Bostwick

I enjoy fitness. I've worked out four to five days a week for the past seven years, first at a climbing gym, and then with Crossfit. I've competed in fitness competitions. I've know a number of well-respected high-level Crossfitters. I would call myself, at the very least, a fitness enthusiast.

I think some of these claims are at best, laughable, and, at worst, will give false hope to people who might truly be interested in fitness. Fitness is hard work!

> * How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time

Muscle memory will allow people to gain significant amounts of muscle in short periods of time, if that muscle has been trained before.

It's why athletes who take rest periods or have injuries are able to come back just as strong in only a few weeks.

It's the source of many of the before/after pictures for "health foods" and supplements.

If you're actually interested in gaining muscle and weight, the easiest way is to eat tons of food and do heavy, compound exercises three to four times a week.

> * How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

Anecdotally, a friend of mine ended up in the emergency room for severe dehydration after trying the Uberman's Sleep Cycle for three weeks.

> * How to triple testosterone and double sperm count

I imagine he's be talking about various supplements here. Supplement science is sketchy, and should always be taken with a grain of salt.

The best way to take supplements is to not take them, but rather, eat more fruits and vegetables.

> * How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks

Pretty simple, actually. There are progressive running plans in almost any running book.

Also, the difference between five and 50 km, at least to your muscles, is much less than the difference between 400M and 5K. It's just training your aerobic system and converting more of your muscle tissue to slow-twitch muscle fibers.

> * How to reverse “permanent” injuries

Eat right and exercise correctly.

If you read the forums for crossfit, or stronglifts, or a number of other fitness websites, or diet websites, you'll see people who miraculously cure their bad back, bad knees or diabetes, just by eating right and exercising correctly.

> * How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months

This is almost guaranteed to happen when someone goes from an untrained state to the beginning of a trained state. It has to do with muscles learning to be used, rather than significant strength gains.

When I started Crossfit three years ago, I could barely deadlift 135#. Three years later, my last 1RM deadlift was 455#. Going from 135# to 300# was _so_ much easier and faster than going from 300# to 455#, because my body had always been able to do it, it just didn't know it.

They completely ignore the growing startup scene in New York - Silicon Alley, Digital Dumbo[1] - and latch on instead to a story about a huge, already established company that's buying a building they already have 2000+ employees in.

Tech meccas are born from hundreds of small technology companies constantly pushing the limits of a platform, not from the presence of a single, large employer.

[1] http://www.digitaldumbo.com/about/

What I'd like to see would be: (1) a better header, and (2) some sort of sidebar explaining the site.

(1) The half-vignette at the top of the page is ruined by the placement of a blue logo in the line of focus. Lose the vignette, and expand the logo to fill the top of the page.

(2) A sidebar would serve the purpose of (a) explaining what the site is for, as it's not immediately clear from the domain name or scanning the page. I've been in the climbing community for ten years, and I have no idea what the slang "thrutched" is supposed to mean. You could also add a call to action like "Submit your climbing link!"

Finally, a pet peeve. Can you change "next page" to something else? It sounds too blog-like as it is.

That said, your site certainly looks a lot better than digg did in v1.

My main criticism is the design. It leaves much to be desired, and as a result I can't seem myself using this much right now.

Some advice: This might be better announced on the communities over at rockclimbing.com, climbing.com, 8a.nu, and the various climbing rags (dpm, rock&ice, urban climber). Have you announced thrutched.com on those forums?

It's good for a first iteration. I'm interested to see how you improve the design. I really like the idea of a climbing video aggregation site.

What I think would be both cool and a useful addition to the climbing community would be a replacement for 8a.nu that wouldn't look outdated in 1996 and allowed to you keep track of training as well as tick lists. Kind of a combination of crossfit's beyondthewhiteboard.com and 8a.nu.

On a a side note: I've seen climbing mentioned by a few others on HN. How many people here climb? I'm based in NYC right now, so I <3 the Gunks, and sometimes NH.

On a per-card basis, Overnight is 3.6x as expensive as Vistaprint.

Whole Foods in NYC has solved this problem by having one queue, but when you get towards the front, there are five separate, color-coded lines. At the front of the queue is a giant television that shows a bar of color for each lane. When a register opens up, the number for that register slides into the color bar for the next person in the sequence, and a voice announces "Register 12". It's fairly efficient at keeping the queue moving as well as managing people's psychological need for multiple lines. It also prevents cashiers from wasting time, because as soon as a transaction is finished, their register is automatically assigned to the next person in the queue. The only "wasted" time is the time walking from queue to register, and pleasantries.

The idea that people like to be productive and hit the ground running on their first day is not new, exciting or bold. Yet, it's still noteworthy when it happens.

I would have loved procedures like this when I started my current job. After the HR benefits lecture, I was sat down at a computer and told to read outdated and often wrong documentation for a week. My login account wasn't active until two days after I started.

Apparently, it's California law that hourly employees can only work 8 hours per day, and anything over 8 hours in a 24 hours period is "overtime."

I'm now at an internship with a software company in New York, where the rules are what I consider "normal": Anything over 40 hours in a week is considered overtime, no matter when it was worked. However, the company has a strict no-overtime policy without (hard-to-get) prior approval.

For me, this meant I spent more of my time working in CA, because I was rewarded, while in NY, I work 9 hour days four days a week, then take off after lunch on Friday for a 2.5 day weekend.

It's a much more pleasant way to wake up in the morning, as it mirrors nature. I've found that after using it consistently for about a week, my sleep cycle stabilizes on the schedule I want, and I can usually get up naturally when I need to and beat my back-up buzzing alarm.

I disagree. Once you've learned the basics of investing or stock trading, accumulating capital becomes about increasing your income.

Let's look at your laptop & apartment example.

Case 1: Super fast laptop & nice clean apartment. I can max out a Macbook Pro for about three grand, and a nice 2br apartment in Boston will cost about $3k per month in rent. With your $8,000 bank account, you'll need to earn at least $3,000 per month from your job just to pay for your apartment. More to save up and purchase that laptop, and even more still if you want to afford to eat.

Case 2: Crappy laptop and crappy apartment with $50k. A crappy laptop is about $500 for a really nice netbook, and a cheap apartment in Boston is about $600 per month (for those in Boston, think JP and Forest Hills). Let's invest that $50k in an ETF called "PFF", which currently costs $40 per share and pays a monthly dividend of, on average, .20c per share. That gives you 1250 shares of PFF, for an average monthly income of $250. With $50k, you can buy a $1000 laptop in four months, or pay for almost half your monthly rent.

On a forum where people are constantly trying to generate passive income through webapps and side businesses, I'm surprised people continuously overlook the passive income power of large amounts of capital. $50k can buy you $250 a month for life.

I'm a college student, so I move every six months, so I'm in a similar position as you. A VPS allows me to have my own server without having to maintain the physical box.

Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem.

The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve.

Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable.

I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.

My local crossfit gym, the Brooklyn Barbell Club, has programs tailored to all abilities. A surprising number of people there are involved in software; I regularly weight lift with a guy who works on Chrome.

I'm a fan of crossfit in general because it keeps fitness fun by rarely repeating a workout (running 30 minutes everyday is awesome, until you realize how dull it is), gives me hard data to work with by doing workouts for time or reps (there's even a startup, http://beyondthewhiteboard.com/, dedicated to tracking crossfit workouts), and provides a huge, supportive community.