[ok_dad]

I would love to work on open source, well designed, free software to control distributed energy resources and building load. Currently I've worked for several companies doing this, but I think that closed source, non free software will never allow us to truly reach the full electrification and decarbonization we need, and the power grid, both generation and transmission, is only getting more complex to manage with the old school tech approaches I've seen. I want to build the free and open OS for the distributed grid, but I need to support my family first.

This isn't to beg, but imagine all the others who have similar stories to the above, like in medicine or education, and don't have the freedom to actually do those things because they are instead pouring effort into adtech or something else that's not as important to the world (no ad trolls please, it's just an example). Instead, we have risk averse profit motivation as our major path to innovation, and that's quite bad, in my opinion.

[R0b0t1]

Ah, I was looking at similar stuff, among other things, so keep me in mind.

Me and my coworkers have a running gag where we predict things years in advance, but we just don't have access to the capital to do it... so someone else who does have money eventually does it, and a lot worse than we would have. These things happen every day.

Think: Do you want some nontechnical banker making decisions about what startup gets funding or someone who actually understands the scientific and social impact of a technology?

[smugglerFlynn]

> Do you want some nontechnical banker making decisions about what startup gets funding or someone who actually understands the scientific and social impact of a technology?

On one hand, the latter would be cool.

On the other, I want decisions made by people committed to the cause. Understanding does not get you very far. “Some nontechnical bankers” often spend years of their life dedicated for a cause, dealing with all the non-scientific bureaucracy which is necessary to get this job done, and which constitute 90% of it (not to mention all the responsibility and risk).

How much time, risk and responsibility does your ‘running gag’ require now? Are you sure you would choose to be that banker, and actually spend your life on this?

[R0b0t1]

People who don't really understand the cause and can find employment separate from it likely aren't committed to it. A banker may not have the necessary training to understand what is going on and likely can find employment with someone else who needs paperwork filed. They may be necessary but putting them in charge of the money is a bad idea because they don't have expertise on the things they are deciding and get paid lots of money (but maybe slightly less) even if they are wrong. In some cases they just rig the rules so they never lose.

To be clear what was happening was random gadgets or improvements to an existing product would be discussed, and then invariably we'd see it later. You can claim it was inevitable but if we knew years before they ever did it then the only reason we weren't the ones making money was a lack of capital.

[smugglerFlynn]

> the only reason we weren't the ones making money was a lack of capital

I understand your point.

But all that is just saying “The only reason I am not Batman is my lack of batsuit, mansion and a butler”.

Most important, I think “technological insights” are overrated. Insights are valued exactly because among investors tech savviness comes rare. But If you want to play in the same field, you need all the other pieces and skills (including the capital, but you might also get hired as an analyst or consultant, so it does not seem to be a critical blocker of capitalizing your knowledge).

So what really stops you from “fighting crime”?

[noacct15243]

Batman cannot exist in the real world; Batman has to be a fiction. Lack of money is not.

I worked in the company where the owner set up something relatively mathematically trivial and burnt through £500,000 before he started to make a profit. He was born into wealth. I am several thousand pounds in debt to try to develop something which is far more technically sophisticated and generally useful to DB devs (may do a show HN), but getting anybody to notice it is difficult. Just developing it as I go deeper in debt is very difficult.

I tried to use it as a way of getting a job -- "please look at my project, it's neat!". The response? Hard to say, because nobody has asked me to demo it.

Not having easy, sufficient cash makes things incredibly hard. I'm talking from experience. I very much doubt you are.

[jaystraw]

I see where you're coming from, but, Frank Zappa said longhairs ruined music: the business brains knew they didn't know, so would try anything. Then, hip kids who thought they knew what was popular started falling out of school with A&R degrees and became the gatekeepers. It became much harder for moonshot, weird and outsider projects to receive attention from labels, let alone funding.

As always, YMMV. Also been reading HN for a long time, and just made an account to respond to this. Times they are a-changin'

[astrange]

We're in a relatively environment to get capital now; not sure it's ever been easier. Beyond the site in the OP, there's Patreon and equity crowdfunding like Wefunder. Though I think the best bet traditionally was to marry someone with a government job before quitting, so you can use their health insurance.

[orzig]

To give a sense of scale, how much would it cost to get you to do it? I'd love to help fund it, but definitely don't make fully 2x "Support a family", so it would be intersting to know how many people I'd need to round up.

[nefitty]

I would personally forego 60-70% of my salary to work on impactful things I want to work on. Rent paid, dog fed, wife happy. Not much else to ask for.

[ok_dad]

Exactly, I would do it for just enough to pay rent, food, medical, etc. for my family for at least a few years. I think these days that could be anywhere from 25k to 75k (just a guess) depending on an individual's location.

