Hacker News Reader

Supremeon Buddhist monk's brain produces highest reported level of gamma waves

Why does the brainwave headset appear to include a pair of headphones?

Supremeon Haskell in Production: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Apologies if I sounded like I was criticising what you do - I'm sure that these made a lot more sense in the context of a presentation. I was questioning why the person who posted this link did so and why it has been upvoted to such an extent.

Supremeon Haskell in Production: The good, the bad, and the ugly

This is a terrible set of slides. The only new thing I gathered from it is "cabal sucks". Then the presentation came to a sudden end which left me thinking "what, that's it?" How does such a low quality link get so many upvotes? takes notes for future marketing endeavours

Supremeon Is there evidence that drugs can help programmers produce “better” code?

You do realise that you're doing something quite dangerous by turning to dopamine-influencing drugs to motivate you, right? This class of drugs can change brain structure, promote cancer growth and generally make you devoid of emotion. At the very least, protect yourself with anti-oxidants and NMDA antagonists. There are plenty of less serious things you can take/do if you simply lack motivation. Exercise, cut out sugar and caffeine entirely and try Noopept.

Also see:

* http://www.nih.gov/news/health/feb2009/nida-02.htm

* http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2006/05/ritalin_causes_cancer...

* http://www.cchrint.org/2010/11/15/adhd-ritalin-%E2%80%93-bra...

But for the love of god, think about what you are doing to your body. There are other ways, just look a little harder.

Supremeon Is there evidence that drugs can help programmers produce “better” code?

> benzodiazepines generally lower cognitive ability

On the subject of a particular drug sometimes being useful and sometimes counter-productive, the missing link is that the brain has several points of neurochemical homeostasis - these are also known as 'moods'. Moving from a given mood to another requires some combination of influences. E.g. moving from mood X to Y may require a boost in dopamine while moving from mood Z to Y may require more GABA. This is why it's relative and different people are not affected by the same drugs in the same ways - their baseline levels of major neurotransmitters differ. So one person has a natural tendency towards mood X while another tends towards mood Y - i.e. one person has naturally high dopamine levels which another has high levels of serotonin.

I believe that these tendencies are the result of the body adapting to the conditions it grew up in. The major factors I can see are diet, the social situation (both in terms of family and culture-at-large), amount of exercise, genetics and pollutants.

I completely agree that mood and productivity are inherently inseparable. It's not a one way relationship either - they affect each other. Hell, everything in the brain seems to affect everything else in the brain. It's a giant web of dependencies and influences. It reminds me a lot of badly designed legacy software systems - everything makes sense when you dig in deep but looks like an absolute mess from afar.

Supremeon Is there evidence that drugs can help programmers produce “better” code?

Who wouldathunk that doing LSD could turn someone into a complete asshole with no regard for an open culture and a penchant for superficial things which don't matter in the least (like one button devices)?

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

So it's essentially a marketing problem. I get the feeling that you were trying to suggest that it's worthy because it's popular. If so, argumentum ad populum is irrational. If not, apologies.

Supremeon Introducing the new compose in Gmail

Good to see that PR is on the job of trying to convince people that they don't really want what they really want. It's funny that even verbatim search asks me if I'm sure that I spelt something correctly. I guess our definitions over verbatim differ but to me, in this context, it means "do this and stop second guessing me kthnx." It's also annoying that I have to switch to another mode every time I want to search. There appears to be no setting to set verbatim as the default and even if there was, one would either need to always be on the same computer (if the preference is saved in a cookie) or always signed in (if it's set on the account).

A suggestion - provide a subdomain with the old search, e.g. old.google.com. All of the mainstream customers get whatever UX/marketing think is best for them and everyone else gets to keep using a tool which they find useful - everyone wins!

Oh, and since you might be the right person to ask, why is Quora still turning up in search results when they censor most of the thread? They're even worse than Experts Exchange (and why are they still turning up in results too?).

Supremeon Introducing the new compose in Gmail

Society is shooting itself in the foot with the trend of dumbing everything down. While we sit here being presented with one button devices so that "we don't get confused", the rest of the world is busy educating itself to a high standard and building tomorrow's industries. This laziness will be the downfall of the west and we'll have this constant thirst for profit at the expense of society's well-being to blame for it. IMO, anyway.

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

I'm not running a blog or expecting anyone to take what they read in a comment on some site on the internet seriously.

Label me however you want, it's a free internet (for now, anyway).

