Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwaltrip | Hacker News Reader

This should be titled "Condensed snippets of accumulated wisdom, focusing mostly on software and business, that I am fairly confident of and feel compelled to share with you".

Many of these nuggets are not "obvious", for any conventional understanding of that word.

That said, I enjoyed the post, and liked the concise format.

View on HN

"obvious" is not a property of a statement itself, it indicates a relationship between a piece of knowledge and a larger knowledge base, where one thing immediately follows from other things that are already known.

I don't think "obvious" in the conventional sense is a real category, because no two people would agree the same things are obvious.

Ah, just like the good old "it is trivial to see that a -> b" from advanced mathematics.

The way I took "obvious" is that these things are obvious to people who have been dealing with such things for years to the point that they don't realize they aren't obvious to those that haven't.

I've noticed that this is a common thing - it's very rare for someone who has spent years in a particular area to sit down and distill things that have become obvious to them over time in a way that can be taught to newcomers.

This was mentioned by someone else, but in case you missed it: the "concise format" is a result of this being a 23-tweet tweet storm that the Threadreader has compiled into one page for us.

The format is really good. Tired of paying ~$5 for a 300 page self-help book, when a 2 page summary like this can do just as well.

you should consider buying The Great American Bathroom Book. Despite the kitschy title, it consists of rather good and concise summaries of novels as well as nonfiction books, including some popular self-help books. None are more than two pages.

They should hire you to come up with titles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com