Why is it so that every so often one of these feel-good LinkedIn-style posts make it to the front page? Is there so much demand for banality on this site? I come here to read good tech articles or articles that stimulate my curiosity and it is sad to see these articles upvoted to the top when so many other good articles at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest continue to languish.
I recommend against Grammarly because I like when I see peoples' idiosyncrasies and it's little fuckups that move language forward.
I defiantly do not want to see people's typos move the language forward, especially when it's native speakers always making the same silly mistakes, for some reason (could of, they're/their, your's, etc.). I do like non-native speakers translating and incorporating their local sayings into English prose.
If enough people are making the same mistake, won't it eventually stop being a mistake?
Not until my dying breath. The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
(My pet peeve is native speakers unable to pronounce "aesthetics" correctly. Drives me nuts. )
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them
Why does it bug you? They are different classes of mistakes but both have driven the language over the centuries. Why are native mistakes wrong but immigrant mistakes good?
Because in my limited experience (I am fluent in only two other languages apart from English), "native grammar mistakes" only happen to native English speakers.
For example, I know Italian and French, yet I cannot think of any weird misspelling only native Italian or French speakers do. I always wondered if it's because of education or how grammar is taught in Anglosaxon countries that is ultimately the root cause of these errors. It is a peculiar phenomenon.
I'm French. I can't list them off the top of my head right this moment, but there definitely are annoying errors that natives do that are in the same category as "could of".
I do see where you are coming from but alas, language is an ever moving democracy. As much as many would like to define it in certain terms - it is largely beyond control.
This is why the English of Shakespeare doesn't hold up today because we are constantly adding and changing these things in a wonderfully organic fashion. It just makes it difficult to define.
The question is should we define it or is it like catching the wind with a net?
Another example is the word Monetize. It used to mean to turn a item into a form of money like currency. Almost nobody uses it like this nowadays. Decimate is another one.
Decimate meaning "kinda reduce the number" instead of "kill one person in 10"? I think it's been used with the first meaning in every language (including latin ones) for a long while.
The English language is a mess because of its haphazard evolution mostly driven by immigration over centuries.
No. Every language evolves, even those in countries with zero to very little immigration.
Usually towards simplification. I've lived enough to notice my native Romanian getting 'dumbed down' and we can count immigrants here on just a few hands.
However, in the 2000s I've ran across a collection of 1920s articles written by someone complaining romanian is changing and getting dumbed down. His examples of correct language felt overcomplicated and pointless, and his examples of 1920s dumbed down were academy style in the 2000s :)
Which is what bugs me about native grammar mistakes: only native people make them. No one that has learned English as second language could ever construct "could of" as it makes no sense. And the act of being defiant is very very different than being definite about something. Yet people get this wrong all the time, as if they never learned grammar at school, or let alone read ONE book.
Agree with that one though :)
If everyone started putting ketchup into their coffee, would that make it a good thing?
Some notions of quality are not dependent on their popularity.
You can make a really ugly, low quality change to a language, wait for a new generation to grow up with it and it will now be accepted as perfectly fine. There isn’t any objective notion of quality here
That doesn’t imply it’s perfectly fine, it might just mean that the arbiters have lost their ability to detect quality. Which is exactly what I think has happened.
What you call signs of quality are cultural signifiers. My native language is French, a language that has an actual gatekeeping administration (English doesn’t). The french I grew up with(not in the country of France) may be considered lower quality by some people because they aren’t used to it, but really what they mean is that I express a different set of cultural signifiers they are used to.
Unsurprisingly signs of language qualities have a tendency to reinforce the language spoken by people in power.
I don’t think those are the same things. I had in mind an example more like this:
A town is full of carpenters that make furniture. They understand the variety and quality of various woods, from oak to ash to ebony. These carpenters can easily discern the quality difference between one wood and another.
Over time, the carpenters die out and are replaced by people that can’t tell the difference. To them, an IKEA table made of compressed wood is the same as a handmade table made of high-quality wood. Ergo they have no ability to discern the quality difference and think they are all the same: wooden tables.
In terms of language: if language is merely becoming more simple and following its own rules less, then that seems like an analogous situation. It’s not simply becoming something else, it’s becoming dumber, less complex, less adherent to the rules that previously defined quality. It’s not doing this as a consequence of pursuing new levels of quality, but merely because the previous ones are decaying. I don’t think comparing two languages like French and English together is quite the same thing.
I would have considered the use of the Ad populum falacy more for use in terms of testable facts rather than opinions.
Is quality of language and taste opinion or fact? I could see the debate being vigorous on that one.
It’s a big debate indeed and I don’t want to get into it here, but I think I come down on the side of, “some standards are not purely popularity contests, but are based on other things.” There are a lot of reasons I think this way, but even if someone doesn’t agree, I do think a purely consequentialist approach is illustrative.
Would we have better food if the top chefs in the world designed our meals, or if the entire population voted on them? For some topics (including the arts) I think a purely subjective approach has worse outcomes.
Literally, yes.
Depends on the mistake, some constructions just fail to do what the author wanted them to. Those are unlikely to catch on.
I saw what was deleted out of this. ;)
In my defense I just woke up, did not understand what you were referring to and did not use Grammarly.
(I originally corrected the use of "it's")
people's
The possessive apostrophe originated as a mistake or idiosyncrasy, credited to one of two people in the early 1500s depending on who's making the assertion, that became widely adopted.
Possession should be, in static, unchanging, OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English, written "peoplees" (or something like that but you get the point).
Merely calling "'" an "apostrophe" was a mistake for over a century, as the word was a well-defined rhetorical term that was later adopted to describe the mark sometime during the mark's slow acceptance.
Grammarly makes people sound like soulless automatons who have been trained to write by similarly soulless and robotic corporate ad copy writers.
Sometimes it seems like half the English language is just Shakespeare or some other writer making up shit that sticks-- and that's awesome.
OBJECTIVELY CORRECT DON'T YOU DARE GO CHANGIN IT English
Your point is well taken, but this attitude toward the orthography and grammar of English emerged several centuries after the 1500s. There was nothing resembling an accepted orthography when the personal apostrophe emerged. Everyone was winging it.
Prescriptive grammar peaked in the mid to late 1900s or thereabouts. Linguists are more relaxed about their approach to language these days. Most publications have a style guide, but if you don't have an editor, there's no reason to cargo-cult it.
But that's how languages evolved and will keep evolving. Whatever you take now as rules and whatever you write now thinking to be correct, was probably a mistake, shortcut or misunderstanding ages ago.
So what? 500 years later, a typo could be part of the English language taught in school. It doesn't mean that every single typo has to be accepted from day one as valid. Otherwise the mere concept of typo, or even the concept of English language itself, stops meaning anything.
I don't get the urge many English speakers have to justify any deviation (i.e. any typo) as valid and indisputable. There's grammar nazis, but there's also illiterate people :)
No, they meant "it is [the act of making] little fuckups". It's is correct.
I use Grammarly, but seldomly. It's useful for longer piece of writing, esp. if I don't want to edit it later, over and over.
Other than that, in normal conversations, these mistakes are part of our personal identity if you ask me.
Never tried writing aids, doesn't Grammarly make every output sound like a corporate press release or HR speak?
It has style aids and allows you to set tone goals. It's not an automated tool which just processes and gives out a "fixed" version.
It gives you suggestions, and marks your errors. It's up to you to decide which ones to add, which ones to ignore.
I generally use its punctual help, and want to see its suggestions about my sentence structure and flow, since English is not my native language.
Also, I use its advice on different levels depending on the recipient of the text I'm writing, plus the length of the text itself.
It's also a surveillance capitalism product, beware. proselint is BSD-licensed.
I’m going to hard disagree with this. A lot of the enjoyment I get from creation is the process of others enjoying what I’ve built.
Further more, building for others is great for building out areas you’re weak or inexperienced in. Like, I was poor on the accessibility front until I found the thing I created resonated with the visually impaired folk.
I think you're agreeing with the article without knowing it. Because you're doing what you enjoy at the end of the day.
