Publishing your work increases your luck

https://github.com/readme/guides/publishing-your-work

by magoghm • 7 months ago

331 125 7 months ago

github.com

beej712• 7 months ago

This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.

magoghm• 7 months ago

Same here

concernedctzn• 7 months ago

oh wow, thanks again for the networking guide Beej!

beej712• 7 months ago

You're welcome! :)

blibble• 7 months ago

translated from marketing-droid-ese:

greetings peasants! er, sorry, valued open source contributors!
remember, without you feeding us training data, we won't be able to train our AI to replace you at your dayjob!
now, get back to work

glouwbug• 7 months ago

I’m sure they probably train on private repos too

dawnerd• 7 months ago

There's a reason there's a toggle to prevent matching on public code.

throw-12-162• 7 months ago

self hosting git is very easy.

mawadev• 7 months ago

99% of open source authors quit right before they go viral!! Would you please upload your training data ... I mean lovely open source code??

aarondf14• 7 months ago

I wrote the article. I'm not a marketing droid, I don't work for GitHub, just a guy recounting his personal experiences and hoping to help others.

volkercraig• 7 months ago

I publish into an open sea and hear nothing in reply. The constant reassurance from every platform that i use that i am merely "one more post" away from all my wildest dreams has to be true eventually, right?

bulletsvshumans• 7 months ago

Hello fellow human!

fragmede• 7 months ago

You may want to be more goal oriented. If you're just publishing into a void and hoping for things to happen, I mean I'm not an influencer, but the successful ones I do know have specific goals that they're driving towards are not screaming into the void and hoping for the best.

Not looking for you to answer these questions for me here, but ask yourself, what are those dreams specifically? What are the concrete steps you've taken to get there, and how are you going to accomplish them? How long is it going to take you? What are success criteria? What are the risks? What are the failure modes?

llmslave2• 7 months ago

The best is when a random throwaway post blows up for some unexpected and unknown reason and everything you think is good is met with silence!

grim_io• 7 months ago

But did you record a complementary TikTok dance, though?

ItsYan• 7 months ago

I am going through interviews with founders on https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ and it is indeed what happens.

It is not straightforward, however. One guy did only product-led marketing and it took him 3 years for his SaaS to make good numbers. And he's probably an outlier, since he's featured on the show.

And then you have another guy, who blogged for 5 years about Ruby and only after those 5 years using the audience from that, he built an OSS project with monetisation on top of that. But he could do that because he talked to his audience about ideas.

Listening to those interviews, I get the impression that if you know what you're doing, you can make a profitable SaaS in 2 or 3 years. But to get to a state, where you know what you're doing, you need at least another 3 years or more of actually putting in the reps in an honest way.

And I think that's where the "increase your luck" comes in. I think it's kind of shallow non-sense in the vein of motivational speaking but lots of people like this kind of content and like to be aspirational. Lots of the books sold by internet hustlers, like Rob Walling or Aaron Francis, don't get read, only bought.

ghaff2• 7 months ago

"Becoming known" (the definition of which I leave as an exercise for the reader) isn't an automatic meal ticket but it does, as I allude to in another comment, lead to connections that you can sometimes take advantage of in various ways.

Whether that's open source code, writing, various consulting, speaking at conferences, etc. will vary with the person. And the more you can do on a company's dime the better.

strogonoff• 7 months ago

When we become ghost content producers for LLMs, you are not supposed to hear something in reply to your post, book, or other work. Most of the time, your work will be ingested by a handful of companies as training data; the readers benefitting from your work will pay these companies, and in return these companies will thoroughly shield and insulate you from being thanked by the people you helped. These companies will do their best to ensure you are motivated to continue producing honest content that can keep their LLMs from choking on their own output.

The exceptions to this are closed (or semi-closed) communities and forums where you directly interact with humans, either by inertia due to a large established human user base or (for newer, smaller communities) via personal vetting of participants.

wincy• 7 months ago

Obviously the solution here is to have the LLMs post thank you notes, and offer a complex network of job offers for all of these people contributing to open source. Of course the jobs don’t actually exist, but these acts of kindness will keep the producers thinking that they are both in demand and appreciated.

ronbenton• 7 months ago

I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.

ctxc• 7 months ago

I'd love to read a couple over the holidays and give you feedback if you'd like :)

foxfired• 7 months ago

If it makes you feel better, on reddit, I shared my very first blog post about deprecating mysql_* functions in php. As a result, someone said something mean about my mother. I figured the web was full of trolls.

But that wasn't enough. Someone else wrote that my article was useless and I write at a 7th grade level. I turned off the monitor, went for a walk. I decided that blogging wasn't for me. It was time to delete my blog. I was so embarrassed.

