mannicken

I also prefer cannabis to alcohol. From what I learned, the difference is -- when you're stoned, you become numb to the pain and can think about the stuff you can't think while sober. It's like an anaesthetic for emotional (and physical pain) that might allow the healing process to go faster. Alcohol merely makes you not give a shit for a while.

No, you are not nuts. Here is an example of nuts: thinking that you have a telepathic connection with your ex-girlfriend, who wasn't actually your girlfriend.

You are normal. Go for it.

It's an acquired taste. It's like first time you try espresso and you hate it, and then you're like "hey, espresso!" so you drink more, and then you finally love it.

I've been in runner's zone much more frequently than I've been in runner's high. I can get into runner's zone 1-2 miles in (usually after muscles are warm) but runner's high I can only get after a run that's longer than 8 miles.

Running doesn't make you fat or skinny. Your diet makes you fat or skinny :)

I've experienced it several times, all of the times on runs over 80 minutes long. Basically, it feels like you're a seven year old.. you start getting these flashbacks into childhood where everything was calm and peaceful.

I remember the first time I had the high I flashbacked into my 8th birthday, where my parents bought me a radio as a gift and we went to my grandmother's house and there was a lot of sun, and everything was so warm and fuzzy. I ran for a couple more miles, came back home and noticed that everything was warm and fuzzy there too. This was a night run, so I slept/dosed off in the bed through the next day and woke up around 2-3am 24 hours later.

That's when I was hooked. That's also when the shit started going wrong.

I have been using drugs when I was young as well as being a distance runner and, well, runner's high is very similar to artificial intoxication. In fact, nothing I've ever tried has given me the same level of intoxication and euphoria as a run over 70 minutes long. There are studies that show similarities between a runner's high and opioid intoxication but I never tried opioids so I can't tell anything about it from experience.

The problem was that I quickly became addicted to running, I would feel extreme depression if I didn't run in the morning and I would often go for a second run as I was craving the pleasure. During my two years of distance running I fantasized about becoming a social outcast who does nothing but runs. Which is what I was, actually. I didn't have many activities aside from running.. I was eventually kicked out of the job I had because I had to go for a team workout in the middle of the day, which screwed up my job performance. Friday nights, Saturday nights, and Sunday nights were spent pounding the pavement.

And I wasn't skinny either, 40-50mpw with workouts sky-rocketed my appetite so I would go on a "Runner's diet": eating everything that was edible. I have lost a lot of weight since I stopped running :)

This might be a controversial view but I do think that running can lead to addiction and even though it's more socially acceptable (not to mention cheaper) than, say, heroin, like any addiction it has its downsides.

>What does it mean to drive an innovative consumer app?

I know, I know!

Let's say we have a car named 'app'. Now, what we need is someone with a driver license who can drive it in a new way (e.g. stoned). The car also needs to consume large quantities of gasoline, so perhaps it will be a bus or a truck.

So what they need is a stoned truck driver. How can they be more clearer?

An opposite to a duct tape programmer is the "Cargo cult programmer".

He will research long and hard on the conditions in which programmers perform the best, then try to break programmers down to categories and figure out which one he fits into the best. Then he will research the psychological flow needed for programming and spend long hours planning out the IDEAL setting for the "flow to kick in". Then he will write a couple of articles on much flow rocks and how awesome it would be if everyone could achieve the perfect flow, and then go to sleep.

No actual programming (or even architecture astronautics) has been done during this process.

You should be cautious with dashes -- but not too cautious -- for a very simple reason -- they can confuse your reader, especially if -- well, let me put put this in a form of a joke -- used as many times as I smoke cigarettes per day.

There is another useful punctuation mark; most people have seemed to forgot that it exists; you can guess what it is, I suppose.

>I wonder why you come out with only positive feedback....

It's a mystery to me as well :)

I also like your formulation better. The main point is the first one anyway -- about blaming this or that on "I was drunk/high/whatever".

Well, then not do anything. Lay in your bed, watch shitty sitcoms, eat food, just don't do anything. It will feel unusual if you've been working for a long uninterrupted time but you need time to rest.

You remind me of a runner who just ran 10mi and is asking: "Hey, I feel tired, why is that? It seems like my legs don't really feel like moving. What should I do? Drugs? Doctors? Am I addicted to something?"

Go and rest for brain's sake. In fact, I've been doing this all Sunday -- I'm laying in my bed with a laptop, looking at the cars outside, and watching crappy sitcoms. I am forcing this lazy behavior so I can recover and have fun working tomorrow.

Perhaps it is advocated for a lot of disorders because it, well, let me put it this way -- actually helps those disorders? To my knowledge, one of the reasons behind making it illegal was extensive lobbying from drug-corporations who were afraid of an easily-grown, non-addictive fun competitor.

For your second point, yeah, it's probably a good idea to research anything before you ingest/inhale/inject it. High-fructose corn syrup, I'm looking at you :)

Your example doesn't bring anything new to the table. I know people who function well in spite of playing World of Warcraft and I know people who temporarily ruined their lives playing WoW. Was it WoW's fault? Should we make WoW illegal? Should we make everything illegal because it might lead to devastating consequences?

In process of experimentation, I created two rules for myself: a) You can't blame your fuckups on the drug, even if you were under the influence. b) You don't have to mention that drug helped you, if you created something good.

