antareus

What specifically can Hulu do better? The only thing I can think of is dropping ads for paid users.

Reactive versus proactive captures the notion perfectly. I'm not content to be reactive. I was that way for too long, but I realized it was a cover for fear. It is hard for me to relate to the reactive mindset now. I feel like codependent-prone individuals smell the change and try to follow you around.

I want to be able to relate to everyone well, but there's a point at which the mismatch emerges, and it is unfortunate. It just means my interests are changing.

Exactly. I'm in the middle of trying to let my wrists heal from RSI, and I've noticed that my sleep quality isn't consistently good. Deep sleep seems necessary for healing to occur. I'm looking for something that will let me try out different sleep tweaks (less ambient lighting/no caffeine at all/exercise in morning/exercise in afternoon/various diets) and see which ones are actually effective for me.

Hopefully Wakemate fits the bill. I'll wait for the initial reviews to come out. I'm excited about the future of health afforded by devices like these.

This is beautiful. Too often I see business as a purely soul-less set of transactions predicated on the exchange of money where both parties need each other, but keep each other at arm's length.

I think natural talent exists, and it manifests itself as an ability to know where to direct your focus when learning something new. Someone who lives in their head a lot may fare better at programming initially, for example. They're used to talking through things in their head.

But eventually the natural talent can't carry you any farther.

Exactly. Nobody cares if the exact details aren't 100% correct in a non-technical discussion. Suppose I begin recounting a blog entry which describes an odd situation. I may not remember all the details right, but I certainly have the gist of it and can convey that. There is no point in someone stepping in and saying, "you know, it was actually in Des Moines, not Dallas," if the city is entirely irrelevant to actual content of the post.

What is the group supposed to do with that statement? Someone has to segue back to the original topic, while someone else just lost face. Most people will just either ignore the correction entirely, or just drop the topic altogether.

Will take a look, thanks.

I'm 28, and I don't want to end up like Liz Lemon ("well I have $12,000 in checking"). What's a good primer on investing? I don't have a ton of money but I'd like to get into it.

Expand on that.

Hey, it's tough being an upper-class white male, y'know? ;)

I'm killing most of my material and time investment into gaming so I can devote it toward music. While that isn't quite as severe as abandoning old projects, it still seems necessary in the same way that the article discusses. It is like I have to prove to myself that I can remake myself, that I can be about something completely new, and leave the old self behind.

Too bad there's no section for males. Clothes shopping is so hit-or-miss in department stores, especially if you know exactly what you want.

Yet another argument for why we should be impressed with natural selection: "we used to be a certain way, so we HAVE to value these things, however arbitrary they may seem!"

I value knowing what our evolutionary history is, and why we have certain biases. But I become highly suspicious of arguments that point to genes in an almost conformistic way. It feels like an appeal to tradition that is backed up by the dominant school of thought of the day. Why should I be impressed that human behavior is similar to that of animals? Our potential is enormous! I'm more impressed, generally, with people that aspire to be more human than animal.

It isn't that 'simpler' drives are bad, but I don't find them inspiring in the slightest.

I'm not convinced until the thread is labeled "Definitive." ;)

I've been thinking about this for awhile. Current dating sites make it easy to meet lots of people, but then there's the issue of how well you actually mesh in real life. Thus, some sort of hybrid approach might be better.

I'm imagining some sort of OkCupid/augmented reality mashup. I think there might be something to some level of algorithmic matching, but it doesn't mean much until you actually meet the person. Matching systems can, for instance, prevent people with totally incompatible different values systems from even wasting time with each other. Augmented reality would let you pick someone out of a crowd (via the inevitable smartphone) and pull up their profile. It could even provide the "similar users" ability among people that were present if you happen to meet your type, but they're not physically attractive to you.

Lots of work can be done here. I'm trying to get the number of awkward first dates down, and I believe it to be possible if we meld the best aspects of online and offline personas.

And the achievements give you...what? A tiny shot of dopamine?

It is hard to be enamored with tech these days when you see what people fall for.

Useful? Why would I care what xXNinjaGuy2938Xx's opinion on foreign policy is? Twitter strikes me as a very anti-intellectual medium because of the 140 character limitation. How do you convey a nuanced, complex opinion in such a fashion?

Story of my life. I suppose doing this sort of thing just sort of desensitizes you to that? I'd be curious to see if your viewpoint is different 3 months from now or so.

What if we just want to be ActionListeners? I know about that.

I like how the author pulls out the word "microact" as if it were the most normal thing in the world and later derides poking as created by "nerds" a few paragraphs later.

I'm considering the same jump (real job -> music school for a bit). Where did you go? What'd you make of it? Did you switch out? The first sentence suggests that you did. I'm perfectly happy to play local venues for the rest of my life.

This may sound extreme but one way to choose to view the confusion and depression is that it is a necessary part of growth:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration

Mind you, even Dabrowski (who created the theory) differentiates between depression that instigates changes vs. depression that leaves you spinning your wheels. I'd venture that anyone who has been seriously depressed has experience with both types.

> Is it worth it?

No. Health is far more important.

> Are the long hours required to deliver a good piece of software?

Be suspicious of anyone who tells you they are/are not required. You have to put in a certain amount of time in order to really understand what's needed. Whether you put that in over the course of the project, or all at the end is up to you.

When implementing, I put pressure on myself to find insights that greatly simplify the code. It can be as simple as a unified way to organize code, or a messaging subsystem. This isn't terribly surprising, but it requires thinking very clearly about the problem and reflecting on it often. You're not going to be in this state of mind if you're developing in a purely reactive, omg-deadline-in-one-hour style. You may not arrive at these insights quickly, however. So you need to be willing to invest time at the offset, working on the hard parts, and be open to tweaking the program's structure until it feels solid to work with.

Chillout is my go to. Check out groups like Blue Sky Black Death (instrumental hip-hop), Portishead, and Apparat. The genre is big -- you can spend a lot of time finding stuff you like.

What if I want to burn a CD? Or make something like Cover Flow?

The time is certainly ripe for a better language to step in and make cross-platform desktop application development easier. Seems like most anything you use (barring C++) necessitates shipping 20mb of dependencies.

I miss the pay for what you use model.

Bad culture/developers will screw up a project regardless of what language you use. You cannot prevent this by giving them successively castrated languages. They will still find ways to make things difficult because they don't know what they are doing. I like minimal languages from an aesthetic perspective, but ultimately they're just tools. The second they prevent me from expressing my intent as cleanly as possible, I become much less impressed by any claims they made about purity.

The defer statement is certainly Go-esque, but not as clean as RAII, because I can still forget to write the defer statement after opening a file. This violates DRY when doing file I/O. You can argue that Go never purported to support these concepts in the first place, but, at the end of the day, I'm writing code over and over again needlessly. Not elegant in the slightest.

Any complexity not covered over by the language will end up in the user's program.

I'm wondering if this resonates with anyone in the HN community. I see a lot of people here with high levels of autonomy.