Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil | Hacker News Reader

Double your userbase with two lines of code and a box of Modafinil

alexkrupp.typepad.com

20 pointsAlex391722 comments

Modafinil (brand name Provigil). It keeps you awake and makes you smarter without any of the nasty addictive side effects of stimulant medications like amphetamine.

Look up the symptons of ADHD. Go to your friendly neighborhood doctor or psychiatrist and tell him you have said symptons. Also, look around continuously, don't make eye contact, and fidget a lot. Then indicate that you've done some research and heard that off-label prescriptions of Modafanil have shown promising results for ADHD and that you're not interested in addictive stimulant medication. If the doctor tries to give you Stratera, tell him that you've heard it makes some people anxious and that you think Modafanil would be a much better fit for you.

If it doesn't work, try another doctor.

Then, enjoy a lifetime of enhanced cognition, at least as long as you've got prescription drug coverage. You will also have gained the ability to go without sleep whenever you so desire.

Avoid milk and cereal, avoid foods with corn syrup, eat more meats and fish (with water), avoid manufactured (versus baked) goods like PopTarts, avoid microwaved foods, and replace those fluids by drinking water from the faucet instead of the soda and coffee (remember, your tap water meets higher standards than bottled water does), and eat small meals 4 times per day or more, and you will be alert and not need prescription drugs.

There are so many good things that will happen by doing the above, as well as by avoiding certain foods, that when you put it all together, you will feel great. Removing caffeine will stop the withdrawal symptoms and addiction after you're done with the initial withdrawal. Removing corn-syrup will make you feel much better and food without it tastes much cleaner. Avoiding manufactured foods will point you to baked goods, which are much, much healthier. Water is incredibly necessary and will help clean you out, as well as help flush any excess protein away from your kidneys after you eat the meat, as well as flouridate your teeth. Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.

Just to be clear, the title was tongue-in-cheek. I'm not actually advocating prescription drug abuse.

Why not treat your body right AND improve yourself with prescription drugs? Surely both will have more effect than one alone.

The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness. Same goes for genetic engineering, I remember the story about the memory gene for mice - if all it takes for a better memory is to flip one gene, surely evolution would have managed to do that a long time ago.

Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us).

The body doesn't produce certain drugs because they have nothing to with our survival. Even if we don't need them, certain drugs can give you a decided competitive advantage over your peers. Of course, you have to be willing to put something in your brain that alters it in a way that no one truly understands. I'm sure it is prudent to err on the side of caution when it comes to messing with your body, but I'm very comfortable with risk.

Evolution is pretty random (or is it chaotic?). There are so many permutations that we have a DNA sequence that is very, very good for surviving in our world. It could be better though, and at this point in our civilization natural selection will not get us there.

Genetic engineering is inevitable. It will happen. In 10 or 20 or 100 years when it becomes practical there will be "conservatives" who are against it and "liberals" who are for it. They will fight for a while but in the end science will win, because science always wins in the long run.

I am not against genetic engineering, it is just that when something seems too easy I get suspicious. Obviously medicine is helping in a lot of ways, the body is not able to fix every problem by itself.

Perhaps I am missing out big time by not using drugs. Some famous works of art are probably the result of drug use (how much of it, I don't know). I also remember a recent anecdote about a rock musician meeting Tony Blair and asking him how he manages his workload. Answer: "Certainly using different drugs than you" - of course it could just be "enthusiasm" being the drug, I don't know.

If you could become a world famous artist in exchange for living 10 years less, would you do it? Or whatever is your ambition (invent the Google killer, whatever).

My ambition is to develop or help develop a serious medical breakthrough, like curing HIV. So yes, I would take 10 years, 50 years, maybe even instant death for making such a profound positive impact on humanity.

I'd also like to take over Equatorial Guinea, but the current regime may fall before I get the chance.

The body also produces some drugs that are outright bizarre. DMT occurs naturally in the brain and is one of the most potent naturally occurring psychedelics. I would be extremely interested when and why the brains of humans or our predecessors started producing DMT.

"The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness."

You are forgetting the other side to evolutionary fitness: the environment. Human evolution has been progressively stagnated by the invention of adaptive technology. Being hard of hearing or nearly blind is no longer a deadly condition, hence it no longer prevents procreation, hence evolution doesn't factor anymore.

The human genetic structure is largely the same as it was hundreds if not thousands of years ago precisely because we can use tools to adapt to situations much faster than any evolutionary fitness can proof out and spread through the population.

