8 ms·
I'm just having fun
- hyperhello 9mo agoI see these blogs sometimes and they smell like Adderal. Have you considered that the thing you’re endlessly tinkering with may not be the thing actually providing the enjoyment you feel?
- all2 9mo agoYes? No? Curiosity drives some to do unexplainable things.
- rtewrtjkewrkj 9mo agoAre you saying everyone who programs is on adderal? I don't understand.
- tikhonj 9mo agoIt's amazing how such a short comment manages to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of stimulants, tinkering, human nature and, implicitly, neurodivergence.
- hyperhello 9mo agoNo, it didn’t.
- prayerie 9mo agoThat's your rebuttal?
- 000ooo000 9mo agoAny merit in your comment was eroded by the unnecessary snark
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- matt_daemon 9mo agoFinally some practical daily affirmations for computer
- com2kid 9mo agoI joined a compiler team out of college because it seemed like fun and I'd never worked on compilers before. I went from C# to embedded engineering and reading clock and wiring diagrams because there was a job that needed doing and I was the one there at the time. I went from embedded programming to running my own startup based on Javascript and React (technologies I'd never used) because I had an idea I wanted to share with the world. Just go out and try to do things, you may be surprised with what you are capable of!
- jckahn 9mo agoYes, but that often breaks down once you have bills to pay and need steady income. Real life tends to complicate things. The risk-averse path is a valid choice too, and often the only sensible one.
- surajrmal 9mo agoPlenty of people take risks even with obligations. I am risk averse, and like to ascribe much of that to my obligations to keep my family happy, but really I've always been this way, and would act pretty much the same without them. On the other hand, I've seen folks go to the brink of poverty to start businesses even with small children to feed. They are far more successful today than myself.
- achenet 9mo agoThere's a video I once saw of Jim Carrey talking about his dad, who, if I recall correctly, was originally a jazz musician, but decided it was too risky and opted to become an accountant instead. And then, having given up on his dreams to follow the risk-averse path, he got fired. Jim's words on the subject were like "well, he gave up on his dreams and still failed, so that's why I decided to pursue acting".
- DoctorOW 9mo agoI don't work in programming, but "you can do hard things" applies to my work as well. It drives me nuts when coworkers refer to me as really smart when in fact I'm merely curious. "I have no idea how you did that!" You should ask. That's how I learned it.
- Aeolos 9mo agoIn my experience, curiosity and intelligence are very strongly correlated. There is a real gap between people with the curiosity and ability to explore and learn, and people without. This is often handwaved as "motivation" but it's more than just that. In fact, the gap is so large that it can be really hard for a person on one side of it to understand how people on the other side think.
- mcmoor 9mo agoI think part of it is that geniuses gets (or at least feels) rewarded whenever they try learning, while other people might not. For the same amount of effort, the amount of new knowledge gained by other people is fewer than what geniuses can get. Overtime, leaning no longer feels worth it. Thus normal people no longer feels curious while geniuses still do.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoI thought of it from the other end. Curious folks end up engaging in cycles of formative learning that the less curious do not. The perceived intelligence follows. Its the process that makes the difference.
- agumonkey 9mo agoit's also a burden when it's the team culture, because you're almost seen negatively for trying to design new things
- ffuxlpff 9mo agoPeople who cannot learn hard things don't have time, or they think they don't have time. Actually they try to fake their way through because they believe it is impossible or at least too late to sort things out properly. The so called geniuses seem to have rather lax lifestyle, like free evenings to really make their homework. When you constantly think you're in hurry you've pretty much lost the game. You're just trying to get by and learn very little.
- all2 9mo agoI like doing goofy things with code. I wrote an s-expression parser using TeraTerm (BASIC-like language). I came up with this generator only recursive descent thing in python. I never did anything with these except to fiddle around and see what was possible. Goofy stuff in code makes me happy.
