Let say you have a cool pretty printing library on one end and on the other end you had a new kind of in memory data store that is an order of magnitude better in performance and efficiency while providing exceptional horizontal scaling.

What I'm getting at with "interesting" are projects that look more like the latter.

There are plenty of exceptions where you have projects that fits (barely) into the interesting category while staying just below the complexity threshold that it can be maintained by one guy and a few community contributions.

Yet they are still the exception to the rule and even then you often have one of the following outcomes: - The features or the project as a whole get stolen/integrated by FAANG, hobbyist burns out and hobbyist ends up depreciating/archiving the project. - The project gains a lot of momentum and gets supported by FAANG. - Hobbyist burns out and depreciates/archives the project - Hobbyist commercialises the project.

P.S. Entropy is a ditch and this is what many of the HN utopians fail to understand, it takes a immense amount of work to build a somewhat self-sustaining entity to fend of entropy. I have theory that its one of the blindspots of being young and technical. You see the world as a massive legacy monolith that you have to refactor into these cool edgy microservices which is super easy and all the problems will be solved and happily ever after. While I don't disagree with parts of the original claim, the solution IMO will end modern civilisation as we know it. I have a bunch of labels for this kind of thinking and the people who preach it but I know señor dang wont be happy about it so I digress..