trash, not the toilet. Flushable wipes are NOT actually flushable.
• webdoodle 4y ago
  I should have become a goat farmer...
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    I should have done something else at this point anything.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  Oh! Another! Car side mirrors. I spent more than a decade of driving adjusting them wrong. You want them so you don't see cars behind you at all in your side mirrors until they're transitioning off the edge of your center rear-view mirror. This gives you far more coverage of your sides, and every car is still visible in at least one mirror at all times. For me, where I put my seat, this usually means setting them as far out as they'll go.
  • halfnormalform 4y ago
    Absolutely! I know what the sides of my car looks like and don't need to see them in the side mirrors. Cars leave the edge of the rearview and immediately show up on the inside edge of the side mirror. I love it, but anyone else who drives my car hates it.
  • lucb1e 4y ago
    That's not what I was taught. It sounds logical but before I take an internet stranger's word on changing one of the likeliest things in life to kill you or those around you, did you read somewhere that this is a good idea based on research xyz or is this something you came up with?
    • viggity 4y ago
      BMW has a performance driving class and they teach the same thing - set them far away from your own car. It is a little disorienting at first because you kind of don't have a point of reference like you would normally, but it is totally worth it.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      IIRC I read it somewhere long after I learned, tried it, and it was so much better I was certain it was correct. All but completely eliminated my blind spots (I still turn and look, but pretty much never see anything that wasn't already in a side mirror, now). Turn them farther in and you're losing side visibility to gain redundant rear coverage. [EDIT] I think I read about it in the context of correcting a common misconception or mistake, actually. Correct adjustment of the mirrors was described as watching a car leave your rearview mirror, and ensuring they show up on your sideview just as they're leaving the rearview—so if you can see cars on your sideviews before they're starting to slip off the edge of your rearview, you've got those adjusted too far in. For me, given how far back I put my seat, this ended up meaning I should adjust the mirrors all the way out in most cars. The idea is both to not have a gap in the sideview/rearview coverage, while maximizing side coverage within that constraint. So, if you can see cars in your sideview while they're still solidly in your rearview, that means you've got less side coverage than would be ideal.
• purututu 4y ago
  Believing main-stream media when they would say "conspiracy theory".
• aendruk 4y ago
  I used to regularly feel bad but didn’t recognize the feeling as thirst. Turns out humans are supposed to drink water.
  • pancrufty 4y ago
    "Recognizing feelings" is something we can be really bad at. Occasionally I would feel "really hungry" in the morning. Only in my thirties I realized that that "hungry feeling" was just stomach pain and a direct consequence of eating late at night. Similarly, I couldn't understand why I had a headache at 5 AM. Hint: I hadn't gone to bed yet. Realized by my late twenties.
    • maximus-decimus 4y ago
      Similarly, my father had headaches on Sundays his whole adult life. Turns out he wasn't wasn't drinking coffee on the weekends so was getting withdrawal syndromes every Sunday.
  • fomine3 4y ago
    This is heavily underrated
• stronglikedan 4y ago
  How to blow my nose. I used to have to find a bathroom to blow my nose, because I couldn't figure out how to keep it from going everywhere, while still getting it emptied. I just recently learned the proper way in my late 40s.
  • rrgok 4y ago
    So, how is done properly? I cannot blow without blocking one nostril.
    • eastbound 4y ago
      ¿With a tissue?
• cloudripper 4y ago
  Walking. Currently in my late 30s, I've long enjoyed pushing my limits in many forms of physical exertion - running, climbing, skiing, mountain biking, etc. However, as I've aged and my bones are no longer made of rubber, I have been forced to realize that pain is not often gain. Dealing with the many persistent aches and pains, I was prompted by a friend to get a 'gait analysis' to assist with my running longer distances and in more diverse terrain. I quickly learned from my very skillful physical therapist/gait analyst, that my gait for running is not sustainable- and will lead to kinks and pains as I progress. Taking a step back, she identified that many of those gait quirks stem from my walking gait. And she quickly identified that my walking gait is out-of-wack due to an injury I sustained while playing basketball when I was 13. 25 years later, I am challenged to learn how to walk correctly.. so the question I have is if I haven't yet learned to walk, have I really ever been able to run? I doubt it, but I'm a pretty firm believer that I will be able to in the future. Edit: I can't spelle
  • prakashk 4y ago
    Do you, by any chance, mean to say "gait" analysis, instead of "gate" analysis? If not, can you please explain what "gate analysis" is?
  • beznet 4y ago
    I used to have a very large stride and was always known as a fast walker. Started having hip/back pain and reassessed how I move entirely and realized my long strides meant my hip and lower back shifted dramatically with each step to give my leg extra reach. Got minimalist shoes to where I don't heel strike as significantly and its reduced my stride length quite a bit thus removing that excess rotation in my hip and lower back
• tapanjk 4y ago
  I always thought I need to exercise [more] to lose weight. Wrong. For all practical purposes, to lose weight you must change what you eat.
  • dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    Great one. Not many people know this, or will even think it's nonsense. Exercise is overrated. What you eat is really, really important.
    • timeon 4y ago
      It is just calories in calories out. Exercise may help with that. Depends how much you eat.
    • qu4z-2 4y ago
      Exercise is great for a pile of things, to be fair. Losing weight is just not one of them.
    • gardenhedge 4y ago
      If you eat to lose weight and keep that up for a long time you will end up weak if you do exercise
  • balaji1 4y ago
    Nice one. also if you see extremely fit adults, it is mostly because they were extremely active/fit during their teens. (note: inverse won't be true, active teens might get unfit later). Their current diet or current activity has nothing to do with it.
    • rjmunro 4y ago
      Is that causation or just correlation? Isn't it likely to be at least partially genetic - if you have "fitter" genes you are going to be fitter both as a teenager and as an adult?
      • 4y ago
• ddorian43 4y ago
  Diet. I think everyone should do keto diet or carnivore. There is no "everbody has his own diet". It is a little bit strong, but I believe it to be true. Everything else is either addictive and harmful or doesn't have nutrients.