- tolerance 9mo agoDear Mitchell Hashicorp, I’m sorry for not taking your terminal emulator serious. Your comment on the red site resonated. > I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics). https://lobste.rs/s/wilmno/i_m_just_having_fun#c_ziuqlv https://lobste.rs/s/wilmno/i_m_just_having_fun#c_ziuqlv
- rtewrtjkewrkj 9mo agoI feel like I can't have fun anymore because the AI can just do the thing instantly and you've got people on this website advocating to let the AI do everything while you merely read the code.
- mecsred 9mo agowhy do you have to do what people on this website tell you? Write the fun thing.
- rtewrtjkewrkj 9mo agoI worry about the meta too much.
- marssaxman 9mo agoI think you've found the problem!
- ambicapter 9mo agoFinding a new meta is always the new meta.
- Lerc 9mo agoI have been doing a lot of little projects using AI, and don't get this experience. I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious. I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed. I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets. I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better. Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
- gynecologist 9mo ago[flagged]
- missinglugnut 9mo agoYou know you could simply pass by ignoring this article since you claim it doesn't apply to you. But uhh, your need to put the author down is revealing.
- xnacly 9mo agowhat a weird and mean comment, do better
- nanolith 9mo agoWe need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's done in good jest. Sometimes, these things become real businesses. Not that this should be the intent of this, but it shows that what some consider silly, others will pay good money for. Example: Cards Against Humanity started as a bit of a gag game between a small group of friends and eventually became something that has pop culture relevance. Example: The founder of FedEx actually wrote a business pitch paper for an overnight shipping company. This paper was given a low grade by his professor. He went on to form this company, which become a success, despite this low grade. I like to think that he did this out of spite, and that Christmas letters to his old professor must've been fun.
- citbl 9mo agoIt wouldn't hurt if they could capitalise their sentences every now and then.
- godelski 9mo agoYou can't have paradigm shifts by following the paradigm. How I think of it is we need a distribution of people (shaped like a power law, not a normal). Most people should be in the main body, doing what most people do. They're probably the "most productive". Then you have people in the mid tail who innovate but it's incremental and not very novel. They produce frequently (our current research paradigm optimizes for this). But there aren't leaps and bounds. Critically it keeps pushing things forward, refining and improving. But then there's those in the long tail. They fail most of the time and are the "least productive". Sometimes never doing anything of note their entire lives. But these are also the people that change the world in much bigger ways. And sometimes those that appeared to do nothing have their value found decades or centuries later. Not everyone needs to be Newton/Leibniz. Not everyone should be. But that kind of work is critical to advancing our knowledge and wealth as a species. The problem is it is often indistinguishable from wasting time. But I'm willing to bet that the work of Newton alone has created more value to all of human civilization than every failed long tail person has cost us. In any investment strategy you benefit from having high risk investments. Most lose you money but the ones that win reward you with much more than you lost. I'm not sure why this is so well known in the investment world but controversial in the research/academic/innovation world.
- teleforce 9mo agoThe Practice Guide of Computer is really a gem, and the bottom lines sentences are just golden (now I understand what they meant when people mentioned bottom lines) of part D: Rid yourself of the following reasons of being a practioner of computer. To add a cliche, according to Mark Twain, "Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life". Or may I add, you probably not going to retire anytime soon.
- nicepost 9mo agoI really resonate with it. When I was a teenager I was a burn out. I went to college and became enamoured with a field of study. Everyone thought I was very smart and people would drop the g word and it made me feel gross. I always just wanted to learn everything I could. Now I am in a very different area of practice. Partially because I got tired of being good. Making young professionals give talks to factory floors about things they can't relate too, getting hired because it would look good for an acquisition, etc. it's draining and makes it hard for colleagues to realize they are your equal or even more exceptional at many things than yourself. I actually worked with Jyn, though we don't keep in touch I will say they were great. Made strong contributions, learned new things quickly and was genuinely curious about everything. It's cool to see them on here. Nothing but good wishes for them and I hope they are enjoying whatever they are doing now. Come to think of it, I feel that way about all my former colleagues.
