While not a tech company founder, Oprah Winfrey created a media empire. She was born to a teenage mother in rural Mississippi (and poverty).
If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.
I think it was Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) that talked about a similar concept as well. Ignoring the 10k hour thing, it also talks abut small compounding advantages that later add up to more opportunity (for those that take it).
To go with the sports analogy, (paraphrasing, been awhile since I read it) it mentions how birth date coinciding with the youth sport season was a strong determiner of success at that sport because being ~11 months older in the same age group meant they were bigger faster more experienced and would be played more, compounding increases in skill.
There was also a similar concept floating around about darts, where the poor get maybe one dart to throw, middle class a few and wealthier get many. But I can't remember where I saw or read that
Baseball isn't popular world-wide. The most popular game here is football (that sport which USA calls soccer).
Darts would be a funny way to make the analogy. It is very much a sport performed by people from the low class, since it is relatively easy to perform and practice in pubs. But you still need to have some money to buy a beer at a pub, ie. it ain't the homeless playing. The most poor people can barely afford their rent, and work off their ass doing so. Single mother with three jobs has near 0% to start a successful business.
The description sounds like a part 2 or updated approach/angle to Mindset (Carol Dweck), a book that made a changing impact when I first read it, but reading the updated edition years later left me wanting more. I had also read a couple of Adam Grant's earlier books and enjoyed them, will definitely check out Hidden Potential.
I am curious if anyone has tracked the full scale of this admins events+inflammatory news bits and found questionable patterns like the Tylenol claims just before a large sale and then mostly nothing, or the tariff roller-coaster and insider trading allegations, or other sleigh-of-hand type patterns. Given the well-known "flood the zone" type strategy.
> they stand upside down, rear ends (and spinnerets) in the air, and send a thread of silk skyward, where it catches the wind or heat currents and lifts the spider toward parts unknown.
That was such a great sad-happy scene in Charlotte’s Web.
However, that is not the context that the referred to statements are in. This is about the kind of statement that is more quip like, with an air of pretentiousness.
They are similar to the other examples, but more subtle. One could more easily tell the difference if heard than if trying to parse it from written form.
If the words are only read as is -- linearly as many articles are -- the reader will read in the context of personal experience (ego cognition, if you will), not the context the author was trying to provide -- which requires reading recursively. As someone commented here, it is difficult to try and write about these topics; that's a big reason why. Imo, thats why many of the comments here are reading this in wildly different ways.
In a way, it's a meta-practice in what the article talks about, using humility and empathy to approach angles the ego is not yet familiar with or use to going down.
I didn't see it either at first. I had to go back to see if I had missed context. The author even tried to provide instructions for reading the statements and says "If you parse them more precisely" that I had myself discarded on a couple reads.
Taking into account the context before the bullet pointed "typical statements": there are developers who seemingly like to gatekeep. They get to feel like wizards in their towers with their dusty books and potions [...] My point is our egos can “leak” in so many ways that it takes diligence to catch it let alone correct it.
It's a bit of a Chesterton's Fence situation. The wholesale statements themselves don't point to having an understanding of the pipeline, only that the person making it supposedly knows better than everyone there and is self-justifying or "leaking" their ego instead of engaging in discussion about it
Time of day definitely plays a part, but there’s also luck/randomness to it.
Even the same time and same day of the week there will never be exactly the same set of users online, and that’s even more true with regard to the users who are choosing to look at HN’s /newest page. So pure luck can determine whether a bunch of comic book lovers see it soon after submission and give it enough votes to get on HN’s front page, or just a bunch of people who think it’s a boring story worth ignoring.
(Personally I thought it sounded like it might have interesting comments worth reading, hence my being here, but I wouldn’t have found it interesting enough to upvote if I were one of the people who saw it on the new submissions page.)
> Funny how the time of day affects the visibility of posting
I have had that happen multiple times as well, but those are usually the ones I posted because I am interested in the thoughtful/knowledgeable comments that happen -- so it works out either way. I assume it's because my main source being BBC -- even though the website has a good variety of interesting (non-headline news) content that is well sourced/linked -- but also because I usually end up posting during odd/off-hours for US central. Think most of the ones I post that gain any traction had ended up in the 2nd chance pool.
This one was a bit of an anomaly for me on how quickly it picked up -- personally thought the one I posted before it was a little more interesting about Rolls-Royce finding ways to limit sand/dust from damaging jet-engines, but this here is Superman after all
I strongly suspect that a number of HN members have been training LLMs on HN headlines, then using these LLMs to recommend stories and times for submission. Maybe they have even set up the scripts to post submissions automatically.
That’s how we roll.
The results are likely to be that all HN front page stories will eventually be LLM-sourced.
I’m not entirely against that, if the scripts do a good job of selecting stories.
Hacker News is for human beings to share stories they find interesting so that other human beings can discuss those stories to gratify their intellectual curiosity. Automating that process with the goal of maximizing visibility and karma defeats the intended goal of the forum.
Not the actual goal, of course the actual goal of Hacker News for many people is gaming SEO and startup juice.
That said, I don't doubt for a second you're right. Trust a forum of tech bros and nerds to minmax away what little joy there is left to posting here.
I don't think it's that simple. It's my opinion that YC doesn't need much buzz, except within this very community. Since they own the venue, they get the benefit.
I think that a goal is to "cultivate" a startup community. Get nerds and tech bros together, and some synergy is bound to happen.
I'm not trying to start anything up, but I do enjoy the community. I'm not really what YC is looking for, but I suspect they like me, more than an LLM.
I don't see much difference with this than when gun buying spikes after publicized mass shootings[0].
Gun sales also spike when new gun control laws are proposed. People are afraid (however unfounded) that their right to protect themselves and their family will be taken away. It use to be one of the biggest issues to scare people into voting republican (at least in Texas), the boogyman threat that "they" are coming for your guns and taking your right to protect yourself always came up just before important elections.
When the government's tagline as "cruelty is the point" and people find themselves on the wrong side of that it's gonna scare a few of them, and scared people buy guns -- "identity" and sides stop mattering.
True. And I agree in a clickbait sort of way; it could have been better if they focused more on the overall fear part that drives gun sale spikes(regardless of who). I find understanding why the "who" are buying guns at greater rates to be an important point to understand gun buying spikes/trends. And if the who gets people new to the subject to read about it then okay, but it should not be overlooked that scared people of all kinds buy guns, and then maybe we can move to looking at why we accept our political apparatus scaring people (of all kinds) in the first place.
> Is there some strategic sense to this that I'm missing, or is Ken Paxton...
He's trying to take John Cornyn US Senate seat by going full Trump clone. The guy is and already was about as corrupt as they come.
He was leading polls early this year until people started reflecting on how Trump tactics have been working out for them and if thats what they want to replace an actual stable guy with, a guy who already checks the very conservative box but goes about his job like professional and grown adult (ie, doesn't turn the US government into realty tv drama) -- now there is a close 3 way race for the republican ticket spot (pretty much a guaranteed win for who ever makes it out of the primaries). Paxton is really leaning into whatever gets him in the news. Expect more nonsense from him til after the March 2026 primaries
If someone wants a story about overcoming one's lot in life through grit, hard work and making the most of situations/opportunities her story is one you'll want; maybe not as relatable as the Bezos, Dell, Jobs, Musk etc but a story that poverty->billionaire entrepreneur can happen. There is also a reason she is the only one I can think of that fits description.