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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher

I prefer to think of this as the on-ramp. Learn your craft by selling eyeballs, or some other relatively trivial technology, make FU money, and then go and do something real. The archetype of this is of course Elon Musk.

I know that what drives me is the hope that one day I will have amassed enough money that I can stop going to work for somebody else, and instead choose to work on what interests me.

But how much money is that? I mean the median income in the US is less than $30k. Live on what most people in the US live on, and with the outrageous hourly rates of most consultants you can do for-pay work about 10 hours a week and have the rest of the time to yourself to work on what you want?

Why does it take millions of dollars to be able to do good work?

It takes millions of dollars to make space ships.

Elon Musk fully funded SpaceX with his own money?

He's put hundreds of millions of dollars of his own capital into his ventures, yes.

Good work != space ships.

Because most people don't get to charge the "outrageous hourly rates of most consultants"?

is it hard to "stay in the game" unless you're giving it 110% of your energy?

The original intention of Paypal, once it pivoted from Blackberry payments to online banking, was hardly trivial. Their goal was to be something akin to Bitcoin before Bitcoin.

As they scaled, regulatory realities set in... but to trivialize Elon like that is foolish imo.

I did say "relatively trivial" and yes, I stand by that: PayPal is relatively trivial compared to the sheer scale of the ambition of companies like SpaceX and Tesla

>I prefer to think of this as the on-ramp. Learn your craft by selling eyeballs, or some other relatively trivial technology, make FU money, and then go and do something real. The archetype of this is of course Elon Musk.

The archetype?

For one, he worked on real stuff from the beginning -- not ads or social crap: online publishing and payments.

Second, even if he fit the profile, he would hardly be an archetype, because I don't see many (if anyone) following on his footsteps.

People making FU money and leisuring or working on pet hobbies I do see. But people making FU money and "going and doing something real", well, can't think of anyone. There could be 2 or 3. I doubt there are ten.

At least we now know that they are also helping to protect the free world.

"best minds" needs many air-quotes attached.

Or writing high frequency trading battlebots.

I was on IRC back in the 1990s, back when EFNet was a battleground for bot wars over taking over channels.

I chuckle when I think back to this and realize this is what world markets have become: a place for k-r4d 31337 d00d3z to totally pwn the market, l0l.

They knew what they were signing up for.

Maybe their minds are not that great after all.

Even great minds need to eat. The problem is that truly daring, innovative work simply doesn't pay that well. It's an uphill battle at best, and a vow of poverty at worst. There is very little funding for hard, long term, daring projects.

The other problem is more systemic and less confined to tech. Most of the people I know under 40 are shackled to student and other forms of debt and home ownership is utterly unthinkable to them. (So they have no way to ever escape paying rent to the rentier class.) They have no "fuck you money," or even enough slack to contemplate changing course. They have to go for whatever pays the best even if they hate it and even if it's stupid or they have no hope of ever escaping the indentured servitude of the debt-financed college degree.

Combine that with real estate hyperinflation and you have a formula for an economy that encourages premature convergence on local maxima:

http://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/bitstream/1822/4291/1/P07...

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