Hacker News Reader

subwindowon That Misery Called Meditation

I read the first half of the article just screaming "He's doing it wrong!" However I later realized that was the entire point of the article.

subwindowon The man who took 40,000 ecstasy pills in 9 years

Picking a nit, but SSRIs don't actually act on serotonin receptors. Although the action of SSRIs isn't completely understood, they generally work by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain by reducing reuptake.

subwindowon We are giving out water

Clubs will keep a line out the door by instructing the bouncer to slowly let people in or to randomly decide to not let anyone in at a given time (when the line is not long enough).

Restaurants will do this by having the waiting area artificially small. Restaurants where you order before you sit down will have the cash registers near the door, and understaff the registers.

subwindowon We are giving out water

Restaurants and clubs do this all the time. It's not so surprising or ingenious. It is kind of a bitch, though.

subwindowon What, Me Exercise?: The Hacker Exercise Regime

You're right, but calisthenics are great for their simplicity. You don't need any equipment, and you can do them anywhere.

People lifting five pound weights piss me off, though. You've already gone through the trouble of getting equipment- why not use some equipment that will actually help you?

subwindowon What, Me Exercise?: The Hacker Exercise Regime

That's too complicated for me. My exercise program is:

Get completely winded at least once a day.

It won't make you Lance Armstrong, and it isn't a weight loss program. However, it'll do subtle things like encourage you to take the stairs- and RUN up them. This kind of attitude gently pushes you towards a healthier overall lifestyle, while keeping your lungs and heart at a basic level of functionality. That's all I'm really looking for.

subwindowon AOL To Sell Bebo For Around $10 Million

The Birch family made out handsomely in this whole fiasco, leaving shortly after Bebo was acquired. Everyone else got fleeced.

This deal reminds me of the many horrible deals done at the beginning of the decade. It's not a surprise that AOL never learned their lesson.

subwindowon Mongrel2

I believe that all comes free with the scm he is using, fossil.

subwindowon Ask HN: How did you find your company & job?

I got my current job via Dice, and the last two via Monster. I wish it weren't the case, but it is true.

I first always look through friends and on smaller job boards, but haven't had much success getting full-time work this way (although it has been very successful for contract work).

subwindowon Why are the east of cities usually poorer?

Saying 'east' is an oversimplification, but generally the prevailing wind theory seems to hold up. Atlanta, for instance, the wind is SSE, with the richer areas being in the north. It doesn't really explain how the west is poorer than the east, however.

subwindowon The Second Age of Perl

General-purpose languages that are "born" successfully (manage to gain a wide following) have a very hard time "dying" in the sense that everyone talks about. New lines of code will be written for 30+ years after a formerly successful language becomes functionally obsolete.

Perl already dead in the sense that it is no longer a "cool" language, and as such there aren't going to be many passionate programmers picking it up.

Once a language has lost the ability to recruit talented and passionate programmers, innovation dies soon thereafter. Perl may have new modules, but I'm not sure many of them can be called innovative- most of it is just "Me too!" kind of work.

subwindowon Plummeting Marijuana Prices Create A Panic In California

In other words; you really need to find a high functioning heavy pot smoker to give the theory credence - and I don't think that is going to be easy.

Carl Sagan. Richard Feynman. Steve Yegge. Thousands of others.

If you're involved in a creative profession, of which I think that software development is one, then smoking marijuana boosts your ability to function.

subwindowon Plummeting Marijuana Prices Create A Panic In California

  I mean; heavy pot smokers are pretty non-functioning and
  it seems a shame to risk more lively minds to that drudgery.

Correlation does not equal causation. People with no ambition tend to smoke pot frequently. However, that does not mean that people with ambition will lose it if they smoke pot. Anecdotally it has little or no effect on the ability of a person to "function."

subwindowon [dead]

"I am the only person in the universe, and since I bought an iPhone, any reported sales of Android phones must have been fake."

subwindowon Why in the world does Facebook let me do this?

The correct question is "Why is the default wall post set to 'Everyone'?"

Searching public posts is just fine. I just think that people should be more made aware of who exactly they're broadcasting to.

subwindowon Heart Rhythm as Password (Apple Patent Application)

Sorry for the late reply, but yes. The amplitude and frequency of the signal would still be different (your heart is beating harder and faster), but the characteristics would still be the same.

subwindowon Git is a Harrier Jump Jet. And not in a good way

If you're only using 3% of git's facilities, then you're doing it wrong. You're probably doing it wrong because you don't understand the other 97%. That's OK, but don't pretend that the stuff you don't understand is useless.

