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superkon We used to sleep twice each night

When this happens to me – the hour or so I'm awake in the middle of the night is not a peaceful relaxing time – the night has this pessimistic quality to it: the assignment I'm working on is impossible, I'll never get it done, I'll lose my job, that pain in my side is likely cancer, etc.. with that on my mind I drift back into a turbulent sleep after a while, but when I wake to daylight all those problems seem trivial and I'm able to get up and cope with the day. If anyone else experiences something similar that's probably why medicating a full night of sleep is so widespread...

superkon US waitress was fired for posting a picture of a tip receipt on Reddit

Getting fired from Applebees is the best thing that could've happened to her. That's divine intervention if I've ever seen it...

superkon The If-by-whiskey fallacy

Highly recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Thought-Action-Fifth-Edition/...

Which talks in detail about the "informative" and "affective" connotations of words (it's a lot more entertaining than it sounds). Only slightly related, but I was just reading in the book how we have the terms "light meat" and "dark meat": because ladies and gentleman in 19th century Britain couldn't bring themselves to say "leg", "thigh" or "breast" – even of a chicken!

superkon A Mysterious Patch Of Light Shows Up In The North Dakota Dark

Well, there are ways around it:

http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120427144332/simpson...

superkon Math Puzzle: Pizza Paradox Puzzle

Agree, 1 in 4, Gambler's Fallacy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamblers_fallacy

superkon What one book could give me a new, useful superpower?

As far as speed reading books go, this one is decent: http://www.amazon.com/Spd-Rdng-Techniques-Accelerated-ebook/...

It's the best superpower: read that book first, then all the rest here in 1/5th the time!

superkon What Is It Like To Be an Adult and Not Have Kids?

I agree with you - absolutely. The potential for growth and perspective as a human being is innate - some people have more of it than others. Though those people with greater potential - an awareness that our experiences can change us - are exactly the kind of people who leave their comfort zone more - versus the author of the linked story who writes: "But when I thought about what it took to get there, the diapers, the soccer games, the braces, the tantrums, the whole enchilada, I knew that it wasn't for me." That was the kind of person I had in mind.

superkon What Is It Like To Be an Adult and Not Have Kids?

Sigh. That wasn't at all what I was trying to say. I'm not my father either... but a piece of his generic code is in me. He was the final link of a countless chain of beings, and I am a continuation of that chain, and my daughter will be too. I hope that makes it clearer... unfortunately I'm not enough of a poet to express this sentiment any better.

superkon What Is It Like To Be an Adult and Not Have Kids?

I'm 35, been together with my wife for about 8 years and we're finally expecting our first kid in about 1 month. We were both always firmly in the "no kids" camp, the cost/benefit ratio just never seemed to add up. So what changed our minds? Partly it was peer pressure: everyone I know by this time has had kids, people who I respect, smarter people than myself. But mostly it was two slow realizations I've had:

1. It is part of the lifecycle, it is part of being an adult. The link at the top is mislabeled, you can't be an "adult" and not have kids. Yes it's grueling and miserable, but discomfort grounds you and gives you perspective. People that never leave their comfort zone never grow... they don't "grow up".

2. I personally believe it is the key to immortality. I'm not talking reincarnation or ancestor worship. Just a mental image I have every being that lived and died since the beginning of time to create me (or you), like threads in a fabric, and then you don't procreate and it's like "snip" and that thread ends.

superkon Things your grandchildren will probably say in the future

I don't see email disappearing. It is one of the classes of communication, from least disruptive to most disruptive:

Messaging - email, fb, linkedin, etc

Broadcasting - twitter, fb wall, rss, etc

Instant Messaging - skype, irc, etc

Calling - skype, phone, etc

In Person

That people are doing more messaging through fb, linkedin etc doesn't change that what they are doing is essentially email.

superkon Introducing Autographer the World's First Intelligent, Wearable Camera.

I totally see this as the future of photography. Good pictures are all about timing (luck) - i'm pretty sure you could give a monkey a digital camera with enough storage and come up with a World Press Photo of the Year. I think about how different I take pictures now (snap snap snap and sort/discard) versus with film (every shot in the roll of 12 or 24 was precious). I see this as an extension of that. I'm pretty sure the future a camera smart enough to understand composition/color in order to know when is the right moment to capture a nicely framed image... and maybe to take more shots when there is a lot of movement or even to react to your body (higher temperature/heartbeat might indicate change in emotion/excitement so should capture more/continuous images). I'd actually like for this to be in a hat form or maybe glasses to capture images at eye-level. Damn, is this just where Google Glasses is going?

superkon iPhone 5

I was watching the video:

http://www.apple.com/iphone/#video

And at about 3:35 when they're showing the step-by-step driving directions and I was like WTF:

Super attention to every detail, state-of-the-art everything, and then that scratchy godawful synthesized computer voice comes on and it's sounding slightly worse than my Amiga back in the 1980's... srsly Apple...

