This really gets lost in the traditional nuclear family argument. From personal experience, having both biological parents in the same house doesn't mean a healthy family environment, and no amount of moralizing is going to wish it into being.

Also overlooked is the impact one can have through simple acts of support and empowerment.

Had a High School teacher that let me into a photojournalism class that was already full (the school admins denied my schedule transfer after we had moved to the 'correct' side of the street (literally) and into an upper middle class school district). This teacher simply allowed me to be socially-weird-awkward-me and set a basic structure to thrive in (eventually winning state and national awards with the school newspaper). By giving me (and others) a chance to show we belonged and could compete helped build my self-esteem after it had been consistently torn down at home.

Didn't know it then, and doubt that teacher has any idea, but it changed the course of my life. I think I'm more a practical realist or even a cynic about life and society than I am optimistic - still, that experience reminds me to try and build others up and pay that empowerment forward

I think it's definitely a starting handicap, no doubt about it. But I'd be very wary in telling those people - if any are reading this - that they're just not going to be successful.

Without getting too touchy feely - I definitely had un-supportive, unstable, conditionally-loving parents. Was it a setback? Yes. Would I be financially ahead of where I am now had they been better? Probably. But you know what, I'm doing alright. Maybe not by HN silicon valley standards well ahead of the curve in my little first world country. Never lost ambition even if I stumbled a lot along the way.

So yeah if you're younger, and reading this, and a bad childhood is still messing with your mind - please don't think all hope is lost. It will be harder but not impossible.

Not having to worry about that stuff, whether it's immediately after graduating from high school or college or when thinking about taking all your money and investing it in yourself/your new business venture is liberating.

Of course, this require two things of the parents, to put forth the effort like you say, and also to have the means to support a dependent.

Do you mean their career success, or their personalities in general?

The kind of parents who are organised enough to give you support, or probably also the kind of people who give their kids the genes to be organised and productive.

It's still a lottery in either case.

Twitter has lots of tech advice, and most of these authors don’t give advice for a living. People like John Carmack regularly share how they achieved things.

Authoring a book or hosting a podcast is btw often not a great deal from an ROI perspective. It could help you get hired, but it’d be way easier to just study leetcode instead.

I think you could cut people and their intentions a bit more slack.

However there are people who have gotten help and made real progress. Think of some of the hardest things one can do: dealing with addiction, overcoming crippling fear, radically changing bad habits etc.

There's people who were weak and gotten strong. Some of them read self help books, some found social support. That's were the focus should be, not on the people who always walked the happy path and just "worked hard". Overcoming hopeless situations, stigma, bias, ego. That's actually hard.

* Huge procrastination problem in college melted away as soon as I started working 9-5 in an office.

* Couldn't run 5 minutes, until I incidentally started wearing a smart-watch, tried running again, and noticed the heart rate monitor telling me to slow down.

* Doom-scrolling trances easily broken by shutting down the computer or putting the phone out of arm's reach.

I don't think any particular advice in the self-help genre is likely to be true, but these "one weird trick" style solutions do keep on working for me.

If you are interested in the solution, you can signup for my . . .

Seriously though the answer was to just do something else. Don't sit around thinking about the problem; just do something else and the problem will be easier to solve the next time you try to solve it.

yup. i almost never go back and forth more than a couple times with anyone here, because it's most common that the other person is bullshitting, and i don't really need or want that. if i argue a point, i want the other person to bring something new to the table that i didn't know before, not rehash tired old platitudes.

relatedly, experts don't need to claim for themselves the term "expert", and folks who start conversations with their credentials have already "lost" the discussion, so to speak. if your arguments can't stand on their own merits, proffering a credential won't help.

Reddit is seriously full of teenagers LARPing as adults, or adults stoned to the point where they basically are behaving like teenagers... not that I have anything against that. When you start seeing it like that it's much easy to get what you want from it, like when I realized The Economist is mostly idealist very smart mid 20s college graduates on their first serious job.

