mujina93's comments

This made me think: if we wrote object oriented code methods where all the members that we access are passed explicitly as parameters, as well as all the members that we modify (as out references), then we at least would immediately identify the real complexity of some methods! I'll try to do this, I'm curious to see how that would look like.

You can tip people with normal money.

Paying for hosting with extremely volatile and environmental harmful tokens that only a part of population pretends has a real value, that you want to hoard rather than spend, and that might go to 0 at some point? To have basically torrents?

Sending deflationary ponzi scheme tokens to people is not helping them. Also, fees are high.

Private transactions are great if you are a criminal, I'll give you that.

Tell me one "dapp" (or "extremely wasteful programs that run on a CPU that is orders and orders of magnitude slower than an actual one) that is doing something useful. I haven't found one yet and I've been searching for some years now.

With NFTs you don't own anything, unless there's an actual contract that comes with it. Also you buy a hyperlink that points to central storage. Also money laundering and wash trading are rampant.

This is the most dystopian news ever. 500M users that might be brought into cryptocurrency against their will or without understanding the underlying tech and implications. Why don't they spend these resources on making their website more usable, without high loading times, without prompting for using it in the app, and without endless streams of Oops something went wrong.

Can you explain to me how something that is very unsatble in value can be useful as a currency?

Assuming all other aspects are solved.

Once I was interviewed in this way: I was given a test with various questions (algorithms, general knowledge, etc.), and I was given a tablet with which I could google whatever I wanted. I was left alone with the test and the tablet and I was given some time to finish that.

I think it's one of the best way that I've ever witnessed or heard of to test for what you mention: the exploration and research that happens in real life when you encounter a problem to solve at work.

I haven't seen this anywhere else unfortunately.

Basically every comment here says positive things about tiktok. Is this a bot invasion on HN or is it really that good?

The few times I tried it it gave me loads of crappy content. No thank you, I'm not in for another doom scrolling addiction. The world has already enough addictive dopamine-f**ing time-sucker almost contentless social medias. I don't have the energies to fight against or maniacally curate my feed for yet another one.

I'd evaluate the usefulness of a social media or any other app by looking at a couple of metrics: 1) how much time do you spend there daily? 2) after you have used it, do you feel a better/improved person? I'd be curious to see numbers for these metrics. If anybody has links to papers/surveys that study how good or bad is a certain social media, please feel free to share.

Amazing job! If you could tell, how much time did you spend on it daily or weekly? And how much experience in the gamedev industry and/or with C did you already have when you started?

Let's go! I waited for 20 years.

W3Champions is an unofficial amazing work to bring back to warcraft 3 what reforged has taken away (mostly ladder and tournaments, for competitive games). But there's more, since they could provide intercontinental servers that offer low ping for players from different continents. We have for the first time in history pro players from china battling with the ones in europe, european vs NA, etc.

Back2Warcraft are the guys that stream and cast most of the competitive games. I suggest you watch them live on twitch when there's some tournament, and/or on youtube for past games.

It's a great time for warcraft 3, thanks to the great effort put in by fans. If only the game hadn't been killed by Blizzard :( But there's still plenty of people playing, with classic graphics and W3Champions servers (you still need reforged), and plenty of pros to watch.

Enjoy your warcraft 3!

This is probably one of the few right approaches that can be realistically employed. Everything else is quite utopian and difficult to achieve, unfortunately.

Is it that good? There are places where lots of people are refusing to get the vaccine if they hear it's Astra-Zeneca, because of all the overblown nightmarish news around it. I can tell you for example that in Italy there are examples of regions where 80% of people refuse.

I understand the need for being cautious and for transparency. Actually, I would like to have even more transparency and actual scientific data and numbers from the news. That would help the public understand better why certain decisions are made.

(Maybe my main problem is just with mainstream press, not much with stopping vaccinations per se. I'd just like to know more and be told by politicians: we are listening to scientists, these are the data, this is how numbers compare to the incidence of other side effects for well known medicines and to the numbers of daily deaths and long term problems caused by COVID, and the decisions are taken because X > Y).

But airplaines are engineered by humans, we know everything about how they are supposed to work until the last bit of physics.

We don't have the same absolute understanding of mechanisms with vaccines. Therefore, I am not sure we can use this metaphore to suggest that it is the right choice in this terrible time to stop vaccinations, causing slowdowns to happen and scepticism to spread in the population that is bombarded by the press which creates an echo chamber repeating over and over superficial news.

I personally don't expect a vaccine, nor any medicine in general, to be supposed to have absolutely zero incidence of possible negative side effects.

