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On my second day of practice, I felt the urge to find a better Haskell syntax highlighting extension for Vim. I managed to find one that was distributed in a pa
by there 15y ago
On my second day of practice, I felt the urge to find a better Haskell syntax highlighting extension for Vim. I managed to find one that was distributed in a package called a "Vimball". I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to install a Vimball and then another 10 customizing the plugin's settings.
This is also referred to as Yak Shaving.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/03/dont_shave_t...
- sirclueless 15y agoI don't consider them the same at all. Yak Shaving is a social phenomenon where a group of people get bogged down by minutia and irrelevant decisions. The Rabbit Hole is private, caused by becoming easily and repeatedly engrossed in tangential topics.
- psykotic 15y agoYou're confusing yak shaving with bikeshedding.
- paulgerhardt 15y agoFellow HN'ers, don't click that link! You may soon find yourself reading a Seth Godin post about a Joi Ito post about an MAKE magazine article about a jargon file page about a Wiktionary Talk page about a MIT CSAIL post about a Ren & Stimpy episode.
- benohear 15y agoNot quite the same. Finding an extension was not blocking his main task, whereas in Seth Godin's story it is a chain of dependencies. By the way, what is the solution for Yak shaving? Seth Godin's advice is "don't go to home depot", but in his metaphor this was a necessity to get the job done. Is the idea to give up on the task or at least postpone it, or to try and find a different way to get the job done?