For example, I design logos and small branding for my (mostly) CLI tools which I write for myself first. Seeing these projects at completion levels comparable with other, bigger projects brings a lot of joy to me. A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
If others like it, that's great. If it doesn't get any attention, then it's OK, because I wrote that tool to fill my needs first.
The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy". It was saying "if you do this you will not be happy". If I end up happy you don't get to loop back and go "Well that was the goal! You agree with me!". The author also forgets that the author is their own audience. That audience is what one imagines others might be. The pursuit of that audience's approval is valuable.
A coherent README.MD, nice documentation and good written code is what I aspire to do, and I do it for myself first.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good. You're working for an audience. You're disagreeing with the article without knowing it.
The article wasn't saying "do what makes you happy"
I disagree. Quoting the blog post itself:
so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
Did you conjure the definition of "nice" and "good" in this context from thin air? No. You defined good by what others told you was good.
Absolutely no. I was always interested in visual design and set out to replicate what I saw and liked. I don't cater to anyone. My blog posts, coding style, and other things got negative comments, and I took note of them and thought about them, but I didn't agree with all of them, either. I only compete with myself and sharpen my axen the way I like. I'm chopping my own wood, so I don't need to optimize anything for others' wood.
In other areas of life, I have always chosen what to do, listen, watch and like. I don't yearn to fit in. In fact, I spent at least half of my life in a pretty opposite state.
Imagine you made a mug and nobody used it. That’s a bummer. Imagine you wrote a novel but can’t find anyone to read it. That’s a bummer too.
Art is there to create experiences for people. If somebody writes a novel in the woods, but nobody is there to read it, does it really make sound?
Imagine you made a mug and wrote a novel! Not a bummer at all.
The advise is don't write a novel if you're motivated by the possibility of monetizing it, because nobody will probably read it. That's all.
I was going to say something similar, but the blog is tagged with something like 'notes for myself' which is fair.
I do enjoy writing and editing.
depends on the project for me, but I'm totally with you
there's the things I do for me, because i would like for them to exist and have fun making it. But for anything that's not exactly that, having someone else care is extremely motivating
Apparently you skipped that one: "Advice for myself around leisure activities."
This frivolous article is not fodder for "hard disagree"-ment.
Yeah. I've been a lone programmer for a long time. It's very difficult to maintain focus and motivation. Sometimes it feels like it doesn't matter and that there's just no point to it all.
Yet people somehow find my work and tell me what they think of it. One day I came to HN and saw my project on the front page. At first I thought someone else had had the same idea as me. Then I started getting emails about it, about my website. Every time it happens it's incredibly motivating. It feels like I finally reached out to someone.
Making things just for yourself and your own enjoyment can be a very lonely activity and you might find yourself with some kind of audience anyway even without trying. That experience can change everything.
I only half-disagree.
I also get a big kick out of sharing my work with the world. But I think it's quite easy to lose yourself in it. Whether you're conscious of it or not, you start optimizing for what you think the audience wants, and not what you want (which is what the article is getting at I suppose).
So, I make a conscious effort to work on projects that are "just for me" from time to time, and I try to make that decision up-front.
I think I get the most out of my "for the world" projects overall - it's where I really push myself, like you describe - even though they're "leisure activities". But I still need the just-for-me projects to stay sane.
I haven’t studied the topic enough, but it would be very interesting to see when this dichotomy of money-making vs. self-interest really embedded itself into the act of creation. Somewhere during the Industrial Revolution, I suppose. But I also think the default mode of “art as self expression” plays a big part, and that’s more early-mid 20th century.
Because when you read about creators during say, the Renaissance, you don’t really have this much of a dichotomy. Da Vinci worked on a paid portrait project, and then did unpaid experiments on his own which ended up being useful for his paid projects. It was a very loop-like thing and I think he would find the explicit framing of “I’m doing this to make money” and “I’m doing this purely to create something I want to create” as alien. Ditto for most forms of art in most parts of the world, prior to the late 19th century.
The solution, I think, might be to focus primarily on the craft and not on the end product. You see this a lot with early 20th century fiction writers that moved in and out of journalism, with the idea that they were becoming better at the craft of writing, not at creating a final product or “being a good fiction writer.”
In the sense of the article artists have always done their best to cater to the taste of the people who might pay them. At least from the 16th century. They were typically paid for and protected by a mecenas (wealthy Merchant or nobility). There are no doubt exceptions but in general the art was to please their mecenas.
Right but (and I could be wrong here) it seems like lamenting this is largely a recent thing. Renaissance artists were focused on creating the best possible work, not lamenting that they had to make paintings for money and not for their own desires.
You are making quite the assumption there. There are quite a few among us focusing on creating the best possible work. And there are quite a few back then who did the opposite. Wouldn't you wonder where the conception that things were different came from?
As I said, I could be wrong. If you have an example of artists in the distant past lamenting the fact that they can’t do what they want and instead must make art for money, I’d be glad to read them.
I didn’t say people today aren’t creating the best possible work, I said this focus on the juxtaposition between the market and the self seems like a recent thing to me.
Depends on how you define "lamenting". Unless there are diaries of the artists in question, it is very difficult to know the private thoughts of people in the distant past. That said, there are certainly well-documented stories of artists being forced to change their work because of (unreasonable) demands from their patrons.
One example is the Windsor guildhall [1], where the architect was forced to add extra columns "for safety reasons" even though he knew they were unnecessary and even though they conflicted with his artistic vision. He was clearly unhappy with this and made them all an inch short of the ceiling as a demonstration to later generations, even though it was impossible to see this from ground level so he still got paid.
Michelangelo would also appease his patron (gonfaliere Soderini) while he was present, famously by faking the altering of the nose of his statue of David. Then some years later while Soderini had fled to Rome for unrelated reasons, Michelangelo publicly made fun of Soderini and mentioned that he only worked for him because he paid so well [2].
These are just some examples that readily came to mind, I'm sure there are many many more. The concept of patronage has existed at least since Roman times, and very much implied that the artists involved would spend their time glorifying their patron instead of just doing "what they want".
[1] https://inel.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/sir-christopher-wrens-...
[2] https://100swallows.com/2007/09/22/michelangelo-as-a-backbit...
I mean, this is part of the story of Caravaggio, right? So much of the standards for art (if you wanted any patronage) at the time were around "what is the church willing to pay for", and Caravaggio alternated between painting stuff that would get him money from the church, and painting stuff that the church wouldn't condone (because of the unapproved ways he used particular symbols, or because they were just secular subject matter).
Well, that and his tendency to murder folks, of course. But that part's less relevant to the "how old is art-for-money-vs-art-for-art" discussion.
I would place somewhere between the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to Reaganomics I remember it being pretty easy to get by on very little money. The go go eighties really changed materialism from my perspective.
In the fine art world, definitely I agree. That’s when Gagosian etc. really started taking off and making the fine art market a thing for billionaires.
Reaganomics are more likely to have been a consequence (of US' peak oil) than a cause of prosperity starting to dive back to the normal.
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” ― L.P. Jacks
Whilst visiting Florence, I found out that Michelangelo is broadly considered the first artist to set his own price for his work.
Before him, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted” and the patron would also decide how much to pay the artist (generally they’d be paltry sums). With Michelangelo, the patron would go “I need this cathedral painted,” and Michelangelo would go “sure, that’d be 400 golden florins, take it or leave it.” There are stories of him not delivering his work when the patron decided to change the price after the fact.
On the topic, I think that if the “money-making” bit is defined broadly enough, then it merges very well with self-interest. Like if someone asked me to make a remix of a song, but then how I’d do that is left completely up to me, it’s a broad enough task as to feel like I’m in control. At that point, there’s very little of the feeling of “I’m doing this for money.”
Agree with focusing on doing it because you enjoy it, something gets lost when we try and impress others; I'm sure we can all remember being a child and doing things purely because we enjoyed it.
However, I disagree with the personal style part of things, or trying to make things look good. These things don't have to be about impressing an audience. It can be just as much about enjoying the process.
The way I read “personal style” was, don’t make it your whole personality.
