I've accepted that all the progress for me happens in tight bursts. I simply cannot do 'thought work' when I'm disinterested. I sometimes envy people who are interested in one particular project for years or decades at a time and make plodding, continual progress. However that's not me. I make inspired, unbelievable progress, and then nothing. I try to constrain the scope so that it at least remains useful, in between the bursts.
Claude Code has been a boon for my software projects, specifically for this reason. I might lose a full night's sleep, but I'm able to stay productive far longer and do what would have otherwise taken me weeks in any given project.
Yeah, I agree. AI helps me bust through quickly on a tedious task, where before that might have used up a lot of my motivation. The ground covered in any particular session is a lot further.
I feel similarly. When I'm bored by a task I tend to entertain myself by getting creative with it, its a way of tricking myself into getting it done, but its a terrible habit if what you wanted was reliable software.
Typically, models excel at tasks that are that boring, so I end up applying creativity where it's warranted instead of getting distracted by reinventing a tool that isn't quite perfect or some other diversion.
I’m very much the same, I wish I had the ability to chip away at projects over a long time span, usually the most I can muster is a few weeks. I continually wonder if I have ADHD. It’s too much of a pain to find out, so I guess I’ll never know and just have to deal with it.
Haha, yeah I was going to reply with the same. I used to work 12+ hours/day for a few months at a time. Now I struggle for anything more than a few hours a day for a few weeks at a time. AI has helped me recover some ground but it's still less output overall.
"Is this worth spending some amount of money to be done?"
I have had innumerable projects where they just languished and languished and languished ... until I got annoyed enough to spend some money and then they were done and gone.
Sure, some projects are a "hobby". My hobbies are continuous and I like doing them so spending money to finish them is not relevant.
However, quite often a task languishing is either because I don't really like the task or don't feel like putting in the effort to learn the required knowledge. For those tasks, spending money often works.
(For example, my latest task along these lines was "sharpen my kitchen knives". After farting with far too many whetstones, I finally spent the money to buy a fixed-angle sharpening system. I took it out of the box, set it up, and in two evenings my dozen kitchen knives were sharp and pleasant to use again. I then put the system back in the box and put it in my closet for the next time I need it. I spent way less on that fixed-angle system than I have on the whetstones I tried up to this point.)
Happy it worked for you but a whetstone with an angle guide and you'd be done in a similar time.
I think I can refresh a lightly dull blade in 10min or so, and speaking as a non-pro.
The long-term benefits of a whetstone is that you can get much more feedback on what's happening, while most "systems" work for a bit and then it's hard to see what part is over-worked or not performing as well as it used to.
Just putting it out here because I think people might either not be using an angle guide or just be somewhat misguided, since using a whetstone is really not much slower.
> I think I can refresh a lightly dull blade in 10min or so, and speaking as a non-pro.
This is the same assumption (and problem) that every YouTube knife sharpening video makes.
The people who need those videos, by definition, have knives that are absurdly out of whack for some reason--super dull, badly sharpened by someone who "knew better", chipped because used like a cleaver, etc.
Those kinds of knives require a very coarse (150 grit or below) stone and quite a bit of time and attention on the first pass to fix. You will not fix it easily. You will not fix it in 10 minutes. You will not fix it with a 300 grit stone. You will not get any feedback from angle bite or a burr for a very long time. etc.
Most of the feedback mechanisms you rely on when sharpening with a whetstone do not exist when your knife is sufficiently out of whack. Learning to sharpen on a whetstone with such a knife is extremely difficult.
At the risk of triggering whetstone enthusiasts, once you have a properly ground knife, all you need is a two-sided 3000/8000 grit stone. I find that I can resharpen my semi-fancy knives within minutes to cleanly cut a sheet of paper. And I also finish with a leather strap.
I would amend that to "Pay a local knife nerd that you trust". Most "sharpening services" use some kind of grinder and they can damage the edge temper as well as do other stupid things.
Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.
I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.
It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.
However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.
Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.
Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.
Not necessarily. Not everyone has easy access to that kind of service. The nearest one to me that I'm aware of is about half an hour drive away. The sharpening system that I have just takes a few minutes. It's definitely easier for me to do it myself than take them somewhere.
I've made the decision to "brownfield" many projects. My GH[0] is full of archived, and even private, repos that I no longer maintain. I have retired most of the apps that I've written. I only have a few left on the App Store[1].
I do make sure to explicitly "freeze" a project that I'm no longer maintaining, and indicate such, in the README. I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.
But the projects that I do want to finish, I make sure to do a "full-fat" job. If I consider it "done," then it gets the Full Monty. I also continue to maintain. If I can't do that, it gets archived; even if I had completed and shipped it.
