I made a super niche modding tool a few weeks ago; it's got one star on GitHub but the two nerds that have actually used it are delighted with it and I'm very happy about that. The notion another few in the future will find it is oddly nice to think about

I don’t think that’s hacker culture. It’s just the mainstream adoption of hacker culture, don’t let it replace the real thing in your mind. When lots and lots of people started playing candy crush on phones, it wasn’t gamer culture that changed, just the public perception of gaming.

There are still people out there who conform to the description you laid out. Are there lots and lots of them? No. It does seem to be a growing segment though.

(Not trying to gatekeep—anyone can be a hacker, no matter when they start. Just sharing some fun memories—I still remember upgrading from a 386 to a 486, then to a Pentium 133. Or the LAN parties. Or when IRC splits let you take over a popular channel for a while! Fun times! The new tools being built today, especially around AI, are just as exciting and remind me of the early days of the internet. There's so much more to create!)

You really should. Without gates everything of value is stolen and we're left with nothing but grifters.

Assuming you’re talking about building an app for other people, I personally would not, no. The market is sending a clear signal that it values the app at zero dollars. In other words, they don’t want it.

> If not then the problem you are solving is probably not important and a waste of your time anyway.

This is exactly the question that charging money answers: Do people just say they want your app or are they willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and actually buy it?

(Also note that not al things are paid for with money. Some are paid for with time or attention, so adjust for that if necessary.)

I'm sure this analogy is a bit absurd (and I'd love to see it torn apart), but I hope it opens readers to the premise that some highly desirable and important emotional, intellectual and social objects should exist even when there is no market for some of their forms

Edit: I can’t tell if you’re willfully misreading what I wrote or just trying to be cute. At no point did I assert that nothing should be created without a market. But if you’re creating something for other people then those other people are, by definition, your market, and you should pay close attention to signs that they actually want what you’ve created (like a willingness to trade dollars or time or attention).

Hacking doesn't require something to be built for other people.

Oh but those are very different things

An app that people would pay $0 is still more valuable (and might I say, a lot more valuable) than an app that people wouldn't install for free

Doing it to your own car is obviously very different from stealing someone else’s, however it’s not illegal to “hack” your own car. The theft part is what gets you in trouble.

I'm certain some car company will sue you if they get to know that you did.

I've always known hacking as a term specifically related to bypassing security in digital systems. Think Matthew Broderick gaining access to government networks via a phone line. This was hacking that would always get you in trouble if caught.

I'm not quite sure when "hacking" was repurposed as a term for using something in a way it wasn't intended ("life hacks" or "kitchen hacks", etc).

Now hacking is about challenging social norms? I'm very lost at this point, in an "old man shakes fist at clouds" kind of way.

Discussed on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255920 and more recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41496725

When I was a young adult and especially a teenager, I spent a lot of time making things out of pure desire to because I didn't have to think too much about my financial situation (present and future). That unfortunately gave way with age, and now ~15 years later whenever I engage with these activities there's a voice in the back of my head nagging, asking how doing those things instead of something that could potentially bring a financial return might negatively impact ability to achieve short term goals, tide over periods of economic uncertainty, have enough money for retirement, etc.

It's probably not the right way to think since personal projects that might seem unprofitable on their face can bring benefits in unexpected ways, but it's a problem nonetheless.

Of course, this isn’t how it actually seems to work - there is some truth to it for most people, but if you “overdraw” from one bucket and “neglect” another bucket, they will change sizes.

At 4 million in the bank (and various assets) you should be good to "escape," if by escape you mean "not need to sell your labor to live" anymore. 4 million gives you more than enough residuals to live off until death. Less if some of that is in property so you don't have to pay rent. Less if you retire to southeast Asia and engage in geographic arbitrage. You spent years paying for carrier groups and precision missiles, why not reap the rewards?

So far as I can judge, this is the only way the system permits escape.

If you're interested in permitless escape, one of my favorite introductions to the subject is "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow, a wonderful amalgamation of hacker culture, anarchism, sustainability, anti capitalism, and communism. Even if you think some of those are dirty words, if you're at all interested in EV tech, 3d printing, batteries, solar, zero trust ID, or transhumanism, you'll probably enjoy that book. He basically just answers every "but what if..." you could think of for a group of hackers living in an abandoned rust belt town.

Personally I'm right now very interested in food forests and tech projects researching local supply chain production of equipment, such as https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ the global village construction set and https://simplifier.neocities.org whoever this person is that's been documenting their efforts building things like solar panels and circuit boards in their garage from raw materials for nearly the last decade.

This does not mean that journalism isn't valuable enough to some people. It just means that the market for journalism shrank.

High-quality, investigative journalism is an essential institution for a functioning democracy, yet it's not valued by the people it is most important to: average citizens.

https://theworld.org/stories/2024/08/27/a-rise-in-water-rela...

Meaning that if you solve valuable problems you will [probably] make money. So spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$

But posting about all the money you are making is just silly unless you want a pat on the back. If you really are making bank and you want to get someone to buy you out, then start talking directly to the big players in your market. Then again, you won't have to, because they won't want to talk to you until you are a real threat to their business, at which point they'll be coming to you. Bragging to your early adopter community about your success just keeps them hyped for a bit.

Just make sure that you understand the the valuable problems are marketing and sales, not code.

Writing code is not hard. (Even an AI can do that.) Building a product is harder, but that's the easy part.