  • yboris 4y ago
    "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." ... the best food is plant based and reduction of animal products is beneficial for one's health.
    • ddorian43 4y ago
      You only took the "carnivore" part, which is just an easy way to do keto. My idea is that "keto diet" is best. You'll find that doing "vegan keto" is a bit hard because plants don't have nutrients that are bio-available. "vegan keto" is insanely better than "vegan".
  • SeqDesign 4y ago
    awful opinion! carnivore diet?? just awful
    • ddorian43 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure you don't even know what it is. Example question: is carnivore high protein or high fat?
      • rngname22 4y ago
        Any thoughts on the 'putrefactive' criticism of carnivore diets? https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7528 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7528 EG: "In the Nature study referenced by Dr. Patrick, the authors write, “…high intake of red meat relative to fruits and vegetables appears to associate with outgrowth of bacteria that might contribute to a more hostile gut environment,” and, “Together, our results suggest venues through which a diet low in fruits and vegetables relative to meats select for outgrowth of putrefactive bacteria, which might help promote colorectal carcinoma.”" from: https://medium.com/@pkslater/why-the-carnivore-diet-works-and-it-also-might-kill-you-c14ac468cb33 https://medium.com/@pkslater/why-the-carnivore-diet-works-an...
• koliber 4y ago
  I recently realized why snowboard jackets have double zippers. I always struggled to bend down to clip in my boots into my snowboard bindings while standing up. I now unzip a third of the way there and it’s a lot easier to bend down.
• erjjones 4y ago
  Making promises. When my child would ask to do something or desire something I might have said, "Not today but I promise in the future ...". Often I would never follow up on those. Now, I am more inclined to say, "I will do my best to make that happen" or something along those lines but no promises.
• deeteecee 4y ago
  not wrong/right but I was watching a video where monkeys were eating bananas. And then I tried it and now I've stuck to it. I've always had issues opening bananas so for me, that's the right way.
• FigurativeVoid 4y ago
  Not getting my dog professionally trained. I spent the money to send him to a proper board and train, and it was life changing. Our relationship is better. He is happier and less stressed. I was able to take him off sedatives. Plus it's cool to have a dog with perfect recall that I can take anywhere without worrying. If you can afford it, I can't recommend finding a reputable balanced trainer more highly.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    This is interesting. What part of the curriculum do you think made the difference? I feel like this would only be half a solution. That, to work as a pair, you would need some amount of training as well. To better understand your dog's signals to you and know how to respond appropriately.
    • FigurativeVoid 4y ago
      > What part of the curriculum made the difference. I think the big difference is in three parts. First, they are doing the training all day. I simply don't have the time. Second, the balanced training methodology adds consequences as well as rewards. This is a far more effective methodology. It is what people use to train working K9s like attack dogs and the like. The last part is mindset. I have a working dog, granted it is a Corgi, and he wants to be working. Instead of making him "be good," I am giving him jobs throughout the day that reward him. > That, to work as a pair, you would need some amount of training as well. You would be correct. I got pretty significant training the day I took him home (about 3 hours). After that, we had a few follow hour-long ups. There they show you the commands and behaviors the dog learned, how to interpret there body language, and how to extend them at home.
      • solarmist 4y ago
        Sounds great. How did you choose what kind of training to do? Also, what kind of jobs do you give to him?
        • 4y ago
• Havoc 4y ago
  Acquired a utility knife with those cheap replaceable blades instead of abusing the kitchen scissors for everything
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• asimovfan 4y ago
  Trying to get happiness from external conditions instead of making it at home in my body through meditation and understanding.
• thegabez 4y ago
  Using toilet paper...bidets are easier and more hygienic.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• high_byte 4y ago
  such a fun thread. I started reading when there were 600 comments, I only managed to read a few and now there are 900. but I'm learning a lot! I even improved my shoe tying skills!
• achenatx 4y ago
  Ive modestly tried to lose weight my whole life. Ive never been fat, but still had to work to keep my calories low. Im 5' 9", and it took 10 years to go from 170 to more like 160. Losing weight made me weaker and caused me to lose muscle. Ive recently started weightlifting for strength (low reps high weights) and the mindset is totally different. With weightlifting to keep your lifts going up you have to eat more. One standard is 1g protein/pound of target body weight. It turns out it is really hard to eat that much protein and when you do you arent that hungry. Im now trying to gain weight to get up to 190-200. Ive gained 10 pounds back to 170, but it is more muscle than fat. In the end weight is just a meaningless number and building muscle becomes a positive spiral. Losing weight causes a loss in muscle which becomes a negative spiral. Paradoxically you can be leaner, look better, and be stronger at a higher weight.
  • ancientworldnow 4y ago
    The standard is 1g per kg but American lifters got confused and repeat it ad nauseum online until it became heterodox.
  • 015a 4y ago
    Any advice/links on getting started lifting?
    • danial 4y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-Basic-Barbell-Training/dp/0982522738 https://www.amazon.com/Starting-Strength-Basic-Barbell-Train...
    • mcnnowak 4y ago
      Generally my advice when people ask me is as follows: 1. In the beginning, going to the gym is the hardest part. Incentive: if you go to the gym consistently for a while you are rewarded with no more post workout muscle soreness, and easy newbie gains. 2. Do compound lifts if you can (squat, bench, deadlift (warning deadlifts are not for everyone, and may not be all that beneficial), pullups/pulldowns.) Add a bit of weight or reps each week. Aim for 3-6 sets. No one will care if you start with an empty bar. If you add reps, if you get up to around 10-12, add weight instead. These number are flexible and there is no right answer. 3. For accessory exercises or things that target single muscles: try a bunch of stuff and try new stuff often. If you don't like it, don't do it. If you like it, work it into your routine. These are generally fun but unnecessary until you hit a plateau/wall in another lift and do some research on what you want to do to get past that plateau/wall. 4. Good form is more important than adding weight. Don't hurt yourself. 5/Bonus. Try watching some cringey YouTube fitness influencers and see if they're doing anything that looks fun and try that. Also follow the golden rule: clean up and put your damn weights back.