superkon Hacker irked by reincarnation

A. Causality came into existence with the beginning of the universe and so was never violated.

B. An eternal God exists separate from the universe he created

I think the issue that most skeptics have with "B", is not that it is being presented as a possible explanation to the existence of the universe as you have written here, but that there are folks that say they know and talk to this dude, and he tells them we need to pay their organization money (or fill in whatever other ridiculous religious dogma you want here).

superkon CSS Variables land in WebKit

Preprocessors evaluate CSS and the cascade so there's nothing stopping them from adding local scope or specificity to variables. On the other hand, if you can really edit variable values with Javascript then that would be client-side only, although I haven't seen anything that says you _can_ do that - for all we know Javascript may only allow getting/setting of the evaluated value, not the variable expression itself.

superkon How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice once by tech & again for its own good

That slow motion `rm -rf` is a little doubtful. Sounds more like an ftp-style recursive delete.

superkon XCode Sucks And Here's Why

That's why I just use VI. Ever since Nibs became XML there's no reason to ever use XCode anymore.

Seriously though.. XCode does suck. It's a miracle anyone has been able to write an iOS app, let alone over 500,000.. /sarcasm

superkon The new iPad and its screen's brightness

I wonder if the much higher DPI let's the new iPad get away with lower brightness overall - ie allows it to compensate on battery life.

superkon Writing Eloquent JavaScript Without CoffeeScript

I guess from MPOV, "eloquent" formatting shouldn't change based on the size of the content... ie the difference between standard indenting and tab-aligning commas vertically. There's nothing eloquent about stepping through a dozen lines of code, tabbing each out, because a value was added that's a little longer than the rest..

superkon Knyle Style Sheets

I thought about it like you describe - but then why even bother with the generation, why not be able to browse your stylesheets and have them transformed into styleguides realtime: https://github.com/aglemann/instant-styleguide

superkon Knyle Style Sheets

I had a similar idea - a living styleguide derived from the css. I envisioned it in 3 parts:

* A way to transform css into html (https://github.com/aglemann/css2html)

* A simple webserver that would detect a stylesheet, run it through the transformer and serve up the html styleguide (https://github.com/aglemann/instant-styleguide)

* A methodology for architecting your css for use with the two technologies (coming soon?)

All the pieces work, I need to do a blog post about it ;)

superkon There is a species of jellyfish that is immortal

"The turriptosis nutricula's cell development method of transdifferentiation has inspired scientists to find a way to make stem cells use this process for renewing damaged or dead tissue in humans."

One word: Zombies

superkon Steps to save webOS

What do you mean.. Workbench 4.0 is coming out any day now! ;) Seriously, reading the quirksmode article thoughts of AmigaDOS kept running through my mind...

superkon Why don't we expire passwords on the web?

I made a widget once to hash a unique password for each domain. Just copy-paste the domain into the widget and it automatically copies the password to the clipboard. All fine and dandy until mobile came along... now I'm entering 16 character strings of alphnumeric and symbol characters by hand to log in to my facebook account, etc... security pass, usability fail.

superkon The only script in your head

I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't think a user should have to re-download all the JS on the site if I just change a single line. Small changes probably happen frequently and shouldn't invalidate the entire JS cache. If I were using a framework like jQuery, I would link that separately from a 3rd-party CDN like Google. Then all the shared behavior would be another request, and page specific code a third. In most cases I would be changing the page specific code which would only invalidate the cache for that request on that page. IMO that's a better compromise.

superkon Google introduces new meta tag to properly cite writers

Interesting. I wonder if Google is trying to push this because no one uses the semantic blockquote, cite and q tags properly?

Edit: Seems to me if the above tags were used properly Google should be able to determine original source just by sorting chronologically.

superkon A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the Web

I think the funniest part is how he specializes in eyeglass wear. I don't know if there's anything to the sterotype of eyeglass wearers being more geeky or introverted (I wear glasses but I'm a small test group) - but it goes along perfectly with his role as the bully.

superkon Ask HN: Any web startups using Java?

Weirdly some in the PHP world have tried to mimic Java's deep layering with these horrific (imho) MVC frameworks that (again imho) simply combine the worst of both worlds. Dynamic class loading, bootstrappers, magic (and sometimes unpredictable) file loading, enforced directory structures and so on are just the wrong approach most of the time.

Sorry, I have to call you out on this. In your list above PHP is really interchangable with Python, Ruby, etc (the scripted languages). The MVC architecture you mention above perfectly describes Rails. So I have to ask, are you seriously saying that Rails is horrific? Seriously?

superkon Ask HN: What is the most modern CMS?

I thought SilverStripe was pretty good when I first looked at it. The framework it's built on is actually not as good as they hype (in my experience) and documentation lacking... but from the enduser standpoint it is a pretty good mix of ease-of-use and power. The blending of traditional concept of posts and versioning of a wiki - all centered around the mighty URL - was one of the best executions I've seen.

superkon Enormous Palaeozoic flesh-eaters created in lab

Pictures pls

superkon "Goodbye GoDaddy" promotion

That's so funny. I just transferred 2 domains over to Godaddy from Tucows. The transfer cost + 1 year hosting was $7.67 per domain. On your site you offer the same deal for $10.50. Thanks - I'll pass!