Ask YC: A Hacker's Dilemmaa? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: A Hacker's Dilemmaa?

22 pointsiamdave20 comments

I spent the last few hours working on a little script (http://fiemster.name/code/quikthot) that I hoped would solve the problem of writer's block.

There are plenty of sites out there are supposedly sites where people come and submit ideas of what to blog about, but all of the ones I have seen are entirely too convoluted.

After I finished this hairbrained attempt to simplify the whole process, I took a step back and immediately saw absolutely no redeeming value of what I had just done, and this made me feel incredibly sad.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?

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For my very first attempt at online success, I spent the entirety of my 8 weeks of Easter holidays back in 2000 working my nuts off on a prototype that ended up not bringing one penny of return and was blasted out in just one presentation (though I learnt some powerful lessons in the process of failing miserably).

Seriously man, grow some skin. Wtf? "I feel incredibly sad that I wasted a few hours doing something that I can't see any value in, in hindsight"? I mean come on.

I'm really not trying to be overly harsh, but if you can't take the emotional turmoil of wasting a few hours on a harebrained idea, then you might want to bury yourself in a coffin filled with cotton, because this world is too harsh for you. Life is full of defeats and failures - and that's when everything goes well. A life without setbacks would be as bland and boring as an over-boiled cabbage leaf.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?

If you've not done that a 100 million times, you really shouldn't call yourself a "hacker" - or even a "man", for that matter.

PS: Otoh, if you have a tendency to go through very deep/high ups and downs with no apparent relationship with reality, you might want to get yourself checked for bipolar disorder.

PPS: Oh, and btw, it's dilemma.

8 weeks? Try 8 months of feverish work and in the end, nothing came from it. Sure, I know now that it probably was a wasted effort as a product, but as a learning experience, it was invaluable. Failure is a part of life. You're right. You have to get over it and keep producing. Seriously, man up

Oh, I've done the 8 months failure thing too, I was just referring to my first attempt...

I think I know what you're talking about. It actually sounds like an aspect of depression. Have you asked yourself if anything else is happening in your life that might contribute to your feeling sad? Are you in basically OK shape physically - getting some exercise, some sleep, some nutrition?

The other thing is positive thinking. I don't mean "happy" thinking; I mean positive in the sense of foreground vs. background. Foreground is something that can help you get where you want to go; background is something you don't have that would have helped you. When building something, you attach things to what you've already got - not try to attach things to space! Trees grow this way; crystals do too. And lots of people talk about building or growing software.

There's a framing issue too: I find it really helpful to compare what I have now compared with what I had before (to highlight the fact that I've had some impact). This is to counteract the frame of comparing what I've done with something that was better, was perfect.

Funny thing is, when I approach things in this "positive" way, I feel a lot more encouraged and inspired. Exciting ideas come to me from nowhere, and I have lots of energy. So, even though it seems like a fun, easy way, it results in much higher productivity. For me, anyway.

PS: there's a school of thought that depression is caused by formal reasoning errors ("cognitive distortions"). As a form of mind-hacking. I find it extremely fascinating: http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Therapy-Revised-Updated/d...

Better to create stuff and throw it out than to either not create it or to hang on to every little thing you do.

Sure, it happens. But you almost always learn something from the experience, and get a bit or two of reusable code. This applies not just to code hacking... I have a lot of other hobbies (woodworking, electronics, cooking, etc.). There have been countless times some big effort didn't have the intended effect in the end, but rarely if ever has the experience been a "loss".

I would say though that I got over the whole "completely empty" thing afterwards a long time ago. Life is too short to get hung up on petty shit. Take what you can from the experience and move on!

Generate quantity. Fail. Learn. Rinse. Repeat. The quality will appear. Success (and money) follows thereafter. Rate of return usually wholly dependent on the value to users generated. Don’t worry about wasting a few hours/days as long as you make progress. Most important lesson, keep moving forward, keep going, even if slowly.

This is good advice. My grandfather had a saying, "If you have no failures, you are not doing enough."

"The man who never made a mistake never made anything"

A few hours? I've had projects last years that I was eventually forced to scrap due to realized worthlessness...

I write lots of stupid little projects that rarely get used, but by writing them I'm improving my skills and learning new things, so they're not a complete loss.

Plus I enjoy writing software. Sometimes it's more about the journey than the destination, blah blah blah...

I took a step back and immediately saw absolutely no redeeming value of what I had just done, and this made me feel incredibly sad.

I would rephrase that as, "...absolutely no redemming value at this time..."

You have just planted seeds. Of course you can see no "redemming value" right now. If you just planted seeds in your garden out back, you wouldn't see any results there either, today.

But just as the seeds in your garden will deliver results in a few months (provided you care for them), the seeds you just planted in your little "hairbrained" project, will also reap dividends. You just don't know when or what.

Sometime in the future when you least expect it, the lightbulb will go on and you'll figure out a cool solution to some other problem. What you don't know now (and probably won't even realize then) was that what you did today stirred a few neurons to enable that light bulb to go on in the future.

As hackers, everything we do is either planting seeds or reaping harvest. If you didn't see a harvest today, that's because you were planting seeds. Just keep on working and trust the process; that's how we all get better at what we do.

For what it's worth, I have searched for topics to blog about before only to find a crapload of websites trying to sell me articles.

I would love to see a simple, nicely designed site that I can just click to and get a great idea for a blog post. Your little script seems half way there, so it has value to me.

Do you intend to continue with it?

I do. Got to add flagging capabilities and a few other things.

It's ironic that you were working on a script to solve writer's block, because this whole phenomenon of "immediately after I finished I saw the poor quality of my work and got depressed" you're talking about sounds an awful lot like writer's block.

I spent a couple of years in grad school before I decided to quit the field of computational biology. All that learning about DNA analysis was worthless, and I was sad about it. But in the years since then I frequently come back and draw analogies and use the things I learned. Just yesterday I was discussing the problem of developing a map from a large corpus of gps paths and realized, hey this is a lot like shotgun sequencing. A lot of stuff will end up being pretty useful.

Not to belittle how you feel. Our feelings to ourselves are very important, but if you look at history and see what some of the greatest hackers have created, such as the atomic bomb, you might be able to get some perspective. Enrico Fermi said, in response to how could you create something so horrible, was that they were intoxicated but what the human mind could do.

fortune cookie fortune that stays on my laptop:

"the benefits of our efforts are not always obvious"

this helps to remind me that any new project I work on helps me learn from simply the experience of creation. Additionally, there's no way to know how whatever you create (or half-create!) will benefit you in the future.

I usually feel elation at having made something beautiful. Whether it is actually beautiful is debatable, but I think it is, and that buzz keeps me going.

I get sad when I make a toy and no one plays with it. Is that what you're feeling? I added some ideas to it. It's not a bad concept--just a limited, single-serving app.

Why must all web apps have kewl spelling nowadays? How long before it's fashionable to put back the "E"?

Try and buy the domain with the "e" and see how much it sets you back. The e is not coming back until the domain name system changes such that .com is not assumed, so maybe with the new domain extensions, or just as likely, never.

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