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markcon The Nuclear Lightbulb (2020)

>Easy-Bake Oven

You can buy a Panasonic FlashXpress toaster oven and get the Easy-Bake experience. Great toaster! Fast and very predictable. It starts cooking immediately and every toast cycle is the same duration. In a regular toaster oven it takes a while for the heating element to get hot before it starts to actually toast the bread. If you immediately cook a second batch of toast for the same amount of time it burns.

markcon Museum of Bad Art

Ha. I assume this is tongue in cheek. (You actually have to buy a movie ticket. Once you're in, the gallery is simply a room in the basement past the restrooms)

markcon Museum of Bad Art

I've been frequenting the MoBA for 8 years or so, since moving to town. We love the Somerville Theater, and can't wait 'till it can safely reopen. The MoBA has mostly been a place to stroll around with a beer/wine to kill time if you get there early. It's intentionally cheap, tacky and low brow. It changes very slowly.

I'd guess there's only about a 30% overlap between the onine collection and what I've seen displayed. There has often been weird art objects/sculptures besides the wall art.

Quite a surprise to see it on HN.

markcon Digital VT100 (1978)

I still have my VT100 "Keypad Condom" - a rubber overlay for the numeric keypad for the EDT editor. A great editor it was too!

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

Thanks for the reply! I know I'm not hydrating enough, getting enough sun early, or exercising, so I'm going to give those a go! I've only ever half-assed the intermittent fasting thing, so maybe I'll give that a real try too.

I think my gut bacteria is pretty good. I'm a nut for fermented stuff, make my own yoghurt, kimchi, saurkraut, kombucha - and eat it all the time. It has been really fantastic for digestion, which had been a problem (pain, irregularity) and now is great. Since starting yoghurt every single day I have a freakin' Iron Stomach. I have zero autoimmunity issues fortunately (knock on wood).

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

>just as I fell asleep I started awake because I wasn't breathing.

Uncanny. Me too. Also tried every airflow device I could find (breathe right, nose baffles, chin strap, and many more) to no avail.

CPAP was a total fail because if the pressure is turned up high enough to defeat my resistance, it just fills my stomach with air (called aerophagia, a common CPAP problem). I'm starting to think the only solution is one of those implanted breathing pacemakers but that freaks me out.

Btw, I also had palpitations! I'd wake up with them really bad, probably from not breathing. Going off caffeine doesn't help though. A beta-blocker (6 years now) works wonders. HOWEVER! I just saw a study yesterday that people can have insomnia from beta blockers, and that 2.5mg melatonin helps counteract it. Round and round!

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

Interesting. I've been interested in anti-inflammation unrelated to the sleep stuff. Sad if there's not much to it, since it seemed like a hopeful no-drugs way of improving health.

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

Skinny guy, no obvious source of airway obstruction. Maybe that's why the cpap doesn't work. I think I literally hold my breath (some variant of so-called "central" apnea?) and foil the cpap that way.

I'll consider the inflammation stuff. I've been trying to cut out down on sugar anyway.

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

I had not heard of this. Reading now - thanks!

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

Good read, really interesting. Thanks!

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

It's literally at 3oz a day though, so "cutting" would effectively be zero. Maybe I could try decaf since I seem to need a bit of coffee for, ahem, regularity.

markcon Lack of sleep, stress can lead to symptoms resembling concussion

I wake up after about 4.5 hours of sleep "no matter what". Bedtime of 10pm or 2am, exercise or no, light exposure or no, late eating or no - always the same result. Then I'm awake for a few hours, then get my "second sleep" of 1 to 2 hours. I've been going like this for a decade without daytime sleepiness (a few oz of coffee and I'm charged up for the day), but these kinds of articles really worry me.

I have light sleep apnea, but a CPAP didn't help either. I'm old (60) so I'm considering trying melatonin to replace what I'm no longer producing, but I'm also wondering if I'm missing some other potential "staying asleep" lifestyle factors. Anyone here successfully dealt with the "stay asleep"issue other than with the variables I listed?

markcon We need a new media system

https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-chart

markcon Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program

I think this nails it.

markcon Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program

I think there was a giant gap between expectations and reality. He wanted to program so he could make video games, but learning to program starts out text-based. The gulf between learning to code and learning to make video games like the ones he enjoyed is overwhelming.

