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hellodevnull

97 karma · joined June 23, 2014

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hellodevnull··on Israeli Startup Can Charge Your Phone in 1 Minute
I've noticed from years of reading Wikipedia that on articles on people, if the side section or first paragraph contains anything related to their background (religion or race) it almost always is there to state that they are Jewish. I don't know why, this isn't a conspiracy theory, but perhaps somebody thinks it's important that if somebody is Jewish in heritage everybody should know.
hellodevnull··on A Lost 1996 Interview with David Foster Wallace
Listen to the end of the Charlie Rose interview. Last words something about not jumping off a building any time soon.
hellodevnull··on We Can Eradicate Malaria Within a Generation
>More than 3.3 million people who would have died of malaria are alive today.

This does make him sound like a saint, but is number of lives saved really a good metric? I mean, what's the quality of life like for these three million people, what's their life expectancy?

I know this makes me sound like a horrible person but I think keeping extremely poor people barely alive looks good as a statistic and there's more worthy causes to spend our efforts on in those areas where malaria is prevalent.

hellodevnull··on Cursors
For the first five minutes I kept worrying it was going to be a scream (see Maze Game).
hellodevnull··on AngularJS 1.3.0
Reasons 1 and 3 are enough for me to stop someone who is relatively new to web app development to use something other than Angular. egghead.io saved me when trying to learn it, but before that I was stuck trying to follow their tutorials and docs (which understand are a little better today) and spending hours each day trying to figure out problems - this wasn't the case with Ember and Backbone just for a persona comparison there.
hellodevnull··on Why don't you use Bootstrap?
>Controls are too big >Designed for touch screens by default

It says "mobile first" in the tag line.. but this is a trend in front-end design in general. Today it's all controls, fonts and you have to scroll down several pages to read about a paragraph's worth of information.

hellodevnull··on Lecture 4: Building Product, Talking to Users, and Growing
What I liked about her lecture is that unlike the previous ones that were full of general ideas about starting a startup, she related her practical advice to her own experiences and the mistakes she made. Examples are very useful and for me they ingrain the underlying ideas to a greater extent. Also learning about what not to do is just as, if not more important (see PG's lecture of counterintuitive parts of startups) than learning about what to do.
hellodevnull··on Reddit
It is not often practical to use dictionary definitions to describe political or social ideologies. If we go by definitions, both feminists and men's rights activities should believe the exact same things.

I don't identify with feminists or men's rights activists today because equality is not those specific group's goal.

hellodevnull··on Reddit
>often racist/sexist discussion

I'm confused. Reddit is one of the most anti-racist/sexist communities on the internet. That's the hivemind, so you'd expect anything that's racist or exist to quickly be deleted or pushed to the bottom of the thread where nobody can see it (on the large subreddits anyway).

hellodevnull··on If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
The general idea is the same in education and almost every other aspect of life: learning enough, then applied practice. You do a programming language tutorial then work on your own programs to really grasp it. If you skip the first step you'll make needless mistakes and pick up bad habits, if you skip the second you'll rarely be of much use in the real world.

Here, working at another company can be considered the first step in learning about building businesses, and I'm sure it's beneficial, but in startups I've found you can quickly learn and practice whatever you're intending or supposed to do. Let me give an example form personal experience. At one point in my life I had never sold anything before and probably would have been a lot better if I had worked in another company and observed the sales department, however, when my time came, I had to start contacting customers. I spent a while reading about sales then just went for it. I improved a lot in a short space of time... now I consider this an accelerated experience gain because I researched exactly what I needed for a particular task and applied it to a problem. In the same way I'd only learn about some particular aspect of programming because I've discovered it's what I need.

hellodevnull··on A Call for a Low-Carb Diet
>However as I see it, research into human evolution sheds light on what the optimum diet would be.

The idea of knowing the optimum diet for humans is exciting. I used to spend a lot of time reading these studies, then I realized that like many other people I know, we read and pontificate these points to everyone else we know without actually putting them into practice to a level that makes spending so much time reading about them worthwhile. This is why I rarely look at diet and nutrition articles.

I'm sure some of you do follow them, but is being obsessive over everything you put into your mouth going to make your life significantly healthier and longer than just following the general principles we've established? I mean, I go shopping and buy fruit, vegetables, meat and some grains. I get my macronutrients and exercise frequently. Will I gain a decade of good health if I start doing paleo? I doubt it. Do I reduce my risk of preventable death if I follow religiously the latest diets (there's at least one every six months that everyone at works will tell me about)? Not likely.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm dismissing nutrition research, I know it's important, but if you're spending hours talking about whether a 30:30:40 ratio is better than a 20:20:60 ratio, then you eat dessert after every meal and get drunk every weekend, I think you'll find better things to spend your time on.

There's currently a group of anti-carbs lobbyists. The pro-carbs is not as vocal, but they have equally strong evidence that eliminating carbs isn't as important as you may think.

hellodevnull··on Proposal for a Friendly Dialect of C
You've made an interesting observation regarding the trend taking place in large tech companies.

>but no one is comfortable going back to the 'good old days'.

