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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

> my work was "utterly and completely useless

I can never understand the arrogance of folks who would say something like this

I used to maintain a code beautifier/diff tool and hear the same things about how the idea was useless only to see those same people shortly there after use my tool or a close competitor. Once you see that pattern a few times you learn to ignore it in it’s entirety.

It’s hard to tell why people behave like that. I presume it’s because many people have a great fear of originality and require social validation.

Asymmetry between complexity of principle and power.

Ie., we are easily persuaded that something very complex will be very powerful (eg., a smart phone) -- but we intuitively regard something simple (eg., a hammer) as under-powered.

Hard to say how well this actually holds, but I'd guess in both cases we arent really enumerating use-cases in our head, we're just using explanatory complexity as a guide to practical power.

This is probably more extreme in cases where people have a specific notion of complexity in mind, eg., in academic environments where "tool A" is as simple as "tool B" if they use the same theoretical basis.

ie., Tool C is worthwhile if it includes a more complex theory, as therefore it is more powerful.

Academic administrators judge performance based on publication counts, journal impact factors, citations/h-index, and fundraising. Working on tooling doesn't fit in those buckets, so it's broadly-speaking "useless" to a researcher vying for promotions (eg tenure). It's an imperfect method of measuring true impact.

And to be fair, that was the context of the comment. It was meant to be harsh but true advice. It was quite arguably, at the time, worthless in the context of advancing my career. It turned into my career, eventually, but that wasn't the goal then.

as a former phd student, it's pretty systemic - labs sometimes get funding as a direct mapping with how many papers get published by that lab. If you do cool work but that does not land you a paper, you are literally wasting the budget that your employer spent on you. Once you solve that (and thanks to things like this numpy papers, things may be starting to evolve !)

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