​ “We are all hunters in the wilderness of the information age, surviving in the vast wilderness of information.” - “Why Become an Information Predator”

​ In the era of mobile internet with information explosion, every internet giant is trying to build their own “information cocoon”, trying to recommend you some things you are interested in, and gradually your life will be shackled in a cocoon-like cage. As a [hacker] who yearns for freedom, naturally, he cannot be restricted by such a cage. This article will introduce some ways or methods to obtain high-quality information.

Please uninstall your short video software

​ The most important thing is definitely to be put in the forefront.

​ You must have had the situation of brushing short videos late into the night, the short video software will subtly steal your time, it will make you get used to or like some short-term sensory stimulation through some medium and low-quality information, and it will make some meaningful time become even more boring and annoying.

​ Once an APP with endless scrolling appears on your phone, uninstall it, and you will find that you will have a lot of free time.

​ Next, start the main topic, how to obtain information, here the acquisition of information is divided into two types, one is you browse the information published by others, similar to Feed, here it is called “passive acquisition of information”. The other is to actively retrieve information, such as Google search, reading books, etc.

Passive acquisition of information

​ Mainly introduce 3 different channels to passively acquire information.

RSS

What is RSS?

TL;DR: Simply put, RSS is a universal information aggregation platform that can help you aggregate and track information from different platforms. Once the information is updated, it can let you know quickly on one platform.

​ RSS is a simple way for sites to share content with other sites (also called aggregated content), usually used for news and other websites arranged in chronological order, such as BLOG. An RSS contains many news entries, a news entry may contain the full introduction of the news, or just additional content and a brief introduction. The links of these entries can usually link to all the content. Internet users can read the content of these RSS-supported websites without opening the website content page with the help of RSS-supported news aggregation tool software on their own client.

News

Presumably, you have a habit of glancing at the news every day, right? I have added the news sources I pay more attention to my RSS, so I can see the daily briefing when I get up. No need to enter platforms like xx headlines that can be swiped endlessly and waste time.

Technology

For technology, I will also put many technical bloggers who write good articles into my RSS subscription. In most cases, it is when I am searching for problems.

Encountering Problems

As a programmer, a lot of time is spent struggling with bugs. Below is a simple example of how I find excellent blog posts.

Generally, if I want to search for Chinese resources in Google, I will end the site with github.io. In this way, I will find many Chinese blogs. If this Chinese blog can solve my problem, I will see if his other articles meet my taste. If it suits my taste, I will add him to my subscription list.

Disqus

Another way is to find excellent blogs on Disqus. Disqus is an excellent blog comment system, and many blogs will integrate it, and this site has also integrated this system. When you see someone replying on Disqus, you can go and see what else this person has commented on elsewhere. Because for a blog post, if this independent blog post is commented on by others, the quality will not be too bad. You can subscribe to the good blog posts you find.

The following picture randomly found an article commented by a brother, and the quality is quite good.

Github

Trend

Github Trend is a good place to discover good open source projects, provided that the language cannot be selected as Chinese. When I have time every week, I will go and see if there are any fun open source projects. If it is a tool, I will install it on my computer and play with it.

Follow

Every day I will take a look at Github, follow what the big guys are doing, and like what projects. If the big guy’s direction is the same as yours, you only need to scan the Github Feed every day to roughly know the recent hot open source projects in the corresponding direction.

Twitter

Twitter is a social platform that cannot be accessed in China. Many big cows will update their software updates or recent updates on Twitter, so it is easy to know when to update what new features, and you can start playing. You can also meet many programmers with the same interests on Twitter and expand your social circle.

Actively Acquiring Information

To actively acquire knowledge, I generally use the method of retrieval, mainly in two ways, through search engine retrieval, and through book retrieval.

Google

Given the repetitive information on Baidu and the unfriendly search problem, Google is used as the main search engine. Here are some tips for using Google:

Compared to Chinese, you just need to describe the problem more clearly in English, and you can basically find the corresponding answer. On Google, you don’t even need a good level of English, you just need to enter a few English keywords to find the answer.

Search for specific sites

If I want to search for a blog post, I might not use the traditional way of searching. I would set the site to end with github.io, so I can find many good independent blogs. Similarly, if you want to search for common sense related things, setting the site to Zhihu might be better?

Books

Perhaps you will wonder why I always mention searching for books instead of reading books. The reason is that, at first, my way of reading books was traditional, reading from beginning to end. As I read more and more books, I also felt many disadvantages, such as taking too long and not being able to grasp the key points.

Now my reading method has gradually changed. For a book, I will choose the appropriate chapters to read according to the goal I want to learn, to prevent myself from wasting time on many irrelevant chapters.

Oreilly

I learned about the Oreilly e-book platform in Cao Chunhui’s blog. Here you can see the updates of unpublished e-books for the first time, which means you can read the best-selling technical books you recently heard from your colleagues 2-3 years ago. However, this platform requires you to be able to read English materials.

Conclusion

The above mentioned some high-quality information acquisition channels. I believe you also have your own high-quality information acquisition channels. We are all information hunters in the wilderness, and we must learn not to scavenge in the garbage dump.

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