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Does it really need confirming? Even if it's not a true story for this guy, something like it will have happened somewhere I'm sure. How many people must have
by NickPollard 17y ago
Does it really need confirming? Even if it's not a true story for this guy, something like it will have happened somewhere I'm sure.
How many people must have run into Sergey Brin, or Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak at some point when they were young, derided them as 'nerds', ignored them, and later realised that the person they looked down upon is now an incredibly successful and influential person? This is just a (whimsical) parable for that, and I don't think the veracity of this particular instant is particularly relevant.
- adriand 17y agoWell, given that we're on a site called Hacker News, populated by a bunch of programmers and other assorted techies, I'm willing to be that many of us were, in fact, the nerds that got ignored and picked on when we were kids. Although I was never nerdy like my bespectacled, asthmatic buddy Marcus, I wasn't too far off, and certainly "geeky" would have been accurate. And of course I took my lumps as a result. In my case, and I'm willing to bet the same is true of many others, this helped engender a powerful motive to succeed. So ironically, it may be that all of the people trying to put nerds down just end up motivating them to rise up. In which case, you might even be able to argue that without looking down on, ignoring, and even bullying nerds, we'd have less technological innovation today. ;)