• racl101 4y ago
  That barring any real medical issue ... intermittent fasting is hard. We just think it is. Every time I tried it, I'd sabotage my efforts not knowing by chewing gum, eating tic tacs, using flavored tea, etc this would just trigger my insulin response and I'd get hungry throughout the day. All I had to do, is just simplify my intake to any of these: water, black coffee, black tea or any tea with a bitter profile. And that's it. Fasting would get easier after that, especially after first few days. And you could do 4h, 6h, 8h, 12h, 20h easy peasy. No problem. And if you should experience the desire to eat during those periods, most of the time it was just psychological. Your body isn't dying. You are more resilient than that.
  • keepquestioning 4y ago
    [dead]
  • solarmist 4y ago
    If I understand you correctly. To do fasting drink more non-calorie liquids. Which is absolutely correct. I drink like 2x as much liquid when I'm fasting.
    • racl101 4y ago
      You gotta be careful with just the no-calorie definition. Technically, Bubbly / Flavored Sparking Water has no calories but can still break your fast because the flavoring can trigger your insulin response by fooling your body into thinking food is coming and you start to salivate and the stomach starts to rumble. That's why I said coffee or teas with bitter taste.
      • solarmist 4y ago
        Sure, you want to avoid non-sugar and artificial sweeteners in there too. I wouldn't go as far as flavored drinks that don't include artificial sweeteners though (not that there are too many of those in practice).
• soheil 4y ago
  Reading hackernews to find out how to start a startup
• drewm1980 4y ago
  Consuming animal products.
• mmaunder 4y ago
  Not my whole life but stuff I’ve discovered: Realizing that sitting for 8 to 12 hours per day coding is catastrophic for my health. Understanding the incredibly high and hidden cost of conflict and anger. Films romanticize fighting the good fight. Avoiding a fight (legal, arguments, etc) until you absolutely can’t is worth a lot. Creativity and intellectual progress happen in a quiet relaxed and happy environment. Leadership starts with humility. Big companies signal unassailable leads and competence but tend to be wildly dysfunctional which makes them vulnerable. Yoga fixes lifelong back pain that drugs, swimming obsessively, chiropractors and workouts could not fix. Confronting death isn’t that scary, even for an atheist. We don’t deserve dogs. Everyone is the main character in their story, including you. You can be good at just about anything you love doing but can’t be good at many things. You can’t buy time but managing your time obsessively has its own cost. Early mornings are a very special time because no one else is up and it is the quietest and most productive part of the day.
  • lpapez 4y ago
    I haven't tried yoga yet because I luckily realized other items before I needed yoga :) Agreed fully
  • renjimen 4y ago
    I’ve found that it’s okay to sit for 8+ hours most days so long as I’m getting out of my seat every hour and going for a short walk or two every day. Yoga, even a 15 minute session once a week, helps a lot, as you say. Using a vertical mouse, large text and staring out the window frequently are the other healthy habits I stick to while working.
  • scotty79 4y ago
    > Understanding the incredibly high and hidden cost of conflict and anger. Films romanticize fighting the good fight. Avoiding a fight (legal, arguments, etc) until you absolutely can’t is worth a lot. That resonates strongly with me. It's better to just take the loss because entering a conflict because of it will cost more, even if you win, in almost all cases.
    • 4y ago
• ac50hz 4y ago
  My psychology friends are going to be busy for months (or years) with the responses here…
• high_byte 4y ago
  holding pens & pencils wrong. I've known since I was in like 2nd grade when my teacher told me. I only tried to change it in my twenties with some success in my mid-late twenties. I work on the computer mostly so I rarely write, but I keep trying to improve! see second image here to see what I mean by wrong: https://thecrackedamethyst.tumblr.com/post/180226225116/apparently-i-hold-my-pencil-wrong https://thecrackedamethyst.tumblr.com/post/180226225116/appa...
• maximus-decimus 4y ago
  I realised in my 20's I was tying my shoes wrong and that's why my laces always got lose. I don't think I ever had them loosen themselves since I learned the correct way from this Ted X video : https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes?...
• ravishi 4y ago
  I have always taken my good relationship with my father for granted. Not sure how to properly express this in english, but I don't remember having issues with him. We were present in each others' lives but while at the same time not connected. Yesterday while visiting him it just struck me like a lightning strike that I had no connection with him. Our world views are so fundamentally different that I might have disrespected him by some honest mistake. It was a difficult realization to process, but I feel like there's no going back from this. Something very deep inside has changed. I spent the night awaken next to my toddler thinking how I want a different fate for our own relationship, while at the same time having no clue how to even bring this up to my father. He expects something from me that I just can't (and don't) want to give. Still, I think this is progress, somehow.
  • zwkrt 4y ago
    The big difference between most people's relationship with their father and their mother (at least for us of a certain age) is that fathers historically were not involved in caring how their children felt. The traditional role of the father was to lay down the law of the house and to provide income. This comes all the way back from the initial formulation of the nuclear family, which was an imitation of the royal family where the king makes the rules and is responsible for the wealth of the land. I provide that background only to point out that it is based on nothing other than folklore and fairy tales. It was a tradition that served its purpose but is not really necessary in modern times. You can be emotionally involved in your son's life. You can let him know how you are feeling, even if you are feeling weak or unsure. I can't say for sure, but I would investigate if you are more concerned about how your father feels about you as a person or if you are more concerned as to whether or not he thinks that you are a success. Is he the voice in your head that says "you can do it, I believe in you!" or "you better not mess up!"? Part of this has to do with being emotionally competent yourself, which is something that you can work on.
