Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | nikster's commentslogin

Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.

Our society expects everyone to be a Generator (in HD terms) - all people who are not then feel like they're totally weird. In reality, they're just wired differently, and have other strengths and weaknesses.

Humanity is like a big puzzle piece.

As someone who never was into astrology, Human Design was a shock.

I didn't want to even consider that idea at all, but as I got my design read by someone I never met, and it matched 95% of what I already knew about myself, I had to admit that it just fits. And so it is for most people - it fits.

Whereas astrology always was a lame 50/50 "could be true or not true" kind of thing. HD is different.

For example I have open head centers - in HD this means I take in thoughts from others and get carried away with them; I also have an easy time to still my mind and have no inner dialogue. And in my life I had already observed if I am talking to someone who is genuinely really excited about something, I get excited about it too - to the point where I am joining their project or decide to buy a book etc - but when they leave and it wears off I am thinking... "wait... why was that so exciting again?"... Now I know how to watch it, and how to distinguish their emotions and thoughts from mine, very useful skill.


Human Design seems like unscientific babbling to me. First of all the connection to astrology should already be a huge red flag and it mixes random stuff and magically we come up with four personality types (then later a fifth one is "discovered"). Shockingly these can be arranged into exactly twelve profiles.

It may be surprising to you but as someone who is well read in mentalism I can fairly confidently tell you that a 95% match is not hard to fabricate in readings. Admittedly is the area of mentalism I don't perform but I have read plenty of theory. Your HD reading was probably based on Barnum statements/cold reading. If you're interested to learn more about this I'd suggest "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading" by Ian Rowland. For a more fun exercise, get a reading at a medieval fair or from some "medium" (please don't pay a lot) and compare it to your HD reading.


I had never heard of Human Design until now. It looks like absolutely maddening junk to me. To each their own but nonsense pulp like that is just about the exact opposite of what draws me to hn, and avoid almost all other forms of social media.

Full disclosure: I loathe astrology, to a disproportionate and somewhat irrational extent.

Thanks for the book rec though. As a "fan" of James Randi, that seems interesting.


> Do your Human Design profile and see how much it fits.

How would one do that? Is there a website for it, or something? I tried looking it up and it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me, so I don't see how that calculation could be any more useful than, say, a star sign.

The concepts seem interesting for sure, just not sure how to find what applies to me.


>it purportedly uses date and place of birth, but those hardly have anything to do with me

While astrology is bogus, you'd be surprised how much "date and place of birth" has to do with you.

There are statistics and studies showing higher than chance similar behavior/tendecies in people born in the same months (for things like depression, health outcomes, etc). Could have to do with exposure to sunlight during early days or whatever.

And for place of birth, of course normally (if you're not in some mix-and-match country like the US, or if your parents don't immigrate immediately) this affects inherited genetic constitution, and of course culture, access to resources, diet, and many other factors.


Makes sense to me. But my date and place of birth don't define me, they only correlate me with others. Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.

i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.


>Astrology's just a particularly bogus way of not doing that, but anything that would try to derive anything about me from just my date and place of birth, without any actual data to correlate with my answers, isn't really worth my time.

Well, it depends on the degree which we require it to define you. In a looser degree, it would define most people quite a lot.

Put another way your "place of birth" alone, would be a huge information point towards predicting lots of things about someone vs someone from another place of birth, given they're different enough (say, India vs Italy, not Spain vs Portugal or Germany vs Austria).

If betting and money was involved about e.g. income, wealth level, studies or not, food preferences, religion, politics, morals, and so on, knowing the place of birth would be a great boon (all other information being equally shared). Repeated many times with different people, you'd be correct way more.

>i.e. you'd need to know "people born around this date in this place tend to have whatever human design" in order to provide me actual predictions based on only date and place of birth, but no such data has ever been collected.

If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example. It's common knowledge.

And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.


There must be some sort of misunderstanding here.

> If we were to bet on whether a person is black or white, freckled or not, has epicanthic fold or not, etc, I don't need no special "data collected" to know what people born in Lagos vs Dublin would look like for example.

Yes you do. In order to make an educated guess, you'd have to know, given where they were born, whether that place is more likely to produce certain traits or not. You could then use that information to make your guess about how likely they are to possess those certain traits, having been born there. But without any information on how likely those traits actually are for people born there, knowing where they were born grants you nothing.

> It's common knowledge.