And making things look good is in the eye of the beholder. If you like design and want to make pretty things, do that and don’t worry about the criticism.
For me, pretty is my code, I couldn’t care less about the UX because I’m the only user.
But the second you want to make things for anyone else is when UI/UX matters.
Some people (and many people on HN) take graphic design for granted, but it's the first thing they seem about your product. It matters. Your app can work flawlessly but nobody will use it if the text has poor contrast or the buttons are comically small, for example.
People say this but I never saw it matter like you say. I know many ux/ui people in my network who I ask for feedback and help; I have never seen any difference in uptake from the vanilla theme version I did myself through to months of tweaking these guys did. Sure it looks tons nicer but it doesn’t reflect at all in (measured) user satisfaction, signups or usage. The default themes these days (shadcn etc) don’t make any of the mistakes you mentioned and users that are not obsessed with tech don’t really care ‘it looks like everything else’. Maybe it’s because I never do b2c and only b2b, but I never saw the difference, not in the last 30 years anyway. Even when these design systems and widgets etc didn’t exist, people didn’t care because there was nothing better; now there is ‘more than good enough by default’.
Would it change anything if Hacker News was redesigned to look exactly like Reddit's UI? Because a lot of people would not want that. Behind the scenes, there are a lot of similarities between the two sites - but doesn't the fact that they look so different actually make them different?
If you're saying design doesn't matter at all then changing the look of Hacker News to be like Reddit should have no effect on user satisfaction, signups, or usage.
I sense a bias toward minimalism (that I share) but that's still intentional design.
that's the point of the article- that you shouldn't be worried about making things for something else if they're unlikely to care either way
with that said, I agree with your overall point, if you're determined to make something popular you shouldnt skimp on design
There are myriad of software that have been super popular despite having dodgy UI. But the whole point is not to care if your app is popular or not if the whole point is enjoying the process of building the app more than seeing it used by many.
Design and branding matter a lot more than people realize. Not just in terms of appeal - it sets the stage for everything that follows.
Half the social media apps are the same thing: Feed, like, block people, follow, post (with image/video, etc.), hash tags, etc. but the slightest difference in design and branding sets forth a different content platform.
UI/UX isn't just aesthetics, it's utility and a huge part of what the thing is.
Yeah, I think another way to think about this is "don't get distracted with cultivating and maintaining your brand", rather than "don't find any particular way that you enjoy doing the thing."
One of those is performative and creates pressure and expectation, often at the expense of personal enjoyment and rest. The other is just finding the bit that's interesting to you.
I think the sentiment is ok, but like you, I think the overall message is completely nonsense. It’s obviously fine to do things you aren’t enjoying as part of a process of to achieve your goals, and that doesn’t need to be about outside validation at all. I’m not very good at design, I don’t too much enjoy the process. Well I do enjoy parts of it when the hyperfocus sets in, but as a whole I don’t enjoy the process. I still do it, not because I care what anyone else will think about the end result but because, I, care about what, I, will think about it.
I’m sure the author is doing some sort of simplification of things. A lot of learning processes aren’t necessarily enjoyable and almost none are enjoyable all the time. I spend years learning how to airbrush while absolutely hating the process because I wanted to be able to do certain things. Now that I can actually make the stuff I envision I enjoy the process, but sucking at the beginning? Yeah that sucked. Hell, even if your end goal, is, outside validation… go for it!
But I do agree with the whole “life is short, so what you love” sentiment. It’s just that you could put it so much better and less condescending than the author does here.
It might be better to interpret in the context of the subtitle: “Advice for myself around leisure activities.”
If my advice is to myself, I don’t see how it is condescending. It seems by definition that it can’t be. I cannot pretend to be above me.
My summary of the sentiment would be “don’t allow the weight of imagined judgmental eyeballs to steal your joy in trying or pursuing your personal creative endeavour”
There is an irony in the blog now being seen at HN scale and judged.
Ok the most important sentence in this essay is its subtitle:
“Advice for myself around leisure activities”
Personally I am no perfectionist at all, but I don’t see the fun in making stuff myself that I could otherwise buy. I took up sewing, not because I want to sew the perfect shirt, but because men’s fashion sucks. That said, I sew stuff I can wear. So it needs to look at least as good as what I could buy. I don’t think that it’s “acting like being famous”. Similarly, I am writing a screenplay, because I have a lot of experience reading bad screenplay that were actually made into movies, and I think I can write one that is at least as good as the worst ones I read. I don’t paint or take photographs because I know mine will look terrible.
Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
"I took up sewing, not because I want to sew the perfect shirt, but because men’s fashion sucks"
I applaud taking up this skill, but there absolute is stellar men's fashion out there, it's just not outwardly public AFA retailers and brands. I was a member of https://www.styleforum.net for many years and highly recommend it.
And you can get MTM custom clothing on the relative cheap. I've used https://www.divij.com/ in the past, a small family run business where they book appointments in major cities to do measurements and provide sample books so you can inspect the fabrics in person, then order online any shirts and suiting.
No offense but the fashion I like is way more colorful.
That statement isn't particularly specific, but Styleforum covers everything - want to dress to the standards of a 19th century dandy? They have you covered.
There are sartorial competitions they chronicle where it would be impossible to get any more colorful.
Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
I guess this is my gripe with advice in general: Why should anyone else make that their aim? It’s great that it works for you, but I don’t think that’s applicable to me :)
Using something you build brings a lot of satifsaction.
Personally I am no perfectionist at all, but I don’t see the fun in making stuff myself that I could otherwise buy.
That's ok, but then there are things that are not available to buy. I want a 500-850 degrees C 3D printing hotend, which can only be built of ceramics. I'm a hacker. Gotta make it.
https://voxleone.com/2024/03/05/3d-printing-im-making-a-500c...
Yes exactly. It's very difficult to find Mexican peppers in France, just gonna grow them. No interest in growing tomatoes whatsoever.
Maybe that would be my advice in taking up hobbies: aim to be better than the worst people who do it professionally.
Then I hope you don't count sports as hobbies because being better than the worst people who do it for fun is a stretch goal if it's me doing any competitive sport.
This is good advice, I'd like to ad one caveat tho: It is not a good idea to base your decision whether to start doing a hobby on your own perceived ability to get good at it.
For one the much more important metric is whether you enjoy doing it, because ultimately you are doing it for yourself. Secondly, as an educator I have to say that many people absolutely suck at predicting their own inability to learn a thing.
There are many people who say they will be bad at $X and because of that prediction they avoid doing $X, which in turn is the reason they can never become good at $X.
It is much better to just take the gift that Punk culture has given us and focus on finding A) joy in doing things even if you are not good at them and B) finding your own way of doing them, because for many hobbies there just isn't one objectively good way of doing them.
> Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience [...] The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it [...] In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it.
I don't understand the equivalence the author is ultimately making in suggesting that creating something with polish is expecting to make money (and fame) from it. Yet notice all the things in the blog post are creations that are exposed to the internet (photography blogging, releasing a program online, making a website), rather than private, non-published hobbies which literally have no audience.
Some prefer to make things polished/more complete as they want others to enjoy something more and polish makes it more accessible/usable/meaningful, or because it's a reflection on them (whether using an IRL identity or even a pseudonymous one) and part of their enjoyment of the process.
Since we all know the audience is whoever will come across it, once something is released in the wild. Might be an audience of one, or many. Which isn't to say people need to care about the output of hobby but I disagree that money/fame is the only motivation in improving something.
The danger with wanting to polish things before putting them out into the world, is often you never share anything because it's never "done". And you may be polishing something in the wrong direction, which you would know if you put the unpolished version out into the world to get feedback.
For some it so hard to recognize that perfection is often an unattainable ideal
i don't think that's an argument the article is putting forth though. its whole point is that nobody is going to see / care about your stuff regardless of polish, so you wouldn't be getting any feedback either way.
I would suggest you don't understand the equivalence because it's not there. They aren't saying that creating something with polish is expecting to make money off it. They're saying when you start a new hobby or interest forget about trying to tailor your output to an audience that doesn't exist and focus on skill. Maybe you really want to produce something polished, but the reasoning for that should be for your own development and edification not because you want it to appeal to others. Prioritise what makes you happy and gives you enjoyment not what you think other people want.
