ryanpardieck

I've lost over 130 pounds in the last two years and I deliberately avoided high intensity exercise during that time. I find it very hard to moderate my hunger when doing regular high-intensity exercise. I would take long, slow walks a few times a week, and would rarely feel hungry while maintaining a very high daily caloric deficit. (In fact, I often felt quite full. I drank beer frequently, indulged in a pint of Ben and Jerrys a few times a month, ate out a lot, etc.)

In my experience it's most important to find a way to eat at a caloric deficit that feels natural, do-able, and fun. Even rapid weight loss takes a very long time, so you need to build it into your lifestyle. If you're like me and you like beer, ice cream, and dining out, then it's mainly a matter of portion control. I ate what I liked, but I learned to moderate portions and listen to my body. I ate until I was no longer hungry, and then no more.

I think maybe the takeaway here is that you can't always tell the difference between a slightly unbalanced and a perfectly balanced game right away. You can probably spot extreme imbalances immediately, I'd guess.

But if this game had been patched monthly, Jigglypuff or Ice Climbers might have been buffed drastically or had their mechanics changed early on, which would have been a shame.

A proposal: when a game has been thoroughly played, tested, and thought through, and the designers are nearly certain that a desirable state of balance has been reached, then restrain yourself to no more than one (maybe two) balance tune-ups in a year. Only patch imbalances so glaring that they are on the scale of bugs or exploits. Let things play out a bit.

"know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won"

What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.

All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.

The only expectation for me is that I can fork the project in accordance with their chosen license. Expecting anything else is a bit too entitled for me.

There are tons of different styles of project management. I don't see the point in claiming one as the "OSS way." I think it's fair enough to criticize someone for their management style in itself; additionally criticizing them for breaking the "OSS contract" or "going against the spirit of OSS" is kind of silly IMO, and a cheap way to score argument points and pageviews.

I've grown kind of tired of these sorts of posts, where people assume that OSS means handling the community exactly the way you prefer.

Does it have an OSS license? Do they adhere to it in practice? If so, then your complaint isn't one of OSS, but rather community politics.

Wow, that's really interesting. Did not expect it to be something so new. I'm going to have to read more about this ...

"Inbox functions very much more like a ToDo list than it does an email client."

That's exciting to hear, since I've recently started turning Mailbox into a combination email client/to-do list/evernote replacement. I've found that having all those concerns in different apps meant that I never wound up using any of them often enough.

The shared concern seems to be the triaging of things that hit an "inbox" of sorts. Email hits the literal inbox, to do's hit my "stuff I need to do" buffer, and notes hit my "categorize these notes later" buffer (I compulsively note things down for later). Ultimately triaging things as their hit the Mailbox inbox is most effective for me, so I've turned it into my single source of triaging.

I'll definitely give this a shot if/when I ever get an invite ...

Well, that's interesting, although I'm skeptical. Can anyone with legal experience say exactly how much this means? If Ello genuinely just did something that makes it difficult for future investors/acquirers to turn Ello into a ad-fueled, data-selling, privacy-undercutting behemoth, then that's pretty encouraging.

But ... it just seems "too good to be true." I've expected them to be about as "ad free" as every other business whose initial ideals are abandoned once the founders have gotten theirs and moved on.

This is great. I hope you guys don't go away. I've been meaning to explore the google cloud a bit more anyway, though, I guess.

This thread has included some interesting discussion of how everyone handles the different tasks of a) committing individual units of work, b) saving works-in-progress, c) syncing files, d) backing up files, and e) persistent undo editor features.

I thought I'd toss out what my setup is right now on my personal machine, for a bit of reflection/discussion...

- I compulsively save to disk after nearly every edit, so I'm a big fan of editors that provide some kind of persistent undo functionality. Right now I'm using live-archive inside the Atom editor, and it is wonderful. I hit cmd-shift-y and it pops the current buffer open in a live-archive interface that includes VCR-like with rewind/fast-forward buttons, etc. It leaves me feeling quite free to mess with code a little more dangerously that I would otherwise. Whereas before I might briefly comment out a line while I try something out, now I'll just delete it and hack away. Anything that was there is just a cmd-shift-y away.

live-archive is actually maybe the foremost reason I'm still using Atom. I'll probably switch away from it eventually, but I'm grown to like the customized little hole I've built for myself, inside that particular editor. I might try out a JetBrains IDE next, sometime ...