Except the open source community. Both recent and on-going projects are being done in C. I'd like to know why but I'm thinking the Linux kernel being in C has a lot to do with it.

hellodevnull··on Some Dark Patterns Now Illegal in UK
To me this isn't additional regulation to standard contract law. A transaction is a contract between two parties, if the contract is intentionally deceitful you have the right to dispute it. So this it's great that they're putting it in print, because nobody's going to sue over a couple of items being added to your basket.
hellodevnull··on [dead]
This 'ugly gender problem' is so blown out of proportion.
hellodevnull··on A Diablo 3 Story
Making millions on the stock market could be seen as a waste of time to somebody who's more interested in doing well on the Second Life game or whatever.

If you look at things in terms of making money and contributing to the 'real world' then almost every hobby is a waste of time.

I mean, does it really matter if it's real life or not? Money might be completely unimportant to somebody... if they already make enough from their day job they're free to do whatever's fun for them in their spare time.

hellodevnull··on Ask HN: How do you transfer money internationally?
Back when it was beginning to get difficult to buy Bitcoin in the UK (when MtGox and Intersango stopped accepting bank transfers) I used TransferWise, a p2p currency exchange, to send money to European bank accounts as an alternative. For example, BitStamp was based in Slovenia, so I'd send money directly to their European account. Without a service like TransferWise I would have to spend £25 with every Bitcoin purchase (that's how much my bank charges for an EU transfer), versus £1 with TW.

Unfortunately now you can't even deposit into European bank accounts that are related to Bitcoin... but anyway it's a really cheap way of sending money, not all currencies are available yet though (no CAD) but keep an eye out.

https://transferwise.com/

hellodevnull··on Emacs and Vim
I used to this like this but honestly once an editor like vim or emacs becomes second nature, typing and editing and moving text around the screen feels a lot smoother and make programming more enjoyable.

But I still don't think "you might have to use a machine that only has vim installed and not your preferred editor!" is a good reason to spend time mastering how to use it (which is what I often hear). If you prefer emacs or sublime or whatever, use it, and just put up with vim if you're on this hypothetical scenario where they're not available.

hellodevnull··on The Stanford Prison Experiment was flawed
Mistype. The point is don't take academic psychology seriously.
hellodevnull··on The Stanford Prison Experiment was flawed
The half-life of knowledge in psychology is thought to be one year, so by now most of the famous experiments (and their findings) in the field are considered flawed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

hellodevnull··on A Different Path to Fighting Addiction
Yes I'm sure you do and I too know many people who improved their lives without going to AA. We're not going to persuade anyone talking about our personal experiences and how this guy Bob we know is doing really well.

Also I'm not speculating and I do have personal experience since you ask, I didn't say you need a psychiatrist and a prescription but from years of talking to addicts and going through recovery myself I've found that setting goals and staying positive and within limits and simple things like looking at changes in a certain way is very effective compared to what seems like a New Years Resolution that you'll likely fail and beat yourself for failing to keep up. Such therapy mentioned in the article can motivate people more than AA-style regimes can and that's more important in the long run.

hellodevnull··on A Different Path to Fighting Addiction
As I read these techniques for fighting addiction - "solving emotional and behavioral problems, rather than having abusers forever swear off the substance", "hourlong meetings once a week at which they discuss their goals for moderate drinking, as well as tips, challenges and progress on avoiding triggers" and "motivational interviewing, a goal-oriented form of counseling" I thought it bizarre that they are considered new and an alternative. Perhaps I found them an obvious improvement to the AA model simply because we now have the hindsight to see how ineffective AA is.
hellodevnull··on Your high IQ might kill your startup (2010)
Yes I thought everybody knew by now that intelligence is pretty much insignificant when you're up against somebody with years of experience at something.

There was even a very popular pop psych book about it that everyone has read (Outliers).

Your high IQ might get you good grades in elementary but gaining skill (which is what you're all talking about) is done through practice.

hellodevnull··on Java vs. Scala: Divided We Fail
Okay and I have somehow said something terrible because I didn't pick up on this hilarious dubious sarcasm in a post about benchmarks.
hellodevnull··on Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick
So? Should we give criminals an easier time because the majority are from poor backgrounds? There will always be poor people and there are always things you can do to make their lives better, complaining about insurance companies isn't one of them.

This is coming from somebody who was raised in a very poor family so it's got nothing to do with not caring about poverty. It's just these sort of liberal ideas you could hear at an occupy protest show zero understanding of economics and are basically just bitching about companies.

hellodevnull··on Java vs. Scala: Divided We Fail
>because they both allow me to write stupid programs with performance problems.

Which language doesn't?

hellodevnull··on Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick
The penalty is for being unhealthy, not poor. There are poor people that are healthy, just because a lot aren't, do you expect insurance companies to give them special treatment?
hellodevnull··on Tor exit node operator prosecuted in Austria
>The operator of an exit node is guilty of complicity, because he enabled others to transmit content of an illegal nature through the service.

This logic would make running an exit node illegal in all of Europe.

hellodevnull··on How you will not uncover Satoshi
This is funny, a couple of months ago everybody was saying how publishing the identity of a man who holds millions in an anonymous virtual currency would most likely lead to somebody attempting to extort him and put his life great danger.

Now this comment is getting downvoted.

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