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firefoxman1on Don’t Take Medical Advice From the New York Times Magazine

Never heard the term "chemophobic" before, but now that I think about it I have some chemophobic friends. Their argument is always something like this:

"Humans evolved consuming only organic material from their very beginnings up until about 100 years ago. Humans just haven't evolved to tolerate synthesised chemicals in a mere 100 years."

(that's obviously paraphrased but you get the point) But when it's said like that, I tend to agree with them. When they're called "chemophobic" in articles like this, I tend not to agree with them. I've no clue which to agree with.

firefoxman1on Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.

That's a good point. Almost none actually owned one. But public perception is often what decides if a product is successful.

firefoxman1on Aggressive negative advertising by Microsoft against Google.

Even if the reviews are positive, I've spoken to many people about the Surface (techies and not) and very few spoke well of Windows 8/Surface.

firefoxman1on Microsoft looking to release Office for Linux in 2014

The people who switch to linux will do it regardless of office being available. Why not make $200 off of them?

firefoxman1on Don’t Waste Your Twenties

Seinfeld advice:

GEORGE: They always make me take stock of my life. And how I’ve pretty much wasted all of it, and how I plan to continue wasting it.

JERRY: I know, and then you say to yourself, “From this moment on, I’m not gonna waste any more of it.” But then you go, “How? What can I do that’s not wasting it?”

ELAINE: Is this a waste of time? What should we be doing? Can’t you have coffee with people?

firefoxman1on Young Money – Beating “The Man” by Spending Less

Right, that's why "You really think you have it worse than somebody born into slavery?" is a ridiculous statement. Would being a slave in the past be any worse than being a slave today?

firefoxman1on Young Money – Beating “The Man” by Spending Less

> You really think you have it worse than somebody born into slavery?

You really think we have it better than someone who owned a few dozen slaves, living leisurely on a huge plantation? History has treated some well, and some not so well.

firefoxman1on The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are perfect examples of how universally Stoicism can apply to people. One is a roman emperor, one is a freed slave.

I'd also recommend Epicurus's writings. Not exactly stoic, but they go hand-in-hand. See: http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html

firefoxman1on Yahoo's Mayer Steadies Ship

> "[Mayer] said she wants Yahoo, [...] to become a force in mobile-device software for consumers and to provide "customized" content for people based on their interests, background and location."

I know that's vague, but isn't that the bundle of buzzwords every clueless Fortune 500 company wants to use 2013? No doubt Mayer can execute it better than most, but I'm wondering what Yahoo's advantage is over anyone else. What do they bring to the table?

firefoxman1on Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S.

What strikes me as more odd is how backward some of our laws are. Looking at the comments on that page I was amazed to read this one:

> "lol.. In Australia it's illegal to sell them locked (if they're factory locked then consumers only have to ask the carriers and they will unlock it on the spot free of charge)"

And this one...

> "...where I live they finally allowed us to unlock ours cellphones [...] it was fun seeing thousands of people trying to finally leave their company they hated to much (some cellphones carriers here are horrible). It has such a happy day lol. Now carriers have to try harder to get people to chose their company, because they can leave at any time, yaay! It's definitely a better system."

Ironic how Capitalism seems to function much better in other countries, even though the U.S. made Capitalism what it is today.

firefoxman1on Unlocking Cellphones Becomes Illegal Saturday in the U.S.

> That's how rotary phones used to work, right?

Haven't LOL'd at an online comment in a long time. In all seriousness, he grew up in the era where AT&T owned the phone line all the way into your house AND the phone itself! I guess he misses the old days...

firefoxman1on Almost Flat Design

So tl;dr is basically "Most big, popular, respectable sites already implement 'Almost Flat Design'"

firefoxman1on Ask HN: How do I cut down on my cell phone bill?

Well, you load up your account with $10, and you can use them on text, data, minutes, etc. It's 5c per text.

firefoxman1on Firefox OS Developer Preview Devices Announced

Aww come on! I just ordered an N9 so I could run Firefox OS (and several other phone OSes coming out this year) and now this comes out?

firefoxman1on Ask HN: How do I cut down on my cell phone bill?

I use a combination of Google Voice (free) and H2O wireless ($10/month for 200 minutes). H2O uses AT&T towers, so your existing GSM phones should work fine. I give people my Voice number, which I set to forward calls but not SMS, so text messages don't use up my minutes, and when I'm in a wifi zone (pretty often) I can log in and check my text messages.

firefoxman1on What is up with the insane long Google results URL now?

http://www.google.com/search?q=test

firefoxman1on Google Glass to Hit Developers' Hands This Month

"the "taking phone out of pocket" motion is inhibitive enough to be a barrier for a successful app."

