I moved to San Francisco a few months ago. In my second week in the city, I went to a party and someone I had never met before opened a conversation with "What do you care most about in life?"
After a second of thinking, I answered "Having fun."
I asked him the same question back and he said "Having an impact on the world."
Although I don't think about it that much, I realized that I personally didn't care that much about my impact on the world. Any impact that I create would simply be a byproduct of me pursuing whatever activities I find fun.
Moreover, a positive impact in my eyes might end up being a negative impact to others. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
You can also desire both. I would ideally like to have an impact on the world while having fun. That said, the reason I want to have an impact on the world is because I like helping people, and helping people is fun for me; constant problem solving and seeing other people helped as a result is extremely rewarding, and simultaneously fun.
I remember Vonnegut saying that on a PBS interview quite a few years back now, but I didn't realize it was in one of his books. I'm happy to entertain people who want to tell me different, but so far no one has been able to convince me. Most people don't seem to think it's the case though.
I feel the same way, no one has been really able to tell me I should think differently so I keep that top of mind. Sure, there are some genuinely important things that can be counted on one hand. The rest are just window dressing and are just me farting around, mostly.
I mean its a pretty personal thing - similar to most moral beliefs. At the end of the day it mostly comes down to "I believe what i believe about purpose because i believe it"
Cynically I believe that person to be judgmental and self-absorbed in their motives for asking the question at the party. They didn't care about your answer, they wanted you to ask them the same in return so they could feel good about themself. It's all too typical in SF in my experience. That said, I love living in a city where people are genuinely passionate about making things better (at least in their estimation).
The context of the situation. If you're at a party you're there to meet people and have a good time. Plenty of deep conversations have been had at parties, but they rarely start out that personal.
Starting a conversation with a question like that means the other person will have to reflect it back to you, which means you get to answer however you like. If the person wasn't self-absorbed, they could have answered like "I want to be helpful to others" or something along those lines.
It's not the kind of thing you ask a stranger at most parties. It's a challenge and who goes to a party to be challenged, and who does not know that?
It's not like the idle "So what do you do?" which can be an intentional challenge but usually is idle and innocent.
It's rude and almost certainly caused by self-absorption and self-importance as they said.
Any conversation could randomly wander onto a topic where the question becomes topical, so it's not that the question can never be asked legitimately at a party, but it's not normal.
That answer is given unironically too often in my circle. "Changing the world" is a cliche among the VC crowd, "pussy and money" is a cliche in the business world.
Yeah, I asked him to elaborate, although I don't remember his answer in detail. He said something about AI safety and making sure that AI is used for good and not evil.
I don't want to strawman him, though. I simply don't remember his answer in detail.
When I used to attend in-person network events, I was sometimes asked "what do you care about?"
Which, to me, tagged them as people who weren't all that interested in you, but really wanted you to ask the same question back so they could feel good about their answer, e.g. "having an impact" or "making the world a better place."
My answer to that question was always "fucking around and finding out."
But more often than not, people would ask, "what is it you do?"
And my answer to that was always "whatever the fuck I want to, it makes money and everyone goes home happy."
Such a question is so context-dependent that it becomes fairly meaningless. For example, in some cases (such as imminent risk of drowning due to a being in a capsized boat), your next breath of air will be the thing you care most about in life. If a person has a new baby, taking care of that baby tends to become the thing they care most about in life. And so on.
It's the kind of question people are instructed to ask in a marketing/networking tutorial, i.e. 'when meeting the client, try to find out what makes the client tick, via asking big picture questions and engaging in active listening.'
At the end of the day we’re all just hitting rocks against something and trying to make it do something.
Sometimes hitting rocks or making things is considered a craft or a hobby, like a blacksmith swinging their hammer against the hot iron. Each impact forging the steel into your desired shape.
Hammers or rocks are just tools like any other craftsman or hobbyist uses in their work.
Pens and keyboards don’t make great hammers, but you don’t always have the best tools for the job. We all
know how it gets. When you get in a pinch and something is laying there that fits the puzzle. So if it looks like it will work you gotta pick it up and swing.
Pottery and poetry are hobbies, should world domination be any different?
I help around Japanese language learning communities and one of the core tenets of a successful "language learning career" is being able to enjoy doing stuff with the language without necessarily trying to learn the language. Learning the language becomes a byproduct of having fun with it.
