14 ms·

Publishing your work increases your luck

331 points by magoghm 9mo ago

a_state_full 9mo ago
[dead]
beej71 9mo ago
This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.
- magoghm 9mo ago
  Same here
- concernedctzn 9mo ago
  oh wow, thanks again for the networking guide Beej!
  - beej71 9mo ago
    You're welcome! :)
blibble 9mo ago
translated from marketing-droid-ese: > greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors! > remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob! > now, get back to work
- glouwbug 9mo ago
  I’m sure they probably train on private repos too
  - dawnerd 9mo ago
    There's a reason there's a toggle to prevent matching on public code.
  - throw-12-16 9mo ago
    self hosting git is very easy.
- mawadev 9mo ago
  99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??
- aarondf 9mo ago
  I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.
volkercraig 9mo ago
I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?
- bulletsvshumans 9mo ago
  Hello fellow human!
- fragmede 9mo ago
  You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best. Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
- llmslave2 9mo ago
  The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!
- grim_io 9mo ago
  But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?
- ItsYan 9mo ago
  I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens. It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show. And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas. Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way. And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.
ronbenton 9mo ago
I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
- ctxc 9mo ago
  I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- foxfired 9mo ago
  If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls. But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed. When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
  - PaulRobinson 9mo ago
    Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026. The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
  - 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
crystal_revenge 9mo ago
> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years. Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight. Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level. In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users). OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.
- notarobot123 9mo ago
  Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing. Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)? An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.
PunchyHamster 9mo ago
That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"
ChadNauseam 9mo ago
Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way
hypfer 9mo ago
I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else. Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money. This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me. Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart. Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all. There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.
- wseqyrku 9mo ago
  Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
- cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
  I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can. They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!" One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
- aarondf 9mo ago
  Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV
  - 9mo ago
OCTAGRAM 9mo ago
Sounds like Fallout mechanics
- odie5533 9mo ago
  A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
  - sph 9mo ago
    You make your own luck. “80% of success is showing up”
FabCH 9mo ago
The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“. I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays? That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…
- codegladiator 9mo ago
  Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.
  - ahartmetz 9mo ago
    "Full stack" grinds my gears, too. Do they really work from sand to human factors?
    - altmanaltman 9mo ago
      I hate sand
- ayuhito 9mo ago
  I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky. Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure. I quite like the terminology the more I think about it. https://github.com/aarondfrancis https://github.com/aarondfrancis
  - aarondf 9mo ago
    Totally. An engineer, who (at the the time) works in marketing! Makes sense to me :D
- michaelt 9mo ago
  Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that. Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.
ayuhito 9mo ago
I strongly relate to this in many ways. Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used. E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more. It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- ghaff 9mo ago
  You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so. Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.
zwnow 9mo ago
Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint. Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products. So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.
realitydrift 9mo ago
[flagged]
dmezzetti 9mo ago
The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years. Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility. I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.
d4rkp4ttern 9mo ago
This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as: 1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others. 2. Build a solution to solve for it. 3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky. When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics. My personal examples of solving for a pain are: [A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid https://github.com/langroid/langroid [B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.
the_gipsy 9mo ago
I just want to share software with fellow nerds. I don't care about stars, community, getting famous, or getting a job.
- aarondf 9mo ago
  Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
charlieyu1 9mo ago
I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.
- jckahn 9mo ago
  I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.
- rrsp 9mo ago
  This is why it’s luck. Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
  - aarondf 9mo ago
    Very well said
angarg12 9mo ago
I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a read https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
neoCrimeLabs 9mo ago
I can attest at least some of this is true. My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted. My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up. Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author. --- Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.
oth001 9mo ago
It's also a great way to train megacorp AI models without compensation.
DustinBrett 9mo ago
This worked for me, but I just coded my own personal project in the open and would post its progress. I don't think it "took off" in the sense of people using it, but a lot of people became aware of it. It's still just a hobby project and I do it for fun.
Jaauthor 9mo ago
As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create. Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/ https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/
aarondf 9mo ago
Hey! I wrote the article a few years ago. Fun to see it on HN again. It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137 Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!
- narag 9mo ago
  Sorry to say, but the article is complete BS. Publishing is only desirable when your work is top-notch ;)
  - aarondf 9mo ago
    You had me in the first half! <3
why-o-why 9mo ago
it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play". while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with. but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.
- aarondf 9mo ago
  And guess how you make friends in high(er) places... by... publishing your work and making friends in your industry
  - why-o-why 9mo ago
    I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay. Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.
pendenthistory 9mo ago
My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.