I mean, consider there are a swathe of things I've made for self-development, that aren't released to others since they're incomplete, less usable for others not sharing the same brain, not great quality, etc.
It would weigh on me from an empathetic standpoint to not improve upon them if being released to others, so they're not and that's fine. Much like an artist's practice sketches they're intended for one's own private goals only.
The article isn't really framed like that though and downplays the internet as an inherent audience. Improving something even for just a random other person to enjoy/find utility in isn't inherently attention or money chasing, it's just bridging a gap.
Very true, to take his advice further would be no audience at all. A blog post is a journal entry, a photograph goes into a binder/ folder. What is the benefit of the audience if it’s for personal growth?
I think if you like polishing things than do so. As far as I could understand, the point is not doing it with the expectation of any recognition.
Tucked away deep in the filesystem I have some programs that I rarely execute, that do a few things well and many others not so well, that I keep polishing. This code is secret, kept for the joy of just rubbing it every now and then and looking at it, having a little feel for how coding could be if it was disconnected from the toil and economics of everyday life. Disconnected from other people.
It’s a quality of artisans to make the things they make polished and complete. There’s an inherent satisfaction in doing that if it’s your thing. In other words, applying that polish is an end, not a means.
My son put effort into dressing up for his Year 10 formal as that is what you do. But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others, and thought he should have spent a lot less effort into his outfit :)
But during the event he observed that most kids focused on how they looked rather than noticing others
Genuinely, that is good. People who care and judge how others look beyond normal social propriety tend to be pretty bad to be around.
Or that's bad, because all those kids who spent time looking good, didn't get as many compliments for their effort than they expected, or perhaps even deserved.
There are many caveats with judging people by their appearances, but complimenting someone on the part of their look they put unusual effort in for some unusual occasion, seems pretty healthy to me.
(Well, there's also the caveat that the rich ones will have better access to exquisite clothes to begin with…)
I think the point is more around the collective distraction of dressing to a formal (and for kids, unfamiliar) standard, rather than enjoying time with the people around you at a party.
I think kids are constantly comparing.
Watch how many of them are buying exactly what their friends buy, so they can fit in and relax a bit.
Not just kids
Hard disagree with this as a polemic
When I take photographs of my friends, it is incredibly important to me that they be in focus, sharp, with a good depth of field bokeh that brings out their face and presents an attractive image. I take a huge amount of pride when a photo I shot ends up as a profile picture or widely shared. That's a large part of why I take them, to share with others.
Got my current job because of my public code and the quality of articles I have written on subjects relevant to the employer. When I interviewed they largely skipped the technical parts and focused on cultural fit and the kinds of projects I wanted to be involved with, because my publicly demonstrated track record left no question about the quality of my work.
It is fine to have some activities you enjoy without perfectionism, but there is a world of advantages that can come from a focus on quality.
you talk about something else. sometimes, in fact most times, this imaginary and large audience (who also happen to be great critics) can beat anyone into inaction and kill whatever little flame we were nursing. it’s all in our heads, which means we end up defeating ourselves. it isn’t an ode to mediocrity, imo. if anything, practice and more practice is the best cure for mediocrity.
I don't understand the difference in what I and the OP are talking about.
The OP said, "In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your 'audience'"
Presenting to the audience is my goal. If you're telling jokes, your goal is to make your "audience" (friends/coworkers/family/etc) laugh. The only way you can get funnier is to try jokes out and see what gets a response, the measure of quality is external, not internal.
I don't tell jokes to myself in an empty room. I don't take photos just to look at them myself in Lightroom. I don't write open source code just to put it on a thumbdrive and throw it in the bin.
None of the activities I, personally, enjoy work without an audience. The audience is entirely the point. Without the audience I wouldn't enjoy them.
Saying "do things for yourself without an audience", period, without caveat, is wrong for tons of stuff.
I don't think it's "do things without an audience"; I think it's "don't give the audience absolute authority over your ability to enjoy the thing".
Comedy is good with an audience, and not so much without, so it's a great example.
If you're doing comedy as a hobby, even though comedy is done for an audience, then you can feel free to take time away (or stop entirely) when it's no longer interesting to you. If you're doing it "for the audience" in the sense that the OP is talking about (where the audience is the only point, rather than just being a part of the experience of your enjoyment of doing comedy), then no, the show must go on and you must sacrifice your own interests for the audience's sake.
It's sorta like the difference between the low-key hobbyist mindset of selling something at the local farmer's market vs the high-pressure "obligation to the shareholders" mindset of corporations.
Or to go back to the article title's advice to "stop acting like you're famous": a member of a local improv troupe might doesn't have to spend much of their life worrying about what the paparazzi will say or how the critics or box-office numbers will judge their improv (even though the improv is very directly a performance for an audience), but an A-list celebrity actor does have to keep that awareness in mind at nearly all times, and it often makes their life miserable.
I think this is spot on - how many times have people (and I include myself) stopped on a project that is even remotely public facing because it isn't perfect-grade work before you've even learnt the first steps?
This is excellent advice, but there is one exception: on the internet, behave as if your username was your real name and everyone was in the room with you. Don’t use the cover of anonymity to be mean. Act as if people knew you and remembered you.
Also these accounts will probably be de-anonymized at some point, between leaks and style matching. We aren’t famous, so mostly it is the same as anonymously yelling on a crowded street corner, but then most of our IRL interactions are similarly anonymous-by-obscurity…
lol, many wrongly assume the convenient services haven't made billions off those that assume any anonymity exists in their metadata.
Prior to ML, it was computationally unfeasible to develop speculative dossiers on the majority of populations.
Best not think too deeply on the matter... Have a wonderful day =)
I wanted to comment something on that same vein: you probably won't be famous, but someone will definitely read your blog when considering whether to hire and/or date you.
I applaud those that bad-mouth their previous employers because it makes my daily reading more interesting, but I can't in good conscience suggest that people should do it more.
Ash's main takeaway is solid — Immerse yourself in hobbies or creative pursuits without being overly concerned about external validation or the potential for monetary gain.
Other takeaways that stuck with me were:
— Finding enjoyment in the process of learning and improving your own skills is crucial.
— Setting personal goals can help fuel growth.
— Sharing your work with others is a way to receive feedback and learn from other perspectives, but don't let pursuit, perfection or seeking monetisation overshadow the joy of the activity itself.
— Intrinsic rewards of your hobby or pursuit trump validation or financial gain.
In the end, you need to find something you enjoy doing, and do it because you ENJOY it.
200 years later, people rewrite Nietzsche.
Or the more practical, and hilarious, J. P. Donleavy. "Scrub your floors!"
Was that the takeaway? The message I got from reading it is that you're not going to be famous no matter how hard you try, so just enjoy yourself.
I am a software engineer based in San Francisco
It's a decent blog post but smells like rich person (compared to majority of the world) privilege. Always easier to talk from above.
We're shit talking people on HN now because they're software engineers from silicon valley?
Personally I don't find any amusement in the pseudo intellectual wisdom of software engineers, especially from SV.
And sure why not it was shared here. I’d rather listen to the people on the streets in Africa and how they see life and the future.
Advice for myself around leisure activities.
This resonates with me. I can't have relaxing hobbies: I take them up, find some measurable/competitive/social aspect in them, smash my way from "rookie" to "advanced beginner" to "top 20 percentile" in very little time and then agonize about the ensuing plateau and how getting into the top 1% would require complete dedication or might be realistically out of reach for me.
By that time I stop enjoying doing whatever the thing is. Not fun anymore.
People will sincerely praise me and it will feel empty because I know there are millions of better painters, my laptimes are a full second off the ultimate pace, my guitar skills only good enough for playing alone in my office, my leisure programming projects all pointless and abandoned.
I envy two kinds of people: those that have found some thing they are very good at and keep enjoying it forever, but also those that can enjoy something for years even if they are realistically mediocre at it and never improve.