I still find it funny how anyone can start a blog and become famous for it. Maybe I should do the same and cash in on all that buttery goodness of advertising revenue...

Supremeon Introducing the new compose in Gmail

facepalm

All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in.

Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

Zynga has (up until now) made a lot of money and they write shit code. Hell, most of the companies I've seen have made money while writing shit code. Making money indicates that a person knows how to make money. Writing good code indicates that a person knows how to write good code. Since the two are disconnected, I stand by my statement that this man is a fraud. You simply don't start a programming blog when you created a new language just to address a small concern in the project spec. Start a blog on how to make money or run a business, sure, but don't tread into a field where people are trying to produce something of quality and try to 'teach' them something.

The argument you have just presented is irrational since it's central point rests upon the fallacy of false cause.

ding!

Another satisfied customer. Next!

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

I've outlined how we solved this problem in another comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717713

Incidentally, I'm not here to form relationships - personal or otherwise. The primary goal of social media sites is to indulge in procrastination while advertisers bombard us with new products, not to improve one's life. For the latter, there are books, actions and real people made of flesh and blood. This reminds me a lot of some of the people I encountered in my gaming days - they tend to forget about the context of the platform they are using.

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

Sorry, should have linked to previous evidence of the fact: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-ju...

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

Data should be backed up to staging nightly anyway. There should also be scripts in place to start this process at an arbitrary point in time and to import the data into the staging server. You do not need to match the hardware if you use cloud hosting since you can scale up whenever you want.

Here's where it gets really simple. Resize the staging instance to match live. Put live into maintenance mode and begin the data transfer to staging (with a lot of cloud providers, step #1 and #2 can be done in parallel). As soon as it finishes copying, take live down, point the DNS records at staging and wait for a few minutes. Staging is now live, with all of live's data. Problem solved. Total downtime: hardly anything compared to not being prepared. Total dataloss: none.

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

Are you kidding me? If you run big sites like FogBugz then ofcourse you have cross-datacenter redundancy. It's not complicated to host your staging site in another physical location and point the DNS records to it when things go pear-shaped.

Supremeon Fog Creek is about to go down

No redundancy what-so-ever? What an amateur operation. I still say Joel is a fraud.

EDIT: this site is amazing - divergent opinions seem to be actively discouraged given how many "points" I've lost thanks to stating mine. Is the point of this site for all of the members to think in the same way?

Supremeon BootMetro: Metro style web framework

> Yeah, except I'm not the guy saying that somebody should just be quiet and move on.

You're one of us too:

> Why don't you just move on?

And yes, I realise the irony of my first comment. I'm just going to take my own advice and move on now.

Supremeon Illegal Numbers

> While I sympathize with these arguments, this isn't how the legal system works. The law doesn't work on absolutely provable certainty. It works on reasonable doubt, intent and (hopefully) facts.

Hah, you still think that the legal system makes an ounce of sense. Read the below, weep, weep again and then ask yourself how you didn't realise that you were living in the dark ages up until now.

http://alwaysfamilycenter.com/2011/08/26/justice-is-blind-an...

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you care to know, read up on the reoffending rates of prisoners and the types of systems which have particularly low ones. Look around you at all of the seemingly civilized people who call for blood when their sensibilities are offended strongly enough.

Where we now stand, in this aspect, is not at the heart of civilization but on the very fringe of it - and hardly anyone has noticed the fact. The legal system, just like everything else to do with humanity, is solidly anchored in emotion, not logic.

Supremeon Tell HN: Let's Be Civil

> That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but it is wrong.

Surely an opinion, a wholly subjective point of view, cannot by it's very definition be wrong. Being insulted (or not) is also a fundamentally subjective experience. Anything can be insulting or non-insulting to a given person. In my opinion, it is hurtful to tell someone that their being offended is in some way wrong since it disregards how a person legitimately feels. I'm not making any statement on how a situation like that should be handled, merely that an offended person is indeed offended and that acknowledging the fact is the best way to move forward.

Supremeon The Internet is experiencing severe outages across North American and Asia

My first thought was that this is probably a virus.

Supremeon BootMetro: Metro style web framework

The agile/lean idea is not to have your users bug test your code! It's a technique for gathering feedback early and often in order to make sure that the requirements are sufficiently addressed. What you are describing is a shoddy work discipline which no self-respecting developer would even think of associating his name with.

More appropriately, one of the central pillars of agile is to be in a releasable state at the end of every sprint.

Supremeon BootMetro: Metro style web framework

> That's pretty rude.

