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Comment by stuntkite | Hacker News Reader

It depends on how you value your time and effort. Not every idea should be valued by its market fit. I don't think people should write code they are uninterested in writing. That's my litmus test for myself. Usually when I'm really, really interested the thing I'm aiming at doing initially isn't even about what I'm really trying to solve. It's picking away at the cruft over something and then I can see what's on the other side. Don't write things from scratch if you absolutely hate it and you are only doing it because you think the market will buy it and you wanna be a big biz, unless you feel like it. I don't know, YMMV. Programming is stupid and I plan to be a pig farmer as soon as possible.

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I don't thing Parent was talking about business at all. Personal projects are not things you do because of potential business opportunities in my book. I wrote a GameBoy emulator, several raytracers, countless demos on 8bits machines, countless "IoT" things, an automatic cat feeder, a 3d scanner and much more, I never ever had the goal to transform that into money, that was for fun.

Of course you won't write anything that you hate at first, because it's for fun. But hating something for some days or weeks is part of the fun, too. You are challenging yourself, not doing it the easy way, to appreciate how well the others are doing.

If you want to turn it into a business, so yeah, don't write a graph visualization engine, or crypto stuff, or anything really. Get a job, that can be fun too, and let the entrepreneurs figure out the rest.

I see what you're getting at and concede that you may be totally right that I'm not on the same page as Parent, but if the reason for not doing something dumb that you'll probably fail at that other people are doing better at, that lets say you also hate, isn't for building a business... What are you doing that for? Pathological self harm?

I think you and I agree. I'm not being crass, but I'd if you had more thoughts on what I'm trying to say about what you're trying to say I'd be interested in further discussion.

haha well, while running a pig farm is also a difficult business, there are some interesting challenges you can tackle :D also you could write software to manage some aspects of your pig farm

Definitely. I have some giant robots and spend a lot of my time with computer vision. I'm gonna put them on tank treads and have them tend to the farm. I just like... fuckin do not want to ever be asked to and feel like I should care about anything related to javascript.... ever again... past 2024, but with just a tiny nudge, I could just live that life tomorrow.

Wow… did JavaScript hurt your children? Have you tried typescript? It’s not so bad.

Yes. And it's hurting yours. But you know, some people like all sort of other things that are literal poisonous torture. Eh, get in where you fit in.

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