faevor.com/net/org. A site for establishing and trading promises and favors between friends. (Inspired by the whole "favor trading" schtick the fae tend to have in mythology.)
What I'm wondering about is how that Retina screen handles in Boot Camp Windows. I haven't seen any reviews that discuss that, and that's going to make or break things for me.
Two of my friends run a wedding planning business. They gave up on targeted Facebook ads because they got MUCH better results using Adwords.
The ads were targeted to a nice big radius that included Lincoln, NE (a college town) and Omaha, NE (a big city, for NE). They targeted women in a specific age range, and if I remember correctly only women with a status of Engaged or In A Relationship. I think they may have aimed for relevant keywords as well. (I personally don't know the exact details of their ads, so I'm sticking to what I know for sure.)
I can't think of a more ideal targeted advertising scenario, and they got less traction on Facebook than they did via AdWords. That's either a REALLY bad reflection on Facebook's ad platform, or a really good one for AdWords, or both.
(Their business is doing really well, for the record.)
Your friends probably tried to do the same thing that they were doing on AdWords, but targeting people instead of keywords. (I am assuming here, so please correct me if I'm wrong)
This doesn't work because they have to approach the people differently; for wedding planning, I would instead do something along the lines of "read these 10 tips to keep your wedding amazing" or "use our free wedding plan tracker"
With an approach based on interest, your friends can educate people and get them thinking in order to follow up for more information. Instead of a hard sell, hit them with a soft one that helps them feel like your friends know what they need.
As an Adderall user, I can back this up. The symptoms of use are very similar to meth. Ever seen that "meth jingle" ad? The whole "pulling hairs out of your face, cleaning everything, etc" pitch is spot on to Adderall side effects. The difference is that Adderall side effects are dramatically more mild due to (as betterth said) a properly calibrated and reliable dose.
Also, with Adderall, you can't afford to just take more to offset withdrawal symptoms, because you only have so much. The temptation to take another as it wears off is pretty substantial, especially for long-time users.
Uh, having taken adderall nearly every day for 20 years, I can say that I have absolutely no temptation to take another when the first wears off. In fact, I tend to forget without an alarm and then wonder why I can't focus.
Nor have I ever had any compulsion to clean everything in sight or pluck every hair from my face. It certainly makes cleaning easier, but I certainly don't feel the need to do it anymore on or off of it.
So you forget to take it for a couple of days? The biological half-life of dextroamphetamine is 10 hours and levoamphetamine 13 hours. That's 10 to 13 hours (since Adderall is a mix of both isomers) until just half of the dose you took is eliminated from your bloodstream. If you take something with a long half-life like that every day, it's constantly in your system. It takes roughly three days to completely eliminate a dose.
Yes indeed I often forget to take it during the weekends. I have no compulsion to take it when my prescription runs out (I often delay going to the doctor to get a refill and go a week without, especially if focus is not absolutely necessary).
Fair enough, that doesn't sound like an addiction at all. If you're just taking it to improve concentration, you might have luck with a combination of a Vitamin B complex, Piracetam and L-Tyrosine. All are cheap and have no side effects.
I'm somewhat surprised there aren't any dating sites that have set up a built-in "brown M&Ms" system to help with the shotgun strategy problem.
By "brown M&Ms", I mean something like Van Halen's Brown M&Ms rider condition; some key piece of text that requires an actual profile read to answer. Almost like a captcha but based on certain pieces of the profile.
The profile owner writes "List 5 of my interests, and my dog's name" and provides a list of acceptable keyword responses. Only messages where the not-captcha is properly filled out get through. (Or, alternatively, they get downgraded in priority.)
This would require people to actually read and parse the profiles, and put some minimum degree of effort into contacting someone.
I can think of several dozen problems with this approach, but I suspect they're surmountable with sufficient cleverness.
(In case the reader hasn't heard about this: Van Halen's extensive rider required a bowl of M&Ms to be provided, with all the brown M&Ms removed by hand, on penalty of show cancellation. The entire purpose of this clause was as an easy way to see if the venue had read the damn contract, and took it seriously. Any time they saw brown M&Ms, they knew something else would be wrong, (probably something dangerous and technical) and started a full re-check of the venue from scratch.)
