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Comment by aerosmile | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough - one article alone probably wouldn't have had the full impact. But I am envious of the generation of current high schoolers who can read HN all day. After a year or so, I imagine you can reprogram your mind quite a bit. Back in the late 90s, access to information like this was much more limited.

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What you are getting from HN at your current age with your experience, is not the same that what your young self would have gotten from the same content

I learned that working at Google pays a ton and not that hard to get in there. So I learned to code and got a job at Google and made a lot of money thanks to HN. My life got a lot easier thanks to that.

I feel the value of HN is greatly reduced once you are more familiar with the industry. But to an outsider this site is gold.

How is it not hard to get into Google? Sounds more like survivorship bias.

I'm really good at math so I knew that learning the algorithmic thinking wouldn't be hard. All I needed to do was learn to program and learn algorithms. For people with a different skillset it wouldn't be as easy, but reading about it online made me realize that it wouldn't be hard for me.

I mean, when you read about interviews and the problems people struggle with you get a sense of what it is. When I read those I thought "That doesn't seem hard, I can do that!", so I did.

What you are describing is exactly survivorship bias.

Are there any sites that are gold for HNers?

I'm sure that's true.

I would like to say that I am young and I remember getting turned on to podcasts and reddit and good books when I was 15 or so, and being exposed to rational thought and discussion did a lot for my development I think.

Same. Unfortunately the internet isn't what it once was. I can't say I'm optimistic this strategy would work out for today's youth.

Occasionally I stumble upon an old article posted here and start reading, lamenting the missed opportunities if I'd only seen this article x years ago. Then a bit further into it I start feeling like I have read it before, and I suspect I often have.

Start up bros are becoming generic this space is filling up with garbage as well.

That's just the natural life cycle of social platforms.

Looking forward to what will come next

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