its a sad state of affairs that a persons 'utility' is by how 'useful' they are in service of others.
Is that so sad? Sounds kind of altruistic.
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It's okay to make something nobody wants
71–80 of 208 posts
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#72Lately i have been wondering about the weird projects that people make- the “I built a web application framework in brainfuck” or “I built a text based bitmap image editor” or “I loaded an LLM on a Speak’n’Spell” kind of projects (I made up all of those but see similar on HN every day). I understand passion projects and the article hints that might be the reason, but I just don’t understand why people would spend suc…
I thought that this is something that wasn't done before (analysing google comments with ChatGPT) and that would be amazing. https://sentimentscanner.com
Simple as that and market will verify.
Also it is nice to develop 5-10 times quicker then in scrum/jira ticket driven development. I couldn't believe that in Saturday I can do more then 1-2 weeks in my job. I of course understand that this doesn't scale to team, but yeah it is nice to feel that you can write good code so fast as a rockstar developer
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#73I feel this resonates with mindfulness lifestyle: give your full attention to the present moment and the quality of your activity (and product) will show.
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#74...if you have other sources that can defend you from the bills.
The obvious needs to be stated.
That said, yes! Learning by genuine curiosity is what can bring to express the best in ourselves.
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#75Interesting how this is only really a problem today, 10-20 years ago most of what we built and shared was things we wanted to build. Things that were cool, and awesome.
But now we have to explicitly say it's OK that what we build isn't a unicorn start up idea. Not feasible for a global business. Hacker news comments always include how the idea can't be a business or is pointless, impractical etc.
Is it because money, wealth and status is becoming the number 1 thing on everyone's mind now?
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#76Not with the help of investors’ money of course
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#77Interesting how this is only really a problem today, 10-20 years ago most of what we built and shared was things we wanted to build. Things that were cool, and awesome. But now we have to explicitly say it's OK that what we build isn't a unicorn start up idea. Not feasible for a global business. Hacker news comments always include how the idea can't be a business or is pointless, impractical etc. Is it because money,…
Yes. The people involved in tech changed to a non-trivial degree over the last 15 years.
I grew up in a family that made software and I’ve been a professional myself for over twenty years.
The post-2008 cheap money era brought a huge influx of people that, at best, were not technology enthusiasts or tinkerers. A similar thing happened in the dot com era but a lot of those people got pushed out by the crash. We’ll see what happens this time.
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#78I think it's ok, great even, the urge to make something that's so strong that you do act on it. Having said a lot of people do software development for a living and they may depend on your project. So I think OSS authors do have the responsibility to word their motivation honestly, when they publish their projects.
> I think it's ok, great even, the urge to make something that's so strong that you do act on it.
- https://coderev.app : code review as interview (OSS)
- https://turas.app : travel planning and story telling for well organized travellers (origin story: https://youtu.be/_SuT9TpJc2c)
- https://youtu.be/ObwLR6Wxr6o : "ProtocolGPT" - ChatGPT for clinical trial sites (latest one I'm building).
All three built between May and now. Built another project for fintech with another team.
Sometimes I think I'm crazy. Turned down a few really good startups this year working on stuff I wanted to.
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why care? The only reason I point stuff out at my current company is because I don't want to get on a performance improvement plan because of their dumb work forecasting solutions
I can imagine caring about something like that if it was impending something important (say, it was about developing software that is part of court system/curing cancer/doing something that I consider personally important). Or they are paid specifically for that, or they just spend they work hours on that. Hopefully they are not spending unpaid overtime on that (unless they consciously volunteer to help with somethin…
> Hopefully they are not spending unpaid overtime on that
Dear god, no. I’m paid for it.
It still feels like nobody (except my boss) wants what I’m selling.
Which isn’t exactly true either, but people certainly do not embrace change.
Re: It's okay to make something nobody wants
#80[deleted]