Now that most people in my life are themselves successful professionals, getting glimpses into their family life and childhood is surreal. It's a completely different culture, typically a much, much, much healthier one. It's shocking how many people don't consciously acknowledge this fundamental chasm between people.

It's especially difficult because there is actually good advice mixed with the bad and unsubstantiated. I've taken good advice from certain comments (e.g. that led to the discovery of open courseware and actually quality resources on physical exercise programs).

But part of maturity is learning to be skeptical of advice independent of upvotes, so one can get the good advice while avoiding getting mislead. To answer quick questions, I try to search for articles from reputable newspapers first (to see if a verified expert interviewed by a journalist is quoted at length) and possibly HN's archives via Googling with site:news.ycombinator.com. For more complex questions and topics, I try to find book recommendations from Reddit that were written by academics or low-profile experts over influencers, and then reading about the topic at length (e.g. it's usually far better to learn about big social problems if curious through well-sourced books, versus any hot takes online, regardless of the popularity of these hot takes).

1) Successful people tend to be found in selective environments. A website that lets anyone in will by definition be filled with junk, bored people, teens, and time-wasters. Since 'successful people' know this, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy (they know their peers aren't there).

2) Most professional peer connections are still offline. Want to know what your peers think about a recent paper? If you're established in your field you'll know them on a first-name basis and will just call them.

Twitter is the only exeption to both these rules, miraculously, though only to a degree.

There are great people willing to share who do exist, though there is a selection bias where experts with certain values and beliefs are far more likely to post than experts with minority views about technical subjects.

From the article on popular beliefs in online communities at the time: “Just because looking down your nose at C++ or Perl is the popular opinion doesn't mean that those languages aren't being used by very smart folks to build amazing, finely crafted software. An appealing theory that gets frantically upvoted may have well-understood but non-obvious drawbacks.”

The view expressed in the article, which I agree with, is that there are experts with minority views on technical topics, who are difficult to find on forums.

>“You have provided examples of domains where charlatans are most likely to operate.”

I agree that you’re unlikely to find these kinds of life advice on technical niche subreddits (like on r/compilers).

However, let’s say a user is a young person looking for life advice. This subject would typically be off-topic on r/compilers and similar forums, so it’s off to more lifestyle-oriented forums (like r/decidingtobebetter or r/selfimprovement).

>“a subreddit that discusses supplements is by it's very nature going to be populated with snake oilsmen selling remedies or doofuses who believe them. Similarly self-help books.”

This isn’t wrong, and there has since been more awareness of paid marketing on subreddit. However, it’s non-obvious to new users, especially young people. If legitimately useful comments get lots of upvotes, there’s an effect where the ones promoting self-help books and supplements seem credible too.

For lifestyle advice in particular, sticking to smaller technical communities may not yield useful discussion. Going to other online communities leads to the problem you’ve described. By process of elimination, it’s viable to start observing and talking with people in real life.

You said you disagreed with the experiences of the OP and essentially the article.

Posited as evidence that your view was correct based on your opinion on what you perceive as the advantages of the internet.

Then treated your opinion as a fact that would be crazy to be argued against.

It's true. The internet does allow for easy communication between people. It does contain a whole lot of information. You can get the documents to most things. You can access most information quickly.

But that information doesn't require commentary. And it's not a guarantee that the people you want to talk to want to talk to you.

If I want to learn Rust, I don't go to a Rust forum, I look up the Rust documentation. If I want to know how to do something Rust, I search for the specific information. Oftentimes, my issue is a faulty assumption about how something works or not knowing the exact name of the method I want to call. Once again, that's not something I need personal interaction for. The very last thing I do, is ask people on the internet. Not out of any misguided misanthropy, but just because it's hardly ever needed.

FWIw, contrarianism has kind of become, in technical forums, a proxy for correctness and value.

