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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

Just because you had some advantages doesn't mean your accomplishments are worth nothing.

If you start out on home base and end on second you did well. If you start out on second and finish a home run you did well.

Let's please not have this attitude that the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances. It's just not true. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve something relative to their circumstances, and many do, and deserve credit for it, at all levels.

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I didn’t say that my accomplishment are “worth nothing” but I’m also not naive enough to think my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. I didn’t start programming in 65C02 assembly in middle school in the mid 80s because I knew a couple of decades later that it would be a thriving field. Even when I graduated college in the mid 90s, computer science wasn’t paying that much more than any other college degree. There are plenty of people who “work hard” in other fields that don’t make as much as I do.

>my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck.

That's near the opposite of what I said. Please don't lazily pattern match me to some strawman argument and attack on that basis.

I'm happy to continue if you want to respond to what I actually wrote.

Complaining about strawmen is pretty rich coming from someone who said that the person you're arguing with had the attitude that "the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances", considering that was never said. You just came up with it, and now you're all huffy about someone doing the same thing to you

What I responded to was

>too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.

Implying that none of them are actually self-made. Which would mean that people born into decent circumstances cannot be self-made. In other words, they cannot take credit for any kind of accomplishment.

It's a reiteration of a common position; my interpretation is not extreme.

Perhaps I misinterpreted something, in which case I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, I certainly didn't explicitly reverse the meaning like was done to me.

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