And the money making part is also true for me. I took up miniature painting and quite soon was at the level where people will pay you decent money to paint their miniatures for them. I started getting offers and accepted one, not for the money, probably just out of pride. It was complete hell, I hated the result and every minute I spent painting it. The client was happy, me, I guess I learned my lesson: never again.
Bruh I am this exact same person. I am mediocre enough at everything I do to impress laymen but leave me feeling like shit because I know anyone who knows the craft will think I suck. I have the ability to learn up to intermediate stage of pretty much anything way faster than most people but I just stress myself out and there's always other fish in the sea for me.
Why not apply kaizen to your hobbies?
1. Do the best you can.
2. Identify the weakest part of the artifact you just made.
3. Design an improvement to that part only.
4. GOTO 1.
Thanks for giving me ideas to add to my 200 hobbies, miniature painting it is. I even have an app (Streaks) that reminds me daily of thousands of things I want to do, and it just shows how unrealistic it is. I want to concentrate on just two things, but then I hate to plateau on the other skill. Right now I concentrate on guitar and trumpet. But my painting and drawing skills are really not that good anymore. I try to also publish some academic papers, repair my bike, lift weights, run, get better at theorem proving, read into all of the social sciences, read philosophy (Kant, Hegel), experiment with Arduino, build a repertoire in Rebetiko ... If you find a trick to just do one things, tell me.
So, if I’m hearing the zeitgeist correctly. Currently, the best competing advice I hear along venn intersections is:
0. Do less things
1. Do things at a natural pace
2. Obsess over quality
3. Don’t obsess over quality, eff the haters!
4. Do more things
;)
Uhmm, the correct way would be: 0. focus on less thing; 1. have fun doing them; don't stress about it, you're not competing; 2. do it, more and more. The important point is to DO. Everything else will come, eventually.
Touché. It’s just fun to watch this attitude towards productivity go in cycles.
Yesterday they recommended that it was a glass of wine, and before that two glasses of red, then a bottle of white.
We kinda always knew it was wine, and like… stuff we can abstract away about blood pressure, moderation, hangovers, fond memories, and whatever, uncle Conrad.
No, we solve that particular thing like all things. But as a consumer, you’ve gotta average out the signal of strong claims.
“Eff it!” and “Obsess over it!”
are diametrically-opposed opinions about work, which I suspect many of us agree with both, a bit.
We try to explain it over and over again as each generation finds the same problems with new tools. Maybe it’s not that bad—but hey, at least my commentary was coherent enough to post ;p
It is a strong theme of taoism that in giving up on clinging to a set goal, it allows you more flexibility to do great things when needed.
I had a goal of programming every morning for an hour, and it wouldn’t stick… Once I dropped any pretense of making money, or getting anything out of it other than enjoying the craft, it has finally stuck.
There is the idea that I kind of subscribe too but not entirely, that if you want to improve yourself - you would just do it rather than force it.
In that trying to force it is like Sisyphus. In giving up the battle, you are freed up to actually do it.
So your exaple is great, you had a good intention but once you gave up that structure then you actually got to the goal.
It still takes discipline, I don't wake up every morning dying to program - sometimes the task at hand is boring, sometimes the motivation is not there, sometimes a little bit of a and a little bit of b. And I still code to a good standard of quality: I try to balance not being overly perfectionist, with making my practice deliberate so that I keep improving. For example, I test, refactor, document and plan with a backlog. But removing users from the equation lifts a massive weight from my shoulders. Like the article says, I leave that for work.
So, do the habit every day, but don't do it because of any secondary goal (like money), other than the immediate goal doing the habit itself.
Problem is, if you haven't completely bought into the habit yet, and it feels uncomfortable relative to other options, I don't know that you can avoid asking yourself "why" you're doing the habit.
In your example, I guess you already find programming fascinating, but hadn't found the discipline to practice regularly. But I still don't know how many people wouldn't abandon developing the habit if they get stuck in the weeds.
Imagine learning the violin, because you've liked to listen to classical music. It takes a lot of faith when you're stuck hearing how bad you sound at the beginning, and how you have to duck nasty glances or comments from others in your household that have to endure your practicing. A secondary goal might be to be admitted to an orchestra and do concerts that your friends and family might attend. But that being "vanity" means that we should only focus on the primary goal of enjoying violin music. Again, I see many people getting lost in the weeds without secondary goals of some sort acting as a lodestar.
I feel, the current generation of AAA Games are a great example for why you should make something you enjoy rather than something designed to make money. Look at Baldurs Gate 3 vs Skull and Bones. Make something you love and are passionate about. Get good at it. Use the Internet to show it to others that are passionate about the same thing - and there's a decent likelihood of success.
Baldurs Gate 3 is not really an indie passion project labor of love, its "just" a really good game. to me that's the big problem with AAA is that a lot of the time they're not even good
Fair enough - let's take Stardew Valley as an example then.
... stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.
What if I enjoy optimizing for a non-existent audience?
You are not alone.
It has to be said that thanks to the Internet, it's now perfectly possible for the most niche audience to connect with the author.
That's easier said and done when half of the population between 15 and 45 are addicted to Instagram.
Even if a small percentage of them, say 5%, decide to emulate the famous people they follow we will have too many people who believe they are important.
Instagram really does seem to give some people delusions or let's delusional people really embrace their disconnect from reality.
It's so weird some of the things people do.
Instagram likes and GitHub stars are exactly the same mechanism as far as someone who owns the content is concerned. Doing something 'to get famous', be it for your pouting selfies or your open source work, is basically the same, and anyone making a repo for the wrong reasons should heed the advice in this article. It is directly applicable to what they're doing.
I have done this all my life (which is also ‘my career’); it paid off accidentally big time in the beginning (90-00s) which made me enough to retire, but I like what I do (as per the article). Now I still work the same way but the money just isn’t there anymore, and the only thing to at I don’t do vs people who make a lot worse stuff but make millions is: get out there and act like I am a rockstar/musk. I hate that social media posing but it seems it’s the difference; we all have seen products here on hn that were absolute garbage but because the creator is acting like some football hero who just scored, many people go for it and they get subscription payments and vc moneys.
I won’t change my ways as I have enough money, but I would be quite… not happy starting out in these times and having to pose and fake until I make etc.
I think all things you said will allow you to get rich. But more money isn’t everyone’s end goal, nor does that always lead to happiness (or even a “better” life)
Sounds like a SF VC domain thing, I’m sure BS doesn’t work in other realms. Or was this early success in a different area?
The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this statement. It implies several things that aren't true:
* That a hobby done for profit that can't also be done for fun.
* That a hobby for profit can't start as a profit-making venture, but turn into a passion.
* That work should be the only route to wealth.
* That optimizing for wealth can't go hand-in-hand with fun.
I despise the adage that a hobby is only a hobby if you aren't making money from it. I'm passionate about fantasy/sci-fi miniature building/painting, terrain modelling, and prop making. I love the expression of taking a universe that exists within the realms of novels and movies, and bringing it to the real world - to scale or in miniature. I design STLs/CAD models for 3D printing, scratch together terrain boards for people to play games on, paint miniatures any hour I get free, machine parts for various outfits and armaments, and spend hours fantasising about what universe I'm going to delve into next.
None of that would be possible if I didn't monetise the process. Most of what I build, I sell. If I didn't, I would neither be able to afford the hobby nor store the stuff I make. It would end up in a landfill. Parts of the hobby I took up explicitly because they demand higher prices when I sell it, but now they're some of the things I'm most passionate about.
Realistically, I'd love to do it as a full-time venture, but the semiconductor industry pays well and I'm not a famous maker so couldn't make it work - as the article states well enough. To suggest that hobbies can't both be fun and profitable though is a philosophy I think should be quashed.
And after a while, your hobby if physical will take space for things that are done, and that you don't need anymore. So why not resell them and fund the next steps ?
You raise another good point; is all monetization of a hobby the same? No, of course not. It's such a blanket statement to say "Save the money-making schemes for work".
