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Are you having a bad day or something? The tone of this is way too close to a personal attack for a response to the controversial statement of "you miss all th

Are you having a bad day or something? The tone of this is way too close to a personal attack for a response to the controversial statement of "you miss all the shots you don't take". You've been posting to HN for longer than I have, so I figured you would already know who Walter Bright is. You don't have to guess how old he is, it's easy to find that information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright . If he can be told that he hasn't accomplished enough for his opinion to matter, what of the rest of us? Walter doesn't need me to white-knight him, but I'd really hate to see HN turn into the kind of place where the mere concept of trying hard to succeed is attacked. Yeah, the odds suck, and most advice sucks too. But unabashed pessimism is some of the worst advice out there.

WalterBright 3y ago
All my life most people I encountered have a defeatist attitude about success, i.e. they attribute success to anything and everything other than their own choices. One of my friends made and lost two fortunes, and was building a third when a brief illness tragically took him. He never lost his enthusiasm and optimism for going at it again. He rose far beyond his peers from his childhood, even having a couple WSJ articles about him. It saddens me to read constantly in HN comments about how people are determined to convince others that one cannot succeed in America without wealth, luck, etc. It's all defeatism and nonsense.
XorNot 3y ago
This isn't a question of what he's accomplished, this is about money - that's what this conversation was founded on. Lots of people accomplish lots of things, they don't get rich (around the USD$billion valuation by the terms of this discussion) from them. The metric we've had put up is the money == "good advice on how to get it". And if that's the case, then giving any advice now asks the important question: where's your piles of cash?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Bill Gates famously spend a couple decades working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, no vacations. I was never willing to work that hard, and so I accept that I never made Bill Gates billions. I've made enough off of my investments to be able to work full time for the D Language Foundation. I've shared many times on HN how to do this, and have advised many friends, and nobody follows the advice. :-/ Advice like I bought a used Ford and used it as a daily driver for well over 30 years until it finally disintegrated.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    If you worked a standard 9 to 5 and took 4 weeks of vacation a year, then you worked ~1920 hours per year. Bill Gate's self-reported work schedule would give him 3640 hours per year, meaning he worked about double the hours of a "regular person". Bill Gates in 2018 dollars as of 1999 was worth about $150 billion dollars. Giving him an hourly rate of 2018-USD$1,369,863 per hour over 30 years. Whatever you, or I, or pretty much anyone else on HN is worth is a rounding error towards 0 of that value. While it is certainly possible that value goes exponential after that first 40 hours, there's plenty of people on Earth who work far longer hours then that and will never be worth anywhere near as much.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      That's because they're working on the wrong things. I emphasize over and over that if you want to get ahead, working hard isn't enough. You have to be working on the right things.

WalterBright 3y ago

All my life most people I encountered have a defeatist attitude about success, i.e. they attribute success to anything and everything other than their own choices. One of my friends made and lost two fortunes, and was building a third when a brief illness tragically took him. He never lost his enthusiasm and optimism for going at it again. He rose far beyond his peers from his childhood, even having a couple WSJ articles about him. It saddens me to read constantly in HN comments about how people are determined to convince others that one cannot succeed in America without wealth, luck, etc. It's all defeatism and nonsense.

XorNot 3y ago

This isn't a question of what he's accomplished, this is about money - that's what this conversation was founded on. Lots of people accomplish lots of things, they don't get rich (around the USD$billion valuation by the terms of this discussion) from them. The metric we've had put up is the money == "good advice on how to get it". And if that's the case, then giving any advice now asks the important question: where's your piles of cash?

WalterBright 3y ago
Bill Gates famously spend a couple decades working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, no vacations. I was never willing to work that hard, and so I accept that I never made Bill Gates billions. I've made enough off of my investments to be able to work full time for the D Language Foundation. I've shared many times on HN how to do this, and have advised many friends, and nobody follows the advice. :-/ Advice like I bought a used Ford and used it as a daily driver for well over 30 years until it finally disintegrated.
- XorNot 3y ago
  If you worked a standard 9 to 5 and took 4 weeks of vacation a year, then you worked ~1920 hours per year. Bill Gate's self-reported work schedule would give him 3640 hours per year, meaning he worked about double the hours of a "regular person". Bill Gates in 2018 dollars as of 1999 was worth about $150 billion dollars. Giving him an hourly rate of 2018-USD$1,369,863 per hour over 30 years. Whatever you, or I, or pretty much anyone else on HN is worth is a rounding error towards 0 of that value. While it is certainly possible that value goes exponential after that first 40 hours, there's plenty of people on Earth who work far longer hours then that and will never be worth anywhere near as much.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    That's because they're working on the wrong things. I emphasize over and over that if you want to get ahead, working hard isn't enough. You have to be working on the right things.