So, would you disagree with the statement 'value is subjective'? What about different value systems? How do we decide which one is more valuable than another, considering we ourselves certainly have a very odd and rare value system, which considers philosophical discussions to be of a high value. Reality check: most people don't spend their time on HN discussing pragmatism and subjectivism.

As an extreme example, consider value system of a heroin addict, for instance. He or she values heroin above all. You might say his value system is inferior to yours, but how would you defend that statement? Speaking from utilitarian point of view, it's not necessarily that a heroin addict decreases society's happiness or pleasure, if he uses it as a constructive stimuli.

Speaking from a physiological point of view, we are not much different from heroin addicts. My opinion is that value systems are psychological routes by which we can get an endogenous high. Our brains have built a series of quests for us to accomplish, after which they reward us with various pleasurable chemicals.

Some people get high watching Fox News, some people get high debating philosophy, some people get high from heroin. The value of each activity is (non-verbally) agreed upon, by spending time on that activity and hanging around people who spend their time on the activity.

What you want is find out how marijuana works before trying it. Essentially, there are two mainly psychoactive chemicals in a cannabis plant: THC and CBD, each one is more prevalent in sativa and indica strains respectively. THC improves concentration, helps in imagining the problem, and is a hallucinogen (think towards LSD from sober). CBD gives you a couch-lock, makes you sleepy and is a sedative (think towards Xanax).

Sativa-dominant strains will have more THC than CBD and thus help you with your problems immediately.

Also beware that THC is a mild psychedelic so all the "set and setting" rules apply.

Ah, but popularity has everything to do with measuring value.

As an analogy, gold would be a worthless piece of metal, if it wasn't for its popularity. Worth is an illusory, human-defined concept and just like anything "the worthiness of something" is ecided by majority. Perhaps because those who don't subscribe to majority's value system are weeded out in the process of evolution, unless their value system offers some incredible evolutionary advantage. And by incredible I mean "everyone is dead and unable to reproduce except for those who think that karma points are bullshit".

In reality, reality is merely a construct of our minds, and all value systems are created by consensus on which hallucinations are advantageous and which are disadvantageous. Thus, if we decide by unspoken consensus that karma points are worthy of construction of smart comments then karma points are valuable.

You have to inject the drug properly :) From what I understand, a lot of the rush in problem-solving comes from release of dopamine, and dopamine itself is the fuel for problem-solving.

So start slowly, solve a simple task, then ride the dopamine levels upwards by solving more and more, until you hit the flow.

Although, I do not understand why would anyone want to get addicted to programming. Trying to have something that can earn money while getting you high naturally is one thing, trying to imitate successful addicts in hopes of huge success is a cargo cult.

I think the proper analogy is: if you want to be like Kurt Cobain, get a real guitar instead of playing Rockband on expert all the time.

And yes, I did just compare Eclipse/Studio/etc to Rockband :)

On my winter break last year, I spent two weeks meditating, lucid dreaming, astral projecting, OOBing, and smoking pot :)

Scariest time of my life. Apparently meditation, when done with some skill is similar to third plateau of DXM. Doing it everyday made me feel extremely weird in normal life. Still recovering.

If I relax and continue with hallucinations I start vibrating and having an out-of-body experience. It's fun and great but I like normal reality more :)

Nope and I stay the hell away from deliriants.

I used to meditate but no longer do since I'm starting to trip (audial/visual hallucinations) very fast and the trip is usually not a good one. It is a very powerful natural psychedelic experience, comparable to third plateau of DXM at least... but controllable, unlike DXM.

If I were you, I'd get a motorcycle. Riding between lanes is legal in California; in traffic you would be cruising between still cars and thus saving precious time :)

Sounds more like "7 habits of highly bored people" :) But in addition to word-playing with the title, why don't I also say something useful for a change.

Why is everyone so concerned with efficiency? One might say "that machine is efficient" or "this machine is not efficient". Why is that? Well, machines are created and owned by humans for a specific purpose -- a coffee-maker makes coffee; a CPU processes logical operations; a carriage horse drags around a cart full of spoiled rich humans :)

We can talk about efficiency of things we own but we can no longer own humans. In a civil society, humans are owners of services that they exchange under conditions of a free and fair market.

There, I said it. Now stop talking about efficiency of humans. Start creating efficient things that efficiently do all the things we hate so we can all be a bunch of lazy fucks :)

Walking 3.25 mi in 25-30 minutes? That sounds a bit too fast :)

PS. Sorry I'm just in a bad mood and feel the need to be anal.

Please note that some of the graphs there start with 50% as original y-axis. It creates an appearance of males drinking twice as much as females, for example.

In other words, "correlation rises the chance of a causation"?

Fuck that. How about others participate in this rat race and I relax and enjoy the shortass life I've been lucky to get, ay?

six.com? stx.com? What's instead of the star, and why the fuck is it there?

Extremely detailed microtasking. Like this: http://taskulus.com/taskulus17.png or http://taskulus.com/taskulus16.png

Each of these is a very small tasks that 1-20 minutes but it's important that I can devote my complete concentration and focus to it, without the need to load everything else in my brain.

That of course requires a lot of what SICP calls "deferred decisions" and so units of my code are forced to be much more independent.