Ask HN: Did you get "never have to work again rich" through software?

Hi Diego,

Could you elaborate more on the cashing out of stock from public companies point? You sold IndexTank for 1.6 million dollars. I don't really consider that "never work again rich" in this day in age. Were the sales of your stock significant?

Hi Michael, I came upon your post before and read them with interest. I agree with a lot of what you say re: "programmers being a defeated tribe" and how business doesn't respect coders to work on their craft. However, I don't necessarily agree with your reaction to the problem though.

Not to be patronizing, as I'm younger and have less technical/life xp than you, I'm 27, but you seem to respect the financial services a lot and consider them a "more honest" bunch than VC's, why not go into algorithmic trading for yourself? Knowing how trivial I make it sound, but it just seems like you're the type of the person who respect the merits of one's sheer intelligence, math, being financially/spiritually independent and answering to no one (least of all, management BS?).

Furthermore, in your posts, you seem to care a lot about "respect" (e.g., programmer salary and choice of programming languages in relation to VC salary and business decisions). I've experienced this myself great many times over in scrum project planning, layoff's and politics of CYA; so what you say is pretty much how I feel I could've written and most likely the stories of a lot of people here. But IMHO, we all made a choice to be "mercantile programmers" and had we cared about say, Haskell, Clojure or computational modeling, then one should apply for a PhD program in such or take a pay-cut to work in a research organization.

Again, I agree with you and would like better pay and opportunities to develop my career according to my selfish interest. But for a mediocre person like myself, I don't see how I can get away with everything (can't have the "salary" cake and eat "job satisfaction" it too). I struggle mightily with this but at some point, I have to make a choice that's most important to me, talking abstractly now but concretely, that means choosing better tech/research oriented opportunities over money.

You know, this whole "wow, what's it like to win the lottery?!" attitude is what makes the startup world so destructive and, I'll say it, exploitative.

Yes, live an intense life building something cool - but don't forget that most startups fail, and even the ones that succeed often end up having most of their money go to investors and partners rather than the founders and builders.

Also, as other commenters here have noted, you would get a lot more mileage out of limiting your lifestyle and expenses than in focusing on the big payout. Bonus: if that payout comes, it'll last longer if you've grown a realistic approach to life.

I've known a number of people who made "set for life" fortunes, and some of them have blown those fortunes surprisingly quickly.

>Women have almost no intellectual curiosity. It is just how they are wired. If you want to have great conversations about anything meaningful, you must find a man.

This sounds like selection bias. From what you wrote, it sounds like two things are true of the women you meet.

  1. You're selecting them based on looks
  2. Your intention is, in most cases, to sleep with them

I'm not saying that no attractive women are intelligent, of course. What I am saying is that if you are selecting based on looks (and interest in clubs) then you're less likely to find intelligence. You're more likely to select your friends based on intelligence than looks, so it makes sense that the men you meet seem smarter. You're looking for different things.

Likewise, you're not trying to sleep with your friends. That dynamic isn't there. But if you're meeting women to at the very least explore the potential of sleeping with them, then you're probably consciously or unconsciously steering the discussion towards fun, sexual things.

I've accidentally torpedoed several first dates by having intellectual discussions with the women I was talking to. We had great discussions! But in most cases an in depth intellectual discussion is antithetical to creating sexual chemistry, at first.

You might consider finding some platonic female friends. You may discover they have qualities you don't notice when you're dealing with women mostly on the basis of trying to date them.