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Comment by qwertyuiop924 | Hacker News Reader

I'm unconvinced. All the wacky projects that usually pop up on show HN are pretty strong signs of a culture that encourages things that don't necessarily make business sense.

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The number of times I show or talk about a side project with business people and they start talking about it as something I built to generate income rather than just for my own curiousity is quite amusing. I think for certain groups of people the idea of creating for purely intellectual purposes is completely alien. It is part of the reason many companies can't hold onto real technical talent. At a cerain point intellectual richness becomes the main priority in a hackers life and the only thing that will keep them around is challenging new problems to solve.

You know, Bryan Cantrill kind of did a talk on this...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI

Why do Bryan's talks keep being relevant to my discussions on HN? This is the second time I've linked one in two days.

Yet so many of those projects, when submitted, attract comments on HN from people who just don't get it. The culture is still there, but it's not as uniformly concentrated anywhere anymore. It's hard to tell what that really means. In absolute numbers there are probably more hackers with the spark now than ever, but you wouldn't be able to tell by just casually sampling the computing industry both professional and non-professional.

Yeah. This blog post sold that for me: https://eviltrout.com/2015/06/29/an-emulator-for-tis-100.htm...

Particularly this bit:

  Them: “So, it’s a game about programming…”

  Me: “Yes, it’s so much fun!”

  Them: “But I program all day.”

  Me: “Me too!”

  Them: “The last thing I want to do when I come home is program again”

  awkward silence

  Them: “You’re nuts.”

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