The following is a short story. Discussed on Hacker News here. This one is about my friend, Aaron. I met him at school, and in our first year when we were eleven years old I told him I wanted to be his best friend but he said he already had a best friend. He was probably the smartest person in our year, but he didn't apply himself academically at all. Instead he was always becoming obsessed with things that weren't anything to do with studying. By the time we were seventeen he was spending all of his evenings playing World of Warcraft , which he was ranked top-sixth in the world at. I remember it was top-sixth because we'd made a bet that if he got into the top five I would let him copy my coursework for our final year Physics exam. This wasn't long after he had tried to convince everyone that he was going to be a professional football player despite being considerably overweight. He had an addictive personality.…