It's not common knowledge what my Human Design type would be given only when and where I was born. That's the whole point I'm trying to make. Astrology or not, the entire idea of giving me an answer solely based on when and where I was born, will always be bogus.

Now, if they had an actual dataset of the Human Design types of people from all around the world, and wanted to correlate me with that, then maybe I'd be inclined to give it a try, just out of curiosity.

But I'm not even the slightest bit curious about bogus astrology (or any other types of divination). I'd be glad to take a personality test, for example, because they ask actually relevant questions. Just not this.

> And in some cases where this changes over time, the data of birth would also come in handy. E.g. in the tendency of a random London citizen to have say South Asian features in 2024 vs 1950.

I'm not arguing against correlating this with other data. The entire point is that one needs to correlate it with other data in order for my answer to be at all useful, and what I have a problem with is that correlation is not being done. The alignment of the planets alone is not going to reveal my personality type, and not even when combined with my location.


An interesting test would be to correlate birth date results with people from the southern hemisphere. "Western civilization" is very north biased IMHO.


Human civilization is very north biased. Almost 90% of all people live in the northern hemisphere.


Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking.

I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.

Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.

To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!

So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another.

The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people.

My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.


> Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless.

> To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all!

I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier.

I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them.

On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.


> I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking".

I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it.

I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.


> But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts.

Yes, that is my experience. If I try not to have thoughts, then what happens is not that thoughts stop happening, it's that I stop noticing them until they're more fully developed. This "not noticing" results in a relative lack of remarks upon those thoughts, but the thoughts themselves are not made of or depending on language. They just are things. Technically, they are "derived meaning".

When on psychedelics I can have thoughts that not only don't depend on language, but don't have language. It's not possible to describe them because they represent indescribable things. It's possible to feel them and interact with them in a way that seems to makes sense to me, but it's not possible to communicate them. If I try, they can actually result in words being generated, but those words sound like a bad phone autocomplete - stuff like "can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters" (real excerpt from a past trip).

(My guess is that my brain has some sort of internal format that real-world concepts are translated into in order to be operated on. That's the "meaning" that gets derived. I wonder if psychedelics allow me to create or perceive meanings that no real-world concept would ever actually translate into, and therefore don't have any way to communicate as a real-world concept.)

> I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking.

This statement is a perfect example of benrutter's point:

> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do.

Don't be so sure that nobody has thoughts that can truly stop, even just for a short time.


> I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language.

I'm the same way, my thoughts happen first, are completed and sitting in working memory with my awareness of the thought/result/whatever it is.

If I have an internal monologue, which isn't always, it's after the fact and more about re-stating the thought that already happened.


I believe that thoughts exist independently of language


Is there any solid scientific background for “Human Design” or it’s one more of this pop science feel good horseshit? Because it sounds like it.


It's about control - Huawei was taking over too much tech for the deep state's taste.

Deep state is bugging American devices so they have a very good reason to believe the other side is doing the same - evidence or not.

Unfortunately in this case, I think the deep state is really that dumb. They did not foresee the consequences. They expected Huawei to fade away with a whimper - and if you read the article, it was a pretty close call, so the expectation wasn't entirely unfounded.

Motive was curbing Chinese state actor influence and also industry, ie preventing Huawei from crushing Google or Apple. it's not very smart but it's kind of how they think about it.

On both sides, tech companies and state intelligence services are walking hand in glove. It's not about devices being bugged per se, it's about siphoning more and more data into their own data centers, controlling more and more of the info highways, and so on. Potential backdoors only play a very minor role IMO - anything can be backdoored these days, and state actors anywhere have the resources to get into anything.

It's more about the front doors, ie our chinese security camera talking to chinese servers... large scale data collection that's not hidden.


Yes. I love AirBnB and the service it offers.

I just like to make fun of the app now and then, because it is overhyped and relatively poor at doing its job. But yeah it could be worse, I would give that app 7 stars out of 10, even though it's driving me crazy at times, and I've cursed it for making me wait 24 hours for the host to accept a booking when I booked for the next day.... thanks to instant book being obscured and not shown on the UI.


For family trips it is unbeatable. Big drama and big $$$ to book 2 connecting rooms in a normal hotel, and the experience is much worse than just getting a nice apartment with kitchen, 2 or 3 rooms, washing machine, etc.

IDK how people traveled with families before.


In the UX community it is indeed very funny to see AirBNB talk so much about their amazing UX, yet the app is very hard to use compared to something ugly and simple like booking.com. It looks good but it is a nightmare to use.