Plenty of people have collecting hobbies that almost go hand-in-hand with monetization. Stamp or coin collecting comes to the top of my mind. Value is discussed almost constantly in those communities, and people are forever uptrading their collection to become more valuable over time; it's an investment as much as anything else, and while you will seldom make money there's always an element of minimizing loss. Same with cars, video games, cards, records, and comic books. We collect them because we think they hold value, join communities that also think they hold value, and use money as a scale to judge what value it holds.
Not only is this bad advice, it’s perhaps the worst advice. I clicked this expecting it to be about attitudes, expectations, and entitlement, such as people who expect special treatment because of their social media profile. Instead it’s someone who is encouraging you to actively suck at what you do and to take no pride in your work when it is a hobby.
Let me counter this with an age old adage that is simply true: “Anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
I might suggest reading the second and third sentences of the article, which directly refute your interpretation:
Want to try a craft or artistic hobby? Focus on mastering the skill and enjoy the variety it can provide.
"Focus on mastering the skill" is directly the opposite of "actively suck at what you do and take no pride in your work".
Let me counter this with an age old adage that is simply true
A thing that is repeated often enough isn't "simply true" just because it's repeated often enough. Perhaps consider the situational applicability and limited-exhaustiveness of pithy proverbs.
There are people out there so utterly brain-broken (myself included) who seek to monetize every little personal hobby.
“Maybe I should start journaling” turns into “How can I be a thought leader on bleeping journaling?” And it ruins everything.
I’ve done this multiple times and regret it. I’ve only recently adopted the mindset that this author is attempting to convey, which is simple: identify what you enjoy and why, and just do it - don’t try to exploit it and monetize it (which the author has strangely conflated to “being famous” I think)
So I like the article. It’s a nice reminder. As to the other commenters railing against its “LinkedIn-ness” or it being a platitude, sure - but it’s upvoted and it is what it is now.
What's wrong with monetizing every little thing? Our time is limited and capitalism is expensive.
Just make sure you enjoy the process.
Is it bad if I yearn and pine for fame? I know it's frowned upon, and I bury the urge for fame, but deep down, I am hooked to other's validation and fame.
I wouldnt say it is bad but be careful of what you wish for.
On the flip side if someone is merely after fame that is not such a bad thing by comparison. It is not like those that seek wealth and power, it is at least going a more ethereal and potentially much less destructive goal. Having lots of fame doesn't necessarily take from others.
The problem with a lot of fame is that the more of it you get, the more decided people will be. A good modern example would be Taylor Swift. Some people love her, many don't even notice but some call her Taydolf Swifler.
Turns out you cannot get just the good, you have to have the bad come with it as well. Unless you are Weird Al, everybody loves him!
This is probably good advice for someone else. For me, life got both a whole lot more interesting and a whole lot more fun when I started acting like I was famous.
What do you do to act famous? Obsess over your Instagram image and dress covertly when you go out grocery shopping?
It’s true you’re not famous. But the rest of this is pretty bad advice. If you’re an indie app developer and you don’t care about design, nobody will use your app—not just the people who care about design. If you’re a blogger and you don’t care about grammar, some people will be turned off by your terrible writing. I assume anything you do you want to do well. If that’s not the case then definitely take the advice in the original post.
It's pretty bad career advice. If you're an indie app developer trying to make a living developing indie apps, then you need to care about design. If it's not your career, then it's great advice.
A few years ago I had a need for an app which would allow an android tablet to play media when power was connected and pause when power was disconnected. Nothing like that existed (at least open source) at the time, so I dug up some ancient school project someone made for an android app back in 2010, updated it to allow media controls, and used it. I published it on fdroid, but I put zero effort into updating the already-then-outdated UI and never updated it again unless I had another need for it.
I wasn't getting paid for app development and design. I am not trying to get paid for app development and design. To the extent that having done this impacts my career, I think "bothered to create a custom android app for his personal project" says a lot more about me than "does not have a state of the art UI for his custom personal project app".
If people are turned off from that app by the outdated UI, I could not care less.
For there to be famous people, there has to be non famous people. In the same way that up needs down, black needs white.
A figure I saw once was based on "do they have a Wikipedia page" as counting as famous. And the ratio was something like 50,000:1 relative to the population.
Would you bet your lives actions on a 50,000 to 1 chance? And even then do you think it would be possitive? Sometimes fame is the worst thing that can happen to someone. Being anonymous can be a blessing in disguise.
I would totally hate being famous.
I disagree to some extent. E.g. I like to tinker, repair and build stuff and then blog about it. I put quite some effort into the writing part and every finished post gives me joy. Blogging has become a hobby in its own right. It also helps with getting projects done, because now the project is finished only when the post is out. All of my three regular readers like the results, too.
Of course, earning money from that never crossed my mind – in that respect, I fully agree.
Seems like the blogging is still primarily motivated by your own enjoyment which makes perfect sense and seems to agree with the article.
Unfortunately, for some people an illusion of themselves is all they have left:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)
Postulating intellectual artifacts somehow bring contentment also can become unhealthy. As some folks spend their entire lives solving a civilizations perceived problems, and only later conclude most of the planet just isn't worth saving... if one becomes hapless as a consequence.
One may disagree, but that is an indulgence youthful idealism often prescribes. In conclusion, goldfish crackers are awesome... =3
In conclusion, goldfish crackers are awesome...
Until the cheese mafia got to them. It's hard to get them without cheese now.
Even Terence Tao advises mathematicians to develop their own personal style when writing mathematics. Your own personal style, based on your experiences, is what makes you unique and hence might make you famous.
You might not become famous by developing your own style but you'll definitely not be you if you don't.
Title should have been: "You can still enjoy building things regardless of how many followers you have".
A little ironic that the author is submitting their own blog posts to HN about the topic :)
Awesome blog, I just loved the way wrote it. And I am totally agree with you. We don't need to be perfect or try to make perfect at first attempt, the more important is to enjoy the journey and honing the skills.
... so that other people can become famous by pretending to be famous? I won't bite, we fake it until we make it in this era, and we care more about the cover than the content
Minor gripe, but I don’t love the setting off of design against functionality. UX Design isn’t just about aesthetics; a good design makes an object, or piece of software, or whatever, more functional.
It really boils down to what you define as "leisure activities" and everyone is different and often multi-faceted in that regard. So this certainly fails as a one-size-fits-all advice.
There are hobbies we do out of pure enjoyment. E.g. for me personally this is (choir-)singing. I know so many people who are better singers than I am (or ever will be) yet I couldn't care less. I am 100% happy with my skill level. If anyone else comes to the conclusion that somebody else is a better singer than I, they're probably right!
Then there are hobbies we do b/c we like the skill itself or b/c we want to have what comes with it. E.g. when I do a SW or HW side-project I really do want to create the best product (as niche-y as it might be) and yes, I do care a great deal about whether others like it or not. Put simply I want to be the best b/c I can be the best. I couldn't imagine doing this just for fun. TBH the whole idea of just-for-fun side projects sounds absurd to me.
I appreciate the author's perspective, but my approach in life has been based largely on two biblical verses that I memorized in childhood. Those are 1) "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Colossians 3:23) and 2) "Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank" (Proverbs 22:29).
These two verses come to my mind often and have formed the basis of how I approach nearly everything in life both work and hobby. I feel the pursuit of excellence is a thing both for work and life in general.
On the Internet, everything is my work. I do not have some benefactor job outside of what I do.
For my hobbies and sports, I approach everything with diligence and care.
I hope to raise my children to do likewise.
I actually have the opposite problem. I think it would help me if I would act MORE like I was, well I would not say famous but like promoting stuff, talking about it. Marketing myself and by business, just "presenting" myself.
It does not help someone create the greatest thing ever in silence when nobody will ever know about it.
Anyone knows how I can get the same style of this blog? I can't access the css for some reason /s
OP written by someone well-employed, so anything done outside steady paid work ought to be done for enjoyment. Nice luxury, that many don't enjoy.
1 The words of the Teacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. 2 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. 3 What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun? 4 A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. 5 The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hurries to the place where it rises. 6 The wind blows to the south, and goes around to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. 7 All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they continue to flow. 8 All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has already been, in the ages before us. 11 The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them.
