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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

I realise you're being positive and helpful, but I don't think many people could actually have these hobbies. The technical side is within reach of most HN readers, but you also need to see the problem in the first place and understand that it's actually solvable. Most people would assume that any effort would be wasted as the authorities would prefer to keep their revenue generator, so they'd never go through with the project. It takes a pretty special and creative person to have the idea, do the work, and actually get results at the end.

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You could practice and build the skills necessary to have these types of hobbies!

Nothing this person is doing is magic, and to the extent that genetics or extensive background prep play a role you could still overcome that deficit enough to at least participate in the space, even if you weren't the most amazing, talented person in the world. It's not like making the world better by addressing weird problems is a particularly competitive field.

I'll make a claim that literally every single skill being shown here is something that you personally could learn, and it probably wouldn't take you more than a couple of months to a year of regularly exercising your creative muscles to get to the point where you were doing something useful.

Ok, here's the thing. I like playing video games. I get a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment from an evening spent crushing my enemies on the field of battle via a surprise contingent of minotaurs. That's fine. It's good!

I would not get that same enjoyment from doing what this person does, although I fully agree i could probably replicate his method. My hobbies reflect what I enjoy doing, as do those of most people. I can feel nominally "bad" that mine are so incredibly worthless comparatively but still know that I wouldn't get as much utility from doing the "better" thing?

I realize that actual tangible human emotions are much more complicated than I'm about to make them out to be. There is no "feel better" switch you can flip to make negative feelings go away. But, it is still sometimes helpful to try and recognize when an emotion is illogical and call it out, or at least it's helpful for me when I'm dealing with stuff like this.

If you know that overall the good parts of an activity wouldn't outweigh the bad parts, but you honestly believe that you have a duty to do it anyway, then you should follow your conscience and ignore trying to have a positive life. I don't think that's healthy, but some people disagree with me.

If on the other hand, you know that overall the good parts wouldn't outweigh the bad parts, and you don't think you have a duty to make yourself miserable in your free time, then what the heck do you feel bad about? If your guilt is real, you should acknowledge and take steps to address the cause. If your guilt is not real, then get a rubber band or something and snap it against your wrist every time you feel guilty about comparing yourself to other people.

You can replicate this if you think it would be worthwhile to do so. If you don't think it would be worthwhile to do so, then you shouldn't feel bad about it and it's just your stupid tribal lizard brain that's making you feel that way. And if you do think it would be worthwhile, then do it. I mean, even video games have bad parts. Having bad parts doesn't make a hobby unsatisfying or unenjoyable by default.

The third category in all of this is someone who thinks that overall the good parts of this kind of work would be incredibly satisfying, but they're so scared of the bad parts that they can't start engaging, or they're so scared of being inadequate that they never try to learn or develop their skills. My comment was addressed to that person. If you're not in that category then, I dunno. Flip your "feel better" switch.

This looks sort of like a disagreement over what people mean by 'hobby'.

I think I could do this, from my starting point it wouldn't take me very long to do something useful. But it looks like the meat of this project involved corresponding with a city bureaucracy and cleaning up ugly data to get basic info from it. It sounds awful.

So... if a hobby is just something optional you choose to do and don't make a living at, then yes, I could do this as a hobby. But in the sense where hobbies are things you do for recreation - reading, gaming, woodworking, gardening, etc? This would be far less pleasant than any other hobby I have, and the bureaucracy parts would be actively negative.

I'm glad this happened, and I'm glad if people enjoy doing this sort of thing! But I think when we talk about having productive hobbies, it's worth differentiating "tasks you can achieve" from "tasks you can seek out sustainably without hurting your quality of life". I have productive things in both categories, but I'd only describe the second category as hobbies.

If I rephrased to say "you could learn enough to break into a hobby that would be both enjoyable and meaningful", would you agree with that?

Yes, I think so. I expect the ease of finding those hobbies varies a lot by person, but I'd imagine most people have some good options.

No amount of training or practice is going to turn a cat into a dog.

No amount of practice is going to teach me how to see that these problems exist in the first place.

No amount of practice is going to teach me that government types might actually be willing to get rid of their revenue generators.

It takes a special type of person who sees what the actual problem is to begin with, then figures out how to get the data into a format where it all actually makes sense, and then takes the next step of contacting the appropriate authorities to get the problem fixed.

Don't get me wrong, I do understand and appreciate that some people might be able to repeat the same type of success, if only they had more training and practice. But you have to be careful about how you "encourage" that kind of thing.

> but you also need to ... understand that [the problem is] actually solvable. Most people would assume that any effort would be wasted as the authorities would prefer to keep their revenue generator, so they'd never go through with the project.

Any reasonable person would make such an assumption without a second thought.

I'm still baffled that the city took any action whatsoever in response to this guy's request. How could he have known that they would just roll over and cough up $60k in lost revenue? It's seriously out-of-character for them.

You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.

Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.

When you treat a government like a business, it falls behind on it’s maintenance schedule, and begins to resemble one. There are a lot of people who wish the government was their business, and will encourage you to play along. These people work night and day to lower your expectations of what you’re capable of.

Stop falling for it!

The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.

But, in any nation, that fingerhold can exist when enough people come together en masse.

> You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.

> Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.

"We the people" decided that government has some set of tasks to perform. Those tasks require resources, so "we the people" decided that we should steal some portion of each others' earnings, in order to provide a means that these tasks be accomplished.

The continued legitimacy of this ... arrangement ... is due to Social Contract Theory.

If, for discussion's sake, we temporarily step into the average-person's shoes and accept the Social Contract Theory at face-value, then it is most simple to conclude that what we are really doing is paying the government a lump sum in exchange for some set of services, and by garrulously quarrelling and advertising to each other we can decide who pays how much, and what is the set of services, and to a limited extent how the services ought be provided; under the limitation that if all the lump sums can't pay for all the services, then the difference will have to be made-up by printing more money and thereby reducing everyone's purchasing power (in short: further theft-from-all).

From that we can conclude that the "best" government would be the one which satisfied the majority of the desires of the majority of the people while appearing to take, in return, as little as possible. Does that not sound like the goal of a business?

> The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.

Correct.

Problem is, that kind of mobilization will cause enough chaos that it's not worth doing it over just a parking-ticket racket.

No, it will likely require some single, unambiguous, flagrant, overt, unapologetic and high-stakes treason against the letter of our principles and procedures ... before the 2nd Amendment's most fundamental purpose is put-to-action.

And I have no faith that the outcome of such an event, will be nontrivially better than the Articles of Confederation; it probably won't even outshine the Constitution of 1788.

But this whole discussion is going far afield enough that my betting-money says we'll soon hear from Fearless Leader Ang...

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