Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

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"I want a good image search engine + database."

One could hire a software developer to write such a program. But, in general, software developers can be untrustworthy and prone to stealing ideas for their own selfish purposes.

Before Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college, he answered a classified ad from someone in the real world^1 who wanted to create a website that could search a database of images. Nothing to do with "social media". IIRC the target market was the auto insurance industry (I could be wrong).

1. Not Winklevoss brothers. That is another story.

Zuckerberg never finished the job but he did create his own website which searched and served up images of students at Harvard. He was of course sued by this person after Facebook became popular.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that so many software developers commenting online seem to have an extreme dislike for intellectual property.^1 It interferes with the stealing and copying they practice to compensate for their won lack of creativity. For example so-called "Big Tech" companies that do not produce any content despite billion of dollars at their disposal; instead they copy and store other peoples' work, so-called "user-generated content" (UGC).

1. With the exception of any intellectual property underlying software licenses. Microsoft wants a fair use exception for copyrighted works used by OpenAI but aat the same time it aggressively pursues copyright enforcement over its software, such as "Windows" and "Office".

> One coulld hire a software developer to write such a program. But, in general, software developers can be untrustworthy and prone to stealing ideas for their own selfish purposes.

Ehhhh? Yes there are examples of that, as there are for any arbitrary group of humans you could select, but [anecdotally] I've noticed the opposite... it's not uncommon to find a passionate developer that's only interested in the challenge/problem solving aspect - it's a lot less common for say.. real estate agents.

I don't really get the point you're making beyond "people be greedy sometimes" (which I do agree with, don't get me wrong).

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