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Comment by mihaic | Hacker News Reader

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You've seen plenty of people who hacked the ps3 and iphone as teenagers and created a low level system analysis tool for doing such system hacks? You've seen plenty of people writing self driving car software a decade ago? Why did you write this when you know nothing?

I actually have seen plenty of people that could have done something like this, but did not because they simply never tried. Being daring by itself is a skill, but we're talking raw technical ability here.

I've actually seen another developer that was probably in the same category write his own self-driving software. It kind of worked, but couldn't have ever been production ready, so it was just an exercise in flexing without any practical application.

So, what product that George built do you actually use?

So, if I understand correctly, you've seen plenty of people that didn't do what he did? This was not a compelling argument.

> you've seen plenty of people that didn't do what he did?

Yes, because I've seen them build software that was actually used. And I've seen a few that did just like him, impressive sounding projects that had no usage.

I understand it's something subjective. I get the same feeling when looking at Damien Hirst's monstrouly expensive stuff that leaves me cold. Even after I get the concepts behind the works, my end feeling is of "so what?".

Your calibration around skill gradients but also cause and effect is so far off that I'm wondering how you manage to navigate reality.

You have absolutely no idea about me or my life, but chose to insult me based on not being impressed by some github profile.

Why did you feel the need to say that?

For the comment above, the more relevant denominator is all humans vs. all developers. If you use all humans as the denominator, he's easily in the top 1% or 0.001% (I haven't followed his work closely, but you'd only have to be a good dev to be in top 1% of the global population).

Thank you, perhaps I worded it harshly, but that was my general feeling. Being a good developer already is a high level. Being able to start impressive-sounding projects that never materialize into anything is a luxury for which most competent developers simply don't have the extra energy.

In the early days of Bitcoin, I was able to send transactions programmatically. Built my own js library using json-rpc to communicate with a node.

Geohot live streamed himself broadcasting a transaction from scratch.

For that I respect his level of knowledge. Plus he built comma which is a product I use almost everyday.

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