PieSquared

Huh, I think it's time to learn something.

I can write C code to reverse a linked list, or discuss the asymptotic efficiency of a bunch of data structures in my sleep... but I clearly don't have enough experience with threading if I had to google what a "condition variable" was, or had to make sure my intuitive notions about cooperative and preemptive multitasking were right.

Always nice to be reminded that you don't actually know anything.

Don't get me wrong - if you are on a tight budget, a Hackintosh (if you can set it up) - is very usable. You might have to forgo some things, like working audio or wireless, but it will work well enough to develop iPhone apps if you have another main computer. Sadly, VMWare is impractical for anything serious, and XCode cannot run on windows.

Both a hackintosh and a VMWare install can be used to develop iPhone apps. (I tried both, before just buying a mac for dev purposes). However, VMWare lagginess and bugginess is a pain even on a high-spec'd machine. And having a real mac is much nicer.

As I said in another one of my comments, sleep deprivation, in my opinion, isn't actually the key part of polyphasic sleep. You can sleep 6 or 7 hours polyphasically, too, and this will increase your productivity and creativity than sleeping the same amount monophasically.

For yet another one, I just woke up from a 30 minute nap, and have been sleeping polyphasically for the past two weeks. (Did this for a month last summer, too.)

I think the reason it keeps me more creative is that it's always morning. You are never more than 6 hours from waking up. And, when I've been awake for 6 hours, I start getting tired... take 15 minutes to relax... then take a 30 minute nap, and can get back to what I was doing with renewed vigor.

(I don't think it's the sleep deprivation that is the key part of polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep with 8 hours of sleep a day - say, 4 two-hour naps - would still be polyphasic sleep. You do not have to be sleep deprived to sleep polyphasically. People assume that sleep deprivation comes with it, because when you sleep polyphasically, you need less sleep. Messed up cause and effect here.)

Thanks for posting this! This is something I've been wondering myself.

I'm particularly curious because I recently started a mobile contracting company for iPhone and Android applications, as well as websites. We've only been doing fixed price contracts so far, but we've been wanting to try our hand at writing our own applications too. We're just about done with our first three applications (in the process of getting one into the App Store, and two more are ETA to be done by the end of the week).

In case you're wondering what normal costs are for mobile application contracting: For simple apps, a fixed price would be in the $500 to $2000 range; something moderately complicated - say, an interface to a social network - would be in the $4000-6000 range; after that it usually goes on a case by case basis depending on what the customer wants.

(By the way, completely shameless plug: we're going to be done with our currently running contracts soon... so if anyone happens to be interested, contact info is in my profile. We build websites, Android, iPhone, and iPad apps, mostly.)

I'm the one who wrote the post, and in retrospect I can see why people would be a bit confused at this example.

I started out wanting to explain my actual implementation of a 'yield' command. As I wrote the post, though, it grew overcomplicated and filled with explanations of Scheme's syntax macros, which was not at all my intention.

I guess in simplifying the implementation I also lost a bit of the idea behind it. You do need continuations to implement a general-case yield; if you just want generators for a list, you can use closers (and be more efficient, too).

Thanks to you (and to parent) for pointing that out; if you don't mind, I'll add mention of what you said to the blog post?

Well, I just sent almost exactly that email (reworded, of course, not actually copied-pasted). We'll see what they say.

Well, what's a better platform, then?

I develop for the iPhone because in some ways, it's a "sure" way to make money. Not necessarily a lot of money, but still. Other than Android, which has its own problems, what other platforms exist that give as wide an audience willing to spend money on your apps?

It's all cheery and nice to say "Apple sucks, hahah iPhone developers", but what's are other options for those of us who cannot work at a normal job and do not have the resources, time, or dedication to invest our lives in a startup?

(Serious question, by the way, not just bashing your comment here.)

My problem: submitting bug reports is sometimes hard.

Every so often, I come across a bug with one of the apps I use on my Ubuntu machine - be it Chrome, Firefox, Amarok, or something else. I go through the process of figuring out exactly what triggers the bug, and sometimes even try out gdb on the app to see what's going on... then I go to the bug reporting page, realize I need to make some Launchpad account or some hassle like that, and decide that I'm too lazy to report it. (And every piece of software uses a separate bug tracker, so you need a separate account for each bug that you want to report!)

Not very accessible to the casual user...

(At least, this has been my experience.)

Oh, how I wish I had more time this summer.

Eh, maybe. I haven't studied polyphasic sleep and I'm not a scientist, so understand that my opinion comes from someone who has slept monophasically, experienced quite a bit of sleep deprivation, and also slept polyphasically.

