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"As I lay there musing in the brisk darkness, I suddenly sensed a tightening inside me. It was as if I was being ever so gently wound. Then quickly, the pressure intensified, and I breathed in rapid-fire staccato and violently shook. I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And that’s when I split apart."

This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which frequent Hacker News. It's anecdotal per account and I've found weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think it's interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More specifically, a bass guitar.

I think Co-star is fascinating for this reason because it's not so much the science of belief but the charisma of truth. People like it mostly because it's kind of sassy. For the most part, sun-moon-rising offers a quick and dirty way to assess relationship compatibility in a dating-app world where rejecting everyone and accepting everyone is tedious and exhausting. It's also a particular love language of understanding and explaining what it is you look for and being aware of how people explain themselves, for those that use it.

Technically, astrology is based on algorithms observing data of the planets positions. For the most part, to the naked eye, and to human sensibility, the planets seem to behave in harmony, resonance and stability. In reality, the long-term behavior varies chaotically. It's an n-body problem, which is as of this time of writing, unsolved. Generally, that doesn't mean it hasn't been answered, rather it means that solutions satisfying specific conditions cannot be determined by the criteria of uniqueness or existence.

But yeah, if you're going to make short term observations of a chaotic system, a sporadically random system is basically just numerical approximation. You don't need to rationalize irrationality, because you can't.

I read a paper once about an ancient tribe of hunters who had exhausted the local fauna and consulted the wisdom of the spirits through an oracle bone ceremony for the next bounty.

In essence, the oracle bone would give them a random direction. If there was nothing, they'd ask again, if there was something, they would keep asking. Doesn't matter. The important function of consulting the oracle bones was that they were randomly distributing their hunting patterns without overexhausting one particular area within range. This allows the population of game to stabilize over time.

tldr

If you're looking for answers, searching at random and searching frequently is probably the most efficient method instead of wasting time figuring out how to find it.

"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." -Alan Turing

edit: I deleted most of my comment. I don't think it added anything substantial to the conversation.

I will point out that this seems like plagiarism.

"...the retina is actually an extension of the brain, formed embryonically from neural tissue and connected to the brain by the optic nerve."

From: https://www.britannica.com/science/retina

"...The retina is actually an extension of the brain, formed embryonically from neural tissue and connected to the brain proper by the optic nerve."

4-5 cups seems about right. I typically ingest about 8 cups of coffee throughout the day. That's a close-to-full pot of coffee for me. As some have mentioned, "cups" the measurement does not necessarily equate to "cup" a receptacle. I only say this because, one or two coffees brings me to life in the morning. After that, I start to basically sustain a prolonged professional panic attack of concentrated anxiety that is more or less a reason to not schedule meetings with me in the afternoon.

That is to say, a cup from say, Starbucks would come in the following sizes:

Demi: 3oz

Short: 8oz

Tall: 12oz

Grande: 16oz

Venti: 20 oz

Trenta: 31 oz

In the US, to my knowledge: 1 cup : 8oz : 16 tbsp.

Typically, when I make 8 cups of coffee in my coffee pot, I use 6 level tablespoons of coffee grounds, medium, medium-coarse-ish. It literally doesn't matter. You swing from Turkish coffee to Cowboy coffee, the importance is that you have a consistent way to produce your desired grind. Ground coffee is unacceptable, because it oxidizes too quickly since it all tends to come in bags that nobody ever seals those correctly, and mostly because if you drink coffee, you're already lazy in the morning.

As many in the scientific community are familiar, the US is one of the last holdovers of the imperial system.

What most do not know, is that there is even significant difference between how the US and UK measure a tbsp for instance.

US: 14.8 ml for tsbp UK: 15.0 ml for tbsp

If you're making coffee, that's a huge difference.

Example: My ideal ratio is about 6 US tbsp : 8 cups of water.

