Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

"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."

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 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.

>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?

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com