Almost every time I learn something new about git, it is something that is immediately useful.

subwindowon Heart Rhythm as Password (Apple Patent Application)

I've done a lot of work with heartbeat signatures, and this is a promising idea. Each person has a certain set of easily identifiable characteristics to their heartbeat, such as notches, and creating something like an FFT to create a signature could potentially be a great method of identifying a user.

subwindowon Ning’s Bubble Bursts: No More Free Networks, Cuts 40% Of Staff

Do you have any idea how much money Facebook is raking in with advertising? The targeting available on Facebook is unparalleled in human history, and they are making a mint on it.

subwindowon Ruby Scales, and It’s Fast – If You Do It Right

Well, "right away" is kind of misleading. If you're the average company making a Rails website, you'll get by with common-sense optimizations, database indexes and the like that you'd have to do in PHP anyways. I've worked on probably a dozen Rails apps and have only ever had to resort to horizontal scaling and memcached once.

I think the key is that developing the app and scaling the app can be separate tasks. If you do it right, for the lion's share of your app code is still focused on the app, and all the caching and whatnot is handled elsewhere. In PHP, if you had to use memcached it would be a massive change that would touch every corner of your codebase. In Rails, you'd use a plugin and maybe a few filters and you'd be good to go.

subwindowon Newbie Fashion Tips for Grown-up Men

I disagree. I wear a fedora somewhat frequently, and everyone says it really suits me (not lying/puffing- just trying to convey that it's not just me). I think the key is venue. Don't wear a fedora to work or every damn day. Wear it out occasionally, and match your outfit to it carefully.

subwindowon How To Become A Spammer Regardless Of People Following You On Twitter

I'm having trouble following your argument. If something is fun to make, then it is moral? How on earth are those two connected?

His argument was that regardless of how much fun it is or how easy it is to do, it is crap, and filling the world with crap is bad from a basic moral standpoint.

subwindowon The Building Blocks of Ruby

Blocks are also an extremely powerful tool when it comes to building DSLs, and if done correctly are a great alternative to complicated options files/hashes/etc. Rails' routes and config/intializer come into mind.

subwindowon How I Landed A $50/hr Side Gig With Little Effort

I agree. It isn't how much you cost, it is how much you're worth.

subwindowon How I Landed A $50/hr Side Gig With Little Effort

$50 an hour is pretty good for 22. At that age I was making $30 an hour and ecstatic to be getting that much. Even that seemed astronomical compared to the $12 I was making two years before. Now, of course, all of those seem like piddly sums compared to the $75-100 an hour I bring in now as a full-time consultant at the age of 26.

While age and experience has a lot to do with why my rate has climbed so high and so fast, mostly it is due to confidence. You have to ignore your inner critic that says you are not worth $12/30/50/75 an hour, and honestly consider what your time is worth. Would you trade an extra hour of sleep or an extra hour with your girlfriend for the price of a meal at Chili's? A tank of gas? A shitty coffee table at Ikea?

There's a spectrum there, and you have to place yourself as high in the spectrum as possible. Don't stop going higher- even if people laugh at you. Two days before I landed my first gig at $75 an hour I had a recruiter laugh at me and that rate. Ignore them. Trust yourself. Trust your abilities. Charge a good price for your time. Because after all, time is all we have. Make them pay for it.

subwindowon Why You Shouldn’t Freelance

It's good to point out the negatives to freelancing. I just started freelancing last month after being laid off, and there are definitely positives and negatives. While I do have a much more relaxed schedule and I do make more money, it sucks not having much work/life separation.

For instance, last week I had a few friends over for some beers and I had to work the whole time because the client had an important demo the night before. Because of the rate I was getting, I had to choose between $X/hr and hanging out with my friends. Sadly, the $X/hr won.

It is also hard to convince my Fiancee that I need to carve out 8 hours a day to do work. Yes, I'm at home all the time. Yes, I physically can go visit her mother today. However, I need time to work, and if I'm running errands all day there isn't time to ever get work done. It's hard to strike this balance and to stay hard line on "When my office door is closed, pretend I'm downtown and at work."

Overall, though, I prefer freelancing. After awhile I'm sure the lack of structure, instability and lack of benefits will cause me to jump to another full-time gig. Until then, I'm happy doing what I'm doing.

subwindowon Crayola colors 1903 to 2010

I remember in art class in 4th grade, a friend of mine drew a person with a black crayon (he was from Nigeria). I was completely baffled and asked him why he didn't use flesh color.

I guess it's kind of nice how ignorant I was of racism. On the other hand- come on, dude!

subwindowon Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your Writer’s Block

Don't forget Calvin!

subwindowon What does HTML5 mean for us?

A lot of forums and blogs would prefer that some sites not know that they are talking about them. I've come across it several times and doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

subwindowon C# is now a better language than Java

He's just now realizing that Java is painful to use? Even PHP had me dreading the tiny bits of Java work I had to do when I last touched it in 2005.