- BergAndCo 9mo ago[dead]
- nine_k 9mo agoThis all is good advice. Don't be intimidated, try new things, have fun. On top of that, keep your day job. Or have enough wealth to not need it. Otherwise fun may cease gradually, then abruptly. Keep the lower levels of the Maslow pyramid well-maintained.
- lotsofpulp 9mo agoThis is like “draw the rest of the owl” advice. Most people struggle with the earn enough money to afford house in metro with multiple employers step. And earn enough money per hour to have time for other stuff.
- nine_k 9mo agoNot exactly. It's more like a "draw the owl first" advice %)
- viraptor 9mo agoI definitely worked with people who were limited by how much they were open to just dive one level deeper. You can wait for someone to explain things to you and tell you what to read, or just... go and do it. There's no speed limit in learning. This is even easier now with AI since you can ask "what's this concept called, what am I missing here, what stuff should I read about it" if you're actually blocked.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>On top of that, keep your day job. I have unfortunately failed at that :(. The fun sure does go away slowly, then all at once
- kristianp 9mo ago[flagged]
- flumpcakes 9mo agoNot addressing the content directly but a note on the formatting: I find it extremely hard to read sentences by people that refuse to use normal formatting/grammar. Why is there no capitalisation? I've seen this before and it's just confusing and jarring. Clearly this is done on purpose but I don't know why an author would be so anti-reader.
- msub2 9mo agoMy take is that it stems from the way we chat with others online, where we might be freer with our formatting as we type out messages in IRC/Discord/wherever. It's meant to convey "down to earth"-ness or speaking plainly, which I find fitting given the content of the post.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 9mo agoI hate it. It’s so much harder for me to read when they opt out of using some of the tools in their written language toolbox. My understanding is that it’s basically just a newer fad.
- strken 9mo agoI hate it when people do this. I refuse to write Bell Hooks or E. E. Cummings without capitals. Even though it's vanishingly unlikely, I hope they both read this from beyond the grave and think about what they've done to reading comprehension. Given the spread of the AI infection and how it's changing the perception of grammatically correct writing, I imagine the allergic reaction that is writing in all lowercase will only grow worse.
- luqtas 9mo agoeNGLISH is a lingua franca, so it's prone to morph much more than without the status. do you really think a blogger or 5 will change how upper case exist? maybe we'll signal something with exacerbation by some unicode somewhere at the phrase. maybe we'll type with the help of AI (fuck ai). maybe English will have augmentative and diminutive word forms like Portuguese. maybe grammar will be simpler, so more people can use it and even with a simpler language, like Chinese, you still can express deep stuff, with more words/characters but then, how often your typing or reading something serious? there's a big difference between a blog and a journal from a psychologist evaluating meaningless activities as the precursor/variable of hapiness or satisfaction (or whatever the correct scientific term is)
- flir 9mo agoI like it. I've worked with the occasional programmer artist (at least one has an HN account). Not in the "elegant and austere like a suspension bridge" sense, but in the "what the fuck? no! stop reorienting my brain!" sense. They're rare and precious like a delicate orchid, and annoying as hell like a delicate orchid that gives you a rash. That magenta PR? Fetch.
- NicolasCornwall 9mo agoStop Trying to Make Fetch Happen
- taylorlapeyre 9mo agoI've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as: > "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept." Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it. MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
- sapphirebreeze 9mo ago[dead]
- mrose11 9mo ago[flagged]
- reval 9mo agojyn’s advice here is spot on, however it misses an important point: jyn you are exceptional because you do these things. This is what excellence looks like.
- trostaft 9mo agoWhat a wonderful article. My stress has been drowning my joy in something I once found fulfilling. While reading this, I suddenly remembered it. Thank you.
- joshdavham 9mo agoWhat has been causing you stress? (If you don’t mind me asking?)
- trostaft 9mo agoIt's nothing special. I'm an academic and usually I balance my desire to work / deadlines and family obligations. The last month I screwed up my management and got frustrated at both. I was holding that emotion even after crunch-time had passed. Sometimes a lighthearted piece is all you need to remember to release. What's the saying? "The sea of bitterness is vast. Turn back, and you may yet see shore." I still love what I do, even if it got tougher than expected for a moment.