    • ravishi 4y ago
      That is a great observation and fits properly with my situation. My father is "old style", while I strive to overcome sexism and develop an emotional bond with my son. I am proud to be involved in his care for his first year and a half: bathing, diaper changing and sleep were all my duties. That is indeed half of the picture. The one I am proud and hopeful about. The other half involves religion. This is the lost cause. His whole world view is built on top of dogmatic religious practice, which I have long rejected. Up to this point it didn't bother me at all: I respect his religious practices and even engage while visiting. But I won't hide my lifestyle choices because of this. I try my best to be considerate, but something will leak. I am not going to deceive him. There was a brief moment when he was disconnected from his practices. I was maybe 19 at the time. We talked about life and I got some "father advice". It didn't last long, and now all advice is tainted by religion. It is not useful nor practical. I can accept it, be considerate and try to adapt it, but it is ultimately useless. This drives us apart slowly.
• jcpst 4y ago
  I used to always stand up to wipe. At one point in my adult life, there was a conversation and I realized everyone else does not do this. Then I tried wiping while sitting down. So much easier.
  • mmcgaha 4y ago
    Yeah but if you stand your hand will never touch the water in one of the tiny grandma's house sized toilets.
  • kodt 4y ago
    I think this starts because as a kid maybe it is easier to stand up? And no-one ever told you to stop because once you are old enough to handle your business on your own no-one is there to see and offer advice.
  • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
    It must be cultural. We never stand up to wipe in France.
  • aussieshibe 4y ago
    I've tried both. Standing is clearly easier. There are three main parameters: stand/sit, front-to-back/back-to-front, front-access/reverse-access (i.e. between the legs or behind the back) Back-to-front is a health risk for 50% of us, and just a bit gross for the rest. So rule that out. Wiping hand between the legs is awkward and requires that the thumb (a notoriously larger-than-the-other-digits digit) is used as the primary wiping vane. Sit + wiping hand behind the back + wipe front to back allows use of the index finger, but requires an awkward lean and lift of one cheek to gain access. Stand + wiping hand behind the back + wipe front to back is, therefore, the only sensible option. Additionally it makes checking the bowlean return value indicated on the paper much easier.
  • stefandesu 4y ago
    I thought I was the only one! I think I learned this when I was like 28.
• bmn__ 4y ago
  • Just be kind to women • If you like a girl, tell her she's pretty • Buy a girl some flowers and watch her appreciate it • Just make her laugh, women love a guy with a sense of humour • Just let her know how you really feel if you like her • Just hold the door open for her • Just ask her out, the worst she can say is no • Just find a girl that likes you for you • Just listen to her and show her you care • Just be a gentleman and pay her compliments • Just be yourself! • Just stop trying and the girl of your dreams will come into your life when you least expect it.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    > Just make her laugh, women love a guy with a sense of humour Tbh Im done being funny. People take me significantly less seriously and I just become a sort of “court jester” for whoever I’m hanging out with.
• ROTMetro 4y ago
  Telling myself that I have no worth. Thinking that lead me to believe the only way to demonstrate my worth is to be superman at work. Being superman allowed me to demonstrate my value each day (corresponds to the 'but what have you done for me lately' mindset of American tech culture), allowed me to get validation that I was not worthless. That drive helped me professionally, which helped me demonstrate my worth as a provider, because obviously without the nice house, new cars, etc my wife would leave me (even though she didn't ask for these things). Being superman burned me out and took up all my time. Which lead to worse relationships with my wife/kids, which re-enforced I had no value/worth. We tried an external solution of moving to the countryside. But ultimately my thinking broke me completely. My court ordered rehab counselor trips out on it. He's like dude, you are a person, you lived better than I ever will, you helped tens of thousands of people in a demonstrable way (software I wrote and was the name on patents for had some life changing impacts), all of the women in this office comment on how it's crazy you are attractive and have no partner, talking to you you are well educated, present yourself well and people like you. In group you are the natural leader. Dude none of your thinking makes any sense. I hear him say it, but inside I know. I put on a good show, I can convince people I am a person, but I know the truth. I have no value. Everyone in group will see through and realize it eventually. I don't know how to change this or get past it. But I want to. I want friends. But I can't accept friends, because they will find out I have no worth, so I only have acquaintances. Honestly, I want my best friend back, my ex, but that is way gone. Being superman != a way to measure your worth. Work != the value of you. You != nothing. Be kind to yourself, show yourself love. You have value. I know that you do. If only I knew that I do too.
  • bmn__ 4y ago
    My good man, a therapist is certain to help you overcome this false and harmful belief that continues to destroy your life. Start tomorrow.
    • ROTMetro 4y ago
      Been there done that. It actually led to my final spiral out of control. The court ordered person I work with has been the best help. He doesn't fuck around. While the therapist said 'why do you feel this way...why do you think that...blah blah' this guy was the first person my whole life to say 'dude, you have value, I wish you could see the person I see'. I can't explain what hearing that did for me. Especially from someone that knows ALL the good and the bad. I can't use my 'but if he only knew' cop out.
• slv77 4y ago
  Tying shoelaces in a granny knot instead of a square knot. In a granny knot the shoe laces sit crooked and easily come undone. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
• omani 4y ago
  ignoring god.
• pengo 4y ago
  Eating Marmite instead of Vegemite. Only in my fifties did I discover that Marmite tastes different because it contains sugar.
• machiaweliczny 4y ago
  Swallowing ;) I learned from ortodontist that the reason I don’t have nice teeth arch and the reason that I have trouble with pills is because of „infantile swallowing”, basically pressing tongue to lower teeth and not lower palate. Learning this solved so many of my problems. This lowers efficiency of breathing and make you snore and might be related to sleep apnea and this makes you tired and depressed so please check your kids.
  • wingworks 4y ago
    So you shouldn't place your tongue on your front lower teeth? Or you should? Sorry, It's not 100% clear to me in your text.
    • favorited 4y ago
      Your tongue shouldn't push against your teeth when you swallow (called "tongue thrust swallowing"). Instead, it should press against the roof of your mouth, behind your upper teeth. Ideally, it's something that is noticed and corrected in childhood. Or, like me, you end up in braces (again) as an adult, because your tongue pushed your previously corrected teeth all over the place over the years.