They change things around a lot, and sometimes they fix one issue, but then add another issue for no reason. I've ended up booking the wrong thing so many times - and even once would be too much for a good user interface design.

My latest pet peeve is that while you can filter by "instant book only" there is no indication anywhere on the UI whether or not a location is instant book. I always book last minute, and places that don't instantly book are basically useless to me - too much drama as to whether or not the host accepts my booking. 24 hour period where I have no idea if I have a place to stay - but I already paid and my money is locked up.

It seems it would be important to know. And they used to have an instant book icon on listings that offered it.

The wording on the booking button is also ambiguous. It says "reserve now" - sometimes this means you can make a booking, other times it means AirBnB will take the cash off your card but you will have to wait 24 hours before you know whether or not you actually reserved anything.

And there's other things also... the UI is dirt poor and we only use it because for long stays when I want a washing machine and so on, sometimes these AirBnBs are literally 10x better than a comparable hotel - it works, in other words, thanks to amazing hosts - no thanks to the poor software.


Booking.com has been working amazing for me. For single room, 1-2 people, it's been flawless over probably 100 bookings or more over the last few years.

Short term I always use booking since it's less hassle than AirBnB.


The opposite - I was watching MKBHDs review of the solar roof - he was charging his Tesla model S ... using only the roof for 11 months out of 12!

That means - total energy independence. I can get a solar roof and no longer need "the government" ie, a bunch of criminals, to "help" me.

Strangely this is never on the news. Ever. Go figure.


Must be painful for you to drink water, drive on roads and have (semi-)breathable air each day. Such crooked things the government spreads..


It's very confusing how consent is super important everywhere but immediately put aside when it comes to government. Could we not do consent and government at the same time?

Possible but it would be highly inconvenient and people wouldn't like the consequences. At the very least we need referendums on all the big contentious issues.


"Consent of the governed" is the founding mythos (whether that rings true for you or not) of democracy.


Ah yes, that terrible tyranny of being connected to the grid and having to pay into the maintenance of it. How dare they? Fascist scum!


Yeah - there are many use cases still where EVs are way worse or even totally inadequate. Yours is one. Cold countries is another (sorry Canadians... don't buy Teslas just yet...). EV performance is horrific in cold conditions.

But the majority of use cases at this point is - EVs are way better. City driving, less than 100 miles per day, which is what most people do in most countries, charge at home, etc.


> EV performance is horrific in cold conditions.

If anyone knows about it, I'd be interested to explore this further.

My understanding is that in some parts of Canada it's common to plug your currently petrol/diesel car into an electricity socket overnight to provide a low-level of heating (otherwise the car would be impossible to start in the morning) - is this level of heating insufficient for an EV?

Alternatively how much electricity would be wasted spending some power to keep batteries at a warm enough temperature to prevent performance degradation when charging? Are we talking a few percent or a double/tripling of power costs?


The problem is not keep the battery warm while parked, it's keeping the battery warm while driving. Most EVs can "preheat" themselves before you start in the morning, the smart one's might even learn the patterns and be ready when you get in at 07:30 every day.

The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E for about 2.5 years now. In the winter the range that Ford claims drops by about 30 to 35%. That is a lot of range that goes missing just because the temp drops below 5 degrees Celsius.

Luckily I'm the perfect EV candidate: my daily commute is less than 50% of the total range so I can drive 2 days to the office if needed. And I can charge both at home and at the office.

The main problem that I see is that people cannot charge at home. If you are dependent on fast chargers by the side of the road you are going to have a hard time. The downtime for fast-chargers is enormous: my personal guess would be that they do not reach the 90% uptime. Which is bizar problem to have because a fast-charger and remote monitoring of the charger condition should be a solved problem by now.


  > The problem is that driving EVs in the cold costs a lot more energy. I've got a Ford Mustang Mach E
Nowadays this problem is mostly just the Mach E.

The Mach E delivers heat in the most inefficient way possible: resistive heat[0]. Modern EVs from other manufacturers use heat pumps, which are much more efficient. There's still some drop in winter range (like gas cars), but it's nowhere near 35% anymore.[1]

Ford's system is also Rube Goldberg[2]: they use a water-based PTC heater to warm a small isolated coolant loop (complete with its own separate reservoir!), and then run a pump to send it through a liquid-to-air heater core. Obviously done for commonality with an ICE heater core, but the unnecessary weight and complexity shows the compromises to shoehorn an electric drivetrain into a ICE (or even "flex") platform.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00ejq7z4H6g&t=449

[1] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/here-s-how-much-range-a-t...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1kHsd3Ocxc


>My understanding is that in some parts of Canada it's common to plug your currently petrol/diesel car into an electricity socket overnight to provide a low-level of heating

Kind of. Block heaters help warm the engine coolant which warms engine and the oil, making it less viscous and help it flow properly so that the battery doesn't need to work as hard to crank the engine. They're typically only 400w to 600w draw.

