CKKim

Indeed. I hadn't seen that video (cheers!) but we both seem to be thinking the same thing!

"Oh yeah, and you don't get from the first picture to the last picture in 16 weeks, not gonna happen."

Someone who looked like the second picture when dehydrated, oiled, posing, and flatteringly lit could perfectly well make themself look like the first picture when bloated, unflatteringly lit, and letting it all hang out.

You can see where I am going with this. For some amounts of making himself look awful in the first picture, great in the second one, and 16 weeks of steroids and working out, those "before and after" pics are not implausible.

But I do realise that wasn't what you were saying. Your point was that if we take both pictures in good faith then it's "not gonna happen" and you would be right. I bother to point out what I did because it is reminiscent of those "get ripped" banner ads where - to me at least - it often looks like the same person on the same day 2 hours apart, first posing and tensing on the back of a fasting session and after, slouching, having stuffed themselves. And of course the advert reverses the "before and after", and pops 6 weeks with whatever they are selling into the timeline.

I do not have a corporate job, nor have I ever. The closest I have come is teaching in schools. However, I find your sentiment at odds with the experience of many I know in the corporate world. Most work long hours, but they find time for what is important to them and they find their work rewarding. The family time comes from what used to be Call of Duty or sport-watching time. When the kids grow up they get to do those things with them too. These people take care of their health, travel, and have rewarding family lives, they just have to be ruthlessly organised and priority-driven to focus on what is important to them (of which a respectable career is one aspect).

In the past I have thought the way you do and the way the original post outlines, but I concluded that I was actually a little jealous of people with more stable, better-paying jobs who were well enough organised that they could still do the things that they considered important and I was actually just looking for ways to frame the situation to my superiority. When I hung out with these people I almost wanted them to sneer and demonstrate values that "someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interest and activities is considered a flake", but they never did. I feel like most corporate folk I know totally "get" what people who haven't taken the same path as them are doing.

At the moment I live in Japan and have friends who work some insane hours. Their Facebook efficiency to set up band practice and baseball (and even now cricket!!) for the few hours they have to spare is a source of constant astonishment to me.

Right now, I'm looking at getting myself organised in that way and heading for a corporate job, not fleeing from one.

I love the short timers on blocks of text too large to read properly before it moves on. I kept clicking back and of course starting from the beginning of the quote to remind myself of the flow and then SWOOSH it moved onto the next one. I did that about half a dozen times and definitely felt my stress levels rise. It makes the point very well!

That seems the most likely, doesn't it? I'd love it if somewhere there were an official diplomatic language glossary with translations for what these terms really mean, e.g. groundless and unacceptable: "justified and permissible".

[Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov] criticised what he termed US attempts to blame Russia for his disappearance, saying they were "groundless and unacceptable".

and

Meanwhile, China has also described US accusations that it facilitated the departure of fugitive Edward Snowden from Hong Kong as "groundless and unacceptable".

Does anyone else find it slightly odd that they used identical wording? Is this a case of the Chinese saying "well the Russians nailed it, let's use the exact same phrase", or what precisely?

In so far as I have had "success" with speed reading it has been to force myself to run over the words more quickly and so interpret the commonly seen structures as single units. This means that if a piece is written in a very formulaic style then I can get through it fast because most of the stock sentences read like single words with only the unique modifiers jumping out of the page.

Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance. The layout of code helps enormously for us, but I find the effect is the same with reading if I go quickly and with specific purpose to reformulate the information as it is scanned. And the more you do it the better you get because you have more data to draw from when identifying structures. It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.

Nowhere. It was speculation on my part extrapolated from the premise that the piece was written as a joke and nothing in it could be taken at face value. A little research on the guy suggests I was reading too much into it. Here he is http://www.linkedin.com/in/rishilakhani and his languages are listed as "Hindi, Swahili, Gujarati, Punjabi" - we don't need much more than that to connect the dots.

Ah, thanks for this and your comment elsewhere in the thread. That Twitter link, for those also intrigued: https://twitter.com/rishil.

What others have said about commenters/lurkers and not being able to downvote, but also I think the "sentiment" is more that SEO sucks than that this piece is garbage per se. I upvoted it because it's entertaining and it did, along with the discussion here, broaden my perspective on SEO.

I read it as a joke by the end but, worryingly, didn't automatically recontextualise it as racist in light of that. Which, I think I agree with you, it is, if it's a joke and all the East Africa stuff is made up for "comedy value".

