Hacker News Reader

Comment by esalman | Hacker News Reader

Hacker news is not really a good place to talk about nuances involving academia. I don't expect VC minded hackers comprehend how someone can devote years of their lives working minimum wage trying to answer questions which earn them a fancy title on a piece of paper, for that matter.

View on HN

A lot of us here are VC minded hackers *because* we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

I am one of those. I'll also say I never felt the kind of emotion in software building that I did when working on PhD problems.

Or maybe to earn proper money?

> A lot of us here are VC minded hackers because we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

This is a disingenuous framing. I've "built" more in academia than in some jobs I had, and some VC-backed startups are renowned not for building but for their lack of ethics.

"Building" is not the discriminating factor.

Building things which you couldn't convince people to pay you for could be might as well building dubious crap

Man, majority of Sillicon Valley production is dubious crap with not much other utility or even actively harmful. And someone pays that.

Earning money is not curelated with usefullness these days. It is somewhat correlated with lack of ethics.

I think it's a very skewed form of ethics to make people pay without convincing them.And fwiw Making money is correlated with productivity which is negatively correlated with a lot of bad things so I think on pure technical point you are wrong, there are subtleties.

Reward alignment is the differentiator. Obviously it's very far from clear-cut what is worth funding in research. But i've seen a lot of crap research, that would have died off far sooner if it had some VC/free market equivelant.

Or preferred to eat. I love teaching, and I'm good at it. If it were more valued by society then I'd do more of it. As it stands, I'm in adtech, and I teach a little piano and math on the weekends.

I spent years programming for myself, for free. I did this because I loved it, not because I was interested in the VC game.

But you did something else for a paycheck in the meantime, right? They're talking about what mathematicians do for their meager paycheck.

> But you did something else for a paycheck in the meantime, right? They're talking about what mathematicians do for their meager paycheck.

Grigiri Perelman, who was awarded the Fields Medal, notoriously refused the prise because he stated no other recognition was needed.

It's great there's an exception, but that isn't the point, they're talking about people who get paychecks as mathematicians. BTW what did Grigori do for a paycheck?

Or hone their craft to best express their art and share their human experience

A large fraction of people are open source contributors, hobby game devs, and various other types of people who fall under "devote years of your life with no formal remuneration"

The US-American mind cannot comprehend "free time" nor working hard on something just for the love of it and the joy of collaborating with other like minded people.

There's a reason that so many open source builders and contributors are unemployed people in social-welfare European states. There's a reason that nearly every great work in the English canon was written by someone who was on the dole at the time, from Nietzsche to Harry Potter.

It's not like you need to raise at least $5m to create an account here. There's a mixture of people.

The vast majority of users here are nerds first, business enthusiasts much later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com