Pennies.
Actually, I'd rather just see cents go away for everything in the US and deal with integers for everyday purchases and floating point when necessary.
Isn't that called "dollars"?
Ask HN: What annoys you?
331–340 of 355 posts
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do electron microscopy on nervous tissue. I know what it takes to get good brain preservation at the fine scale, at the level of synaptic connectivity. I know how small problems in fixation and embedding can completely trash the anatomy at this fine scale. I am skeptical that current cryonics methods can preserve the brain at anything better than 'massive stroke' quality.
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?
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#333Traffic noise. Build quieter cars, give more thought to urban design. Make low noise a design property.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't planning to post in this thread, but now you mention it, what annoys me is people who seem to think that their particular utopia will be the first to have no unintended consequences whatsoever. Double the annoyance factor when they refer to an engineering approach to the problem, given that the whole utopian premise is such stupendously bad engineering in the first place.
1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's a…
First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's an accurate description of your agenda.
1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty impotent when it's actually not.
2) In engineering we generally make incremental changes to society, test them and either back away from them or put in place feedback mechanisms to keep them in check. "Wouldn't it be great if we abolished death by natural causes (and everything else stayed exactly the same)" is about as far as you can get from this. See Billy Vaughn Koen, Discussion of the Method, pp. 233-236.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#335I'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)
To add to the list, Notepad++ (hold down alt and click+drag, I believe) does this, as does Eclipse (although it's annoying to enable in Eclipse (shift+alt+a to toggle it on, then block select, then toggle it off). It also only seems to work on some file types (e.g. .java, but not .xml) in Eclipse.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
1) You are putting words in my mouth. I never said that. My stance on this is that if the new problems aren't bigger than the problems we have now of having about 150k people die each day, mostly after long periods of suffering, affecting whole families and losing humanity lots of knowledge and expertise, draining our resources into losing battles against diseases that are fatal, then we should do this. Everybody's a…
First off, I plead guilty to putting words in your mouth. My comment was an accurate description of what annoys me; I leave it up to the reader to decide whether it's an accurate description of your agenda. 1) If there were no aging, everybody would most likely spend all of their time playing WoW and never leaving the house for fear of being hit by a bus. All of those slogans about how life is short become pretty imp…
1) I don't think that argument has much weight. Considering how little healthy people think about death, and how the incredible extension of the average lifespan didn't seem to have catastrophic effects like that, I doubt we'd turn into some kind of sci-fi distopia where everybody doesn't do anything. You live one day at a time, and if you are healthy and like your life today, you'll want to live tomorrow. And so on. Doesn't matter if it's for 40 years, 80 years, or 120 years. Most people who say they want to die are frail, sick and suffering, and what they want is not death per se, but for the pain to stop. You don't see many healthy 20-30 years old wish for death unless they suffer from severe depression. The cliché about "death gives meaning to life" is just rationalization, trying to convince ourselves that something we think is inevitable is actually a good thing. But if there was no death from the diseases of aging, we certainly wouldn't invent it or miss it, just like we wouldn't invent smallpox or malaria.
2) I'm calling it the engineering approach because that's what it is (http://sens.org/sens-research/what-is-sens/engineering-solut...) as opposed to the gerontology approach or the geriatry approach. It is about simply repairing damage, the same way you maintain a vintage car or an old house for 10x longer than it was designed to last without necessarily having to understand exactly how that damage is created (by metabolism or physical and chemical reactions, etc), and without having to know how to cure all diseases (you repair damage before it becomes a pathology).
If you want to learn more about the biology and details of the proposals I'm talking about, check out the links I posted in other comments here. They have detailed plans for the 7 types of damages that accumulate from the operation of metabolism. Otherwise, your criticisms aren't specific, you are just attacking a vague idea of what you think this is about.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#337Food. I miss the healthy, affordable, sociable dining halls from university. There are people who cook better than I do, and who should be able to make great food at a reasonable price by buying fresh ingredients in bulk. My options for eating are * Cook it myself [1]. Cheap but takes time and effort to make good food. * Restaurant. Good food but expensive and takes time. I don't always want table service and small p…
I agree with this... only I want to add one more star
* open late.
where do I get food at 2am? silicon valley is full of Engineers who don't have to stumble in to work until 11 or noon, yet most places that serve food close at 9pm. what is with that?
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not quite the replacement for a dining hall, but learning to cook is not only cheap but really enriching in other ways as well. 1. It's easier to be healthier (and in time this transforms to "impossible to not be healthier". 2. It's an impressive skill for attracting relationships both friendly and romantic. 3. Once you're confident, cooking for a party of friends and second degree strangers is a GREAT way to me…
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 all meals.)
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#339Advertisements! They're obnoxious, obviously biased, and interfere with whatever it was you were doing (watching a show, visiting a website, reading a newspaper, whatever). It's just wrong. And we all know this, yet we just accept it like it's some fact of life. In addition, it doesn't just affect customers, but all newspapers/magazines/sites that rely on "advertisement income" to make a buck. One thing that puzzles…
It is sort of crazy. Consider two products A and B. They are identical, except that A is more expensive and has advertising. B is cheaper, but has no advertising. Which one wins? A because nobody knows that B even exists. However, everybody is worse off. Consumers got advertising displayed to them that they didn't want to see and they got to pay more for the privilege. The manufacturer of B lost totally. Even the man…
search engines provide some of the answer, but search engines have an upper bound to their effectiveness. If a search engine were more effective than an ad, people won't click on search engine ads, and the search engine wouldn't make any money.
I think what we really need is another business model for search engines.
Re: Ask HN: What annoys you?
#340Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me, same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always an order of magnitude better.
I've had a lot of success with the CouchSurfers community. It's a travel oriented site, but they also promote meetups for the people living in a city so as to form a tighter, most trusting community. When you throw travel-wise tourists, friendly city ambassadors, and generally open-minded go-out-and-tackle-the-world style people together in a room and have them share stories or plan events it gets crazy and amazing r…
Likewise - If you have time and love meeting interesting people, Couchsurfing is awesome. I've met some very interesting people, and it's quite safe.