What irks me is the inappropriate focus on the who over the what.

I'd in all honestly be similarly annoyed if the headline said "57 year old stamp collector from Yorkshire designs a novel synchronous reluctance motor".

It's the hero worship fetish half of the world has.

It's never about the achievement, it's about the person that achieved it. You can very easily find out if wherever you've the same tendency: just think about the most impressive score or safe you remember in whatever sport you love. Do you now think that the deed was impressive or that the person that did it is the impressive thing? Will you remember the play, or the person that played?

Today, my friend and I cynically talked over a beer about this. We ranted to each other about how we wasted the best years of our life and how we didn't have the resources or education other people have right now. This is a defeatist attitude and your post has inspired me to be better.

Thank you for writing this.

How important is it to have accomplishments?

That are important to yourself, or to others?

This is the key, most people don't care about my "accomplishments".

For me its all simple, if you've accomplished nothing in a field your opinion is not worth noticing, if your brain has calcified around dogma your opinion is pure comedy.

If you are both accomplished and have an open mind your opinion can be valuable if constructive but in the end there is only one opinion that counts.

Also, it is entirely fine to try to do something that will take a million attempts like yours to maybe perhaps get it done poorly.

Hero's engine is just fine. We didn't need more from him. It was enough. It took a while for anyone to truly get it and their steam engine and many after it were useless pieces of crap - which was good enough. We didn't need more from them.

x86 is a piece of crap too!

> why so many of us have the impulse to figure out what the flaw or missing part of the story is

Because media LOVES to say "12 year old creates revolutionary invention!" especially for energy related things and especially for inventions that aren't revolutionary. Here's a classic example:

https://www.wired.com/2011/08/boy-genius-13-year-olds-solar-...

> 13-year-old Aiden Dwyer has managed to do something that grown-up scientists haven't. He has wrung up to 50% extra electricity from regular solar cells. How? Brains, trees, and a dash of math geekery.

(It's 100% nonsense.)

That said it doesn't exactly look like the case here but it's the obvious null hypothesis.

> why so many of us have the impulse to figure out what the flaw or missing part of the story is.

Why? Because that's literally what engineers are paid to do: make things, break things, fix things. It's all about tearing things apart to understand them, and then making them better.

Just like this kid is doing. I don't think DC motor engineers took it personally when he decided to "figure out what the flaw" was in current rare earth magnet designs, right?

If you take that personally, you're in the wrong field.

> you're in the wrong field

Bravo

I found it interesting that the article chooses to not acknowledge several projects like

* https://www.refreedrive.eu/

* https://www.electricmotorengineering.com/synchronous-relucta...

Good point, and it’s hypocritical to admire the impulse in one person while criticising others for the same

If you want to be cynical about it see

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/why-sc...

(of course that is another clickbait article from a magazine that was good before the web but now specializes in clickbait)

I remember when I was in high-school agonizing for over a year over the 100$ fee to publish an app on google play.

Ultimately it's hard to ignore the pattern when you see the stories about these precocious kids on the news, they always come from wealth.

Agree, I was very interested in electronics as a teenager, but had no money for tools, instruments, or components. I had to scavenge components from discarded radios, used my dad's plumber's iron for soldering and saved up for months for decent wire and a wire stripper.

I did eventually end up getting a scholarship to study engineering, but I cannot help feeling a tiny bit resentful when seeing kids in the news who obviously had a lot of support from a wealthy family.

You should not feel resentment, but you should feel their luck to be born into that.

On the downside: they will never learn the value of recycling, of working with inadequate, broken, uncalibrated and dangerous tools. But you did and I'd bet you came out the better engineer on account of that. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger isn't just about health.

Lately I try to see privileges like that less as an unfair advantage that someone else has, and more an unfair disadvantage for everyone else. I want every kid to have access to high quality education which includes the tools and materials to work with and learn new concepts - that's regardless of the socioeconomic class they were born into. Instead of trying to tear down other people for the opportunities they had that you didn't, maybe we should be attempting to improve the world for everyone so that there's less of those unfair disadvantages going around.

I grew up nearly the same. Built many of my own tools from what I could find literally laying around.

Please take my comment here as my experiences shared in the hope you get something good from them. It's nothing more than that, and it's worth what you paid too.

Fast forward many years:

Today I'm working on an advanced additive manufacturing machine in a company I and a friend started. I'm doing electronics, working with advanced CNC machines, writing some code, and doing a lot of stuff that was hobby type dreaming a decade and change ago.

The team is largely people who really enjoy the electromechanical world, some have gone to school, some haven't. Nobody cares about any of that. We all want to make something cool happen.

When I took my first job, I began to also take up hobbies. Spent a number of years in manufacturing, during which I did a lot of computing on whatever computers I could get my hands on, or seat time with. Next job was CAD related, and I spent time on electronics again.

Wash, rinse, repeat a few times and those hobbies are real!

Each one ended up adding to the set of things I can do and as that set expanded, and as my circle of friends and professional contacts expanded, so did my potential opportunities. Get the skill, look for an opening to do it professionally, do it, get help if you need to, wash, rinse, repeat.

I think about what I can get done now and how it might pay me and those close to me. That stuff is real.

