I don’t have fond feelings for hackernews, but since this blog never ever gets on hackernews due to its subject matter I thought it was objectively a novel phenomenon that it was on the front page for a day or so about a month ago:
I can’t help but wonder who submitted it in the first place. What was interesting to me was that it was submitted for a couple of days and nobody cared, but suddenly trended on the third day.
I thought the concept of a minimum effective dose was pretty well known in these communities, but it seems like there are many who still find it provoking?
I have to admit I was pretty worried because I know how the comments on hackernews can get, and I write in a style they would probably dislike, but surprisingly there was only a couple of questionable comments among the 184 comments?
For me it was also interesting to observe the comments themselves were very hackernews-esque – I wouldn’t get them in my day to day reality, so I appreciated reading them.
I’m really surprised people didn’t know this.
I recall Rippetoe & Kilgore speculating in Practical Programming for Strength Training that 70-80% of all muscular gains occur in the first set.I had OpenAI’s deep research look into this and its sources concluded that “One-set routines can achieve roughly 60–70% of the muscle growth that higher-volume (3–5 set) routines produce”.
You can do one set of various exercises and be out of the gym in minutes.
Of course, this sounds ridiculous, but appears to be true.
– source
I also enjoyed reading individual stories of how the minimum effective dose theory or the “use it or lose it” concept affected them personally.
There was a commenter that seemed to be skeptical that I could finish 1-2 books in 240 minutes – that is like 6 hours. I could typically finish a book in roughly 2 hours of focused speed reading. To be fair I am not sure how much is being retained.
In return I am bad at many other things that require slowness and patience, and I can’t force myself to read anything uninteresting, which made me a terrible student back in my school days. Fair exchange I guess?
I was surprised that the site didn’t crash – being on a small shared hosting plan I didn’t think it would do well with concurrent visits. I was expecting memcached to crash at least, but it held up for at least a couple of days before doing so.
In total being on the front page brought in about 18k visits, which isn’t a ton in the grand scheme of things, but I barely get a hundred for each post typically.
It is strangely still having some long-tail effect. A month later I am still getting referrals, which is very surprising to me. Who reads hackernews back in time?
This was my favourite comment:
Nobody says we have to be good at everything we do
This is advice I have to push on my kids constantly, because they are obsessed with finding that one thing they are better than everyone else in the world.
“Do some” is not advice I got as a kid, but my mom eventually figured it out and told me that when was in my mid 20s or something.Her words (from Malayalam) are best translated as “For whom a little is not enough, nothing is ever enough”.
I think that’s true for everything from money to self-worth. Enough is too hard to have.
I guess I really like the part of the internet where we throw something out in the wild, and sometimes we get back something else totally unexpected. And I got to learn from people’s life experiences in return.