I think the same goes for any wearable tech. I find the idea of watch phones awesome, but all of them right now (like on aliexpress or Sony's smartwatch) are pretty tacky/nerdy. But with the right execution and design a watch phone could be an awesome way to avoid taking the phone out of your pocket for checking messages or snapping a pic real fast. A phone client rather than a full phone seems like the right way to go. Plus it's way less intrusive than a pair of glasses (not as fun as augmented reality though).

Edit: something like these would be amazing:

http://www.archiarcha.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Samsung...

http://sumanl.com.np/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Electronic-w...

firefoxman1on Building A Node.js Server That Won't Melt

Side note: caching at a fixed interval is a great way to save CPU cycles. If you're serving 100req/s and you had to grab the current time within 1sec accuracy for them, you could have 1/100th the amount of Date calls by getting the time each second instead of each request.

firefoxman1on The Nightmare That Keeps Microsoft Awake: Android On The Desktop

I agree. Using touch apps with a mouse is worse than using mouse apps with a touchscreen.

firefoxman1on Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan?

As someone looking to move to San Francisco, I was amazed the author said it was ever cheap. Any chances it will return to affordable-to-live as a college grad in the near future?

firefoxman1on Is San Francisco The Brooklyn To Silicon Valley's Unbuilt Manhattan?

I agree, Richmond is a great city and Charlottesville in my opinion is more tolerable than northern VA.

firefoxman1on How To Make Trillions Of Dollars

Amazing article. The most powerful method of marketing I've seen is that which blurs the line between "want" and "need", or between pain and discomfort. Then they put their product on the "need" side, or categorise your discomfort as real pain.

"You don't want a cell phone, you need it. Look, everyone around you has one, so it must be necessary!"

"Hey, that minor discomfort you have with [whatever]? You have every right to be in pain from it. Heck, you should go out right now and get diagnosed with a disorder we invented/coined last year. Oh by the way, we also have a drug that relieves the symptoms."

firefoxman1on Why did infinite scroll fail at Etsy?

I only enjoy infinite scroll on touch screens. I think the perfect solution would be paginated results, but if the user ontouchstart pulls the page past the bottom, it would automatically load the next page (like reverse of the facebook app's pull-down for new items). It's much more convenient than trying to tap just perfectly on the "next" arrow, but paginated is just easier with a mouse.

That mindset of design I think is the next step after "responsive" design. Rather than just scaling the visual design of the page, how about truly designing the user interaction to fit multiple scenarios. If it were up to me, I'd call it Symbiotic Design (responsive 2.0)

firefoxman1on MySQL to Redis in One Step

Does anyone else wish that Redis had a disk-based version? Other key/value stores like Riak are nice, but I want the simplicity, commands, and raw data types of Redis in a version that could handle terabytes of data. But maybe I'm the only one that wants that.

firefoxman1on Canonical announces Ubuntu for smartphones

Wow, I'm impressed even though it is just a demo video. One thing that doesn't feel intuitive to me is the left/right edge choices. It's the same problem with Windows 8, I feel like if I pull an app in from one side, I should be able to switch to the previous app by pulling in from the other side.

firefoxman1on How I Made a 26-Hour Day

Machines don't need either :)

I'm guessing that's not his schedule 7 days a week. I think that's just the ideal productivity schedule.

firefoxman1on Should startups bother having original ideas if big companies can clone them?

The biggest fallacy in this way of thinking is the notion that your idea is "original" in the first place. Maybe you're the first to market, but that doesn't mean there weren't 10 guys a month behind you, and it doesn't mean that your idea and execution can't be improved upon.

While it's easy to list unoriginal innovators (Ford, Edison, Eastman, Jobs, Gates) I can't name anyone that's had a truly original idea that no one else soon before or after thought of. That's because our ideas are improvements upon current technology. DaVinci didn't imagine things like the Apple I because electricity hadn't been harnessed. All of the great innovators we talk about didn't invent the entire world around them, they just took an idea and added their own "claim to fame" to it.

It seems to me that chances are your idea won't be even remotely original, but more likely it's just now technically feasible to build. I'm sick of hearing about software patents "stifling innovation" then seeing people act as if there isn't enough protection of intellectual property.

firefoxman1on Node.js error handling

What a great pattern! I have to disagree though, (err, data) seems much more popular. Until now I'd never seen this (fantastic) style.

firefoxman1on Backbone.js 0.9.9 Released

What's the browser support situation for PATCH?

And yes please for Events.once support.

firefoxman1on Coroutine Event Loops in Javascript

Oh, that's a good point. Didn't consider that.