vijay_nair

When drugs targeting the gut have effects in the brain, serotonin receptors are usually involved and it's 5-HT4 this time. Taking carbidopa (or benserazide, another peripheral decarboxylase inhibitor) along with prucalopride can potentially enhance the memory effects by preventing gut metabolism.

Blocking 5-HT6 also improves memory (in mice) but it seems to come with circadian disruption.

Email: [email protected]

Experience: 15 years

Branding & identity designer, full-stack web developer focused on helping startups get both their marketing and product off the ground ASAP. I cover everything from logos and business cards to websites and web apps (Node + Mongo or MySQL)

Designer of the branding for io.js, which has now become the new Node.js — https://behance.net/gallery/23269525/IOJS-logo-concept

Social banners designed as part of the branding for io.js on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/official_iojs

Previously I was employed as a Front-end Engineer at Infinera working on web-based NMS solutions (Angular + D3).

Email: [email protected]

Experience: 14+ years

I'm proud to be the designer of the branding for io.js, which has since become the new Node.js — https://behance.net/gallery/23269525/IOJS-logo-concept. I also did the social marketing banners for their Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/official_iojs.

Previously, I was a front-end engineer at Infinera working on web-based telecom solutions, mainly focused on bringing their Java-based DNA NMS to the web using Angular and D3.js. The highlight of my work there was building a D3.js-based semantic zoom-pan interface that allowed customers to start at the node level and drill down into the servers at each node, then into the racks inside the server, continue still further down to the chips and lasers inside the racks. This works similar to how you can zoom-pan from the world map all the way down to the street level in Google Maps. This allowed navigating the interface with zero clicks so NOC engineers can see an alarm and simply scroll to dig deep down into a node and identify the faulty piece of equipment. Besides this, I also designed and implemented a standard style guide/design language for all their internal apps along with a unified icon theme.

Over the years I have been lucky to have found quite a few clients from these threads and it has always been exciting to work with HNers. My one and only regret so far was when I almost landed the logo design for jsDelivr CDN; even though they paid me for the job, I found out later they later decided to go with a different design that has an angular.js/HTML5 bent to it. I use their service quite a bit and I would've loved to see my work on their website. That would have been a big break for me and I'm sad to have missed out on it.

Hope to redeem myself soon with my next project. Looking forward to meeting some new faces this time around, cheers : )

I rolled out my own Firefox/Chrome web extension to tweak the native UI. Nothing drastic, just a gentle tweak of the CSS.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/vjk2005/status/1343664202288754689

I have a private HN client that does this and more but I don't want to release it and destroy what we have here. I've gone a step further and removed username display next to comments so I make judgements based solely on the content of the message.

Only some of them are on a daily schedule so actual pill count/day is low. Niacin (vitamin B3) for example leads to diabetes and liver damage when taken upwards of 4g/day. So I take 0.5 mg (nearly a tenth of the therapeutic dose, that too on alternate days, to reduce the potential for side effects even further). High dose vitamin B6 (>20mg/day, I take 3mg once every 5 days for 30x reduction compared to therapeutic dose) can lead to lung cancer in men. So the b-complex pill¹ is taken once every 5 days. Vitamin D overdose can lead to hypercalcemia so that's taken once a week (60000 IU) and some months I stay off it entirely as fat-soluble vitamins like vit. D tend to build up in the system. There are similar rules for other supplements as well.

¹The B-vitamins (1 to 12) + zinc + calcium are a single pill called "Recobex-Z". These are generally called "b-complex", it's a combination drug.

Essentially the daily pill count is 2 in the morning + 1 in the afternoon + 2 at night, so 5 pills/day. I also do supplement fasting days with no pills taken on that day.

No condition and no medical diagnosis. For the past few years I've been afflicted by periods of existential crisis and L-DOPA short circuits this. Much better mood, focus and most importantly — drive (which is what helps most with the EC). Feels almost as good as how I felt when in my teens¹.

As others have mentioned I simply buy them off of Amazon.

¹completed my 37th trip around the sun yesterday, the 17th.

Vitamins (B-K) + calcium + fish and cod liver oil: several years.

L-citrulline, zinc: 2+ years.

Ashwagandha, Boswellia: slightly more than a year.

L-DOPA, niacin, L-taurine: a few months.

It's been a few months now. L-DOPA tolerance is dose-dependant, term-dependent as well as drug-dependant. After looking for ways to work around this, I found L-DOPA from Mucuna pruriens does not have the two major side-effects I was concerned about:

1. LID (Levodopa induced dyskinesia) - ironically the "cure" for Parkinson's disease (abbreviated to PD from here on) induces PD like side effects!

2. tolerance built up over chronic use.

We're not sure why Mucuna is able to do this but regarding LID one hypothesis advanced in a paper I read was that it might have something to do with pure L-DOPA being co-administered with Carbidopa in order to prevent peripheral metabolism of L-DOPA so that a greater amount reaches the brain. In the paper they show Carbidopa worsens LID and patients on pure L-DOPA alone took longer to get LID. Mucuna group didn't see any LID symptoms for the duration of the study.

