Hacker News Reader

Apfelon An Experience with Modafinil

Yeah, I'm afraid you're definitely wrong on this. I've used Modafinil extensively at several different doses. Even at a quarter pill (50mg) you will struggle to feel even remotely tired if you take it after 9am (assuming you go to bed at a normal-ish time).

Apfelon An Experience with Modafinil

As someone who has just gone through the ADHD diagnostic process in the UK - previously abusing stimulants is a risk factor they have to consider before prescribing you anything.

I have previously used Modafinil fairly extensively and considered purchasing Ritalin or Adderall on the dark web, but was very worried about telling the doctor in case it would cause me issues getting treatment.

Apfelon IBM and Samsung Unveil Semiconductor Breakthrough

Jevons' Paradox would also apply in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Apfelon Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi? (2007)

The book "Practical Vim" is written with this exact use case in mind. And it's great

Apfelon Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka, creator of Somethingawful, has died

https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Zybourne_Clock.html

I assume this is the RPG you're referring to?

Apfelon False Pro-China Accounts Invade Twitter in the UK

They're already all over Quora and Reddit.

Apfelon Show HN: A tool for your learning, like Anki and Notion in one

This is a pretty unpleasant response. Your app very strongly fits my interests but your replies have put a bad taste in my mouth.

Apfelon Interactive introduction to game theory and trust

Absolutely agreed - their game about spacial repetition is my go-to conversion tool for friends and family: https://ncase.me/remember/

Apfelon Duolingo S-1 IPO

Agree strongly with this. The Spoonfed Chinese deck is so good that it's worth actually paying for. I think it's only $3 or so now.

Apfelon Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

This story is just a lie. As others have said, council houses and benefits in the UK are not a pleasant experience, or easy to get without jumping through means testing hoops constantly

Apfelon Sandwell Bitcoin mine found stealing electricity

Depends on both local climate and lighting method. LEDs output very little heat nowadays

Apfelon Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

My current (government) employer blocks installation of Firefox and Chrome setup exes, but it's still just a hardcoded block on Chromesetup.exe and can be bypassed by calling it literally anything else.

Apfelon Opening Up the Samsung Q60 Series Smart TV (2019)

The TV in the article has two microphones built in!

Apfelon Why Working from Home Will Stick [pdf]

Obviously this isn't a permanent solution, but noise cancelling headphones have gotten really good recently. Sony xm1000 models and Bose could potentially go some way towards helping you deal with this.

Apfelon Increment.me: easily get anonymous feedback on anything

This is a great idea and I'd love to have a go with it, but I'm struggling to submit my information for the beta - getting a 500 error.

Apfelon Coronavirus: Oxford vaccine triggers immune response

15% of those who test positive die. Most infected people are unlikely to be tested in the UK unless they are admitted to hospital.

Apfelon Hong Kong: UK makes citizenship offer to residents

It should be pointed out that life in Hong Kong is definitely not markedly better for young people than it was for their parents.

Apfelon Parachuting for Charity: A 5-year audit (1999)

Their analysis actually only focused on two centres in the east of Scotland.

There were ~1500 jumpers in 5 years across the two centres, of which 174 (11%) were injured at a cost of £3751 per injury.

Apfelon I quit contracting 6 months ago

This is a very interesting article, but hijacking middle mouse click to scroll made the experience of reading it pretty annoying.

Apfelon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

I live in Glasgow - isn't it closer to 600k?

Apfelon Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?

I think the only city around that population in the UK is Birmingham. It is notoriously a pretty rubbish place.

Apfelon One-quarter of the world’s pigs died in a year due to swine fever in China

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3042991/chin...

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chi...

These should cover it. Most dystopian story I've read in years!

Apfelon Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

I hate meetings with a passion, and I work in HR data for a very large (40k+ employee) government employer in Western Europe.

I got myself in a bit of trouble by attempting to produce an automatically generated "meeting cost" report to dissuade people from having meetings.

The script pulled salary data for attendees of each meeting (pulled from Outlook calendar), length of meeting and even used the Bing maps API to capture travel costs for each attendee.

When I mentioned it to my manager, he promptly killed it. Although he is very much anti-meeting, he pointed out that it could easily be targeted by a Freedom of Information request and used as a political weapon.

Apfelon Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job (2018)

I do most of my of work in this realm, using Python. I pull data from multiple databases each day with selenium and bs4, clean and transform using Pandas then generate pretty nice reports with ReportLab.

It's given me a lot of opportunities to flex my creativity on what was previously a fairly mundane Excel-centric role.

Having a supportive manager is really valuable for this stuff, though.

Apfelon Dead Malls

Sidenote: isn't it a bit odd that they have a merchandise page?

https://www.cafepress.com/deadmalls

Apfelon Software made me loathe my car

It's a lease, I think. He mentions it in the article.

Apfelon The Economics of Kenneth Arrow

It's a testament to the sheer breadth of Arrow's work that he essentially created the field of health economics and it's only given a cursory mention in the intro.

The below (not excessively mathematical) paper was light years ahead of its time, and is well worth a read even now.

https://web.stanford.edu/~jay/health_class/Readings/Lecture0...

Apfelon Cryptic, allusive messages from Hong Kong's wealthiest tycoon

The discussion being entirely banned on Weibo also implies that it's deliberate.

Try searching "李嘉诚发声" and you'll get a message saying "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, this page is not found"

Apfelon How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

Homelessness in China is visible and universal, but you have to know where to look. There's a lot of shame associated with it, just like disability (I'm sure you've probably noticed you don't see many disabled people in China either). https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-life-like-for-disabled-people...

I fundamentally reject that filial piety is the reason for this (filial piety causes all sorts of other social problems, too).

People in Confucian cultures hide things they see as shameful to protect their 面子.

If anything, I think this indicates there are far darker unseen truths in Chinese society that we are insulated from through the 'face' system.

Apfelon How is China able to provide enough food to feed over 1B people?

It's extremely easy to find a job in Chinese cities, generally speaking. There's lots of jobs for jobs sake - most restaurants have far too many staff, and there's lots of security guards everywhere who run away at the first sign of real trouble.

Regarding homelessness, it definitely exists, although differently from the US etc. If you go into a 24hr McDonalds or KFC you'll see lots of homeless people slumped over tables sleeping because nobody there will kick them out. It's also very common to see homeless people congregating in the lower levels of major railway stations at night.