HN user
ra88it
You make a lot of interesting (and colorful) points, but I'm not sure crisis is the right word. When you write:
Masculinity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell men all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.
...I feel like I could change it like this and it would be equally "true":
Femininity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell women all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.
I'm not sure what it is other than some general insecurity common to humanity.
Sacha Chua is an undersung emacs hero. She has faithfully published Emacs News for so long, quietly pushing good things forward, quietly helping people understand the weird thing about emacs ... there actually is a "there" there.
When I was about 20, I went to the local Barnes and Noble to find a book about programming.
Picked up the O'Reilly Javascript book from around 2000. Had no idea what javascript was, just wanted to learn how to program and trying to pick the most popular language.
$40 later, I got home and started reading! Very confusing, the first half of the book covered the language runtime (I think?) and the second half covered the browser sandbox, and it took me 200 pages to realize that I can't easily read or write to files on my machine with this language. Not what I was hoping for!
Back to Barnes and Noble, another $40 and I came home with the O'Reilly camel book, Beginning Perl I think? Cover to cover read, probably the last time I did that with a programming manual.
Decades have passed, I'm in the same camp as those that prefer Ruby now, but man what a breath of fresh air Perl was back in 2000.
Keto community generally recommends replacing carbs with fat and keeping protein constant. Protein consumption is almost a constant (with some variability due to workout regimen, etc).
I think of it like a see-saw, with protein level being the axis of rotation (ie., it stays the same). Now you have 2 remaining macro variables: carbs and fat. If you decrease one, you need to increase the other or else caloric intake might be too low.
Keto community generally refers to the diet as Low Carb High Fat because not eating enough fat can cause problems on the diet.
Edit: To be clear, assuming sufficient consumption of protein, if calories are still deficient, keto community recommends making up the deficit with fat rather than protein.
I agree that this should always be considered, no matter the activity. But it is hard, and games like Chess make it particularly challenging.
I will start a game of Go, completely relaxed and with the goal of staying relaxed and enjoying the game. Sometimes it works if my opponent falls behind early, but if my opponent is worthy... watch my heart rate over the course of the game.
There is no point in playing if you don't care about the outcome. I wish there was, I wish it was like making a painting, I wish it was nothing more than making something beautiful with the go stones.
It's impossible to play as much Chess as he does and truly not care, but I think he is figuring out ways to care differently, and that might be key.
I loved that manual too. I think we got a slightly different version with our IIGS, but I loved how inviting it was. I was probably 11, maybe 12.
15 years later in grad school I found a copy lying on a chair in a computer science classroom. I think it aged well.
Cue the org-mode brigade! (Of which I consider myself a member.)
I haven't used FreeMind specifically, but when I hear hierarchical organization with folding, I remember the rabbit hole that I fell into 20 years ago...and still haven't climbed out quite yet. From Shadow Plan[0] on Palm OS, through so many others, and landing at org-mode for the last decade or so.
I have this also. So many things to say I don't know where to begin. I feel like there is a distinct difference between the experiences of seeing the images when you are falling asleep vs seeing the images when you have recently come out of sleep. And then there is a third state where you have recently come out of sleep but you aren't done sleeping yet so you are also falling back to sleep. This last one often allows me to start having a lucid dream.
1) Weird things like this happen to me most often in the early morning hours when I'm still drowsy but I've woken up for a few minutes.
2) It is sometimes accompanied by a "whooshing" sensation that used to frighten me and usually caused me to "back out" into normal consciousness. Eventually I learned how to relax and let it unfold without panicking. Quite often I have the sensation of rolling out of my body, off the bed and onto the floor.
3) I am paralyzed when it happens, in the sense that if I move my hand, the hand that moves is a dream hand. My real hand of course doesn't move. It doesn't feel like paralysis because I can "move" in my dream. But I am consciously aware that my real body is lying still in bed.
4) I have to be very careful not to wake myself especially at the beginning (edit: and being careful is paradoxical because if I am too careful then that will wake me too, sort of like the paradox of needing to be both loose and tight in sports). I am also aware that if my wife coughs or makes some kind of noise, I might wake up. I have discovered an odd remedy for this however: if I make "dream noise" - for instance, if I shuffle my feet loudly in the dream - I am less likely to be woken by real noise from the real world.
I put Calvin and Hobbes up on the pedestal next to Winnie the Pooh (the first two books by AA Milne). It’s a weird connection between being an adult and being a child. Like a bolt of lightning... that somehow repeats itself strip after strip or chapter after chapter. I just count myself lucky for being exposed to it.
I'm surprised that the energy usage axis does not come up in this summary of his thoughts. Isn't that likely to be a factor in bitcoin's growth and long-term survival?
I thought that was odd too. Maybe the middle one was a practice swing?
edit - I watched it again more closely. Looks like he threw down the second ball and the middle shot was either a practice swing or he missed it altogether and it wasn't counted (which I think is fair given he was wearing a thick space suit in low gravity swinging one handed with a fishbowl on his head).
edit 2 - Just seeing child post. Guess I gotta watch it again :)
edit 3 - Yep, child post is correct. It's sort of weird how confusing this short video is. The second ball kind of appears out of nowhere, as if he was doing a practice swing and dropping the ball at the same time.
There was more than one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_Russian_Revolution
In English, "spicy" (usually) means that it will cause your tongue to burn and/or tingle due to the effects of chili pepper or black pepper or hot mustard or anything that causes your mouth to react with what I would call a physical sensation rather than a flavor sensation (of course they are not entirely distinct but that is where I draw the line).