Regarding tolerance, there are a few papers that compared Mucuna with other common PD drugs and found trial participants remained responsive throughout the study to a greater degree while on Mucuna compared to the other drugs. Here's one such paper: "Mucuna pruriens in Parkinson’s disease: a double blind clinical and pharmacological study", https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/75/12/1672.full.pdf

Tolerance also seems to depend on the dosage and delivery regimen, the key thing to watch out being the prevention of dopamine peaks and to maintain a smooth steady level through continuous administration via IV — "Does Tolerance Develop to Levodopa? Comparison of 2- and 21-H Levodopa Infusions ", https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8474479/

Having done all this work, I'm still highly wary of continuing Mucuna for years. I keep a watchful eye on any behavioral (hallucinations, insomnia) and physiological (tachycardia) abnormalities in myself, just in case. Also because I don't have PD, I can stick to a relatively low dosage (PD patients are given 45g of Mucuna/day equivalent to 1.5g of L-DOPA; I take 2.4g/day, roughly a twentieth of the therapeutic dose) which seems to be highly correlated with LID (what I'm most anxious about).

What gave me the confidence to move forward was knowing that Mucuna has been used in traditional Ayurvedic and Siddha medicinal systems here in India for thousands of years and is still actively in use as treatment for mood disorders¹. Something that lasts long and is also backed by science can't be wrong. Even so, I won't deny that L-DOPA via Mucuna is a minefield I'm gingerly stepping across.

¹https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyxVCPgUVMI (sorry, the video is in Tamil, "poonaikali" is vernacular here for Mucuna pruriens)

Supplements, especially L-DOPA (amazing mood improvement and libido boost), L-citrulline (libido and energy boost) and niacin.

There are other supplements¹ in my stack but these three stand out as the effects are near immediate, measured in mere minutes/hours.

¹zinc methionine, L-taurine, Ashwagandha, Boswellia serrata, fish oil, cod liver oil, vitamins B1, B2, B6, B9, B12, C , D, K, calcium, resveratrol.

Email: [email protected]

Experience: 14 years

Designer of the branding for io.js, which has now become the new Node.js — https://behance.net/gallery/23269525/IOJS-logo-concept

Social banners for io.js on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/official_iojs

I almost landed the logo design for jsDelivr CDN but even though they paid me for the job, they seem to have gone in a more angular.js/HTML5 style logo in the end. Which is a pity as I use their service quite a bit and would've loved to see my work on their masthead.

Previously, I was a front-end engineer at Infinera working on web-based telecom solutions. Specifically, I re-built parts of their Java-based DNA NMS for the web using Angular and D3.js. I also designed and implemented a style language for their internal apps.

Over the years I have found a few clients from these threads and it has always been exciting to work with HNers. Looking forward to meeting some new faces this time around, cheers.

• Magnetism. There are plenty of videos out there calling it the result of a relativistic charge imbalance. But I've never been able to use this point-of-view to practical use cases like understanding how permanent magnets work or how increasing the number of windings in inductors boosts the magnetic field strength. There were more situations I tried to put this POV into use but I can't remember them off the top of my head.

• Qualia. What is this subjective experience that I know as consciousness? I've gone through Wiki, SEP and a fair number of books on philosophy and a few on neuroscience but I still don't understand what it is that I experience as the color "red" when in reality it's just a bunch of electric fields (photons). Why can't I get the same experience — i.e., color — when I look at UV or IR photons? These too are the very same electric fields as the red, blue, green I see all the time.

• Photographic composition. I'm a designer. I know them. I use them. But only empirically. I just do not understand them at a neuroscientific level. Why does rule-of-thirds feel pleasing? Is the golden ration bullshit? My gut says yes but I'm unable to come up with a watertight rebuttal. Why do anamorphic ultra-widescreen shoots feel so dramatic/cinematic? Yet to see an online exposition on the fundamental reasons underlying the experience. Any questions to artists are deflected with the standard "It's art, not science" reply.

• Wave-Particle duality. "It's a probability wave that determines when a particle will pop into existence out of nothingness." okay, where exactly does this particle come from? If enough energy accumulates in a region of empty space, a particle pops into existence? What is this "energy"? What is it made of? What even is an electron, really? I've followed quite a few rabbit holes and come out none the wiser for it.

• Convolution. It's disappointing how little I understand it given how wide its applications are. Convolution of two gaussians is a gaussian? Convolution in time domain is multiplication in frequency domain and vice-versa? How do these come out of the definition which is "convolution is sliding a flipped kernel over a signal"?

Email: [email protected]

Experience: 14 years

Branding and Identity designer for startups. From logos and collateral (business cards, letterheads), to social media banners as well as websites and web apps (Node+Mongo back-end, Vanilla JS front-end).

Designer of the award-winning branding for io.js, which has now become the new Node.js — https://behance.net/gallery/23269525/IOJS-logo-concept Social banners for io.js on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/official_iojs

Previously, I was Front-end engineer at Infinera working on web-based telecom solutions (NMS).