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The Art of Money Getting

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Re: The Art of Money Getting

#81

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

t_mahmood wrote: post #78
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not advertising jack. Everyone else mentions the LLM they use, along with all kinds of details, like token costs, etc. I mention it to frame the context. I don't think that using ChatGPT impresses anyone, around here. It is not a common theme. However, when I do post something like this, I find a lot of kindred spirits, so I guess we are the "quiet ones." Most people -the vast majority- use agents and IDE integra…

I still don't get it why me being skeptical considered trolling. I don't troll. And, my comment was definitely, absolutely, not an attack. But true, I didn't check your profile initially, so, my conclusion was uncalled for, and wrong. So, really, was not trolling, and no attacks intended.

We're good, here. I checked out your profile (and GH profile).

We probably have a lot more in common, than differences. I'm always glad to find people to interact with.

I know that my HN persona is a bit "stuffy," because I'm going out of my way, not to be abrasive, and to contribute to the community, but there are folks that absolutely hate me -in a Commissioner Dreyfus kind of way-, and I'm not really sure why. Maybe it's the Apple thing.

Eh, whatevs. I'm "on the spectrum," and got used to people disliking me for no reason that they can even articulate. It used to really bother me, but these days, it's just background noise. I'm actually a fairly decent chap, and probably worth getting to know.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#82

Post by xp84 »

> " 2. Avoid Debt Like the Plague"

Does anyone else feel like they overindex on this principle? I have on multiple occasions found myself too conservative to take advantage of the leverage available to me. (Example: doing a refinance in 2020 I could have taken out a 30-year mortgage at the rock-bottom rate, but chose to do 15. This is irrational given that I could have taken all the money I didn't have to pay toward the mortgage and even putting it in completely safe investments, come out ahead (even before considering the mortgage interest deduction).

I'm not saying I envy those leveraged up to their necks, but I think growing up in a family that didn't really have any money and did have a lot of the bad kind of debt made it hard for me to feel comfortable owing money even when it would probably be in my best interest (no pun intended).

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#83

Post by MrDarcy »

neilv wrote: post #56
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that's pretty important to me The older I get, the more I realize what a critical component of personal and social relationships it is, and how deeply it reinforces virtually everything good in society. There's never a good reason to forgo it, and never a good reason to accept spending time with people who don't have it. It only leads to trouble. I started my career in ad tech and it was often such abject miser…

Like you, I've found that working with people of integrity (or some qualities closely related to that) is very important to me. Not in a "new-grad or corporate PR appropriating meaningless platitudes" kind of way. But in a "I have seen multiple times how one untrustworthy person can easily wreck all the work of a team or organization, and make their lives miserable, so averting that is a high priority" kind of way. L…

> But how do you find a respectable one, in a gold rush?

Look for those who are trying to serve established respectable professions, ideally have already done so for many years or decades. Accounting, Legal, Healthcare, Journalism (in the ideal sense).

Then look at their own mission. Then look at their own work. Do they show their work? Are they open? Do they willingly allow their customers to audit their work product? Does how they talk about their work match the work product itself? Does the thing do what it says on the tin? Are they hypocrites with respect to those they serve or those they manage?

These are my strategies and I’ve found they lead to working almost exclusively with people who have high Integrity.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#84

Post by NortySpock »

draftsman wrote: post #32
UncleOxidant wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm retired. I don't have to write software, but I spend more time writing software (for free), than I did, for most of my career. Same. Claude/Gemini/DeepSeekV4/Qwen3.6 are enabling me to do way more experimentation than I could do on my own. 10X at least. Not getting paid for any of it, but that's OK, getting paid imposes limitations on what you can work on and imposes responsibilities that I don't care to have a…

Do you find joy in using LLMs to write software? I tried using Claude/Cursor/CodeX/etc. for personal projects and experimentation, and I found no joy in it. I learned nothing, and when my MVPs were complete, I only had a shallow understanding of how the code that powered them worked.

I asked the LLM to explain, rephrase, or rewrite things until I was happy. Some examples :

I asked for examples of how the algorithm worked. I asked for examples of how to call the code. I asked for a happy-path unit test and a simple error-handling unit test. I asked it to rewrite something as a pure function. I pointed out an obvious race condition and told it to guard against that issue. I asked it to rewrite a function in the style of this other function. I told it to separate one function into two separate functions that handle the first step and the second step separately.

