161–170 of 209 posts
I fear that what you're feeling is a dark side of the net's otherwise positive aspects. (It's not just HN.) The net lets us see all the great output from the most talented writers, thinkers, doers of their fields -- including people who we could imagine to be our peer group. But what we see is not an accurate sample -- it's dominated by the most remarkable, outliers by both skill and luck. (That is, there's massive s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife has the occasional habit of cherry picking the best bits of all of our friends/acquaintances lives, combining them into one and using that as the yardstick as to how we are doing. She'd be the first to admit this btw:)
Like wives tend to want the best qualities of all their friends' husbands all rolled into theirs :)
Never judge your insides based on anyone else's outsides.
You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less ov…
"If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases." I'd rather trade ten smart people for one person who ships.
You have to consider the number of users. HN now gets 60k unique visitors on weekdays. That's a decent sized stadium full of people. Of course they seem overwhelming collectively, but most individuals are only experts in a few areas. If it makes you feel any better, my biggest worry about this site is the opposite: that the median awesomeness is decreasing as the number of users increases. If you want to feel less ov…
While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comment…
Yes, Pinky, and there always will be. There's always a faster gunfighter.
I would sigh and go back to the 486-33 and keep hacking away at whatever I was building in Visual Basic. I resented it at the time, but I bought my first drums with money I made coding when I was 11 and I was making good money as a freelancer by 16.
My advice to you, should you choose to listen to me, is that you can read Hacker News all you want, but just remember that we've already made our millions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While writing, it occurred to me that this might be the primary effect. There appears to be some sort of counter in my head that counts awesome comments. There is no counter, however, for number of awesome users, or number non-awesome comments. I ignore them without effort. But due to this selection bias, the awesomeness counter gets to such a big number that it's quite overwhelming, and it feels that 100% of comment…
What makes you think you're talented? You say people have always told you you were a smart kid. Do you have any actual achievements to back this up? I come on here and find that the vast majority of people are well below my intelligence level. I find that this site is basically a bunch of talentless wantrepreneurial pundits. I come on here to test my patience with idiotic circlejerks - praise Apple, bash Facebook, on…