That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to.

What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.

I used to bounce around like a molecule, colliding with everything untiI I discovered every crack and backdoor by sheer persistence.

I used to sit in my parents basement for 14 hours straight without a single thought unrelated to the screen in front of me entering my head.

I once made $5 in a day. The money was meaningless, just a way to keep score.

I used to be a hacker, I was driven by pure curiosity and the joy of finding out.

I once made $100 in a day. I could actually buy stuff in real life.

The money wasn’t important to me. I wasn’t concerned about my future, my career, or what other people thought.

I once made $1000 in a day. I probably don’t need a real job. That’s nice.

The money wasn’t that important to me. I just wanted the freedom to travel and keep hacking without having to work for someone.

I once made $27,000 in a day. My parents were proud of me because I was successful now.

The money wasn’t the most important thing to me. My expenses increased, but I lived below my means. I should probably invest in a tax deferred retirement account and make a linkedin profile.

I once made $1 million dollars in a day. I was now a professional internet entrepreneur.

I was no longer a hacker. I wanted to build a robust internet business with low overhead and diversified recurring revenue streams to be attractive for an eventual acquisition.

I was concerned with the landscape, the competition, and that guy on the cover of Inc magazine.

It became harder to figure things out. I felt like I was consuming twice the mental resources. I’m a successful internet entrepreneur now, and my identity is tied to the outcome.

Me today could never have done what I did back then. I don’t have the curiosity, the scrappiness, or the delusional optimism to even try.

To those just starting out who haven’t yet made a dollar and a cent, block out all the bullshit and hack.

So glad to see people doing silly things that in fact require skill. This is why I come to hackernews.

Keep up great work with this wonderful attitude!

We built tens of products, website and apps. The fun is always when you hack something new. When you manage to get the math right for an AR system for the first time, when you add zoom capabilities to your canvas with just two lines of code, or have the ability to embed youtube videos into your Android app before everyone else. When you create things out of nothing, when you share your creations and move to the next puzzle.

And once the hacking stops, although the product is pretty much finished and all that's left is the launch (which is a very important part, but not for the hacker in us), the fun is almost completely over. That is when fun ends, and the work starts for the hacker.

Hacking keeps us sane. And if you ever get to that point when you're stuck in a high position of your successful startup, look for role models that got the recipe right. pg always comes to mind.

Then I realized, "Perfect hacker news." Let me explain...

I try to approach my business just as the Mexicans in the story did. Not to make money, not to change the world, not to build cool stuff (well maybe just a little), but to genuinely help people. For a business person, this thinking is difficult and counter-intuitive.

Why do I do this? Because of my first mentor (and co-founder).

He was relentless in everything he did. I learned to stay up all night, keep calling on customers, and stay with tasks until we got somewhere with them. I remember many nights with thousands of invoices spread across the carpet, watching the graveyard shift run their machines, or scanning reports on-line, looking for clues. He wouldn't quit and the reason was always the same, "These people need help and we can help them. So we do. Don't worry about how hard it is or how much time we spend, it'll all work out in the end."

Sometimes I think that this is the attitude very successful people must have. It's too easy to give up when it's for ourselves, but much harder when we know that someone else needs us to get the thing done.

The Mexicans in the story reminded me of my mentor. A great lesson for anyone in business (or not). Thank you, OP.

Also, ever hacker working on a project shouldn't miss those few seconds in the video where he talks about emotion. That's the missing key into most projects I see. When you are busy trying to sell your technology and not the emotional impact it'll have on me -- you are missing out on one of the most powerful human motivators.

Seriously man, grow some skin. Wtf? "I feel incredibly sad that I wasted a few hours doing something that I can't see any value in, in hindsight"? I mean come on.

I'm really not trying to be overly harsh, but if you can't take the emotional turmoil of wasting a few hours on a harebrained idea, then you might want to bury yourself in a coffin filled with cotton, because this world is too harsh for you. Life is full of defeats and failures - and that's when everything goes well. A life without setbacks would be as bland and boring as an over-boiled cabbage leaf.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?

If you've not done that a 100 million times, you really shouldn't call yourself a "hacker" - or even a "man", for that matter.

PS: Otoh, if you have a tendency to go through very deep/high ups and downs with no apparent relationship with reality, you might want to get yourself checked for bipolar disorder.

PPS: Oh, and btw, it's dilemma.

"The idea being that you could focus on business processes without thinking about implementation details."

Bingo! In 18 months of sharing this concept, I think you may have closest to understanding it (or at least explaining your understanding).

"Then I discovered I hate running a business, not just dis-like but hate so much I never want to do it again :-("

I may be the yin for your yang. I can't wait to have a business to run and customers to serve! Seeing a customer achieve their goals with my support is like oxygen to me. I have to have it. I love hacking, but it's only a means to an end. If I had something to implement, I'd be implementing, not hacking.

Kindly put your email address on your profile and stay in touch.

I'm thinking this post is a thorough, and probably pretty spot on, analysis of the situation. A great problem statement. Ironically, it is a bit dystopian and defeatist, can we not turn that around?

So with a slight rewording at the end, I turn it into an Ask Hacker News:

What could a daring entrepreneur start doing to change the world into a place where society, and work, is better aligned with basic human needs?

Unless it is about starting a business and making money via ads.... Then they're willing to devote thousand of hours of their life thinking creatively about how to solve problems to "change the world".

I realize that this is news.ycombinator.com, but it's really sad that everything needs to end in entrepreneurism, startups, and money.

In hacker culture, the hack used to be the end, not money or power.

The Theo Deraadts and Werner Kochs are the real hackers of this world. They could have worked for anyone from Google to Facebook and have big paychecks. Instead, they accepted having more modest means to do what they love: hacking on code and being in a position where one can uphold their ethics (and the hacker ethic).

To my mind, solving an impossible sounding challenge is larger than ethics.