For this reason, I have this kind of conversation almost daily with people asking for help in studying or just ways to "find motivation", etc. I always ask them "Why are you learning Japanese?".
The amount of answers I get that revolve around the idea of "I want to get better at it" always amaze me. I'm the kind of person that just does things because I want to have fun. I learned Japanese because I enjoy doing stuff in Japanese. I never cared about learning Japanese, it just happened that doing so made it fun for me in the process. And yet there's people out there whose entire goal of learning Japanese is to "learn Japanese"... I will personally never understand that mentality myself, it's very puzzling.
Maybe that's lost in the brevity of answers of the people you talked to, but some things I know I only have fun doing when I'm (moderately) good at it. Talking to someone in a different language and having to think about every second word is not fun. Being able to talk and only having to think about a word every few sentences is fun. Same for sports or whatever activity. You think you like it but you're so bad that it's not fun. You try to improve in order to have fun.
Then the goal was all the things the language enables, not the language itself. You want to talk with people who speak that language. You want to function in an environment written in that language.
Even a language theorist researcher who learns a language just to study the language itself with no practical use planned, is still learning it for some other rrason, which is to study it's rules and construction and correlate that with other languages and information systems etc.
Even someone who learns a language not to use it and not even to study it, but merely as mental excercise, has that other reason, mental excercise.
> You want to talk with people who speak that language
No, there's a good chance I can talk to those people in a common language, mostly English. I didn't say my explanation was valid for 100% of the cases, only that it's a bit like that for me and there's a chance other people feel the same.
"I want to talk to people" and "I want to talk to people in their native language when I visit their country" are related, not a complete match. And honestly, I think that borders on overanalyzing. I am sure I am learning languages because I have fun doing it, but I also have fun having mastered a certain level.
Ugh. I think my reply would be something like "I'll trade you, Why did you come to a party?" Or "Why do you ask a question like that at parties?" or maybe just "Why do you ask?". Somehow bounce that right back on them. Force them to declare their own odious transparent self-important nature, or wriggle on the hook trying not to.
I really feel this. For me, there is nothing more exhilarating than seeing a project going from just an idea to adding features and then having a somewhat working product. Some of the most fun weeks of my life have been focused on spending almost all my waking time putting some project together and learning the skills necessary to bring an idea to life.
Once the project kinda works, I often lose interest - but who cares? There is always the next idea that comes along to create.
I agree completely. I have so many half-started projects that never get finished, but I learned a lot along the way, and that's what matters. Some do get 'finished' at least to a state where I can use them, but my ADHD lends itself well to the former. :)
I go all the way to “full-fat” release. Documentation, tests, ultra-high Quality, etc. I even set up social media cards on my repos.
I do every one of my projects -even the “farting around” ones- as if I were under contract with a Fortune 50 company.
I know it sounds crazy, but I guess I’m a completionist. I also like to establish the habit of ship. It’s important to do everything as if it will ship, so the stuff that actually does ship happens almost effortlessly.
Just this morning, I attended a video class, on Apple’s new DocC documentation generator. I plan to massively improve the developer docs for my projects, going forward.
I wish I knew more people like you. I do this too knowing damn well nobody reads my docs or notices the card, they're spoonfed and expect it. Still going to keep doing it though.
Love this comment. And this resonates with me - I see the trajectory of my life as basically a series of completed software projects, which I enjoy building, although often also for financial gain. Much like how a professional artist will create a series of paintings throughout their life.
I think when people ask "why are you doing this" what they are really asking is:
Why are you showing this to me?
Especially for things that are really common or totally undocumented. E.g. i'm glad you are having fun making a commandline calculator in python, but im not sure why you posted it to show hn. Or alternatively - im glad you are having fun making whatever you are, but if you cant even write 1 paragraph describing what your program is intended to do, i dont know why you are showing it off.
Alternatively, occassionally people are asking "why do you find this fun?". Everyone gets joy out of different things, but if you show something off and then give no context, its a bit weird. Most people expect an explanation on why whatever you are doing is interesting or meaningful to you.
I think those people might be looking for a community of creators who enjoy showing things off to each other. Ideally, the command line calculator in python would be accompanied by a blog post explaining either why the project is important, or what the creator learned by making it.
it may be as simple as them just being excited. I sure was when I wrote my first program and many people don't have anyone else to show it to. The world is so full of things to passively consume that someone building anything, no matter how scuffed or with little explanation does in my opinion not really deserved to be treated abrasively.
