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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Love the title! Sadly, it describes so much these days.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm a hacker at heart and love to get under the hood, pull things apart, and put them back together. But the more I do this, the more I hear this little voice in my head say, "Wait a minute. Sure it's cool, but what's the point?"

I have started using an approach that satisfies both my need to hack and my desire to be useful: I try to hack not the stuff that I find interesting, but that which my customers do. It took a little while to get used to (who cares about past due orders when I could be playing with HTML5?), but I have been pleasantly surprised. Grokking someone else's stuff may not lead to many happy dances, but it sure is fun watching someone with money to spend do a happy dance of their own.

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> "Wait a minute. Sure it's cool, but what's the point?"

Learning.

>Learning

Learning is of course awesome. It's the entire point of life. We are all here to learn.

But, excessively doing things solely for the sake of "learning" is actually doing a disservice to yourself. You should do things with tangible applications to real people besides yourself, too.

There are a lot of preliminary or experimental avenues to explore, but once you find a handful with promise, my advice would be to try to follow those more deeply and apply the principles you learned to something with direct applicability.

What you'll find is that by turning an experiment into a product, you've actually learned a lot more than you ever thought that little idea could yield up. You'll gain not only depth but also breadth as you explore the implications of that product in various fields, gauge peers' reactions to the product and marketing, and attempt to develop your idea into a repeatable, profitable boon.

Tinkering is really important for a lot of reasons, but endless, exclusive tinkering results in a very superficial knowledgebase. I recommend that everyone follow several of their promises tinkers down the rabbit hole and see what comes out of it. I recognize that this takes effort and commitment, but I think you'll often be surprised at the results.

If it had a reason it wouldn't be a hobby.

That makes no sense to me. Is there some obligation that all hobbies be useless? One of my hobbies is contributing to open-source software. That's useful, right?

As my fiance is so fond of telling me when I say "I'm off to do some work!" when going to work on my programming side projects (which includes open source development with plans for future closed source commercial projects as well), she replies "Until it makes us any money, it's just a hobby. Have fun."

Ah, good times.

Ask her if she thinks that way about your marriage.

Marriage makes you money (via economies of scale and tax breaks).

She worked and paid our rent and grocery bills while I finished up my CS degree. She can call it whatever she wants. :-)

A => B /= ~B => ~A

Sorry, maybe I'm misreading your notation, but are you saying that modus tollens isn't a valid argument? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_tollens

I think he's using a logical implication notation "|=". as in: A => B logically implies that: ~B => ~A

He just decided to use "/=" rather than "|="...so it looks weird...

Ah, I'd read that as "does not equal", rather than "implies". Thanks pilgrim689.

Actually, if the positive is true, then the contrapositive is also true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapositive

Ah, I screwed it up :(. I meant to say A => B /= ~A => ~B to convey the fact that if someone says that all useless things are hobbies, then it doesn't follow that things that aren't useless cannot be hobbies, i.e.: that all hobbies must be useless. But as groovy2shoes and MattyDub pointed out, I did it wrongly. Thanks for the kind interpretation pilgrim689 (and indeed, I could have stated that to make the same point), but I was just wrong.

Who says we're here to learn?

a) """Learning is of course awesome. It's the entire point of life. We are all here to learn."""

b) """But, doing a lot of things solely for the sake of "learning" is actually doing a disservice to yourself."""

Your two statements contradict each other.

learning != "learning"

Unless it's in PHP.

Fun?

Why do you go on walks? Read fiction books? Hang out with friends? I think one of the ruts a lot of hackers (myself included) can fall into is thinking that everything that they do needs to have a point to it that furthers some long term goal. Somethings can be done just because you want to.

> Learning.

Exactly. And just to expand on this a bit, the process and resulting value of an experience should not be discounted. This is the foci of experiential learning. I can only speak for myself here, but the way I've learned best has always been by getting into something and doing it! Not always successfully, but rarely without gaining some kind of knowledge in the process. Importantly, for me, an important aspect of this has always been because it was "cool" to me. It it weren't...I'd probably lose my focus or quickly get bored.

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