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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

The contrast between the article and the comments here is absolutely striking. And it all comes down to attitude.

Some people look at life and see the opportunities. Others look and see the obstacles. Some take the hardship they encounter and use it to grow. Others use it as an excuse for their failures.

The older I get, the more people I know, the more I arrive to the conclusion that it’s all about attitude, more than anything else.

It’s our attitude that decides if we end up as winners or losers. It’s our own responsibility and merit, not others'. But pushing a victim mentality, a loser attitude on others - is criminal.

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The older I get the more I empathy I have for people who aren’t as successful financially and the more I realize that I owe the majority of my own success to factors outside my control.

I'd rather have a single entrepreneur, building businesses, creating jobs, creating value and chasing success for his own selfish reasons than a thousand empaths busy telling people they are victims and there is nothing they can do help themselves.

With the empaths, we'd still be in caves.

That's a nice false dichotomy you built.

> With the empaths, we'd still be in caves.

Yes sir, damn empaths, coming together to take care of the children and the tribe and hunt for prey. Let every person go out there and hunt for themselves.

If it weren't for the "empaths" your would be indentured to a warlord at best. Ayn Rand world does not exist, have never existed and it will never exist.

In the article I a see a success story for the people behind the company. The results (valuation and whatever) speak for themselves and how they got there is irrelevant if the only question is whether the company is successful in dollars and cents.

Here in the comments I see concerns not just about whether the company is successful or not, but whether it has done any good. That is, _good_ for people other than the owners of the company.

That is not about “attitude”, or some other self-help slogan. You can’t evaluate the outside world based on what you read in Think and Grow Rich.

The older I get, the more people I know, the less I divide people into winners and losers.

100%. While the story certainly is embellished and deserves some critique, it is still a very inspirational piece for the current and next generation of entrepreneurs.

It certainly inspired me. Huge congrats.

These types of naïve worldviews usually tend to come from a position of privilege. While we might all be running the same race - some of us are lucky enough to be equipped with Nike racing shoes, but there are a lot of people born with flip flops. Attitude is not nearly enough.

This is also why the expression “you can do anything you set your mind to” is a naive saccharine pile of oliphaunt excrement. Frankly, this overwrought phrase sounds like something an early 20th-century Gilded Age industrialist would have coined as a means of motivating the common man to toil even harder in a world extolling unbridled capitalism as its loftiest ideal.

Here's another way to look at it.

Is there any way to be really successful without being some kind of disingenuous sociopath or at least blithely unaware of the broader context of your success and the suffering it's built on?

No, not really. And if that makes somebody bitter, then I think that makes them sane.

This is story is the perfect example of the above. PG is selling us same old story that these two made it through hard work and attitude, while they really made it by opening up residential housing to rent-seeking speculators to use as hotels.

Get your gist but the indiehacker and bootstrapping community are absolutely full of counter examples, and plenty of YC companies have not made the world a worse place: Stripe, Dropbox, Gitlab, Twitch, etc.

I agree that all of those have much fewer obvious negative externalities, and do provide very useful services. But I can't help but think that work in general is a hostage situation for most workers: "sell your labour for less than it's worth or die. Also you will have to simply accept a host of petty tyrannies (in the best case) or abusive behaviour (in the worst)." You have to accept because most people don't have enough capital to make it on their own, and are prevented from accumulating that capital because they are exploited in the first place. Then the CEO's/founders/funders will turn around and say "Look at this amazing thing that I personally built." The value extracted from workers (and the real suffering that entails) is ideologically erased in the narrative about why the company was successful.

I think this dynamic is generally less recognized by software developers because we're frequently comparatively well paid and well treated at work, and can occasionally accumulate enough capital to break out of this vicious cycle (though we're still paid less than the value of our labour and still deal with much of the BS noted above). However the same can't be said for the people making our computers.

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