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Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
251–260 of 496 posts
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#252This is a trap for engineers. If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any. There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
Maybe in the first 10 years of your career, after that you totally have the skills needed to create value from nothing - something no value extracting actor will ever be able to learn.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#253[flagged]
But how do I know stupid blogs are your niche, you don't even link to one in your profile!
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#254[flagged]
I don't think HN needs the top comment to be a vague attack on someone in response to a blog post that the comment doesn't even interact with.
You must be new here.
But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sound like a description of Elon and the X fanboys firehose.
You don't have to be a fanboy to respect outcomes. He's got a winning track record. You may not agree with his politics or his morals but that's separate from his effectiveness. Specifically he's effective at stepping outside the domain he currently operates into create inside another.
As a 2018 Tesla owner I strongly disagree with the idea that Elon's got a track record of success. The Model Y was their last successful product and it's just a stretched Model 3. FSD is not there. Robotaxi is an embarrassment. Cybertruck failed to deliver the gigacasted exoskeleton and shipped at double the original price point. Tesla has lost its way completely. (Also, Twitter has lost users and revenue ever since he got involved.)
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#256It's easy to create value for others and not worry about returns when you have enough money to not worry. Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do. I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
Indeed, what is worse is expectation created by rich people that whatever little value you did create should be given away for free! I see it frequently on HN with product launches where people are demanding product to be opensource with liberal license which effectively means it should be free.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO. The national debt is just a hidden tax on future generations. You're stealing resources from the future (by selling claims to them in advance, that's what national debt is) and spending them in the present. It's justifiable in extreme cases like a war (or perhaps for massive public investments that can't be funded within the existing budget - whi…
That's not how that works, because for each unit of debt (loans or negative balances) there is a corresponding unit of credit (bonds or positive balances) in the economy. Hence, mathematically speaking, all debts could be paid off instantly at any point in time. The reason why the debt keeps growing endlessly is that there is a 0% lower bound on the interest rate, which if you think logically about it, means that deb…
The zero bound on nominal interest rates is not relevant today. (It may be relevant in a deflationary environment where debt or 'safe assets' are essentially needed as a liquidity instrument akin to money, but that all gets hoovered up when interest rates rise.) The U.S. government is paying a whole lot of interest on its national debt bonds not because of a formal constraint, but rather because its bonds would go unsold otherwise, it would be unable to roll over the existing bonds as they expire, and the whole house of cards would collapse. IOW, it's the chickens coming home to roost, and the American taxpayer is paying for it. The alternative is to inflate the debt away by debasing the currency, which is even worse.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guess we'll starve then. Good luck dealing with hundreds of millions of hungry angry people.
The idea you're suggesting here is 19th century era Marxism, and isn't based on historical or economic realities. There has never been a famine caused by new technologies creating unemployment, and food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
"Food security is much higher now than at any other time in the past", huh?
18 million households in the U.S. were food insecure in 2024.
And that's from 2024. How much was oil then?
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#259[flagged]
I don't think HN needs the top comment to be a vague attack on someone in response to a blog post that the comment doesn't even interact with.
Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.
Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
#260This is a trap for engineers. If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any. There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
So you think that engineers that maintain and write the FOSS that runs most of the world IT infrastructure ( Linux, Curl, GIT etc. ) do it for the returns ?
They don't, and as a result most don't get much if any.
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.