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Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

What rule does the title refer to? The body of the text doesn't even contain the word "rule" (all 7 to 11 sentences depending on how you slice it)

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I also didn't quite get the point of the article, but I clicked on it because I expected to learn some insight about something related to the number of minutes in a day.

Like, what I learned in engineering, that there are 86,400 seconds a day and you can use 100,000 instead for estimation. E.g. when you have around 10 requests per second in a web service, each taking 1KB, then the traffic the web service generates a day is 1GB (== 10 * 100,000 * 1,000).

Apologies for the confusion, although it was intentional. Let me explain: Yes, you are right, 1,440 is indeed the number of minutes in a day which is not a widely known fact (outside this website that it). People always use what they know (i.e. hours) to describe their lives and not surprisingly get to similar, predictable results. Proving this point, you expected the post to be on a familiar subject so you quickly rejected it because it wasn't. But that is the main premise of the post: when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And to be true to the subject, I deliberately made the post short because I didn't want readers to invest more than one minute.(7 or 11 sentences to quote the other reader). Thanks for the comments!

Agreed, pretty weak sauce. There are some other worthwhile articles though.

feedback is always welcome, even negative. Apologies for the confusion, although it was intentional. Let me explain: Yes, you are right, 1,440 is indeed the number of minutes in a day which is not a widely known fact (outside this website that it). People always use what they know (i.e. hours) to describe their lives and not surprisingly get to similar, predictable results. Proving this point, you expected the post to be on a familiar subject so you quickly rejected it because it wasn't. But that is the main premise of the post: when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And to be true to the subject, I deliberately made the post short because I didn't want readers to invest more than one minute.(7 or 11 sentences to quote the other reader). Thanks for the comments!

Here is an example of local knowledge: I once worked in an office at the end of runway 27 right at ohare, chicago. It was known, at least in that circle, that there were over 2000 operations (take-offs and landings) at ohare daily. That was known to be more than the 1440 minutes in the day. That coupled with the knowledge that there were few operations between midnight and 6am meant that at peak hours there were often three events in one minute.

Great example. It also makes me wonder: If every moment of your work is so intense... does that change your perception of time ? A student once wrote that if he had one hour to live he would spend it in a boring classroom, because it would feel like eternity. Joking aside, the perception of time is an interesting subject...

Hmm...I think you're projecting your own ideas into my answer a bit. Actually, I was able to guess what it was about from the 1440 (as I'm given to passing the time with mental arithmetic, and I liked the point you were making.

I only complained about it being 'weak sauce' because I felt you could have taken more time to develop this concept for the interested reader (which you do successfully in multiple other posts). 'Do more with less' is great advice, but 4 words don't necessarily constitute a complete essay :)

True. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said that "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" Obviously I am not implying anything about my post here (which is far from perfect -_-), but I do like simplicity as a principle...

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