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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

It may be true that youth confers certain physical and mental benefits, but I feel it's generally under-appreciated what a massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.

I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.

The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.

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Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.

I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.

I have two existence proofs in mind that this isn't true.

One of them runs a very large venture backed company and is active right here on this site, the other you've likely never heard of, is super modest and absolutely blew me away with their ability while still in high school, by which time they'd been programming for more than a decade. Some kids really are amazingly capable.

Geohot sim unlocked the iPhone at 17.

Pff, I unlock my iPhone all the time

I wasn’t a child prodigy but I wrote a word processor (on a Wang PCS II) that was used for years later by (high) school administration when I was in the tenth grade. By the 11th grade my first after school job was writing commercial software.

I remember an article on Slashdot (IIRC, can't find it now) that examined big discoveries in science and they found there are either child prodigies or old masters that make them. Prodigies make a big splash by their early twenties, and then you get people who don't make big contributions until after middle age.

Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.

The ham radio community is basically kept alive by senior citizens and the 42 of us under 50.

> It may be true that youth confers certain [...] mental benefits

I think it would be better if HN didn't tell impressionable 20yo techbros things like this.

> massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.

This is generally recognized in many places, outside of techbro echo chambers.

> in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar,

To your 20yo techbro, this sounds like damning with faint praise.

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