Perhaps I'm wrong on what exactly he was getting at, but to apply it to myself I think it's more about wasting time in general. I know I look at HN for inspiration and to stay on top of what is new in my industry. Over time, though, that has turned into a lot of investment (reading/wasting time) with very little return (doing). It reminds me of the question someone asked here the other day about learning how to scale. The best answer was... you learn scaling when your site is over capacity. You can't read that on a site and understand it because the problem is never the same.

I do think it is ridiculous to not research an immediate problem like how to crop a picture in Photoshop.