      • wingworks 4y ago
        Yeah, no one said nothing to me about it ever. Is this something one should talk to with their dentist?
        • machiaweliczny 4y ago
          Orthodontist send me to speech terapist. I corrected tongue placement on my own but still have problems during sleep so I’ve booked visit. I’m currently testing these exercises from YT - https://youtu.be/aSdc1pKnqDY https://youtu.be/aSdc1pKnqDY
• kraftman 4y ago
  Not my entire life, but competing with my girlfriend/wife. Trying to win arguments instead of trying to solve the problem. Holding onto resentments instead of letting them go. We used to have huge arguements all the time, it took having a kid together to finally hammer it into my head that we are on the same team, we need to work together. Since then we've had 2 kids under 2 during covid and barely argued in 4 years
  • halkony 4y ago
    This reminds me of an article I read some time ago written by a house wife. In it, she admitted to verbally abusing her husband and demeaning his intelligence. When he'd do things like accidentally put colors in the wrong wash, she would chew him out and belittle him for not doing it right. And of course he felt ashamed and uncomfortable sharing his trivial mistakes with his wife. Then one time she left his tools out in the rain and they rusted. She apologized profusely but all he said was "It's okay, they're only tools." It made her rethink how she treated her husband. She married him because she knew he was intelligent and kind, so why does she look for evidence to the contrary and berate him for it? She says their marriage was much better after she realized her fault in this. That article left a deep impression on me as to how I should treat my partner/people I respect.
    • Zircom 4y ago
      Absolutely. People are human,and to be human is to make mistakes. You can't claim to love someone if you can't accept them for their imperfection and extend to them the same grace you allow yourself for your own mishaps and fuckups. Back a long time ago, about a year into my relationship, my partner managed to spill an entire crockpot of apple cider all over the backseat of my car she was borrowing to take to a friend's place. I reminded her several times to make sure to shut it tight and to secure it somewhere on the floor in the middle of the rest of her stuff so it wouldn't tip and spill. Of course she didn't do any of that and it got absolutely all over my seats and was a sticky gross mess. I later heard she spent the whole rest of the night over there fretting and worrying about how mad I was gonna be when she got home. And she was literally dumbstruck when my only response was "Alright no worries, sounds good" when she'd gotten back and offered to pay to get the interior detailed after explaining what happened. "Aren't you mad," she asked and I just said "Not really, it's fixable and you already said you'd fix it, not much to be mad about."
• marsven_422 4y ago
  [dead]
• enigmoid 4y ago
  A few years ago I discovered that I had spent my entire life tying my shoes incorrectly, with a Granny Knot instead of the stable Square Knot (the knots are very similar). My shoes would always come untied and I frequently double knotted them. Now a single knot is always sufficient. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
  • tstrimple 4y ago
    Huh. Not only have I been tying my shoes incorrectly for decades, I've taught my children to do the same.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    This! I've never had a good explanation, but being left handed I was making a granny knot about 80% of the time. I never figured it out consciously, but it eventually nearly stopped. Just the rare one. Now I understand!
• Tarsul 4y ago
  I actually went up stairs up until my 20s always while holding my breath. Sometimes wondering why it's so exhausting.
  • spcebar 4y ago
    When/why did you start doing this and when did you realize it wasn't normal?
• gongdzhauh 4y ago
  I used to be a NIMBY. I thought small neighborhoods that have nice characteristics should never evolve or change, I thought places with tons of people were unpleasant to live in, I looked down on people who could afford market-rate new housing ("evil techies"), I thought new development increased rents (it doesn't). 20ish years later, seeing the homelessness, property crime, and housing crisis in the Bay Area, I am convinced I was wrong and wish that the area had built a ton more housing in the past. There used to be so many artists that were able to survive on a part-time cafe job back then. That's no longer possible and it's a bummer and makes the area so much more mundane. I do still consider open space and parks important and valuable and don't support building new housing on a lot of those types of places.
  • Dowwie 4y ago
    George Carlin presented another solution for housing development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSRCjG-VLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbSRCjG-VLk (2:38min if you want to skip ahead)
  • armatav 4y ago
    Our homeless crisis is determined by factors unrelated to the amount of housing (though it used to be, and it’s important to build new housing in general) - nowadays we actually import homeless people to places like SF.
    • gongdzhauh 4y ago
      Basic supply and demand along with every study I've seen points to housing supply being one of and usually the main factor in the level of homelessness of a city. As to San Francisco homeless coming from outside the Bay Area, that's true for only around 10% of the population. Most (70%) became homeless in San Francisco and many others became homeless in other parts of the Bay Area. See the `PLACE OF RESIDENCE` section from https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDReport_SanFrancisco_FinalDraft-1.pdf https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...
      • 4y ago
• Self-Perfection 4y ago
  For several years since I got my first cell phone I held my cell phone during conversations so its top side is on the same level as top edge of my ear. Seems neat an logical, right? Then I realized that I should align its speaker to be right against my ear canal, that is 1-2 cm lower. And now I could hear the other person so much better!
• iancmceachern 4y ago
  I still innately spell maybe mabye. I have to stop myself and correct my spelling manually wver single time I write the word.
• CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  I eat hotdogs "sideways". Since I don't put condiments on mine, I eat it so there's bun on top like a hamburger would be.
• wscott 4y ago
  You are tying your shoes wrong: https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/theres-a-better-way-to-tie-your-shoes-according-to-science.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/theres-a-better-way-to-tie-... (tie the bow reversed from the square knot and it will last much longer) But then trying to come up with a good link I hit this alternative version which is really cool: https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm Likely you can do an Ian knot reversed from the square knob, but I need to play with that.
