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Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

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81–90 of 247 posts

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#81
post #10

A 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! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7120102

Ha! Same here. But don’t stop at 34. I had it at 40. Found it because of that post. They say I could have walked with it for much longer as it was the extremely slow one (there are at least two types). No side effects further; just a tiny lump.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#82
post #5

For 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.

One of the things I look for when getting into a new venture, investment, etc is that most people don’t understand how it would succeed. If I have a deep, realistic understanding of how it will work, that’s all I need. Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does, but you know they will all see your reality as the truth with time.

> Big gains come when you have vision that no one else does

Dunno man, is that really true? It's true that some of the outsized winners out there are those that bet big on long odds (i.e. had vision and acted on it). But not everyone that bet big on log odds were outsized winners.

Ignoring the large number of cases where the vision is just wrong, sometimes the timing is off.

So I don't think vision guarantees success. It's just that in _some_ cases, success requires vision.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#83
post #69
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. Seemingly good ideas fail all the time and if it was easy to determine which ideas are good everyone would be successful.

> Also I don't think most people can really tell when an idea is good. My heuristic is that if you google it and someone is doing it successfully, you know you had a good idea, and it makes me happy. If you google it and nobody is doing it, it is a bad idea for some reason that’s not obvious.

And if you see $100 on the road, leave it there, it's fake or someone would have picked it up first.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#84
Nowhere near as profound as many other comments listed here already, but here's a 2015 comment by haberman that stuck with me for some reason, on how modern operating systems have learnt that 'grand abstractions' don't belong in the OS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9807777

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#85

One of my favorites is a super-long one by a user named bane, about three solutions to speeding up computing: (1) "high" (more RAM, CPU), (2) "wide" (more machines), and (3) "deep" (refactoring), which is what he recommends first. More than once he has rewritten something that was running slowly even on the latest and greatest architectures (perhaps partially because of that), to running on a single machine, even an…

Reminds me of this recent comment on Chuck Moore, of Forth fame, building his own technology stack right down the hardware and squeezing it for performance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24469625

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#86
post #38

I'm sad I can't find my favorite comment, and have actually searched for it on multiple occasions. It wasn't a good comment, it was a bad comment — I am only sharing it on the off chance that somebody else will remember and post the link. The discussion had veered to bicycle helmets: should they be required, is there innovation to be realized in their design, something like that. Somebody posted some comment about de…

May be this one : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916434

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#87
post #60

"The contrarian dynamic" by dang, from around a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24215601 > The "contrarian dynamic" is that HN threads (and internet comments generally) are largely propelled by people making objections. Cunningham's Law touches on this [1]. The objections come in waves. In the earliest stage of a thread, they tend to be rapid negative reactions to the article. It's not that these are…

It would interesting to study these phenomena quantitatively.

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#88
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be fun to think of "new" ideas, and then search the Internet for them. This week, I wanted a handheld device to push buttons and open doors without touching them; found several for sale (though the models without covers seem useless.) Later I wanted a 3D support structure to fit under a mask and increase its usable surface area; found several for sale.

> 3D support structure to fit under a mask Wow, I also thought about this idea. For those who are interested in something like this, you can search for "frame for face mask" on Amazon...

I don't know if you have seen this one: https://bellus3d.com/solutions/facemask.html

*I have no affiliation to the site or map, just remembered a colleague showed me

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#89

The legendary "Putnam" one, of course: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079

Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?

Re: Ask HN: Your Favourite HN Comment?

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably Dutch. We usually get very agitated when someone tells us we should wear bike helmets.

You should though

There is ~250 cycling related traffic deaths per year in the Netherlands. Some 60 of those are e-bike related.

Normalized per capita that is well above the EU average, but you shouldn't forget that we cycle a lot in the Netherlands, which means that per cycled kilometer, cycling in the Netherlands is still ridiculously safe even without helmets. It has been argued that forcing people to wear a helmet in law will reduce trips taken by bicycle and increase air pollution due to an increased number of trips taken by car (25% of ALL trips in NL are taken by bicycle, versus about 16% in Denmark, to give some comparison). And this is not even counting the psychological effect it has on car drivers and their behavior around people wearing helmets. Besides: cycling injuries and deaths are skewed heavily towards the elderly population (65+), if you're a 20-something person, statistically speaking you're more than fine not wearing a helmet in the Netherlands.

Let's not jump to conclusions here about helmets and think this stuff through before shouting 'You should wear a helmet'. It's not quite that black and white. Forcing everybody to wear helmets might very well cause more death and injury than not to. We have taken other precautions to ensure cyclist safety, such as designing our roads to protect them, and those measures make a lot more sense. You shouldn't forget that a helmet only helps a little if you are already in a bad situation (e.g. an accident), so it's much better to prevent that situation from occuring in the first place. The Youtube-channel Not Just Bikes has great explanations about how we approach those problems over here.

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