A simpler version of this would be to use fuzzy matching on the person's history of messages. Which would rule out copy-canned messages right away, and would also prevent them from just changing a dot here or there in the message.
I'm very interested in dating sites btw, and I have quite a few ideas up on http://ideashower.posterous.com (no time to go thru and pick out the dating-related ones right now, alas).
There's a lot of mention in the article about "McKinsey"; looks like that's a management consulting firm. The impression I get is that they have a bad reputation, but I have no idea why. Anyone have any insight on this?
I think consulting firms have a bad rep with tech people because the demand for consulting firms is due to political problems in an organisation. my experience is that someone brings in consultants into an organisation because they want to carry out a plan but another group in the organisation is blocking them so they bring in consultants to bless the plan. consultants are glorified yes men.
I didn't take that they had a bad reputation; quite the reverse, that people have left their relatively prestigious job there which would look great on a CV, and now that's going to be slightly tarnished by an apparent failure at Groupon.
On the contrary, McKinsey is very well respected within the management consulting industry. It is part of the big 3 consulting firms: namely McKinsey, Bain, and Boston Consulting Group. The Mckinsey brand is probably the best known out of the 3.
McKinsey is certainly one of the best-known management consulting firms. As such there's plenty, positive and negative, that's been said about them (1). To cite but the best-known instance of the negative, there's their heavy involvement with Enron. Jeffrey Skilling, who used to work for McKinsey, is now in jail for his actions as CEO of Enron (2), and McKinsey consultants were heavily involved in running the company (3).
One thing that SMB did really, really well was provided a very slick learning curve. Every level provided you with techniques that, while learned through repetition, were applicable in future levels and scenarios. Every new mechanic was introduced sparingly at first, but then compounded upon by introducing new quirks to the formula you had already learned.
I think that's what made SMB such a solid game; not the difficulty, but the way the game presented you with that difficulty.
(Also, I'm in general agreement with others about the presentation of this article. It felt like the author was trying too hard to act like a college bro. I will admit, however, that I liked the bit with the monkey.)
I'm getting $47.5k in Nebraska to work for a Maryland company working on their Service-Now platform. 6 years with the company, been using SN since we were customer #5, and I just had to fight for a raise ($2.5k) after 2 years without. $80k seems pretty damn good, but based on what it sounds like you're doing you've got the skills to earn it.
Myself, I'm not so sure, and I really do love working from home, so I'm plodding along as is. A little ominous though to read this right after I insisted on a salary review and got one...
I'm currently taking adult ADD meds (Adderall); it's a double edged sword, and I'd personally really prefer to find another method.
The primary problem is, during any sort of transition I would be pretty useless, and I can't afford to take that long being useless with my current job.
I went cold turkey from 25mg of Adderall XR daily, and for about a week and a half I was absolutely dead. I'd have a splitting headache due to dehydration, but I couldn't summon the energy to get off the couch and walk 12 feet to where I had bottles of water. I'm glad I went cold turkey rather than just tapering the dose, though, because tapering the dose would have taken months of feeling miserable, rather than 1.5 weeks of feeling like a dead man.
If you hear anything interesting from people about biofeedback/etc, long-term non-medicinal adult ADD treatments, could you toss me a mail at taloen@gmail.com? I'd really like to see other peoples' opinions on those routes, and I don't lurk enough on HN to be likely to see a submission about it.
(Just to clarify; yes, I'm back on the Adderall XR again, although at 5mg rather than 25 this time.)
Scary thought: Going cold turkey with coffee has had very similar effects on me (after 2 weeks of 1-2 cups a day; 2-4 shots/day).
I've also had a similar feeling of deadness when I stopped eating meat, dairy and anything with additives for 6 weeks. The first week or so I was completely useless - this could have also been due to me trying to feel my way through to a balanced diet.
So much of what we consume ends up having all sorts of unknown effects on us and the minute we stop consuming them we really feel it - it's easier to never stop.
One bonus of cutting certain stimulants out of my life has been that I've ended up feeling much better.
The last time I got rid of coffee (back on it now), I switched to a high caffein tea and then steadily walked my way to low / no caffein teas. It is really, really hard to get going with cold drinks in a ND / MN winter.
