[xauronx]

Man, this is so disappointing that everyone shits on you for this post. Just like most negative internet forums, you end up with one person putting themselves out there and telling about their experience and then 100 people criticizing everything about it (and plenty of stuff they made up about it).

Anyhow, I think your root sentiment is valid (that most people are only limited by what they believe they can accomplish). Most people take offense to the "little effort" part, but I believe that if you through pure will power accomplish something you thought you would NEVER accomplish, that's "little effort". Most people would probably be surprised by their progress in something if they just put their heads down and worked at it.

[vehementi]

I see this a lot on HN, people embarrassing themselves by totally missing the point of some post / article / blog / whatever and raging about the tone or taking issue with some particular usage.

Oh no, this guy maybe over reached in his assumption about how well general people can memorize numbers! Better make ourselves look like idiots and go wildly off point about it!

Check out the thread about that guy's blog "Kids these days can't use computers" as a prime example :(