pedrolll

Business Insider... A great source for wild Apple rumors.

Also, funny top 10 lists like: http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-science-can-teach-u...

Not much credibility there.

Also, why is "unknown" almost the same colour as "1-5%"? To me it seems that most of the world is unknown, including India, yet they still have statistics for India. Confusing...

It's just a PR trick, telling investors he's taking things seriously and learning some business 101 in a restaurant. Probably the restaurant doesn't even exist.

Not to mention the fact that professional athletes start their training very young, so this would essentially mean pushing drugs to kids for the entertainment of adults.

A lot of pro athletes use drugs anyway these days but making it legal would present some ethical issues.

I would have to agree with you. When agriculture was invented, so was "work", that is, something that is separate from your real life. There's a reason agriculture didn't properly take off for hundreds of years, even though people knew that planting stuff makes it grow. Tending the earth was a shitty business, hard work that took most of the day without proper tools. Gathering stuff was a lot easier.

Work is in no way "natural". Having to eat is quite natural but for most of humanity's history you could just eat stuff from your immediate surroundings, with little time spent on gathering food. These days we spend 10 hours a day to a acquire the means to eat. I'd say people we're a lot smarter thousands of years ago.

Wht do you mean by signing? Scene groups don't use torrents.

Got this weirdness after a while without touching any settings: http://i.imgur.com/ebmc0.png

Chrome 18 osx

To save you some time:

Japan: September 13, 1985

US: October 18, 1985 (NES launch) or November 17, 1985

Offtopic: Why do you use two accounts on HN, _gabesmed & gabesmed?

Why? Why would Nokia want to enter the tablet market, when everyone except Apple is struggling with their tablets? Consumers seem to want ipads, not tablets. What could Nokia possibly bring to the table, with their string of failures in the recent past? This is probably going to be another half-assed effort on Nokia's part.

Seems there's still no proper Lion support. I wonder what's taking so long. Chrome has had this for months.

So we procrastinate because we're intelligent? This should massage every hackers ego on Hacker News :) "Ah, I see, it is because I'm smart that I can't get things done. It's not that bad after all". To me it seems that most people procrastinate, whether they're are intelligent or not.

What a horrible article. Complete lack of in-text citations. There's no way of verifying any of the claims there, unless one goes through all of the listed references. To me it seems like the article was created by someone with very mild depression, wanting to back up his subjective feelings on the matter with vague citations.

Over 70% of indians live in rural areas. Many of these people live completely outside of the monetary economy. Counting these people in the GDP statistics skews the whole thing. Yet many of these people live just fine by farming, but do not need to use money, or use very little of it. To me it seems that when making GDP statistics, it would be wise to count in only people in urban areas, participating in the labor market. Of course this would look quite bad from the point of view of neoliberalist economists.

In Peru and Bolivia, coca leaves are sold just about everywhere. A good tasting tea is made from them, and people chew them while hiking on the mountains and so on. The effects are similar to caffeine. I didn't see any coca soft drinks there, though.

HN is a freaky place sometimes. Accumulating a pile of money is actually the purpose of life for many commentators here. It has often been stated here that there are easier ways to accumulate money than doing startups. This article also seems to enforce this point.

Looking ok on 17/OSX.

Yes, this is definitely relevant to my interests as well. So far I haven't found anything as good as GC and even that is not as good as I would like it to be.

I've set 4 weeks as default in Google Calendar, so reading this article was baffling at first. Curious that 4 weeks doesn't show up for everyone. It is infinitely more useful than the month view.

>I'd argue that programmers are held in high regard now--witness all of the news articles in the past year about "software engineers taking over the world"

This doesn't prove much. The media you follow might have these articles, but most of the world still don't know much about programmers or hold them in high regard. If you work in Silicon Valley, I'd say it's a bubble, outside of which people think very differently about ICT.

I can't tell if you're joking or not. Dyson spheres, space mining, superstructures... Currently we have sent a handful of people to a rock orbiting this planet, then gave that up because it was uninteresting. At the moment there is no incentive to send anyone to space because machines can do better that little bit of exploring that is currently being done.

I'd be surprised if in a hundred years there's enough resources or motivation to do any space exploration. To me it seems far more likely that we have spent our fortunes on earthly matters such as wars and the like.

I don't think this will turn into a pissing contest. Hacker News comments are usually pretty insightful. Arguing over whether Europe as a continent or the U.S. as a country is better in some respects is just useless.

After my smartphone was stolen, I switched back to a dumbphone and realized it was exactly what I needed, for the reasons mentioned above. I don't think I'll buy a smartphone ever again.

Yes it's a problem when there are not enough charging stations around. In some countries the network is quite well spread already but I guess not in the U.S. so far. Once that gets taken care of, I don't see any reasons for people not buying electric cars.

About Joel's second point: Why would Google/Facebook give free ads only for U.S. politicians? If they start with that, shouldn't they do that for every other country as well? Sure for the moment nominally their HQs are in the U.S. but they are multinational corporations, with huge HQs in Ireland and several other countries as well.

I do interviews over the phone. Often I find myself subtly copying the local dialect of the interviewee. I don't really do this on purpose, perhaps it's some kind of an automated mechanism to make myself more understandable or bring myself on the same level with the interviewee.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but isn't the case such that when you place a call and immediately hang up, no one pays for that call, although unnecessary traffic is caused for the operator? In some of these cases the receiver might call back, and then that second call is paid for. But if this is really a culture in India, then the operators lines are used a lot all the time, even though no one is paying for these one ring calls.

I think the idea that there's a war between human and nature is a very modern one. People in pre-modern times didn't see themselves as separate from nature, they were nature.

Just like other (what we see as distinct) entities in nature do not see themselves as separate from anything else. They go about their business, transform energy to their bodies (eat). If and when they cease to exist, then it's not a big deal.

For me, The Mindful Way Through Depression was a good starting point. I was never really depressed, but I feel that without that book, I might have gotten to the point of real depression.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindful-Way-Through-Depression-Unhap...

It's written by four western doctors, so there's no cultish things here. It's also about the practice of mindfulness in general, not just mindfulness meditation. There's an audio guide to meditation included.

Other books By Jon Kabat-Zinn could also be useful introductions.

Then, pretty much everything by Alan Watts is interesting. He's an excellent speaker and there's tons of his audio lectures available online. Watts has a peculiar way of being able to introduce the listener to very complex information, without being off-putting.

If one want's to read about the benefits of mindfulness meditation, there's a great number of scientific studies done in the past 30 years or so.