embeddedradical

the final line of that post got me thinking about how good my work environment is: ideal creative workspace: a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries.

i don't know about blue walls though :P

also, in the code itself, i sometimes get caught up on trying to make everything perfect and try to take care of every edge case....often for things any user doing such a thing should know - this isn't going to work....but in case they try :) i want something friendly to happen.... and so on, and so on.

those new android phones are coming out later this year, right?

i came across this blog outside of hn, i ended up bookmarking like 10 pages (pretty extensive compared to other sites).

it's not like every post on hn is going to interest you. for me, when reddit was the only place i knew of, quality articles were 1 in a thousand, you learn to scan...here it's 10 out of a 100, pretty damn good -- but i don't expect to find an aggregation site where every link is meaningful to me.

take a look at the hn headlines, there's plenty of industry gossiping, and just waste of time speculations about the future.

sure it's not fart joke equivs thaty you find on many aggregation sites, but just because they were spell checked and the grammar is nice, and the person talks intelligently, or has a job remaking the same jquery code everyone else is remaking....doesn't make it quality -- quality is tough to find.

this dragon guy puts thought into what he writes, that's for sure. i don't expect him to be right, i expect to find another person truly exploring. he's not some 'wanna be a blogger so i don't have to work' delusional mess-up spamming the world with the latest hunches he came up with while reading cereal this morning...you can tell this is another person who takes life very seriously, wants a rich experience, has spent lots of time thinking about these things, and is sharing, and he's pretty good at that..sharing his perspective.

browse around the site, and compare it to the other headline articles from this last week on hn...if this doesn't make the cut, then there's a whole bunch more that doesn't make the cut which should could use your criticism more than this post.

speech is my hammer, bang the world into shape -- now let it fall! my restleness is my nemesis. it's hard to really chill and sit still, committed to projects, i write lines, sometimes won't finish for days. scrutinize my literature, from the large to the miniature. I mathematically add, minister, subtract the wack, selector, wheel it back, i'm feelin that. -- haha! from the core to the memory and back, you know the motto - stay fluid even in staccato.

-- altered lyrics of Mos Def's Hip Hop

science mag and a lot of others thought he was worth listening to...

the argument is that it's not something simple like calorie in, calorie out (seen this argument on hn a few times), but rather how certain calories trigger certain behavior with insulin in our bodies.

After all, if he's right - it quite changes how we approach the problem, and considering the backing this research has from other reputable sources - it's quite foolish to just ignore such a paradigm shifting idea like that. perhaps it was worth ignoring before the guy wrote a giant book looking at one study after the next....before he presented such a good case for the argument...but at this point, obviously wrong is not true.

if you've got a good reference, a link to an article perhaps, to why Gary Taubes is wrong -- I'd love to see it.

-- but let's give you some more quality prestige: let's say that you spend a week looking into this matter and think of something that you think people might actually want to know -- well, i doubt you had anything valuable to say still, because that's just enough time to get caught up on what others have to say

which is all to say, that the only person you can possibly help is another novice as yourself going in, someone who knows almost nothing about baby shower bingo cards. for such people we have things like wikipedia, and perhaps someone who knows a bit about them will write more.

you see, supposing that i wanted to know about baby shower bingo cards, i would prefer that the kind of content i find is from people genuinely interested in them, genuinely interested in sharing information about them, because those are the people that are going to do a real quality job, and have vested interest in improving that conversation.

if there is little material out there about baby shower bingo cards, and not big of a group, well let the demand grow, and someone actually interested will produce some quality content.

is it wrong? well, it's not that bad, you're not doing anything oh so terrible, and i could say many bad things about advertisers in general, but i have a term for people like you...and that term is noise.

it's quite alright, you can keep doing it if you think it right. It is up us, the people like me, to solve our own problem, to figure out how to get your noise, and those like you, out of our way. It's a bit of a challenging problem, so thanks for giving us all more puzzles to solve.

"Dream in a pragmatic way." - Huxley

...after all, we need only look near the end of his life to see what conclusions he drew of all this as to what we ought to do: "In regard to man’s final end, all the higher religions are in complete agreement. The purpose of human life is the discovery of Truth, the unitive knowledge of the Godhead. The degree to which this unitive knowledge is achieved here on earth determines the degree to which it will be enjoyed in the posthumous state. Contemplation of truth is the end, action the means." (thoughts on the perennial philosophy, after he went mystic)

huxley perhaps is not the name to invoke to defend human interests in triviality, or rejections of reason.

invoking a reminder of huxley's ideas works well for rejection of trivial banter, rejection of living life as efficient strife for the accomplishment of the superficial (like finding this girl), and the rejection of making ourselves slaves to technological progress while making no progress in our deep understandings of life (like having successful startups and never taking the time to ponder the cosmic whole).

The issue of genetically modified food is not binary, it is not that genetic modification is good, or that it is bad, and when our primary terms of discussion are how much genetic modification is around and whether or not we like genetic modification - well, it’s here, and we’ve been doing it thousands of years slowly, and now we can do it quickly.

