Hacker News Reader

firefoxman1on Millennials Lead the Trend to Less Driving. Will It Last?

"The money that would otherwise go into a second vehicle, fuel, insurance, and maintenance instead goes toward higher quality food."

I love this. It shows how so many of our lifestyle choices affect one another. I'm sure the domino effect doesn't stop here either. I've noticed how much more I feel like a part of the human race when I bike. When you drive a car you're so isolated, it's easy to get angry when someone makes an honest mistake in the next lane. When biking or walking you always have to constantly confront smiling faces and "good morning!"s and I think it's important to have this interaction with strangers.

firefoxman1on Social Roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your account

This is hacker news, chances are 1/6 he knows what a revolver is.

firefoxman1on Depression Part Two

hmm that's a thought. I think it would be more sociopathy than psychopathy if anything. Then again, it could be that I'm an introvert who's read too much stoic philosophy meanwhile forcing himself to act extroverted lol.

firefoxman1on Depression Part Two

So what is it called if you have every single one of these symptoms, except actually being depressed? I find myself not caring at all about what others have to say, how they feel, etc. and you can imagine the hurdles that imposes on someone who has to make a legitimate-feeling human connection to sell a product. Social interactions are a game to me (that I've gotten quite good at) but none of it feels real.

I haven't felt that need to be dead as described, but definitely concluded that death would be neither good nor bad...and what's the point in waiting, right? Isn't it all the same?

And the "everything is hopeless bullshit" attitude i've had many times. I've just concluded that, perhaps...everything IS pointless. But we can enjoy it nonetheless. Enjoy the pointlessness, since it's all we CAN do.

Anyway, is there a name for this besides selfish asshole syndrome? Anyone else like this?

firefoxman1on The Worst Room - Photos of Cheap Rooms for Rent in NYC

I think some areas depend on city size. Moving from New Mexico to (southwest) Virginia I realized that small-town southern cities are extremely backward, especially with racism. However, head North to the northern 1/3 of VA and it's as diverse and accepting as any decent city.

firefoxman1on Help Kiera with her legal bills

The school's reaction is truly ridiculous. I remember telling my grandfather about the explosives my friends and I would make when I was ~13/14. He responded with "You ever see what happens when you mix sodium and water? There's that, then there's magnesium...haha my science teacher wasn't too happy about that explosion." (It's hard to convey his jolly "ah good times" tone with just text)

Sure, I wasn't around but it sure seems like people were way less of a tightass back then. I got threatened with a lawsuit because I remotely controlled a teacher's computer. Just a prank!

My friend and I wanted to test out Final Cut Pro on his new Mac, so we made a little action short which included kicking a stuffed model of myself (half a day's work and a LOT of duct tape) off the school roof. Again, 15-year-olds threatened with a lawsuit for trespassing (I was under the impression my parents paid their state taxes?) A constructive activity is punished while drug deals go down in the guys' bathroom unnoticed.

firefoxman1on The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom In Silicon Valley

What, you're not into this kind of thing?

http://goo.gl/ZvOlp

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/images/stories/large/2012/08...

firefoxman1on The Whole Problem Is That There Is No Housing Boom In Silicon Valley

> the city REFUSES to re-zone for higher density

Call me crazy, but that's what I love about SF. It feels so much more (friendly? approachable?) than other cities because of the architecture and height of buildings. It's quite unique and I'd hate to see it go.

firefoxman1on Employers, Employees and Loyalty

Well said. Those are the two opposing sides of labor in capitalism. As Marx pointed out, a company does best by commoditizing labor. To make a worker as replaceable as possible is in the best interest of the company: They can pay less and hold his replace-ability over his head. "I demand a higher pay or I'll quit" is met with "Fine, your position will be filled tomorrow morning" and realizing his replace-ability the employee feels it's better to at least have a job, thus creating the illusion of employee loyalty.

Now with companies like Google you see what happens when the pendulum swings toward the workers' favor. Google employees are top-notch. They are much harder to replace, so the company offers amazing things on top of great pay to keep them. Again, it appears to be loyalty but it's always in their own interest. Keeping and taking care of these amazing employees is how they create great things.

It seems that the best option as an employee is to find an industry/position that requires a unique, hard-to-replace set of skills and dominate that position.

firefoxman1on The Paris Time Capsule Apartment

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

firefoxman1on Edis: a Redis for larger-than-RAM datasets

Me too, then I Googled it:

https://github.com/Moodstocks/redisk https://github.com/quirkey/redisk

firefoxman1on Edis: a Redis for larger-than-RAM datasets

>I'd like to read antirez's opinion about this.

It looks like he already made his own (3yrs ago): https://github.com/antirez/Bigdis

> in redis you have to design how you are gonna store your data with it's limitation and performance in mind.

Hmm, that's interesting. This is the very reason I've always loved Redis and I'd love a Redis-for-disk.

firefoxman1on Meet Mr. Money Mustache, the man who retired at 30

I completely agree with this. My grandfather is a millionaire...apparantly. I never would have guessed it. He drives a near-broken-down 1980-something honda. He takes frugality to the extreme. I love talking to him and hearing his investing advice, but it gets irritating hearing about how he saved $0.50 on a book or hitch-hiked to Colorado for a family event. I don't see him much, but I've hardly ever seen him smile.