This sounds like "You aren't having fun properly".
TFA: stop acting like you're famous
TFA (later): well, we made it to the front page of HN
I love this idea. I don’t actually want to be famous. Michael Jackson used to pay a supermarket to shut down so he could play at being a normal person. You and I can just go to the supermarket and be a normal person.
Author is probably a firstborn. If you’re 3rd in birth order, you don’t need that reminder.
Good article, there is a certain level of being tied by what others might think while they don't give a damn actually. I guess this is somehow inherent to the US society (I am from Central Europe and don't observe this things at such scale) and it would be actually interesting to scientifically track the origins how it went this way
Decent advice, because you're not famous, but... > As long as your thoughts are coherent, don’t worry too much about writing mistakes or filtering yourself. If your grammar is poor, and there are mistakes, the chances of being coherent are diminished.
The problem is that if you do what you enjoy, it's very unlikely to correspond to what customers want.
I suffered from this a lot because I love coding. There's a point when you may want to adjust your priorities. Beyond a certain point, it becomes defeatist to always do what you want.
I get though that the industry can feel like a giant psyop though so maybe it is better to be defeatist... Not sure.
My advice is to do the exact opposite of what this article recommends you to do. You will not look back fondly and proudly on all the half-assed things you did to just to have fun, whatever that means. Writing a blog post to rationalize it will not help either.
I generally agree with the sentiment of doing what you enjoy first, and not thinking about an audience that may or may not exist, but the suggestions themselves will vary from person to person.
Design is for an audience and you don’t have one.
It's wrong to generalize like this. Good design drives your work forward, and if you enjoy doing it, then by all means focus on that first.
Not appeasing an audience even when you have one is also a good idea. Art is an expression of the artist, and it dies once it starts being created for an audience.
Well, there is also a thing called reputation, especially when job background checks include internet/social-media scan these days. So I try to build trashy things under my anonymous nickname(s), it is much more fun like in 90s.
Living in the panopticon, it's really hard to take this advice to heart. You have to self-censor all the time as if in front of large audience, the leap to believing that audience is interested in the positive aspects of your output, to make the constant vigilance worth it, isn't large, however delusional it may be.
I recently started my own Mastodon instance for myself in this same train of thought. I noticed that one of my toxic traits was reaching out to people too often about things I found interesting. Expressing my own interests on my own Mastodon instance — even if nobody is looking at it — has been amazing for me to be more self-sufficient emotionally when it comes to my interests. It’s almost like a tech diary for me at this point.
Similar to parent, I find tremendous value in making myself my target audience.
This goes counter to "Make things other people would want simply for the purpose of making good things."
as Marcus Aurelius reminds us, the applause of the crowd matters very little since our life is very short and death will cancel it anyway for us.
daydream about how you can make money off of it.
I do this but mostly from trauma of having to kill things due to hosting costs (happened before), as long as its cheap/self sufficient enough the fun part dominates.
Do you want to build an app or website but don’t enjoy the process of designing? Then make it ugly. Who cares!
Well... I do as the only user of what I create. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I also don't like clunky interfaces. So even though it isn't the process I enjoy doing most all the time I still put in the effort.
It's fun how this makes me both agree and disagree at the same time.
For whatever reason I manage to re-sign in to LinkedIn or Twitter once in a while, and boy do I hate the tone of people who act like they're some sort of business guru. Beyond the point of the article, there's a pretentious tone that I think one should avoid.
But stuff like:
Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t
I have to disagree with. I like the craft portion of any activity. It's the type 2 sort of fun, where it's not necessarily fun when you do it, but the result makes you proud and happy, so it's worth it.
I think a better advice might be to do things for yourself rather than trying to please others?
I think the emphasis is not "don't create for others" but more on "don't let people-pleasing get in front of the actual joy of whatever you are supposed to enjoy", which I'd personally agree with.
For photo example: If creating a style on Instagram for more presence and likes etc. does NOT negatively impact your photographic process and decisions, but solely build on top of the hobby that you already enjoy without social media, then go ahead.
Hypocritical - because all the edge-lordiness in the title and writing style is for an audience too.
It comes across as typical anti-individual ("anti-millennial") drivel by a person paralyzed by society out of fear, who now wants to share that paralysis with others.
This kind of paralysis (and writing style) comes from failure - either too much or not enough.
This author should have made a song, a documentary, an app, a painting, a company, documented making a dish from an ancient recipe, recorded themselves doing their first kickflip, made a pixel-art game engine in C, traveled to the Richat Structure to prove that it is/isn't Atlantis, etc. but instead of all that much cooler stuff that would further enlighten themselves and the world, they wrote this projection of insecurity.
"Don't try."
Nobody says this louder than people who either give up too easily or are afraid of challenges. Maybe they've never experienced the fruits of labor when it comes to a personal venture - economic or otherwise.
You really can sell software, get brand deals on a YouTube channel, get sponsored doing action sports, perform on stage in front of thousands, gain fans by living and documenting an incredible life on social media. It's not only possible, but it's a lot more fun than living as a copy/paste bubble jacket drone who has to go to work, who never does or says anything interesting.
The author's choice to not use CSS is not effortless minimalism by the way, it's the same thing as his moody black and white photo example - it's a conscious decision to appear a certain way to an audience.
This article is what a crab in a bucket looks like in the wild. The author is trying hard - they're just putting more effort in keeping contemporaries down than pulling themselves up. A sad state of our youth.
There's a lot to unpack here and a lot of nuance that is getting missed in the discussion.
I've learned a similar thing over my years, so I'll share:
The pressure to do something amazing or uniquely is very very real. This can lead you to avoiding a lot of hobbies (sports, crafts, etc.) that would nonetheless very very personally fulfilling.
Understand that having a beginner's mentality can be fun in many pursuits. (This is an idea from zen.) For a few things we have mastery, most things we will enjoy as beginners.
Additionally, if you cannot do something with the desired results, the key thing is to find a variation of the activity that you find satisfying. For example: 1) I think I'm bad at sports. Wait, actually, I just hate sports that don't completely immerse me. Hence, I figured out way late in life that I enjoy surfing and squash. 2) I want to take photographs. I hate my photographs. Wait, actually I hate digital photography. Analog point and shoot gives me satisfying results. (Or, using a 90s Nikon coolpix if you're gen z, apparently.)
So for the people who are like: "Yeah, but you can't SUCK at your activity", my response is: "Right, but you also shouldn't give up on the activity wholesale because you're not a natural prodigy, and there's probably a non-obvious variation where you don't feel like you suck as much, perhaps because the variation is harder to critique." in the real magic here.
And, again, there's something special about trying something new. The people that tend to plateau in a pursuit are the ones who start out "good" because they are addicted to their strengths and avoid their weaknesses. Being bad with potential, those are the non-lucky people that end up mastering their field.
This really resonates with me. Of course it's great to create something that other people enjoy, share it with them, get feedback etc. But it also might create a pressure that will strip off all the pleasure from the activity completely. So for myself, I decided to share my creations and welcome feedback, but also see the main goal in creation itself.
Main character syndrome is a disease. But you can get help. Call the number on your screen.
The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.
People will even ask you about this.
I dunno, I think people should do what makes them happy. Don't know why the author is so crabby about it.
The artists and innovators I respect the most are people who have gone way out a limb to put effort into a expression or endeavor, knowing full well that it might not appeal to anyone else. It takes a lot of effort, self belief, and perseverance to do this, and there's no guarantee of success. In fact, success is unlikely.
But a world where everyone follows the author's advice feels mediocre to me.
Software engineering aside, I've definitely noticed that in other sectors - especially on the creative side of things - there's this expectation of you not only to be a good craftsman, but also have a brand. Be a personality.
The subhead to this article is:
Advice for myself around leisure activities.
Which I think is worth restating here.
It’s one thing to, say, buy Azure AD Premium so you can obtain auth logs and put them someplace/analyze them for your startup. That’s just taking your work seriously.
But unless you’re learning or practicing, or perhaps building out demo or educational content, you might want to consider whether your personal AAD tenant needs that at home.
