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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

There are times when I could swear that Scott Adams reads Hacker News. But IIRC, these are written weeks or months in advance.

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I'm pretty sure he has a shorter buffer than that. My friend who works in enterprise development says Dilbert has often come out and satirized some new thing to the day when it gets hyped up at work.

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/thatlost4gphone/ would indicate that Scott Adams works with a buffer of almost 2 months.

Is this the same comic that (appeared in newspapers yesterday|will appear in newspapers today)? If so, he said in a blog post a few months ago that the normal lag is ~a month and the best he could do was like 2 weeks. (Those numbers are a little off, I'm sure.)

But if this is just an online version (it is /fast, whatever that means), it might be a different story.

it is /fast, whatever that means

AFAIK /fast is an URL to read just the comics "fast" without spending bandwidth loading all the additional information presented in the landing page of the website.

It also doesn't use flash. A gift to *nixy and mobile readers.

I thought newspapers publish the comic one week before it's on the web.

FWIW, the previous comic to this one in that website, labeled July 14th, was in yesterday's July 14th newspaper here (Yes, I'm from Sydney Australia, we live _in the future!_ aka UTC+10)

You, sir, are personally responsible for 3.2 fluid ounces of coffee that's all over my montors at work. Well played!

So he has to keep 2-4 weeks upstream of trends? I guess that's possible, too.

Doonesbury has a 10 day lead time, which is still challenging for Trudeau to remain topical: http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/faqs/faq_cs.html

It can be a long buffer, but maybe not a FIFO but a priority-queue. :)

I recall soon after the oil spill he published a comic directly on his blog, stating that if he published it through the normal route, it would take upwards of 2 months to get through the process, and would no longer be relevant. I'll post the link if I can find it.

edit: My bad, it was the iPhone 4 prototype debacle! But he directly answers the question about how far he works ahead. http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/thatlost4gphone/

If you read his blog, he states that he has a pretty long lead time. He says relation to current events just happens coincidentally. When you think about it, he publishes one comic a day and they're often total non sequiturs, so it will happen by circumstance somewhat frequently.

If he even has the ability to get one approved and published quickly, which I'd say is doubtful given that it's print, it's probably a nuclear option that he wouldn't use for having seen a few threads here.

> He says relation to current events just happens coincidentally.

In one of his books, he talked about this in greater detail. One of the examples he cited was a comic where someone made a joke about a "dead nun in a snow drift" - that just happened to run the same day as a bus crash that left a whole bunch of nuns dead.

Probably uses a pseudonym, amichail maybe ;) ?

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