• niom 4y ago
  Mental health. Haven't seen it mentioned yet. Never think of yourself as wrong, invalid, defective or unworthy. That's wrong. Don't do it. For about 90 % of my life I've thought about myself as defective in many ways. - In puberty I thought I was defective because other boys were talking about their crushes, how they'd like to f--- this girl or that girl or how they got a boner just looking at them. Later almost everyone got a girlfriend or two. None of that happened for me, so I felt defective. Turns out I'm gay. - Also in puberty I'd get random boners when sitting down in the bus. It made me feel ashamed and like a pervert, so I stopped sitting down in public transit. Turns out many boys experience this in puberty because, well... the vibrations. They're called "bus boners". - I always struggled a lot remembering faces and names. I felt bad about it because I thought it meant I didn't care or try enough. I've always had issues forming relationships and again I felt bad and thought I just had to try harder and make a better effort, which didn't work. And various other issues, and for each of them I thought it was a defect of myself. Turns out I'm on the spectrum and my parents didn't bother telling me about being diagnosed as a child. I only found out when bored me stumbled over online autism tests and literally all of them came out strongly autistic-neurodivergent.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    Yes, knowing and understanding that you're not alone in your feelings and experiences is super important too. Another piece is understanding your body's feelings and your emotions. Many people aren't taught how to understand their feelings and emotions, especially men. This is NOT automatic. It is not difficult, but it can be very hard and unpleasant. Everyone needs to be taught how to process emotions, emotionally healthy people are taught this as children. But to balance this a bit. You, as a person, are never wrong, but you are still accountable for your actions/words. This is an important distinction to keep in mind.
    • treszkai 4y ago
      What resource can you recommend for identifying one’s own emotions?
      • 4y ago
• f3b5 4y ago
  Not waking up earlier to the fact that the meat section in the supermarket is a product of systemic, gruesome torture of intelligent beings. Like probably many of you who read this, I usually felt a bit guilty when I was confronted with the ugly facts we are all vaguely familiar with. I justified my meat consumption with specieist arguments (humans are so much better than pigs, cows, etc). My wife challenged me to watch at least a little bit of a documentary, and if I still wanted to eat salami, so be it. Afterwards I didn't want to eat salami anymore. I now think that the extreme abuse of animals by the food industry on behalf of ignorant consumers is probably the worst evil of the 21st century. If you disagree, I challenge you - watch 15min and then post your reply: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
  • high_byte 4y ago
    you would probably love Cowspiracy and the less gruesome and more wholesome The Game Changers. both on Netflix.
  • KMnO4 4y ago
    Curious, do you still eat meat? And if you do, do you prefer small farm butchers?
    • f3b5 4y ago
      No I'm completely vegan by now (though I was vegetarian for a long time because cheese had a strong hold on me). Regarding small butchers / organic farms: a long time ago, I spent two days at a tiny organic farm that was run by a local politician of a European Greens party. By meat industry standards, this farm was an absolute animal paradise. I helped around the farm, including with slaughtering a pig. My job as the guy from the city was to just herd it into the kill room. The pig seemed intelligent to me, it was confused and didn't want to die. A crew of men dressed in wifebeaters stunned the pig with an electroshocker, lifted it up with a chain, sliced its arteries to let it bleed out, all while cheerfully drinking beer. They made crude remarks while blood and guts was spilling everywhere. Needless to say, there was way more chopping to be done after that. The scene had a surreal quality to me - what had just been alive a moment ago was now dangling in halves in front of me like in a horror movie. The pig probably didn't suffer, but the experience still felt deeply wrong to me. But here's the kicker: even after this close-up slaughter experience I still continued to eat meat for years, because I just was so used to it. Back in the city, in the gleaming supermarket, meat again stopped being something that lived, and was again a yummy product to buy. Long story short: even the best farm and the best butcher (which are getting exceedingly rare) are still using, abusing, and ultimately killing intelligent beings. This also does something to the people that do the killing: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683 https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50986683
• dirtybirdnj 4y ago
  It doesn't matter if you do nice things for other people. Do it because you enjoy helping others, not because you want a response. You are acting incredibly selfishly if you help people because you feel it entitles you to a specific outcome. I now see why people have called me childish. You have to let people have their own agency and decide whether they want your help or even like what your doing. You can't get upset if they don't think it's as good as you do. Find people who care and lean into those. Forget the rest. Don't get emotionally attached to people who don't care about you. You can never "nice" them into liking you. Fake friendships are everywhere and you may seem "rude" by realizing this or pointing it out... but you can both live better lives by not continuing the charade.
• exogen 4y ago
  OK here's a dumb one. You know how the label on EVERY toilet bowl cleaner bottle always says "Step 1: flush toilet"? I always dutifully followed those instructions, thinking "hmm, the extra splashing water must be pretty important and help it mix or something." But no. One day I realized it's just that my toilet always started from a flushed state... like a normal person. But they knew somewhere out there, someone would try to clean their toilet still full of piss and shit.
  • adrianmonk 4y ago
    Step 1: Don't not flush toilet.
  • aussieshibe 4y ago
    Ooooooohhhhhhhhhh. I often thought: It seems like flushing first makes much of the cleaning product run right into the water rather than sticking to the bowl, but there must be a reason they say to do it.
    • ixak 4y ago
      No it's because urine contains ammonia, and if you mix bleach and ammonia you get a highly toxic chloramine gas that can literally kill you.
  • raldi 4y ago
    Isn't it about moistening the surface of the bowl above the waterline, which would probably otherwise be dry hours after the last flush?
  • eastbound 4y ago
    Europeans often keep shit in their toilets for two reasons: Living in a multistory building and not annoying the neighbors downstairs during the night; and saving water. It’s absolutely disgusting, but such people also don’t usually wash their hair (and I mean, engineer-type people, not necessarily unemployed kind).
    • 4y ago
• machiaweliczny 4y ago
  Standing. Turns out you shouldn’t be standing with locked knees. I learned it in my twentees. People with hyperlordosis have tendency to do that it seems.
  • OJFord 4y ago
    It's also better advice for not fainting while standing long periods than rolling onto balls of feet and back to heels - the reason that works is that it forces you to unlock knees, if you can just unlock/bend slightly without doing that it's fine (and how you should be anyway as you say).
