Hacker News Reader

I don’t think that great work and financial success are necessarily related; in fact, in many historical cases they were not. For me personally, I always have special and long-term projects on the side (that may or may not lead to “great work”), while doing more boring work in my bread-and-butter job. I guess I need some sort of independence from financial or social pressure when I want to do what I am passionate about, even if it means that I am not able to go “all in”. Otherwise it would only stress me out and in the worst case, I would lose interest or drift away from my original intentions to satisfy a customer or whoever might give me money.

So many very valuable or important things are just not profitable, but that doesn’t mean they should not be pursued.

> I don’t think that great work and financial success are necessarily related

This is an important thing to know. An even broader point is that no matter what you do you can't control how the world will receive your work. You may do work that's considered great long after you're dead. You may do work that is tragically overlooked because something bigger happens to be going on right now.

That's why I think the advice to follow your interests is solid. At least that way you'll guarantee doing something interesting even if you can't guarantee doing something great.

I think they're related, but it doesn't go both ways. Self-made financial success almost always takes great work, although great work does not necessarily lead to financial success even when the work is clearly great.

Maybe we disagree on what constitutes self-made financial success, but it seems to me that most wealthy people have not done great work at all. It's entirely possible, and fairly common, to become financially independent by grinding away at mediocrity or even actively being shitty.

Oh no, I agree with you there. Most wealthy people are not self-made, which supports your point. Maybe that's where the sleight of hand occurs -- many if not all wealthy people will pass it off as being self-made, when only a small fraction of those instances are the case. But I do think you will see hard work playing a large role in that fraction of cases.

No, I really think you're mistaking this. Some of the easiest ways to become wealthy - or let's say "financially independent", because it's a more clear-cut term - are doing useful and well-compensated work, that is definitely not "great work" in the essay's sense. Think dentists and most doctors and lawyers, and also lots of different kinds of "businesspeople", including software engineers at big successful companies. Think about the people you see on a private golf course that they have a house next to; those people are all wealthy, some of them inherited it, sure, but many of them just plugged away at lucrative jobs and saved and invested well. That's not what the essay is talking about. It is a much easier way to achieve financial success than attempting to do "great work" in the essay's sense.

Personally I have had a tendency to waffle back and forth between the ambition to "great work" and the ambition (and at times, necessity) to do lucrative work. And for me, thus far, the two things have been almost entirely negatively correlated; I have given up the lucrative path to seek something I hope will be "great", or given up the "great work" path to seek something I know will be lucrative.

To bring this back into the lens of the article, I do think that for people who are not already financially independent, this can / should / is just one more constraint in the search through this space of "what should I work on". Some "great work" is lucrative while a lot is not. Financially independent people have the privilege to choose freely among the two kinds, while the rest of us have to focus on the lucrative kind to at least some degree.

If anything, I view that as a slight deficiency and bias of the essay's sense. Here's how I'd phrase it based on what's worked for me, which is "Learn to fall in love with expensive, poorly-solved problems." Not all expensive poorly-solved problems are poorly-solved, but for the ones that are, focusing your curiosity on them -- why they are expensive, why they are poorly-solved, what state of the art looks like, how it could be improved -- that is a surefire way, in my view, towards doing great work.

Now, that may not be considered great work by the essay. But I might read the essay with my assumption around its editorialization -- which is that it's to some degree an attempt to describe "here's what I'd like to invest in." I'll bet you today (and especially in the future) that if I tested the author's revealed preference about investing in "my" thesis of great work, while our stated preferences might differ, our revealed preferences would align.

Caveat that this is this is all conjecture given that I've never directly interacted with YC's investment thesis.

Yeah we're sort of just debating the implied definition of something left purposefully vague, but I don't read this particular essay as an investment thesis thing at all. His motivating examples are pretty much all musicians and theoreticians there's no investing in those things. To some extent those examples are metaphorical of course, and I'm certain he is thinking of at least some entrepreneurs as having done "great work". But I still take the essay more at face value that it isn't primarily focused on the kind of wildly lucrative "great work" that makes a good investment.

I can think of many examples of mediocre work resulting in self made financial success.

I remember looking this up before, and game rule sets are not protected in USA. You can't make some game rules and say that other people can't make that game. The things that are protected are the things that go along with the game, like if you use any trademark name in the game or if you use any protected media like if it's a card game then you can't use the same card art. My understanding is that you can make a game with the same rules as scrabble and not call it scrabble or use their art and you are allowed to do it.

Edit: this is getting upvoted so maybe at this point I should say I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice lol

In theory. In practice, depends what judge you pull, and you'd better have deep pockets for legal fights.

