The truth is that players recognize players. The lawyers here can normally spot the other lawyers, and they can always spot the law students. I think it safe to assume the doctors, physicists and soldiers have similar abilities.

An interesting way to see this in action is to take a look at any conversation here debating different viewpoints. You'll often have conversations that could coherently be read as between two individuals but every post could have a different author that contributes to the conversation in a way that it doesn't matter who they are. What is said matters much more than who says it.

Not levels. It is about experience rather than complexity. Law students, all students generally, get hung up on the minutia of a situation. Old hands see the bigger pictures. The law student will say "That doesn't come in because it is hearsay". The lawyers say "If the cops have it, it almost certainly will come in at trial somehow". The old hands don't bother with such discussions because they know a case is won or lost long long before evidentiary hearings.

This reminds me of the bar scene in Goodwill Hunting (sans the power/class dynamics):

> CLARK: There's no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the southern colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War, the economic modalities—especially in the southern colonies—could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre-capital—

> WILL: [interrupting] Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to James Lemon, then you’re gonna be talking about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

> CLARK: [taken aback] Well as a matter of fact I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of —

> WILL: "Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from Vickers, Work in Essex County, Page 98, right?

etc.

Apologies for the grandiosity, but the oft-denigrated "words on the internet" may be the most significant trace left of the existence of myself and many others long after everyone here is dead. If technology and civilization survive, future data anthropologists have their work cut out for them. The thought of historians combing through ancient threads and trying to piece together a narrative - only, maybe, for a moment perhaps with something I wrote - gives me a glimmer of warmth, like a fireplace on a cold day.

Edit: Clarity.

I suspect you're probably doing yourself a disservice but I can certainly think of numerous instances of my own idiocy. I should particularly have learned by now not to browse and contribute to internet forums whilst drunk, for example, because this tends to magnify my idiocy[0].

[0] To be clear, I'm not drunk now.

Every now and then, I come across something phrased in such a way that it makes something in my brain click. This is one of them, and I'm really leaving this comment so I can find it easily again in the future and maybe get it put on my coffee mug or something.

In San Francisco there are tech millionaires everywhere. Just like almost every other group, some are nice, gregarious, excited to talk to anyone; others are rude, snobbish and judgmental. You're likely underestimating yourself and others.

I've noticed the difference between the kinds of people who will respond to me or the tone of their responses in public just based on what clothes I happen to be wearing that day.

I'm not saying everyone out there is shallow and judging of people, just that people tend to prefer to interact with people they feel is on the same level as them in a public situation.

HN removes all that and leaves just a username and words.

I'd wager most people on here are not in San Francisco.

To me, what's really great about HN is not the "talking with millionaires and billionaires" thing. It's talking with people who know how to get shit done and some of those people happen to be millionaires and billionaires because they know how to get shit done. Others are lowly PhDs (okay, sometimes someone is both a Phd and a zillionaire).

And they will, in a surprising number of cases, answer your questions in layman's terms even though you are a big fat nobody. Assuming you are not blatantly an over the top asshole about it.

(Whoops. Forgot the not. That's a bad thing.)

I agree that HN is pretty much the best place on the web for this kind of thing, but I think we can still do better to reduce the number and degree of 'hostile disagreements'. I would like to see us debate charged topics a bit more objectively and constructively and with the genuine desire to understand other points of view. On the other hand, posting here has taught me a lot about how to structure comments to head-off the obnoxious / predictable / low-value responses while still being able to find a fair number of good-faith participants (which isn't to say 'people who agree with me', but rather 'people who can constructively disagree or even challenge my logic when they agree with my conclusion').

I'm a mech eng with little to no software knowledge. I only understand concepts from a high level

Even though HN can have a distinct "pro-privacy, pro-free market, SV centered" bent and people getting pedantic about technical detail, I find it has one of the most egalitarian, informative, collaborative and non toxic comment sections on the internet I have found. Expecially considering its size

With the upvote system and user base, I find it filters out the comments to bring the relevant, informative and humble responses to the top

I frequent the site to read the articles relevant to my interests and almost always lurk the discussion in the comments

I wonder what causes this - perhaps it's the lack of emphasis on the poster's name (small text, light grey vs profile picture, bold name, etc)?

Case in point: I'll give you good odds the person saying $3.7 million "isn't a lot" is not on the ludicrous salary they're citing. It's a dumb sentiment.

More broadly when someone earning half a million says you're wrong about their area of expertise, you should probably just listen. Deep understanding isn't easy to explain, and most people with deep understanding won't explain things laboriously.

Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections?

Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections.

Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career.

The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something.

Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around.

But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.

So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).

From my own perspective, my side-project makes just about enough money that it looks like from August/September most months I can now expect a payment from Google Adsense. Net hosting expenses I'm still not making any money (at all!)[0] but it feels pretty good that the project substantially pays for itself: hosting is getting close to covered, CDN and domain expenses not yet.

I also don't have any time to work on it at the moment because I'm working on my house, but I do have plenty of ideas about how I can grow that revenue into something that perhaps ends up being more substantial. Not mega money, but maybe enough to cover the mortgage after hosting expenses and taxes. That's nice because it will make me a bit less dependent on earning a regular paycheck every month.

[0] I don't really want to get into this but, to pre-empt possible questions about why this is so expensive (greater than the £60/mo threshold for an Adsense payout), I host it on a physical machine that's way more powerful than strictly necessary at the moment. This is primarily because I want to also use that machine for other things, but also because even a few months ago the site was getting hit infrequently enough that on (e.g.) Azure there'd be this horrible startup delay for most users if I went ultra-cheap, and I didn't want that. I went dedicated with Azure a couple of years or so back, which worked out more expensive than the machine I rent from OVH, so I switched to a much beefier physical box. I also use Cloudflare because I serve up a reasonable number of media assets, and using a CDN really reduces the bandwidth hit on my own box. Yes, I could do this more cheaply, but I don't want to because it would yield a worse experience for a non-trivial proportion of my userbase.

It's not quite the same thing, but, StackOverflow. I won't name-drop, but I've conversed with some pretty high-powered people on there, and I've conversed with some other high-powered people here on HN.

I think a lot of the credit goes to the HN moderation team.

Imo, you are wrong. Some of these people (even for wealth > $1bn) are just regular folks. The difference is that there are lots of people around them and lots of rinsers, so they are cautious and it is harder to find them in real life. But beyond that, you can have an average, regular discussion with them. A key point is to not think about their wealth much or at all.

unless you have a slightly non mainstream opinion on some of the HN dearest, then you get drowned in flags irregardless of merit.

A bit of an inferiority complex here, you can’t possibly be that unpleasant in real life.