- I don't do a lot of work-in-progress saving. Maybe I should be better about this? I'm not a fan of git histories that read like "went to lunch," "stuck, think on this--" etc. Even when I'm the only one that's going to be seeing them. I keep a gitignored text file where I tend to scribble down notes like this, but maybe I should play around with WIP commits.

- For syncing I have an hourly cron job that does a rsync -av --delete-after for my important directories to several different locations. This is mostly meant as a true sync and not backup, but I do find myself using it as a way to lose no more than an hour's work at a time. I might change this to running every 30 or 20 minutes since it doesn't seem to tax the machine too much.

- For backup I have crashplan backing everything up to a local external drive and then their cloud service too. I haven't put a terrible amount of thought into this. It only runs when I sleep. I want to play around with using arq and amazon glacier eventually.

For git I just do small unit-of-work commits for myself, and then cleaning up when necessary.

That's exciting to hear. My gut reaction is that this is far too large. However, the idea of always carrying with me something that is nearly as big as my Nexus 7 is enticing. I love reading on my N7, but I never seem to have it on me when I want it.

The smartwatch + phablet combo is not something I had thought about. Which watch are you using?

I love these kind of "man behind the curtain" things. I've had a few somewhat similar ideas I've meant to make, though they were more in the spirit of being silly and fun rather than "brutal truth telling."

They don't really make much(/any?) money or involve cool tech, but I think they are fun, and good times. Maybe I'll get working on the one I've been wanting to do most.

Yes, for some reason many people think freedom of speech means they--and those they identify with--should be able to speak free of social consequence. I don't really know what leads a person to think that. Maybe they just said stuff for so long without being challenged, that they start to think they are entitled to never being challenged?

Mailing lists, in my experience, can feature incredible discussion. I participated on one centered around a somewhat obscure literary topic for some years. You almost develop a sense of kinship.

However, mailing lists seem to be going extinct. Even back then it had a quaint, ancient feel to it.

And it has almost nothing to do with reddit.

Reddit could censor all instances of discussion featuring the phrase "hackers news" tomorrow, and it's not as if they would be brought up on freedom-of-speech charges.

Personally I find the predominant brand of humor at Reddit to be annoying too. An interesting conversation devolves into five trailing one-liners circling around a pop culture reference ... ugh.

We can also criticize Reddit for that choice. Freedom of speech, and all. It sounds like you're upset that we choose to criticize Reddit for this.

The difference between what a business allows and what a state allows are so different as to not really be illuminative here.

I could decide that no one watches animated cartoons in my house, and no one is really harmed by that in any significant way. A state that declares that no one shall watch animated cartoons, however, is quite a different thing.

If the reporting is accurate, then he really got screwed. Your money is taken despite your never being convicted of anything, and then the IRS taxes you for that money that was taken. What a joke.

I think you've latched onto the wrong thing here. Clearly both things are conferred by the state. I was not arguing that one was more worthy because it somehow wasn't granted by the state, but rather that they are granted for clearly different reasons, because the two types of "ownership" are so vastly different that they required different laws.

The fact that both of these concepts are enforced by the state doesn't change the fact that there is still no real possibility of my macbook entering the public domain after an arbitrary numbers of years. That one form of property does do this, and another doesn't, would suggest that we're talking about two extremely different things, no?

If there were a fundamental "sameness of the two", then making an exact replica of my macbook would be the same thing as stealing it from me. Clearly that's not the case though. Copyright deals with who has the permission to make legal copies of a thing. Generally it's a much stickier question than the question of who owns a physical item. Sometimes I can legally copy a thing without being the copyright holder, though rarely, I'd say, can I legally steal something.

I don't think I'm arguing that people should make a moral distinction. I've argued that largely they already do. People have never cared about copyright infringement like they do theft.

