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Comment by reinhardt | Hacker News Reader

> It was 2010. I was 17 years old (...) and I had found the next Billion Dollar Idea.

> It was 2011. I was 18 years old (...) and I had found the next World Changing Idea.

> It is 2013. I am 20 years old (...) and I have found the Right Thing for Me.

IOW "this time it's different". Color me skeptical. Looking forward to the 2023 edition or whenever he gets over the Dunning–Kruger effect.

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Your skepticism is understandable, yet I feel as if you are missing the core message here. The message here is not about my own journey - my narrative is a trope for the culture of Silicon Valley. Whether or not I succeed in my venture is irrelevant to the main point - entrepreneurship is not about raising money or acquiring fame; it is about building a business.

As much as I appreciate constructive criticism, your implication that I am suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect is unwelcome. You know nothing of my talents nor my mind-state and to infer that the small glimpse of my life I have provided is representative of my being is naive.

I'm going to try to be nice and give you some advice: don't write like that. Constructing these overwrought sentences with the dashes and the semicolons and the vocabulary and whatnot just makes you look like an insecure sophomore trying to cover up inexperience with excessive verbiage. Which is probably accurate, but oh well. The purpose of writing isn't to make you look smart, it's to communicate your thoughts clearly and convincingly, and writing to show off all your fancy college-boy book lernin' is just going to antagonize your audience. You're still in school, my advice is to take a writing course and listen to what they say.

Thanks. I switch between being overly concise and overly verbose. Today is an overly verbose day. I'm working on finding a cool median.

'Over' is already an adverb. If you want to modify a word with 'over', combine the two words or use a hyphen, as in 'over-concise'. Although 'overly' is now common usage, it is still looked down upon by the literati.

There is nothing wrong with using dashes, but if you do, use the correct dash. The em dash is U+2014. If you cannot type an em dash, the custom is to use two en dashes.

If you care, try switching many of these sentences from passive to active voice. It helps to tighten up your writing. Sometimes it helps for dramatic effect, but excessive use of passive voice slows down your writing. Also, watch your redundancies and overuse of certain words.

Oy, some of us actually do talk like that.

>Constructing these overwrought sentences with the dashes and the semicolons and the vocabulary and whatnot just makes you look like an insecure sophomore trying to cover up inexperience with excessive verbiage.

You're uncomfortable with how somebody speaks, so you call them insecure. Classic.

By the way, there was nothing sophisticated about the content or construction of the parent post. And if there was, maybe you should consider carrying the burden of trying to understand it instead of dragging us down to your idea of how people ought to communicate.

Agreed.

If he had written it as "I thought I had found [...]" I would be more inclined to trust the writer's judgment.

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