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Ask HN: What annoys you?

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341–350 of 355 posts

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#341
post #52

I'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5 characters of each line)

Thanks for the suggestions. No more importing text into a spreadsheet, splitting into columns, and copy/pasting it back to a text editor for me.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't like when people downvote when they merely disagree.

I would guess that you were downvoted because of extreme brevity (e.g. "Iran") or because your comment trivialized the tough business of making and running something like Twitter. If that's the case, then the downvoting doesn't just mean "I disagree"; it means "I disagree, and don't think this guy is worth arguing with." It's a reply to tone as well as content. Mind you, that's just speculation. I didn't vote on your…

Well, fwiw, I get the fail whale more often than not when signing in. How much funding have they received again? Iran - well, I am not the only one annoyed. Pretty much the entire middle east dreads the thought of it with a nuclear arsenal, let alone the damage it can do around the world with its proxies.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#343
post #21

Informal music notation. Existing systems are fine enough for formal classical notation, but if you want to make a quick rough sketch (e.g., lead sheets in The Real Book ) it's pretty cumbersome, and the amount of time & effort it takes doesn't seem commensurate with the sort of document desired. I've been pondering this off and on for years; I think it might require a pretty fundamental switch in how the data is ent…

Oh man... This one bugs me too, but I see a lot of potential for things like the iPad here...

Yes, agreed. I am actually working on an iPad app for this purpose.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#344
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed a great skill, but time is limited and it feels so incredibly futile to spend 30 minutes preparing nice food for the millionth time, when in 10 minutes it will only be a memory in my stomach.

Eat slower? (edit: removed a superfluous link, so instead I'll just be anecdotal. Cooking and eating are great social activities when done right. In my mind it's incredibly relaxing to cut vegetables and manage a meal. Conversations can spring into new inspiration or just better bonding with friends. I understand that not all meals can put striving for that kind of bliss as a major goal, but I'm not trying to defend…

Make more food. Leftovers!

Every time I make pasta, I boil the entire box and make too much sauce so I can eat later.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#345

I am annoyed at how much the hacker/startup scene sucks here in India. All the cool people and projects are in the USA and the people who don't emigrate end up working on the outsourced Java/RoR enterprise program from hell simply because there aren't any technically interesting jobs. Beng teh greta outsourcing destination for crap legacy code creates an ecosystem of substandard "programmers" who all get certified in…

I tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot. Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize something like this.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#346

laundry. i think it's absurd that we can put a man on the moon and send a message around the world instantly (from a touch screen computer in my pocket no less!) and i'm still stuck moving laundry from one machine to another machine 2 feet away.

I am not sure if I can sympathize you because I only have one washing machine. Is the second machine for drying I wonder if I should even want one, if it causes such annoyance. :-/

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#347
post #43

Dealing with random candy attraction aka dopamine email effect. The reason I and other people keep refreshing email, fb and hn all day long is because you never know when something good is coming up. Maybe one email that will change your life. A wall post from a potential partner. A insightful reply to your comment. Limiting one's usage to predefined periods (eg mail only at lunch) is a start, but far from enough if…

I advise to only check email/IM/what have you once a day at most. In the evening, when you have done the meaningful work. Don't use notifications. Only launch email, IM client when you need them.

See Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule if you haven't:

http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#348
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixation? Cryonics involves cryoprotectant and vitrification at liquid nitrogen temperatures, not plastination, and the last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope. Also, think in terms of the brain being carefully examined on the molecular level by nanotech for tiny hints in the process of being restored to its exact old state, not in terms of trying to warm people up using present-day technology an…

last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope Do you have a reference to some images I could look at?

Fired off your question to Aschwin de Wolf and got back:

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html (Figure 4 and 5 for the more recent technology, earlier photos are older technology)

http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm... (photos as of 1995 tech)

Aschwin also notes this paper is important: http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#349
post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

last I heard the results looked excellent under a microscope Do you have a reference to some images I could look at?

Fired off your question to Aschwin de Wolf and got back: http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/newtechnology.html (Figure 4 and 5 for the more recent technology, earlier photos are older technology) http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm... (photos as of 1995 tech) Aschwin also notes this paper is important: http://www.ijcep.com/707005A.html

Thanks for inquiring and relaying the response you got.

Here is an example of the scale I'm interested in: http://synapses.clm.utexas.edu/atlas/1_6_2.stm

Things that look like the newtechnology.html's figs 4 & 5 can look very bad at higher mags. I know this from painful experience. I don't see any high mag pictures at newtechnology.html or in Lemler et al. 2004, which that page cites. These mags are quite accessible once one has gone to the trouble of preparing sections for transmission electron microscopy.

Sheleg et al. 2008 was interesting and surprising to me. It is published in a journal not included in the ISI Science Citation Index, so I can't tell at a glance how their paper might have been received by other workers. I might try replicating their results myself at some point down the road, it would be a pretty simple experiment for me to do (at least, the EM part, not the histology work).

I understand the hope that even anatomically degraded tissue could retain sufficient information for cryonics to be useful. I just don't plan to bet my own money on this hope, at least not at this time.

Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?

#350

1. Seeing a traffic jam where every car has exactly one person in it. This is just a tragedy. 2. Job interviews that require quizzes and an "intensive" multi-stage interview process. As a candidate, I've just sent you a bunch of links to open repositories where you can review my code and offered to give you other code examples from my private repositories on request. I give you links to my previous work and letters o…

>This mythical "programmer that can't program" myth

This is absolutely not a myth. I've seen it first hand in an interview. Having said that, it appears that you've been dealing with "interviewers who can't interview" or companies with really stupid hiring practices. These silly tests they do are designed to tease out what you've freely offered. They should just have their engineers look at your repos, verify which commits are yours and how good the code is.

But honestly, imagine working with a place that has such stupid rigidity. I seriously doubt this inflexibility would exist in HR in isolation. I think they did you a favor (accidentally).

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