Many dishes contain a lot of spices (nutmeg, cardamom, clove, etc.) but they aren't considered "spicy" because there's no sensation of heat/burning. These dishes are "spiced" but not "spicy" (in English).
It doesn't necessarily make sense, but that is just how common usage has evolved.
I see your point and I don't blame you. But for myself, it is the opposite: I've always been a meat eater, and I'm looking for a vegetarian burger that mimics the taste and texture of meat as closely as possible...for many reasons, but one of the main reasons is the sheer engineering novelty of it. I can't help but cheer on these efforts and I'm always eager to try the latest attempt.
I stumbled on this video randomly, watched 5 minutes and then I was hooked. I really like this guy's approach to documenting the journey, and his attitude, especially when things get tough. It occurred to me that the HN community would enjoy it.
People are complaining that this is painful to read on Twitter, so I expected it would be painful.
Then I actually followed the link and it was delightful! I'm not really a fan or a detractor from the medium, but I don't understand the hate in this particular context.
PS: What a lovely thread about the reality of peeing in space!
Correct - website is gone now, replaced with the book.
I wish I could upvote this to the heavens.
It's been almost ten years since I read it also. Was originally published as a fake blog, with all the posts backdated according the journal entry dates from the late 1980s.
I remember discovering the "blog" after a night of insomnia, lying on the couch at dawn. I couldn't stop reading. After a few minutes I called in sick to work and spent the rest of the morning consuming the journal and literally tingling with excitement and nostalgia and pure inspiration.
I can't recommend it enough.
I noticed my boy was happy getting into cold water as a toddler (compared to adults who suffer during the transition from air to cold water).
Now he's four years old, and a few weeks ago we swam together in a cold lake. He was happy to get in, but after ten minutes I noticed that his teeth were chattering and his lips were blue, while I was quite comfortable.
I feel the same way. Would love to get behind a new shell that has a chance at ubiquity.
Yes, I think it is quite normal.
Alcohol is a cheap, ubiquitous drug that helps us relax today, for a roughly proportionate cost which we can pay tomorrow (plus whatever longer-term costs like liver damage or memory formation which we can ignore or put off for even longer).
It's not confusing or unintuitive. Alcohol helps us relax. That's all it does! Which leads to all the other behaviors that are secondary to suddenly finding oneself relaxed. At first, a healthy relationship with alcohol is a perfectly reasonable transaction. I think it is normal that we would have fond memories of being relaxed, even in the midst of the mild hangover that would necessarily follow.
We easily get addicted to cheap methods for getting relaxed. Why wouldn't we? Especially if everyone around us is constantly using it to get relaxed. It's disgusting to witness! Unless you also use it to relax, in which case it suddenly becomes tolerable or even amusing.
You don't need much to relax (initially). Like with most drugs, eventually it is less potent and you require more. Also, like with any habit, your default baseline (in this case, your default relaxedness) starts to shift, so that eventually you are actively un-relaxed unless alcohol is present in your system. Obviously, as this continues, you need more and more alcohol, which is toxic pretty much in direct proportion to its volume.
Edit: added the sentence about hangovers, for clarity
I've found the same, and for the last year I've been almost always skipping breakfast and usually skipping lunch. I've gotten used to it, and I rarely experience the gnawing kind of hunger that doesn't pass as quickly as it arises.
I wonder if I could adapt just as easily to the reverse, like gp.
Does anybody have recommendations for books or documentaries that evoke the general vibe of this era?
A year ago I sold my beloved MacBook Pro for $950 and purchased a ThinkPad X220 (circa 2012) via eBay for $300.
Installed Arch and xmonad. Learned how to use xmonad.
I love it now, and I might just continue buying used X220s for the rest of my life or until I'm unable to source decent batteries for them.
It could be more about MetaCPAN just being better. Or the maintainer looking to move on for other reasons. Not worth the maintenance for a variety of reasons other than that it is made out of Perl.
I’m assuming MetaCPAN is written in Perl, at least in part. But I’m on mobile and I don’t want to research right now; I could be wrong.
Edit: also, 2005 era Python or Ruby, for a website, would likely be unpleasant to maintain as well.
Edit2: I know you’re not a Perl hater; I’m not an advocate; just playing the devil’s advocate.
Can somebody please summarize what has changed? Maybe I don't use Reddit enough, but I just refreshed one of the subreddits that I like, and I can't find a difference. Possibly a caching issue?
This is such an important point. I know some people who have made great efforts such as exercising more or quitting alcohol, but for whatever reason they claim to not perceive the purported benefit of their effort.
I don't know how to help them, because for me, if I need more exercise, I perceive the "benefit" (mood improvement, etc.) usually almost immediately, like 5 minutes into it. When I cut out alcohol, I perceive improvements within 24 hours. It unsettles me to imagine if this was not the case.
A Brief History of Time changed my life too. My dad gave it to me when I was about 13 years old. It taught me 2 big things that I had not yet realized:
1) That science was graspable, even by me, given enough time to reflect (and a good teacher helps).
2) That science requires sparks of creativity, in addition to all of its methodology, and that being a scientist can involve being creative.
Me too.
What if a company made this? And made it repairable, with a removable battery, so that you could buy one and keep it forever if you wanted? And a little cottage industry could form around it for 3rd party accessories (which also would continue to work as long as you kept them repaired)?
Are we not at the point where this seems like a novel idea and actually has a chance of "disrupting" the smart phone industry?
edit: sorry, I just took a very specific thing that I want, and pretended you want it too, when the only thing we both necessarily want is an efficient, e-ink display on a small, lightweight phone.