Looks like a great product and congratulations on your success.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
There is good reason why these posts don’t regularly make front page.
The genre of content is regularly abused by hypesters. There is a forum / podcast dedicated to this kind of success story and it is just massive cheerleading and success bias.
If you go look for it, you’ll find it.
HN readers achieving this success either don’t need or don’t want the attention that might come with this kind of content marketing.
It’s much more interesting to learn about detailed technical solutions engineering and the SOTA.
There's limited space on the front page, and the topic of AI is so prevalent, it occupies a lot, every day. Right now 10 out of 30 stories on the front page are about AI and LLMs.
Yeah, it's a Trump-related political outrage, or it's an AI thing. I feel anecdotally like the AI-related things are even more prevalent, but would love to see some data on it.
The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
> The Trump stuff seems to get flagged very much, and the AI stuff, very litle.
Speaking personally, I flag the political posts and not the AI posts because the political posts always turn into flame wars. AI posts do not, so I leave them be (even though I don't personally like them).
Hmmm. Is there a statement of HN policy somewhere about that? Or is this just a thing you decided to do on your own accord?
No judgment, just curious. I presume you've reflected on the idea that one person's flame war is another person's gentle exchange of opinion.
I can see what you're saying though, and I have seen discussions where I've thought "oook, don't really understand what these people think they're achieving", but I wouldn't say I've seen anything horrendous. I mean, individual horrific comments get quickly flagged to death. Why bother flagging the whole topic? Why not simply not investigate those threads?
to see flagged stuff too is great. Not sure if you see everything, but I definitely am more interested in a less curated frontpage. I don't find ignoring headlines I'm not interested in to be such a major affront to my sensibilities.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
I'll speak as someone who is part of the problem. As groucho Marx says, I wouldn't want to be a part of any club that will have me as a member!
HN is a victim of its own popularity. Things just get diluted and more mainstreamy by people like me, who are perhaps hackers in spirit but don't have much to show for it.
I work in IT at an international company everyone knows the name of. I've got a garden and there are meals in my fridge made of meat from pigs I raised. I've got furniture in my house my wife and I made years ago in a different state.
I'll submit random articles, but never a show HN. How could I? Woodgearsca built a woodworking shop out of his woodworking shop. No one cares about the tables I built. I try to speak only when I know I can contribute, but im very unsure i raise the quality here.
I've submitted articles that I thought were really valuable, and never had any success [0] (maybe the first is too business-y, not hacker-ish, but I genuinely believe what I wrote there matters and it's worth understanding, at least in the sense it was transformative for me when I did understand it) and then an article on a random weekend project a friend and I did made the top five on the front page [1] and stayed there for ages.
People very much just might care about the tables you make! Especially if you can share something you learned.
Or about building tables… I don’t think hacking has to exclusively be about programming and computers.
If you submit a story about raising pigs or building a table on a weekend, it would probably get a lot of interaction. Please think about doing it. I’d love to hear the story!
Do you have a blog or Instagram or something with your work? Non computer projects sometimes get traction here if they are unusual or interesting or are made by a regular or whatever criteria the hivemind uses to choose the upvotes.
I'd like to take a look, in case there is one where my spider sense feels that can farm some karma. (Obliviously, my spider sense can fail!)
I'd also like some horror stories, like someone vibe-coding their way into burning a million dollars by accident and having to sell a kidney on the black market so they don't lose their house.
I was not expecting this comment here but it tracks with my observations.
Things that previously could be taken for granted now require applied thought and physical capability.
For example, people regularly ask how to find reasonably priced housing in /r/askPortland. The OP usually mentions constant looking at Zillow and other sites / apps.
Very, very few good deals will be found there because the marketplace is too fluid and too accessible. You gotta hustle on the ground in the neighborhood you want to be in to find the best housing compromises.
Used to be you could wing it on craigslist.
From concert tickets to new Nike shoes, you want a good seat / common size? How about a nice family campsite?
Well you better have set up automation. It’s to the point where public swim lessons can’t be got without a bot. Unless, you go to the pool and ask about lessons not scheduled on the internet.
It is an absolute hustle, across the minor daily desires of good things and experiences.
Those products rejected by the most motivated get binned into some consultant optimized vertically integrated reseller.
The services get marketed heavily with dark patterns just to cancel their membership.
