She did, she founded Technical Illusions with a fellow Valve employee when they were fired from Valve. It was a AR bid. They raised millions of dollars but eventually shut down.

One awesome project was called CastAR https://youtu.be/AOI5UW9khoQ. It didn't take off like porn or anything, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a really cool technology.

After the company folded, her and a few others bought all the ip and prototypes for cheap and are trying to restart it correctly.

I know that's just supposed to be a complement, but sometimes that kind of a comment contributes to people thinking there's such a thing as a "math person" (or a "non math person"). Having comments like that thrown around in the aether makes it seem like technical subjects have "you either have it or you don't" characteristics, which I think most people on HN know is BS. I prefer to emphasize hard work over any kind of genetic advantage.

That is how people are. We are not identical, interchangeable cogs.

Most people can be trained to do simple things in most any field. But brilliance is innate. Its not learnt and can't be made through hard work. Some people have analytical minds some don't.

I'm pretty good at what I do, and when people tell me they're jealous of my talent, and kind of hint that it's innate, I get a bit insulted. I had to work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like I had it easy.

> I had to work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like I had it easy.

Not at all, but you had it possible. There are plenty of people who are just not equipped to do whatever you do and will never be halfway competent, let alone pretty good at it, no matter how much training they receive.

We're all good at different stuff in different amounts. There's probably some stuff they can do which you can't, too. That's OK.

It's not that you don't have to work hard if you have talent. It's that if you don't have the talent, no amount of hard work is going to make up for it.

There are so many people in the world, so much competition. That to be "top" performer in whatever field you have to 1) have innate talent, 2) work your ass off 3) get lucky.

There are people who could work harder than you worked and not get to the point you are at.

The reality is probably a mix of both.

I would say opportunity + curiosity + propensity is the formula and we know what curiosity and propensity are not chosen things. The other caveat is just anomalous ability and although rare we have strong evidence of these people existing. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't have the baggage that you speak but understandable. What you mean is applicable for the average folks, me included.

I get what you are trying say. It is just that most of society doesn't care if you are smart, creative or trying to do anything special when you are trying to get an education, apartment or anything else on your own terms. It is only once you succeed that people are quick to call you all those things before going back to enforcing the same rules you barely survived. It is sort of like an honorary degree.

> It is only once you succeed that people are quick to call you [smart, creative, etc] before going back to enforcing the same rules you barely survived.

This very eloquently sums up most of my experience with society. If you succeed, it's 100% because of talent or privilige or dumb luck or not having to work a part-time job to feed yourself/your younger siblings/your ravenous creditors, and 0% because of any actual effort on your part. If you fail, it's clearly because you're a lazy good-for-nothing welfare-sucking leech, and any attempt to point out other reasons is just excuse-making.

"If we succeed, no one will remember. If we fail, no one will forget."

(Incidentally, while trying to find the source for the above, I discovered that Google considers it a "inspirational quot[e] about overcoming failure".)

There is something to be said for that, 20/20 hindsight is easy to classify and mistakingly so bringing reasons for things unknown or impossible to know ahead of time is silly. I get that too.

My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not.

> I'm pretty good at what I do, and when people tell me they're jealous of my talent, and kind of hint that it's innate, I get a bit insulted. I had to work a shitton to get where I am, and comments like that makes it sound like I had it easy.

This is a common sentiment, but I don't find it convincing. The discussion here is about nature vs. nurture. There's a lot of data points on that subject, and, from what I've seen, they mostly support nature (twin studies, intelligence being 60-80% heritable, etc).

The fact that you like to think it's mostly nurture isn't really relevant. I'd like to live in a world where ability and virtue were absolutely correlated and everyone got what he or she deserves based on how much good that person does in the world. But I don't think we live in that world.

>My experience is that "you either have it or you don't" is more accurate than not.

Maybe that's correct, but is it more useful than the nurture view?

It's a debate; I mean, clearly, you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to get better at things you will never get better at, but sometimes it's not easy to tell you will be good at a thing until you spend a lot of time on prerequisites.

This is the argument that even if it's true that nature is more important than nurture, it is sometimes more useful to believe that nurture is more important, and that you can learn things.

