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sidsavara

Re:[Ask HN] How do you organize your tasks/to-do lists? on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @10:06PM (#1230729)
I like using Toodledo:

http://toodledo.com

I like it because it's free, and I can even sync it with my iphone free - just have to pay $1.99 for the app

Nice clean interface, has a nice Google Chrome extensions, and for me it is intuitively how I order things - by date and importance. I just use "Project -> Task" to signify next actions within projects

Re:Ask HN: "Basic SEO"? on Monday March 08, 2010 @06:04PM (#1176772)
http://www.sensational-seo.com/ Free firefox plugin for basic SEO ;)
Re:"Don't you dare waste your fucking time" on Tuesday February 09, 2010 @01:17PM (#1112801)
Surprised that HN likes this. I wrote a post on this topic too:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/today-is-your-gold...

Since people enjoyed this video, here's the HN link - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1112797

Re:Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009? on Friday January 01, 2010 @07:48PM (#1026519)
I just finished a ton of great books, some that immediately come to mind:

The Four-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris - Really made me think about life and the work I do

Tribes by Seth Godin - Love this book.

The Dip by Seth Godin - read it before, reread it again this year

Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina - really had to struggle to get past the beginning, was fantastic once I did

Find Your Great Work by Michael Bungary Stanier - I liked this one a lot, motivational

The Power of Less by Leo Babauta - no surprises here, I enjoyed the book, it reads like you would expect it to. Some new insights that aren't on the blog

Superfreakonomics by Stephen Levitt and Dubner

Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (I liked The Tipping Point the best out of those 3)

Free by...Chris Anderson (?) I forget. Very interesting.

Team Up by Pete Mockaitis - Great read about accountability groups, subset of a mastermind group IMO.

Collapse by Jared Diamond - Very interesting looks at patterns in civilizations. Some people I spoke to get bored after a few examples, it is a little repetitive but I enjoy the parallels

My old faves are of course Gettings Things Done, 7 Habits, Greatest Salesman in The World, and How to Win Friends and Influence People.

More details here: http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/best-personal-deve...

I regularly (and will be posting a bunch in the next couple weeks) post reviews of books I read here: http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews

Re:Ask HN: Which is the best way to keep yourself organized on Sunday November 15, 2009 @06:32PM (#943548)
I like to Use ToodleDo and Evernote on my iPhone.

Both apps sync with the web, and offer offline modes. This makes it easy to use no matter where I am. I used to use my blackberry and outlook, but really wanted web integration.

Re:Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information on Friday November 13, 2009 @03:20AM (#939618)
Thanks chipsy, I think you answered the question perfectly =)

To expand, bananas may be relatively high sugar/energy compared to other natural foods (green vegetables), but they cannot compare with the super concentrated foods we have created such as Twinkies =)

Re:Ask HN: What tool makes you most productitive? on Thursday November 12, 2009 @02:23PM (#938520)
RescueTime!

http://sidsavara.com/product-reviews/review-of-rescuetime-fr...

Of course if you're using Unix, you can get the linux version (which I don't believe is officially supported).

Just knowing where I am spending my time makes me more productive and less likely to randomly web surf etc

Re:Dopamine Makes Us Addicted To Seeking Information on Thursday November 12, 2009 @01:52AM (#937290)
I wrote an article regarding dopamine as well, I saw a couple recently on HN on the subjects of dopamine and self discipline, if you guys are interested. Much more in depth than the articles I've seen make it onto HN - but I didn't really think this was the appropriate place for them, that's why I never submitted them. Kind of off topic IMO, but for readers who like it here they are:

Dopamine, rewards, pleasure center of the brain -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/personal-developme...

Willpower research -> http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/will-power-how-to-...

Re:Netbooks are the new Razor Scooter on Wednesday October 14, 2009 @07:13PM (#882350)
I use my netbook whenever I travel - I can write articles and do moderate amounts of software development

It is also cheap enough that I am not too concerned with it getting lost or broken

I get a legitimate 4-5 hours of battery life (tested - I fly Hawaii to Los Angeles)

Genius headline though. Caught my attention. sigh

My favorite feed is still this one:

http://nirmalpatel.com/fcgi/hn_feed.fcgi

Grabs the full content of the article, and contains links at top and bottom to the comments. Beautiful!