As for the memory gene of mice, that would only have been important if a better memory made mice more successful at what they do. Evidently in the environments mice adapted to this was not the case.

"Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us)."

Evolution doesn't have ideas. It does not use reason. It does not think. It exists purely as a pattern of change in species over time. There is no need to give it more credit than that, it is quite powerful enough without the addition of sentience.

Drugs work because your body has the ability to react to them. If your body can react to drugs is, usually, because there are internal receptors that can bind to them. But of course naturally occurring concentrations of 'drug'-like components are much lower and extended over time than a pill, and the components themselves are milder than their drugstore counterparts (except counted instances such as norepinephrines). Besides the fact that generating them requires (usually) exercise (for example, for endorphines and melatonin/cortisol/tyroxine fine-tunning), and/or yoga-style body control.

A report from your friendly biomedical biologists.

| Often when your body feels "hungry," it is actually thirsty for water.

Complete bullshit. Penn and Teller killed this one pretty convincingly.

Basically, if you eat a 'normal' diet (which most people don't, ironically) including enough veggies and fruits, there's no real need for outside water sources.

For most people, enough water that you don't feel thirsty is sufficient. There's no need to force yourself to drink water. And hungry very, very rarely means thirsty.

Thanks for the reply. First of all, I would not take dietary advice from Penn and Teller, just by using common sense and looking at Penn. But, on top of that, you went out of your way to call what I said "bullshit", basing your belief on what a magician said in a TV show by the same name, without ever quoting what the magician actually said.

Also, you claim that people very, very rarely feel hungry when they want water.

It's easy to show you're just guessing. Have you ever eaten a solid meal without drinking fluids? Then how can you be sure that the hunger you felt was just for food, and liquids only to wash it down, instead of hunger for water as well? You can't. It could very well be correlation, and not causation, that when you eat, you want to drink water as well, which means that you were hungry for water all along.

If it's even 1% hunger for water, that proves you are wrong.

Also, there's no such thing as a normal diet.

I'm not citing Penn, per se. He interviewed several doctors and nutritionists, they were the ones who stated that additional water in the diet is largely unneeded, and that rumors of chronic dehydration in the general populace are wrong.

Also, Snopes has addressed the topic: http://snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

Believe what you'd like, but don't try to mislead other people with it.

(Have I ever eaten a solid meal without drinking fluids? fuck yes. are you kidding?)

It's actually not too expensive, and pretty easy to find online from overseas (which is legal, I understand, so long as you're importing personal-use quantities i.e. 3 mo supply or less)

Doesn't really make you smarter, that's pretty hyperbolic, but will definitely stave off some of that 'brain fog' that comes about after lunch / towards the end of the day. And being able to be productive an extra eight hours or so a week is pretty priceless.

In the USA, I'm almost positive it is only legal to import if you already have a valid prescription for it. Even then, customs can seize it if they want.

A study showed that "Modafinil significantly reduced error rates in the long delay condition of the visuo-spatial task and in the manipulation conditions." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15221200&dopt=Abstract

Maybe it doesn't make you smarter, but it makes your brain function better for some very specific memory tasks. I think that such a benefit would be broader than the number recall tasks from the study.

Right now, I'm the reading 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell and the message seems to be very similar to what Alex is saying.

The smallest details can sometime have a surprisingly large impact.

It's not always clear why certain startups are successful and others fall by the wayside, maybe the success or failure of a website just depends on getting the hundreds of little details just right ?

As site developers, we need to think more about the psychological and sociological side of things, we should think of ourselves as community builders not just tool makers.

"if I were launching a new website, here's what I'd do. Instead of hiding the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner, I'd place a form right on the main page. A big form. And I'd bend over backwards to get people to use it."

What are the two lines of code to produce this?

I'd like to know too. You could do something like the following, but that would mean an ugly email message and ugly thank-you page.

[(define-input feedback) (mail '("foo@bar") feedback)]Thank you for your input.

Don't take the headline too literally. :-)

The thank-you page isn't really code, so even though it might be hundreds of lines of HTML and CSS, it's the web designer's responsibility, not the coder's. :)

The code for the thank-you page could be as simple as:

import smtplib

smtplib.SMTP('127.0.0.1').sendmail('website@example.com', ['you@example.com'], "From: website@example.com\r\nTo: you@example.com\r\n\r\nMessage follows: %s" % (web.input.get('feedback', 'NOTHING'),))

Not sure it that will work without a .quit(), but then you'd have at least 4 lines. Well, that's what local libraries are for. :)

so where do I get my Modafinil?

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