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It reminds me of that Instagram thing, you look on Instagram and see beautiful people living perfect lifes and feel completely inadequate in comparison. Then y

by jmkni 6y ago

It reminds me of that Instagram thing, you look on Instagram and see beautiful people living perfect lifes and feel completely inadequate in comparison. Then you look a little deeper and realise most of them are pretending, they're photoshopping their selfies, renting their expensive cars for a day and taking their selfies on other peoples property. HN can be a bit like that, you can feel completely inadequate compared to these super-geniuses doing everything perfectly, when really you're doing ok.

noir_lord 6y ago
The simple solution is not to look on Instagram (which is a bit trite). The more complex solution is to develop a worldview where you only compete against yourself, i.e. is what I'm doing now going to make me a better person in X time. It's up to each person to decide for themselves what better means, it could be an emotional thing "will it make me more empathetic?" or a financial thing "will this allow me to earn more money?" or something else "will it make me a better programmer, chess player, cyclist, *happier*?". For all the size of the world and its complexity it collapses down to a local optimisation problem for you as a person.
vidarh 6y ago
It doesn't even require them to pretend (though I do realise many do pretend). All it requires is people to be more likely to post their successes, or if mistakes then at least mistakes on the path to success. Even if everyone were to post the mundane it wouldn't generally be what would get upvoted or liked in a given medium enough to counter the successes.
- vharuck 6y ago
  This is my thinking, too. On Instagram, we're seeing the best photos of the people who are on their one vacation of the year. Even if we ourselves post a vacation photo and it gets shared and liked, we won't think of it as one of "those" beautiful photos, because we just got lucky with that one. We remember our embarrassingly bad photos. And on HN, comments are filled with insight backed up by decades of deep experience. But the Perl expert in one thread is unlikely to be the Russian historian in the other. There are few masters-of-all-trades (though they do exist, as if to inspire and mock us). Not to mention the majority of readers whose experience is rarely relevant enough to comment.
josephg 6y ago
There’s a bell curve of software engineering ability in the world. There’s a few super geniuses, a bunch of smart cookies and a whole lot of people in the middle. HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. By contrast, most companies will attract and hire people like their current employees. So the variance at any particular company is much smaller than in the general pool. Everyone ends up working alongside people like them. So if you work at a big bank or something, you probably don’t interact with many people like the super geniuses who write interesting articles that get upvoted a lot on HN. They’re over represented amongst HN content, but most programmers are average and getting by just fine. And remember, hotshots are equally ungrounded. Lots of good engineers you meet at Google were hired at straight out of collage. They have no idea how the sausage is made anywhere else. Lots of folks here don’t have your experience. They have no idea what it takes to do software at a company that sees their job as a cost centre. Or what it takes to get good work done in spite of political pressure to stagnate. Having a variety of voices gives all of us something to learn and something to teach.
- theli0nheart 6y ago
  > HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. Does HN really upvote the “smartest” content? Citation needed, please.
  - asimjalis 6y ago
    I am not certain about this either. My experience has been that the newer posts on the new tab are frequently more interesting than the posts on the leaderboard.
    - bckr 6y ago
      For instance, the OP is not very well written or informative, IMHO. Great discussion though
finnh 6y ago
AA saying: "don't judge your insides by other people's outsides"

by jmkni 6y ago

noir_lord 6y ago

The simple solution is not to look on Instagram (which is a bit trite). The more complex solution is to develop a worldview where you only compete against yourself, i.e. is what I'm doing now going to make me a better person in X time. It's up to each person to decide for themselves what better means, it could be an emotional thing "will it make me more empathetic?" or a financial thing "will this allow me to earn more money?" or something else "will it make me a better programmer, chess player, cyclist, *happier*?". For all the size of the world and its complexity it collapses down to a local optimisation problem for you as a person.

vidarh 6y ago

It doesn't even require them to pretend (though I do realise many do pretend). All it requires is people to be more likely to post their successes, or if mistakes then at least mistakes on the path to success. Even if everyone were to post the mundane it wouldn't generally be what would get upvoted or liked in a given medium enough to counter the successes.

vharuck 6y ago
This is my thinking, too. On Instagram, we're seeing the best photos of the people who are on their one vacation of the year. Even if we ourselves post a vacation photo and it gets shared and liked, we won't think of it as one of "those" beautiful photos, because we just got lucky with that one. We remember our embarrassingly bad photos. And on HN, comments are filled with insight backed up by decades of deep experience. But the Perl expert in one thread is unlikely to be the Russian historian in the other. There are few masters-of-all-trades (though they do exist, as if to inspire and mock us). Not to mention the majority of readers whose experience is rarely relevant enough to comment.

josephg 6y ago

There’s a bell curve of software engineering ability in the world. There’s a few super geniuses, a bunch of smart cookies and a whole lot of people in the middle. HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. By contrast, most companies will attract and hire people like their current employees. So the variance at any particular company is much smaller than in the general pool. Everyone ends up working alongside people like them. So if you work at a big bank or something, you probably don’t interact with many people like the super geniuses who write interesting articles that get upvoted a lot on HN. They’re over represented amongst HN content, but most programmers are average and getting by just fine. And remember, hotshots are equally ungrounded. Lots of good engineers you meet at Google were hired at straight out of collage. They have no idea how the sausage is made anywhere else. Lots of folks here don’t have your experience. They have no idea what it takes to do software at a company that sees their job as a cost centre. Or what it takes to get good work done in spite of political pressure to stagnate. Having a variety of voices gives all of us something to learn and something to teach.

theli0nheart 6y ago
> HN attracts a broad range of ability, but generally upvotes the smartest content. So if you sample from “upvoted HN articles and comments”, the content you read is heavily biased toward things written by unusually smart people. But there’s a range. Does HN really upvote the “smartest” content? Citation needed, please.
- asimjalis 6y ago
  I am not certain about this either. My experience has been that the newer posts on the new tab are frequently more interesting than the posts on the leaderboard.
  - bckr 6y ago
    For instance, the OP is not very well written or informative, IMHO. Great discussion though

finnh 6y ago

AA saying: "don't judge your insides by other people's outsides"