- 65 9mo agoThe cutesy writing style is a bit irritating, plus the article is one big ego stroke. Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? No? It's because you're not a narcissist.
- shepherdjerred 9mo agoThere's a differences between narcissism and self-awareness. It would be narcissism if the author didn't have talent or ability. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
- GaryBluto 9mo agoYou can be narcissistic and be talented.
- shepherdjerred 9mo agoI guess I'm confusing arrogant and narcissistic. You're right.
- ehnto 9mo agoIf we are maximising our input I should only read things I wouldn't write. That's the beauty of communication and the free internet, what a joy to learn about someone elses way of thinking, add a little colour to my world view. One of the things I miss most about the days of IRC chat networks, the personalities were big, broad and diverse, all mixing together. If someone is a narcissist, so be it, they still have value, knowledge, opinions to share. Online discourse these days can verge on corporate approved, totally empty. Apologies for the tangent.
- johnnyanmac 9mo ago>Could you, HackerNews reader, imagine yourself writing something like this? Maybe in more optimistic times. "Just have fun" is a top luxury nowadays in 2025.
- mghackerlady 9mo ago[flagged]
- Weryj 9mo agoIt’s great advice and exactly how I live my life. Programming was a hobby and then a profession, I still use the phrase ‘working’ but really it’s play with outcomes.
- begueradj 9mo agoWhat is this new blog trend where I see capitalization disappearing ?
- GaryBluto 9mo agoIt's a helpful indicator that the article isn't worth reading and that it was probably written by somebody who spends too much time in chatrooms.
- ccapitalK 9mo agoI'm asking this question purely out of curiosity, and not as a snark, is there any particular reason why you don't capitalise the beginnings of your sentences? It seems strange to go to the effort of capitalising STEM and putting a hyphen in college-level without capitalising the letters. Is it something like the push towards sans-serif fonts because some groups of people find it easier to read?
- BugsJustFindMe 9mo agoMaybe they're anti-capitalist.
- isoprophlex 9mo agobravo
- neutronicus 9mo agoIME it is a common affectation in the queer / feminist internet. A sort of Tumblr Shibboleth. I guess, these days, also a "not typing this on a phone" Shibboleth.
- pluralmonad 9mo agoI take typos as "poster was using a standard physical keyboard unit" sometimes.
- tock 9mo agoI use "text-transform: lowercase;". It's just a fun look. When I get tired of it I'll just remove the property.
- rpigab 9mo agoThank you, I just did the opposite in Microsoft teams PWA, "text-transform: uppercase;", now I feel like the whole company is mad, everyone using shouty caps at each other, and every message makes me laugh!
- redscare67 9mo agoStarting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
- mackeye 9mo agothey clarify that point in the first sentence of that header, > i mean, in some sense if you work as a professional programmer it is a competition, because the job market sucks right now.
- redscare69 9mo agoStarting a blog like with "it's not a competition" in a capitalist societity is straight up igmorant. Yes it is not as much competition, if you are already so far ahead of others, that it doesn't matter for YOU, right now.
- meindnoch 9mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway17_17 9mo agoWhat the actual fuck? What does your comment mean? Is there some sort of substance to your statement or are you just being a hateful troll? Did you even read the post? Are you trying to draw some conclusion from a person’s appearance? I don’t know Jyn Nelson, but I have seen some of their talks. They seem to be a more than capable developer. Their blog is probably one of the least offensive, most down to earth, get shot done type of developer blog I have seen? So again, what the actual fuck. (I’m not certain if the ‘seven words you can’t say on television’ are actually banned on HN or just frowned upon, but I think my usage is justified)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- hackboyfly 9mo ago”it's by repeatedly forcing you to confront the results of your own mistakes” Damn, that’s powerful.
