Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

I think a more interesting perspective on this article would be "there's no such thing as a quick buck, or if there is, this is not a story of it."

Sure, he made 2,500 guilders in 5 minutes, but the author says of his early QnX days: "After a couple of visits there to talk over strategies on how to solve certain problems using QnX [...]". So to me this anecdote is about how guy spent an amount (several days? months?) learning QnX, getting involved in the (1-man) community around him, and became somewhat of an expert in QnX such that when the time arose, he was the guy they called.

The way the story is told is akin to patio11 saying "an easy way to make a quick buck is consult with a BigCo!" True... but that ignores the time, effort, and experience Patrick has put into building his skills.

TL;DR: "Invest time in learning something valuable" is a better takeaway from this article, IMO.

This is not a tutorial, and the title is supposed to be intriguing, not to be taken literally.

Seems like you're pointing out the obvious, at least to me.

Maybe it was obvious, but no one else had said it yet. I said it because I believed it would provide value to our community.

You're right. And I hope my comment didn't come across as harsh. I would have said the same thing to your face, but my tone and body language would have softened it quite a bit.

After reading the article, even I found the title tongue in cheek. That said, GP has explicitly called out (quiet well) what he thought was the underlying lesson and I am thankful for that.

It's a bit banal though, of course you should learn something valuable. Isn't that what your mother's been telling you all these years?

I think the better lesson which is directly applicable to all coders is "question your assumptions". To me this was a huge benefit of learning ruby as it happens to be one of the easiest languages to pull your assumptions right out from under you.

This comment depresses me. It's like some kind of dream killer or something I'm not quite sure what it is about this comment but it's not good. :(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com