• swframe2 4y ago
  So many haha ... 1) Working for someone else instead of starting my own company. 2) Trusting people to do right thing instead of accepting that people are selfish. 3) Giving up on interesting tech projects because my friends didn't understand its value. 4) Write a lot of code before testing it haha 5) Avoiding tech bubbles instead of figuring out how to get in and out quickly. 6) Not keeping close contact with my tech friends (many of whom are super successful now).
• cvhashim04 4y ago
  What’s with the proliferation of Ask HN post? Take this back to Reddit.
• w_for_wumbo 4y ago
  Thinking other people's emotions were my responsibility (or likewise that other people were responsible for my emotions). I can control my actions and that is all. If someone reacts negatively, it's not my fault, and it's not my responsibility. I may choose to help them through it, but at the end of the day, I can't, nor should I want to control other people's emotions.
  • NoPicklez 4y ago
    I think you have a responsibility to understand how your words and/or actions may impact someone else's emotions. It is then your decision to act in a suitable way to you. But if something needs to be said, you shouldn't shy away from saying it, if you're worried about how they might react.
    • w_for_wumbo 4y ago
      I agree, I'm not trying to absolve all responsibility. The comment was just highlighting that despite how well you may word something, you can't prevent someone from reacting poorly. You can't know with certainty the right words to use, so all you can do is your best. The rest is out of your hands.
• goodgoblin 4y ago
  A couple of years ago I realized that the big metal rod inside the box that holds the knives is for sharpening.
  • orange_fritter 4y ago
    It's not, it's for honing
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • goodgoblin 4y ago
      and til the difference between (and that there was a difference between) honing and sharpening.
  • BanazirGalbasi 4y ago
    As already mentioned, it's for honing. The difference is that sharpening involves removing metal to create a new edge, while honing simply bends the edge back to being straight. Although we think of steel as being a hard material, the edge of a knife is thin enough that it gets bent to one side or the other just through normal use. Using a honing rod to push the steel back to where it belongs means the knife feels sharper because you're now cutting with the actual edge.
    • tstrimple 4y ago
      What I found interesting when learning more about sharpening is that you’re actually looking for the edge of the blade to bend. That bend creates the “burr” and you can feel it by running your finger along the flat of the blade towards the edge. A consistent burr across the blade is one way to know it’s sharpened enough. Then you hone that burr until it is straight. When you no longer have a burr which can be honed, it’s time to sharpen again.
  • justin_oaks 4y ago
    It's a honing rod or honing steel. Honing isn't exactly the same thing as sharpening, but yes it will help the knife cut better. I've heard it explained that honing is for improving the cutting edge you have, and sharpening is cutting a new edge.
• SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  It took me up until this year to learn I tie my shoes wrong. The knot has to be balanced. I never knew.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Using a vegetable peeler. You can cut on both strokes, push and pull, and it goes (more than) twice as fast.
  • solarmist 4y ago
    Oh, damn. Duh! I never even thought about it, but that's why there are two sharp blades.
    • aussieshibe 4y ago
      That could also be explained by left handed people wanting to join in on the vegetable peeling fun.
      • solarmist 4y ago
        I'm thinking peelers with horizontal blades. Not the knife keepers with the blades parallel to the handle.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      Well I've never heard of, seen, or done 'two stroke peeling' - but I use both blades depending what/how I'm peeling: you can either brush away from you, or pull in against your thumb as you would if using a paring knife.
  • top_post 4y ago
    I learned this one about a year ago and every time I try and do the push stroke I pretty successfully slip and cut myself. So I get you can do both but I'll be damned if the pull stroke isn't the only one I'm still doing.
• grenbys 4y ago
  I've been rinsing my mouth after brushing my teeth my whole life. Turns out you should not. Logically, why even buy that expensive toothpaste only to negate all its positive impact by rinsing it away?
• christophilus 4y ago
  Now I'm curious how you held it! In my late 30s, I learned that I'd been tying my shoes wrong my entire life.
• jimt1234 4y ago
  Managing my money. For much of my career, or just my adult life, I never did anything related to money management. I just worked and saved. That's it. A little context: Growing up, no one ever talked about managing their money. No one had any money to manage. Everyone in my circle lived paycheck-to-paycheck. Any talk about money management was for rich folk, and that wasn't us. So basically, I never learned any of this stuff. Next, my career hit its stride right after the Enron scandal, and then the early-2000s dot-com meltdown. So I just saw investment/retirement accounts, and the stock market in general, as a big con to steal my money. (If you don't know about the Enron scandal, and you wanna be depressed, read up.) Anyway, I was full of FUD, and I was just gonna keep stuffing money in my mattress. Then, a random conversation with a trusted colleague led to him spending an entire afternoon explaining it all to me. He explained that his various investments were extremely low-risk, and he was still making thousands every year, and that my mattress-stuffing strategy was leaving a lot of easy money on the table. It was the way he explained it all, and the fact that I trusted/respected him that changed everything for me. I'll always owe him.
  • e10jc 4y ago
    I feel you on this! As a follow up: what are some of the top tips you would recommend?
    • rjmunro 4y ago
      The usual advice is put your money in an index fund that tracks the stock market, not one with a fund manager who makes decisions. Vanguard are good because the Vanguard company itself is owned by the funds it manages (which are owned by the customers), not by other people who take a percentage of the profits away.
• poulsbohemian 4y ago
  Honestly - when I bought a bidet seat, I truly felt like I had been lied to my whole life that TP was acceptable.
• DavidPiper 4y ago
  Drinking a glass of orange juice every morning. That stuff is full of sugar. Actually managing sugar intake in general. I'm 30 and just starting to do something about it.
  • twbarber 4y ago
    Same here!
  • iKlsR 4y ago
    Try slightly chilled or root temp water with a lime squeezed in it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• AussieWog93 4y ago
  I spent the first 25+ years of my life[1] thinking that philosophy, logic and reason were the most powerful and effective tools for driving and guiding my life. Nope! [1] OK, maybe not my whole like but at least from 10-11 onwards.
  • charlieflowers 4y ago
    So what is then?