On one hand you have the kind of work that went on in Mexico and is now making its way into Africa; the works of people like Normal Borlaug (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug) .

On the other hand we have Monsanto as the iconic forerunner of delusional-antisocial-take-over-the world-food-supply companies.

The binary discussion, is GM good or bad, is misdirection. The valuable discussion is in what is good engineering, and what is bad engineering and what are we going to do about that distinction? This article is taking it in the right direction (even if it has some errors like mentioned in the other comment).

the problem zed brought up is one worth thinking about, and this convo revolves around his name and works as the example case, i see this a satire for the convo more than a satire of zed personally -- i don't know tho... but thats my reaction. i hope he laughs too - it is, in the end, poetically funny that it started with, i need some attention for what i do, and now him as open source maker is headlines for a week....(once again, because it's a convo worth having)...

You have to admit though, that interface is awesome. When I first saw this last night, I was impressed - the subtitles expand into the full transcript, the extras fluidly work with the video while it is playing, and it seems they had some bandwidth issues in the first few hours and during that time smooth playback was in effect, and although the video would hiccup at those points (rarely), the audio was smooth and I liked that.

Really, the only thing I can think of to complain about is that when you full screen it, the background is white. For media, black seems to work nicer on the eyes.

A wonderful interface, high quality video and audio, and of course the content - Feynman - is just wow ... I'm a very happy person right now....although I was up pretty late watching these videos, and so I'm a very happy tired person right now....

I recommend checking out this article from Seed Magazine: http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/thinking_meta/ :

Unless we are aware of our tendency to act irrationally in certain situations, then we’ll continue to act irrationally. That much is predictable.Although the mind is full of flaws, we can learn to outsmart them.

I think for an approach to productive use of meta discussion in these tech circles, we should begin by looking at the already existing strategies for utilizing meta-cognition for our benefit - like the ones listed here: http://coe.sdsu.edu/eet/Articles/metacognition/start.htm

In short, thinking about thinking, thinking about you think, are quite valuable, but do it wrong, do it too much, and you end up driving yourself nuts -- and say crazy things like meta is murder and run away from it....'I will not think, I think too much, will not think...will be braindead zombie not questioning what I'm doing...' -- also, your analysis of your thoughts isn't often that valuable to other people, which I think relates to why we find reading about bloggers telling us how they blog is kind of mmm, boring.

Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software.

The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use).

Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.

I've never been in a situation where dual licensing was applicable, but when I give away software, I usually paste in the MIT license. I figure - if it's going to be free, it should be completely free.

Maybe if I thought the GPL license stood a chance to ever make it so that all software, or at least the majority, was free and intellectual property was dead...then I would use it - but to try and make such a giant philosophical/political change just in the software industry appears naive.

If intellectual property is what we want to get rid of (the philosophical reason to go with GPL rather than BSD), it should be addressed as a whole: looking at it in sciences, software, literature, all of it -- for if it is true that we don't need it, or are hampered by it, I don't see how it only applies to software. I'm far more concerned that companies are patenting found genetics than I am that this stupid iphone which erased all my music this morning because I had recently formatted and it thinks it was synced to another computer, and how the new firmware breaks it from musicmonkey again, and now I can't transfer my flac files, and have to use their junky itunes instead -- yah it sucks, but the genetic stuff is even more troublesome - philosophically.

if had been then I would not have called it to be superficial. I mistakenly assumed with the tone of the article, that it would make as strong of a point that it could, and this article, presented very little information about all these additional constraints and steps you mentioned.

Now knowing about all these additional steps, I'm still left pondering - what if high energy people shifted their sleep patterns? I'm a night owl, and I'm generally a high energy kind of person, but if I was to shift my sleep so that I went to bed earlier and woke up earlier (although tough to pull off for me), maybe my energy would go with me, shifting to earlier in the day.

I think that would make a good follow up study: take those night owls and perhaps the early rises as well, and shift their sleep up and then do all these measurements again to see how it affected them. Did they drop in energy, or did their energy go with them through the transition (giving them time to adjust as well).

generally, i find it easier to sleep if i've hit one of these plateaus, or if i'm stuck, or if there's too many options of where to go from here; the answer will be clearer tomorrow. It's when the answer is -almost- clear, just need to try out a few things, that sleeping feels like trying to swim upstream.

i've tried to 'fix' my sleep so many times in life now, by which i mean be consistent - and so far, no success. nothing too bad has happened to me, either -- if i don't get enough sleep i know i'm sub-par but i feel capable of at least being 'average' until i get home and get more sleep the next night. on the other hand, i've taken vacation simply because i know if i don't solve this ranking algorithm, i'm going to go insane - so i took three days off (wed-fri, so i got weekend too), and worked through the day and night, sleeping as fit until it was all good, and that itch in my head was resolved.

funniest part of this ad is how they ask you to try and think of why they are such a great company. mcdonalds sales agent: mcdonalds is great because people eat fatty food that comes quick; what do you think? why is it that we rock so much? we'd love to hear from you...

looks as if things are going to be k.