Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 146 posts

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#51

Post by JohnMakin »

homefree wrote: post #6

It's more about resilience and what sets the stage for it. He argues resilience is created through suffering (which plays into the idea that if you want to know who will be a good founder, ask about their childhood). It makes me curious though about the direction of the causality - how much is resilience actually about temperament and genetics vs. the environmental experience of suffering. Why do some people become r…

Traumatic early childhood experiences (suffering) can cause profoundly negative, irreversible effects on a child's brain development that will have issues persist well into adulthood and beyond - I don't think his take is scientific.

edit: not sure why downvoted, here's a source if you don't believe me: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3968319/

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#52

Post by MrYellowP »

Draiken wrote: post #21
Ninjinka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

I guess at least some people realize how insulting you are.

"Luck" is often a reason given by losers. It's the argument that shifts blame away from their own poor, often stupid decisions. It's used by losers when it comes to starting and running businesses, just like it's used by losers who failed to buy-in on cryptos or stocks when they were low.

"Oh, your business actually took off? You got lucky!"

"Oh so btc hit 69k? You got lucky."

They talk as if they had any clue whatsoever (because to make the assessment you need to understand the matter at hand), but if that was the case, they'd be amongst the actually objectively successfull people.

So ... yeah, right. I didn't make the right decisions at the right time to make sure [project] works out, after doing lots of research. No, I just got lucky. I didn't put hard work into [my project], I just got lucky.

Fuck. You.

It's not luck. No. It's simply not being a clueless loser. It's "putting hard work into reaching your goal". It's "not giving up". It's "standing your ground against the losers who want you to fail".

If these people you're mentioning, were so smart, they'd be rich.

Now take a good fucking guess why they're not.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#53

Post by [deleted] »

Draiken wrote: post #21
Ninjinka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's a Taiwanese immigrant who graduated early and built his own company. I think he contributed some hard work himself.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

[deleted]

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#54

Post by schnitzelstoat »

brushfoot wrote: post #10

Reminds me obliquely of what Jack Cowin told an MBA class, as quoted in Rafael Badziag's _The Billion Dollar Secret_: "You guys have a big disadvantage over what I had. When I finished university, I got a job offer of $6,000 a year, and you're going to get a job offer of $150,000. You're going to develop a lifestyle. You're going to join the golf club, you're going to have private school for your kids. You're going t…

This is just the myth they build for themselves though.

In reality, you have far more to lose when you start out with nothing because if you fail Daddy's not going to pay for you to go back to school and do your plan B. You have no safety net.

Empirically, this bears out as well. Successful entrepreneurs are overwhelmingly from the upper-middle/upper classes.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#55

Post by wslh »

sanderjd wrote: post #34
wslh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rushmore, I think one of the greatest movies ever (and i don't like other Anderson's movies [1]). Going back to the topic I think Jensen is right 99.9999 % of the time. An exception could be Bill Gates and I don't think that is because him was born in a priviledged family but because he has an unique drive [2]. [1] https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41611.Hard_Drive

Man, I dunno, I tend to agree that Rushmore is his best (at the least, it has had the most influence on me), but I think it's a very close thing between it and The Royal Tannenbaums. (But after that there is certainly a large gap to the next best.)

I agree that could be a stretch but Rushmore does not only depict a nerd but one that is creative and iconoclast. Many times we have a bond with a movie for personal reasons that are not shared with the rest. I shared my ranking where there are movies which are classical top and others personal takes. That is the reason to create these (non algorithmic/AI) lists: share and help others to move from the average^average.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#56

Post by indoordin0saur »

ajross wrote: post #49

Not really relevant to Huang's speech per se, but the article engages in IMHO one of the most infuriatingly wrong misconceptions in education journalism: > [Stanford] is one of the most selective in the United States [...] and the few students who get picked to study there are charged $62,484 in tuition fees for the premium, compared to the average $26,027 per annum cost. But, unfortunately for those saddled with stu…

I know many people who have attended ivy league schools and $100k+ debt is not unusual among them.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#58

Post by sanderjd »

donflamenco wrote: post #14

I would recommend the full video on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk Another fascinating bit is when he describes the flat management structure NVDA has. He, as CEO, has 58 direct reports and no scheduled one on ones. Feedback is given constantly (up and down.).

No 1:1s sounds miserable. I don't want to give or receive feedback "constantly", I have other things to do constantly. I want to have a set periodic time where I know I will not be interrupted by my manager "sharing feedback", and will not be interrupting them with my feedback.

I suspect that in practice, relatively little feedback is being shared either up or down within such a structure, as people are busy working and never hit their set time reminding them to think through what feedback they have.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#59

Post by Draiken »

MrYellowP wrote: post #52
Draiken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's somewhat irrelevant IMO. There are hundreds of thousands of hard workers (probably millions) that are smarter than him that will never become billionaires. The difference is: he got lucky. This is the nature of survivorship bias.

I guess at least some people realize how insulting you are. "Luck" is often a reason given by losers. It's the argument that shifts blame away from their own poor, often stupid decisions. It's used by losers when it comes to starting and running businesses, just like it's used by losers who failed to buy-in on cryptos or stocks when they were low. "Oh, your business actually took off? You got lucky!" "Oh so btc hit 6…

What a load of crap. Being a hard worker is not causation for being rich. That's such a naive take.

How many people working 3 jobs you know are billionaires? Even millionaires? Are those not hard working people?

Yeah, citing crypto, which is literally gambling, tells me the kind of argument you have.

Not sure why the personal attacks are necessary.

Re: Nvidia founder tells Stanford students their high expectations is a hindrance

#60

Post by deciplex »

duggan wrote: post #20
nimbius wrote: post #15

Huangs net worth is $80 billion. Hes literally one of the richest people in the world and arguably the least qualified to address the public in any form. The mans completely detached. Nothing, none of what anyone experiences in the real world impacts him in the least. The man wouldnt be able to empathize with the sufferings of predatory college lending if he tried. his stratospheric wealth makes him practically undef…

I dunno, it sounds like he's as self-made as it gets. Immigrant family, worked in Denny's, got an electrical engineering degree, founded Nvidia. I don't mind dunking on the disconnected rich who luck their way into fortune, but this doesn't seem like one of those cases.

I know plenty of people like that and none of them are billionaires. No one's saying you're going to become a billionaire by sitting on your ass and waiting for it to happen (unless you're born into it of course, which many of them are) but the point of survivorship bias is to note that you have to do all those other things and then you have to get lucky. And once you're lucky the tendency is to attribute your oversized success to all the other things, but that simply isn't the case.

It's funny that all the comments pointing this out are getting heavily downvoted here. I thought we were all (or mostly) into Bayesian reasoning here. Perhaps not, or perhaps many of us are really bad at it.

Post reply on HN