I can relate with most of the things from the blog post, and I am sure the pain the author goes through is real. In no way I want to diminish it.

Having said that, a couple of things:

- I think on HN it would be more appropriate to link to medical/scientific resources, instead of personal blog pages like this, which despite being relatable, are dangerous to extrapolate an objective and statistical view on the topic from. I personally found some parts to be too driven by animosity (against "nonbelievers"), and some to show contradictory advice. There are several good parts, but overall I did not find it a high quality piece, and I would advice against proposing that as a flagship piece.

- When I read pieces like these, the question that pops into my mind is: how can we distinguish a person that has a condition and that needs comprehension from a person that is just lazy, that just wants to do what they want all the time, and that lies to you about them being in pain (or maybe even lie to themselves, having built a view of the world in which they thing they are going through something and they are legitimized to act in a certain way, or they built a habit and can't help to act in that way)? I do not ask this with the intent of provoking anybody. It is a serious question, both philosophical (what is lazyness? Is there a thing such as inability to focus with and without malice? Who has the right to judge morally?) and practical/scientific/medical (how can we distinguish an illness from something that would look indistinguishable, when hearing from people claiming it? What are objective methods that we can use to declare that we are witnessing a legitimate impairment in someone? Does a right moment ever come for nudging, scolding, encouraging? Or is it never the right thing to do, with anybody?)

I think, to answer the latter, more statistical surveys would be useful for all of us to share and to read, so that we could avoid the usual anecdote-driven arguments that most of the time plague threads like this one, even on a website like HN, which is full of scientific-minded people.

I am the first one that would like to read more academic literature and less anecdotes on the topic, but I am not very informed. So, if anybody has resources to share that could help the discussion, please do! :)

Yes, actually. His/her/their wallet has the majority of bitcoins. If they were to move them, everything would crash.

It's amazing and fascinating how many diverse explanations and personal narratives are present in all the answers. It shows how difficult it is to diagnose something as common and relatable as the situation described here.

Yes. It's really a life-changing experience. One that I think everybody should have once in their life. I'm always amazed by the almost perfectly matching descriptions of such experiences from people living in different parts of the world. There really is something objective and true to what you described. I must say, having taken them multiple times in my life, and my mind being prone to surgically analyze every experience my brain has, I was able to "deconstruct" the experience quite a bit. I can tell you that I never had the god-like one-with-everything experience I had the very first time. I think there is a big factor of novelty to the experience that plays a big role (this is true for most things in life, I would say. When you experience something deeply new, you are naturally excited in addition to what the experience itself has to offer to you.). Another thing I noticed was that I realized I always was feeling physical pleasure during the "highs". Like a constant orgasm sensation that I could feel with all my body. And that is something I think a lot of people experience but don't actually realize, unless they force them to shift their focus from their spiritual breakthroughs onto on what they are physically feeling. I think that plays a big role in enhancing all the various beautiful sensations, thoughts, and almost religious realizations. In such a state of physical pleasure you would judge even a dog that pisses on your leg as something devine. I think there is much less "magic" to the experience once you realize these mechanisms. But, as I said, I still think everybody should take mushrooms at least once in their life (possibly in a nice, controlled setting. You don't want to waste it.). Other times I funneled all their "magic" into creativity, spending all the time of my trip doing my form of art, writing, and I was amazed at some genial things that came out. (Your art form could be different, for example one ex of mine, which is amazing at drawing, drew very cool things when she took mushrooms). I kind of "wasted" the experience in that I did not focus on me, or on enjoying the delight and the weirdness in any way, but I was hyperfocused on my writing, on describing every small bit of sensation that I was experiencing instead of living it and enjoying it. I won't make this post infinitely long. I'll just conclude saying that ultimately I stopped because they weren't giving me much. Like all people taking them, I agree that you get to feeling that you don't need to take them multiple times. They are a drug that basically communicates to you that you don't really need to take them ever again already the first time, given how big and life-changing the first experience is. If you do take them again, it's never on an addiction impulse, like (I guess) opioids would give you or like social media and notifications would give you.

It really depends on the species. For most mushrooms I wouldn't go beyond 5g. Suggesting 12 or even 24g to me sounds like suggesting to drink 12 or 24 bottles of wine at the same time (if I think of the type of mushrooms I often took. For truffles maybe that's ok).

I'm curious. What is the blog post that tore "Why we sleep" apart?

Thank you for the link. The document could benefit from being a bit more polished and have less exclamations, but it contains some useful links and references at the end, such as this interview here, which I found it reflects what the bubble of cryptocurrencies is about: https://amycastor.com/2021/02/11/nouriel-roubini-tether-is-a...