He's entitled to his opinion and has the right to criticize whatever he wants, however he wants. If you don't like it, why not just move on.

Positive feedback is not the only useful type of feedback. If someone suggested, say, developing a new site on the Gopher protocol then the appropriate response is to tell them that it's a stupid idea, mainly because it is a stupid idea.

There is much more to be gained from emotionally disconnecting yourself from the fruits of your labour than it is to always, without fail be positive about everything. It is folly to pick yang over yin or vice-versa.

The fact of the matter is that a lot of people will have this emotional reaction to this project and not telling the author in order to protect their feelings is going to hurt their success in the long run.

I feel that being rude is insulting the person. Being honest is insulting the work (if one honestly feels that it is unworthy enough to be treated as such).

> Yes, yes you are. Or perhaps you meant "I am being a hater and a downer but I'm hardly having to put any effort into it".

A hater is someone who hates out of prejudice. For example, hating a celebrity because one is jealous of their wealth or think that they do not deserve what they have. I do not detect any prejudice here, just an honest reaction to something.

The most ironic thing about your post is that you mimic Grandparent's tone, which you yourself label as rude and throw it back at him. Surely a mature response is to respond in a way which you find acceptable, not simply stoop down to what you perceive to be a lower and, ultimately, unacceptable level?

Supremeon Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

It depends on your perspective, no?

If the perspective is that everything is disconnected and that you are more important than everyone else then yes, it does.

If one can see that all is connected and everything affects everything else then it makes very little sense. Those taxes pay for poor people's sustenance when they cannot work. They pay for people who can't afford private healthcare. It's rational to help them because more national unrest means more stress, less productivity and, in the end, less likelyhood of people buying your products.

The problem with being perfectly rational is that one may not consider the flaws in one's assumptions. Rationality is only as good as the information it's acting on and is not a silver bullet for making the right decisions. A blind man might conclude that while the sun may be hot at times, it's also extremely dark.

Supremeon Zynga May Have Just Laid Off 100+ Employees From Its Austin Office

You might want to read up on the tax avoidance and political lobbying which the Gates foundation is involved in.

See: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Gates_Foundation_Critiq...

Supremeon On facing two years for protesting Stop-and-Frisk

I just typed out a big post, hit add comment - "link has expired", highlighted the text, forgot to copy, refreshed and lost it. Fix this already, HN!

Similar laws also exist in the UK. Unfortunately both our politicians and activist organisations such as 38 Degrees completely ignore the effects of them. I've tried taking political action against this and have been met with canned responses and ignored outright.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/jan/14/stop-search-racial...

> Analysis by the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Open Society Justice Initiative shows during the past 12 months a black person was 29.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched than a white person. That figure was 26.6 the previous year.

We also have a "stop and account" law, where a police officer may ask you what you are doing and why you are where you are. Recently, the obligation for police to record these encounters has been removed.

http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/police/powers/stop-and-search/

> From 7 March 2011 we have removed the national requirement to record stop and account, in order to reduce police bureaucracy. Instead we have allowed police forces to make a local decision on whether they feel that recording stop and account is necessary. Those forces with little evidence of disproportionate use and little community concern should no longer need to spend valuable police hours completing forms, monitoring records and collating statistics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/sep/22/police-record-race-...

> Five out of the 10 forces most likely to use stop-and-account powers disproportionately against black people – West Midlands, Avon and Somerset, Thames Valley, Sussex and Hertfordshire – have halted recording the race of people they have stopped.

> One experienced officer said colleagues could use the power, which does not require reasonable suspicion of criminality, to justify searching someone, which does: "It could lead to a suspicion to arise. Why are you not talking to me? Why aren't you answering questions?"

So you're not officially obliged but in practical terms, you are.

The worst thing is the heavy duty denial by the authorities that there is anything wrong with this.

Supremeon Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

Fair enough, I stand corrected. The problem is in the culture surrounding cloud services, not with the providers themselves.

So it seems that the only real benefit to utilising cloud services is to make scaling up easier and save money.

Supremeon GitLab, open source github clone, reaches 3.0

This costs money, GitLab does not. The benefit is obvious.

Supremeon Amazon EC2 currently down. Affecting Heroku, Reddit, Others

You find it bizarre that the cloud providers' marketing strategy has worked? I find that bizarre!

Supremeon E-Ink Android phone promises a week long battery life

I had a knee-jerk reaction to this:

>It could be useful in India or African countries with not much access to energy.

It's appalling that countries located in regions where the sun tends to beat down most of the time lack energy at all.