That's not to say, "be an arsehole" or go against ToS, but definitely it's made me willing to stand my ground even when I hold unpopular opinions or opinions where my culture clashes with the dominant one.

Because if you do it enough you’ll find yourself with a 3 comment per hour rate limit or shadowban. The moderation here actively discourages meaningful discussion in favor of sterile communication. It’s boring.

—————

The author is relating second-hand information. That’s useful, it’s good to have people who have a skill of curating business advice and pointing us in good directions. But my first-hand advice is to recognize the difference between:

Alice: “I’m making five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”

And Bob: “People like Alice make as much as five figures a month for five hours a week reselling five products.”

In the first case, Alice has direct experience with success. In the second case, the incentives are such that Bob is someone whose experience and expertise is in selecting stories that have verisimilitude, that is, things that sound true.

And what makes something sound true? Quite often, something we want to be true sounds true even if it isn’t, and something we don’t want to be true doesn’t sound true, even if it is. Bob nearly always sounds more authoritative than Alice, because Bob’s business is sounding authoritative, whereas Alice’s business is being authoritative. Why doesn’t Alice always sound authoritative? Because she speaks the truth whether it appeals to our biases or opposes them, whether we want her truth to be true or not.

Bob, on the other hand, is an authority on what people want to hear. Bob is just as expert in Bob’s business as Alice is in hers. Bob uses metrics and data to write headlines and even choose the most compelling adjectives to use in his posts. Bob sounds authoritative to people lacking expertise in whatever Bob is talking about.

The Bobs of this world can (but don’t always) become “a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a failure’s idea of a success,” because their customers are people early in their lives and careers.

So what to do when a Bob suggests something is true? Well, we shouldn’t dismiss it. But let’s think of it the way we’d think of Bob referring a candidate for a job in our businesses. We might fast-track them into an interview, but we’d still interview the candidate. And so it must be with business advice. Bob pointing us to an idea is Bob referring an idea to us. Our job is to take Bob’s referral and still validate the idea by seeking original, authoritative expertise. Bob’s value is suggesting ideas to think about, not teaching us about business.

p.s. I say all of the above as an authority on the subject: I’m a Bob.

———

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31715485

This would explain a lot of bad programming books.

Although it's not a popular term, he truly is a super architect and 10 x coder. You can throw any problem at him and he'll solve it, fast and with quality. As part of this, he explores new technologies and seems to master them in hours or days at most, and it all looks so effortless. Even more rare for such a powerhouse of tech skill, he's no nerd. An excellent communicator with deep business insight.

I often wonder about him, if you can do all that...if you can manage such absurd scope and complexity in your mind whilst it seems you're not even breaking a sweat...doesn't that mean you can do anything? Anything at all?

Anyway, his online exposure: he has an email address, but don't expect a response. He has a smartphone but I never see him use it. He has no social media.

If he would post online, he'd inevitably be recognized as a guru. But he won't, he goes home to his family. Not just smart, also wise.

In the first example, a forum poster was taking the absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. In fact I've never met a person who didn't have a story about making such a mistake, so I'd venture to guess we all do that at some point in our lives[1].

In your example, however, people were confusing the absence of evidence with an imagined preponderance of evidence. That's an error on a very different level, like accidentally joining a pyramid scheme or getting sick from eating an entire piece of plastic fruit.

1: See? :)

Its actually a pretty generic term that is used similarly like "imitation". You can see it used like that in xterm, which is a terminal emulator.

For some reason, many people believe it means something like "virtual machine", to the extent that the Wine project needed to rename to avoid being understood as a virtual machine, which is was associated with really bad performance back then.

> just tell me how to do what I want to do

I think this attitude is part of the problem. Like, when you try to weld you need to know about many details like preventing heat-corrosion and inclusions, otherwise your seam is going to be unacceptably bad. Welders do have training for that reason, but yet we dont apply the same standards to computing.