Totally with you. I was enjoying the amusing tone of the piece but he lost my sympathy at:

"Before, SEO was the game of really skilled people, you know like professional poker players. You had to know the game, know when to raise, and when to bluff."

Then with the "Maybe I should find another job?" I thought this has got to be satire. Well played, sir.

The way the piece is framed, the writing style, surely a work of humour?

As a Mathematics graduate I was going to call you out on your comment, because I feel the subject does not lend itself to the kind of wiggle room necessary for maneuvering such as you describe. Then I remembered this: http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013/01/23/the-indiana-pi-bill..., and thought better of it.

Indeed. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Cassagnes I wonder: 'idea' or 'discovery'?

"Cassagnes, an electrician at the Lincrusta Company, was performing a routine installation of a factory light switch plate wrapped in a translucent decal covering. During the installation, he removed the decal and wrote on it with a pencil, noticing that image transferred to the opposite face. Cassagnes tinkered with his discovery, which led to the world's first prototype of the Etch A Sketch."

I love these stories of something chanced upon by accident being turned into a product. It wouldn't surprise me if most successful ideas come about this way, rather than from a 'visionary' entrepreneur brainstorming the 'next big thing'.

Seriously?

If you asked someone to build a three page "We're Hiring" site and got this, you'd "probably tell them no thanks and stop returning their emails". Why?

Their main .biz site looks fine to my eyes too, like thousands of other business websites settled on functional and simple - I'm sure all of this was built closely to spec. What am I missing here?

A general point and not meant as a criticism of you, but is there a gender-neutral way to express "This, of course, makes him a gentleman" as you use in your final paragraph? Or a clear female equivalent? It seems "This, of course, makes her a lady" does not mean the same thing at all, and an obvious alternative (either non-gendered, or symmetrical to "gentleman") does not readily spring to mind when, one feels, it ought to.

Thanks, muellerwolfram. This guide is excellent and dear to me as someone once stuck in the exact same position described in the opening paragraph. Indeed, flitting between operating systems was so natural that even now I instinctively want to take issue with your "dual boot sucks" but if I could use one OS for everything (and I do mean "everything", other OS emulation included) then I would, so quite simply: you are right.

For what it's worth, I chose a different route in solving my Photoshop dependence: I forced myself to learn alternatives. But I don't mean just that I learned GIMP (which I recommend, though completely sympathise with the "Regarding GIMP" section); I mean that I made it my goal to be someone who can take new software and ascertain how to do with it what I already know how to do in my "native" habitat, even if the method is convoluted or requires learning a new paradigm. This goes back to days of using elementary school computers with nothing more than MSPaint and enjoying that hit of satisfaction from performing a manual "crop": make a selection, copy it, minimise the canvas to a handful of pixels, ctrl+V, MSPaint automatically resizes the canvas to the pasted selection, BLAM it's a crop! (We've all been young, when figuring these things out for oneself is the next best thing to being a Jedi - and that said, if anyone has their own method for cropping in 2000-era MSPaint I'd love to hear it). Likewise in the "new paradigms" category, learning about Turing machines and formal data structures changed everything for me as a BASIC-minded programmer.

Since adopting this generalised view I have found it's helpful as a core principle: I can't always count on the environments I know, so learning to adapt is crucial. This applies to programming, competitions, and even romantic partners. In the infinite indulgence of our field to give everything a "cool" name, I refer to this as the "Peter Petrelli" skill.

Quite apart from arguing against using Photoshop in Ubuntu, it returns to your piece. Sometimes short of coding something up from scratch there really is only one program that does what we require to solve a specific problem, and sometimes the operating system is fixed. Knowing how to solve the equation for these variables is part of being an adaptable and valuable agent. Great article.

I really don't think that's how it works any more than seeing one's siblings naked is a turn on. With the disclaimer that of course narcissism and incest are some people's thing, but while the former may be more common than the latter I certainly don't think it's an automatic inclusion of homosexuality.

Needless to say I didn't mean it that way, but the imagery in your comment did make me laugh a lot on an otherwise depressingly rainy Monday morning with three meetings scheduled for the afternoon that I'm really not looking forward to leading. Thank you! :)

Ah, got it. Thanks very much for the explanation. The alcohol analogy makes it lucid. When it comes to pornography I'm definitely a "glass of red wine with dinner from time to time" kind of person (TMI?), so it was out of my frame of reference to know what kind of behaviour you were describing.

