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This is at the intersection of several of my interests.

The idea that nicotine improves cognition in schizophrenia is not new and, indeed, several drugs inspired by this idea (nicotinic agonists) are currently in the pipeline for the treatment of ADHD, schizophrenia, and depression. [1]

In this paper, the researchers are focused on a polymorphism in the CHRNA5 gene. Pulling up my 23andme data, this mutation (rs16969968) looks common, listed at 45% of the population. I have one of the "bad" alleles and, personally, use nicotine as a stimulant every once in a while and find it more effective than coffee but less effective than adderall.

If you are interested in this sort of research, I recommend getting part of your genome sequenced with 23andme [2] and then running your data through Promethease [3]. But, remember, don't take anything too seriously -- most of this isn't settled science.

There is also some evidence that nicotine may function as a "nootropic," i.e. a drug that enhances cognition even in the healthy. Nick Bostrom mentions using nicotine and caffeine to aid writing his book Superintelligence.

Contrary to what you might believe, nicotine is probably not all that bad for you, or even that addictive when not used in combination with an MAOI. The best review of this is, as usual, by Gwern. [4]

Finally, I want to mention a few other interesting properties of nicotine:

- The drug seems to more strongly reinforce behaviors done while under the influence of it than it reinforces "taking nicotine" (addiction). This may make it useful for implementing positive habits. e.g. I often chew half a piece of nicotine gum while running in an attempt to solidify my exercise routine.

- One study suggests that, at least in mice, nicotine administration results in long-term upregulation of reward sensitivity. [5]

Huge disclaimer here at the bottom: if this post convinces you to experiment with nicotine, please do not start with vaping. The near-instant reinforcement of inhaling a stimulant makes it much more addictive. Stick with gum, or a tincture. [6]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinic_agonist#Current_stat... [2] https://www.23andme.com/ [3] https://promethease.com/ [4] https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine [5] http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n6/full/1300905a.html [6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/comments/3lvkmc/nicotine...

I won't pretend to exactly understand Urbit, but it seems to be more or less what you're describing:

> In an Urbit world, your data is no longer trapped in a jumble of proprietary servers. Your urbit is a permanent, versioned, typed archive the size of your digital life. Even before you move your data from a Web service to a local Urbit app, your urbit can drive your account with an API or scraper.

http://urbit.org/posts/overview/

> The "leader" is an avowed racist and nasty person in general.

Oh, good. This again. Curtis has stated publicly, "I am not an 'outspoken advocate for slavery,' a racist, a sexist or a fascist." See: https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/why-you-should-come-to-lam...

+1.

I've been experimenting aggressively with different techniques for email capture (e.g. [1]) and, looking at my analytics, the exit-intent popup accounts for 47.27% of all emails.

[1]: http://rs.io/behavior-modification-techniques-if-then-rules/

Gwern did a convincingly rigorous self-experiment with LSD microdosing. [1] He sums it up as, "No beneficial effects reached statistical-significance and there were worrisome negative trends. LSD microdosing did not help me."

[1] http://www.gwern.net/LSD%20microdosing

If anyone is interested in the PAQ code, I have put one of the stronger-but-open-source variants on GitHub, here: https://github.com/robertseaton/paq8pxd

> Why is the piece talking about averages, when wealth is distributed as a power curve?

80,000 Hours is explicitly focused on maximizing social good, often by advising people on what career will maximize their "earning to give" potential. That is, earning a lot of money to donate to an effective charity (e.g. high rated charities on GiveWell).

Because of this, their analyses tend to look different than it would if it was optimizing towards a risk-adverse individual maximizing personal utility.

The justification for looking at expected value (averages) is expanded on here: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-goode...

There's quite a bit of further discussion (including explanations of a number of the questions) scattered across a couple different LessWrong threads.

Explanations of many of the questions: http://lesswrong.com/lw/emj/poll_less_wrong_and_mainstream_p...

What do professional philosophers believe, and why? http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hbw/what_do_professiona...

Here's a list of links to more discussions: http://philpapers.org/bbs/thread.pl?tId=420 I haven't actually gone through these, though.

You might also want to check out:

Survey of eating habits among philosophers: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/philosophers-e...

