so true. and luck can be a big factor in any aspect of life..

and there you have an unanswerable question! :-) at an atomic level in computing, as others have said, it's a stream of ones and zeroes.. after that everything else is implementation, i.e how to interpret, use, store etc. In fact it's one of the "bug bears" in computing that there are so many "data format standards" (used loosely not definitionally)..

or the age old joke: "The good thing about (data) standards is there are so many of them!"

yeah, like, I was thinking just the other day.. "there's just not enough porn in the world" haha

I received email 5+ hours ago

very cool, thanks for the video, enjoyed it, as well now being aware how easy it would be to 'project this' into something in the future should the need arise :-)

Ok, I get it, I love technical elegance too :-) But if you'd like people to actually read what you write (and I get just writing for yourself too, I do a lot of that) then they shouldn't be the ones to pay the 'technical debt' IMO Sadly nobody (nobody = vast majority of users now) knows about RSS anymore.. Text - absolutely, no hyperlinks or images in the actual content - ok. I get it. However, it's like 10 minutes more work with the basic tools you outline to script outputting this stuff (without changing the base texts) into a browser in html with html links etc established through delivery code (which - html - after all, is the browsers lingua franca). IMO if you're bothering to put out content for users on the internet via http then it seems reasonable to do it in a way that they expect.. just my two penneth worth :-)

Thanks for posting this :-)

This thread (the HN comments) is quite interesting, as opposed to the article which says pretty much nothing and is an email harvesting exercise.. If you're going make a statement such as the title (particularly prefixed with I) then you better say something about your own experience and why you believe your 'title proposition' is true.. if not, and you're not just 'fishing' (for hits and/or email addresses), why bother?

hey, author here

thanks for the valid feedback -- I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my blog and definitely got carried away with SEO/Growth Marketing tips I've incorporated towards the end of the article. I'm not sure whether to go down mtlynch.io 's path of being a solopreneur or Daniel Vasello's deconstructing his career in SWE or a more pure scott aaronson or star slate codex blog.

I'll change it to something less 'fishing' and rather more open if people want be notified of posts. In retrospect, I'd rather just share my stories, guiding principles, and tacit knowledge I've developed than try to sell a course or a guide at the moment

With regards to the title, I hope the story I shared about the uber driver and my experience with the mismatch between my degree and what I had to learn on my own to become employable speaks to why I believe the title is true. I'll consider changing my essay's point of view from 3rd person-ish -- but again I'm still trying to find my voice so it's a work in progress

thanks for reading! I thought the discussion here was pretty cool too

A smattering from my audible listening list which I particularly remember liking (this might actually be a 'less read books' list sorry ;-) ): Michael Palin - Erebus ; Alan Moore - Jerusalem ; Graeme Green - Travel with my Aunt ; Karen Maitland - A Company of Liars ; Louis de Bernieres - Captain Correlli's Mandolin ; Umberto Eco - The Name of the Rose ; Nikolai Gogol - Dead Souls ; Robert Harris - Imperium trilogy ...

I'd second for Master & Margarita and almost anything by Dostoyevsky

At 55 I can relate. I'm wondering in the tech space whether we happen to be the first generation that has spent our whole professional careers in tech (me electronics first, then computers, then networked systems, then internet systems, with a bit of dev. sprinkled throughout) and thus after 40 years of constant change you (or one) just gets to certain stage? I know I'm done (at least professionally, I've retired), although I still tinker with tech daily but out of pure interest. The last prof. gig I had I spent a lot of time thinking why am I spending so much time re-tooling, re-fixing, re-inventing the wheel? :-)