When I came back, there was a reply to that comment. It said something like "that's a good thing, 7th grade level writing means we can all understand it easily". And that was enough to keep me going. 13 years so far.

PaulRobinson5• 7 months ago

Reddit is now just AI slop, so I don't know if that's an improvement or not over this story. I'm just glad you were able to get over that BS and engage with it all again and kept going! I gave up and never went back in around 2010, but I'm going to try again in 2026.

The problem with environments designed to make interaction low-energy and gamified like Reddit, is that it gathers just the worst people. I've got ~63k karma there, and disengaged some years ago and I can't tell you how much ditching that, twitter and Facebook improved my mental health. There's some great fun to be had there, but it's often the same thing over and over again and increasingly drowned out by utter crap. They've taken multiple actions that have destroyed the sense of community and have become a poster child for ens*tification, unfortunately.

Agraillo• 7 months ago

Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.

KronisLV• 7 months ago

I once spoke in favor of remote work (around 2020) and someone here on HN told me to get cancer and die, before it was flagged enough times to get out of the way.

On YouTube, I also sometimes get mean comments, though at least there the automatic moderation catches them so they don't show up publicly and I can shadowban the offenders off the channel easily. None of the content is even controversial, YouTube just attracts a lot of angry people that feel entitled to speak what's on their mind.

I wouldn't publish in an environment where blocking or banning people is difficult. They're not entitled for me to engage with their hateful drivel. My blog also doesn't have comments. At the end of the day, I will say what I want to say.

PaulRobinson5• 7 months ago

Turn off comments on platforms that allow you to do that.

One of my projects for the next few weeks is to get my blogging stuff up and running again but with a couple of tweaks:

1. I'll never allow on-blog comments again, ever. The signal/noise was always so poor. I'm sorry that you had a similar experience and the unpleasant odour of drive-by sniping got to you. For what it's worth, I'm always interested in finding new writing on tech topics, and I try to never be mean: I am not unique in this, so consider if there's another way.

2. If I ever publish code, it'll not be on a SaaS platform like GitHub, I'll manage the release through tar.gz/zip files, and if people don't like that, fine. I'm not after pull requests or starting a "real" OSS project. If somebody wants to take that OSS license code and host/manage it, godspeed to them.

3. I will write some code that looks for links back to my blogs, so if something I write is referenced by another blog, I'll learn about it at some point and I can go take a look, and that would be interesting. A long, long time ago there was some automation around this using web hooks that almost became a standard, so I'll look into whether that is a thing or not any more.

In my experience if somebody is writing a blog about something they are normally more constructive and thoughtful than if they are just writing something in a text box while "driving by". I'm OK with those articles normally even if they're critical or in disagreement with me about something.

ValtteriL• 7 months ago

No need to write any code for 3. Just search for backlink checker and you'll find multiple free ones.

crystal_revenge• 7 months ago

Having your OSS library take off

All of the other bullet points there are pretty reasonable, but, having worked in OSS professionally, I genuinely hope none of my GH projects take off in the OSS world.

I have a few projects that are in the >50 stars range, and am both grateful for other people's interests and very glad that none of them crossed the threshold to becoming real OSS projects. I like sharing my interesting experiments, but I absolutely do not want to be stuck with the nightmare of maintaining OSS software for years.

Even on these small projects, I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about. It has eaten up a few weekends, and was a relatively minor annoyance, but it gave me the taste for what OSS work involved. Working professionally for an OSS company gave me even more insight.

Maintaining OSS is a royal pain in the butt and I am forever grateful for the people who choose to do this. Running a popular OSS library is not a prize. It's at least a part time job you aren't paid for. The benefits are slim; even the "fame" part (name your top 10 favorite OSS tools, now name the maintainers of those), and has really limited rewards outside of that. I've know plenty of brilliant creators of OSS libraries who struggle to find jobs in industry that are appropriate to their skill level.

In fact, it's really hard to both run a successful OSS project and have a full time job (especially a high paying one that wants a lot of your brain and time) if you can't some how manage to make that OSS project your full time job... and even then you will be under constant pressure to find a way to monetize your OSS project (which inevitably leads to either losing that job or making decisions not in the interest of your community of OSS users).

OSS maintainers are saints as far as I'm concerned. So much of the world's software depends on them (even moreso in the age of LLMs) and the vast majority are compensated way less than your average FAANG engineer.

notarobot123• 7 months ago

Open source culture has changed so much over the past couple of decades that it seems totally reasonable now for up-and-coming maintainers to question the whole thing.

