Hacker News: qbit

New comment by qbit in "Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One"

qbit — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:51:02 +0000

I’ve always been somewhat dissatisfied with image viewing/browsing software. Gqview and Sequential came close to being what I wanted, but there were things about both that I didn’t like. I finally just wrote my own custom viewer using pyqt. For me, it is perfect software!

New comment by qbit in "'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue"

qbit — Sat, 20 Apr 2024 01:02:57 +0000

A chicken once beat a friend of mine at tic-tac-toe at a state fair.

New comment by qbit in "Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older, finds study"

qbit — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 04:03:00 +0000

I just wanted to mention how I cope with occasional restless leg syndrome. I find that a wall sit for two minutes right before trying to fall asleep works every time. I have to do it long enough and push hard enough to make my legs really burn from the exertion. The more unpleasant it is, the better it works. Afterwards, I immediately get in bed and try to go to sleep (it doesn’t work unless I do it right before attempting to fall asleep). Usually by the time my heart rate returns to normal, I’m asleep.

New comment by qbit in "The Screwed-O-Meter (2013)"

qbit — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 02:23:39 +0000

I disable js in safari (which is my main browser) on ios. If there is something that I really want to see that requires js, I switch to brave which has js enabled. But most of the time if a site requires js, I just leave the site. I now find browsing the web with js enabled to be intolerable.

New comment by qbit in "Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear"

qbit — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 18:17:13 +0000

Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part:

“Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.”

Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.

New comment by qbit in "Technical milestone reached: global earth system simulations with 1.2 km resoln"

qbit — Sat, 08 Oct 2022 23:45:54 +0000

Also relevant and mind-expanding essay:

Simulation, Consciousness, Existence

Hans Moravec, 1998.

https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles...

New comment by qbit in "You don't need a math PhD to play Dwarf Fortress, just to code it"

qbit — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 05:05:37 +0000

I would make an even stronger assertion that this is almost certainly the case. ;-)

New comment by qbit in "Functional Programming in OCaml"

qbit — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 18:42:08 +0000

If you can find a copy, the first edition of ‘Introduction to Functional Programming’ by Richard Bird covers the concepts of functional programming in a language-agnostic way.

New comment by qbit in "A researcher on how to live a happy life"

qbit — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:44:15 +0000

Another perhaps more esoteric approach is pointed to by Ramana Maharshi (and others) who encouraged people seeking happiness to inquire into "the one who is unhappy". In other words, to ask oneself, "Who is it that is unhappy?" The idea being that the independent entity that most of us take ourselves to be is just a fictional story (an I-thought) with no real existence, and that it comes about from an erroneous identification with thoughts. Once that is fully realized, the problem of happiness is permanently solved because the "I-thought", as he calls it, is the real root of the problem. In fact, according to him, it's the root of all of our problems. ;-)

New comment by qbit in "Elevated Use of Absolutist Words Is a Marker of Anxiety, Depression [pdf]"

qbit — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 18:07:55 +0000

"You need to..." is one of my favorites. I'm often guilty of it myself when offering advice to others, but recently I've realized how off-putting it can be and have made an attempt to stop phrasing things in that way.

New comment by qbit in "Lazy ants make themselves useful in unexpected ways"

qbit — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 21:36:11 +0000

"The Ants" by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson.

New comment by qbit in "Are You Downplaying Luck’s Role in Your Life?"

qbit — Thu, 24 Aug 2017 03:48:46 +0000

The reality is, everything comes down to luck. We are all ultimately a product of our genes plus our conditioning, neither of which we control. And any decisions we make are a function of those two things, so they are also out of our control.

New comment by qbit in "Legalize It All – How to Win the War on Drugs (2016)"

qbit — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 02:43:22 +0000

It seems to me the standard argument for legalizing cannabis is tax revenue. It reminds me of when Kansas was considering abolishing capital pinishment. It wasn't due to any ethical or moral reasoning, but because of the economics of housing death row inmates.

New comment by qbit in "Legalize It All – How to Win the War on Drugs (2016)"

qbit — Sun, 30 Jul 2017 02:08:33 +0000

It's interesting that whenever the subject of legalizing drugs comes up, people rarely argue for legalization from the perspective of cognitive liberty. Why we allow certain people to decide what states of consciousness are allowed for other people never ceases to amaze me.

New comment by qbit in "My dad hid his depression. I won’t hide mine"

qbit — Sun, 27 Mar 2016 03:33:05 +0000

I'm curious and I think others might be as well. How does one possibly go about finding a therapist who is a good fit? It seems like searching for a needle in a haystack -- akin to finding a good life partner which requires lots of trial and error.

New comment by qbit in "Legalize It All"

qbit — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 01:37:06 +0000

> And as long as we live in a democracy, they're entitled to structure their society as they see fit.

I strongly disagree. There are certain human rights that should not be able to be voted away in a democracy. I believe that the right to modulate our own minds as we see fit belongs in this category.

Girl builds a camper van – 32 months in 4 minutes [video]

qbit — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 23:57:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbhUNWmamFI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11114087

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by qbit in "What Happens When You Can’t Talk to Yourself?"

qbit — Sat, 21 Nov 2015 20:26:51 +0000

I'm really curious about this. Was stopping your inner monologue as a teen a conscious decision or did it just happen? If it was a conscious decision, how did you do it?

New comment by qbit in "How to Pick a Meditation App"

qbit — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 03:26:28 +0000

I'm curious how long you did the three minutes per day before doubling to six, and likewise for the time before doubling to twelve.

New comment by qbit in "Why there is something rather than nothing – The finite, infinite and eternal [pdf]"

qbit — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 00:43:54 +0000

I am one of those people who finds this question fascinating. I am neither a philosopher nor a physicist, but it seems to me that one of two cases must be true: Either the universe has existed for an infinite time in the past or the universe came into existence from nothing. Either of those cases seems extraordinary to me. But am I missing a third option? I realize that some (like Lawrence Krauss) have shown that you can get a universe from nothing plus the laws of physics, however, that seems like a rather unsatisfactory answer. For one thing, it leaves me with the question of where the laws of physics came from? And do the laws of physics exist independently the universe or are they merely convenient models that humans use to describe the universe?