I'd add, cinnamon naturally "perks" one up for the most part. I used to add cinnamon to my coffee (to avoid sugar), but works as well for tea, or your hot water, lemon and honey for a non-caffeinated morning (or afternoon slog) beverage.
I went cold turkey from all caffeine. One day, almost 10 months ago I said enough is enough and quit. While on caffeine I was always highly irritated, and was snappy with people. I just couldn't get enough caffeine to feel good, and was always tired.
When I went off I was dead to the world for about 2 - 3 weeks. I had a splitting headache which no medicine seemed to fix, and felt laggy. But after those 3 weeks I started to feel better. I had more energy, I was a lot less irritated and was happier in general. I was able to contain angry outbursts and in general have changed entirely. I have more energy now than when I was binging caffeine. I can stay awake longer, fall asleep faster, and I feel refreshed when I do get at least 6 hours of sleep.
Not drinking any soda has also helped in other ways. I no longer have a real need for sugar throughout the day and don't have nearly the same headaches I used to get from not getting my sugar fix. Since I have also lost a major source of calorie intake I have started to lose weight.
I don't drink anything with HFCS in it, soda's with natural sugars every so often (maybe once or twice a month), but mostly I drink water. I drink a glass or two of milk a day as well. One thing I have noticed is that living in America is that soda is pushed with every single meal. It doesn't matter where you go, what soda would you like with that.
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Since you mentioned no longer eating meat ... I have recently started eating a lot less meat, and even in the past week have stopped eating meat altogether, and I have yet to feel a real difference. It does make it a lot harder to think of meals to make though as I have been eating meat my entire life and it is an integral part of any meal my family used to make. Will see what happens in a couple of weeks from now :-)
"When I went off I was dead to the world for about 2 - 3 weeks.... Not drinking any soda has also helped in other ways. I no longer have a real need for sugar..."
You may be misattributing. Caffeine withdrawal is a matter of days [1]. 5 tops and I'm usually done in 2 or 3. (I've dropped cold turkey three times now, and each time I've personally experienced a marked decrease in my ability to function, but I've got various other possibly mitigating circumstances. I'm planning on trying again with my latest set of circumstances to see if it helps any as soon as my infant is no longer an infant.) Dropping that much sugar out of your diet can definitely take substantial time to acclimate to. (But it's a great thing to acclimate to.) You sound a lot more like someone who has gone through adjustment to a much lower carb lifestyle than someone who has gone off caffeine.
I went from drinking four liters of mountain dew, 6 cups of coffee and taking 500 mg No-Doze caffeine pills to nothing.
It is possible that lower carb may have had something to do with it. One thing I did notice though is that in compensation I was eating a LOT more candy at first. I'd eat gummi worms and haribo gummi bears by the kilo. The local gas station started giving me discounts on swedish fish! Luckily I eased off that after about a month, and now I eat very little to almost no candy.
One thing I would note is that it has changed how I taste sugar. A lot of sugary drinks such as juice (even natural sugars) will quickly taste too sweet. I also find it harder to eat candy because it just has this disgustingly sweet taste to it. The other thing is that with drinking water with my meals instead of soda I am finding that a lot of foods are over salted, and could do with half the salt and still taste just as great. My personal believe is that people want taste even after making their taste buds taste something really sweet like soda.
I'd love to find another method as well. I am 31 and I've been on and off it for the last 6 years or so. More off than on, because I really don't like the effects it has on me, so I really only go on it when my life is in shambles.
One pattern I've noticed is that when I'm off it, I self-medicate with caffeine and energy drinks. It starts with an occasional Starbucks or Coke and before I know it I'm getting a venti latte with an extra shot every morning, then drinking 3-6 rockstars/redbulls/cokes throughout the day.
I was also taking Adderall XR 25mg for about 2 years until I had to change doctors and the new doctor was concerned about my high resting heart rate so he gave 1 month of 10mg. After that was gone, I was pretty unproductive for about 2 months. I simply had a hard time concentrating, like I was in a haze.
I just restarted on Adderall (generic, 5mg x2 a day) and the side-effects are definitely difficult to deal with. I am able to hyper-focus but I also get irritable, daily headaches and exhaustion when it starts wearing off. I tend to take it one in the morning as I start work and perhaps once in the afternoon if I find that I need it, but I don't take it on weekends at all.