Agreed, but a pet peeve is when you ask a question on StackOverflow, and get asked why you're doing it, the answer to which isn't need to respond to the post at all. But they want to know. Fine. Fair enough. So you tell them, and then they proceed to tell you that that's not what you should do, and instead should do something else.
So now you have multiple comments in your post that has nothing to do with anything. It's just noise and a waste of time.
Also, maybe I have a very good reason for why I want to do something and I'm not really willing to tell the world because proprietary in nature.
People are just overly nosey, or as usual, they understand that your domain is their domain, so we have have the same problems :)
The motivations you ascribe to the SO respondents and the description of the nature of comments are not congruent with reality. If you cannot fathom where you went wrong in your assumptions, then I have a small psychological experiment for you: try being a respondent for some time instead of only a supplicant.
I think there's a third reason, which is insecurity. "Why is it that you find coding so fun". "Why can you spend all your free time coding when I can't muster 20 minutes without getting bored". etc..
I have this sometimes. It feels like if only I loved to code all the time I'd be much better at my job and be more respected / better paid / higher titled etc..
Truth is it's ok to not love coding and not want to do it on the side. It's also ok to love to code and do it 24/7. We need to be empathetic with our own selves and our own passions/interests :)
I love to code, but pretty much only when i am unemployed. There is just only so much coding i can do in a day before becoming a crazy person.
If it helps, i dont think my love of coding has really helped me at work. It just makes work seem more boring compared to the coding i would actually like to do, and makes work/life balance more challenging. :)
Often the blog post / program / whatever was not shared by the author. It was discovered by someone else. It was public, but not intended to have a big HN conversation.
Sure, although i think that just means the question is better directed to the person who shared it rather than the person who wrote it.
And its not neccesarily a negative question either - i might actually want to know what part of this project sparked excitement so i can share in that excitement.
Mark Zuckerberg on the creators of The Social Network:
"They [the film's creators] just can't wrap their head around the idea that someone might build something because they like building things". [1]
This led to an interesting exchange where, iirc, Aaron Sorkin replied that this is in fact exactly what Hollywood people do: make things up just for the sake of it.
I think that in Hollywood just as in software, there is a mix of people who create things to create, people who create things because creations are valuable and come with associated money and power and fame, and people who fall somewhere in-between.
It's fun to think of famous directors on this spectrum. For some reason, the "I do it for the money" part of the spectrum seems vaguely disreputable, even if it does make good art (major video game studios come to mind, along with giant cinematic franchises like MCU/Star Wars/etc).
It's interesting when very elaborate art (that requires actual artistry) becomes an industrial product, output from a gigantic megaindustry with thousands of people in hundreds of supply-chain corporations beholden to fiduciary duty.
Whenever I ask “why did you build this?”, the answer “just for fun” is one that I find admirable. Replies like this just punish curious conversation between hackers.
The lack of a human face and inflections in voice can make anything come across as passive aggressive. Reading the question "why did you build this" can come across as many different ways, including condescending.
It wouldn't need to exist if so many other people in our communities didn't ask "why did you build this?" with implied disdain. Just count how many times you see a link to that horrible X_CD "Standards" webcomic where the author's self-insert is always the Smartest Guy In The Room because he knows better than to ever create anything.
Interesting, I guess I've never seen anyone upset about xkcd before.
I'm not sure if "author" here refers to the HN comment author or Munroe, but the latter is hard for me to view as "knowing better than to ever create anything", given authoring 1000+ webcomics and all.
What a perfect opportunity to discuss something that drives me absolutely nuts. The term "hacker" being used so liberally (especially here, despite the name).
No, getting your app launched does not make you a hacker. Being the CEO of a startup does not make you a hacker. Writing a website does not make you a hacker. In fact, in my opinion, these things are against the very spirit of the hacker.
