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There seems a bit of a contradiction here. You say that real hackers wouldn't work on startups-- that the really smart people are in academia. And yet a large percentage of the CS faculty at MIT and Stanford have done or are doing startups. There's a joke that you can't get tenure at Stanford without having done a startup.

You're also confusing exploratory programming with doing trivial work. Making a quick version 1 and then iterating works for both big and small problems. It just depends how long you keep iterating.

It's true that a lot of the work you do in startups is crap work, and that a lot of startups only take on trivial problems. But this is also true in research.

Perhaps I haven't framed my confusion into a proper verbal frame, but there were quite a few books in my life screaming "try this!", and I was unable to find time/application for them in this crazy-fast pace of startup life. Startups I worked in were all hungry, fast and aggressive predators, consuming other people's code (open source), other people's research, algorithms and even ideas for products. I haven't been inside of something genuinely new, let alone doing my own, truly mine, thing.

What I've done, and companies I was a part of, was just that - a bunch of incremental improvements based on 4-6 months release cycle. How can I be not sad about that?

Nearly every scientist I know is doing "a bunch of incremental improvements based on a 4-6 month release cycle".

They just call the results of the releases "publications".

"I haven't been inside of something genuinely new, let alone doing my own, truly mine, thing."

That is why what you're saying here and in the above is a rant rather than advice.

"You've gotta try, because if you haven't tried then you haven't lived."

I haven't been inside of something genuinely new, let alone doing my own, truly mine, thing.

Sounds like that's what you're really sad about, and with reason. Doing something you don't want isn't any more fun at a startup than elsewhere. It might even be less fun since startups are more intense. You're right that startups don't solve this problem, but they don't cause it either. We cause it ourselves by not doing what we really want to do.

I struggle with this myself.

"Make something people want" isn't the axiom to invoke here. "Do something you want" is more like it. Gruntwork is inevitable, but when you're doing something that is truly your own thing, it doesn't feel so bad; the connection to what you care about is much closer at hand.

While I would agree there is a large amount of "crap work" involved in academic research I think it is a stretch to label it trivial. It is practically the opposite by definition.

No, it isn't. Most of the labor performed in the name of research is tedious, and the vast majority of published research results are trivial extensions to previous work.

It's like geology: everyone focuses on the earthquakes and the volcanoes, but 99% of everything we see on the surface of the earth was created through a gradual process of accumulation and decay. Research is the same -- on a day-to-day level, it's labor-intensive and tedious. Only from the thousand-foot view does it become sexy and revolutionary.

Well, I'm a full-time researcher (cs phd student) and I find it sexy. I'm not even rare, I feel the same spirit amongst most of my peers. It is certainly labor intensive and tedious, this does not mean that the work is trivial. In the context of this particular conversation, of all the problems that are being solved between startups and academia I hardly think that someone could label academic research trivial. If someone chooses to work on lame problems, thats mostly their fault, but there are plenty of interesting/difficult problems to be solved.

Something he may be aiming to point out is that a lot of what I'll call "pure" hackers just want someone to foot the bill for them to go on hacking on what they love. I'm thinking of guys like Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tridgell and the like: technically brilliant guys who want to focus exclusively on tech, and are famous and good enough to more or less get what they want, and get paid well for it.

Notice that the following people are not American:

- Linus Torvalds

- Andrew Tridgell

- DHH

- Alan Cox

- Rasmus Lerdorf

- Mark Shuttleworth (and most of Canonical)

- Guido von Rossum

They work at various companies by day and continue to work on open source when time permits them to do so.

They're happy to get the paycheck and go home. (Except maybe for DHH for hitting a jackpot of lifestyle business and Mark Shuttleworth for hitting the real jackpot).

Are any of them as ambitious as YCombinator crowds? probably not. But they "learned" to enjoy their life better than most of the younger generation these days.

Linus is 'not ambitious' and 'happy to get the paycheck and go home'? Not in the world I inhabit! Also, most of them do work on open source for their day jobs, with the possible exception of Guido, but even he gets more than 20% time for Python. In terms of impact on the world, most of those guys could very easily go up against the best of YC, just that they're different sorts of impact. My point is merely that, that hackers can find other outlets in this day and age, besides startups. Personally, I'm more interested in the startup route, not being a brilliant Linus type hacker, but I think it's interesting to consider everything out there.

I may be wrong about Linus "ambition". I don't see him as ambitious as these young generations that want to get rich quick.

