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Comment by ncallaway | Hacker News Reader

> For the record, I am not jealous – I make my money doing literally whatever I want, on projects that I find much more exciting, with ample time left over for nature walks, rock climbing, reading, and more. Unlike these authors, the money I make is not the most interesting part of my story

Frankly, I think you’re being incredibly rude to assume that because someone shared their story on a topic, then it must be their entire identity. It’s just so presumptuous to assume that the author or authors of these pieces have nothing else in their lives of value, because they decided to share this piece of their life.

There’s a lot in your comment I agree with, but this note struck me as just… extremely uncharitable, presumptuous, and rude.

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I think the point is that it seems like these days every time someone get's lucky with a couple SAAS / Apps they've released they've got to author a blog post how how they climbed the mountain. At some point the playbook seems more like self-promotion than it does anything else.

And that's fine, no one should be ashamed of their success. But it is also OK to point out what's going on and that's what the OP is doing.

I think it’s a mystical part of the software career path and useful to write about

He said he took risks because he was unencumbered, he waited till the ideal time to strike and did and it has more success than his employment offered financially and fulfillment wise

Who cares that his blogging is intrinsically tied to his growth hacking

This same standard is not levied on every Stanford dropout that sold shares of a pre-revenue idea to their VC neighbors for $20 million dollars

What are you all even bickering about

To be fair. The title of the post only focuses on money and completely ignores whether the work has any real value to themself or society. Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.

No it doesn't? They just chose to write a tight, focused post. Rather than an autobiography. If they had written a larger sweeping piece focusing on all their hobbies and aspirations and well as their successful business people would still be salty in the comments.

Devils advocate, if the post was about building an open source non-profit with that level of financial success I don’t think there would be so much salt.

I don’t care about the salt, I don’t like people making wild assumptions that aren’t founded on anything, and then criticizing that.

There’s plenty to criticize in the post, but I think making things up about the author is just not a kind thing to do.

> Kindof implies pretty strongly “their identity”.

Respectfully, it doesn’t, I don’t think you’re being fair, and I think saying it does is rude and presumptuous.

It pretty strongly implies “what they chose to write a blog post about”.

If, in the blog post they described focusing on nothing else but money, I’d agree with you. But they don’t.

> I still want to get more revenue, but I realized that this is a moving goalpost, and it will never stop. $10K, then $20K, then $50K. I knew I would never satisfied.

> It’s much better to work and play at the same time.

> So I traveled. I went for a trip around Vietnam.

> My average working hours during this period was about 4 hours/day. I still tweet a lot

Clearly there’s more to this person than doing nothing but focusing on money. Just because they chose to write this blog post, doesn’t mean it’s their entire identity.

Yeah, their comment read as incredibly privileged, and that paragraph pretty much said what they didn't have to

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