So what are some technological feats that people under 30 have achieved? The only one I can think of is Linux, I think that Linus was like 22 when he started it. That being said, I don't know how l33t were first versions of Linux.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
Those are just three of four things that I checked (John McCarthy was in his early 30s). The idea that once you're over 30 you can no longer hack it is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the opposite has any truth to it.
Edit: Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs when she was 27-28.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L_Peter_Deutsch http://www.codersatwork.com/l-peter-deutsch.html
Throwing out some more: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Johannes Kepler.
http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2014/30-under-30/techno... Another 30
Seymour Cray was just over 30 when the Cray-1 came out.
* John Karmack's game engines for Commander Keen, Doom, Quake * Palmer Luckey's original Rift design * Feynman's "parallel" computer at Los Alamos
And many many more if you include mathematical / physical discoveries although these are not strictly speaking "technological feats". I would add that I do not agree with Zuck's statement, no matter how many examples I can come up with (and despite the fact that I'm myself under 30)
I don't know enough about the other feats to comment on them.
It's way impressive how young Feynman was when he was apart of the whole project, though. He was the youngest member.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin with Google
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, VisiCalc
Pierre Omidyar, eBay (some may say it's not an impressive technical feat, I disagree)
Bill Joy did plenty of amazing work before 30 (including co-founding Sun)
Sandy Lerner founded Cisco and did some amazing technical work pre 30
Bob Metcalfe was around 27 when he created ethernet
http://ffxlearn.zf4.biz/index.php?title=Life_expectancy_in_t...
Most of the people mentioned in this thread from that era in fact lived into their 70s or 80s (70 for Leibniz, 84 for Newton, etc). That might be a coincidence, but I suspect that reduced occupational hazards played a significant role.
The article is trying to say that life expectancy is reduced by high child mortality, but that's a pretty harsh adult life expectancy too. Surely almost everybody alive was under 30.
Actually, that's still true: a majority of people in the world are under 30.
Newton himself lived to be 84. He published Principia Mathematica aged 45. As the article explains, life expectancy is just an average.
But it is relevant here: if most people alive are under 30, most stuff gets done by under 30s.
This is very obviously not true. For example, more people use PHP than use Facebook (supposing that there is at least one user of PHP who does not use Facebook, such as e.g. myself). I'll let you construct additional examples for yourself.
And if, btw, you argue that the users of Facebook don't "use" PHP, then I'll argue that they don't "use" Facebook in exactly the same way, since their web browser (or mobile client) is an intermediary.
Facebook doesn't really fit into that category. It was MySpace 2.0