You have to be too close to the face in order to throw out the background with a 20mm 1.9. It's going to make the nose look weird and accentuate a double chin, if you have one. (I have the same camera and lens)
Is the self portrait in a bedroom mirror really more sad than these photos that look like they were semi-professionally staged? In my experience with OKCupid "good" photos are often the least "accurate."
but my blood panels were dramatically better on a low-carb diet
My blood panels were exactly the opposite - bad when I ate cheese, meat, fried, oily stuff... good when I switched to a diet consisting mostly of rice, noodles, fruits and vegetables.
I don't think academia is really like that. One of my former roommates was a Physics PhD student at MIT, so I know him and his colleagues. They all drank beer and played chess and cards in this one basement bar in Cambridge, did stuff like hang gliding, rock climbing, ultimate frisbee and played in various awful experimental-folk bands. They were nerds but they were all bros and even attracted the weird kind of cyber-hippy chicks who are into dudes like that. They all eventually got married. They seemed pretty happy to me. In contrast I once got stuck in a corporate programming job, which was the most uninteresting and socially isolating experience of my entire life.
Whenever I read these HN screeds against academia, I wonder what they are comparing it against. In my experience academia was way more interesting and fun than working as a professional programmer. The only thing good about the later is that it pays a lot.
When I was broke I read lots of books but certainly didn't care about what a patent trolling dong from Microsoft thought about Sous Vide (still don't). Maybe that's what t.ptacek meant?
There's a lot of glycemic index nonsense out there today. There is a low carb meme which will have you believe that just a few ounces of "carbs" will throw your metabolism out of whack and you won't lose weight even if you keep calories low. This is bullshit.
However, if you are trying to lose weight, it's often good to leave out carbs simply because it is so easy to overeat carbs. I love pasta and could easily eat 1200 calories worth of spaghetti and still have room for more. On the other hand , I almost have to choke down 1200 calories of eggs, fruit and vegetables.
You just need to eat a lot more calories. You might be doing the wrong weightlifting routine. If you can do egg whites, those work pretty well. I went from 150 to 180 in college on a "hard gainer" program. My diet back then was: egg whites, brown rice, vegetables. Now I'm trying to get back down to about 165, so be careful what you wish for...
Has anyone here ever tried hypnosis? I got sick from food poisoning a few years ago, and ever since then have had an on again off again issue with hypochondria. I've heard that hypnosis can help with this, but as a natural skeptic I'm... skeptical.
My intro to computer science class had 12 people in it, and was structured the same way as 6.001 at MIT, using SICP, and whatnot. Subsequent courses had about the same number of people and used the top textbooks at the time. Cormen for algorithms, stevens for networking, foley and van damme for graphics, the dragon book for compilers, etc. The small class size put me in close contact with my professors, who cherry picked me to lead some NSF funded grant projects in computational geometry and atmospheric science research. They also let me be the sysadmin for the school's UNIX servers. This combined experience and education made it trivially easy to have a career working for various internet startups. Just wanted to point out that there's varying quality of education, and maybe it just sucks to be you.
On the other hand, maybe I don't really know what I'm talking about, since I went to one of those "hated on HN" flaky liberal arts colleges.
It's easy to get tossed on any bike with an aggressive geometry if you are going fast and slam the front brake. Personally, I do not think the most popular bike styles in the USA have the right geometry for commuting in the city. The default accident for stopping abruptly should not be flying over the handlebars, which is what happens on road/track frames and MTB frames. My bikes are set up more like dutch bikes or beach cruisers, which have a very upright geometry with my bodyweight over the back wheel.
- it gets really hot
- the battery only gets about 2.5 hours, max
- in NYC area, it is slow.
- it's not really cheap, it's $60/m for 5GB. Plus you have to pay $150 to buy it in the first place
If that still sounds good to you, I've got one for sale... ;)