Hacker News Reader

Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

The problem with side projects is that they do not have a well defined goal. Or they do, in which case something like Factorio won't have any appeal because you can just work on something more meaningful instead. Factorio is for people who want to keep programming but are too frustrated or cynical about the real world to do it there. If the real world was better, they would do it there. If the real world could be fixed with programming, they would do it there. Many have tried, only to discover that what they thought were technical problems are really people problems.

View on HN

Games usually have kinks worked out - if you build project you might end up chasing one liner for a week.

From game I get instant gratification as if I play by the game guide/rules I can have something satisfying built in one evening.

i find tech hobbies fun because so may of the hard skills are transferable so i'm never starting from scratch, aka the hardest parts of a new hobby.

however, this is the trap i always fall into - i have these vague targets like "learn vue" and spend the whole weekend trying to figure out how to install node on a windows machine and run a basic test

100% agree, but think how long it would take you to install node without all your previous experience!!

Personally I have a list of things to learn that could easily take several lifetimes.

There are plenty of technical problems that are in fact technical problems.

e.g: making bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions

In fact there are probably infinitely many.

Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!

If you just walk up to the mailing list with the complete designs, documents, experimental results, schematics, trade offs, feasibility studies, you know what you're going to get? People saying "whoa, hey, great work but let's talk about this. I see here you've made assumption X about implementation area Y and that actually conflicts with the direction that we had in mind for the upcoming release, so let's talk more. To start, we'd like to see if we can explore option Z, thoughts?"

That ain't fun. It's rewarding but it ain't fun. Not like sitting down and messing with Legos in your own house is fun, or building a silly factory in Factorio is fun.

> Making Bluetooth 10% more energy efficient in the next few revisions is a terrible example because you absolutely cannot just tackle that by yourself. Not because it's technically hard, but because it's actually a people problem in disguise!

I know a person who 2x'ed BTLE transfer speeds by herself by coming up with a new protocol to talk to iPhones w/o the need for one of Apple's security chips.

Sufficient brainpower can do amazing things.

Well of course it would take a literal super genius to actually accomplish successfully this via individual submission.

Nobody is going to believe anyone short of that bar would have even fully understood the bluetooth specification. So even a regular genius, 99.9th percentile HN user, would have a starting credibility of roughly zero.

But there are likely infinitely many waiting for that 99.9999th percentile HN reader to come along.

No one is waiting for super geniuses. They are just trying to use groups of people to solve hard problems instead of relying on individuals. It's amazing what people can accomplish by working together.

This isn’t a feasible pathway outside of a lifetime commitment, because it takes several decades to build up enough credibility to reliably advance proposals in such committee work. (Or be very lucky )

Reply on news.ycombinator.com