mcjkrw's comments

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR

Totally. Why do you need a virtual screen if you have a real life one. I could not imagine myself working in VR, I like to look around from time to time when I'm working, I also like to have some space/depth before me to be able to look far away and I love working from cafes especially. VR seems like a way to get even more cut off from the body / trapped in head (losing body awareness) when working - a problem that is going on which most people are not aware of.

It may make sense for some games, but desktop will be the king of work for a long time - until we get brain-computer interface with some AR glasses, then maybe that would be an improvement.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your spiritual practice?

Zen. I do the "shikantaza" version of it every day in a 40 min session (20 min sitting, 20 min walking - yeah I know shikantaza means "to sit" or something related). It's a very intense type of zazen meant to gain a very clear perception of your body and surroundings. When I first learned about it, the example was that the engagement is not unlike engagement you would have if you engaged into a swords battle to death. That you cannot slip and need to be super duper alert. There are many elements that come into it actually and it's all well described in a book "3 Pillars of Zen".

I have noticed that the intense focus does me much better than calmer types of zazen like counting breaths. I'm only intense during formal practice, but in daily activities I just try to relax and focus on the task at hand - nevertheless, if it was not for the daily practice of the intense version, I would not be nowhere near as alert when I'm more relaxed.

The combination of formal practice (40 min of shikantaza) and the right attitude (to engage well into every task, no matter how menial) did wonders to my wellbeing and quality of life. It is a powerful tool for change and a great way to practice spirituality.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Twitter confirms Twitter Blue

If there will be an indicator like that, people may assume that the account that doesn't have it is worse in some way.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Was cancer less likely in a pre-industrial world?

Even if we had a way to stop aging, I guess the brains would be the biggest problem. How likely is it that our brains can function for hundreds or thousands of years? Probably not likely at all. All these things within us of unimaginable complexity work, because they had to evolve in the past. Our brains evolved to work only a few decades.

Suppose we stop aging - this may be great, as we could live at our physical peak until death and the life would be much much longer on average. But at some point, maybe 100 - 200 y/o depending on individual, people's mind may just break.

To truly achieve immortality, we would have to probably reverse engineer the brain and gain complete understand of how it works. Even if we could copy brains atom by atom, or upload it to virtual world, without understanding of how to assemble a brain, this will be useless. A virtual brain, which would not be enhanced in some way, would age exactly like a real world one.

So probably the scenario where people can't die of old age is almost impossible, because that requires technology more advanced than even the ability to backup/restore a mind - which would allow people to die in accident and be restored - although most certainly there would be laws to regulate it, unless we have practically infinite space / land for people to live.

Sorry for going all Sci-Fi on this, I watched the 6th Day yesterday. The antagonist thought he could be immortal because he had a machine that could clone (or rather copy) a person including the brain. He had the ability to get himself resurrected if he died, but he probably wouldn't be able to live even a thousand years, unless he also had developed the technology to prevent data corruption in his brain.

Unless maybe I'm completely wrong and the brains are so flexible they would just work, but there's no way to test it, is it.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure (2007)

It's not as much about hiring people, but if you can afford not having to work for living at all at an early age, you can become a genius in almost anything you pick by spending e.g. 60h a week on that thing, every week, for years and not having to worry you will ever run out of cash.

On the other hand, having the money and luxuries may eliminate the so much needed evolutionary pressure on a personal level. On the company level, there's also the trap of creating a "charity business" that is not profitable, but that's if you really have loads of cash to blow / VC-funding yourself.

Please don't interpret this message as "if I was rich, I would be successful". I just think it's harder and takes more time and more sacrifice when you have to work for a living, but creating a successful company is hard either way and requires full attention.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster

The offer kinda looks like an April Fools joke to be honest.

> A browser that's always on.

Not when you experience a shortage of service and freeze all your users from doing basic work, not just on one service, but everything else.

They have a point though.

The plague of front-end is that most developers just don't care about performance. Take Redux for example, which for a while was considered a golden standard by many. When you look into it, you see that when one little thing changes in one big global store that has everything, everything else is notified and a comparison is run to see if that item has changed. (If I'm wrong, I'm sorry, but this was the impression I got when I was evaluating that framework). But if I'm not wrong and that's really the way it is, the fact that this framework was accepted by so many, just proves the point that most developers think all their end users have a high-powered Mac.

I could say something similar about virtual dom abstractions. I understand that there were no alternatives earlier (today we have Svelte), but you could still do a good front-end with classic dom-manipulation that was super fast, and with some thought put into it - well organized.

mcjkrw | 4 years ago | on: Hire me and pay what you want, just give me interesting work

For me if something is super boring, I will try to perceive it as a "free zen meditation session". Just do the boring stuff, but also try to work on my posture, breathing and so on, and engage.

I'm far from perfect with it, but it has changed the way I perceive work forever.

mcjkrw | 5 years ago | on: Study finds walking improves creativity (2014)

I used to feel similar about a city I lived in for quite a time. In winter it was super depressing. Imagine communist architecture everywhere, short winter days, often foggy. I got maniac about zen meditation stuff and I decided that I will try to be aware to surroundings to the best I can when I walk and the change was mindblowing. I really started to appreciate the walks in what once was a very depressing landscape, the picture got much more clear and vivid. So much stuff happenning, I enjoyed "tuning to the beat of the city". I also started to notice whatever little pieces of nature were left, like birds signing or naked trees here and there (in winter). Suddenly a walk in a busy city centre could be just as refreshing as a walk in the forest. Maybe even more refreshing (to me). I have noticed that in peaceful places I have more tendency to get stuck in my head, while in busy places, it's easier to focus outward and observe.

mcjkrw | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are some “10x” software product innovations you have experienced?

Using a tiling window manger over traditional desktop environment. For instance, I use I3. I have it set up with 10 workspaces. w1 is for the browser, w2 is for notepad, w3 is for code editor, w4 is for file manager, w5 - misc stuff, w10 - terminals. I can switch between them immediately with Super+(1-0) - no clunky animations, no waste. It's more convenient to work that way on a single monitor than using 2 monitors.

mcjkrw | 5 years ago | on: Germans are turning down Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine

My mom is a teacher a few years under 60. She got a chance for AZ vaccine. Initially she declined because the vaccine was not approved in our country for people over 60. However, we decided it's better to take this vaccine now, even if it's inferior than to risk her getting covid unvaccinated. The alternative would be to wait a few months for the next vaccination phase for people with chronic illness (she has diabetes) - although it may very well be she would get AZ then anyway.
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