[hn_throwaway_99]

Baloney. I don't think it's "black magic", but as a software engineer with some deep familiarity with my tool chain I'm not going to pretend that I could ever be as productive as some of these folks. It's like when I see another post about a Fabrice Bellard project, and I think "he gets done in a year what it would take me about a career".

I don't understand this fetishization of "everyone has nearly equal ability" in the face of tons of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

[ZephyrBlu]

I don't believe everyone has the same ability. What I do believe is that performance is explainable and there's a practical upper limit to raw output.

I made a side project that I spent 1-2years building on and off and had people saying "wow I could never build that". That's bullshit. If they were of similar intelligence and put in a similar amount of time and effort I'm sure they'd be able to replicate what I did.

The luxury of being able to spend ample amounts of time on a project or idea is also massively overlooked.