Supreme

On the subject of a particular drug sometimes being useful and sometimes counter-productive, the missing link is that the brain has several points of neurochemical homeostasis - these are also known as 'moods'. Moving from a given mood to another requires some combination of influences. E.g. moving from mood X to Y may require a boost in dopamine while moving from mood Z to Y may require more GABA. This is why it's relative and different people are not affected by the same drugs in the same ways - their baseline levels of major neurotransmitters differ. So one person has a natural tendency towards mood X while another tends towards mood Y - i.e. one person has naturally high dopamine levels which another has high levels of serotonin.

I believe that these tendencies are the result of the body adapting to the conditions it grew up in. The major factors I can see are diet, the social situation (both in terms of family and culture-at-large), amount of exercise, genetics and pollutants.

I completely agree that mood and productivity are inherently inseparable. It's not a one way relationship either - they affect each other. Hell, everything in the brain seems to affect everything else in the brain. It's a giant web of dependencies and influences. It reminds me a lot of badly designed legacy software systems - everything makes sense when you dig in deep but looks like an absolute mess from afar.

Comment · 14 years ago

Who wouldathunk that doing LSD could turn someone into a complete asshole with no regard for an open culture and a penchant for superficial things which don't matter in the least (like one button devices)?

Comment · 14 years ago

So it's essentially a marketing problem. I get the feeling that you were trying to suggest that it's worthy because it's popular. If so, argumentum ad populum is irrational. If not, apologies.

Comment · 14 years ago

Good to see that PR is on the job of trying to convince people that they don't really want what they really want. It's funny that even verbatim search asks me if I'm sure that I spelt something correctly. I guess our definitions over verbatim differ but to me, in this context, it means "do this and stop second guessing me kthnx." It's also annoying that I have to switch to another mode every time I want to search. There appears to be no setting to set verbatim as the default and even if there was, one would either need to always be on the same computer (if the preference is saved in a cookie) or always signed in (if it's set on the account).

A suggestion - provide a subdomain with the old search, e.g. old.google.com. All of the mainstream customers get whatever UX/marketing think is best for them and everyone else gets to keep using a tool which they find useful - everyone wins!

Oh, and since you might be the right person to ask, why is Quora still turning up in search results when they censor most of the thread? They're even worse than Experts Exchange (and why are they still turning up in results too?).

Comment · 14 years ago

Society is shooting itself in the foot with the trend of dumbing everything down. While we sit here being presented with one button devices so that "we don't get confused", the rest of the world is busy educating itself to a high standard and building tomorrow's industries. This laziness will be the downfall of the west and we'll have this constant thirst for profit at the expense of society's well-being to blame for it. IMO, anyway.

Comment · 14 years ago

I'm not running a blog or expecting anyone to take what they read in a comment on some site on the internet seriously.

Label me however you want, it's a free internet (for now, anyway).

I still find it funny how anyone can start a blog and become famous for it. Maybe I should do the same and cash in on all that buttery goodness of advertising revenue...

Comment · 14 years ago

facepalm

All of the pain points that this supposedly solves have already been solved with tabs. Middle click compose and all of those problems are solved with the added bonus of having an entire screen to write your email in.

Google is being taken over by pointy haired managers and marketing. RIP.

Comment · 14 years ago

Zynga has (up until now) made a lot of money and they write shit code. Hell, most of the companies I've seen have made money while writing shit code. Making money indicates that a person knows how to make money. Writing good code indicates that a person knows how to write good code. Since the two are disconnected, I stand by my statement that this man is a fraud. You simply don't start a programming blog when you created a new language just to address a small concern in the project spec. Start a blog on how to make money or run a business, sure, but don't tread into a field where people are trying to produce something of quality and try to 'teach' them something.

The argument you have just presented is irrational since it's central point rests upon the fallacy of false cause.

ding!

Another satisfied customer. Next!

Comment · 14 years ago

I've outlined how we solved this problem in another comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4717713

Incidentally, I'm not here to form relationships - personal or otherwise. The primary goal of social media sites is to indulge in procrastination while advertisers bombard us with new products, not to improve one's life. For the latter, there are books, actions and real people made of flesh and blood. This reminds me a lot of some of the people I encountered in my gaming days - they tend to forget about the context of the platform they are using.