A hacker is someone who creatively solves a problem, usually in an unexpected way. Sometimes, this is "hacking" together parts of smaller systems to create something novel and unique. The religious text of such hackers, the Jargon File, says so. Hence, why the above are not hackers. Gluing frameworks together does not make a hacker. Hijacking your CANBUS system to make your car better does. In fact, it would seem commenters here despise the idea of the hacker... there are so many posts that are either ambivalent or downright malicious towards people suggesting using a different language, trying a different technique, or whatever. To use the authors term the dominant mentality is unfortunately one of "what does this do for me" or "how can I make money with this". It seems like every young developer I talk to is obsessed with making the next big app in $FRAMEWORK or whatever. It's getting harder to find people who write code for the love of the art.
The author is correct except in his use of the term hacker. I find it distasteful to attribute the average MBA-cum-developer a title as important as hacker. The snark is deserved. Our field has been hijacked by normies. This post is an important reminder of that.
Sometimes I get the urge to stick my hand on the metaphorical stove and write my own init system. I know better options exist, I love openRC and sysVinit, but I just have to know.
I remember posting https://imgz.org here when I made it. The vast majority of people got the joke and liked it, but some people couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that maybe I made it for me and really don't care if people use it.
They insisted that my stance was a marketing ploy when no, I made this for fun, I'm showing it to you so you can laugh, and I really don't care if you use it.
I retired about a year ago. At first, I didn't want to code at all. I spent a lot of time making stuff from balsa. I enjoy that.
Somewhere along the line, perhaps getting tired of cutting balsa, I got the itch to write a game repurposing an old "voxel" algorithm.
Later, after that project was a wrap, I got another idea to write a "TV app" and got to work on that. It was a little weird writing MacOS code again — though less than a year from retirement I found myself trying to remember how to set up an NSCollectionView, some of the more esoteric aspects of Swift... (But I'm also getting old too.)
The author of the article is correct. I started coding decades ago because it was fun. (More specifically, I imagined computer games and they weren't going to write themselves — the fun was seeing the thing come to life so to speak.)
And correct too — while as a career it did become "work", now that I can code for fun again I am back to enjoying it a lot.
I hope I don't need to wait until retirement to have enough energy to code for fun again. It's still quite far off.
I still do some coding for fun, but I can't spend more than a weekend on a project without feeling like my time and effort could go towards work instead, especially since I get to do my own projects at work too. But they're not exactly voxel engines or roguelikes.
In my free time I guess I found other things more appealing than coding when I was still employed as a coder. I did a lot of woodworking, some electronics, some art.
I dabbled occasionally in code – learned Javascript because I wanted to write a web-solitaire game. But it was pretty infrequent. I wish I had more mental energy to code in off-hours because I learned a lot being exposed to Javascript, have learned even more after retirement by learning Python....
My job had consisted of Objective-C and Swift almost exclusively (picked up some SQL as well, parsed a lot of file formats and learned those). So it was refreshing to learn other languages have some cool libraries, interesting ways of doing things. I see now where a lot of Swift borrowed from.
I've always thought I just got really, really lucky that my favorite activity/hobby in the world ended up paying well. And I am - I'm incredibly fortunate that that's a reality.
I had no idea when I was 12 years old writing silly video games (shoutout to [BYOND](https://www.byond.com), something I'm near-certain nobody on Hacker News has ever come across), that it was a venture that made money, let alone that it would culminate in a very fruitful and happy career (that I'm still very much early into). I oftentimes feel that I still get to just do what I love, and somebody is willing to pay me well for that.
But most of the side projects I want to work on don't align with my company, or its vision. So I still make them. I hack away at small projects that are over-engineered because it's fun, or really only target a usecase I have. They aren't production-quality changes, but they work for me, and I enjoy working on them.
When I entered the world of Silicon Valley, I realized how naive I was thta many people enter this career because it is well-paying, despite if they actually enjoy the process.
Not to get too sentimental here, but code is still magic to me. I'm just amazed that all of this works. To a small degree it bothers me that others just see this craft as an ends to a means (but then I remember that they aren't really hurting me, or this field, so it's OK, and I move on).
>If one only spends time on Hacker News, or other startup-oriented news sites, they might believe that everyone is working on their next multi-million-dollar startup and/or exit strategy
This might have been true a decade ago...now I don't really see it as much
Way more cynicism (though that's always been present) about tech and business overall than it used to be around here.
I mean yes. I don't program for fun as much as I do other things, but when I find some annoyance which I grumble, "I could fucking write a better X!" and then I actually do it, it's very satisfying.
