Every once in a while there are some good, __in-depth__ replies to posts on HN, worth bookmarking. What are your favourite HN comments?
Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
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Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#2The first comment (umvi) in this thread I thought was great advice for those who are ambitious but also practical :)
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#3It's very short and not at all in-depth, but this was my favorite comment. It was one of the greatest troll shutdowns I've ever seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#4This comment where I first learned about using a bare Git repo for dotfiles management: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071754
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#5For me, it's this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#6The first comment (by mikekchar) in response to this student going through a rough spot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14312416
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#7@dang recently (17 days ago) posted a list of the most favorited HN comments in this comment:
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#8My favourite HN comment was about burnout:
Burnout is caused when you repeatedly make large amounts of sacrifice and or effort into high-risk problems that fail. It's the result of a negative prediction error in the nucleus accumbens. You effectively condition your brain to associate work with failure.
Subconsciously, then eventually, consciously, you wonder if it's worth it. The best way to prevent burnout is to follow up a serious failure with doing small things that you know are going to work. As a biologist, I frequently put in 50-70 and sometimes 100 hour workweeks. The very nature of experimental science (lots of unkowns) means that failure happens. The nature of the culture means that grad students are "groomed" by sticking them on low-probability of success, high reward fishing expeditions (gotta get those nature, science papers) I used to burn out for months after accumulating many many hours of work on high-risk projects. I saw other grad students get it really bad, and burn out for years.
During my first postdoc, I dated a neuroscientist and reprogrammed my work habits. On the heels of the failure of a project where I have spent weeks building up for, I will quickly force myself to do routine molecular biology, or general lab tasks, or a repeat of an experiment that I have gotten to work in the past. These all have an immediate reward. Now I don't burn out anymore, and find it easier to re-attempt very difficult things, with a clearer mindset.
For coders, I would posit that most burnout comes on the heels of failure that is not in the hands of the coder (management decisions, market realities, etc). My suggested remedy would be to reassociate work with success by doing routine things such as debugging or code testing that will restore the act of working with the little "pops" of endorphins.
That is not to say that having a healthy life schedule makes burnout less likely (I think it does; and one should have a healthy lifestyle for its own sake) but I don't think it addresses the main issue.
link to comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630618
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#9For me, it's this comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 ) that argued Dropbox wasn't useful and was going to fail. Both the comment and its replies (by Drew at the time when Dropbox wasn't known) really get to me because they remind me to keep an open mind to other people's ideas and have conviction in my own ideas even if there are people who doubt them.
The comment is interesting because it's such an exception. This community is almost fatally optimistic and has blind spots where skepticism and criticism could be. Our website should have the X-files "I want to believe" poster as the HTML background.
My counter-response to laughing at "you can build such a system yourself quite trivially" is Theranos.
Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?
#10A commenter talked about his experience with testicular cancer and encouraged other 20-34 year old men to check themselves.
So I did, found a lump, and because I found it early it was removed with no further issue. So that's definitely one of my favorite comments!