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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

The smart rod made me think.

What is it about competitive hobbies and having the best kit. If you go fishing and have the best rod, bait, hooks, where's the upside? You cant be sure that massive fish you caught is your skill or just tech. Everyone would expect you to catch a big fish because you have all the kit.

If on the other hand you just have a cheap rod etc, that big fish you catch, you caught because of your skill. The guy sitting next to you with all the kit, that's just caught a massive fish is ok, because he has all the kit.

I've noticed the same thing with cycling and golf.

I suppose you could say its to prove you're part of a group, but isn't being sat in the rain, next to a muddy pond proof enough?

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A part of the puzzle is just that it feels better. It's a bit like taking a long walk - with nice shoes you'll enjoy the views and weather, with bad shoes you'll just think about the pain in your sore back and knees.

Myself, I generally strive to find the stuff at the point of diminishing returns. Top stuff is often just expensive in comparison, bottom stuff you just have to fight all the time.

Good point, I think it goes past that though? Racing cycles and saddles aren't comfortable. And as for the quality feel. Is a smart rod going the feel better than a traditional rod?

>Racing cycles and saddles aren't comfortable.

They aren't uncomfortable if you're fast. The harder you ride, the more force you're applying to your pedals and so more of your weight is borne by your feet and hands. The saddle on a racing bicycle is more of a perch than a seat; it's a very important link in the connection between rider and bicycle, but it doesn't need to be plushly padded. A wide and heavily padded saddle deforms and creates a large and unstable contact area with the rider, which increases friction and leads to nasty chafing on longer rides. It seems superficially insane to use a hard and narrow saddle and padded shorts, but it's actually a very comfortable solution for a fast rider who spends a lot of time in the saddle.

It's also worth bearing in mind the relatively enormous forces that a fast rider can apply to their bicycle. Solutions that work fine when you're pootling along at 120w are hopelessly unstable if you're banging out 500w in a hard effort or 1500w in a bunch sprint. You need a very stiff frame, you need stiff shoes with a rigid attachment to the pedals, you need high pressure tyres with good lateral stiffness. That stiffness can be bone-rattling at times, but it can also be very satisfying. There's a directness and agility to a good road bike, a precise connection to the road that is essential for professionals and hugely enjoyable for a certain sort of amateur.

You can't do this on a "comfortable" bike:

https://youtu.be/QE97iUvSHk0

https://youtu.be/RxXqQqAc2pA

Well said. I doff my cap, you obviously quite like cycling. :)

1500w though, that's very high, like Greipel territory. I wasn't quite thinking of that when I had my rant.

> You can't do this on a "comfortable" bike:

I had one of those bikes. You lower the saddle, and they're very, very comfortable, because of how light those bikes are. You can pick them up with one hand and throw them 5 meters easily. For comfort, I guess you'd replace the steering wheel, but these are kinda cool.

The saddles are built so athletes can realistically sit on them for 10 hours a day for 4 weeks. I assure you, they're pretty comfortable. Not motorcycle saddle comfortable, but those get in the way of actually pushing the pedals. They're as good as they'll get.

You want to take them on the bus/train ? Talk about easy. You need it standing up in an elevator ? No problem. Bounce on stairs ? They do that unbelievably well, even with you on them. And they're fast, very fast.

Only thing you could say is that they're built for speed, and the compromise is that they slip really easily. Don't use in snow, mud or on ice or something like that, you'll break something.

Also anywhere in Europe they get stolen faster than a steak in a bengal cat nest. Which is a pretty serious disadvantage.

Even though a hobby may be competitive, you don’t have to do it competitively. Maybe you just want to go fishing and catch fish and you’re happy if you caught one and want to catch more.

As a hobbyist cyclist, I like having a decent bike simply because it’s more fun to cycle with less effort. Of course I could get an old crappy one to show off my skill and constitution, but that’s not the point for me. The point is to have some fun and while part of this fun is due to achieving goals, achieving a hard goal with a little help such as a good bike is still more fun than not achieving the hard goal, especially if it’s due to comparably-bad tech.

Whether your threshold for bad tech is now a really old bike or a not-newest bike is merely a quantitative difference and in the end subject to personal preferences.

Where do ebikes fit into that picture?

Ebikes can be of assistance without spoiling the entire experience. For example, they may allow you to make more miles with the same human effort. One application is that they might allow you to bike to work, in cases where it would otherwise not be practically possible.

They fit a different niche. Some people cycle for fitness or sporting reasons; a motor might compromise the sense of achievement of going faster and further under your own power. A lot of people cycle just to enjoy the outdoors; the idea of going faster and further for the same effort might seem perfectly logical. Ebikes are a great solution if you're just using a bicycle as functional transport, serving as a convenient halfway house between a bicycle and motorcycle.

People who go fishing for competitiveness are going fishing for the wrong reason, AFAIC.

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after." - Thoreau

It's everywhere though not just hobbies. Whether it's what clothes you wear, what phone you have, what car you drive. (Most) people want to have better stuff than those around them. "Beat the Joneses" etc.

