[Zanni]

Why your [ultra-light hiker] friend suddenly has [the world's lightest] power bank.

I remember Colin Fletcher, years ago, writing in The Complete Walker about trimming the borders off his paper maps to save weight, which seemed like an insane over-optimization to me. But then, I'm not an ultralight hiker.

I am impressed folks are getting their loads down to 10 pounds though.

[chrisweekly]

Tangent: as a web performance consultant, I've sometimes used "shaving down half the toothbrush handle while carrying a bowling ball in your backpack" as a metaphor for misguided performance optimization efforts.

[jancsika]

To turn it back around-- your entire codebase is on the hiker's back. They feel its aggregate weight with every step.

It's all literally in the hot path.

When bugs show up in the form of back pain, "pre-optimize everything" sounds like a sensible option to me.

[JohnFen]

That insane over-optimization is how folks are getting down to (and below) 10 pounds.

I'm not even remotely an ultralight backpacker, but I do count ounces (no matter what your weight limit is, you can't escape making tradeoffs to stay within it). Your hiking load is a great example of how quickly apparently insignificant quantities can add up. Saving fractions of an ounce multiple times gets you large savings far more quickly than you'd think.

[addaon]

I'm down to around 10 lb base load. And then I hike in the desert where I carry 5 - 7 liters of water (11 - 15 lbs). And food. Saving a pound here and there is totally worth it, but there's a large part of the country where prudent hiking means the majority of your weight is water.

[anonymars]

The topic reminds me of the .NET core peanut butter improvements:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/performance-improvemen...

[jfengel]

I'm surprised that the gram weenies are carrying a battery at all. Carrying a phone at all must be galling, but you really need it for emergencies (and final pickup).

[vasco]

Better not forget to take a shit in the morning ever, or all your efforts are wasted.

[matwood]

A guy I knew biked across part of Europe and borrowed a travel book of mine. He bought me a new one when he got back because he would tear out the pages of places he visited in order to lighten his load.

[int_19h]

There's a point past which it becomes a number game without any practical utility. But there's a lot of people (especially hereabouts!) that find this kind of thing very enticing. Think of min-maxing D&D builds... it's kind of like that, but your rulebook is basically physics.

[duxup]

I recall reading about mountain climbing and some experienced climber was joking about the folks who are all about the weight and gear and so forth. He didn't say it was unimportant, but he did say that everything that makes him better than the amateurs, or even amateurs better than other amateurs had nothing to do with gear or weight fixation.

It was the same thing when I got into photography. It's always easy to talk about the easily measurable things. This lens is better than that and so on. Gear is cool and fun...

But the old guy with the beat up camera and not optimal lens shooting next to me ... he will take better photos almost every single shot.

[heelix]

The trick to lighter packs for many was weighing everything. Not uncommon to break everything down by grams - which tells you what could be improved. No point in spending $50 on a .5oz spoon, if your pack is coming in at 4lbs. Does help optimize where things could be cut and where the faf is. Lets you focus on what you really want to bring in when you have a breakdown of everything you bring. I really like lighterpack.com for my trip planning.

Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well. Always surprised me how much an extra hoodie or something would add to what was on my back. Also there is a 'stupid' light, where shaving grams is silly. Was shrinking down my hammock tarp and discovered my setup was not great when the wind shifted direction.

When it comes to power bricks, smaller things like this is great for the normal laptop bag or purse. This is cheap enough that I'd send it off to be black holed with all the other bricks I lend my kid.

[JohnFen]

> Very easy to bring crap you don't need as well.

This is so true it's not even funny. I keep a spreadsheet for each trip, and among other things, I record which of the items I actually used on the trips. It was very surprising to me how many things I thought I used and therefore needed, but when reviewing the records, I never (or very rarely) actually used.

Those items get cut from future loads.

[dreadnip]

I’ve met people on trail with 5-6 pound baseweights. Crazy world out there.

[WithinReason]

does that include food and water?

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Ounces equal pounds and pounds equal pain.

[lightedman]

Pain equals gain.

Most ultralight hikers optimize for low weight, I optimize for low weight and maximum leftover space to haul a ton of weight back.

https://imgur.com/a/ezPqNG1

Cuz trust me, you don't wanna leave that behind when you find it.

[binary132]

I mean, maybe that makes sense if you carry 50+ pages of maps, but carrying a whole book of maps on a single expedition doesn’t.

[JohnFen]

Paper is very heavy. Even if you just carry a single map, you could likely save much of an ounce by trimming the borders.