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Comment by hothead334 | Hacker News Reader

One thing I try to remember is that HN is a place where a lot of people from the same broad area hang out. There are math Phds here who know nothing about Bash, veteran sys admins who don't know anything about the Node event loop, regular old devs like myself who know nothing about quantum cryptography - but we're all coming over here, posting links and chatting away and tripping over each other's areas of expertise which were literally years in the making.

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Exactly this. There is no mystical hn user that has a PhD in every single discipline.

I feel you first need to learn how to be competent, then you need to learn how to be incompetent. By that I mean recognize your areas of deficiency, know how and when to ask for external support without being ashamed about it (being competent _somewhere_ helps with that). I don't know if this is meta-cognition, wisdom, or something else.

While you're still struggling on the first step it's easy to get tripped on the second one.

Agreed completely, the joy of HN is the broad spectrum of expertise and a moderation/karma system to elevate both a mix of content on the homepage, but also the experts to the top of the threads.

My recommendation to younger people starting out is to aim to become a "T Shaped Person"[0], or even better "F", or "π" shaped. The idea being to have a very wide range of shallow knowledge, enough to communicate, understand, spot the BS, and make a start. But have a very deep area of expertise in one, or ideally a few, core areas relevant to your chosen field.

Personally I find HN an invaluable resource to ensure that I have a very board, but shallow(ish), understanding of a large number of interesting things. I've been here for 14 years and it's probably been one of the most valuable experience I have had.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills

Yeah I don’t think there’s anything to worry about if you’re overwhelmed: there’s a lot to learn in the world, and HN is just a place where’s you’re exposed to a lot of specific knowledge about certain topics. Just dig deeper into the things that interest you at the moment, and be patient — it may take decades to get up to the same level of knowledge and/or expertise as some people over here.

I felt this cleared up my mind. I know I am obsessing about something small. For me who used to be on top of things in my 20s is now drifting off. I realize life happens but sometimes I can’t help stop my anxieties. I wanted to thank all you took time to answer. Appreciate all answers

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