[tikej]

And to me this is the essence of hacking and hacker culture, not “how do I create MVP from my idea and become an entrepreneur” or “this and that in company XYZ” mindset.

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!

[smt88]

Not sure why you need to put down entrepreneurs while praising this kid.

Hacking a company together is really hard. Like tech hacking, it requires intelligence, creativity, and persistence.

There's no reason we can't read about and respect both on this site.

[kick]

The concern is in the appropriation of the term 'hacker'.

He's not putting anything or anyone down, he's saying that this is hacking, and MBA posts of acronym soup aren't.

I think his implied conclusion is probably wrong-ish (both are arguably right for HN, even if I vastly prefer this), but he's right in that this is hacking.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

100% agree. Winamp was a hacker's application. iTunes is a company's application.

[rapind]

One could argue WeWork hacked unicorns.

[toofy]

One could argue anything they like, it doesn’t mean their argument (or sophistry in general) leads to a better acquiring of knowledge through discussion.

In my opinion, the gp’s discussion is one worth having.

[Barrin92]

hacking culture was not just about the skills it takes to participate, it was also about values. One of them, openness and sharing information. open protocols over closed walls.

entrepreneurship today in particular in tech often tries to capitalise on the latter rather than the former, at least most of the time. Adopting the aesthetics of hacker culture to further institutions that could not be more damaging to an open ecosystem is already more common than actual 'hacking'.

[gitgud]

They seem to be antithetical ideas somehow.

Business inherently relies on secrecy (proprietary stuff). Hackers try to make secret things open.

[wwright]

What makes you think that business inherently relies on secrecy?

[gitgud]

All business is based on some kind of upper hand right? Secrecy is usually the root of that upper hand.

Sometimes you can reveal your "secret sauce" but patents/copyright/regulation will protect it from being stolen. So the "secret sauce" is still what separates you from the other businesses...

It makes sense in my head, but maybe I'm rambling... I'll try and write a blog post to explain my thoughts a bit better.

Can you think of a business that is entirely transparent?

[wwright]

I think the framing is kind of off.

Being a successful business doesn’t mean that you must be secretive about your business operations. I don’t think it requires an “upper hand” either. Those may be key to out-competing other businesses in some way, but that is different than being successful. (Capital culture makes us think of a “successful business” as one that makes insane amounts of money, rather than one that achieves a goal.)

Of course, all businesses realistically will have some secrets, but those may often be separate from the business operations. For example, it would probably be very difficult to be public about all of your HR details, or expose all of your internal phone numbers/emails/physical addresses (humans just like basic privacy).

But many local businesses can probably operate just fine without being very secretive. There was a place in my hometown I loved that served shakes, cheese sticks, and cheeseburgers. I don’t think he did anything special that needed to be kept secret. People just like a nice diner with a decent burger.

[ddevault]

Startup culture is basically the opposite of hacker culture. As kick hints to, the term has been appropriated. This site has been dubiously hackish from the start.

[enos_feedler]

Hacking together a product takes intelligence, creativity and persistence. Hacking together a company takes empathy, honesty, respect, humility, etc. It's about the people and building a team. I don't associate this with "hacking" at all.

[smt88]

This is a distinction without a difference. When to start a new company, you hack together both a product and a company.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Comma.ai which is used in the demo is a for-profit company that makes a sellable product.

[dddbbb]

Yes, but the author is a student making use of their open source software. I think that's in the spirit of hacking.

[Erlich_Bachman]

The point is that the original topic is against "startups" where in this example, 99% of work was done inside precisely an organization like a startup, and only the resting 1% being work of a student who simply applied a ready-made solution to his situation. The point is, regardless of hacker culture, there is nothing wrong with startup culture, it often produces great products and technology.

[littlemtman]

Yes the comma two https://comma.ai/shop/products/comma-two-devkit. If you have a newer Honda, Toyota etc. you can try it in real life !

Won't be working on your Aviato car, I am sorry :)

[dicknuckle]

There's plenty of hackers working on bringing this to old vehicles. One guy got it working on his old VW Vanagon/Syncro. https://github.com/Lukilink/openpilot/blob/071_OC_WATER/READ...

[nunja]

But please don't try it on a real road. Find a spot where it can't endanger fellows. It's possible to find those places.

[dicknuckle]

There's hundreds of people using these on public roadways. Check out the official Discord and the various Community Discords centered around it.

[commaai]

Over 1,000 people just today. A couple thousand every week.

In addition to running on a laptop, openpilot also runs on a phone for easy mounting in your car.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot

[Miraste]

Your FAQ says Comma "openpilot performs the functions of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC)" and my 2020 Corolla is supported-but it already has those features. I read through the site and I don't see the value proposition. Is it that Comma does a better job of it?

[littlemtman]

Thank you very much !

[umeshunni]

WSJ had an interesting article the other day about why there are fewer startups now - https://www.wsj.com/articles/six-theories-on-why-fast-growin...

tl;dr is that people are now more motivated by the idea of being an entrepreneur than by having a great business concept.

[holografix]

I think Scott Galloway has some very valuable input on this topic. I might do it a disservice by trying to to;dr it here but basically there is very little if any room for innovation left when the big monopolies are currently very efficient in “featuring” your whole startup and through economies of scale (not having to turn a profit) they’ll eliminate you from the market it acquire you if they like the talent.

[skrebbel]

I see your point and I agree with it. But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I'd be way richer right now if I had just taken a job at some bigco. Or kept doing consulting.

I don't feel that what I'm doing right now (building a startup because I can) is fundamentally different from my demoscene past (coding computer graphics because I could). Sure, some startups make some people obscenely rich, but the vast majority don't :-) It's not too different from art or AI hobbying or gaming or game modding in that sense.

[alexeichemenda]

> But I also want to remark that in many ways, building a company is also a silly thing that in fact requires skill.

It is - Tikej's point isn't that it's not a skill - but rather that it's not the right place to share these. Think of the difference between a "Startup News" and "Hacker News". Hacker news used to be very deep on tech topics, now those deep topic have become more rare.

[bravura]

I remember an early pg quote where he noted that being a hacker isn’t supposed to be limit to coding or tech even, but all topics that hackers are drawn to and can ply their hacking in. Social hacking to bootstrap a userbase is a on-topic as far as that quote is concerned [edit: errant autocorrect]

[edouard-harris]

Interestingly, Hacker News used to be called Startup News in the early days.

[BrandonM]

Indeed, we’ve come full (half?) circle. IIRC, it was renamed to Hacker News in part to discourage meta-discussion on intellectually stimulating posts, questioning why the front page had so many posts that weren’t about startups. Now we are instead discussing startup post fatigue.

[dang]

You can see the reasoning here (Aug 2007): https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. Basically, pg got bored reading about nothing but startups.

[ximeng]

Interesting the idea that the original plan was that your votes count for more if you vote for the right kind of stories. Would seem to create an echo chamber effect where what’s already popular stays popular and new stuff doesn’t.

[woah]

Hacker News has always been the message board of the most famous startup accelerator out there.

[owlninja]

Very true, but it is hosted by ycombinator which exists to fund startups.

[littlemtman]

Hopefully I could bring you a deep tech topic !

[ehnto]

I imagine the OP is just bored of the generic startup technology churn cycle. It can feel as though the majority of "tech stack" articles on HN are just Yet Another Web Application Tool. We have solved making web applications so hard that we have ascended to meta-tools, tools that manage our tools or use our tools for us.

It is refreshing to be reminded of the myriad of ways computers can interact with the world! I recently refreshed my love for technology by getting into 3D printing, it's nice to have a tangible result for my efforts behind the keyboard. The machine is surprisingly rudimentary as well, and reminds me of old school CNC machines, so it's relaxing in the way driving a classic car can be. You can understand all the parts and their purpose intuitively, as they operate in the real world.