I think there are a fair number of studies showing that people with a 'growth mindset' as they say, who believe it's about hard work and not just innate ability, tend to do better than people who believe it's fixed.[1]

I mean, in the usual case, of course, people who are smarter are more likely to think than anyone can learn things, 'cause their experience is that learning things is easier, and the way work and education is segmented, quite often people are put near others of their ability. but... I think a lot of these studies control for that.

[1]https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.h...

My own personal view is that some attributes are mostly fixed, and some are not, and it's pretty hard to tell which is which.

Sometimes you need to struggle for a long time through stuff you aren't any good at to get to something you are good at. I love reading and read very quickly, with above average, but less impressive compared to speed, comprehension.

But it took me longer than usual to learn to read. I assume because I'm terrible at memorization; and to learn to read, you need to memorize enough words that you can start puzzling out the words you don't know from context. I would not have done well if I had given up on reading because I was inherently bad at one of the prerequisites.

On the other hand, I spent a lot of time trying to run a business... and that turned out to be something I didn't get good at after a decade of trying; so yeah, sometimes it's best to give up early, but it can be really hard to predict which side of that equation a particular problem is on.

A better comparison to reading is writing. My handwriting is terrible. Like not doctor-terrible; there's at least dignity in that. It's a grade-schooler's block letters. It's terrible. And I spent so much wasted time and effort on it.

I mean, I've had access to a computer since the mid-80s, so I could write, I just couldn't hand write. And it turns out? nobody cares about my handwriting anymore. It's not that useful when you have portable computers. (In the mid '90s I took a tandy TRS-80 model 100 to high school. Such a nice keyboard)

I argued and fought with my parents who made me practice handwriting, arguing even in the early '90s that it was an obsolete skill; but they sat with me for hours a day, making me copy letters. Just like they did earlier, when they were making me learn how to read.

But reading, well, it went from a struggle to make me practice to the thing I got in trouble for doing when I was supposed to be doing other things almost overnight. It was like I finally memorized enough of the words to figure out young adult fiction, and a whole new world opened up to me.

Handwriting never got to that point, even though there was a lot more struggle involved. To this day, I can't write coherently with a pencil and paper for more than a sentence or two; it takes too much focus to make the letters, and the thoughts about the sentence or paragraph evaporate.

How much of this is my own motivation? I do remember arguing that handwriting was useless 'cause I could type, and that was better. If I had access to a state of the art screen reader (they existed at the time, and I think were okay?) I maybe would have made the same arguments about reading. Would that have made it harder for me to actually learn to read?

But for one guy, here is a completely unimpressive family[0]

But which studies show those 60%-80% numbers? A 20% spread is a lot but not surprising since the results change completely with the definition of intelligence which is easy to redefine since it is just a social construct.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_family

Most people can't be Jeri any more than they could be Michael Jordan. 10,000 hours of practice wouldn't be enough. A million might, if you somehow managed to combine it with a foolproof nootropics regimen or something equally fictional.

You might not like it, but that's the way it is. All (wo)men are not created equal. Whoever told you they were was lying, or at best misinformed.

Yet there is a difference in people whether they start creative something or not. Whether you prefer something or not, doesn't make genetic differences in mental stuff less real.

As a most extreme counterargument I raise you the NBA players. They got it, we don't. No amount of training can make up for it if you don't have it.

Yes this is a clear cut argument. The fact that the brain is hidden under the skull allows people to make statements that people's brains are all the same and its just effort after that. I think generally they are correct but there are outliers, most likely similar in proportion in terms of the traits that make NBA players in rarity in terms of intellectual gifts. I have met only 2 genius people in my life and the difference was so strikingly obvious that there was no doubt. One was a child prodigy in music and the other was a brilliant programmer that did string theory in high school. I also played basketball in my youth with a kid that made us all look like goofy idiots playing against him (but later drugs did him in) and swam with a swimmer that could lap everyone in the whole league but I do not know what came of him. It is a gift to see these people and undeniable when you experience this but for the vast majority of us, hard work and sheer will makes a huge difference in our own outcome.

You've never tried to tutor a computer class, have you? There are absolutely people who naturally 'get it' and people who never will, along with a large middle ground of people who don't 'get it' innately but are capable of learning.

This tabula rasa dogma might help determine how to treat people from a human perspective, but when trying to help people choose a career path it's terrible.