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Comment by steve_taylor | Hacker News Reader

You forgot to mention millions of dollars of value created for other people.

If you create an app that makes some annoying task take half the time, you can potentially save literal lifetimes of frustration for your users. The value created for the founders is a small fraction of the value created for the users.

Conversely, if you create an app and optimize it so that users spend way too much time in it relative to what they need, you'll probably rake in lots of money, but you'll also be responsible for much more value being destroyed for your users.

Basically everyone who works for Facebook. Think of the time it takes away from society and what that time is worth. Compare that with the pittance in advertising income they earn off it. That's more inefficient than a thief who steals jewellery and sells it for a tenth of its value. I don't think the small benefits from Facebook come close to the tremendous harm it does to society.

I closed my Facebook account years ago and have never missed it. I'm a lot richer (literally and figuratively) for not having wasted a thousand more hours on it.

I get that Facebook is a solid target to pick for such a rant but frankly it's a tool like any other. Blaming Facebook for potential productivity loses due to its addictive nature is like blaming hammer maker for all deaths it caused. My dad doesn't have Facebook but he definitely spends his spare time watching TV or sports that can be considered just as wasteful.

Maybe. Or maybe you got paid a salary and benefits for years by a business that then failed and took all of the owner’s investment and opportunity cost with it.

The point is, if you think that it’s just so easy and starting a business means you get to reap the benefits of someone else’s hard work, then go for it. Why doesn’t everyone do that?

Large amounts of debt (student loans) and lack of access to capital. I have several friends who have started their own business, which turns out to be "consulting to pay the bills and trying to balance the remaining 20% of time towards new-product development and finding more consulting clients". They are all but doomed from the start because the leftover scraps of time between consulting gigs is not sufficient to really create a viable product or business. If they could raise a half million and give it a serious go, their chances would increase substantially.

Of course it's not a sure thing, but a) neither is it with most of the startups that raise a seed round, and b) failure without seed money doesn't mean "aw shucks, it didn't work out, I'll try again in a couple years", it means their personal finances and credit have been decimated and now they can spend the next N years clawing their way back to zero (remember the student loans they still have).

A lumber jack cuts down a tree and sells the wood for $500 to a high end furniture maker. This furniture maker then produces an armoire that he sells to a rich person for $7000. Was that lumber jack exploited because he only made $500 from the wood?

Uh huh and who are these artisans multiplying value (not just selling but literally adding value) of software systems by 14x?

I think PG said[0] it well:

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I'm guessing Paul Graham has never restored a beat up car to pristine condition. Your pristine condition car that will fetch you less than the new parts you put in when you sell it at what the market will pay for it. Restoring beat up cars to new state is a losing game unless someone pays you to do the work, except for some rare collectibles, which I am assuming are not your personal beat up car. And even then chances are just about even that you'll end up losing money on it. It's fun to do, you'll learn lots but please do not think you will make money this way, especially not if you put any value on your time.

This metaphor really has nothing to do with car restoration. He assumes in the example the car would be worth more.

And that assumption is fundamentally incorrect, and not just coincidentally.

I think it’s coincidental. Are you suggesting that attempts to create value almost always consume more value than they create? The entire economy is proof this is false.

No, but in the case of fixing up an old car, it is not just a poorly chosen example. Fixing up older equipment when the industry of parts has moved on, is fundamentally more expensive than going with what the industry is currently manufacturing. It's easy to see a product in isolation and see that it needs a "$3 part" to be "as good as new", without taking into account that products are part of an elaborate, dynamic, evolving ecosystem that no longer makes said part for any price.

It makes me wonder, if we were to go full on Jurassic Park and clone some creature from 100mya, would it be able to thrive in today's environment? Would it have sufficient immunity, and be able to digest meat/plants from the present day? Even the alligators have evolved a bit since then.

Historically, the atmosphere was thicker and had a higher percentage of oxygen. Those dragonflies with two foot wingspans could not survive in the current atmosphere. Insects don't have lungs per se and the current lower atmospheric pressure and lower oxygen levels means you would need to basically give them their own pressure suit.

My general understanding is the same would be true for dinosaurs: Their lung design and large size would mean they would need life support to survive at all.

...unless you just want to drive an older car instead of buying a new replacement for the old clunker.

I've never restored a car to pristine condition but have kept quite a few on the road as daily drivers and they were certainly cheaper than buying a new car every three years or so by a huge margin. My current "clunker" is an '87 Goldwing that should be on the road in perfect driving condition with a few hundred invested in parts once I get around to working on it. Heck, might even get the neighbor to give it new paint since he offered "a good deal" a while back and still be ahead on resale value.

after having seen a few shows, at one point I was sold on the idea of driving around in a restored, older car. But the truth is, my new, tiny run of the mill car has bluetooth, AC, 10 airbags, great fuel economy and is much more quiet and turns off when idle. Oh and starts reliably - I haven't had a single day of downtime in the 5 years that I own it. So much nicer for daily driving.

I interpret it the opposite from you. Sure you probably won’t make a lucrative living restoring an old car but over time the value will go up. The lesson is more about putting in work that builds value, self actualization and doing something gratifying. I do this with land/property. Sure I could hire a dozer operator to clear it all but the time I’ve spent manually as well as renting a mini excavator for a small price has supplied tremendous gratification and perhaps added $50k in value by opening up a nice view of the mountains that nobody ever thought existed.