There's definitely something to be said for behavioral adjustment rather than medication. That's how my mom deals with it, but even so she's pretty scatter-brained.
I stopped on 56mg for two months and did not have any withdrawal symptoms. You may want to talk to your doctor about this, withdrawal like the one you experienced is not very common, I think.
When I used to be on an Adderall IR prescription, I didn't have any withdrawals but the effects declined very noticeably after a few days use, and the side effects worsened. I started taking it only a few days a week at most instead and was much happier. If I didn't have work that needed the extra focus on a particular day, there was no need for taking it that day. I've never understood the people who use it daily, including weekends, unless it's for something else like narcolepsy of course.
My doctor prescribed it for daily use too, but I asked him about it and was told it's fine to take it whenever I feel the side effects are worth the relief from ADHD. Where did you get the idea that it's necessary to take it every day or not at all? Adderall is not a drug that requires that. You should ask your doctor more about it.
That's how it's commonly prescribed, but I'm sure it varies depending on the person.
I have stopped taking the medication in the past and I did not have any withdrawal symptoms or felt happier or anything of the sort. I've always used caffeine though.
I guess what I'm saying is that someone who thinks they may have ADHD shouldn't discount methylphedinates because some people have withdrawal symptoms, which mostly happen only when someone is abusing the medication, or is nervous about it in the first place.
The reason I went cold turkey was that I was already seriously tolerant to my prior dose, and the doctor had recommended several months of tapering to reduce my tolerance. (I had been on that dose for about 5 years.) I couldn't afford to spend that amount of time eliminating my tolerance, because I'd be operating at such a reduced capacity (from withdrawal) that I'd risk my job.
So, instead, I took a week off coinciding with a long weekend, and just went off it completely. It sucked really bad, but I had some stuff in place to make sure I wouldn't be in as much danger as I could be. (I removed all potential weapons/poisons from the house, stocked up on "comfort food" so I wouldn't be tempted to get in a car, etc.)
I wouldn't recommend it for everyone, especially due to the suicide risk, but in my case (for various reasons) that risk was pretty much 0. (I'm aware that self-diagnosing suicide risk is really unreliable, but I have a few personal situations that make suicide impossible to seriously contemplate, so I'm pretty safe in that regard.)
I think it's probably a lack of familiarity with this sort of thing. Sort of like how folks are thinking 56mgs is insane, and 25mgs are almost cocaine and speed.
High dosages are up in the 150+, more like people who binge on 3 pills, or crush and snort them. That would create withdrawal symptoms and be neurotoxic. Therapeutic dosages (like the ones the doctor will prescribe you) are supposed to be just that.
That's a high dosage, to the level where I expect it is neurotoxic. I think you might be more of the exception than the rule... some withdrawal is to be expected, though not necessarily as strong as OP.
56mg means Concerta, which is an all-day extended release formulation - not the same as injecting 56 mg into your mainline, or taking an immediate release tablet.
Concerta wouldn't come in a 56mg tablet if it was expected to be neurotoxic.
Good point. As he was responding to someone discussing amphetamine, I thought he meant amphetamine. I have known someone prescribed 3x20mg short acting amphetamine daily who after stopping is now quite aware of the long term negative effects.
High dose stimulants in rats are neurotoxic. http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/neuro/20091104/msgs/931964.html Your mileage may vary, but I think prescribing patients >50mg amphetamine is often irresponsible. Ask your psychiatrist at what dosage he thinks amphetamine is neurotoxic. 90mg maybe? Doctors agree that a certain dose is neurotoxic but disagree on what that dosage is. 60mg is the official maximum safe dose, but it's not like you should put all of your trust in the FDA. Given clear stimulant burn-out I have noticed in multiple taking >50mg of amphetamine daily, I have no doubt that dosages like that cause negative neurological effects and that caution is merited in amphetamine dosing.