Here's something I wonder about: have people ever gone significantly out of their way to respect copyright? or have they only do so when respecting copyright was also the most convenient way?

I'm not sure the answer means too much either way ...

---

FWIW, I either get my media legally or I don't bother getting it at all(1). I'm watching Game of Thrones currently through physical video store rentals. I'm not sure this is necessary but sometimes I feel like it's worth putting out there.

1 - The only exception was some long out-of-print books I wanted to read, which I downloaded illegal pdfs of since they were not available new, or in the libraries I searched, or in the used book markets I searched. So, that's the one notable time I violated copyright.

Sorry I'm like a week late here, I don't check HN very frequently.

It's not just "people" that distinguish between copyright infringement and stealing; the law does as well. I find it extremely odd that you're asking why people feel "entitled" to make a perfectly lawful distinction.

It's my personal opinion that traditional ownership of property and the intellectual property afforded by copyright are such different concepts that all debate tends to collapse into incoherence once the concepts are taken to be the same.

For things that I personally own, there is no idea of a "public domain," and my belongings are not temporarily granted exclusively to me for the good of the public. My macbook is my macbook, full-stop. Copyright, on the other hand, is a temporary monopoly on the distribution of a creation because, at some point in time, the state deemed it beneficial to the public to incentivize artists/creators/inventors with this kind of financial benefit.

Why do we have any concept of a public domain if copyright and traditional ownership are perfectly interchangeable as ideas? Why is there no concept of "fair use" for my macbook or my car, but there is such a thing as "fair use" for any novel I might write?

My personal take: there isn't really any analogous concept of "ownership" for most things that could be considered artworks or intellectual creations. I can be credited as the original creator, and I can attempt to control the distribution of physical manifestations of my artifact, but in what sense do I actually "own," say, the dirty limerick that I wrote? The only way I can truly own it is to simply never show it to a soul. But that's not very satisfying, is it? And yet it's perfectly satisfying to keep my macbook solely to myself ...

When have consumers ever cared if a firm makes such a costly product that it can't be profitable? Consumers will never care about that. Appeals to make them care about "manufacturing costs" are pointless.

I think it's a little disingenuous to keep calling it "stealing." It's copyright infringement, and in my experience people have never felt as badly about doing it as compared to stealing. For instance, think back before digital books became popular: if you had a truly epic book of poems and you had several friends who wanted to read it and copies of the actual book were unusually difficult to procure, I think it used to be that many people would just run a large chunk of the book through a xerox machine without thinking twice. Similarly, I know people who used to get very into making custom mixed CDs as gifts for people. Copying an artwork has never been considered a crime on the level of stealing someone else's possession.

Wow, it really is sad when you think of it that way.

I don't torrent stuff, but this kind of sentiment makes me wish I did ...

This is awesome. Reading about his work and the subsequent work on FHE in general was one of my favorite "holy shit this is the future" moments. (And I don't have those moments hardly at all ... kind of silly. But I was giddy, and it was amazing, and so I was silly.)

It was also one of my foremost "I will never ever in my life be as smart as these guys" moments. Alas.

The author William Vollmann comically wrote about doing this at a San Francisco (I think?) software shop when he was young and writing his first novel. Living off of vendor-machine candy bars, dodging the janitor, etc ... Probably my favorite parts were how he confessed having no bloody clue what he was doing when faced with the thing he was being paid to do: write code ...

As with any fiction author, the details are probably exaggerated, and he particularly tends toward a certain kind of luxuriant self-deprecation, so, pinch of salt and all ...

I believe the dueling meta-narrators of his first book, You Bright and Risen Angels, were also programmers, or something like that. It's been a long time since I read it, but I remember Electric Emily's origin story and the parts where the programmer-narrators fucked with the "source code" of the narrative being my favorite parts.

There was a famous writer once who said that one of his greatest assets was his extreme forgetfulness. Appropriately, I am blanking on his name at the moment, but I'll pop back in here if I recall it. It was a long time ago.

