We keep coming back around to why didn't the author say:
"I want the one in the smallest box for <reason>"
Instead of providing no reason and being smug in their assumption that they are both very clever and the barely over minimum wage employee assumes they are "stupid".
It's also funny that he didn't even put it in the post. I'm not sure it's because of length restrictions, since the post is 4,495 words long. Maybe he wanted to keep under 4,500.
Also perplexing: footnote 2 mentions the car tire paradox. (Traction is determined by weight and coefficient of traction, and those two things only. So why do high performance cars have wider tires, which shouldn't make a difference? Because softer and stickier tires are mechanically weaker and tolerate heat less well, so you need to spread the force out over a larger area.) But it doesn't actually mention the answer besides noting many other people are wrong, and also is separately incorrect and says contact area doesn't change based on tire width?
Like, there's no clever counterintuitive Boyle's law/hydraulics effect where at the same air pressure a tire twice as big deforms half as much or whatever. Just the very obvious intuitive case that wider tires have bigger contact patches, which you can calculate yourself by plugging numbers into this tire calculator: http://bndtechsource.ucoz.com/index/tire_data_calculator/0-2... and the BMW i3 electric car has a crazy thin tire to have a smaller contact patch and less rolling resistance: https://www.bmwblog.com/2015/04/24/bmw-i3s-tires-more-import...
And the css thing... notoriously, everything on danluu.com has been completely unstyled for years. So every time one of his posts is on HN, someone comments about the unreadably wide lines, which could be fixed with a single `body{max-width:600px}` CSS rule.
But the reason everything is unstyled is because Dan installed octopress seven years ago, which had a braindead default theme that used custom fonts for everything, causing a glacial 15 second time to first paint: https://danluu.com/octopress-speedup/ Irritated, Dan ripped out all the CSS entirely, and the site loads in a flash. But now he has a trapped prior,[1] and any time someone says "CSS" to him he thinks, "ugh, that awful garbage which ruined my site" and refuses to touch it.
> now he has a trapped prior,[1] and any time someone says "CSS" to him he thinks, "ugh, that awful garbage which ruined my site" and refuses to touch it.
Do you know that's true? Are you extrapolating his mental activity from a limited set of facts?
"I want the one in the smallest box for <reason>"
Instead of providing no reason and being smug in their assumption that they are both very clever and the barely over minimum wage employee assumes they are "stupid".