He may have "hopes" as in "I hope Linux will become better" or whatnot, but certainly he doesn't have the hope of "Linux should run everywhere and anywhere".

I'm not saying anything in regards of Open Source.

My point is that non-Americans seems to be able to live in a "comfort zone" without having to join the startup movement and work like hell + eating cheap.

>I don't see him as ambitious as these young generations that want to get rich quick.

He worked at transmeta for crissakes.

Collecting salary just like anybody else.

Is Transmeta a startup that have an exit strategy where everybody will get rich?

I think you are far too quick to dismiss the guy behind one of the world's most popular operating systems. My point with the post in this thread was to simply say that there are other kinds of noble ambitions and goals for hackers besides doing a startup. Consider comparative advantage: Linus might make a good startup, but if his comparative advantage is in doing Linux, most likely he and the world are better off for him to keep doing Linux.

Linus was widely quoted in the late 90s for saying that Linux should aim for "world domination, fast!"

As the creator of Linux, Linus was given stock in many Linux-oriented companies by the company founders. He has done fairly well, as he should.

I've been exposed to the robotics academic world in depth. Even academics I know are growing tired of the academic mode of work. There is a persistent and growing respect for making real and complete systems. This it often antithetical to the unit of academic progress: published results.

A great test for whether you have a real system is whether you can sell it. That's why iRobot is so awesome. They make robots that people actually use.

Make something people want :)

Trevor's a case in point. As far as I can tell, he's ahead of pretty much everyone on walking algorithms.

He is definitely very far advanced, but academics still make very good walking robots. http://www.msl.ri.cmu.edu/projects/actuator/ http://www.rhex.net/

Some other efforts that come to mind help illustrate the territory. Honda made a horribly unscalable walking mechanism in the ASIMO. It will never be more than PR. The best work from CMU & MIT's Leg Lab got spun out into Boston Dynamics. You've probably seen their "big dog" video. http://www.bostondynamics.com/content/sec.php?section=BigDog

Boston Dynamics is part boutique research firm and part startup. They'll probably be the first to sell a walking robot.

Honda makes a clunker, and the hungry, small companies make something that will actually work.

I read a recent Popular Science article where it says Trevor helped with the unicycle motorcycle. This article here is essentially what it said in the Popular Science article; so it seems Trevor is quite the go-to guy when it comes to these types of things.

http://www.motorcyclemojo.com/articles/the-uno/

* Not disagreeing, just supplementing

Nice rant, tx. Now let me tell you why is does NOT resonate at all with me.

I do not think that what we read about here at hn is a random sample of "hackerdom" in the world today. I think that my background is probably much closer to that.

I have done work for over 80 companies, only a few were in the software business. Most did something else and needed some form of IT to do it. I have sat in the worst of cubicles, attended the most lame meetings, and worked on mind-numbingly boring "projects". Just last week I rewrote a 16 year old batch program that was taking 25 minutes to run. I found 12 unresolved bugs; the program has 25% LOC and runs in 3 minutes. My experience may not be the norm for everyone here, but this project has been the norm for me.

The only time I have ever worked on something interesting was either as a contractor with the clout to change the agenda or as an independent software producer providing a solution I already knew they needed.

In my experience, the state of application software in small, midsize, and enterprise businesses is stunningly deplorable. These people desperately need good software and don't know where to find it and have no clue how to produce it themselves.

Maybe you don't think that call center apps that get the agent off the phone in 2 minutes, accounting apps that deliver exactly the info that management needs, or an inventory app that actually allows you to change a SKU are "big problems", but I do. While so many are working on a realistic robot, a social network, or a rocket to Saturn, somebody has to stick around and grab the low hanging fruit that's everywhere.

Then I come to a forum like this where the thinking is "Just Do It" (sorry Nike) and it puts me in the perfect mindset to do what I've always wanted. hn is the antecdote to corporate malaise.

jl said, "I want to give other people a better opportunity than I had in my professional career."

I say, "I want to give myself a better opportunity than I have had in my professional career."

None of this was available as recently as 10 years ago. But now, thanks to modern technology and hn style thinking, I can turn all the little wrongs I've seen over the years into my "big problems" to work on.

I'm doing a startup in order to work on what I want.

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Bravo.

My limited personal experience confirms this too: smart people I know work at IBM, Motorola, Google and Microsoft and they're HAPPY.

Selection bias is funny that way.

But, I do know several famously good hackers (four, to be precise), and while three of them work with no equity for a mid-stage startup and the fourth works for Canonical, which seems sort of startup-y, none have ever started startups independently.