Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radu_floricica | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We are on Hacker News, aren't we? Most people here value the material world more then the spiritual world. This doesn't mean they completely ignore the latter, of course. But between discussing spirituality and creating something, I'd say most would choose creating.

As for making money, this is how our success is measured. Yes, you can do things for your soul, of for your friends, or for your family or for the society at large, but to be an entrepreneur means to accept to be judged, indeed, to judge yourself by your material success: money. It is not an easy thing to do. Money does not lie to you, does not tell you you're ok as you are now, that things will be better or that it will love you no matter what. Failure is clear to see, and so is success.

I probably needn't say it, but all this is worthless if you do not apply complete honesty to your work. Money is not an end in itself, it is the measure of your skill. To steal or cheat in any way makes it useless for this purpose.

Most people here value the material world more then the spiritual world ... between discussing spirituality and creating something, I'd say most would choose creating.

The urge to create things is very spiritual for me, just fwiw. It doesn't have to be material things either - these days it's mostly software and occasionally robots, and in the past it's been mathematics and music. But I must create things - it's a fundamental part of the person I am.

I wish that were me. I try to create because I admire creators. However, the drive to create is not innate to my personality. Rather, it is a struggle.

Fortunately, I am learning to hack my personality to drive myself to do what I want. For example, I surround myself with creative people and I work on team projects where a sense of duty will drive me to do good work. But it is hard, and I must trick myself to do what I desire.

We are on Hacker News, aren't we? ... [skipped] ... As for making money, this is how our success is measured.

No it is not. I love HN, but most people here accept the distorted definition of a hacker.

Hacker culture had nothing to do with money, only lately, and PG is partially guilty of this, "hacker" started to associate with "21 year old internet millionaire" in the minds of many.

PG is partially guilty of this

But I've been very explicit about this question:

"Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

"So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html)

Don't you think there's something of an opportunity cost, though? If someone like Linus had dedicated all his time to a startup (he did spend some time at Transmeta, but still had time for Linux), perhaps he would have never accomplished what he did. Perhaps similar arguments could be made about people like Guido van Rossum. Obviously there are various paths to success, but how many people made their cash, and then went on to do a seriously successful open source project? I'm sure there are one or two out there, but I think mostly it's a one or the other situation.

Bill Joy founded both Sun and Vi.

Both making a lot of money and doing a "seriously successful" open source project are pretty rare, so even if the two are independent, you shouldn't expect many people to succeed at both of them.

You could say that those guys went straight to step 2: Work on something they find interesting, ignoring money. It probably is a one or the other situation, but the results end up being the same -- living life as one sees fit.

I wrote an essay about this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

The relevant section is called "Two Routes." Linus seems to have taken organic route, gradually arranging his life so he could spend more time on Linux. Startups are usually an instance of the other strategy, the two-job route, of which they are the most extreme form.

(For a few very lucky people, a startup can also be one's life's work. But it's usually all one can do to make a startup succeed without also satisfying that constraint.)

Yes, I've read that essay, and liked it. What I'm getting at, though, is that isn't it possible that by taking the startup route, by the time you 'get there', yes, you have time to do whatever you want, but you've blown your chance to do something else?

No matter what you do, you are blowing your chance to do everything else.

I don't think PG is responsible for this any more than the rise of the tech sector (and he defended himself quite sufficiently in his reply). When a new industrial sector emerges, people will get rich, and, well... welcome to the information age.

I think that hackers, however, have an appreciation for the system. Hackers want to learn about complex systems work, but they have a profound respect for those complex systems. Thus, they're not engaged in the business of getting rich no matter what the cost to others.

All the people I know who only want to get rich end up in jobs that promise that. But they are all jobs that reek of unsustainability, like wall street traders and dot-com-type startups with a lot of hype and no business model or valuable contribution to society. These people are selfish and as we're seeing (and have seen during a thousand years of business cycles) their money is gone as quickly as it came.

I have been a bit imprecise in my comment. Yes, hacker and entrepreneur are different concepts. It's just that here there is a much greater density of people who are both then anywhere I know. Hacker culture is old, and I respect it. One of my dreams in high school has been to write open source software. But still, here you are more likely to find hackers interested in a startup then in OS. This is what my comment was about - this is a place I love _because_ it's one of the few where smart people openly want to make money (in the randian sense). And to see the highest modded comment praising spirituality over materialism - I really didn't like it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com