I think the calculator eliminated that dissonance between expectation and possibility.

markcon Ask HN: Please share your experience teaching your kids to program

Didn't work:

  - BASIC, Ruby, Python, Java setups + intros, tutorials.
  - LEGO Mindstorms
  - Scratch, Squeak
  - Coding classes / camps

Note that I "made these things "available" but never pushed. I'd set up the environment, show him to to edit and run the code, and pointed him to tutorials. After some time went by I'd show him the next thing. Rinse and repeat.

Worked:

A Texas Instruments programmable calculator. He read the manual, played with it a bit, then found out he could automate some of his homework. Then found out he could make simple games. Then fairly impressive games.

After that, he did a bunch of Minecraft programming and loved it.

Fast forward a decade and he smokes through Advent of Code without breaking a sweat, and is a co-founder and CTO.

I.e. all my efforts to pique interest didn't have any effect that I could see. He had to find his own way to it.

markcon Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction into High Art (2019)

I've read lots of SciFi over the years, some of it challenging. I can read hard books.

Back in the 80's I started seeing so many raves for TBotNS that I went out and bought them all at once.

About 80 pages into the first one, I was turned off, bored really. They sat on my shelf for a decade at least, before I just gave them away.

My question is this: how long did it take you to "get into" this series. Should I have plowed on further? Or tried a restart? (I read the first 100 pages of Dune about 3 times before it clicked, and I loved it all after that)

Or is it a taste/style thing, and if someone doesn't like it within 80 pages, they're not likely to enjoy the rest?

markcon A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize

TIL: Escher got the visual paradox in "Ascending and Descending" from Penrose.

markcon The demographic and cultural roots of the midlife crisis

I'm not in the camp of saying all corporal punishment is abuse, but IMO it's quite limited in the ages and situations where it's applicable.

Has everyone on this thread forgotten about non-physical punishments?

These should take the form of natural and logical consequences whenever possible.

Make sure the kid understands what's expected of them, and how they failed to meet the expectations. Then, if needed, reinforce this with natural consequences (when it makes sense). Classic example is taking away possessions or privileges when they're misused.

Punishments can certainly be arbitrary or disproportionate (which tends to spark resentment - and possibly the mental baggage you mention) so it's important to do it thoughtfully. Done right, it's effective and non-traumatizing.

markcon Emacs Survey 2020 Results

You thought wrong. The term is neither universal among developers, nor obvious without clarification.

markcon Distributed Systems Reading List

Agreed, I looked for Kleppmann and didn't find it. Red flag.

markcon Computer input latency from 1977-2017 (2017)

Back in the day (early 80's) I remember using a VAX 780 @ 1 MIPS via time-sharing with 60 other simultaneous users.

Editing with EDT felt quite snappy. Amazing.

markcon Lisp Koans

Clojure Koans: http://www.clojurekoans.com/

markcon Not Just Nuclear: Families are elders long buried and generations yet unborn

T.S. Eliot

markcon Ask HN: What underestimated technologies will dominate within 5 years?

This Skynet?

https://blog.sia.tech/skynet-bdf0209d6d34 https://siasky.net/

Looks promising!

markcon The Remarkable Number 1/89 (2004)

Question (perhaps naive):

Given the decimal expansion of 1/89, is there any way to directly retrieve the Fibonacci sequence from it? (that is, not using any knowledge of the sequence itself)

I'm assuming it can't be done because different sets of fractions can sum to 1/89, but maybe I'm missing something.

markcon To write better, develop a habit of writing

>Read really good writing

Any favorites? I like the writing style of some authors in your study books (Pinker, Le Guin, Zinsser) but what books really inspire you in terms of sheer writing genius? (in both fiction and non-fiction)

markcon To write better, develop a habit of writing

I despised running as long as I was doing under 3 miles per session. Once I pushed to 5 miles it was a very different experience. No more oxygen deficit, almost effortless, with all those lovely endorphins telling you you're awesome.