"I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again" sounds, well, pretty wild and probably jolly good fun to be honest, but I can see how that could be problematic as a regular and difficult-to-resist habit rearing its head every week or so.

"I am addicted to porn"..."I would look about once per week"

It seems odd to me that being addicted to porn would go with only looking "about once per week". I think I understand how this could still be technically an addiction, but compared to other addictions and - I imagine - especially porn addictions, it seems rather bizarre. Certainly if pornography was only being consumed once a week then the rate of let's call it "stimulation inflation" can't have been that high, or can it? Could you elaborate?

I believe the problem is in the way we make "special", or "intelligent", or any one of countless others, an actual part of a person's identity. I'd like to get away from describing the individual and instead concentrate on their specific achievements. It may not make us feel very good about ourselves, but it's a great deal more precise, and it focuses on reality rather than cherry-picked descriptors to encapsulate a "character".

Every time I read an 'about' section of a personal site and see something along the lines of "I'm a blogger, a technology geek, a cyclist, a photographer, and a serial dabbler" I wrinkle my nose a little because it seems like they're writing the person they want to be, rather than focusing on what they have to show for it.

One of those articles where a lot of ideas have been put down that aren't exactly "true" so much as it would be convenient if they were, to better justify the path the writer has decided to take in their life.

Great example, and I believe complementary to my observation. If talk show interviews are to be believed then when Hugh Laurie began on House he wasn't famous in America, and most people didn't have any idea he was British. The show was a hit, everyone loved him, and then it's far too late for anyone to erroneously pick apart his flawless accent.

It's almost impossible to imagine, but if Hugh Laurie had been popular in America, and his natural voice widely known, then the reception to that series could have been very different, purely from unfounded criticism of the accent. And if this is starting to sound a little far-fetched, let's not forget it all began with someone saying "British actors trying to do American accents, which never fool me".

"Really never, or do you just never notice?"

Indeed. Folks seem unbelievably harsh on accents they know not to be the native one, which is every time a famous actor does an accent, but all those no-names doing even not very good ones fly straight under their radar, making me highly skeptical it's not just confirmation bias.

Christian Bale often keeps his American accents for interviews and press. There might be something in that...

A similar effect can be heard in "Skwerl (How English sounds to non-English speakers)": http://youtu.be/Vt4Dfa4fOEY (speaking starts at 0m30s).

It's not quite as good, is it? I wonder if this effect is easier to achieve in a song or if it's more a case of how much time, talent, and effort goes into making it.

At first this looks like another submission about the value of objects, a la "The Best" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4755470, "The Worst" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4838109, and countless others in between.

However, it's really a (roundabout) way for Peter to tell us how much he likes using pen and paper, and what advantages he sees in them over the alternatives.

This is the right way to look at objects: suitability. Not best, not cheapest, not highest-quality, but most suitable for the job.

Crucially, by the end, the strongest point made in the first 80% of the article has not been addressed:

"The problem with pens that cost more than a dollar is that, well, you lose them at the same rate you lose pens that cost less than a dollar."

I look forward to a follow up post when he has misplaced it, given up using it for fear of misplacing it, or perhaps treasured this wonderpen so much that it is still faithfully by his side after 6 months of note-taking. In short: how suitable really is it?

You did, and I think this submission found me in a mean mood. For people who have read about polyphasic sleep etc. the phrase "26-Hour Day" has an intuitive meaning which led to disappointment on clicking to the article.

I stand by my point about entrepreneurs' blogs providing clues to their character, but I retract the judgement on your use of "26-Hour Day". You could have been clearer in the title rather than waiting until the third paragraph, but then there is a reason you seller types are what you are: you're good at hooking people in; after all, you got me to read the article.

I'm broadly with you on this and upvoted both your comments, but I don't feel quite strongly enough to call him out. I find more and more that "hack" is used figuratively not only in the way you describe but also in the "hacking down a tree" or "hack writer" sense. Before everyone rushes in and says "this is Hacker News, we all know which version we mean", I'd like to point out how often the phrase "hacked together" is used to describe work in our field done in a somewhat scrappy or unpolished fashion that nevertheless gets the job done. If I'm to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think "I've hacked this productivity schedule quite a lot" is just about alright, but boldly describing it as "a hack" is a little too far.

Bingo.

I'd reserve judgment on anything before having a good shower, dressing in fresh clothes, and eating some real food. Plus lots of water and a nap or workout, if necessary. Biology > Internet ;).