There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years, to the point that it became tedious. It looks to me like you're engaging in a bit of revisionism for the purpose of posturing above the community. That is a popular sport but a distasteful one.

Would you mind giving some guidance on what I should have done in the situation? I was doing the best I could against the constraints. The situation was that someone made point X, to which I have point Y as a reply. Both X and Y, in some form, have been posted numerous times.

Should I:

1) Not reply?

2) Reply, but make sure to reword Y each time?

3) Link to a previous version of Y?

4) Copy-paste a previous Y but not admit to it so it's not clear I did anything wrong?

I chose 5) copy-paste the best previous version of Y and be transparent that I"m doing so, and why I thought the circumstances merited it. You think that's the wrong choice. 4) and 3) don't seem much better based on what you've said.

I'm guessing you want 2), but IMO that's even worse because it disconnects the discussion from previous ones and forces us to retread the same ground more clumsily.

>There is no "HN mentality", just a large statistical cloud that people see what what they want in. Most of that cloud has been the opposite of what you're suggesting. Commenters here have been not just skeptical but cynical and outraged by Theranos for years,

That's kind of my point. The typical comment is outraged at Theranos. But the typical comment is also endorsing the very kind of behavior that avoids and ignores those very same warning signs. "Well sure, I consistently said over the years to 'never listen to the haters'. But I didn't mean when they were right, of course!"

"HN [most often] tells everyone that no one knows what they're doing either" is not revisionism. Revisionism would be claiming outrage that someone would press ahead when they didn't know what they were doing.

I don't agree with you at all about what the typical HN commenter is endorsing; it seems to me you're adding a lot of interpretation to a lot of disparate information and constructing something of a straw man.

By the way, if anyone is interested, only a small minority (10% if that) of HN users are in Silicon Valley. And plenty of those identify more against it than with it.

What if some 20 year old business major drop out said they are going to make chipsets double the speed of the old and lumbering tech companies like Intel? Everyone here would say no way and never think that would be disrupted so easily. So yes it is a case of people with HN mentality thinking that well taking blood via a venous draw and giving me my results a day later is cumbersome and stupid, and rife for disruption. Someone thinking outside the box despite me or that person knowing next to nothing about clinical lab tech can easily make it better than Roche, Quest, Lab Corp, Abbot etc. because they can move quicker, and disregard the old paradigms. With no consideration for the physical impossibility with known scientific knowledge!

So yeah please by all means look at how smug a lot of us were on earlier Theranos postings about the Steve Jobs of med tech. It is a valuable lesson to learn. Not everything is inconvenient for no reason, and not everything can be disrupted without some serious demonstrable tech.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8181339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7951019

Arrogant, presumptive behavior is annoying -- but I think it's important to keep a bright line between that and dishonesty, because one self corrects and the other doesn't. And, a pinch of presumption is necessary for exploration.

Edit: If you have a good answer, then I would suggest we start posting that as the advice ("here's how you know if you're good enough") rather than immediately tell everyone they have they have Impostor Syndrome (as seems to be common practice).

Those folks exist, but I meet plenty of basically honest people who are arrogant before experience and humbled after. Far more than the raging narcissists who will do what Holmes is accused of, though those get attention.

As a recent dad, I think a lot about sending my guys into a world with 10B people in it, moving incredibly fast publicizing accomplishments (real and otherwise) in ways that make it seem like every niche is filled up. It's clear to me that irreverence for status quo and honesty with themselves are going to be equally important in them finding a niche for themselves.

That is, if you believe that you can't learn kernel hacking, that's (potentially) impostor syndrome. Lots of people have in fact learned kernel hacking, you can learn it too. Your self-doubt about it is based on (falsely) thinking that you are individually incapable of doing a thing plenty of others have done. But if you believe you can't build a perpetual motion machine, that's just thermodynamics. Nobody has built a perpetual motion machine, and doubt about your ability to do so (which isn't really self-doubt) will be quickly confirmed by a survey of the literature.

No, the fact that others have learned it is not (strong) evidence that you can learn it too; you would need to know how similar you are to those people, and whether those dimensions are relevant.

IOW, exactly the diagnostic criteria I suggest we search for rather than immediately skip to "so what, other people thought that too".

>Your self-doubt about it is based on (falsely) thinking that you are individually incapable of doing a thing plenty of others have done.

That's generally not what is happening in practice. People don't de novo say "I can't ever do this". Rather, they attempt (or otherwise survey) it, find difficulties ("I can't consistently understand how the stack is doing that"), see others that have no similar difficulties ("what? It would have taken me a day to work through that and it comes naturally to you"), and on that basis conclude that they're unlikely to succeed as well.

"You have Impostor Syndrome" doesn't make any headway on the core problem.

IDK, I feel like that's a sweet spot most people hit at the end of a PhD. Enough confidence in yourself that you can expend lots of resources trying hard things.

Enough humility to recognize that you'll probably fail at most of those things.

And most importantly, the project management, risk management, and communication skills to hedge your big bets.

Enough experience working with top-tier people to know that all of these things are learnable skills that other successful folks are using (including fields medalists and including high-school dropouts).

Maybe there's a difference between the "informed arrogance" of a researcher working on an open problem in their field (or a serial entrepreneur trying to disrupt a huge industry) and the "uninformed arrogance" of a charlatan, hack, or (in this case) fraudster?

- that it can be fixed by a low-bureaucracy, Angel-funded startup

- that any skill is just a matter of 10,000 hours of practice

Some of these things are correct sometimes. Many industries have been doing things wrong for very long, and massively productive changes disrupted the industry. Who knew that boiling water would change the coal industry forever? Some guy came up with the pump idea and changed everything. The mine owner that invested in him made a lot of money. The industry changed. Things like that happen.

I get that we sometimes have gut feelings that we can't explain. We have to be honest with ourselves though. "Is it just that I don't want to face reality, or is there truly something that I can't put into words drawing me in this direction?"

Is that the HN mentality? It might lean more that way now, I suppose, but I've always felt it was more in the "scratch your own itch" territory and less in the "complete industry outsider disrupts XYZ industry with revolutionary ideas" area

Hopefully we're about to land in a cultural place where getting an education is seen as getting an education, rather than either a panacea for individual success or a complete waste of time/money for the docile masses.