Unless the car is a very rare make / model, you will nearly always lose money on it. You won’t suddenly discover a rare carbuerator buried in there that, with some elbow grease, add $50k of value to the car.

I realize this is missing the point, but this is why one should pick metaphors carefully.

Can't speak for other places but in my city many have made a business out of doing this. They buy and soup up old cars. There's a trust factor because they've been in the business for more than a decade. Also, they have a reputation for selling at comparatively higher prices -- and they don't seem to be running out of business.

https://m.indiamart.com/yash-car-bazar/

I think we have a different definition of 'pristine'.

It's likely. Plus, most cars here are likely to be scratched or dented. The state of UP recorded the highest rate of road accidents in the country which also indicates the recklessness of the drivers.[1] I attribute this to a poor bureaucracy, widespread corruption[2], and careless drivers. My driving test was literally just accelerating and reversing the car once. Personally, when I park my car somewhere I assume it might be a little scratched when I am back. Perhaps that's what most people do and therefore we are content with not-so-pristine vehicles.

[1]https://www.hindustantimes.com/lucknow/road-accident-deaths-... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronakdesai/2018/03/07/india-con...

As with all car analogies, this is NOT about cars - it's telling a story about wealth creation...

An analogy by definition requires strong similarity to explain the position. Being a poet is about expressing your emotions having the reader transported to the place, like a doctor explaining the condition and cure, err

But if it does not work he should have a better example.

Still remember the paper about the externality of bee farm and apple farm. Obvious issue of apple not paid the bee farm but no such issue - all paid and in fact have contract what kind of bees etc.

A bad economic example is bad example.

> Obvious issue of apple not paid the bee farm but no such issue - all paid and in fact have contract what kind of bees etc.

What are you trying to say? This sentence is nonsense.

There's a famous economics paper by a guy called Meade that gives some examples of externalities (i.e., situations where what one person does affects another in ways not represented by market transactions); one example is of a region where some people keep bees and some grow apple trees, and the bees get food from the apple trees and/or the apple trees are pollinated by the bees. The beekeepers' productivity may be affected by the apple farmers' choices, and the apple farmers' productivity may be affected by the beekeepers' choices, but (in Meade's hypothetical situation) they don't trade with one another so the market doesn't do anything to push them towards making choices that work well together. (In which case, e.g., you might want the government to step in somehow -- regulating those choices, or arranging taxes or subsidies that encourage mutually beneficial behaviour, or whatever.)

But allegedly it turns out that in at least some cases where you have beekeepers and apple farmers near to one another they do trade with one another -- with e.g. contracts stipulating what sort of bees the beekeepers are going to keep -- and the market does do its thing, and the result is efficient allocation of resources.

Here's a paper by Steven Cheung about bees and apples in the Pacific Northwest. It claims (I haven't checked any of its empirical claims or its theoretical analysis): https://www.jstor.org/stable/724823

Oops! I accidentally the last sentence. It should say something like: "It claims (I haven't checked any of its empirical claims or its theoretical analysis) to find the effects I described in the paragraph above: there are contracts, the market does its thing, and the result is efficient resource allocation."

I think you’re correct. It’s an easy-to-grasp metaphor, but cracks appear when you look harder, especially with the specific detail of “restoring to pristine condition”. Illustrative as a fable of value-add, though.

The business creates value by organizing thousands of software developers together, giving them PMs and EMs to manage them, using data analysts to determine the success or failure of a product launch, and having a legal team to navigate regulatory hurdles.

The business also takes on risk for paying software developers to develop products which may not be successful.

> Uh huh and who are these artisans multiplying value (not just selling but literally adding value) of software systems by 14x?

Selling is adding value. If you make something great and nobody uses it, how is that different than never making it in the first place? It would have no effect on the world and nobody would be better off because it exists.

Software adds value to the users and the users need to find out about it and be convinced to purchase it in order to realize that value. That's the case for any category of product.

Any business whose business is not that of software.

Code doesn’t make a business. Go look at the millions of failed startups and side projects that software developers have created and failed with. You need more than the ability to just create software systems. Code is a commodity.

The ones finding the customers. The ones staffing the help desk and providing support to users. The ones writing good user documentation or making how-to videos about using the software.

Illustrators and designers who make marketing pages.

You could argue it both ways. I've always just thought the point is so void.

Compared to what? And someone might propose an alternative system as if to say "well it's better if we do it this way" and you could argue it both ways that they were exploited under the new system too.

The fundamental problem is you need to eat. No matter what political or economic institutions exist, or if any even exist at all, as long as you are alive you are never absolved from having to eat food. For the vast majority of people this means you have to do some form of work. In the base case it means you are a hunter-gatherer and need to forage. This takes all your time and I'm not sure how enjoyable it is either.

Imagine just how ridiculously magical the notion of financial independence through passive income combined with a market where you can procure all the necessities of life would be to a human being living at the turn of the Neolithic Revolution ~14,000 years ago.

It just blows my mind. And people want to throw around words like "exploited". Woe is me.

Hmm, I interpreted what he said as referring to the improved quality of life for the people who use the products/services that the programmer worked on. I'm not sure which interpretation is correct.

$50 is closer.

Not necessarily, but I don't think anyone (even Marxists) are arguing that she is.

In the software space your statement might be true in some cases. You're still far above the median, if you really create real value in the millions for others.

Or burnt.

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