331 points by magoghm 9mo ago

a_state_full 9mo ago

[dead]

beej71 9mo ago

This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.

magoghm 9mo ago
Same here
concernedctzn 9mo ago
oh wow, thanks again for the networking guide Beej!
- beej71 9mo ago
  You're welcome! :)

blibble 9mo ago

translated from marketing-droid-ese: > greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors! > remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob! > now, get back to work

glouwbug 9mo ago
I’m sure they probably train on private repos too
- dawnerd 9mo ago
  There's a reason there's a toggle to prevent matching on public code.
- throw-12-16 9mo ago
  self hosting git is very easy.
mawadev 9mo ago
99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??
aarondf 9mo ago
I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.

volkercraig 9mo ago

I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?

bulletsvshumans 9mo ago
Hello fellow human!
fragmede 9mo ago
You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best. Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?
llmslave2 9mo ago
The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!
grim_io 9mo ago
But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?
ItsYan 9mo ago
I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens. It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show. And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas. Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way. And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.

ronbenton 9mo ago

I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.

ctxc 9mo ago
I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
foxfired 9mo ago
If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls. But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed. When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.
- PaulRobinson 9mo ago
  Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026. The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.
- 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

crystal_revenge 9mo ago

> Having your OSS library take off All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world. I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years. Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight. Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level. In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users). OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.

notarobot123 9mo ago
Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing. Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)? An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.

PunchyHamster 9mo ago

That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"

ChadNauseam 9mo ago

Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way

hypfer 9mo ago

I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else. Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money. This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me. Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart. Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all. There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.

wseqyrku 9mo ago
Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.
cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can. They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!" One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.
aarondf 9mo ago
Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV
- 9mo ago

OCTAGRAM 9mo ago

Sounds like Fallout mechanics

odie5533 9mo ago
A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.
- sph 9mo ago
  You make your own luck. “80% of success is showing up”

FabCH 9mo ago

The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“. I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays? That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…

codegladiator 9mo ago
Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.
- ahartmetz 9mo ago
  "Full stack" grinds my gears, too. Do they really work from sand to human factors?
  - altmanaltman 9mo ago
    I hate sand
ayuhito 9mo ago
I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky. Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure. I quite like the terminology the more I think about it. https://github.com/aarondfrancis https://github.com/aarondfrancis
- aarondf 9mo ago
  Totally. An engineer, who (at the the time) works in marketing! Makes sense to me :D
michaelt 9mo ago
Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that. Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.

ayuhito 9mo ago

I strongly relate to this in many ways. Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used. E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more. It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.

deleted 9mo ago
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ghaff 9mo ago
You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so. Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.

zwnow 9mo ago

Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint. Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products. So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.

realitydrift 9mo ago

[flagged]

dmezzetti 9mo ago

The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years. Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility. I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.

d4rkp4ttern 9mo ago

This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as: 1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others. 2. Build a solution to solve for it. 3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky. When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics. My personal examples of solving for a pain are: [A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid https://github.com/langroid/langroid [B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.

the_gipsy 9mo ago

I just want to share software with fellow nerds. I don't care about stars, community, getting famous, or getting a job.

aarondf 9mo ago
Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works

deleted 9mo ago

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charlieyu1 9mo ago

I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.

jckahn 9mo ago
I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.
rrsp 9mo ago
This is why it’s luck. Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.
- aarondf 9mo ago
  Very well said

angarg12 9mo ago

I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a read https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surface-area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

neoCrimeLabs 9mo ago

I can attest at least some of this is true. My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted. My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up. Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author. --- Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.

oth001 9mo ago

It's also a great way to train megacorp AI models without compensation.

DustinBrett 9mo ago

This worked for me, but I just coded my own personal project in the open and would post its progress. I don't think it "took off" in the sense of people using it, but a lot of people became aware of it. It's still just a hobby project and I do it for fun.

Jaauthor 9mo ago

As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create. Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/ https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/

aarondf 9mo ago

Hey! I wrote the article a few years ago. Fun to see it on HN again. It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137 Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!

narag 9mo ago
Sorry to say, but the article is complete BS. Publishing is only desirable when your work is top-notch ;)
- aarondf 9mo ago
  You had me in the first half! <3

why-o-why 9mo ago

it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play". while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with. but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.

aarondf 9mo ago
And guess how you make friends in high(er) places... by... publishing your work and making friends in your industry
- why-o-why 9mo ago
  I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay. Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.

pendenthistory 9mo ago

My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.