Those are valid questions, but I don't usually get that exacting. The projects that I walk away from, are usually because they were just for learning, I got into a "death spiral," or that were eclipsed by something else.
> I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.
The date plus hundreds of issues, of which the last dozen are unaddressed variations of “is this project still alive”. And then you check the creator’s account and they’ve been active on other things. Just archive the repo. Please. It’s fine if you don’t want to work on the project anymore, that’s 100% your decision and your right, and no one should be able to criticise you for it. But please just do the tiny courtesy of letting other people know so an alternative can crop up and flourish. Archiving a repo takes less than a minute and is reversible if you ever change your mind.
Questions to ask when you think you need to finish something? Sorry for the nitpick, typically my brain completes missing words easily. Must be the lack of coffee here.
Even when I know that I should not finish something, there is still a surprisingly robust mental barrier that holds me back from it. The solution that works for me is the making a 'Low priority' folder to put those projects I know I don't need to finish. Moving them out of my active workspace feels great, and the 'low priority' means its non-committal to completely abandoning them (although in practice 99.9% of the time, that exactly what the result is).
This is a mental trick I play on myself that I know that I am doing, but somehow its works anyway.
You reminded me of the early days at inscribe.ai where we just had an Asana board with red, orange, and yellow tags meaning high, mid, and low importance, and after completing an important one I'd treat myself to a few unimportant ones. I'm not sure I ever did anything in the middle!
I've been consulting since 1984, and before there was a notion of "open source" I (and others) had a notion of "tools of the trade" that we wrote into contracts. These had to be finished enough in a conceptual and artifactual sense sufficiently so as to be distinguishable from what was delivered to the customer as the customer's property. How public these tools would be was negotiable. There wasn't necessarily support, but there was often an expectation that bug fixes or functional enhancements would be shared with prior recipients / licensees.
So that's kind of my grounded understanding of "finished": that something is "finished" given the context it operates in. Meets some contractual specifications.
I give away the core components of an (mildly SIEM-like) observability platform on GitHub. I publish demo clients, but I don't publish the actual clients which I utilize in production. I will give them to you if you make friends, demonstrate that you can steer the core components, and demonstrate that you're capable of providing useful, cogent feedback.
This is a support issue. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to provide support theater. I'm not that interested in the clients, per se; I'm more interested in what they accomplish for me. Let me put it plainly: I'm interested in what they do for you if you pay me money to be interested, or I find your particular application of personal interest. I don't want to hear that the clients are crap because they don't solve your personal problem pretzel. I don't want to hear that the client doesn't work when the server components aren't set up properly.
I'm pretty comfortable with stuff being finished for a given context. That functionality in that context is a kind of oasis or petri dish, and if stuff manages to transplant to a different context or different inhabitants come to the oasis then I'm generally interested in looking at that and reexamining "finished"; and that's why I put it out there, in public.
this is the same drack which appears endlessly on Linkedin and bluesky and lil blogs.
Guess whatelse is pushed? the same drack in a Newsletter! Not interested and Hacker news is for so much better content than this horseshit.
I've accepted that all the progress for me happens in tight bursts. I simply cannot do 'thought work' when I'm disinterested. I sometimes envy people who are interested in one particular project for years or decades at a time and make plodding, continual progress. However that's not me. I make inspired, unbelievable progress, and then nothing. I try to constrain the scope so that it at least remains useful, in between the bursts.
Claude Code has been a boon for my software projects, specifically for this reason. I might lose a full night's sleep, but I'm able to stay productive far longer and do what would have otherwise taken me weeks in any given project.
Yeah, I agree. AI helps me bust through quickly on a tedious task, where before that might have used up a lot of my motivation. The ground covered in any particular session is a lot further.
Claude Code has revolutionized my side projects — I've never accumulated half finished projects at a more impressive rate!
Can you share some things you finished using Claude?
In what way does it help you?
I feel similarly. When I'm bored by a task I tend to entertain myself by getting creative with it, its a way of tricking myself into getting it done, but its a terrible habit if what you wanted was reliable software.
Typically, models excel at tasks that are that boring, so I end up applying creativity where it's warranted instead of getting distracted by reinventing a tool that isn't quite perfect or some other diversion.
It can handle the boilerplate that is so uninspiring, it can help move the needle when you don't feel like diving in.
But you have to be intentful to keep the interesting parts and the high level choices for yourself - why by default doesn't happen, and many don't.
I’m very much the same, I wish I had the ability to chip away at projects over a long time span, usually the most I can muster is a few weeks. I continually wonder if I have ADHD. It’s too much of a pain to find out, so I guess I’ll never know and just have to deal with it.