I think we have to be very careful in a society that promotes living in such excess. It's a hard balance to find between casting off all expenses to the point that it becomes frugality for the sake of being frugal, and frivolous-spending yourself into debt.

firefoxman1on Meet Mr. Money Mustache, the man who retired at 30

I bike to school and work in 20 degrees because my dad wants me to learn the value of a dollar before I'm in the "real world" (he also started me investing pretty early). I have 0 resentment and complete respect for him because of it.

firefoxman1on The Future of Parse

Looking at all these comments has me wondering: Why is it that as soon as a startup is acquired we immediately abandon it as if it's going offline tomorrow? I first remember noticing this when FriendFeed was acquired. As soon as I read the news, I quit using it. I checked back about a week later and sure enough, the only ones using it were blogs like TechCrunch.

Any ideas why we (that includes me) behave this way?

firefoxman1on Fathers Recognize Their Babies’ Cries Just as Well as Mothers

> Every mother participating in the study spent enough time with their kids to develop the skill tested, while just about half of the fathers did

It seems like this data explains that stereotype. Mothers are often "better" at it because they often spend the time with their kids to develop that skill.

firefoxman1on Nikola Tesla’s Predictions for the 21st Century

Back then in the U.S. and Europe, black tea was pretty much the only thing they knew as "tea". Of the different types of tea, black is the least healthy and most caffeinated, which is why he would call it a "stimulant".

firefoxman1on What Makes Rain Smell So Good?

It also doesn't answer my main question: Why does the air smell good right before it rains. I'm sure being able to smell rain coming had evolutionary advantages...but how does it work?

firefoxman1on Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?

I'm not comparing the Nazi party to our own government. I'm simply giving an example of how easily the term "anyone endangering [country name]'s security" can be abused.

firefoxman1on Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?

I've heard of this "public safety exception" before:

In 1941 Adolf Hitler ordered a directive intended to suppress members of the resistance. It was called Nacht und Nebel ("Night and Fog"). People suspected of "offenses against the Reich" would disappear without any trace.

Who could be considered suspect? "anyone endangering German security" (die deutsche Sicherheit gefährden).

firefoxman1on Sailfish – An open source mobile OS

I'd love to know. I bought an N9 late in the game expecting its "openness" to work with all this year's upcoming mobile OS's, mainly Sailfish. So far all it can run is android.

firefoxman1on Sailfish – An open source mobile OS

I think there were a lot of us who got it. Palm's hardware division, marketing dept. and whoever sucked at wooing carriers didn't get it.

firefoxman1on CISPA Passes in the House - Full Roll Call

So much for the "small government" Republicans advocate, huh?

firefoxman1on We used to sleep twice each night

With adequate access to natural light, it's pretty hard to oversleep if you follow your body's natural schedule. As soon as light hits your (still closed) eyes, your brain scales back melotonin production and raises your body's temperature, which is what wakes you up. The opposite happens when the sun goes down and you aren't around artificial light.

firefoxman1on [dead]

> Apparently brown babies are receiving their Ivy League acceptances stapled to birth certificates in the delivery rooms nowadays. You sign up for a lifetime of other systemic issues (Racism? Discrimination? No big), but hey, at least you’re going to Harvard.

This seems to imply that college is supposed to be the sort-of "invisible hand" hand that makes the whole world equal. Just because your parents/grandparents endured some hardships because of a prejudice society, I'm not sure how that ties into college acceptance (or should at least).

If a person earned a 4.5 GPA, they earned a 4.5 GPA. If I earn a dollar, is my dollar less valuable than a black person's dollar? No because it's earned all the same. Maybe I don't have a car and have to bike to work in freezing weather, where the black person has a nice warm car. But when I try to buy a burger with that earned dollar, will I get a discount because it was a little harder for me to earn that dollar?

firefoxman1on Thesis Hatement

> Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent? No, because that’s stupid.

Yet lots of people smoke even though they're fully aware of the risks. It appears that the author knew of the job outlook for a Lit PhD all along but chose to ignore it. I think we all exist in that optimistic dream-world state of mind at some point.

firefoxman1on Meteor 0.6.0: brand new distribution system, app packages, NPM integration

I think Derby and SocketStream might sit at the 7-8 spot.

firefoxman1on The iPhone Killed My Creativity

I can relate to this. I came up with the idea for my current side project while sitting in a waiting room for 30+ minutes with no phone, just me and my thoughts.

firefoxman1on Caps Lock Key Has No Place on a Modern Keyboard

I have to say, replacing the caps lock with a "search" (super) key is one of the best design decisions on my chromebook. It automatically brings up my Gnome3 app menu/search, which I used to have Gnome-Do for.

Needless to say, the "search" key is the first one pressed every time I boot up.

firefoxman1on Why Asm.js Bothers Me

> "Why asm.js is a JavaScript subset?". Simple, because Mozilla wants the benefits of the (P)NaCl approach but don't want to have to import LLVM.

Or, you know, it could be like Mozilla's vice president of products said about NaCl: "These native apps are just little black boxes in a webpage."

In other words, Flash reincarnated.