Genuinely trying to understand ADHD here (I'm really open, have no aggressive intentions, ready to put empathy to use, might have ADHD or other issues myself, I still don't know. I am driven by scientific curiosity). A few questions:

- What are the symptoms? I read here that some argue that they cannot do menial tasks or get up from bed, others get up at 5am regularly or are exceptionally able to do chores. Some can't achieve anything in their life, losing one job after another, others are serial entrepreneurs and feel like having superpowers. I am confused by the broad and (apparent?) conflicting set of symptoms.

- How does the "evolution over time" of ADHD look like? What I mean is: is it a condition that "starts with you" since when you are born, or does it "begin" at some point, like a normal illness? Likewise, can it end? Can you heal from that? Can it be reduced? And in the "in between part", if you were to graph its intensity/presence, would draw a constant(ly high) line? Or are there periods of higher and lower intensity? If so, what is their frequency? And if you were to draw only the segments "controlled for other confounding factors", for example ignoring big impactful events like big successes, personal losses, breakups, particularly happy or particularly bad relationships (even long ones), periods of medication or drugs, turbulent hormonal teen years, periods with second jobs or complete lack of jobs, how would the graph change? I had up and down periods, mostly long downs (even years) and short noisy high frequency ups. Often I was able to identify the causes behind the intensity of my mood (identifying does not imply solving), and I wonder how this time series looks for everybody else, and if and how ADHD people's curves are different from the cluster of "normal" curves.

- What are the tests that are used to assess and quantify it?

- Any scientific study on the effect of various medication on people with ADHD and without? I'm particularly interested in the reported effects for "normal" people in control groups. The effects of some medicines that I often see described sound wonderful: stability, being able to focus, being able to do what is useful (chores, big projects), stopping train of thoughts, etc. Disregarding the fact that, much like with symptoms, it looks like the effects are wildly varying, overall they seem impressively useful, and I ask: are there reasons why anyone would not want improved focus, cognition, productivity and stability? Some of these drugs are indeed famous for being (ab)used by students or even workers, in some parts of the world, to push through stressful times. Why wouldn't and shouldn't everyone have access to those? And, related to this, how does one recognize that they may not be 100% genuine and objective with perceiving and describing their ADHD symptoms to a doctor, but maybe one is exaggerating something unconsciously just to get to those miraculous meds?

- How do you explain (or, better, do you have any paper that explain) the differences in the percentages of diagnosed cases throughout the world (thus, differences over space) and during the last decades (thus, differences time)? Is the incidence naturally different in different countries? Has it naturally changed over time? If so, was that due to a change in other causing factors? Or, more worryingly, did the way of diagnosing it change in time / is different across the world? If so, do you think (or have papers about) the current criteria for diagnosis are accurate and precise (identify the "true value" and with low variance) and uniform? Or is there still work to do? Maybe in 100 years they could have mutated into disgnoses for 10 different more specific disorders, that "our ancestors [we] thought it was just one thing", maybe the disorder won't exist anymore like hysteria evolved from the 1800 to today, or maybe they won't change that much.

- Same question as the above one, but on differences in treatment (over time and across countries). Any anecdotes on people being diagnosed in a rest-of-the-world (non-US) country? Was your experience similar to the ones you read about, from American fellows? Were your symptoms and treatment different? I am particularly interested in hearing more from the rest-of-the-world, being from a non-US country myself. It's hard to understand how much one is in a bubble of American experiences and anecdotes, when reading from the internet. For example, I never even heard in my country the word ADHD. My only experience is from reading about it on the English-speaking part of the Internet. Never heard stories of hyperactive kids taking medicines, or students or adults being prescribed stimulants to push through. I am sure such cases exist, but from my experience these things are just "not in the culture". For almost all the people I know from my country it would be unthinkable to even consider a hyperactive kid to be something to "medically treat". I'm not saying I come from a place where kids with problems are not treated, on the contrary, kids with autism, dyslexia, learning impairments, all sorts of disorders, are followed and given the attention they deserve. I'm just saying that the perceived threshold in the public opinion for what deserves medicines seems to be wildly different than the American one, when it is applied to hyperactivity (or hypoactivity, lack of motivation, etc) and to adults. (I'm from a big country in Europe).

I hope my questions don't come out as provocative. I acknowledge the ignorance in them, because I am ignorant (unknowing) on these topics. And that is the reason I want to find more (and help people like me to understand better). I appreciate any scientific study, paper, or any article with sources that you can offer. Thank you :)