7 ms·

Neil Armstrong would have been 17 years old when Orville Wright died in 1948. In the lifespan of those two men, humanity went from horse-and-buggy to standing o

Neil Armstrong would have been 17 years old when Orville Wright died in 1948. In the lifespan of those two men, humanity went from horse-and-buggy to standing on the moon. One wonders what the 17 year olds of today might accomplish...

shanelja 14y ago
I couldn't agree more, we stand constantly at the start of new things, in another 70 years, we will be so far past where we are now that to the people of those times it will seem as though we were as backwards as the people of 1948 seemed to us.
namidark 14y ago
Sadly, I think a consumer of cat pictures with the way our education (people not focusing on math and science) is going
- daeken 14y ago
  People born with the drive to do amazing things will do them regardless of the education they (do not) receive.
  - MichaelApproved 14y ago
    But they need the support system of a country with educated people. OP is saying the school system is shit. You're saying a gifted person can do well regardless of the school system they're in. I'm saying the gifted need well educated people to help them realize their vision. Everyone losses, even the self educated, with a poor school system.
  - gizmo686 14y ago
    If that were true, then why do poor people have a disproportional high chance of having their children grow up poor?
    - 3143 14y ago
      Because the vast majority do not have that drive, and simply fall into the same pattern as their parents.
      - gizmo686 14y ago
        My original point was that upbringing is important to accomplishments. In response to your point, I think that the problem is much more one of opportunity than drive. For example, I went to a private high school that costs slightly more that the poverty line for a family of 4 (as did my 2 siblings). My mom was able to leave her job, and stay home with me, where she taught me the fun parts of math (knowledge which made school math classes bearable). Later, when I was in high school, my mom started volunteering, where she met the wife of a fairly well known computer science professor at a local university. She arranged with him for me to get a summer internship there, after which point I had a brief phone interview, where I answered almost nothing about my abilities. A few days later, I got an e-mail saying that the robotics lab (where I would have prefered working) couldn't take me, so I had to settle to work in his lab, at 10$/hour - after I offered several times to work for free. While at his lab, I did a reasonable amount of work, but nothing that impressive. One of the things I did was help one of the graduate students with their research project, which involved a web crawler to collect data, and a machine learning algorithm to analyze it. I did some incremental improvents to the crawler, but nothing that impressive. I also wrote the machine learning "algorithm" which was a 250 line program that took data from an sql database, and fed it into a machine learning library, then printed out the results. For all of my being driven, I ended up being a co-author on a published research paper before I even applied to colleges. Of course, I am just one person, so we cannot generalize from my example to say that it is the parents that do the work. What we can say is that the children of poor parents are disproportional likely to end up poor. This means that you can, with a high degree of accuracy, predict a childs future success before they are born. If this is the case, they we cannot blame the child for his failures, because we knew that he incredibly likely to fail before he even had a chance to influence his own life. This leads us to the conclusion that there is something going on outside of the control of the poor that is making it difficult for them to improve their lot in life. Looking at it this way, we might notice that the rich tend to spend large sums of money sending children to schools that the poor cannot afford. The rich tend to be more available to their young children, either by leaving their job, or only having 1 job. The rich know other succesfull people, who are an automatic network to get their children jobs and such. In fact, looking back on my own life, and the lives of many of my rich classmates, It seems like we also tend to fall into the same patterns as our parents; those patterns just happen to be successful. This is almost the definition of a rigid class system, and it is something we should be working on moving away from. In an ideal world, even if you knew everything about the parents of two different children, you should have no way of guessing (with better accuracy than a coin toss) which of the children will be more successful.
vesky 14y ago
Who knows... You might actually be surprised by the answer to that... http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/12/08/30262/california-teen-wins-grand-prize-potential-cancer-/ http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/12/08/30262/california-teen-wi... http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/15-year-old-maker-astronomically-improves-pancreatic-cancer-test/ http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/15-year-old-maker-astron... http://gizmodo.com/5813207/teen-builds-nuke-detecting-device-saves-us-all-from-horrible-death http://gizmodo.com/5813207/teen-builds-nuke-detecting-device... http://www.livescience.com/14138-teen-cystic-fibrosis-drug-cocktail-contest.html http://www.livescience.com/14138-teen-cystic-fibrosis-drug-c... http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTa3n7CWjq1k6auqOW2_-qSgaJdA?docId=CNG.41380f9fd13a9cf5399ea138e7f20afb.d21 http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTa3n7CWj... Rest in peace Neil. You were and always will be the beacon of achievement for all of us!
THE_PUN_STOPS 14y ago
Woah, as a 17 year old, that blows my mind. I cannot wait to see what humanity accomplishes in my lifetime. Personally, I'm hoping to see the first man's footsteps on mars.
- vesky 14y ago
  I'm 21 myself and by what I see around me in my friends and people close my age is that we've become too accustomed to seeing instead of doing. We should start thinking along the terms of "I cannot wait to DO that!" if we ever want the chance to follow in the footsteps of a man like Neil and succeed in taking human achievement further than our predecessors. But hey... you're 17 and you read HN. That's a good start!
  - felipemnoa 14y ago
    >>I'm 21 myself and by what I see around me in my friends and people close my age is that we've become too accustomed to seeing instead of doing Speak for yourself.
    - MichaelApproved 14y ago
      I think OP is referring to traveling in space himself rather than just watching a select few do it.
    - vesky 14y ago
      http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433358 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433358 Does it look like I'm speaking for the whole population? I've clearly stated "me" and "my friends and [some] people close my age". Sincere congratulations if you've managed to become the next Alan Turing but next time leave the snarky comments for yourself buddy. Thanks!
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
- tomjen3 14y ago
caf 14y ago
The steam locomotive, rather than the horse and buggy, was probably the apex of transport technology when Orville was born.
- Nitramp 14y ago
  ... or maybe the big ocean liners.