The harder part is reaching people who would benefit from consuming your value. Facebook and Google offer value to you in this space, and because this space is hard they make the big bucks.

Once you've reached the market convincing them to part with money is the next hard problem.

So yes, by all means solve a problem. Build the app, write the code. That is necessary but not sufficient.

>> not posting about $$

Honestly it doesn't really matter what you're posting about. Posting is marketing. Building an audience. It's one way, and yes feel free to do what works for you. Try and be different, don't just follow the herd.

Coding is easy. Marketing is hard.

The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.

The second someone says "tell me what you want" I'm out. If I have to tell them that I'm interested in x, and then they go investigate x, what value is that to anyone? What insight can they bring to me about the topic of x? Why should I care what they have to say about x when 2 seconds ago they had no knowledge of it? No one's mere personality is so awesome that just having them do the same exact google search I can do and read the same exact intro material I can read and blatting out their initial reactions based on just that, results in something worthwhile.

Whether your numbers (or your sales) are good or bad, it is a factor to consider, but it can't be the fundamental point of your existence. You have to have some legitimate point that stands on it's own, and only then, maybe, you can live off of it somehow.

If you only care that you somehow get money, and don't care how, what value is that to me? Why would I as a customer give you money for anything? Even if you were trying to pander to exactly what I said I wanted, if I don't perceive that you are deeply knowldgeable and insightful and experienced in that topic, or at least maybe new but genuinely interested in working in that field or on that problem, but just trying to say yes to anything, no way in the world am I choosing you to supply that need.

MrBeast's leaked production document is pretty much exactly this: trying to anticipate what people will click on, what will go viral, and throwing all their weight behind it.

Now it's fair to say that you, personally, place no value in viral content such as that. On the other hand, it's clearly not the case that this content is of no value to anyone. Very broad-based entertainment like this is about providing a small amount of value to a very large number of people.

Whether this is good or bad for society is a different question. Markets have never been able to solve that problem.

Money often comes as a side effect but not the motivation that drives you to build in the first place.

The thing that keeps you in the door and makes usage grow is the quality of life. Especially in the business world, most software is terrible. If people like using your software, they will tell others about it and they will be more accepting when things inevitably go wrong. The ease of use of our software and the immediate service we provide when customers ask for help are time and again the things they say keep them using our tools. With good support, even a frustrated bug report can turn into a happy experience.

But in most cases you don't see quality of life improvements unless you also get users.

In other words building it is not enough. Lives need to use it to be improved.

Monetizing an app forces you to concentrate on articulating that value. It frees up resources (ie money) to spend on spreading the word. It offers you feedback on whether this is a meaningful use of your time or not.

Dont get me wrong. An app can add value to a single person. You can give it away for free. There's nothing wrong with that.

Somehow, this suggests that perhaps your rubric needs amending.

The former is the nature of data itself, the latter having come into the existence the first time a creature with more than a handful of neurons was capable of making the choice to take what was right in front of it as opposed to venturing far afield for something similar. Both predate humans by millions of years at the least, and do not require the abstractions of market and money, or even the homo sapiens which first coined these concepts.

While these two give rise to the freeloading scamp who attempts to read entire magazine at the news stand if they can get away with it, the printing press or coinage are not specifically required, and, if we were to ever meet other aliens with some kind of civilization, they would likely have situations parallel enough to end up in our eventual xenoanthropology textbooks. Assuming they're not so busy coming up with their own copies of To Serve Man that we haven't the time for us to write said texts.

People pay for every one of those things.

Fastmail, Garmin, Slack etc. WhatsApp had a paid model until Facebook bought it.

I labor in this industry because I enjoy the work and it pays better than anything else I could do, and I try to work for companies doing good things, but I have some misgivings about seeing unpaid open source work in the same light as volunteering. To be clear, as an engineer who benefits I'm grateful, but I'd rather developers were compensated fairly.

EDIT: given the down votes, let me pose it as a question--Is software obviously a public good? Are we actually making things better on balance?

Then media started using it to mean "computer criminal", which was annoying.

Then "I don't code I solve problems" tech bros coopted it, which is worse. Looks like now you're a hacker if you identify a need and monetize it.

I am fully cognizant I am writing this on a VC-backed founder oriented site called Hacker News, but I like to think there's still some good ol hacker spirit here, YC being named after an extremely nerdy thing and not "SaaS Launchpad" or somesuch.

(yes yes old man yelling at cloud, get off my lawn, etc)

Edit: Deleted a claim that was probably stronger than I meant.

They’re entrepreneurs who don’t really care what you call them. Of course people will try to make money, not everyone can afford to (or is willing to) maintain whole side projects for fun. Some people have side projects unrelated to their main line of work.

If you solve valuable problems you will make money.

If you have a side project then spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$

Unfortunately, like a casino a lot of tech is an illusion, e.g. social media- you walk in and it’s flashy and exciting, but you walk out having lost hours of your time and possibly a few brain cells.

So the attention combined with the desire to escape the grind which is only offered in combination by tech founder, has nearly fully been consumed in the broader machine of capitalism.

When we ran out of stored resources to consume, we unsustainably consumed our own attention, and then when that was gone, we turned our attention to the money machine that made it possible, and started eating that.

Most hackers some 20 years ago weren't worried about money, so they could naturally explore their curiosities in their free time. Hustle culture in general seems to rise and fall inversely to the economic situtation, so I'm not too surprised that we're shifting to $$ over curiosity at the moment.