You can be at peace with your approach to life, and also understand that others do things differently, with or without a diagnosis.
I can definitely relate - but I have noticed that the bursts have got longer and less intense as I've got older.
It could be worse. I've noticed that the bursts have got shorter and less intense as I've got older!
Haha, yeah I was going to reply with the same. I used to work 12+ hours/day for a few months at a time. Now I struggle for anything more than a few hours a day for a few weeks at a time. AI has helped me recover some ground but it's still less output overall.
Questions missing from this list are:
"Can I spend some amount of money and be done?"
"Is this worth spending some amount of money to be done?"
I have had innumerable projects where they just languished and languished and languished ... until I got annoyed enough to spend some money and then they were done and gone.
Sure, some projects are a "hobby". My hobbies are continuous and I like doing them so spending money to finish them is not relevant.
However, quite often a task languishing is either because I don't really like the task or don't feel like putting in the effort to learn the required knowledge. For those tasks, spending money often works.
(For example, my latest task along these lines was "sharpen my kitchen knives". After farting with far too many whetstones, I finally spent the money to buy a fixed-angle sharpening system. I took it out of the box, set it up, and in two evenings my dozen kitchen knives were sharp and pleasant to use again. I then put the system back in the box and put it in my closet for the next time I need it. I spent way less on that fixed-angle system than I have on the whetstones I tried up to this point.)
Happy it worked for you but a whetstone with an angle guide and you'd be done in a similar time.
I think I can refresh a lightly dull blade in 10min or so, and speaking as a non-pro.
The long-term benefits of a whetstone is that you can get much more feedback on what's happening, while most "systems" work for a bit and then it's hard to see what part is over-worked or not performing as well as it used to.
Just putting it out here because I think people might either not be using an angle guide or just be somewhat misguided, since using a whetstone is really not much slower.
> I think I can refresh a lightly dull blade in 10min or so, and speaking as a non-pro.
This is the same assumption (and problem) that every YouTube knife sharpening video makes.
The people who need those videos, by definition, have knives that are absurdly out of whack for some reason--super dull, badly sharpened by someone who "knew better", chipped because used like a cleaver, etc.
Those kinds of knives require a very coarse (150 grit or below) stone and quite a bit of time and attention on the first pass to fix. You will not fix it easily. You will not fix it in 10 minutes. You will not fix it with a 300 grit stone. You will not get any feedback from angle bite or a burr for a very long time. etc.
Most of the feedback mechanisms you rely on when sharpening with a whetstone do not exist when your knife is sufficiently out of whack. Learning to sharpen on a whetstone with such a knife is extremely difficult.
If you treated your knife like that, even a system wont help.
Either bring it to a professional with professional power tools or buy a new one and start being kind to your knives.
At the risk of triggering whetstone enthusiasts, once you have a properly ground knife, all you need is a two-sided 3000/8000 grit stone. I find that I can resharpen my semi-fancy knives within minutes to cleanly cut a sheet of paper. And I also finish with a leather strap.
That’s exactly the point: you have knowledge. GP spent money so as not to have to learn that knowledge.
From a spend money not time perspective better to take them to a local sharpener!
I would amend that to "Pay a local knife nerd that you trust". Most "sharpening services" use some kind of grinder and they can damage the edge temper as well as do other stupid things.
Funny story time ... my problem with learning to sharpen with whetstones was due to taking my knives to a local sharpener.
I could sharpen two of my knives with a whetstone just fine but could never figure out why. But they were my two smallest knives, so I assumed that it was skill issue when I was handling the bigger knives.
It turns out the local sharpener that I used ground an absolutely absurd angle into the cutting edge on my big kitchen knives--something like 30+ degrees. Given that they did cut for a while, I presume that they also had something like a "microbevel" on them. Of course, the problem is that I am never going to be able to put a "microbevel" back on them with a whetstone.
However, an amateur with a whetstone like me is going to have difficulty figuring all this out because they are always going to suspect their own skill.
Of course, as soon as I put them on the fixed angle sharpener, the fact that the edges had an absurd angle was immediately obvious. And the fact that, yes, it is going to take a while to correct this also became obvious. So, I sat down and stoned the edge with a 100 grit(!) diamond stone for 45 minutes until I got the angle back to something reasonable. And then went up the grits to sharpen it.
Just for giggles, on my last kitchen knife, I used the system to fix the angle, and then I used whetstones. Funnily enough, it sharpened just fine. I'll still use the fixed angle system in the future though.
