Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawndumas | Hacker News Reader

'I often went three or four days between showers or until someone told me I smelled.'

-- Ok I'm sorry, maybe this is superficial of me, but I just cannot fathom consciously choosing to wait till offense overcomes decorum to decide when to shower.

View on HN

The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the mores of contemporary society - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

Which sounds noble until I'm forced to share a confined space with the person.

You only especially notice if all the people you routinely interact with take daily showers: in places where no one does, everyone has acclimated to the smell of sweat.

In which case it's not particularly offensive, and is part of the culture, negating the whole argument and the Byronic character aspect...

Mores change with time and place. Negligent malodourousness is to be avoided at all times and places.

Besides, he wasn't "creatively following the dictates of his inspiration". He was wimping out of the consequences of his 'inspiration'; man-up and shower. Unhygienic!

edit: bad speller

100 years ago, the practice of bathing once or twice per day would seem luxurious if not wasteful.

now !== then

Which language uses !== instead of != ?

PHP. The !== checks for equality and for type. For example, it is true in PHP that 0 == false, but it is also true that 0 !== false.

Also Javascript: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Referen...

Correct.

But given that now and then are both of type Temporal, he should still go for !=.

There are coding style guides that advocate using the strict operators everywhere it makes sense. http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html

Ah, sorry, I read it as "equality of type".

It's strict not equal in JavaScript. 'Returns true if the operands are not equal and/or not of the same type.'

'==' and '!=' are coercive in JavaScript -- as in:

    5 == "5" -> true

    5 != "5" -> false

    5 === "5" -> false

    5 !== "5" -> true

His point seems to be that nothing fundamental has changed except for people's expectations. People being slightly more odiferous has never been a showstopper before.

And you say it's unhygenic... there's nothing dangerous about not showering daily. It's purely an aesthetic thing. I do it for that reason, but I don't kid myself about its necessity.

Fundamentally, people's expectations have changed. Context, as always, is king.

And in many parts of the world, you can relive that experience.

here !== there

As if there's a single `here' on HN.

myHere !== yourHere

You could make that 30-40 years ago in much of the world outside of North America. My parents certainly believed that was a crazy indulgence back in the 80s. They have since tempered (though I still think twice a day is ridiculous unless you really need it after labor/exercise).

> Unhygienic!

What definition of "hygiene" are we using?

As unpleasant as his smell may have been, when does a shower reduce the incidence of disease? (That's the medical definition of hygiene - Wikipedia - "In medicine, hygiene practices are employed as preventative measures to reduce the incidence and spreading of disease.")

If you don't shower for too long, you start to itch and you'll probably have more acne and foot fungus (provided that your showers are fungus free of course).

Sources? (I can imagine that wearing shoes without showering makes you grow fungi. Going barefoot most of the time should solve that problem. Or just washing your feet with cold water.)

Also since when was acne caused by not taking a shower?

It you are prone to acne, keeping your skin clean reduces outbreaks by keeping your pores clear.

Your skin did not face an every day destruction of its microbe and oil film in its evolution, and may react strangely, including with acne.

Anyway, I'd like to see some statistics, because we can both come up with arguments like that for as long as we like.

Unhygienic as in smegma.

nitpick: melodiousness != malodourousness

I think I'd love to be surrounded by negligent melodiousness, it sounds delightful.

good call, thank you.

> Negligent melodiousness

Malodorousness, perhaps?

yes, yes, you are correct, thanks.

If you want more context, it was usually the employees of the company I founded that told me I needed to shower. It's not like I had flies swarming around me. Rather, they'd walk into my office and sniff and let me know it was about that time.

This seemed very efficient to me. Why go around guessing when you need to shower when others can more tell you more accurately?

But different strokes for different folks. I'd rather be known, not for my complete lack of odor, but for having an independent intellect.

I hate to be the one to break it to you; but if your employees had to tell you when to shower they won't remember you for your "independent intellect", they'll remember you as "the guy who smelled so bad we had to tell him to take showers".

If you had to wait until your employees actually had the balls to tell the owner of the company that they smelled, you probably waited too long.

No one is known for their lack of odour.

People are known for their bad odour though; and if they figure out it is because your not washing most people will either a) think your a bit weird or b) avoid you.

I agree, though the notion of showering every day is a reasonably modern American innovation (that has, thankfully, spread further afield). As a kid in 80s Britain, my parents and I all had our baths on Sunday, and that was that. When I reached my teens, of course, I decided to become a little more regular!

All that said, people clearly have different washing demands. Manual workers, people who sweat a lot, and people, like the GP poster, who clearly smelt to third parties. There are folks, though, who can go a while between washing without becoming pongy though, in my experience.

I use to shower everyday. However, when I was on a vacation in Mongolia we jumped into a lake, say, once a week. Strangely, we did not smell. (And I did not smell the other guys, even when I just had a bath in the lake.) On the other hand, this was around 2700m above sea level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com