Hacker News Reader

You hit the nail on the head. Survivorship bias is a bitch! There are millions of such postings from remarkably talented people starting out interesting projects all over the world. Only a few will get the recognition they deserve and in hindsight it will look like the successful ones were somehow special or different from the rest.

Inadequate? I think this does the opposite for me showing that there's hope for the common folk who are just passionate with their projects :P

Yeah but I'm older than all those guys already and the project I was passionate about at 21 didn't do the thing.

Jeff Bezos had a fairly long career on Wall Street before founding Amazon. I believe he was ~30 when he first flew to Seattle to start it in his garage

Makes me rethink every 'shameless plug' posts I've seen on boards. How many billionaires were there...?

re: "I wonder how many similar postings exist from people who did not end up changing the world."

https://news.ycombinator.com/show

There may be one or two change-the-world posts mixed in there as well.