Re:LooseStitch - Free Online Outliner on Sunday May 24, 2009 @04:21PM (#624637)
Tried it out, biggest complaint is that I can't do "in place" editing -

Example: As Mark Bao mentioned, have to edit to the side, rather than in place. Pressing enter to head to the box, and then hitting enter (or escape) to go back isn't bad, but it is not as ideal as if I could double click and edit in place.

Second (more irritating for me) I can't grab something and drag and drop it.

I know these are challenging technical problems (with solutions) but they do make the experience a little difficult for me.

Also, in Chrome Alt+up and alt+down shortcuts are not working for me. No idea if this is something I've changed as a setting or not. Other shortcuts appear to work fine - but why is it one button (?) to open the help and another (space) to close? I don't see space used elsewhere, perhaps just use space for both?

For exporting, I was not too pleased with how it exported to HTML. I was actually expecting a bunch of nested lists, but it gave me lots of divs and styled it as an outline via CSS. I don't know how other people feel about it, I was looking to use it to outline blog posts: so for me being able to export and then import a list of lists would have been dynamite.

Re:Ask HN: How do you manage your news reading time? on Tuesday May 05, 2009 @01:16PM (#594368)
The abridged version:

I use Google Reader and delicious. I make liberal use of starring articles (rather than reading them inline) and then as a secondary filter I also will tag them as "Read tonight", "Read this week" and "Read someday" in delicious on the second pass.

I have had to let go of a lot of temporal "breaking" news since it's just so hard to keep up with it, but this process lets me still see the headlines and see what's going on, without getting sucked in

And discussion in the comments definitely take more time than reading the original article ;)

I have a full discussion of my process here:

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I like the gist of the article, but disagree with the opinion of dumping the RSS Reader. It seems to me that it's a mental shift that the author finds possible when using Firefox, but can't do with GReader

The "neutered RSS version" of the content is exactly what I want. I don't want ads. I don't want to see other headlines in the sidebar. I want to get through the content as quickly as possible, pick out the gems I like, and share them with friends. Opening up 15+ tabs is not my preferred method, though I can understand that it may work for others.

http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/how-to-effectivel...

I also submitted it to HN just now:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591690

This is a follow up to this posting (except, I wrote about this almost a year ago)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=590135

Re:Hacker News RSS Feed + Readability on Thursday April 02, 2009 @12:43AM (#542922)
Nirmal that readability service is incredible. I tried it on my blog - I hate to admit it, but it does look a lot better. One thing that makes it much easier to read is that it strips out the comments. I am not sure how I feel about this, but I suspect for 80% of readers (and likely many of the people who use the bookmarklet) the comments are just noise.

Similarly stripping the navigation also makes it easier to read, but then it loses it's value as a website.

I wonder if there is a readability wordpress plugin that could display the readability version in a JS pop-up overlay. I think if I can find one, I'll add that to my site.

Edit: I just tried it on DaringFireball. Beautiful.

Re:Hacker News RSS Feed + Readability on Wednesday April 01, 2009 @06:23PM (#542559)
Awesome! Thanks Nirmal! Talk about customer service.

Now, if only it had better twitter integration ...

I use TinyMCE, but that's mainly because it came built into Wordpress and I think was easy for me to set up in Joomla at one point.

Worked well enough for me, never felt the need to change

Re:Why Marriages Fail on Saturday March 28, 2009 @07:03AM (#536373)
I actually think people on HN will enjoy it, because it takes a rather emotional topic and breaks it down into what are the primary reasons he has seen for marriages failing in what, I assume is, his professional opinion.

I think people like me enjoy hard problems, finding out the root cause, and determining a solution. From that perspective, I thoroughly enjoyed this article as it presented some salient causes for a fairly difficult problem (keeping a marriage/relationship going).

It wasn't full of platitude and suggestions to "date once a week" etc - it was a solid breakdown of causes. Coupled with the recent discussion of the bachelor paradox, I really enjoyed the diversion.

Re:Review my dating startup: EstablishedMen.com on Thursday March 26, 2009 @04:45PM (#534132)
Have you guys heard of http://www.sugardaddyforme.com/ and is this a competitor to them?

One of the guys I worked with knew the guy who ran that site. I thought it was a pretty funny name and concept, yours sounds much more refined. Took a quick peek at it, can't really give feedback since I'm at work but upvoted and may take a look later =)

Re:Interactive California Unemployment Map on Friday March 20, 2009 @06:36PM (#525723)
Agreed, it really should be something like

* Dark greed good

* Light green not so good

* Light Red Bad

* Dark Red really bad

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