That's not for flavor – so much that, in the morning, my brain literally does not care about mathematics or physics or cooking or anything really – I want to dump an exact amount of water, pour an exact amount of coffee and have a consistent cup that I can then slowly improve upon if I have a satisfactory cup of coffee.

The difference between US and UK would be 6 * 14.8 and 6 * 15.0 = 88.8 ml vs 90.0 ml.

You might say, that is a negligible difference!

HOW DARE YOU. THIS IS COOKING. THIS IS TASTE. THIS IS CHEMISTRY, THIS IS SCIENCE. THIS IS MATH. TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE, BUT TO NOT CARE IS DEMONIC.

Less confrontational: That's just for one measurement of say grounds or fluid. The conversion of difference in measurement can be applied to both grounds and water.

So let's just convert tbsp by itself between UK and US.

6 tbsp of level coffee grounds. 96 tbsp of water, at whatever quality Los Angeles tap water is, which is terrible.

6:96 = 0.0625

This is an arbitrary ratio which means absolutely nothing, but let's compare it to the UK version.

So we know that UK tbsp is slightly larger. Exactly (15.0/14.8) ~ 10%?

Okay, so that would be... (15.0/14.8) 6 = 6.08108108108 (15.0/14.8) * 96 = 97.2972972973

So notice, when you take the ratio, it is exactly the same. The terms cancel out, but you are making more coffee. This stuff tends to matter more, at higher altitudes or various humidity. Essentially, water is the most sensitive medium for variation in boiling and quality control. This may seem trivial, in my personal experience – I'd rather have too little caffeine than too much.

Basically, I want exactly two cups to be satisfactory. It has more to do with the experience of drinking coffee and taste than the actual 'boost'. Programmers or statisicians, data scientists, machine learning engineers will understand – You'd rather have just 2 of something, than to round up to 3. Nobody pours 2~3 cups of coffee. Either they are satisfied with 2, or they're chugging 3.

In whatever-programming, we call this the domain of non-linear real arithmetic as a decidable language. As in, I decide to drink more coffee than not.

As someone who started drinking coffee heavily since a teenager to offset the fact that I have never been a morning person and never will be, while also trying balance professionalism towards working in different timezones where clients prefer to start their day with a meeting...

Yeah, 1-2 cups of coffee. 8oz exactly. I have Ikea mugs. Those are 8oz. One to install my brain, another to calm it down. The second-order effects of caffeine are not unsubtle.

Anything more? I am bull-riding an anxiety trip of wanting to simultaneously produce Berlin techno and the latest innovation in machine learning. Your Mileage May Vary.

For true scientific intuition and experimental honesty, observe the following video detailing what occurs when you drink a full jar of coffee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpWVk3h2SA8

Should this be posted automatically two weeks prior to the first? I am being entirely serious, I always find these threads helpful.

This may sound obvious and pedantic but by practicing it.

Getting yourself in someone's head is something you should return to casually, formally in various contexts and subtexts.

I like to use this one: "What part of their day is this?", which feels more relevant since I work across timezones now.

Von Neumann outlined two rules.

1) Self-reproduction

2) Simulation of a Turing machine

I have seen other summaries of this description as replacing step 2 with "mutation" or using simulation of a Turing machine as being synonymous with mutation

I am not a fan of this analysis, I think two rules is too many. Really there should be only one rule: no rules.

Plus, I think the second rule necessarily implies the first, since the theory of the universal Turing machine sufficiently allows for self-reproduction which later outlined the sketches for cellular automata and subsequent models such as Conway's Game of Life.

You may consider the Cold War a real world usage for ordinary people:

https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2016/09/09/mutually-assur...

It took me a month to finish a full game for my AP European History class in High School.

Easily the best board game I have ever played.

It inspired me to actually pursue a path in diplomacy and international relations for some time.

The game was setup to be high stakes. It amounted to a month's worth of assignments. Only one team could achieve an A grade by domination. Everyone else fails the assignment.