shanelja 14y ago

I couldn't agree more, we stand constantly at the start of new things, in another 70 years, we will be so far past where we are now that to the people of those times it will seem as though we were as backwards as the people of 1948 seemed to us.

namidark 14y ago

Sadly, I think a consumer of cat pictures with the way our education (people not focusing on math and science) is going

daeken 14y ago
People born with the drive to do amazing things will do them regardless of the education they (do not) receive.
- MichaelApproved 14y ago
  But they need the support system of a country with educated people. OP is saying the school system is shit. You're saying a gifted person can do well regardless of the school system they're in. I'm saying the gifted need well educated people to help them realize their vision. Everyone losses, even the self educated, with a poor school system.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  If that were true, then why do poor people have a disproportional high chance of having their children grow up poor?
  - 3143 14y ago
    Because the vast majority do not have that drive, and simply fall into the same pattern as their parents.
    - gizmo686 14y ago
      My original point was that upbringing is important to accomplishments. In response to your point, I think that the problem is much more one of opportunity than drive. For example, I went to a private high school that costs slightly more that the poverty line for a family of 4 (as did my 2 siblings). My mom was able to leave her job, and stay home with me, where she taught me the fun parts of math (knowledge which made school math classes bearable). Later, when I was in high school, my mom started volunteering, where she met the wife of a fairly well known computer science professor at a local university. She arranged with him for me to get a summer internship there, after which point I had a brief phone interview, where I answered almost nothing about my abilities. A few days later, I got an e-mail saying that the robotics lab (where I would have prefered working) couldn't take me, so I had to settle to work in his lab, at 10$/hour - after I offered several times to work for free. While at his lab, I did a reasonable amount of work, but nothing that impressive. One of the things I did was help one of the graduate students with their research project, which involved a web crawler to collect data, and a machine learning algorithm to analyze it. I did some incremental improvents to the crawler, but nothing that impressive. I also wrote the machine learning "algorithm" which was a 250 line program that took data from an sql database, and fed it into a machine learning library, then printed out the results. For all of my being driven, I ended up being a co-author on a published research paper before I even applied to colleges. Of course, I am just one person, so we cannot generalize from my example to say that it is the parents that do the work. What we can say is that the children of poor parents are disproportional likely to end up poor. This means that you can, with a high degree of accuracy, predict a childs future success before they are born. If this is the case, they we cannot blame the child for his failures, because we knew that he incredibly likely to fail before he even had a chance to influence his own life. This leads us to the conclusion that there is something going on outside of the control of the poor that is making it difficult for them to improve their lot in life. Looking at it this way, we might notice that the rich tend to spend large sums of money sending children to schools that the poor cannot afford. The rich tend to be more available to their young children, either by leaving their job, or only having 1 job. The rich know other succesfull people, who are an automatic network to get their children jobs and such. In fact, looking back on my own life, and the lives of many of my rich classmates, It seems like we also tend to fall into the same patterns as our parents; those patterns just happen to be successful. This is almost the definition of a rigid class system, and it is something we should be working on moving away from. In an ideal world, even if you knew everything about the parents of two different children, you should have no way of guessing (with better accuracy than a coin toss) which of the children will be more successful.

vesky 14y ago

Who knows... You might actually be surprised by the answer to that... http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/12/08/30262/california-teen-wins-grand-prize-potential-cancer-/ http://www.scpr.org/news/2011/12/08/30262/california-teen-wi... http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/15-year-old-maker-astronomically-improves-pancreatic-cancer-test/ http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/18/15-year-old-maker-astron... http://gizmodo.com/5813207/teen-builds-nuke-detecting-device-saves-us-all-from-horrible-death http://gizmodo.com/5813207/teen-builds-nuke-detecting-device... http://www.livescience.com/14138-teen-cystic-fibrosis-drug-cocktail-contest.html http://www.livescience.com/14138-teen-cystic-fibrosis-drug-c... http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTa3n7CWjq1k6auqOW2_-qSgaJdA?docId=CNG.41380f9fd13a9cf5399ea138e7f20afb.d21 http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iTa3n7CWj... Rest in peace Neil. You were and always will be the beacon of achievement for all of us!

THE_PUN_STOPS 14y ago

Woah, as a 17 year old, that blows my mind. I cannot wait to see what humanity accomplishes in my lifetime. Personally, I'm hoping to see the first man's footsteps on mars.

vesky 14y ago
I'm 21 myself and by what I see around me in my friends and people close my age is that we've become too accustomed to seeing instead of doing. We should start thinking along the terms of "I cannot wait to DO that!" if we ever want the chance to follow in the footsteps of a man like Neil and succeed in taking human achievement further than our predecessors. But hey... you're 17 and you read HN. That's a good start!
- felipemnoa 14y ago
  >>I'm 21 myself and by what I see around me in my friends and people close my age is that we've become too accustomed to seeing instead of doing Speak for yourself.
  - MichaelApproved 14y ago
    I think OP is referring to traveling in space himself rather than just watching a select few do it.
  - vesky 14y ago
    http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433358 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4433358 Does it look like I'm speaking for the whole population? I've clearly stated "me" and "my friends and [some] people close my age". Sincere congratulations if you've managed to become the next Alan Turing but next time leave the snarky comments for yourself buddy. Thanks!
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
tomjen3 14y ago

caf 14y ago

The steam locomotive, rather than the horse and buggy, was probably the apex of transport technology when Orville was born.

Nitramp 14y ago
... or maybe the big ocean liners.