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thalur | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: Sleepio - how I cured my insomnia, turned into software.

To me, the obvious follow-up would be social anxiety because it is intrinsically hard to talk to other people about, yet discussing it with a computer doesn't pose any difficulty. (I'm currently reading a 'use CBT to cure social anxiety' book which has been rather eye-opening.)

Regardless, I like the site, though it sometimes gets a bit choppy on my old macbook pro. I think £50 might be a bit steep as an up-front cost - it almost put me off.

Also, have you considered doing an iphone app for the diary? I use some supposedly motion sensing app to wake me up with music. It doesn't work very well, but for your purposes I could easily see just thumping the phone when I notice I'm awake instead of having to look at a clock and remember a time.

thalur | 13 years ago | on: Ask PG/HN : Replacing Email - What problems/solution comes to your mind?

The thing that jumps out at me is your first question: the majority of the actions I get from e-mail come in the text of the email and are external to the mail client (implement this feature, fix this bug) rather than part of it (reply with an answer, accept meeting request).

I think the reason why email works for this is that somehow email "comes to me" whereas everything else I have to consciously "go to it" to check it. I recognise that some of this is habit, some of it is how the email client is integrated into the computer (outlook at work, mail on my iphone) so that it presents new stuff to me directly, and some of it is that it presents a single place to check rather than having to hit refresh on a bunch of webpages to see if anything has changed on each.

thalur | 13 years ago | on: Penny Arcade Sells Out

It seems to me that you have introduced an unnecessary third party to the problem (the agent) that holds the same power and position as the current problem party in the copyright arena (the publisher/label). The interesting development in recent years has been the removal of this party from the equation (self-pub ebooks, kickstarter etc.) so it would be a shame to bring it back.

thalur | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft analyzes over a million PC failures, results shatter enthusiast myths

Alternatively, how much of the stats were the same machines failing repeatedly until they found stable settings?

[Anecdote] If my brief experience is anything to go by, overclocking involves lots of crashes until you get it right. Once it is working I would expect no more failures than a shop-bought PC, but by that point the statistics are already skewed by all those crashes that I don't care about.

thalur | 13 years ago | on: Secret messages on the web: How to do steganography in JavaScript

I would have guessed the opposite - I would expect the least significant bits to have a random distribution (if the image is a photo from a camera, that is) so if the least significant bits of the image have a non random distribution that might be a hint that there is something hidden there.

Of course, all of this is moot if the image is lossily compressed.

thalur | 13 years ago | on: Why Diablo 3 is less addictive than Diablo 2: a scientific explanation

Finding drops for the AH isn't as powerful a reward loop (at least pre-inferno) because whether you get a reward or not is at the whim of other players, and because your reward (or failure) is delayed by up to 48 hours. This may be different in the end-game (I didn't get addicted enough to get there) but during levelling it is quite weak.

I think there's definitely something to your second point though. Are we less prone to addiction, or more likely to recognise it and choose to break the loop?

thalur | 14 years ago | on: The Real Cost of Used Games

"The rebuttal of course is usually the same. Used games fuel new game sales; this is GameStop's response and some buy into it. Of course, in reality it's pure conjecture without any evidence."

...just like most of this article then. I doubt many dispute the outcome (decline in game quality, trend towards multiplayer or DLC), but the author hasn't even shown a correlation let alone cause.

FWIW I don't agree with the rebuttal quoted here. I would simply point to the same trend in Hollywood movies. Greed and risk aversion have done the damage, not piracy or second hand sales.

thalur | 14 years ago | on: Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun

The last paragraph really bothered me, but I'm not entirely sure why; it felt authoritarian, thought police etc.

That aside, the idea of a gender neutral pronoun sounds good to me. I'd also like a specifically plural "you", for example when you're talking to a representative of a company and want to refer to the company rather than the representative.

thalur | 14 years ago | on: How Far Can You Get From McDonald's?

At the furthest point in its orbit, the command module was probably about the diameter of the moon (plus a bit) away from the guys on the surface, so ~2000 miles.

thalur | 14 years ago | on: If Software Is Eating The World, Why Don't Coders Get Any Respect?

"Programmers are interchangeable" seems to come up quite a lot, but I don't think we have a monopoly on it: celebrities (where it is the individual's brand that sells) are the only example that aren't interchangeable that comes to mind.

One thing that may disadvantage us is that programmers are still one big blob: we don't define our specialities strongly enough to the outside world (or to ourselves). For example, teachers have their subjects: one might consider two maths teachers interchangeable but not a maths teacher and a French teacher, and that is obvious to a non-teacher. You and I might see the absurdity with swapping a web programmer for an embedded safety-critical systems programmer, but I don't think it is at all obvious to the outside world.

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