If it's friggin' HOT, and as long as there's privacy in my own room, nothin', and nada, no need for close proximity insulation technology, and for bugs? I use my mosquito bed net I bought from Amazon.
I cannot sleep with any layer, very uncomfortable indeed. To be honest, I cannot stand the idea of getting irritated by clothing during my sleep. Not only that, even the faintest bit of light or even the slightest periodic ticking of the clock (or anything for that matter) annoys me. A thin blanket will do in the summer, but usually tucked to the side when hot, and a second blanket of the same material in the winter, a third blanket of the same material as a bed sheet. Everything needs to be dead quiet and super dark when I'm sleeping. I'm trying to achieve the darkness to the point where the capability of the human eye adaptation to low-level ambient light won't matter (absolute pitch black).
I've been on those toilets before at street-side filthy restrooms in hot & humid summer days, uncleaned vomit and splattered excrements of drunk people from the night before. It's the worst when you're feeling sick yourself from too much drink, and you have to squat for 30 minutes. You sweat like a pig and swim in a urine-covered floor; it's a full work-out session every time you go into a bathroom like that.
Wow, inspiring comments. I am a 30-year-old software engineer — not married, no kids, but reading the comments here gets me thinking that however busy I think I am, I wouldn't even dare to compare to what you all are going through. Instead, I should stop fooling myself of thinking that I am busy and cease to be lazy.
I have all my books in a public storage facility, I'm gonna donate every single one to Goodwill or some other thrift store. Trying to be book-free for the rest of my life - ebooks are great.
When I was a 3rd grader in South Korea I had the hardest time solving the simplest arithmetic problems. My teacher used to keep me after hours as a punishment until I was able to solve them. I think it was literally something like "2+3-3+2+2-100+39". You could say that I was pretty much in the opposite end of "exceptional" on any subject — was NEVER serious about school back then and completely ignorant of education (probably didn't even know what this meant).
To me school was a place where I went to hang out with friends for 7 to 8 hours, and yet, I don't remember my parents doing anything about it, not even a light discussion about my education. This went on for several years even during my early school years in the U.S. (my family immigrated in the middle of my 3rd grade year).
It was only when I started watching stargate and other scifi movies/tvshows that I got interested in science and technology, and thought "Hey, maybe I might try this thing called education so that I can do things that these guys are doing in the tv!", but realized that I was still extremely subpar at math and english (not to mention i even sucked at korean - got worse now, but i think i got a little bit better at english), and pretty much everything else, flunked algebra in high school and mostly Cs and rarely Bs on other subjects, and miraculously A in PE hahaha.
At the time I knew I had to do something about it, so I asked my parents for help, but sadly got close to none. They hired some tutors for me but it never worked out (you could really tell, the tutors were frustrated at how stupid I was). At some point I realized that I had to take this matter into my own hands - had to start all over from the fundamentals. At which point I actually started reading books, writing, memorizing, solving (math problems), I had to pretty much make up for what people usually learned in their primary school up to jr. high years. I eventually managed to do well in math, improved speaking/writing/reading in english a little bit, trained myself in scientific thinking, got into physics at a university and now I'm working as a software engineer. Buried in financial aid debt... :(
The thing about people though... is that we forget quite a lot of things we learned 10 years ago, but the most coolest thing nowadays is that as long as you have a way of getting information into your head, your education only ends at your last breath. Although when I was growing up I hardly saw my father, and my parents never intervened in regards to my education, they were there for moral support, life lessons, and the list goes on. I think that in the near future if I were to have children of my own, first and foremost I'd hope to see them growing up healthy, and that they'd find something they're interested in earlier in their lives, but I'm not sure if it will help to be strict with their education, we'll see.
I lived in the US for 20 years — came here when I was 10. I'm still not completely fluent in English. A lot of the learning came from interacting with others who mainly spoke in English, but in some occasions I still have to make an effort in order to get pronunciation and grammar correct.
In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.
Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.
In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.
For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.
Children's books are very helpful, and give you a kind of fluency with the low-level stuff that you will never get from SAT lists, etc. I think exposure to children's rhymes, poems, and nursery stories is useful if you really want to be fluent and probably necessary to get to a native-like level.
When I first started using Sublime, I disliked the occasional popups, and thought I'd just keep using it without paying $70 for a text editor?!?!
But I HAD to buy the thing! Not because I wanted to avoid the annoying popup, but because of everything we know about Sublime today; performance, simplicity and intuitiveness of the UI, packaging system, etc.
The article mentions that they're coming out of beta in the near future! nice! and I just noticed they're already mentioning sublime text version 4 (under sales FAQ page).
1. I'm a single guy in late 20s.
2. I don't get out much.
3. Always focused on work.
4. On computer all the time day and night more than 12hrs every day.
5. I went through clinical depression in the past, I don't feel depressed anymore but sometimes get lonely.
6. Tried online dating sites, but never made any connections.
7. Not very social, I'm quiet, and am an introvert.
Things that keep me going:
1. Family.
2. Occasional get-together with old friends.
3. Science and technology and the fact that I exist and can experience the things that I can feel with my physical senses.
4. Hiking and hobbies that require physical activity.
5. I'm not religious, but sometimes visiting local churches to genuinely get to know new people helps too.
Something that I should look into: Fashion. Skinny jeans LOL. cool socks and hair styling. Putting myself out there where there are girls.
I have the same question but without the title. Maybe I can generate the "Ask HN: Hacker News Comments" link from titles by tagging it by topic.