- nektro 9mo agoone of my favorite quotes of all time: "the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried"
- maplethorpe 9mo ago> i really, sincerely, believe that art is one of the most important uses for a computer. Me too. Sometimes when I tell people I spent the day on the computer, I get responses like "oh that's sad" or "you're going to burn yourself out". Would they say the same thing if I told them I spent the day painting in my studio? Or playing the guitar? Or writing a piece of music? The computer is my paintbrush.
- xgulfie 9mo agoMost people probably assume that you're consuming rather than creating, consumption is what most people do on computers
- nashashmi 9mo agoA famous quote by Winston Churchill’s mother on meeting Gladstone and Disraeli is, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.” How people make us feel is so important — not only in Leadership but also in life.
- iamflimflam1 9mo agoThe ability to be genuinely interested in what someone else has to say and what their opinions are is a real gift.
- attila-lendvai 9mo agoa gift? isn't that the result of all your past efforts? i mean, if you want it, then do it. if not, then there's nothing to be sad about. IOW, "I am I, and you are you. I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. If by chance we meet, it's beautiful. If not, it can't be helped." — Fritz Perls (1893–1970), 'The Gestalt Prayer' (rephrased)
- nashashmi 9mo agolol. That quote is like a blatant copy of the Al-Kafirun chapter of the Quran. Say: Oh you who turn away. I do not worship what you worship, nor do you worship what I worship. And I will not worship what you worship, Nor will you worship what I worship. Your way is yours, and my way is mine.
- ozim 9mo agoRefreshing, after narration that usually goes along the lines that if you can’t make transistor from sand grains while also knowing all the http details, databases and of course all JS frameworks you are not “real programmer”.
- GaryBluto 9mo agoI don't know what I expected from a blog written entirely in lowercase but I'm unsurprised it's something like this. > if i can't feminize my compiler, what's the point? I remember when people saying things like this would be considered strange, because it is strange, along with all the other bizarre and often fetishistic references in both the blog body and various screenshots. Same for the bizarre pull request screenshot referring to "the gay people in my phone", which is also devoid of grammar. It's one thing to act stupidly, it's another thing to act stupidly write a self-important blog about it and how much you enjoy pissing people off (back in the day we called that trolling, believe it or not, and it was largely considered a negative thing). I eagerly await the paradigm shift when people stop condoning and supporting bizarre behaviour like this and I won't need to create proxies and extensions explicitly for filtering this kind of nonsense out. I find the worst thing about this not the blog post itself, but the fact that the majority people on here see no problem with it and those who agree with me are being flagged to death.
- ChrisSD 9mo agoIt's ok to be strange. It's ok to be bizarre. Be free. I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life.
- GaryBluto 9mo agoPeople can be strange or bizarre if they want too but they have to understand it means some people won't like them, especially if their shtick is deliberately making people uncomfortable and being annoying. > I do not understand the desire for everybody else in the world to act exactly like you. Variety is the spice of life. I don't want people to act exactly like me. I greatly appreciate the existence of people different from me with differing points of view and differing nations with differing cultures. This doesn't mean I have to like one specific archetype that I feel acts obnoxiously.
- ChrisSD 9mo agoWhy do you feel uncomfortable? Why do you think anyone is trying to make you feel uncomfortable?
- RagnarD 9mo agoWhen did this writing with no capitalization start to become a thing? I'm seeing it too often now. It's pretentious crap and quickly leads to me thinking that the writer doesn't want to be taken seriously, so why read it?
- SilverSlash 9mo agoI think Sam Altman popularized it with his tweets during the height of OpenAI, GPT popularity ~2023. Or maybe it was already trending by then but at least for me he was the first among prominent people to be doing it.
- Zolomon 9mo agoThis has been my perception of the timeline as well.
- bluedel 9mo agothe lack of capitalization (and occasional omission of punctuation) was already a big thing on tumblr / twitter 10 years ago, especially in some anime and LGBT-adjacent spaces. I don't think jyn got it from Sam Altman, and I don't think he had that big a role in popularizing it.