Consumerism is a drug, and it's incredibly addictive. It took me a long long time to stop caring about having the best stuff. New phone every year, new laptop every 2. As fancy a car as I could afford, high end fishing gear, etc.

Thankfully, having kids let me "grow up" a lot in a very short timeframe, and I now have a 15yr old car, 4yr old phone, and generally just cheap but functional stuff around me, but it's still hard to shake that urge.

Why use proper technique - wouldn't it show more skill to catch a fish when using poor technique? If you're not trying to catch fish why are you fishing at all?

There is joy in doing a hard thing well, in improving yourself. But the only way to actually improve is to have an objective-enough standard for the thing you're doing - weight of fish, speed on bike, number of strokes in golf. Without that it devolves into "I only caught a small fish? Oh well, I was using a cheap rod, and my left hand, and I wasn't really trying anyway". Whereas if you caught a bigger fish this time, there's no way to fake that.

"There is joy in doing a hard thing well, in improving yourself"

Yes, which is why I'm confused. I'm not asking why people cycle instead of motorcycle, or don't go to the fish shop instead of fishing.

With fishing surely theres an upper bound on the size of the fish, the worst rod can still catch it, while showing superior skill.

> Yes, which is why I'm confused. I'm not asking why people cycle instead of motorcycle, or don't go to the fish shop instead of fishing.

Well, it's two sides of the same coin: why is "no motor" a restriction that makes for an interesting hobby but "crappy bike" isn't? My answer is that trying to be as fast as possible subject to x can be interesting provided there's a clear sharp line between x and not-x. E.g. plenty of people ride single-speed bicycles - but they'll still try to be as fast as possible within that restriction, and may well buy an expensive single-speed bicycle for doing so. Indeed the vast majority of cyclists follow UCI's decidedly arbitrary rules which are explicitly designed to make cycling a bit less pay-to-win (minimum bicycle weight so that bikes made with cheaper materials can still be competitive, arbitrary spoke/frame shape requirements to make wind-tunnel testing less effective and limit innovative designs).

You could say that people stick to the UCI rules so that they can compare to other UCI cyclists and be part of the same community, and I'm sure that's a part of that, but IMO that's a minor factor. The really important thing is having a ruleset that you can't easily change yourself: the UCI rules are external and fixed, whereas if I tried to follow my own definition of what a "crappy bike" was and be as fast as possible within that, there would always be a question of why that particular definition, and whether I could/should change something. If I got a new bike and was faster on it, would that be "cheating" because the new bike wasn't "crappy enough"? What about things I hadn't thought of in my ruleset? (e.g. when I first started cycling I hadn't even heard of cleats, so would switching to cleats have been breaking my rules?)

Well, that's partly because you've specified "competitive hobbies".

98% of cyclists don't compete in time trials or races. If you single out the 2% of cyclists whose hobby is trying to go faster than the guy next to them, and ask why they buy equipment to make them go faster than the guy next to them, isn't the answer obvious?

98% of cyclists may not compete, but a large % will shave their legs, don Lycra, and time themselves etc.

Plus 98% of cyclists don't ride around on sit up and beg bikes, wearing normal clothes etc, outside of the Netherlands and a few other countries.

No doubt it depends on your location. Cycle commuters in my locale look like [1] - you might see people with TT bars and shaved legs from time to time, but it's certainly not the norm. And if instead of cycle commuters you look at weekend cyclists on scenic bike paths, or the bikes locked to bike racks at major train stations, the vast majority won't be top-price high performance bikes.

[1] https://www.123rf.com/photo_30847100_london-may-6th-unidenti...

"scenic bike paths"

We obviously live in different UKs.

It is more of a weekend rider thing, I note theres still only one sit up and beg, to the two drop handled bikes.

Edit: Just to add, that picture is quite encouraging. People actually cycling in 'normal' clothes, a sign of an improving cycling culture. Hopefully it will spread to the rest of the UK.

why are Scandinavian style bikes, ridden by people in day clothes, seemingly the only acceptable bike commuter to you?

what is it about the look of someone on, say a hybrid, who's wearing gear appropriate to their commute (which may be athletic gear) that induces so much tut-tutting?

My rant did start off on competitive hobbies. In my neck of the woods cycling is very much in that category.

I wasn't complaining about the hybrid bikes, I did mention the drop handlebars, hybrids don't tend to have drop handlebars though.

> but a large % will shave their legs

well for 51% of the population in places like the US and UK, it's also a cultural thing...

Like car buying. In the UK many people buy over powered cars as if they're going to be racing them, preferring speed over comfort/durability/economy. Then they commute in them sitting alone in super-accelerating, high-speed, family-sized vehicles in traffic jams going under 30mph.

Like car buying everywhere. For as rapidly as Teslas can accelerate off the line, I don't think I've ever had one out pull me leaving a light, and I'm never flooring it either

Yep, this is what eventually leads to back-to-the-nature movements (barefoot running, free climbing, expeditions without oxygen masks, etc.).

It seems to be a device that you attach to your rod and it records where and how you cast. I don't see why that's hugely different to recording running/walking/cycling activity - which loads of people already do (and I do for walking/cycling).

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