Stimulants aren't neurotoxic, specific substances at specific levels are. Methylphenidate's majority of benefit comes from its reuptake inhibition of both dopamine and norepinephrine. While it is also a dopamine releasing agent, it does so at dramatically lower levels than the amphetamine family. The difference turns out to be significant - while they both promote more dopamine activity in the brain, it turns out that preventing the disposal of brain chemicals is generally much safer than promoting their release. As far as I know there aren't real concerns about MPH neurotoxicity.
Methylphenidate and amphetamine is not the same thing, and I have not experienced anything like what you've said.
I really don't think burn-out is as common as people say, high-doses are more like in the 100+mgs, and that's not in anything that is considered therapeutic and extended release.
I tried Adderall last year and had a similar reaction. I used it during the week but went off it on weekends. I only did it for two weeks and that was enough for me to know I didn't want it.
Modafanil works to cut Adderall withdrawal symptoms for most people. And Modafanil withdrawal is nothing more than being unusually tired, but not miserable.
I tried a few sessions of bio-feedback but quit because I got frustrated by it and not being worth the time and money.
During the intake the therapist described Ritalin as "poison". I should have probably gotten up and left right there. If you have the opinion that Ritalin is overprescribed, or that it should not be given to small children, that's all fine with me. But "poison" has a pretty clear definition, you'll find that whenever someone refers to a drug as "poison", you're dealing with pseudo-scientific quackery.
What made me quit was mostly that I couldn't find any correlation between the signals received from the electrodes and my own state of consciousness, be it more relaxed or more concentrated or alpha/beta waved, whatever.
When I watched the graphs on the monitor, I noticed a few things. There is a LOT of noise. If I'd clench my jaw, move a muscle in my neck, my ears, whatever, it'd cause an avalanche of noise, completely drowning out any possible brain signal. Ok so you sit still, you're meant to focus or relax anyhow. Except that muscles just seem to generate a whole lot more electrical signal than your brain, and every time I even blinked my eye there was a burst of noise (probably also because the eye muscle is relatively close to the electrodes). The software did nothing to filter out these noise-bursts, even though it'd have been trivial to make at least a basic attempt that would throw away the data during a burst so the other filters wouldn't trigger.
Ah, the other filters. Well, it quickly became clear I knew a lot more about DSP than this guy. He had no idea how his device operated, at least not how the signals were transformed into whatever was displayed on the screen. There's not really an excuse for this. Sure enough a surgeon might not know about the algorithms used to convert an MRI scan into a picture, but the radiologist does (at least, on some level), which is why we have radiologists.
So you know about these alpha/beta/theta/gamma brain waves right? They're at 12/10/7/3 Hz frequencies or something like that. Now I always had the idea that by this they meant some fundamental Eigen-frequency of signals in the brain, so you'd think to apply some auto-correlation to determine the base frequency and its harmonics. But instead he had a bunch of bandpass filters running concurrently being graphed through some ancient MS-DOS program with obvious leakage from one band to another and we were looking at the raw filtered signal, not even its energy and as I said there was no noise suppression.
I'd have loved to take that device home, write some code for it and see what it could detect though. Hell, even detecting muscle movements is already way cool :)
Anyway, no correspondence between my state of focus or relaxation.
Staring at a computer screen (with a game, usually one frequency band was used to control a game of some sort) for 1-2 hours per week, actively trying to relax or focus would definitely have a result of course.
Which is why I'm doing a universal yoga meditation class. Dunno if it helps with the ADD, but it can't hurt and it definitely has some other advantages (notably: posture and stress/tension). One thing I do notice, yoga works best if I haven't taken meds that day. You'd think it improves focus, but this yoga class is mainly being able to really feel your whole body and muscles should not be tense for that, but on meds I find I get way more fidgety and subconsciously re-tense every muscle I relax as my focus shifts to the next part of my body. Fortunately, noticing and being aware of such subtle effects in your body is exactly what the class it about :-)
The evidence is much more strongly in favor of amphetamine being actually poisonous (neurotoxic) than ritalin. Even then, it only happens at higher higher than a certain, not really well known dosage.
You might like playing around with Neuro-Programmer 3. You can get substantially similar or even stronger effects to EEG neurofeedback with simple audio brainwave entrainment. I actually question the value of EEG neurofeedback not combined with audio brainwave entrainment, which serves the purpose of teaching people what different brainwave states feel like. http://www.transparentcorp.com/products/np/index.php You can hook up an EEG to it to. Or build your own for a few hundred, http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/, but the signal processing is actually the hard part. Among the cheap commercial EEG products I've tried, only the NeuroSky Mindwave filters out facial movements well, but it's one sensor is not really useful for doing much of anything.