However, his point was something like focusing on rote memorization of detail makes for trite, superficial, and boring fiction-writing, and that you're better off experiencing something as intensely as possible and then forgetting it almost immediately. The idea being that your brain will recall the crucial bits more relevantly and more vividly once they have been yanked back from the fog of utter forgetfulness. I'm not sure how closely related this is to the ideas presented in the article, but for me personally, it became significantly easier to write fiction with a real sense of "immediacy" once embracing this principle.

However, fiction can require a strange sort of learning: it can involve sensory knowledge of scattered quotidian detail. Back when I wrote a lot, things like the discrete texture and smell of different wooden tables were very interesting to me. Or exactly how it feels to be in a room lit by a single large fluorescent light vs other kinds of light. I'm not sure that kind of learning transfers to any other domain, really. But forgetfulness was very useful for it, at any rate. I'm done now.

It probably depends on why you're learning this. If I understand the concept correctly, the idea is to interleaving complementary skills. i.e. you stay within the same broad skill/activity domain.

So if learning this to prepare for a quiz show, I'd probably interleave it with specific trivia-esque facts about each capital city's culture, history, etc. That way you both learn the names of the capitals, and you attach varied bits of context to each name.

If I needed to know them because I'm moving to somewhere in Europe and I want to have a "lay of the land," I might interleave other useful tips and tricks I would need to know. Any quirks in how they drive over there, how to order food in whatever languages I need to know, the different new social customs I need to be aware of, how to translate in my head between English and metric measurements perhaps, etc ...

That's a really good point. Entertainment does do the "presented by" thing quite well. I will say though that for me at least, part of why it works so well is most shows have trained me to see that "presented by ..." segment as basically a slightly different commercial.

Maybe entertainment has just had more time to learn the ropes. I watch Pardon The Interruption occasionally, and I think they have a "presented by ..." every episode while listing a few beers. However, if in the middle of a discussion Wilbon stood up, showed off his duds, and said "This episode presented to you by Snazzy Suits Inc" ... well, that'd feel pretty crappy.

Maybe that's basically the point news media is at right now. I wonder, then, what would doing it better look like? I think something like "This week's spotlight on 'Videogames and Violence' sponsored by: Blizzard and Madden 2015'" could potentially be better. Remove the sponsorship from a single article to a swath of articles with differing viewpoints, and always have a couple sponsors instead of only one. I think that's closer to something that feels right, as a reader. Maybe.

If native advertising is nothing more than brands attaching their names to articles, why don't these publications simply implement a way to buy ads on specific articles, or on articles with certain very specific subjects? As in something like, "Whenever you run an article whose main subject is adult ADHD, we will pay a premium to occupy all of the available ad placements on that article."

That's what I've never understood about native advertising. If it's as pure as its proponents say, why is it even needed? Why does a print magazine need a "native" article when they could sell a massive, full-page ad on the page right across from that article? Doesn't it accomplish the same thing? And if advertisers aren't somehow exerting an editorial influence, then what exactly has been gained here?

It seems to me that there are two options: 1) "native advertising" is merely a hypeword that makes it easier to charge a premium for ad space, because it gets buyers irrationally excited. 2) The thing of value being sold w/ native advertising is actually a very tiny amount of editorial influence, something which otherwise is incredibly scarce and, ethics aside, would understandably carry a very high pricetag.

edit - of course there is the other option, which most likely is the real-life case: 3) Native advertising is valuable because it is not a traditional ad-space, consumers aren't used to it, and most readers will not recognize it as an ad unless they read carefully (and how many publications are read carefully, really?).

It doesn't go well on spaghetti.

I strongly agree with this. Not only is the "why is anyone surprised" a cynical ploy at seeming "sophisticated," but it serves to make people feel foolish for their initial anger, distrust, fear, sense of betrayal etc. And they have very good reason to feel those things! But we look at them with blank, bored eyes and ask why they're surprised.

I mean, do we really expect anyone else to seriously care about this stuff, when we kind of subtly mock them for having initially cared at all?

"I'm not sure why anyone's surprised" is the nerd version of being too "cool" to ever care about something.