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Comment by jilljennV | Hacker News Reader

In March 2014, I attended a conference in Atlanta. In the subway, some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference. So I went to some kinko and asked:

- How much for 250 business cards? - $69. - If I provide a PDF and just ask you to print and cut, can you do it for today? - Yes. - How much? - $39. Do you have the file? - Yes.

It was a lie. I opened a new LaTeX document and typed this thing, thanks to Stack Overflow.

https://github.com/jilljenn/business-card

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I don't quite get why LaTeX is special here. You could have done the same in Inkscape, Word or whatever other text stuff related program.

Even better, you could layout with Inkscape AND typeset the text with LaTeX using textext: https://bitbucket.org/pitgarbe/textext

This is so silly and yet so awesome. I might actually use it in the future.

I don't understand. What was the lie?

I believe he means when he responded "Yes" to the final question (as in "Yes, I have the PDF file for the business card"), he was lying and had nothing. So he quickly searched SO and found what he needed.

Sometimes, that's just what Stack Overflow is there for: a quickly accessible CYA!

That's a bit dramatic to call a lie!

It was a lie though, the fact you can then go on to do something such that the other party is never aware of the lie does not stop it from being a lie.

Most interactions are full of such lies, particularly between people with very different skill sets. Lies are social lubricants, and often have very little drama associated with them.

We do however have an interesting social stigma associated with the term "lie", much like "manipulate".

>some nice guy told me I had to make business cards for the conference

why? are they checking for business cards at the entrance or something?

Every person you meet is going to ask what you do, that's the moment to hand over your card.

I've always used it more as a natural conversation closer personally.

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