My friends made a Tetris-like game (under a different name, with unrelated art, just broadly similar rules) and were sued out of existence by The Tetris Company. Even though they were legally in the clear according to theoretical analysis, the judge took a brief look and decided "this seems like it should be a violation" and summarily decided in the Tetris Company's favor, without even engaging with any of the issues involved. Their pro-bono lawyers decided they didn't have the resources to mount an appeal, so that was the end of that.

An interesting discussion from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19533219

Tetris Holdings, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. held that the tetrominoes are "expression; they are not part of the ideas, rules, or functions of the game," which certainly seems open to dispute, but I could just as easily imagine the same standard being applied to letter tiles with a score value in the corner.

So yeah, unless you have a few spare million to get this precedent overturned, it's probably not worth it.

Wait what? That’s not expression. Without the blocks being the shapes they are there wouldn’t be a (viable) game, so it’s clearly part of the rules.

Whether the blocks look like jelly or concrete is expression. Or even the exact graphics they use in Tetris.

But the fact there’s blocks in preconfigured shapes (and what those shapes are) is game rules. There’s only so many ways you can stick four blocks together…

Yeah, the judge's gut-feel decision that using tetrominoes is not part of the functional rules of the game seemed absurd to me. But hey, when you are the judge you can more or less decide however you want, and the only one who can say otherwise is the next appellate court.

Disclaimer: I made the "art" for Xio's game (i.e. I picked the colors and drew all the tiles and menu buttons etc. on my laptop in photoshop) as a favor to my friends, so am not an unbiased reporter. As a reward I got to sit through a long deposition. :-)

Sounds like words with friends.

You seem passionate about it, so you should definitely keep going

> Hasbro is litigious

> I’m not going to charge without getting sue

I don't think this is a thing ? There's this website which is a web Catan game ( https://colonist.io/ ) which is at least as niche as Scrabble, and they seem to be doing well

Is there a problem if you don’t use the trademarked name Scrabble or any of their art? It’s my understanding that you can’t protect a game mechanic. Is that inaccurate?

Are you obsessed with scrabble… or could that obsession be broadened to “word games” including wordle, crosswords, other word games (boggle?). Maybe time to make your own original game? That may get you further away from hasbro.

I was rated around 1600 about 15 years ago and just discovered Woogles through Mack Meller’s Mack vs. Machine series on YouTube. I definitely won’t study again, but for a quick game against a bot it’s quite fun!

Frankly not sure what you want. You want money but also want to keep things open source and free. I think you need to take a hard look at your wants and how they map to the real world.

I just want enough to be able to work on it as a full time thing.

Have you got a Patreon?

@cdelsolar, definitely consider Patreon. I mentioned in this comment [1] recently about how so many coders are doing exactly what you wanna be doing, working on awesome projects full time, funded by people who want to see you succeed and to get the opportunity to get a behind the scenes glimpse of how you work, get updates about new things you're working on before anyone else, and getting access to beta testing and new features first.

I've worked with Scrabble players in the past on a personal project [2] and can say this is absolutely the kind of thing they'd go for. I had never heard of woogles.io either and will be passing the link on to them as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=36525089

[2] https://github.com/v64/fiend

We have a Patreon for Woogles, we make on the order of $100 a month from it. Mostly to keep our servers running along with other random donations. Not sure if we need to do more “fundraising”.

That's legit and a sign that you're on the right track. I was an early user of lichess when it was getting started and they were always a better experience than either chess.com or internet chess club, it was just a matter of convincing the best players to play there. Hope things grow and I'll do my best to convince my friends who play to give the site a shot :)

Maybe hasbro wants to hire you?

You could perhaps pivot someday into your own original IP (i.e. create a word/letter based game that doesn't infringe a corporations IP).

In the old days we used to call those hobbies.

Just keep doing whatever you want and maybe this work will be the springboard to a new discovery where copyright isn't limiting.

I say following your passion can never go wrong, (well ,sometimes, heh)

No doubt I have followed this advice to a Tee (given to me at weighing graduate school or a commercial world) 32 years later I have whittled the perputal timeline from 2-5 years to 6 weeks. Some days I even think I’m doing it.

Good effort, but ISC is still better. Sorry not sorry.

Nice trolling :) ISC still saves all passwords in plain text (!), they’re unchangeable, and probably running a very ancient and vulnerable version of Java. Apparently someone on the FB group claimed their password which they only use for that site was found in a data breach.

Oh yeah and you can change your tiles at will and draw RETINAS 7 times in a row if you want :)