The kind of meditation that helps with ADD is concentration meditation, where starting Vipassana, when you focus intently on watching your breath, is a concentration meditation.
I was diagnosed with ADD. I'm not sure that was the problem, exactly, because there were some other things going on, but I was talking Adderall for almost two years, along with Wellbutrin. I quit cold-turkey and went through a long period of being almost totally exhausted both physically and mentally.
As I slowly recovered, I was more strict about my diet, got a lot more exercise, and started meditating. I found that vipassana-style meditation was a tremendous help.
This is speculation on my part, but I think that meditation really strengthens some of the areas that I'm weak in due to ADD. I think sitting still forces me to develop "inhibition" skills that are typically rather weak in people with ADD. Also, mindfulness develops memory skills that I've been having a lot of trouble with lately. Also, paying close attention to direct sensations and thoughts makes it a lot easier to relax, so I tend not to build up anywhere near as much stress through the day. The bottom line is that I have more energy and focus, and just seem to function a lot better when I meditate regularly.
I'd bet that you will get a lot of the same benefits from yoga, alone. But I'd like to suggest that you look into vipassana and see if it works well for you, too. I don't think you will have any trouble finding resources on the internet, but please let me know if you'd like some recommendations.
A $99 Zeo comes with an API and will let you do exceedingly simple biofeedback; the manufacturer is quite helpful, too. (I was going to work on a waking study using the hardware, but ended up not having time).
Is it possible to have a third volume as well, opened with a different key? Or a fourth?
Maybe the solution is to have a first "primary" partition, then an "under duress" partition which you'll fight tooth and nail to protect, filing every appeal possible... and if you finally do give up the key, it's filled with entirely legal but extremely embarrassing pornography, plus a few self-written Harry Potter fanfictions.
Meanwhile, whatever you're ACTUALLY trying to hide is on a third.
Sure, it's a big damn hassle, but if you're conscious enough about the stuff you're trying to hide to go with a TrueCrypt hidden volume, it'll be worth your effort.
(I'm not actually sure this is possible, but if it is, I'm sure someone else has come up with it already.)
I've been wondering about this every time someone brings this up. So you use Truecrypt to secure your disk, and have say a "naughty" partition and two "clean" ones, for plausible deniability.
Won't the police in the event they have compelled you to unlock your HDD check how big the partition is? If you have a 500GB disk divided by three say with the 20GB "naughty" partition, a 20GB "double-decoy" and a 460GB "decoy" partition won't the police pull the disk out, look at the label on it which says "Seagate 500GB" and say "You have 20GB left on this disk we haven't seen yet. Unlock it."?
Or is there a way in which trucrypt can hide your hidden partitions in a way that a) they don't look like randomized/encrypted data and b) it isn't obvious there is space "missing" from your disk.
That's the beauty of full-disk encryption. Even the empty space is encrypted. So the hidden volume is truly hidden. Even TrueCrypt has no idea the hidden volume exists if you unlock the outer volume with a different key.
Truly empty-space is indistinguishable from a secret inner volume.
Why can't I write a program that tries to expand itself to use any available space, then runs in to a wall if the "empty space" is actually encrypted data? If the space used by data + my program adds up to less than the total capacity of the disk, it indicates something is hiding right?
You seem to be misunderstanding. Read your parent's last line again. "Empty space" is indistinguishable from encrypted data. On the hard disk, everything will just look like randomized bits, empty space and data alike. There is no way to write the program you propose without the encryption key(s). So there's no way to tell, unless you have all the keys.
The program will just overwrite the data of the hidden volume. That's why it's important to have a lot of empty ("empty") space on the primary volume when you have a hidden volume there.
AIUI, Truecrypt is actually very clever about this. Until decrypted, every TrueCrypt partition consists of nothing more than random data. This, combined with the fact that hidden volumes are actually stored within your first / outer partition it should make it impossible to analyze whether other volumes / partitions exist.
