You're entirely correct. However, most people on Hacker News are also making decent money on the side with their main job. This is not the case for most Olympi

You're entirely correct. However, most people on Hacker News are also making decent money on the side with their main job. This is not the case for most Olympians, because even for sports that are not attracting large amounts of visitors and viewers and therefore sponsorships, you still basically need to dedicate your life to it. You don't need to dedicate your life to writing code unless you are working for an early-stage startup or Elon Musk. So you have spare time which you can use to write code.