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Comment by etothepii | Hacker News Reader

This advice is for 14/15 year olds. I think the advice would be different for 22-year-olds. It would be different still for 35-year-olds.

22-year-olds have a hard time selling to enterprises, 14-year-olds will find it impossible. Whereas if they build something cool that they and their friends love they will gain many of the skills that might be useful later on.

PG has made the point many times that the superpower 22-year-olds have is that they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day. The superpower that 14-year-olds have is that (in many cases) they don't even need to find the $1,000 a month to survive.

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What's the super power of 35-year-olds? Arthritis?

Compared to my 25 and 15 year old self, my 35 (now 40) self is a lot wiser in terms of dealing with people, applying humility and being crisp on the wide gulf between "what I find is worth doing at the moment" and "what's valuable." I think these are all hugely valuable and serve me well.

LLMs are increasingly good at your 40 year old soft social skills like humility, so don't bank on that being worth much very long.

I was as young, arrogant and naïve as you once.

Viewing things like wisdom, patience, discipline, and humility as both "soft" and "skills" is one of the single most problematic aspects of the tech industry.

I don't think of humility as a soft skill, it's an internal assumption about where the ultimate truth resides based on which you reason and engage with reality.

Man even once AI takes all our jobs or whatever there's still gonna be 8 billion people wandering around. We're still gonna need to talk to each other.

Reduced arrogance.

More reps/iterations to learn from

Experience. Contacts. Money.

>they can live on ramen and work 16 hours a day.

And the fact that most people don't see a problem with a statement like this a _big_ problem.

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