Modern full synthetic oil and a well maintained AGM battery makes it less necessary, it's just a little less wear on the engine overall over the long term. Most folks though don't spring for either since they're a bit more expensive then mineral oil and flooded lead acid batteries.


Your comment is more about the 'passive' heating to keep some bare minimum for the hardware to function, but a big part is the 'active' heating for the driver and passengers.

If we look at the total energy consumption for driving in cold conditions, then moving the vehicle along the road needs in the ballpark a similar amount of energy as what is required to heat up the interior of the car to a reasonable temperature and keep it there - cars aren't (and probably can't be) as insulated as houses, so they need quite a lot of energy to stay so much warmer than the outside.

In an ICE, most that heating is done from waste heat of the engine. In an EV, that comes directly out of your range.


> In an ICE, most that heating is done from waste heat of the engine

I don't think there is a car in production where the heating is coming not from the engine.


In any case, the key point is that in an ICE car the heating is mostly "free" since the engine has perhaps 40% efficiency and the majority of heat released by combustion is unused/unusable waste heat that might as well be used to heat up the car if you need to, but in an EV you don't have that source of free waste heat to tap into, and you have to use the energy that you could have used for moving the car instead.


Some cars do have additional resistive heating or heat pumping through AC, where that is technically driven by engine power, but not from the waste heat.


Implied "mass market, passenger".

Of course there are some cars which do have a resistive heating, but which are those?

> heat pumping through AC

Uhm, the compressor runs from the engine so while the heat is not from it, it's still directly relies on availability of running engine.


The small diesels like VW Polo etc have resistive heaters as otherwise it would take too long for comfort to heat up the cabin.

Also don't forget that seat heaters are also resistive and most cars in cold climates have them.


> Also don't forget that seat heaters are also resistive and most cars in cold climates have them.

I know it (or more like my bum) too damn well, though I didn't think about them in this case.

> small diesels like VW Polo

Makes sense, though as I understood, it's strictly auxiliary till the engine is heated aaaand maybe some additional heating at the parking lot with the engine turned off, though I would wary of this usage, it would drain even the extended battery fast.

Overall it's not quite what I had in my mind (think of space heaters), though yes, there are some parts which can operate independently from the engine, though it's not a primary function for them.

Thanks for the hint.


There's also these https://www.disco3.co.uk/wiki/Fuel_Burning_Heater that can be run with the vehicle engine off.


Yes in our experience, a 120V outlet is sufficient to keep the EV battery warm when the outside temperature is -30C. However, that's all it can do; it won't add any appreciable charge to the battery while it is doing so.


Yes, like that famously warm country, Norway, where 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are electric.


Norway is generally warmer than a lot of Canada. Most of the population of Canada don't get the warming of the Gulf Stream.


EV suffering range loss in cold conditions is well documented. Norway has tons of EVs purely because of massive government incentives.


Norway is rich. If electric cars weren't suited for Norwegian conditions, many Norwegians can and would buy gasoline cars instead. EV's sell well in Norway because they're both good enough and cheaper. If only one of those two conditions held they wouldn't sell well.


The bar for "good enough" is artificially lower in Norway when it comes to EVs. I'm not sure if you're aware just how huge the subsides are for EVs in Norway. They are trying to reduce these a bit and I'll be interested to see how that affects purchasing patterns. You're exempted from a punishing 25% VAT that gas cars are subject to first and foremost. Also, electricity is very cheap in Norway due to their abundance of hydropower.

https://elbil.no/english/norwegian-ev-policy/


I've got relatives in Norway and Denmark. All the ones in my generation can afford gasoline cars even though they cost ~twice as much. They would drive gasoline cars if electric cars sucked. They don't.


Electric cars would have to suck pretty bad for someone to spend twice as much, I'm not sure that anecdote is saying what you seem to think it is.

They might be saying "In an ideal world I'd drive a gas car, but the electric car is good enough where I'd rather not pay double." I don't think the person I was responding to was saying they "sucked", just that they had drawbacks.