[kstenerud]

I've been working on https://concise-encoding.org/ for the past 3 years part time, and the worst part is being aware of all of the time I could have spent on it but couldn't because I need to put food on the table. And I've got a ton of other technologies in the works, many of which will never see the light of day because I don't have enough years to make it happen working on them part-time...

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"... (no add trolls please, it's just an example)."

What is an ad troll.

Is it like someone who believes advertising revenue "makes our modern world spin".^1

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29186326

That is interesting because advertising spend is probably one of the least certain investments. It's causal effectiveness online is difficult if not impossible to measure. It is like suggesting casino receipts are what make the modern world spin.

Adtech is, IMO, not a "major path to innovation". Unless one adopts a very narrow view of what innovation looks like.

It is wonderful to hear someone claim "I want to do X, but I have to do Y to feed my family", where X is "something important to the world" and Y is not.

However, if doing Y is diverting attention away from X, or possibly even causing harm, then maybe "not doing Y" is also "something important to the world".

No doubt people working for companies who were selling massive quantities of opioids were feeding their families, and arguably they were not violating any laws. Unfortunately, these criteria were not by themselves enough to stop them from doing harm.

[ok_dad]

I'm lucky that I can work in an "X" category job still, even if I can't do what I described above. I wouldn't be so harsh on those in "Y" category jobs, though, because I imagine the vast majority of folks are doing that, and maybe only a handful are truly in the "opioid pushing" equivalent jobs.

[generalizations]

> However, if doing Y is diverting attention away from X, or possibly even causing harm, then maybe "not doing Y" is also "something important to the world".

I think this kind of analysis discounts the importance of family. Maybe, "not doing Y" is less important than "keeping my family fed".

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"I think this discounts the importance of family."

Which family. (a) The family of the person doing Y or (b) the families of the persons who fail to ever see the benefit of X or, worse, who suffer harm from Y. If the answer is (b), then not doing Y benefits the most families. Choice (b) fits better with the idea of "doing something important to the world", especially if one agrees that what he is doing now is preventing him from doing not something that is important to the world.

You want to discount the importance of not doing Y/doing X. The "keeping my family fed is more important than [something important ot the world]" argument is just not very convincing. Because the question is not all-or-nothing. It is not either-or question. It is possible to keep a family fed without working on adtech. And if no one was in fact keeping their family fed while working on more important things, then it stands to reason the world would be even worse off as a result.

[generalizations]

> Which family. (a) The family of the person doing Y or (b) the families of the persons who fail to ever see the benefit of X or, worse, who suffer harm from Y. If the answer is (b), then not doing Y benefits the most families. Choice (b) fits better with the idea of "doing something important to the world", especially if one agrees that what he is doing now is preventing him from doing not something that is important to the world.

This is how you get neglected kids with parental issues. I've seen it happen. If you're going to have kids, they need to know that they are your first priority, and they need to be treated that way.

> You want to discount the importance of not doing Y/doing X.

Nope. I just want to make the point that however important X is, or not doing Y is, the hierarchy should be family > ( X | !Y).

> It is not either-or question. It is possible to keep a family fed without working on adtech.

If you're lucky. But you're sidestepping my point, which is that if you have a choice between not working on adtech and feeding the family, feed your family.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Your "point" is a self-serving framing the issue of working on important world problems versus working on adtech as one of feeding the family versus not feeding the family (starving). You want us to believe "I have no choice". That may be your perspective. Whether it applies to anyone else is questionable. If there are really lots of people working in adtech who are in some sort of "forced labour" arrangement, where if they take another job, their children will starve, then we perhaps we should try to help them. The whole idea is silly. There are millions of people around the world who really are suffering who truly cannot feed their families, for real, and you want us to believe that people who work on adtech, who have the skills to be working on more important things, are among them.

[generalizations]

a) You came up with the example of feeding the family, not me. I'm just using it.

b) I think you have a vastly inflated sense of how much a programming job impacts the world, especially compared to the immediate impact we have on our kids.

c) Stay off the personal attacks, they just make it look like you couldn't come up with anything better.

d) Twice now you've told me what I'm saying. Are you sure you actually know?

[zelphirkalt]

> [...] It is like suggesting casino receipts are what make the modern world spin.

One thing is for sure: Some people inside the casino do make parts of our world actually spin.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Some say love makes the world go round. I tend to be skeptical when someone says they are "sure" but offers no evidence to support their claim..

[zelphirkalt]

Not sure, whether you got the joke. Or am I not getting a follow up joke?

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Now I got it. :) Nice one.

[prox]

I love the idea of mothminds, and I would also love to support projects like these even if it is just little money each month. We need a Twitch like sub model, or maybe this moth minds could help.