I absolutely find it interesting aswell, even though I'm not a car nut by any stretch.
I saw a very similar thread that was linked to me about 18 months ago, where the man in it was doing it to the nth degree - which I found very fascinating. One of the differences between the two was in this one he was taking measurements of the car and mapping it out on a laptop to work out the thickness of the paint.
Quote from thread
This showed that the roof panel was 155 microns at the thickest point compared to 120 at the lowest.....
I asked Paul why this was so important and he explained that for maximum reflection you needed to take away the peaks in the clearcoat to a maximum point of the lowest trough microscopically which should flatten the clearcoat to a reading of + or - 2 microns across the board and take no more than 8 microns from the clearcoat for fear of clearcoat failure in the future....
Perhaps the Lamborghini guy did the same thing aswell which could be how he was talking about how many micrometers he was taking off. Maybe his measurements were based off experience. Hard to know really.
For the record, I think this kind of variety can definitely be interesting every now and then. There's only so many Google Chrome threads one can take.
"This dude does something mundane so thoroughly he turns it into fine art."
I think this really sums it up.
It's not very often you see something like this that is so focused upon acheiving perfection (or as close as possible). And I gained a bunch of respect for top flight car detailers.
It's like Gary Vaynerchuck says. Be the Gary Vee or Ze Frank of Lambo detailing, evening. Be the Ze Frank of Lamborghini detailing. 400 highly dedicated fans can give you more enjoyment and fulfillment than 25,000 anonymous Diggers.
You can have it if you want it, you just have to work for it.
I don't think stories like this are harmful. People read them, look around, comment and that's the end of it. That's not so much the case with the politics/economics stories, which are the ones I have a problem with.
While I disagree with you, after spending 20 minutes reading his forum post, I clicked back expecting to see the homepage of AutoBlog.com and quickly realized "oh yeah, this was on Hacker News"
That's my point. While in fact I do like the content, I'd like to keep this forum more narrowly focused simply because with more generic content comes a more generic crowd and with that LOL cats.
I can see that my mundane comment of polite disagreement above is taking quite the karma hit. I guess the crowd prefers a wider topic scope.
Cleaning anything for longer than 5-10 minutes seems like the exact opposite of hacking. Maybe that's the point, gawking at how peculiar non-hackers can be?
If he did the exact same thing to a 1997 Ford Escort instead of a new Lambo he'd be mercilessly mocked.
Making love for longer than 5-10 minutes seems like the exact opposite of marriage. Maybe that's the point, gawking at how peculiar non-married people can be?
If he did the exact same thing to an ugly chick he'd be mercilessly mocked.
Hackers are usually driven by that which is interesting. Some people, however, are more driven by that which makes them feel that they've accomplished something. While boredom precludes my doing something like this well, I can admire the doing. :)
Not only did the guy do a thorough job on the car, his forum post and all of the pictures where as thorough as could be also. I never thought I would be so engaged in a post about detailing a car.
This is somewhat unrelated, but if you own a white Macbook, pick up some Turtle Wax White Polishing Compound. It will remove any scratches on the outer case and make it look perfectly clean and white again.
Also, I hear arm&hammer tooth paste can fix the fading that happens near the keyboard.
Very nice, but it does bring to mind the phrase "law of diminishing returns". The car was pretty nice looking to start, and it was stunning after the quick wash. That's where I would have stopped and moved on to something else :)
Uh... someone is posting on Hacker News about... some anal retentive dude cleaning a car? Is this some sort of circlejerk for neat freaks or QA engineers?
Now, after reading some comments:
Okay, I can see how it's a little interesting to see just how ridiculous you can get about cleaning stuff and how ridiculously detailed the techniques can get. Still, I have a natural aversion to cleaning and think it's useless and overdone half the time (thus, strong bias). The effort is appreciated, but really, big whoop.
There's an excellent lesson to be learned here. The level of passion and technical competency the detailer displays in his quest to clean the car is what's also needed for a startup to succeed.
The number of upmods is utterly mysterious to me. Man washes car. Yep. That's what he did.
That car costs about 200,000 dollars. It's ugly, like a drugged-up Toyota prius. It costs more than a used twin-engine Cessna. It costs more than a Peterbilt. It costs about as much as a flying fortress [1]. It costs more than 99.99 percent of useful products. It's made of plastic and will not survive its first pothole. It just screams "douchebag".
"Look at me world!!! I'm a douchebag and I spent 200K to inform you of this fact!"
Is it all right if I upload some pictures of a successful appendectomy...cause, you know, "detailing" is not really the apex of "task execution". I think what we're really seeing here is the most thorough diminishing returns ever executed. Ten minutes with a cloth and dish detergent would have done the job.
While I may agree with you on the impression I get from such a car, what your post told me was, "Look at me world!!! I'm a douchebag and I didn't have 200K to spend so I wrote this post to inform you of this fact!"
Sorry, I don't mean to imply that you are a douchebag, but perhaps the car's owner isn't, either. He obviously drove the car and got some use out of it (as the poster indicated), so perhaps he just enjoyed it. Life is short, what's wrong with doing what makes you happy?
As for the submission, I (longtime HN member) upmodded it. The post was very thorough, and it was worthwhile to get such deep insight into the workings of a field that I previously had no knowledge of.
I once did sort of the same thing with my keyboard. Do you guys know how much dirt my right windows key had? like half a millimeter at least. And it had some tomato sauce and i have no idea how all the hair got inside, but i found a lot of it. Took me hours to clean the thing, its sparkling now.
Kudos to whatusername for the link.
For the record, I think it is Hacker News. I'm a hacker, I find it interesting, I think other hackers will find it interesting. Hacker News.