A $25,000 base Civic is a fabulous car yet $50,000 cars are far more popular in the US.


The question becomes “is that loss important?”

I suspect people overestimate the frequency in which they drive 250 miles a day.


Yes.

No.

The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two. If you're going on an extended road trip, you know you could skip a dozen gas stations and still be fine.

I drove an EV before alongside a fuel car, and I constantly considered whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day or journey. The constant mental load, light as it was, is something I don't have to deal with driving fuel cars. Having ease of mind is priceless.


I have the opposite. Some of my kids activities are almost 50 miles away. I have to think about whether there's enough gas in the gasoline car to get there and back. If not, we have to leave 10 minutes early, and that means you have to yell at the kids to hurry up, et cetera. Or when driving home you always have to ask yourself "do I need to fill up or not"?

OTOH, if the EV is at home, it's plugged in and is always sitting at 80% full. No load.


Strange, I’ve been driving EVs for seven years and I have just as much ease of mind as you claim to about gas cars.

Maybe it has more to do with how much you need to drive each day?

If you’re putting in triple digits of miles every day, then you have a very different set of constraints compared to someone commuting up to 40 miles a day, which is the United States average.


> The nice thing about fuel cars is you almost never need to think about range beyond the refueling visit to a gas station once every week or two.

If that's your frequency of gas fillups, and you have a garage charger, the same is true for an EV. (If you lived in an apartment where you couldn't plug in regularly, perhaps not.)


Here's the thing: I rarely ended the day on an empty tank. I always ended the day on an empty battery.

So there I was, constantly considering whether the bloody thing had enough range for the day. It's a worry I can do without, and so batteries will need to see exponential improvements before I'll consider one over a good old fuel tank and an engine.


This doesn't make sense to me. Average gasoline-powered car has 300-400 miles range, and you're filling up once every week or two? That implies an EV range of something like 80 miles?


Their tax and energy policy dictates what cars their population can drive. That 87 percent of Norwegians drive EVs really says nothing about the quality of ownership experience. Many could be annoyed by forced EV adoption in cold weather.


Norway is forcing EVs everywhere, generates tons of waste due to overconsumption of cars and uses oil money to do it. It's an abhorrent policy.


Norway: 323802 km²

California: 423970 km²


I have the other problem where I live. This past summer, we had almost two months of over 100F heat. There were days we were pushing 110F.

Skimming the Tesla forums, some said to estimate a drop in range of almost 1/3 in this extreme heat?


You'd be absolutely shocked by the amount of Teslas in northern Canada.


It's a new level.

Kia, Hyundai (same company I think) are well situated. As are BMW, Mercedes, and obviously Tesla.

But... Toyota? Nowhere to be seen, has some also-ran EVs in production. The old American carmakers - absent. VW - been talking about EVs for years but ... nothing.

The biggest carmakers in the world have a vested interest in keeping EVs off the market for as long as possible.


> VW - been talking about EVs for years but ... nothing.

What do you mean?? There are loads of ID.3 and .4 about here.

https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/electric-and-hybrid/electric...


> VW - been talking about EVs for years but ... nothing.

Well I think they're the third EV manufacturer in the world for 2023. BYD is first (I guess mostly in China), Tesla second and Stellantis (Peugeot, Fiat and some American brands I think) fourth.

Hyundai, BMW, Mercedes (didn't even know they made EVs but apparently they do) Toyota and the other brands I'm reading about in these comments are all much further down the charts, so I'm not sure what to think.

Maybe the American market is so different that most commenters here have a warped view of the actual EV market in the rest of the world


BMW and Mercedes don't actually manufacture a lot of cars compared to other manufacturers. They go for margin rather than volume...

Total deliveries in 2022 (incomplete obviously, there are many other manufacturers): Toyota (10,483,024, including Daihatsu), Volkswagen Group (8,262,776), Stellantis (4,488,269), Hyundai (3,944,579), BMW (2,399,630), Mercedes (2,043,900), Tesla (1,313,851).


> The old American carmakers - absent.

Ford F-150 electric Lightning truck has production issues, but it exists. Same with the Cadillac LYRIQ. VW's ID.4 is also all-electric.

Tesla and the gigafactory has a head start on the critical component - batteries - but the rest of the industry has started to wake up.


Actual deliveries of BEVs in 2022: Volkswagen Group (572,110) followed by BMW (215,755) followed by Mercedes (117,800). So VW actually shipped more BEVs than BMW and Mercedes combined...


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: