[teaspoon]

For one thing, you should take phrases like "weekend project" with a grain of salt. People who share their projects on HN know they're facing a tough crowd, and understating their time investment is one way to deflect the inevitable nitpicks. Add to that the typical hacker bravado factor, and you can assume the real figure is well more than whatever you read.

That's not to say that anyone is being deliberately dishonest. Most "weekend" projects borrow code from weekday jobs, layouts from ThemeForest, and ideas from weeks of idle brainstorming. It's easy to forget in retrospect all of the time that went into laying that groundwork.

[mono]

Completely agree. "Weekend" projects don't come up when you wake up on Saturday morning and are ready for sale on Monday.

My comment was caused as I observe an increasing number of these "weekend" or "side-project" messages at HN. For me it looks like the authors are too cautious to stand for their project as something that took all their attention and that still may have mistakes.

What follows is an inflationary trend that most "Show HN" posts are declared as minute-jobs and we lose the open culture of a showroom, where the other mates take your work serious and try to positively criticise it. Not long, and we have sidecars only.

I think it is not important how long one needs for a project shown here. The message transported with the timeline is else "look I'm a genious" or "sorry, all the remaining bugs are from a lack of time".

I have to remark, that I don't think of any particular posts in the last time and I know that I may include projects in my generalization that don't deserve it. This hasn't been my intention. And my original confession to be a bad hacker is still valid!