- int_19h 9mo agoIt was a thing 25 years ago already in SMS and IM.
- monerozcash 9mo agoBefore smartphones, it seems to have been the standard for just about every form of instant messaging. Well, morse has no capitalization and telex would typically have been uppercase-only too, but I think we can still count those? I suspect that this is just something that happens naturally, for shorter-format messaging typing in sentence case probably offers no added readability and tends to get dropped over time.
- 9mo ago
- oldpersonintx2 9mo ago[dead]
- guytv 9mo agoThis hits different when you apply it to chess. Instead of obsessing with my rating on I just turned on Zen mode in lichees and hid all the numbers. The game became fun again — Just "oh that was a cool tactic, let me try this weird opening, what happens if I sacrifice my knight for vibes?" Turns out the rating was a distraction from the actual game. Same energy as your point about "fucking around" being the point. The elo was just making me miserable; removing it made me better anyway.
- constantcrying 9mo agoThe world was a much better place when engineering was done by men in dress shirts, who saw technical excellence as their professional obligation, but then returned home to their families and could leave their professional life behind. People like this make me hate everything to do with software. Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression. I do not want to interact with these people at all. If you derive your identity from being a programmer you are actually harmful and I hope that I will never have the misfortune of having to work with you. And yes, if you do not capitalize properly, then I do not see you as fully human. And if you keep swearing you sound like a twelve year old.
- brazukadev 9mo ago> People like this make me hate everything to do with software Well, the people that code for fun (and profit) think you, the men in suits, ruined everything so at least the feeling is reciprocal.
- constantcrying 9mo agoWell, since those men in shirts built the whole thing up, I am not disappointed that they are hated for it by the right people. >suits shirts was what I said. Not suits.
- jynelson 9mo ago> Software should be an engineering field, which exists to help humans, not as some personal art project for your self expression it makes me sad that you see these things as somehow in conflict with each other :(
- constantcrying 9mo agoIt fills me with joy to know that those are irreconcilable. It lifts the burden of having to reconcile these things and I know that my self expression can be directed elsewhere. Whatever beauty exists in engineering comes from the purity of it. A fighter plane or a microchip looks beautiful, not because it was designed to be so, but because of the purity of the functionality, the harshness of the requirements. If you turn a fighter plane into an art project, then it will be inherently ridiculous. It will make a mockery of its own purpose, looking at it will be like looking at a cripple.
- Hendrikto 9mo agoWhy do some people hate capital letters?
- WorldPeas 9mo agothis forum probably isn't the best place to make that statement, though I can see both of us didn't take that hint when we made our names
- the_af 9mo ago"Reasons to do computer: 1. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth" ...damn, there go (out) most computer jobs!
- d--b 9mo agoWho's jyn?
- yoan9224 9mo agoThis captures something crucial that gets lost in the "validate your SaaS idea in 48 hours" culture. The best products often emerge from deep exploration of a problem space without immediate commercial pressure. When you're optimizing for fun and learning, you make different architectural choices - you experiment with weird ideas that might unlock novel solutions. I see this in the analytics space constantly. Everyone rushes to clone Plausible/Fathom with minor tweaks because that's the "validated" approach. But the genuinely interesting problems - like real-time 3D geospatial visualization or AI-driven anomaly detection across behavioral patterns - require months of tinkering with WebGL, spatial databases, and ML pipelines before you know if it's viable. The counter-argument is that "fun" can turn into perfectionism and never shipping. I think the balance is: have fun building the core innovative piece, but be ruthlessly pragmatic about everything else. For Prysm, I had fun building the real-time Globe visualization with Three.js and Supabase Realtime, but used boring proven tools (Next.js, Stripe, Resend) for auth/payments/email. Ship the fun part, commoditize the rest. That's how you avoid the "two years building in stealth" trap while still doing creative work.
- supriyo-biswas 9mo agoI'd appreciate if you can give the LLM generated comments a rest (your entire profile is like this), given that this site is for humans to interact. Thank you.
- BergAndCo 9mo ago[dead]