Example: I was trying to find a Windows (or Android) platform podcast downloader so I could pull down all episodes of a particular podcast, and then get the raw files to put on whatever device, I discovered that the one I used to use way back was hopelessly broken. The remaining podcast downloaders either:
1. Sucked
2. Required an account for some goddamn reason
3. Both
I had written something to scrape a podcast in a scripting language for a project helping out a friend (downloading and speech-to-text converting her sister's podcast to provide a transcript of when she was getting shit-talked on the internet), and thought I could do something much cleaner and usable.
In about 30 minutes I had a downloader which worked well enough for the podcast I wanted. It was about 20ish lines of code. Drunk on my own sense of power, I tried it on another podcast, and found a few corner cases and fixed them. 60ish lines, and about 1:15 invested.
I tried more and more podcasts, and put in another 9-10 hours or so. I'm at 100sh lines. I have a lot more corner cases handled (inconsistency in the XML, different file extensions, etc.) and it now basically works close to 100% of the time well enough for me.
When you build your own tools, and then you use your own tools, it's like having a superpower. Like having an extra set of hands. The journey too is fun, solving problems.
I looked a the page. I read through the statement. I looked for a link. I found only a superficial tiny one to his personal page that frankly looks amazingly bad in a good way. The first thought that went through my brain was "what are you trying to sell me?" I may have put an expletive or two in there. I have become jaded and cynical because there are so few genuine people who are building stuff for fun. Or so it seems. Perhaps the echo chamber is skewing my perception.
I love building stuff just for fun.
I built a stop watch desktop application the other week.
Because I could.
It doesn't do much, but it is my stop watch application that works precisely how I want my stop watch application to work. It starts, it stops, it counts laps, it has big buttons that work on a touch screen, it fills the entire screen when launched, it records daily logs in a JSON file and reloads the logs when the application starts up, it uses computer vision from the door camera to detect when I leave the house, alone, with the wife, with the dog, with the wife and the dog, it looks at my shoes, it figures out if I am "walking laps" based on whether I walked past the front door camera several times and a heuristic that figures out "that's about the right number of seconds of what a lap takes to do" and it counts those laps up automatically, it doesn't require a server, it isn't in the cloud, it doesn't collect analytics, and it doesn't need lots of permissions.
I built it "just for fun."
I am currently building a task list device & application. It's got buttons, and digital displays, and a retro-cool look.
And it is "just for fun."
When people ask me "why are you building this?" really they're saying "why are you showing me? why should I care? I don't like it. this doesn't seem like a productive pursuit."
To put this in the words of Dr Frankenfurter, "I didn't make him, for you."
The comparison with a poet (or a musician) is most apt. It was made in 1975; since then, it has only become much more apt. Also, software engineering is the closest thing to magic which you can do unironically and non-delusionally.
As for being a hacker: blessed are those who have free time. (And mostly younger.)
My goal when writing anything is to provide a solution, something that makes things easier than what can be currently done today. I've written hundreds of applications that no one uses except me. It's nice when you write something that other people find useful for their own purposes. Making money is a nice side effect of providing useful software that other people love.
“Why the hell would we want to [launch an anvil 100 feet in the air]? I get that a lot from women y'know. Women say why would you want to do that? and I don't know other than it just need launchin' sumpin' that wadn't intended to be launched.”
I don't do it for fun and I don't do it for profit. I don't breathe code, most of my time is spent present in the moment in my real life.
I do it to create things simply because I want them to exist. Even when it isn't fun. Most often because I will find them useful, sometimes just because others might.
Coincidentally, I was trying to convince some people recently that "just for fun" is not the same as "shoddy".
For instance, a syllabus can make learning anything more fun, in my opinion (even though coming up with one may require some effort). [1]
If you do something "just for fun", it *sounds* like no real effort is put... But doing anything at high performance is more fun that doing it without too much effort. I think there's confusion about this point some times.
Corollary: to make anything you are learning more fun... always have a syllabus! (even if you need to create one yourself).
If you create a syllabus yourself, don't do it shoddily, please... :-p.
After a second of thinking, I answered "Having fun."
I asked him the same question back and he said "Having an impact on the world."
Although I don't think about it that much, I realized that I personally didn't care that much about my impact on the world. Any impact that I create would simply be a byproduct of me pursuing whatever activities I find fun.
Moreover, a positive impact in my eyes might end up being a negative impact to others. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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