Etc etc.

If you don't understand it, ask for more or better comments, or better variable names, or cut down the scope into a smaller section, or more examples.

Edit: also I almost entirely leave the LLM in read only mode... I tell it to make the smallest change possible, and tell it I will only copy paste it in its proposed change when I understand the change and where it needs to be made. That way it's my hands on the keyboard, interacting with the code by making recommended changes... 80% of the code is touched by me (via copy-paste) most-of-the-way before I will 'git commit'.

Sure, there was one recursive folder descent function that found the most recent file modification time that I didn't fully understand, but it's self-contained in a function, I don't care to learn every corner of file modification times, and it appears to work, so I left it as is for my static site generator.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#85

Post by HPsquared »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #24
Michelangelo11 wrote: post #14

> Barnum’s first rule: pick the work you’re built for, then aim to be the best at it. Edsger Dijkstra, in one of his letters, giving advice (IIRC) to a PhD student: "Do only what only you can do." Kind of funny to see one of the greatest computer scientists and one of the greatest public entertainers giving the same advice, but I guess that speaks strongly in its favor.

I could never do anything, I could talk fancy and bullshit and could come up with all kinds of great ideas as an ideas guy. Nothing useful. So I became a developer and data engineer, and I became really good at it even though, like the protagonist in Gattica (with whom I share other similarities), I had to work twice as hard and spend all my off hours obsessed with it because my nature worked against me. While others…

Generalist jobs are all about that System 2 thinking. I never developed it, so my general power is limited.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#86

Post by v9v »

sireat wrote: post #57

I am paraphrasing but I think it was W. Buffett who said: "Work at the job that you do not hate" In other words, not all vocations that you are great at and talented and want to pursue are valued by current world. I love playing chess way more and actually am reasonably good at it, but programming and teaching are valued more and I like those too. As Jimmy O. Yang's father reportedly said: "Pursuing your dreams is ho…

I think Kevin Kelly has taken the opposing side before: https://colossus.com/article/flounder-mode/ (discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44455933)

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#87

Post by t_mahmood »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #81
t_mahmood wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get it why me being skeptical considered trolling. I don't troll. And, my comment was definitely, absolutely, not an attack. But true, I didn't check your profile initially, so, my conclusion was uncalled for, and wrong. So, really, was not trolling, and no attacks intended.

We're good, here. I checked out your profile (and GH profile). We probably have a lot more in common, than differences. I'm always glad to find people to interact with. I know that my HN persona is a bit "stuffy," because I'm going out of my way, not to be abrasive, and to contribute to the community, but there are folks that absolutely hate me -in a Commissioner Dreyfus kind of way-, and I'm not really sure why. May…

Glad to hear! And I understand, yeah there are weird people who just want to make things difficult for everyone else.

And, I really believe you are, and glad for having this conversation, This is something, I believe we all fell in love with the internet heh. As I'm going through a bad patch of life, this made me smile. Thank you.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#88

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

t_mahmood wrote: post #87
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're good, here. I checked out your profile (and GH profile). We probably have a lot more in common, than differences. I'm always glad to find people to interact with. I know that my HN persona is a bit "stuffy," because I'm going out of my way, not to be abrasive, and to contribute to the community, but there are folks that absolutely hate me -in a Commissioner Dreyfus kind of way-, and I'm not really sure why. May…

Glad to hear! And I understand, yeah there are weird people who just want to make things difficult for everyone else. And, I really believe you are, and glad for having this conversation, This is something, I believe we all fell in love with the internet heh. As I'm going through a bad patch of life, this made me smile. Thank you.

> I'm going through a bad patch of life

Hopefully, it’s a short patch.

I sincerely wish you the best.

No stranger to bad patches, myself, but overall, I feel blessed.

Re: The Art of Money Getting

#90

Post by rglover »

wwarner wrote: post #52

I've only ever been good at dancing to punk music, which has only cost me money so far.

Organize underground punk shows. Make a deal with bands to split the door in exchange for hustling a crowd. May require some fun conversations with the police later, but hey.

Me and my roommates living room in college [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/WuJ60dAHyc4?si=bLVmWEM9tTgtA1MF

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