Maybe there's a connection between the narrator's struggle and an entrepreneur's struggle. Both seem to enjoy the fight to overcome mediocrity and strive for their goals despite hardships and constraints, but the narrator's hardships and constraints are entirely of his own making. Check this quote:
"I loved the feeling: Floating slightly above everything but still able to cope with the world, sensing that I was somehow special, or at least different, that I belonged to a secret and exclusive club."
Couldn't that apply to a hacker? At least in the abstract?
Well, all I know is I enjoyed the article and that I believe I can find value and knowledge from disparate sources regardless of their topical relevance.
I also realize that HN is trying to remain topically focused.
To much of the world, the thought of making life more difficult by forging your own path/company/livelihood/etc, as opposed to settling for an easy job, seems akin to choosing make your life more difficult through addictions. I know it may appear I'm stretching it, but it's a fun mental exercise.
Erdős was an amphetamine fiend from when he was 58 until the end of his life. Lots of guys I knew in college were unhealthily addicted to caffeine and sugar. It's worth noting unhealthy habits.
Do you come here to read 10 year old stories about writers that had a drug addiction in college? I don't. I come here for technical and startup news and to discuss those things with people that are knowledgeable of them.
As a founder, honestly, while stories like this are interesting, it's just not worth the time investment of tracking the site if it's not focused on the topics above, and I fear that as it becomes more general, more of those people who come here for similar reasons, whose opinions I value, will also stop frequenting the site.
Eh ... the people who frequent this site, found this an interesting article, thats why the upvoted it I think. I don't think Hacker News has to always adhere to just startup news and technical news, this is a breath of fresh air. At the end of the day it depends on Hacker News viewers to upvote this knida of a news !
I hate these kinds of summaries. I am sorry to be picking on yours specifically right now, which is no worse than any of the others that are posted to every article longer than three paragraphs, but I just have to say something.
These sarcastic little snippet summaries take all the meaning and value out of the stories. What you wrote is factually correct, but completely misses the point. Much writing is not about the information you extract from it, but the process of telling the story.
People like me (and I assume you too) who have technical backgrounds often miss this, because we're so used to a reducible world where the value of an expression is simply the output it evaluates to. Biography and fiction do not work that way, and that doesn't mean they're less valuable.
You can learn much more about human nature, the thought processes of great minds, or different world-views and cultures (to name just a few examples) by observing how they reach their conclusions and how they tell their stories than you can from the mere factual outcomes of the stories themselves.
In short, these summaries miss the point and are nothing but aggravating because they make the mistake of thinking that the article is about the facts of his life. I don't know this guy, and I don't care about how he made it through high school. I do, however, care about his experiences, thought processes, value conflicts, and the world view of someone in a situation like his. Your summary has taken the meat of the story out and left us with a dried out bone, lacking even the marrow of the context.
Dave Barry has a very humorous example where he intentionally makes the same mistake:
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me." Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
I appreciate your sentiment and, in general, I think you have a point about short comments such as mine. But, in this instance, I think it is reasonable to be dismissive of this story in this context.
I honestly don't understand the value of this story, why it is on HN, why anyone has upmodded it and why it hasn't been killed. There are plenty of off-topic human interest stories which I find compelling (one example is the great one describing a writer's experience interviewing Mr. Rogers) and wouldn't mind seeing here occasionally even if they don't strictly meet the submission criteria.
My expectation upon seeing an off-topic story here (and with so many points!) is that it is of such compellingly high quality that reading it is probably justified. I'm sure we can conjure up some allegorical way in which this story is relevant to both me and many others here, but there is plenty of real literature which does that much more effectively.
Some 19th century romantics and beatnik writers went on about tortured, artistic souls and their double edged but ultimately damaging relationships with drugs. So we're stuck being forever subjected to these stories about downward spirals and tortured souls. See any movie about drugs.
Newsflash: drug use and drug users are not interesting. The vast majority of drug users are normal people with a normal boring relationship with drugs. That is, they do drugs for fun and it has no meaningful bearing on anything else in their life. These endless stories about whiny nut-jobs who can't keep their shit together wrapping themselves in the mystique of drugs annoy me to no end.