There were 42 of us. So each nation had 6 students.

I remember almost every move we made to this day because I remember how we reached the final turn and what had to happen for those pieces to be there.

One twist: Each nation had spies. I was a spy for Germany. But I was elected as leader of Turkey. My grade depended on Germany winning, not Turkey. However, Germany does not know I am a spy for them. But I won my election by revealing to my group that I was a German spy and how I would use this information to manipulate both countries.

11 turns later. Europe is decimated. Italy has been crushed by the mighty Turkish armada. Russia is starving while fending off a relentless horde of Turkish armies. Austria-Hungary is completely occupied by Turkish forces, advancing on Germany. The British and French navies form an emergency pact to resolve their despite over the English channel to meet us in the Mediterranean, and are prepared to strike us at Greece. This last turn is my masterpiece. The Germans have rallied a massive force, intending to match my positions in the Balkans. The Turkish empire only needs one or two more tiles to claim a victory. The final moves are coordinated such that the Germans must strike at us to deter our assault. However, if I moved things around slightly, the German army would end up seizing the majority supply center limit necessary to achieve victory.

My team ousts me as leader. Right on time. They intend to decimate Germany. I have been useful up until now. I cannot issue the final commands and the German resistance will be annihilated by the sheer amount of units we possess. They issue the assault without me and I cannot do anything but reveal our hand to German intelligence. With or without me, the Turkish army will fall since we know their movements.

However, Germany fails to issue any orders before the time limit expires. They make no moves. They are crushed by the unencumbered Turkish assault.

The German leader was a Russian spy.

Turkey wins. Victory by domination.

One problem.

The entire country of Turkey was composed of spies, assigned to every other Great Power. No one technically works for Turkey. None of our grades belong to Turkey. Every group receives an F. Everyone in our group fails. Nobody receives an A.

The class absolutely loses it. I have somehow managed to piss off the entire class where everyone loses.

The teacher is frustrated. Technically, this was possible, but it has never happened before. He chose Turkey to be made of spies because Turkey almost never wins, to give it some advantage. He's reticent to amend his grading policy since if any of the other spies were actually good, they would have revealed each other to the group and avoided this situation. But nobody ended up revealing themselves because they assumed that I was the only spy - because I already revealed myself.

A compromise is negotiated and settled upon.

We're going to watch Patton and write an essay on it. Everyone receives an A.

Perhaps you've heard of the "Butterfly Effect" but not a formal definition of the term.

For the issue of predicting weather, the model of weather is "sensitive". The observation metaphor of the "butterfly effect" is that relatively small perturbations to the system have the observed effect of being indistinguishable between relatively large perturbations. We may substitute "small" with "deterministic" and "large" with "non-deterministic".

A summary of this statement would be that initial or past conditions of the system poorly characterize the dynamic and chaotic behavior of nonlinear dynamic systems.

The phrase is drawn from the title of the paper by EN Lorenz:

https://static.gymportalen.dk/sites/lru.dk/files/lru/132_kap...

Somber note: Weather is in fact, becoming predictable, precise and accurate: towards chaos, volatility and instability. Measurement and policy do not adequately address the ongoing issue of climate "change", which may more adequately be defined as climate chaos.

One of my early childhood memories was crayfishing. You can pretty much put anything on a string and these things will bite onto it. They are not picky. It's not even really fishing, it's almost as easy as just grabbing them from the water. It's a fun activity for kids because it doesn't require any skill to get good at.

They are an indicator species. They are not known for tolerating polluted bodies of water and quickly die if the water becomes toxic.

I tried looking up more information about this:

https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Mommy_and_I_are_one

"According to studies that determine the subconscious mind's ability to absorb subliminal messages, the subliminal phrase "Mommy and I are one" is considered the most effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation."

How do you test if a subliminal message is effective?

This part is interesting:

In a game of darts, researchers found the the phrase "It's OK to beat dad" improved scores.