Yes, but maybe this rose-tinted glasses, but it seems like every week we would have a story like yours, an essay from Patio11 on how much money Bingo Cards are making, Nathan Barry talking about how a book launch earnt him $50k in a weekend, Brennan Dunn launching a course for 5 figures etc.
> Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?
The popular keywords for some time have been AI, Trump, Russia, Ukraine.
As these are hot topics, the "Hacker" part of HN has taken a noticeable backseat. There are still interesting submissions but they don't reach the front page that often.
For example, there's a huge thread on this very post about the source site because of its supposed origins.
Well, perhaps people see such success stories for what they are, well curated commodity flowers in the walled gardens of the major players, who will not hesitate to pluck them the instant they threaten to have any kind of uncontrolled growth. It's "ISVs" all over again, commoditization of complements etcetera, the tech molemen that serve the big machines.
AI looks to many as a wall buster, at least for the time being, so even if breakout success is unlikely you can't blame people for at least trying to escape the underground caverns where the "widely successful" ceiling is capped at perhaps reaching a FAANG manager level of compensation.
I think what that is demonstrating is that models are commodity objects. The model factory may have a value. I think it would need a specialized context. It would need a market large enough to support it and small enough to keep the context out of the mainstream.
My guess is this will always be a moving target. The consumer will choose models based on their value proposition.
>it bothered me because I come here to get away from all the propaganda.
Somehow, I doubt this statement is true, given the rest of your post, which was in no way adding to the conversation, is exactly the sort of propaganda you claim to try and get away from.
>We have to educate and inform.
Which you did not do in any stretch of the words - all you did was add noise.
The parent comment was more about submissions than comments, and it is in a sub thread that is already a tangent from the main topic: a wiki app on the teams store that was successful.
I feel the same way as parent, that the idea of keeping politics off HN made more sense when the US wasn't going through a "bloodless coup" to destroy it from within.
Is this comment a primer on ranked choice voting or ascendant fascism? No. Do I welcome those posts more now than before? Yes.
Oh, facts are propaganda now? Well, I know who you voted for then. At first I thought you were talking about maintaining quality but now I’m pretty sure I touched a nerve. lol.
How are the things I mentioned not real? I didn't say that we are talking about those semantic arguments on this Hacker News thread, I'm talking about the world outside of that.
I've been here since August and I haven't seen anything that even remotely resembles
> semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps
If you feel you have, I humbly suggest you go back and re-evaluate whatever it was that you read. Keep in mind that in order to qualify as such, the other party would have to agree with you that ICE's actions could be fairly described as such, in every aspect.
Because otherwise they aren't actually arguing that it's okay for ICE to do the things you say they do; they're arguing that it's okay for ICE to do the things they do, per their own perception of what those things actually are.
If the distinction doesn't make sense to you, it would be better to take a break from all political discussion on the Internet. This kind of outside view is essential to actual productive discussion.
This isn’t a perception thing. ICE is breaking down the doors of people, arresting others without warrants or identifying themselves. They’re deporting people to a concentration camp in a foreign country that no one has ever left alive. Just because people choose to not educate themselves doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. And as a matter of fact, I’ve heard plenty of people arguing that all of these things are good and that ICE should do them.
Yes, it is. It very much is, and until you understand the simple ideas I explain below, I don't consider you qualified to discuss political matters in a space like HN.
Since my previous comments weren't enough of a hint (I didn't really expect them to be, because I've dealt with people using rhetoric like yours before), I'll go ahead and give a detailed explanation.
Again, here's the part I quoted from your original comment:
> semantic arguments about why it’s ok for ICE to bust down random doors looking for brown people to deport to the death camps
You said they bust down "random" doors. That is not the same thing as saying that they don't have a warrant. It's saying that they target essentially whoever they feel like, or that they go through neighbourhoods and randomly choose places to enter without any a priori reason to expect a legitimate deportation candidate to be there.
You said that they are "looking for brown people". That is to say, you use common rhetorical flair to imply that this is not only racially motivated, but motivated specifically by the racism of ICE themselves. Not only that, you suppose the sort of folk racism that puts Mexicans and Central Americans in the same category as Middle Easterners and South and South-East Asians. You do this without evidence, and against simple real-world observations that would tend to refute it.