At one point in my life, I could see some real opportunity, but I was going to have to lean into it. So I quit modern gaming. This was big! I do retro, and play the occasional title I find interesting, but pushing that out of the front row in my life both hurt and was amazing!

See, I got bored. And that's how a lot of good stuff starts. The amazing part was finding out that being bored means I'm also receptive to learning new things. And doing stuff is a lot more fun than thinking about it all is too.

If I think about what I could have done, if... I get depressed. And that stuff is fantasy.

So I just don't do that.

Maybe this helps you some.

Look, there is no doubt luck plays a big role in our lives. No joke.

I can also say that if you invest in yourself, network with others and essentially expand your receptivity to luck, your chance of experiencing some goes up and with that come opportunities.

I do take some pride in the fact that I really did get a lot of my skills the hard way. Same with any money. And if times get tough, I really do know how to deal and can do that, am used to doing that, to a much greater degree than many of these lucky people might be. And helping others get things done often lead to them helping me.

We all need a little help. Give and get. That's the rule.

One can have a significant impact on the world, and many people without any of those nice things.

Consider making it all about what you can do and what that can mean. You will be very likely to do more than you think and it will mean more than you expect it to. Ask me how I know. :)

At the end of the day, most people are after wealth to give their children advantages. Either advantages they had growing up, or advantages they didn't have growing up. Granted there is diminishing returns here, i.e. a billionaire's children aren't likely to be much more advantaged than a child from a family with a net worth of $100 million.

Until the US gets away from the idea that education is a for-profit industry and something you pay for, almost all highly accomplished children will come from wealthy families.

Even I retrospect I think of this 2 ways

1. Could I have made that $100 if I did it specifically for the purpose of publishing the app? (For me, the answer is always yes at that amount. I could have easily washed some cars, mowed some grass, etc. I had so much free time)

2. When it comes to business, tech, particularly the early internet boom, probably some other domains; I’m just thankful to be in the minority of the world that speaks English. I’m self taught at most things and it’s hard enough as it is. This value of this one diminishes every year but I find it’s still useful and feel it’s a form or luck.

It's not about making the money, it's about what you spend it on. If 100$ is a significant amount you're not going to spend it on a frivolous purchase, you'll spend it on the absolute necessities. And if you do want to make a purchase purely because it makes you happy, you're going to agonize over it and feel guilty for a long while.

I went on to make 20,000 euros doing freelance over the next five years while in college but it all went to my student loans, rent and other necessary costs while I was starting my career, not anything I actually wanted to buy for myself.

I get that. What works for me, and I tried to point out, is not taking $100 out of my income/savings that is funds for my absolute necessities. It's more so about using the goal as motivation to temporarily increase my income. That extra income is already earmarked for the goal, so it doesn't really take away from necessities.

Obviously, if you're at a deficit on the necessities it will be tempting to use the extra income for those things. That's a different conversation/problem however

What a ridiculous article. It says:

> Last year my son, who was in third grade at the time, came home with a sheet of paper from his school that listed three categories for appropriate projects: developing a hypothesis and conducting an experiment to test that theory, inventing something new, or researching "something specific." The guidelines listed "whales" as an example of something specific. Given that my son was 8 years old, the idea that he could, on his own, do any single one of these things seemed ludicrous.

> Even the easiest of these items—researching a topic—is nearly impossible for a child who hasn’t yet mastered the ability to browse the Internet. (As a parent and the founder of a tech company, I’ve observed that in order to browse the Internet one needs to know how to scan the screen, differentiate between actual content and ads, and evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource—elements that are far out of reach of most 8-year-olds.)

Has that parent never heard of books and libraries? If their school has a library it should have books appropriate for a child with enough information for an 8 year old to research some topic like whales. If the school is one of the ones that has ditched their library, a good public library should do.

Even if they have to resort to using the internet, the parent should be able to easily point the child at some sites that are trustworthy and ad free, such as PBS Kids. If the parent does that, and keeps an eye on the kid while the kid is searching to make sure they stay on kid friendly sites, that's not going to count as the parent doing the work for the kid and should be acceptable.

Thoughtful post, I think it's such a strong ability to develop to be able to see this thought process happening in your head and being aware of it. Thanks for sharing this

People don't understand that in the worst case scenario, an avenue of potential innovation is eliminated and makes future work easier. Too many people identify as scientists, especially online, for the sake of their ego rather than intellectual development. Anyone exploring possibilities has contributed.

Insightful comments like this are why I love HN. Thank you!

Comparison is the thief of joy my friend :)

I personally don't think age has anything to do with it. If the story for some reason said 47 instead of 17, I think comments would largely be the same.

So then why? Insecurity may still have a lot to do with it. I guess a large percentage of people like to either prove others wrong, or show off intelligence?

See also, Cunningham's Law.

https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

That’s not why. It’s because the low hanging fruit has been picked decades ago so it seems, and usually is, unlikely that a 17 year old would be able to create something people paid to think about this with sustainable financial incentives were unable to do.

> Next I start to resent how society scores us on things that can contribute to the economy

Lol

Gave me chills, thanks!

Why are you making this about you?