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Comment by R3Y-P2U-jz3PVKd | Hacker News Reader

I hope he learned something useful while doing it and it seems like he did, because, although regarding all the comments here I'll likely be alone in my assessment, I just see a massive waste of time & effort? He described it as "a brutal year-long journey of 18 hour days" and he didn't bootstrap a company, he wrote Doom in Typescript types...?! The "epic" doom music underlying his story just makes it seem even more comical to me.

Maybe it's just me, don't want to crash the party. Carry on

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> don't want to crash the party

> I just see a massive waste of time & effort

Kinda seems like you do wanna "crash the party". I disagree that this is a "waste of time" of course, the value I see here is manyfold:

1. Learning how to do self-directed learning, managing time, etc

2. Learning, at an expert level, about dozens of complicated (not to mention in-demand) CS subdomains

3. Doing something that nobody has attempted, and few people could realistically accomplish

4. Having fun on the journey of taking a ridiculous idea from conception through to a truly functional implementation

5. Sharing something you've built with the world

It is, of course, not everyone's cup of tea, but if someone wants to spend a not insignificant fraction of their life building something unique (and beautiful, in its own way) and sharing it with the world, to the detriment of quite literally nobody else, I support them in their adventure.

It's just you. It's extremely impressive. He likely set himself up for life with this + learned an unbelievable amount. And this is, in and of itself, a business. He has merch, a conference, a social media presence, etc.

I guess you have to ask yourself, what truely gives value in life? The answer is that value is subjective, and this person is wasting his time no less or more than you or I.

It's just you. I would rather hang out with this guy than anyone who has ever started a company.

It is just you, I think.

Recreating the WASM runtime makes you learn a crap ton of useful stuff no matter what you use as your host compiler. In this case, the host being the typescript compiler happens to also add a wow-factor.

This reads to me like "After running the marathon he just went from point A to Point B, and that effort could have been better spent elsewhere"

You could say the same about art. Artists put lots of time and effort into creating unuseful things to inspire others. Just like here!

Uh, I think he learned what _universe level scale_ really means.

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