You said that they do this "to deport [them] to the death camps". To support this claim, it's not sufficient to show that they go "to a concentration camp in a foreign country that no one has ever left alive"[0]. To support "who are deported to death camps", you would have to show that ICE directly and knowingly causes them to go to such camps. But to support "to deport them to the death camps", you would additionally have to show that this is their specific intent - i.e. that the ICE agents expressly believe that their targets should die, and that they have the goal of ensuring their deaths abroad - rather than the actually stated goal of, you know, just having them off American soil.
> Just because people choose to not educate themselves doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
2. Please contemplate how many things might exist in the world about which you know absolutely nothing, and then re-consider whether the phrase "choose not to educate themselves" is at all coherent.
> And as a matter of fact, I’ve heard plenty of people arguing that all of these things are good and that ICE should do them.
I absolutely believe that you've seen people argue that, for example, ICE can be excused for not having had a warrant, identifying themselves etc. if they successfully located and extradited someone not lawfully entitled to be within the USA. I also absolutely believe you've seen people argue that whatever happens after that point is not ICE's concern.
But I don't believe you've seen people make the claims you think they have.[1] I think you've simply failed to understand the massive differences between what they're actually saying and what you think they're saying. I furthermore think this is a result of your personal attitude towards political topics, and that you need to fix this before you can have a productive discussion on HN.
[0]: Although you do have to evidence that and not just assert it. And I really do think this would be an extraordinary claim, because even some disproven, sensationalized claims I saw people make during Trump's first term involved "concentration camps" being within the US and not at all fatal, merely inhumane. Further, ICE has existed continuously since 2003, through Obama and Biden's presidencies - three-letter agencies simply don't change their operations that radically simply because of who is president.
[1]: On the flip side, though: during Trump's first term, I saw video evidence of ICE protesters shouting N-bombs at ICE agents, or at least people they believed to be ICE agents - in what appeared to be a rural environment, as I recall. As far as I could discern and remember, all parties involved were white. This is not to say anything in support of ICE or against their detractors in general. It's simply to illustrate that there's a wide world out there, and there certainly could be people saying the things you claim to have seen, too. I just don't believe it occurs in good faith on HN, and I have ample reason to believe you're mistaken in that.
>
But seeing just how incompetent, corrupt and lawless this administration is, it no longer bothers me. We have to educate and inform.
That has been politicians through time. It is you care at this point.
I shifted through life from: Not my problem, to "I know who and what is right", to "We touched bottom", to (currently) the world has always been this way and I have little agency.
Edit: Do what you want with your little agency. And enjoy life what you can. Not mutually exclusive
you half joke, but having one administration (lying) about solving abusive interest on student loans, vs current one boasting (probably lying too) about sending millions to jail for failing to pay that abusive interest, do change peoples priorities in a way that lead more people to work flipping burgers instead of trying to code a wiki for a niche audience for example.
I'm grateful that HN informed me about right-to-repair, EFF, privacy, cybersecurity, and so forth.
I was so upset I when the Clinton Admin promoted the Clipper chip. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip I can't believe we're still arguing about the issue (right to use encryption) today. That was probably the first time I realized that politics had real impact on my world.
Coincidentally, Neil Postman's book Technopoly was my gateway drug into criticism (Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, McLuhan, Chomsky, Donald Norman, etc, etc). Transmuted me from a naive optimistic technophile into a skeptic.
Then the (now evergreen) electronic voting and tabulation debacle radicalized me. I just couldn't believe that otherwise intelligent people supported that crap.
Then I tried (and failed) to protect personal privacy (electronic medical records, secret ballots).
It makes me crazy when people, like geeks and policy makers and bosses, who I think should know better, advocate for stuff that can't be true. I've tried to explain that perpetual motion machines simply aren't possible. Making me sound like the nutter.
(One of our local papers called me a "sweaty paranoid kook" for having the gall to correct their misunderstandings over how voting with postal ballots works. That was fun.)
(Workwise, I got a soft demotion when I/we tried to explain to the boss that the blackbox demographic database they licensed (without our knowledge) simply doesn't work. "How can that be true?! Everyone else is using this database." Ya, sure, believe the sales pukes over your own team. Terrific.)
So. I don't know how to separate technology from politics. It's unfortunate that everything swiftly gets coded as partisan. Whereas I see everything in terms of punching up vs down; our popular culture persists in making everything a team sport.
--
FWIW, Joshua Citarella (Do Not Research, Doomscroll, etc) is probably the most cogent contemporary critic I follow today.
