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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

Besides phones, other applications:

- Wait for movie hype to end to avoid crap movies with great marketing. I usually wait to borrow them from the library.

- I buy all my computers used from Craig's List. I'm typing on one I paid $500 for that would have been $2,000 new.

- Latest news about "superfoods" or nutrition. I heard about someone who waited 5 years to act on food trends. None lasted that long before more latest nutrition news superseded it.

- Reading daily news. Doesn't improve my life nor make me better informed.

I still check my email too much.

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It shocks me how many people get upset when you tell them that you avoid following the latest daily outrage that the news media presents us. A while back I realized that exactly nobody spends time "catching up" on daily news if they are required to unplug for any significant amount of time, so why should I bother to follow it in real time?

They are shocked you are not like them, you are shocked them are not like you.

The loop feeds itself unless one of the parties ceases being shocked. I've found it easier to cease being shocked on my end, than waiting for the universe to change to suit my fancy.

Great perspective.

Not exactly nobody: I do actually spend time catching up, but maybe the interesting part about that process is the sources. There's a few online aggregation sources/tools that I sometimes use, but old school weekly periodicals (Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, etc) shine, to the point where I sometimes wonder if that's how I should be doing all my media consumption. Maybe even tech chatter, if I could pull it off.

"You have to know what's going on in the world" is what my parents would say. News always makes me upset or angry in some way, so I avoid it too.

You're just cheap like me. :D I'm frugal, which makes me adopt tech late but that's because I'm waiting for the price not because I don't believe in new tech. Late tech adopters are more skeptical in the beginning and almost end up adopting it because everyone around them have adopted. It's not necessarily the price that gets in the way.

Computers definitely peaked in performance almost a decade ago, but this might change with more parallel software and core counts - but emphasis on parallel algorithms.

Superfood is also marketing hype. But I’d say there is an underlying truth: fresh, whole foods are more nutritious than spliced up or fried options and a diet lacking nutritious food can easily be deficient. Herbs are pretty crazy packed with (sometimes unique) beneficial compounds though.

edit-possibly it’s that plants pack nutritional compounds into their fruits, leaves, and bodies and the smaller the whole component of a plant is the more densely packed it will be.

> Computers definitely peaked in performance almost a decade ago

haha no way. I was lent a octoccore server from ~2009 recently, and I'd describe it as a hairdryer with a modicum of compute tacked on.

My personal dev machine is ~4 years old is a boatload faster core for core, and matched the octocore overall performance (DB benchmark on real world task, not disk-bound).

>Latest news about "superfoods" or nutrition. I heard about someone who waited 5 years to act on food trends. None lasted that long before more latest nutrition news superseded it.

The Atkins diet bore all the sociological hallmarks of every other diet fad when it became popular in the first decade of the millennium, however, its basic advice (reducing carb intake) seems to have been valid from today's perspective.

Lots of Craigslist computers are bought with stolen credit cards

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