That said... what I was talking about is not at all like sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation causes tiredness, lethargy, lack of energy. You wake up feeling tired and maybe your eyes or your head hurts. What I experienced with everyman-3 was nothing like that. It wasn't you falling asleep because you were unusually tired; it was you falling asleep because you willed yourself and your entire body to relax and let go of consciousness, almost like a sort of meditation. You wake up feeling absolutely refreshed and ready to go. In any case, it feels completely different from going to sleep tired or waking up sleep deprived; I don't know about the specific mental mechanism, as I am not a neuroscientist, as cool as I think it would be to be one.

Anyway, I would recommend giving polyphasic sleep a few tries. I only managed it after trying and failing twice (once because I kept oversleeping, once because social things got in the way). Also, I would not recommend doing polyphasic sleep for many months on end. At least, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing it, as who knows why it's possible. Maybe I'm depriving my body of very necessary sleep and preventing long-term learning or something - until it's more well researched, I wouldn't want to sleep polyphasically for more than a month or two.

I tried Everyman-3 last summer. It was a very weird experience. Highly unusual.

After a few times of failing to wake up on time, I became a bit alarm-paranoid. I once woke up on my own early, and jumped out of bed thinking two hours had passed (instead of 30 minutes). Turned out only 8 minutes had passed since I looked at my watch before going to sleep.

This reflects one of the cooler aspects of polyphasic sleep - you learn to fall asleep regularly in under 3 minutes. I slept on a bed, on a floor, on a lawn. You just learn how to relax and drift off immediately.

Also, once you've slept for 30 minutes, you don't want to sleep anymore. Your consciousness just regains control of your body and poof - you're awake.

It's not something I would do for years on end, because it can be difficult to accommodate having work and a social life, but it's very fun to do for a few months at a time. You gain a lot of time.

Capoeira. It's a mix of Brazilian martial arts, music, culture, dance, and game, and one which requires physical training as well as the ability to think quickly and creatively on one's feet, and it teaches you how to truly control your body, something most people never learn to do.

Many people don't know much about it, but it's a beautiful sport. (Martial art, not dance. Common misconception is that it's non-contact - it's only non-contact if you move fast enough!) I particularly enjoy it because of the associated culture and traditions.

(In case anyone's interested, here are some videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8xxgFpK-NM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51q1VB_dDik Feel free to email me if you have questions.)

It knows about us!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=hacker+news

And about me. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=piesquared

Truth is, the idea isn't difficult, it's just very difficult to explain well.

I would suggest that you learn some basic Scheme, download an interpreter, and just play around with it. Try a few things with call-with-current-continuation. Try to figure out the examples on Wikipedia. It'll might take a few hours of toying with it over a few days, but you'll get it. Don't be discouraged :)

Hahah, same here, same here.

There was a comment earlier on this thread a while back about seeing "more squirrels than humans" in the suburbs... it then apologized for the exaggeration. For my entire life, I've lived in a place where that isn't an exaggeration, and my nearest friends (people who I know well who are not my immediate family) live 20 miles away.

Seems like just something a large part of our generation, especially parts of it that grew up in the suburbs, takes for granted.

I felt like the whole purpose of this discussion was essentially to point out: teenagers aren't exactly children. Teenagers can be fully functioning adults, they just aren't given the chance to get the necessary experience. (I'm assuming here that the teenager in question is at least 15, I feel like younger than that blurs the line between child and teenager...)

Disclaimer: I'm 17, and this is just how I feel about people equating teenagers to children. Also, sorry if this post came off a bit... over-vehement. ;)

It's 100% doable.

I'm taking 3 APs and a few past-AP classes (classes for which APs don't exist), and in my free time working at making iPhone apps/mobile contractor work with a few of my similarly motivated friends. It's not exactly what people around here consider a "business" (i.e. startup), but it does show that it's possible.

But people do translate names. Since you're Russian, I'll give this example: What do English speakers call a Саша? Why, usually, it's not Sasha - it's Alex.

I actually think you aren't a minority. Many of my tech/web-less-literate friends are already using Buzz and liking it; it's mostly the techies and web developers and programmers that are saying "Oh, it'll fail like Wave" and "It's stupider than twitter and facebook, it'll die instantly".

I also like it, and am noting that others do too.

Aurgh! Your comment is on one hand something I really want to respond to, yet on the other hand difficult for me to respond to well.

> At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't. > At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.

Background: I am in high school.

Anyway, I've come up against this barrier so much and it drives me crazy. Here, like in most American high schools, society isn't teaching us anything. It's teaching us to hate the 'mandatory' subjects, because everyone has to take them, and thus the teachers can't teach it well because 3/4 of their classes are utterly uninterested. To be honest, I despise my world history class. And it's not because it's history - I'm fine with history, in face, I enjoy learning about it. It's because it's mandatory, which means everyone takes it, so in the end, everyone suffers.

With the AP level course system that exists in the USA, you're taking college-level courses in high school. Why should high school students have to suffer any more than college students?

> Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums.

This is even harder to argue with, because of the "most". I guess it's that old argument: would you rather allow the more gifted to excel, or everyone be held at the same level (with that level being slightly higher than had you went with the other option)? And, honestly, it isn't 'society' - society isn't doing anything. It's the school system, a bureaucratized administration incapable of seeing the system from the students perspective and incapable of creating a true institution of learning in which the students who want to learn at a decent rate can.

Ugh, sorry for this rant. It's just been bothering me for the past two years, because high school is so goddamn constrained and mandatory it's angering. Instead of learning, I have to sit through things I already know and listen to incompetent teachers talk about irrelevant topics.

I guess I should add something related to the original topic. I speak two languages fluently, and learned Spanish in high school for four years, then promptly dropped it. Why? Because even though I live in an area with easily 30% Spanish-speakers, I don't ever need to use it. Ever! And if I try to practice it, the Spanish-speakers would just rather speak English, because a lot of them are more comfortable talking to me in English. My point: in almost all places in the USA, other languages are useless. Now, in my own time, outside of school, I've learned some Portuguese, because I play capoeira and my instructor and students learning it along with me speak it all the time. My second point: when you need to, you will learn a language.

Eh, not really. You can talk about quality of conversation, quality of life, quality of friendship. Why not quality of people?

And if they've identified the wolf as "Ossian", why don't they talk to the owners (?) of the trained wolf?

I think you're misunderstanding what he meant. At least, it seems that what you got out of what he said isn't what I did. When he said 'quality', I didn't think he was talking about people as "mates" or as gene quality or some such. I took 'quality' to mean exactly what you want it to mean - attractiveness, how much fun they are to be around, etc etc. Basically, whatever you would look for in a 'significant other' - certainly not just gene quality or whatever.

As for the tone, it is a bit unusual, I guess. Our crowd - hackers, programmers, engineers, nerds, whatever you want to call them - does tend to like abstracting things away, trying to model life that goes on around us in a precise and systematic way. The tone is due just to that.

It's true... but I assume (and hope) that US politicians are not stupid enough to advocate anything actively harsh against China. China is nearly a superpower, and we do not need anything like another Cold war. (Not that it would be as bad, but two large countries in a state of conflict do note bode well for their inhabitants.)

Everything you've said sounds very logical to me. We don't want to accept what China is doing and go with it, but we certainly don't want to go with embargoes or anything drastic. Things change slowly, and we need to realize that. Demanding things won't work - particularly, I think, in China's case, where responding to a demand would surely hurt their sense of nationalism which they (I think?) value highly.

I'm confused at your last statement though. What about KKK protests? They should be allowed and protected. Free speech is for everyone, regardless of opinion. That's the whole point of it.

I guess these are just the effects of Google's decision.

As for 'if it's different, kill it': I've noticed this in my discussions about China. Many of the people I talked to that supported China's handling of things (or were themselves Chinese) disagreed with me on a fundamental value basis which you can't argue. I value human rights far, far above nationalism, yet those people did not. I simply do not see how they could do that, and, I'm guessing, they can't see how I could consider human rights more important than national pride. The Internet is mostly ruled the by United States and Europe - if the word 'ruled' is even applicable. Anyway, the US and Europe tend to share the idea of human rights > nationalism, and are thus pushing it in other places too.

Now, my opinion. I don't think you can go with the 'he just has a different view than you, everyone's view is good' thing here. I think there is a 'good view' and a 'bad view' - where the "goodness" of a view is characterized by long term societal benefit and societal contentment. Obviously, I think the 'good-er' view is one which emphasizes human rights over nationalism, because while allowing human rights might cause some unpleasant effects in the short term, in the long term, it will result in a better country with a happier populace.

Why are there riots? Why is there a need to suppress information? Because people are unhappy. Clearly, the current system of suppression isn't working perfectly. In fact, it isn't working perfectly by definition, since if everyone were happy, this wouldn't be needed. (By my definition, of course.)

Now, I realize that my point of view may sound biased - incredibly so. Maybe even something along the lines of "I'm right because the things I say are better". But you say: "Just because it's different doesn't mean you must kill it." You don't have to, but perhaps it will be better for the world as a whole if you do?

I'd love to hear your counterargument if you're willing to write another sentence about china. (Ack, that sounded snarky. Wasn't meant to.)

"Boring features such as scoring, menus and a nice user interface are not implemented. Also, any other non-implemented feature is deemed boring."

Heh.

It seems to me what he's looking for is more like a "get-rich-investment". He has time and money to invest in something, and wants to use them to maximum advantage. No need to belittle the post, it's quite valid.