Harvard and Heroin

As a founder, honestly, while stories like this are interesting, it's just not worth the time investment of tracking the site if it's not focused on the topics above, and I fear that as it becomes more general, more of those people who come here for similar reasons, whose opinions I value, will also stop frequenting the site.

I also realize that HN is trying to remain topically focused.

To much of the world, the thought of making life more difficult by forging your own path/company/livelihood/etc, as opposed to settling for an easy job, seems akin to choosing make your life more difficult through addictions. I know it may appear I'm stretching it, but it's a fun mental exercise.

These sarcastic little snippet summaries take all the meaning and value out of the stories. What you wrote is factually correct, but completely misses the point. Much writing is not about the information you extract from it, but the process of telling the story.

People like me (and I assume you too) who have technical backgrounds often miss this, because we're so used to a reducible world where the value of an expression is simply the output it evaluates to. Biography and fiction do not work that way, and that doesn't mean they're less valuable.

You can learn much more about human nature, the thought processes of great minds, or different world-views and cultures (to name just a few examples) by observing how they reach their conclusions and how they tell their stories than you can from the mere factual outcomes of the stories themselves.

In short, these summaries miss the point and are nothing but aggravating because they make the mistake of thinking that the article is about the facts of his life. I don't know this guy, and I don't care about how he made it through high school. I do, however, care about his experiences, thought processes, value conflicts, and the world view of someone in a situation like his. Your summary has taken the meat of the story out and left us with a dried out bone, lacking even the marrow of the context.

Dave Barry has a very humorous example where he intentionally makes the same mistake:

I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.

Newsflash: drug use and drug users are not interesting. The vast majority of drug users are normal people with a normal boring relationship with drugs. That is, they do drugs for fun and it has no meaningful bearing on anything else in their life. These endless stories about whiny nut-jobs who can't keep their shit together wrapping themselves in the mystique of drugs annoy me to no end.