(I’m not staking a claim on that. Just an illustrative example.)
The title could also be "Breaking out of a product thinking."
Along the lines of this it reminds me of the people who obsessively baby things like phones so they can "preserve the resale value".
Screw that. If someone wants a pristine phone they can buy a new one like I did. It's bonkers.
HN is a comment site masquerading as a news site. A large percentage of commenters go directly to the comments without ever reading the article. They just want an excuse to spout their opinions.
And to read the opinions that other HNers spout. The comments are often better than the articles. Also, I know I'll be able to read them without fending off popups and dark patterns.
I disagree.
Same here. The top comment we're discussing is a good example of comments I really dislike :/ people think that only things they find interesting should be upvoted by everyone else :D that kind of thinking, which is very common in HN comments, shows just how much one can lack understanding of others, their motivations, how people's tastes/objectives/world views can be completely and utterly different than their own.
I agree with the top comment but it's not for lack of understanding but for a lamentation of how this place is similar to any other social network like internet place overwhelmed with solipsistic banality.
Just look at how many comments around the site are personal anecdotes tangentially related to whatever the post is.
As a revealed preference, no, you don't. It's trivially easy to collapse a comment you genuinely don't like, which would mean you wouldn't be posting in its replies more than halfway down.
"Better" is subjective...
We can debate if comments are more informative than articles and sometimes they are. Many times they are not, especially if you happen to be a SME.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to read reddit, the signal/noise raise is very low, but when you get that 1 informative or insightful comments out of a sea of garbage, it keeps you going for awhile.
The comments here as elsewhere are overwhelmingly garbage, and generally worse than even the “bad” articles.
Your comment certainly fits that bill. Generalizing negativity sure is constructive…
Ironic.
No more ironic than an alcoholic's introduction at AA.
In any case, though, I did read the article before commenting.
Well, there was the Great Slashdot Influx of 2010, where not reading TFA before commenting was a badge of honour.
As an old Slashdot user with a low user ID, I disagree. Not RTFA was definitely scorned as it was on the Usenet. But you had limited ability to vote people down, so perhaps it appeared more socially acceptable.
I don't think it's even masquerading, the design puts the comments front and center.
Funny you say that. I do often go to the comments because some of the people commenting here on HN are famous. If not famous they are more involved in IT or other industries at a high level.
I know I'm a nobody but it's interesting to read comments some are better than the linked articles.
Why put a negative spin on it? It's a perfectly normal desire to socialize that way...
Simplicity bias, kind of like "bikeshedding". A large number of people can read this quickly, agree with it, and upvote it. Whereas articles about optimising machine code for the Apple Silicon CPU, or "Risks to the Glen Canyon Dam" are a lot more niche.
Personally, I follow specific people who regularly submit interesting content, and pay less attention to the homepage.
Could you mind sharing those accounts?
I'd suggest going through https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders and looking at their submission history.
Hmm... See a whole lot of experience, there. Maybe this isn't just "a young man's game," after all...
Now, you are having fun or making fun of us. With your list to experiences, I'm going to assume you are lot senior to me. ;-)
> Now, you are having fun or making fun of us.
Yes ;).
I have become somewhat… jaded, in my view of the current tech scene.
I’m sure that some of it is just sour grapes, on my part, but that doesn’t make the problem any less real.
I don’t really feel like going through my posting history, but there’s been a number of times that I’ve been “OK, Boomer”ed, here (I suspect that you’d need to turn on I See Dead Posts to catch most).
I’ve learned to accept the SillyCon Valley ageism, but it still pisses me off, to see the awful results of disastrous decisions made by folks without experience. Many of these jackpots were entirely predictable, to anyone with scars.
If it were just the Principals, getting hurt, I wouldn’t mind so much, but the blast radius tends to include a lot of collateral damage.
how to follow them at HN?
In the true HN spirit, I have a little script goes through the Hacker News API and shows them as an RSS feed. But if you'd rather use something off-the-shelf there's https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=synergy20
Wow, I thought I had accumulated a pretty decent amount of karma with my 7800 over the past decade, but nope, those put me to shame.
Interesting idea. I'll give it a shot.
Welcome. Don't worry too much, have fun, remove emotion out of the equation, be consistent, fire-n-forget. The side effect of it is then the Karma keep growing on its own. But don't worry too much about that - not worth it.
Mine was just about 10K+ before the Pandemic. Then, I found the fun part, the rhythm, and then it has grown since then.
Never thought about that, thanks! This post was worth it just for this!
I’d much rather read about the Glen Canyon dam, thanks for the suggestion.
HN is too popular, too many users water it down. I hope I will soon discover what the next place like this used to be, is now
Nobody reads Hacker News anymore, it's too popular.
I think the tech industry has also changed over time. I joined just as the iPhone and thus smartphone apps became a thing, but we just haven’t seen shakeups like social media, cloud computing, web frameworks, etc recently.
Crypto is effectively dead, LLM’s ended up mostly hype with limited utility, so what’s there to talk about? Random interesting side projects, retro technology, random science stuff, a bit of news, etc and that’s what HN front page looks like.
At first I thought it's generally good and can help with perfectionism and apathy, but the completely unnecessary plug of Grammarly put it in question. I'm on mobile but if there is any analytics tracking views (hard to say if it is server side) then surely the author gets paid
(For context, I was triggered since I know the likes of Grammarly, NordVPN and similar are absolute beasts in getting plugs from people with any sort of following in any niche)
I think it's similar to a well shared meme, or a self help book. Sometimes something (simple/banal(!)) just encapsulates the way a lot of people are thinking or feeling but haven't managed to verbalise. You read it and think "huh, that's very true," come back to HN and vote it up. The fact other people are doing the same is a nice justification that you're not alone in feeling that way, particularly in the midst of a crowd of high achievers.
Indeed. I think it fulfills some sort of social need to read/hear back my own thinking in slightly different and often more coherent words. It gives me a feeling of being understood, which is of course sort of artificial when writer of the text is someone who doesn't even know who I am.
It feels sort of related to the technique therapists seem to use; based on patient's rambling stories, they summarize how they feel in much more succinct way than they themselves would have been able to, which makes them feel like they are finally being understood, which often results in tears.
It's good advice, pointing out a very hard-to-grasp aspect of human nature.
Here's a question for you. Why, if /newest is meeting your needs, did you feel the need to make this comment, hoping to adjust HN's sorting behavior for the front page?
You, and everyone who upvoted this to make this the top comment on this post, are making the exact same mistake pointed out by the linked article.
This article is pretty much on point for HN where every third commenter runs a solo founder SAAS business...
Dunno where you been but the quality of HN has been degrading for quite some time…
When I hit that link half are flagged dead, I see one directly from LinkedIn, and most are not hard tech articles but rather something tech adjacent such as about soft skills or selling tech.
I follow /best through RSS and I upvote every single post that I looked at the comments for. Even if I think it's dumb and disagree with it (like in this case), it made me interested in what other people think of it, so it provides value.
I didn't upvote or submit this article, but my answer to your question is that this site serves a wide audience and not everyone shares your preferences.
There's always been a place for the occasional self-help or inspirational article on HN. I think there's probably a bit less of it than there used to be.
If you see good articles on /newest that are languishing, please upvote them!
...and if there's a really good one that hasn't had attention, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can consider putting it in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). Especially if it's not an article you have any personal connection to—we'll appreciate the nomination a lot more if it's motivated by curiosity rather than self-promotion.
Why is this the top comment (at time of writing)? It makes no reference to the actual content, just complaining that the article was on the frontpage.
I personally enjoyed reading the sentiment of the article and don't mind it being on the frontpage. But I would never think of writing a comment complaining that the article wasn't on the frontpage.
Why should the frontpage content only make you happy? This made me happy, so I was glad it was on the frontpage.
I guess the comment could also be juxtaposition on the headline: stop acting like you're famous.
If anything the original post looks like the very antithesis of a typical linkedin post which is overboard with enthusiasm and positivity (to the point of being nauseating) and devoid of even a hint of introspection or a reality check. Maybe it's just our linkedin networks and personalizations are very different... who knows?