Few observations:

Cicada groups split off while they occupied glaciated territory. The Appalachia mountain range is famously, formed by glaciers. The Valley and Ridge part of Appalachia, was a major highway of immigration and colonization. It is more likely that territory borders respect the geography and that the brood respects geography, rather than to each other.

A rough inspection of the brood distribution and the continental divides shows approximate respect to the St. Lawrence and Eastern Continental Divide.

There also seems to be some respect to the division between Mississipi Flyway and Atlantic flyway, which are bird migration routes.

It is my understanding that an organism highly dependent on deciduous forests will respect those regions and this includes most of the South.

Turns out, humans like deciduous forests too. They're useful for timber, charcoal and potash (fertilizer). The borders of this territory lines up pretty squarely with the border to Canada. That makes civilization a predator of the cicada through deforestation. The Onondaga brood is named for the Onondaga people.

As I understand, the Brood distribution effort is done by crowdsourcing.

Given the longevity of the brood cycle and the inconsistency in historical record, it could very well just be the case that the recency of this effort has not synced with an emergence.

That's my guess why cicadas and humans line up.

More practically, cicada cycles provided a necessary evolutionary flush of nutrients, bacteria and fungi across the distributions. They breed in such overwhelming numbers that the entire ecosystem of predators is likely to prosper from their emergence. So perhaps humans settle where there is game and timber, and where there is game and timber it is likely that the area prospered from a cicada cycle.

For those who don't get the reference:

There's a scene in Silicon Valley based on a story about Peter Thiel.

The scene involves the idea of 'prime collision' and cicada cycles.

http://valleywag.gawker.com/the-peter-thiel-sesame-seed-scen...

Addendum: Don't just pick any prime numbers. The Babylonians devised our time system because it's highly composite or 'antiprime'.

So obvious primes such as 2, 3 and 5 won't do.

For the uninitiated, hella is flexible as a quantifier and intensifier. Hella has hella meanings for hella words.

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

Honestly, being from the Bay Area, I'm against pegging hella to a specific size. It feels more appropriate for cases where you don't know how many, but 'a lot' feels insufficient.

If you want to record your Terminal output, here's a helpful answer:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/396123/how-to-recor...

This will let you record from your built-in microphone.

If you want to record direct output, download Blackhole and route the audio through the virtual device: https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole

Audio quality will need a bit of tweaking with gain.

I submitted this thread as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19579216

I've been into program to music to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music

If you want indiscernible lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz47h75_FJo

(Not sure this fits the criteria of 'decent')

I like long pieces that distort my sense of time and concentration and give texture to the feeling of being in the zone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZZ0DYIkaP8

I saw "Love is the Message, the Message is Death" at the SFMOMA.

It was the first and only time I have ever been reduced to complete sobbing in public by a piece of art.

Can't get the page to load despite disabling all of my trackers.

I talked to an Uber employee once about a "Zoolander mode" project for drivers so that it only turns right and cannot turn left. The code was pretty simple if you've ever written a maze-solving algorithm. (Hint: What happens if you follow either side of wall for the entire maze?)

In theory, this would be useful for truck drivers or prioritizing passenger pickup locations.

But now, I use it as an example of overengineering and overoptimization.

In practice, the main concern should be reducing cognitive load on the driver. Additional instructions, rules that can be potentially broken, inconsistencies in logic, all of it poses a substantial risk.

Oh that makes a lot of sense.

Somehow, I managed to permanently set my advertisements to Vietnamese, which I don't know how to change. What's weird is that Google also started doing this to me too.

It gave me an idea. I call them canaryprofiles. Basically the same idea as creating fingerprints or initial seeds of a cold start engine. What you do is you create a bunch of accounts that are explicitly interested in certain topics and post specific content. Then you follow/unfollow them to set a flavor for your timeline. It helps kick the recommendation engine out of feedback loops, I was stuck getting recommend only Billie Eilish content for like 3 months. (I was experimenting with what happens when you follow nobody and it seemed to permafrost my cold start recommendations, surprisingly every single post on my TL was Billie Eilish).