Not necessarily. Not everyone has easy access to that kind of service. The nearest one to me that I'm aware of is about half an hour drive away. The sharpening system that I have just takes a few minutes. It's definitely easier for me to do it myself than take them somewhere.
I have never sharpened a knife in my entire life so that's an option too.
Quality varies. I was disappointed to see Sur La Table's sharpening service is little better than an angle grinder.
I have a similar story about a clogged kitchen sink.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44521693
I've made the decision to "brownfield" many projects. My GH[0] is full of archived, and even private, repos that I no longer maintain. I have retired most of the apps that I've written. I only have a few left on the App Store[1].
I do make sure to explicitly "freeze" a project that I'm no longer maintaining, and indicate such, in the README. I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.
But the projects that I do want to finish, I make sure to do a "full-fat" job. If I consider it "done," then it gets the Full Monty. I also continue to maintain. If I can't do that, it gets archived; even if I had completed and shipped it.
Those are valid questions, but I don't usually get that exacting. The projects that I walk away from, are usually because they were just for learning, I got into a "death spiral," or that were eclipsed by something else.
[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY#browse-away
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/AppDocs/
> I hate encountering abandonware that is only obvious, because of the last modified date.
The date plus hundreds of issues, of which the last dozen are unaddressed variations of “is this project still alive”. And then you check the creator’s account and they’ve been active on other things. Just archive the repo. Please. It’s fine if you don’t want to work on the project anymore, that’s 100% your decision and your right, and no one should be able to criticise you for it. But please just do the tiny courtesy of letting other people know so an alternative can crop up and flourish. Archiving a repo takes less than a minute and is reversible if you ever change your mind.
Questions to ask when you think you need to finish something? Sorry for the nitpick, typically my brain completes missing words easily. Must be the lack of coffee here.
Funny. I didn't notice the missing word. I did have trouble reading the title. I didn't realize why until now.
I didn't notice the absence until your comment
I probably wouldn't have noticed if it hadn't been directly below the Detective Listeria post. HN titles look like TikToks this morning.
Even when I know that I should not finish something, there is still a surprisingly robust mental barrier that holds me back from it. The solution that works for me is the making a 'Low priority' folder to put those projects I know I don't need to finish. Moving them out of my active workspace feels great, and the 'low priority' means its non-committal to completely abandoning them (although in practice 99.9% of the time, that exactly what the result is).
This is a mental trick I play on myself that I know that I am doing, but somehow its works anyway.
I really need to do this!
You reminded me of the early days at inscribe.ai where we just had an Asana board with red, orange, and yellow tags meaning high, mid, and low importance, and after completing an important one I'd treat myself to a few unimportant ones. I'm not sure I ever did anything in the middle!
I've been consulting since 1984, and before there was a notion of "open source" I (and others) had a notion of "tools of the trade" that we wrote into contracts. These had to be finished enough in a conceptual and artifactual sense sufficiently so as to be distinguishable from what was delivered to the customer as the customer's property. How public these tools would be was negotiable. There wasn't necessarily support, but there was often an expectation that bug fixes or functional enhancements would be shared with prior recipients / licensees.
So that's kind of my grounded understanding of "finished": that something is "finished" given the context it operates in. Meets some contractual specifications.
I give away the core components of an (mildly SIEM-like) observability platform on GitHub. I publish demo clients, but I don't publish the actual clients which I utilize in production. I will give them to you if you make friends, demonstrate that you can steer the core components, and demonstrate that you're capable of providing useful, cogent feedback.
This is a support issue. I don't have the time, patience, or interest to provide support theater. I'm not that interested in the clients, per se; I'm more interested in what they accomplish for me. Let me put it plainly: I'm interested in what they do for you if you pay me money to be interested, or I find your particular application of personal interest. I don't want to hear that the clients are crap because they don't solve your personal problem pretzel. I don't want to hear that the client doesn't work when the server components aren't set up properly.
I'm pretty comfortable with stuff being finished for a given context. That functionality in that context is a kind of oasis or petri dish, and if stuff manages to transplant to a different context or different inhabitants come to the oasis then I'm generally interested in looking at that and reexamining "finished"; and that's why I put it out there, in public.
Thank you for your considered words. I need something like this. It helps.
I have a thing. I solved a riddle after much labor. Having solved it the fire is gone AND much new possibilities have opened. So that's the dilemma.
I'd love to read something longer about this.
Didn't feel the need to check the grammar of the title as the essay no longer aligned with goals and interests.
cut/paste right?
this is the same drack which appears endlessly on Linkedin and bluesky and lil blogs. Guess whatelse is pushed? the same drack in a Newsletter! Not interested and Hacker news is for so much better content than this horseshit.
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