Initially, Citarella just wanted to figure out how to be a working artist. As in "get paid to produce culture". He (and his community) ingested acres of knowledge and have synthesized a largely coherent worldview (criticism of platform economics, neoliberalism). Helping me to gel and articulate my own worldview, forged over the decades of working on the frontlines of technology and policy.
--
Absolutely, I'd rather spend my time programming, solving problems, tinkering, hanging out with my peers, talking shit. Alas, the real world continues to conspire to deprive me of these simple pleasures. Makes me cranky. I choose to fight back.
For anyone into this vein of criticism, I highly recommend `The Technological Society` By Jacques Ellul [0].
Among other things it makes the point (paraphrasing poorly) that politics is intrinsically technological. More precisely, he says modern politics and technology are both instances of the same underlying process of "technique". It's heavily informed my way of looking at technology, politics, and their interconnection.
My moment was when the Australian Liberal Party destroyed the previous government's plan to rollout fiber to the premises to 90-odd percent of the Australian population. They stole a decade of fiber internet from me because they wanted to play politics. They rolled out new copper in some areas for goodness sake. They said they were technology agnostic, they said something better than fiber may come along, yet they rolled out copper. Said a lot about their competence.
It was disgusting. It set Australia's technology landscape back by a decade (it didn't just affect me, it affected the entire industry in which I worked, which is a foundational industry to almost all others - what does not depend on communications infrastructure these days?). Somewhat at the behest of Rupert Murdoch, who's not even an Australian citizen anymore, to protect his interests in the dinosaurs of traditional media. The roots of the issue also stem from the privatisation of the owner of most of Australia's communications infrastructure a number of years before that - also a great decision of the same political party. I don't know how / why people can still take them seriously (I do know, but that's actually worse).
Both sides of politics are biased and corrupt to some extent, but only one side has burned me to that degree on something I actually cared about.
Separately, it's only niche political parties that actually seem to care much about the privacy invasion that's rampant on the internet. No major parties seem to have any willpower to take that on.
The ongoing attacks on encryption, including the ridiculous comments from Australian Prime Minister at the time Malcolm Turnbull about the laws of Australia overlooking the laws of mathematics. SMFH.
When technology is woven into our daily lives it cannot be apolitical.
Once wealth inequality reaches a certain threshold, revolution becomes inevitable.
I'd argue that we're seeing various indicators that suggest we've passed a tipping point. We can look at things like the high national debt vs unprecedented low tax rates on the wealthy, the wealth of the top 1% surpassing that of the bottom 90%, how government agencies and safety nets are being gutted when we have the highest GDP in history, how the wealthy build gated communities instead of relieving even the most basic suffering (like infant mortality), how tech profits get vacuumed up by a handful of people through financial instruments and crypto rather than going towards investment in new businesses, how private equity firms own a 5% stake in most companies and are buying up all housing and real estate along with foreign investment to turn owners into renters, how politicians are so involved with insider trading that we can no longer distinguish campaign contributions from Wall Street bribes and kickbacks.. the rabbit hole goes so deep that we fall forever if we get sucked into it.
Meanwhile how many of us are struggling to win the internet lottery with our 2nd, our 3rd, our 10th startup? When deep down we know the odds of succeeding are perhaps 10% or less, and the system feels rigged to deny us access to any capital at all, especially when we need it most to cover a mortgage payment or health emergency that should have already been covered by our exorbitantly high insurance rates and taxes going into a private healthcare system that's twice as expensive as the rest of the developed world.
In many ways, I consider us to be in a worst-case scenario. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. We could have had a technotopia like solarpunk with full automation and UBI, instead we're racing towards fascist dictatorship. Where we once had democrats and republicans at least symbolically opposing one another, now we effectively have a single center-right party funded by the same private donors, which uses wedge issues to keep the population divided and conquered.
I'd even say that we got here by banning political content on HN and elsewhere. So we have a generation of young people who never knew an America before everything was privatized. We can imagine what a center-left government would look like, a we society instead of a me society, where most profit flows into a pot shared by all, with equal pay regardless of gender or race, a national surplus as large as our current debt, free college and healthcare paid for by that endowment, nearly free renewable energy, climate change reversing back towards baseline, etc etc, an ivory tower so high it would reach the stars.