Zoomers do this too with pods, I think they all sign onto the same account so it can't track them as effectively?

Have you considered:

One tier and one price? Make it simple.

Consider this, how much time/money/effort do you want to spend incentivizing multiple tiers of payment which may or may not just stress out the user to not sign up?

One of the replies briefly mentions coffee cup vibrations.

There's a fun Numberphile episode just about this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfzNJE4CK_s

By far, it is my favorite trick for impressing dining company.

There's already Pink Elephants which are cool

A few observations and anecdotes from a lifetime smoker.

1) A lot of my friends smoked Juuls. Once those became hard to find, they switched to cigarettes.

2) I hate smoking lights or menthols because I need to smoke more of them to get the same satisfaction as a 100.

3) A lot of people don't know you can at least write-off smoking cessation aids on your taxes.

4) There are medications such as Wellbutrin that help reduce cravings. I've taken one, and it basically makes it so you get nauseous from smoking or dampens your ability to taste it at all.

5) It's annoying to get cessation aids. There are plenty of neighborhoods without even a basic pharmacy and no dearth of liquor stores.

6) There's campaigns to prevent people from smoking and there's campaigns to help people quit. There's one way to moralize and there's another way towards harm reduction. Telling people they will die or get sick only makes them feel more cool. Smoking is cool. Especially when you're a teenager who feels invincible.

6a) I like this campaign they did in Japan produced by Japan Tobacco. http://inventorspot.com/articles/japan_tobaccos_delightfully...

7) Encourage smokers to carry an ashtray. Muji sells one for $5. It is my favorite accessory, because I use it to pick up other people's cigarettes. https://www.muji.us/store/d-aluminium-portable-ashtray.html

8) Cigarettes are incredibly valuable as currency and shifting their value towards the black market will backfire. The illegal cigarette trade has all sorts of geopolitical ramifications and even selling a loosie here in USA will get you killed.

9) Nicotine by itself is not sufficient for me. I smoke cigarettes BECAUSE they are dirty. There is something more than just nicotine that is addictive about the flavor. Substituting or replacing nicotine intake does nothing to change my addiction to the habit itself.

10) People smoke literally just to talk to other smokers. This is basically a science in nightlife culture and even a tradition in some places.

In conclusion: this smells like ethics washing. The only "better" cigarette, is no cigarette.

The argument for a "safer" cigarette is old. And it's marketing. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/cigarette/

There are substantial measures we can take actions towards to reduce harm. Reduction of pesticides. Polonium. Regulation in cultivation and curing. Did you know that tomatoes can get mosaic virus from smoke or ash? Things like 'natural', 'organic', 'less-additive' create false perceptions of 'healthiness'.

Legalize cigarettes. Ban smoking.

Aside: The title is 'easy-way-to-quit-smoking'

The headline is 'The Easy Way for Joe Biden to Save Lives'

The submission is 'Eliminating nicotine from tobacco products could help up to 5 million adult smokers quit within a year.'

I find the wording to be a bit odd.

Making cigarettes even more conspicuous I think will backfire on teenagers

Twitter. Just Twitter.

All of my jobs have come from a direct recommendation from the head of the department. Everything else gets passed through HR and takes forever.

People find me, or I find them. We chat. Interview. Test. Offer.

Sometimes whoishiring is good for more niche jobs but don't post your email in plaintext. Use an alias, I've noticed certain variants of my email getting sold off to recruiter farms from here.

You want a LinkedIn just to show that you are a real person. Levels.fyi is a good resource for negotiating salaries and managing expectations.

Start with what you do.

What am I bad at and needs to be done better? Fire yourself.

Hire someone who is good at it.

What are they bad at and needs to be done better?