    • AussieWog93 4y ago
      Culture, religion, tradition, instinct, with a little philosophy on the side as a modifying influence.
• benced 4y ago
  Being correct is extremely overrated, it’s better to allocate that time to doing more things or fully internalizing information you already know (I.e. how everyone knows it’s better to take chances than not but basically everyone is at least somewhat chance-averse).
• lysozyme 4y ago
  Tangential to the original question, just want to note that having such realizations constantly is one of the primary benefits that accrues if you expend the energy to constantly keep yourself in a learning/teaching mindset. The primary global benefit of teaching, in my experience, is that it keeps us jaded experts constantly at the entry point to our field. Close to the basic, foundational material. Making sure that it’s easy for new people to join, because that’s how the field grows and it’s good for everyone in it. The primary local benefit, to the teacher, is that you have moments like this that allow you to constantly refine your worldview to be more congruent with reality. This allows you to better define what should be taught, and how.
• alberth 4y ago
  Peeling a banana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i733KI8B6-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i733KI8B6-Q
• colinsane 4y ago
  when regulating temperature, the body does better at heating than cooling: i sleep better and all the way through the night with a wool blanket @ 10C than with thin sheets @ 20C.
  • wingworks 4y ago
    This, and also the way our bodies go to sleep is by dropping it's body temperature a bit. If it's hot in your room, or too many blankets, you're body will struggle to cool down and thus you'll struggle to get to sleep.
• geocrasher 4y ago
  Food is not a reward. Food is not for recreation. Food is not for fun. Food is fuel. Food should be delicious and enjoyable. Your enjoyment can come from taste, not from quantity. Being hungry is a good sign, not a problem. And "Just full enough" is more than full enough. I have a long way to go, but at 46 years old, this is all a revelation to me.
• black_13 4y ago
  [dead]
• entropicgravity 4y ago
  I've always thought the sun was some kind of yellowy orange. It's not, it's bright white. Not entirely my fault because if you check the NASA images of the sun they are all yellowy orange so either they are helping to perpetuate the conspiracy or, they don't know what color the sun is either!
• t0bia_s 4y ago
  Not asking a questions. Curiosity or lack of understanding of topic is great opportunity to learn new things. And also put my ego on side.
• ruskyhacker 4y ago
  The song jingle bells - I'd been saying "one horse slope and sleigh" for like 25 years. I'm not dumb, I just never looked at the lyrics I guess? IDK, it was a life changing moment I'll tell you that much.
  • andrewstuart 4y ago
    Love it
• spcebar 4y ago
  For years I dealt cards with my non-dominant hand. When I switched I got twice as fast. That and wearing incorrectly sized dress shirts and feeling like I was being choked in ties.
• vilkkala 4y ago
  I always thought the SUM() function in spreadsheets was “here be maths” function. So, whenever I do anything in spreadsheets I wrap it in =SUM(), like SUM(A1 / B1). I know it’s wrong, but it’s in muscle memory already.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• jrace 4y ago
  Tying my shoes. For almost 40 years my RT shoe lace would always come undone after walking for a few minutes. Turns out I was making the same mistake on only my RT shoe, rather constantly. Thanks Ian! https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm
• devinrhode2 4y ago
  Similar. When my baby lets air out of his esophagus, he makes a stuttering sound. I've started throttling my burps with my mouth and it's more comfortable.
• thorvaldsson 4y ago
  As someone who sits at a desk for long hours it was not doing stretching exercises, such as yoga, every day. I thank my partner for introducing that habit into my life.
• smckk 4y ago
  As a developer you need to have a Documents, Downloads and Development folder. I was always shuffling things around in documents and downloads till i realised I need a Development folder. I'm sure i read it somewhere but never took it seriously. It is one of those things that needs to be included in CS 000 (how to use command line, github etc.)
• jkmcf 4y ago
  Realizing one needs to move their 401k plans when you leave a job or incur higher fees and potentially stagnant growth. Also, it appears Roth IRAs need you to pick an investment option, but when I created one I don't recall there being an option. Invested ~3k and many moons later it was still ~3k.
  • Jeremy1026 4y ago
    > and potentially stagnant growth Shouldn't growth not matter where the money is. $100,000 gaining 6% is $106,000, gaining 6% is $112,360. $25,000 in 4 different accounts gaining 6% is $26,500 in 4 different accounts, gaining 6% is $28,090 in 4 different accounts, or $112,360.
• AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  Rinsing my mouth with water after brushing my teeth. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-teeth-and-gums/how-to-keep-your-teeth-clean/ https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-teeth-and-gums/how-to-k... > Don't rinse with water straight after toothbrushing > After brushing, spit out any excess toothpaste. > Don't rinse your mouth immediately after brushing, as it'll wash away the concentrated fluoride in the remaining toothpaste. > Rinsing dilutes it and reduces its preventative effects.
• ed_at_work 4y ago
  Apparently, I've been doing lat pull-downs the wrong way for like 20 years, using too much biceps instead of the lats. Took a trainer just a few minutes to correct me and I def feel the difference.
• jgimenez 4y ago
  I have been tying my shoes the wrong way my whole life. It was thanks to HN that I found out, and it was mind-boggling. My knots were always untying, but I just thought that was the way they were, so I just kept tying them as hard as I could, to prevent them from untying. This video explains it very well: https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes
• Bird22 4y ago
  Tying my shoelaces. It turns out, most of us have been doing this wrong for years. When you get to the stage where you have a loop in your right hand and are taking the left lace around that loop, it's actually better to go behind the right loop, not in front. If you do this properly, you never need to double knot your shoes. One thing to keep in mind, it will be harder at first and that might lead to your initial knot being looser which will lead to unties. Keep at it, and I guarantee it is better. It still blows me away that the other method is so prevalent when this one is better and no harder. How does that happen!? Source and graphics: https://www.realmenrealstyle.com/tie-shoes-right-way/ https://www.realmenrealstyle.com/tie-shoes-right-way/
• frankus 4y ago
  Trying to do everything by myself instead of asking for help.