MMOs with markets in them. RuneScape and friends.
It taught me that money isn't really that hard to get, you just have to repeatedly care slightly more than the next person.
Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#12That working harder than other people, attempting to manage risk well, and failing a lot could stop me from being poor or locked up
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#13Discovering that the number 1 has n nth roots, eg there are three cube roots of 1. Blew my 16 year old mind and pushed me to go to university from a very working class background where people didnt do such things. Sadly, I then graduated into a horrible recession so the math degree was useless and i became a librarian. However, in the basement they had these mysterious computers they called roadrunners* and I learned…
I like that there are two of us who liked computers from a working-class background that went into librarianship as an alternative, though you're before my time.
I was a working-class girl and there was a lot of emphasis on picking a stable career as the one in my family most likely to 'succeed' (because that stability would let me help my family). Since I started college after the dot-com bust, computers were 'risky'.
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#14We had an NES growing up, and the copy of Dragon Warrior III we had erased my game when I was 80% of the way done with the game (I was 4; getting that far on my own was an accomplishment that took weeks and I was very upset).
Cue the start of my obsession with digital preservation.
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#15At 17 years old I walked into a computer lab and saw some people who were using Mosaic. It blew my mind. I knew then the internet was going to change everything and I needed to know as much about it as I could.
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#16For me it was a magazine. As a kid, somewhere I ran across a copy of a National Geographic about the energy crisis (I think it was this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1157137.National_Geograp...). It might have been in a waiting room or lying on a table at school, I don't remember. But it made an impression on me at an early age that solving energy problems was very very important to the state of the world.
So as a kid, I played at things like 'building' a solar cell out of glue, wire, and can lids, or trying to make a nuclear reactor out of strangely colored rocks. When I was ten, I thought that if you would spin a magnet in space you could make a perpetual motion generator. After all, I knew that things in space would spin forever if nothing touched them, and a generator was basically just a magnet spinning near wires. Eventually I met some engineers who explained to me about things like electrical resistance and inductive back-voltage (Thank you Sam and Ernie). In my early teens, I kept trying to find ways to get around the things that would prevent a perpetual motion machine, and each new idea would teach me a new thing about physics.
By my later teens, I had learned enough physics to give up on perpetual motion, but I was still interested in energy. I got into fusion, and spent a lot of my senior year of high school coming up with bad fusion reactor designs. I learned a lot of new physics that way too. At Georgia Tech I met a kindred spirit (Thank you Nick), and together we started a fusion startup.
I don't know if I never would have been interested in energy if not for seeing that magazine, because energy issues have been everywhere during my lifetime. But I remember that magazine is where it started for me.
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#17A friend gave me his Dad's old 386 to use as a word processor. This inspired me to buy a second-hand 486 (a big purchase for the family). I decided to put a CD-ROM in the 486 myself. I was smitten. 25 years later I have advertised fixing computers in the newspaper, photocopy guy, IT Technician, IT Manager, Infrastructure Team Leader, owner of small Saas business, now teach IT to grads.
Re: Ask HN: Which significant discovery in your youth changed your life forever?
#18That I could save files as .html and create webpages. I was 10 years old (1999) and I have no idea why I searched for it (there wasn't google at the time), but I discovered that programming was more fun than gaming (my computer didn't run most of the games anyway so it was the only fun available).
I think it is way harder to be hooked to programming nowadays, the basics are way too boring.