But sadly that's all just a dream now, so far away that it's hard to see a way to get there without going through societal pain that as recently as the late 1990s could have been completely avoided.
Ours was supposed to be the quick and easy path. Is it any wonder that we succumbed to the dark side?
5 years of product development for lower ARR than a standard FAANG salary is not a great way to make money.
EDIT: I am just commenting on "people using their expertise to make money". I have done many side projects but money isn't the primary motivator for me.
I quit a AU$300k job almost exactly 2 years ago to work on my ‘side project’ full-time. My partner too: it’s our only income.
I earn perhaps 20% what I used to. We just quit our lease and sold all our stuff so we can live in a cheap country for a while. I’ve never been poorer. I’m 48.
It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
> It’s the best decision I ever made. I pity you fools at your FAANG jobs. Because I know how unhappy you are.
I think you might be projecting to try not to feel bad for your life choices. A telltale sign is the way you try to claim every single engineer employed by half a dozen companies is unhappy. This is obviously unrealistic. I personally know quite a few of them and they are having the time of their life. Keep in mind that you hear far more reports from those who quit/were fired than from those who are happily chugging along in their role.
Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
I didn't read OP's comment as "every FAANG employee is miserable". That's uncharitable but easier to fight than the more realistic one that those people might be in a "golden cage". The "wolf and the dog" fable above is impressively accurate.
> Internet psychoanalysis based on "telltale signs" is just seeing what you want to see especially if you're responding to a perceived personal slight. The people telling you they're having the time of their life also might be projecting to try not to feel bad for their life choices.
Not really. I've worked at a FANG for quite a few years and I can tell you from my own personal experience that in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The misery imagined by OP has no bearing in reality, and screams projection. I see it a lot, sadly. People are desperate to get in and when they don't then they resort to shit-talking things to try to make themselves feel better.
They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world. Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
> They are having the "time of their life" sitting in a desk chair at a corporate office. It's not the same as what the parent poster is describing -- which is presumably traveling and exploring the world.
Is it though?
The FANG engineers I know have been leveraging internal transfers to relocate abroad to places like Madrid, Milan, Amsterdam, etc. Not to mention business trips abroad for all kind of things like hiring events.
> Try asking the younger generation which is the better job.
This is not a generational thing. This is about objectively comparing jobs. Accusing each and every single FANG engineer of being miserable whereas a random low-paying role is the envy of the world screams the fox and the grapes.
There are definitely a lot of FAANG engineers who are not unhappy and miserable with their lives, they are gainfully employed and live rich fulfilling lives providing abundance for their families.
In contrast I know plenty of people who quit jobs and are now working way harder to earn less at the expense of those around them, resulting in broken homes, divorces, and all around miserable lives, all pinned on the hope they will get their big break and it will all be worth it. They are very pathetic but can’t see it because they are so wrapped up in some foolish idea that isn’t going anywhere.
Except you’re not free, you’re bound by the constraints of how much money you have, which isn’t much.
And traveling the world is a bit overrated. It’s cool to change scenery, but at the end of the day, you’re just doing the same work you always do, just in a different country. You’re just running away from the fact you have nothing worth settling down a bit for, no where to truly call home and invest in a local community, just a drifter chasing their next hit of stimulus. Eventually, you run out of truly novel places to go. You’re not giving back to a community and making your mark, you’re just leeching off the lifestyles built by people who chose to settle in one place. If everyone was a traveler, there wouldn’t be anything worth traveling to.
I like changing the scenery a lot but I disagree that it makes me a bad or immoral person. Most people do not want to leave their country. Some people do and that benefits local people through tourism and retirees. The system is working out well for developing countries. It helps them develop faster.
Do office workers do anything to help other countries develop? Or does all their effort go towards making their rich friends richer?
Nothing beats the freedom and fulfillment of owning and operating your own business. A job at a FAANG company with a high salary is so overrated. I know, since I have worked in multiple FAANG companies over the last 12 years.
I also love side projects and have done a few. What I was commenting on is "people using their expertise to make money". For me it's more of the opposite. I could have earned way more in traditional things but I do side project because I can select what I want to do.
You make that salary only if you physically live near Silicon Valley, or some other HCOL areas where FAANG have offices. And guess what? The world is bigger.
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
I miss the days when HN was more stories like this of people using their expertise to make money - whether it was code, book launches, writing courses etc. Is that harder to do these days, or has the HN news appetite shifted?