Survey of beliefs among economists: http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/02/news-flash-economists...

It has received more downvotes than upvotes.

I would rather not be destroyed at all.

I have made this specific feature request on an application (Mangler) and I have no affiliation with XDG.

Hell, I love the sound of his text.

    > I suspect ken spends most of his time thinking rather than
    > typing, and I have found this to be true of most great 
    > hackers.

Who cares? Slow input is still not a desirable property in a text editor.

I think your faith in the justice system (especially considering the technical nature of this redditor's activities) is unfounded.

A lot of the work on the open source stack which supports AMD GPUs is done by AMD employees.

    $ gcc -v
    ...
    gcc version 4.6.2 20120120 (prerelease) (GCC)

When it comes to diagnostics, GCC isn't even competitive.

    > What about the freedom of the children in the
    > pornographic images? That important to you?

The OP explicitly stated that he believes anything legal should be allowed. At any rate, this kind of remark really doesn't facilitate the kind of thoughtful discussion we, as a community, ought to strive for.

Interestingly enough, though, by outright banning suggestive images of minors, you are limiting "the freedom of the children," their freedom of expression. It's for the greater good, of course. ;)

One of the Plan 9 papers actually refers to Oberon as an example of a similarly integrated system. I believe it's the one titled 'The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9,' but I'm not certain.

Unfortunately, the server is down right now so I'm unable to check but, if you're curious, the various papers can be found here: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/

I'd hesitate to describe HN as non-political. The majority of HNer's are very pro-capitalist and pro-business from what I've observed, which makes sense given the community's focus on start-ups. The popular political sentiments that you'll find on Reddit are very different from those you'll find on HN.

Try voting.

     > it's pretty naive to think that racists in Mississippi
     > and Alabama, who never went away, wouldn't seize on the
     > chance to reinstitute something resembling Jim Crow laws.

He's the naive one? Frankly, what you're suggesting is absurd and borderline offensive. As if the enlightened North and federal legislation are all that prevents the re-institution of Jim Crow laws! Give me a break.

Yeah, this is something that I've been meaning to do. I'll be sure to hit you up if I ever have any business/marketing questions.

Thanks, I might be interested in moving to South Florida. I'd love to hear about those opportunities.

I'm trying to find a mentor. I need help finding potential candidates.

I'm 19 and I'm really interested in doing systems-level work in either C or, more recently, I've been looking at Erlang. I'm just picking stuff up on my own.

The thing is, I don't know any professional programmers. I don't really have any idea how one finds a mentor. I don't know who I should contact. If anyone knows someone who might be interested in this kind of relationship, my contact info is in my profile.

     > This might be getting less interesting 
     > to the general audience, so we can take
     > it offline if you have any more questions.

This is Hacker News. I, for one, would much rather read about the nitty-gritty details of this project than debate about how great Facebook's engineers are or read another opinion on whether or not PHP is a good language for X.

The best way to deal with a downvote is to assume that it was an accident.

I'm personally holding onto my Core2Duo until a general-purpose processor with 32 cores is available to consumers. It's completely arbitrary, but 32 cores is for me, psychologically, the point where it feels like a crime not to design a program in a concurrent fashion.

Picking such a buy-threshold also has the added benefit of suppressing any desire that I might have to update to the latest and greatest. I look at something and I think: "Well, that's nice, but it's no 32 core processor."

My variables are a little more verbose than the anemic style preferred by Rob Pike and used throughout K&R but, in that tradition, I also tend towards shorter, simpler variable names than something like minValueForTemperature, so maybe it would be useful to illuminate my own thinking.

Complex variable names ought to be avoided because, simply, they hammer the programmer with a bunch of information every time they are used. Usually, when reading code, you're trying to wrap your head around how a procedure operates rather than the specifics of what it's operating on. Often, if you need to know more about what a variable represents, it's sufficient to refer to its declaration.

Thusly, I prefer to name my variables so that one can pick up the general idea of what they're for from the name and then I document any additional information at the variable's declaration, either using a comment or via the type system.

So, this is how I'd handle your examples:

    int maxval; /* until overflow */
    Temperature minval;