Scale has changed everything. There are orders of magnitudes more users than contributors compared to some of the early OSS and the balance between grateful and entitled end-users has skewed expectations much more towards maintainers as a support role with similar responsibilities to a product engineer in the commercial world. Why would you want to enter into that social contract now? Why would you want to risk your library taking off and the associated costs that would bring (as well as benefits)?

An alternative evolutionary pathway for OSS is for developers and communities to self-host their own git projects. Projects get to define their own ethos and workflow. Discovery remains high-friction which prevents the commodification of maintainer effort. The bar for writing custom tools to support things like this got a whole lot lower so it might start to make sense more than it did in the past (there are both push and pull forces at work here). It might even make OSS fun again.

PaulRobinson5• 7 months ago

I agree with all of this, and as I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, anything I release now is going to be a tar.gz/zip with a LICENSE file in it, and people can do what they want with it, but they're not getting tech support on it.

However, this is a really sad state of affairs, and I'm wondering if we can't have scale _with_ friction to counter some of these pain points?

throw-12-162• 7 months ago

I recently unpublished a couple libraries because I was so fed up with maintaining them.

Lot's of entitled "I want to speak to the manager" types ruined it for me.

didip• 7 months ago

Exactly this. Word by word. Some of my OSS projects got popular accidentally and oh boy… pain in the butt for real.

And for little benefits to myself. Hitting HN front page or r/programming was nice for my ego. But that’s about it.

MasterScrat• 7 months ago

Exactly - best case scenario is Reddit/HN front page with a cool project you enjoyed working on, have some nice conversations there, reach a few 100s stars which look good on your CV, and that’s it.

If you expect more long term support you better be paying me for my time.

PaulRobinson5• 7 months ago

What's surprising to me is that TFA is from GH who are uniquely placed to have a real impact in terms of OSS maintainer quality of life.

If they're so keen on helping people publish more stuff and showing how awesome AI is, perhaps they can pre-screen the entitled comments and just not let them get posted? Perhaps they could see that you've not touched a repo in 5 years and when that PR comes in, they could help bootstrap you back in with a code review summary? Perhaps they could stop the idiots pressuring you by explaining to them all the reasons why their PR might not get looked at any time soon?

Perhaps, just perhaps, Github could take some ownership of the problems they have created, and do some work to fix them?

esperent• 7 months ago

I've had times when I'm pressured to do a bug fix on a 5 year old project where I don't even remember how it works or review and merge an enthusiastic PR solving a problem I don't actually care about.

Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

There's already all kinds of badges on GH readmes, couldn't we have a few more signifying "actively maintained, PRs welcome" or "security & critical bug fixes only" or "looking for new maintainers", etc.?

blitzar• 7 months ago

"when your fix is accepted you are the new maintainer"

Aurornis2• 7 months ago

Also having spent years working in the OSS space, I wish it was normalized to have more nuance between "totally unmaintained" and "maintainer will literally miss their child's birthday to review your PR".

The other spectrum that I’d like to know up front is where the maintainers fall on the spectrum of “I would be honored if you forked my project” to “This project is my baby and I will mobilize my users against you if you fork it”.

The refrain with open source is always that if you don’t like something, you’re welcome to fork it. But my experience with forking projects has, in a couple cases, drawn anger and attacks from maintainers. In a corporate setting when we ran up against maintainers who were unable or uninterested in even merging PRs, we had to fork the project and continue work in the fork. For some maintainers, this turns into “<corporation> is trying to steal my work!” even when the name and README were maintained. Or the maintainer gets angry that the name is kept on the fork because it is no longer under their control, we changed the name, which prompted more anger because we were “stealing their project” and so on.

To be completely clear, this isn’t all maintainers. Some have been so happy that they marked their original as maintained and referred users to the new fork in the README. But I’ve had enough cases where forking triggered anger or even calls to mobilize their Discord against the fork across social media (HN, Reddit, Mastodon) that when I run up against a slowly-maintained OSS project I try to look for alternatives or evaluate the effort to just build it in house to avoid drama.

tor825gl• 7 months ago

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).

Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.

bmitch3020• 7 months ago

Absolutely. I say that being an OSS maintainer is a job, which can easily become a full time job, where the pay is often non-existent. If you have a separate full time job, you now have to choose:

1. Work two jobs until you burn out.

2. Quit your paying job and hope you have you don't go broke.

3. Scale back or quit maintaining OSS projects.

I think companies, governments, and societies could do a better job funding this work. But since this is a "tragedy of the commons" problem, I'm not holding my breath that this will happen before the public experiences a lot more pain from failures.

darubedarob2• 7 months ago

You can always sell it out for exploits? The price for oss wage is (incident -1 $)

didgetmaster3• 7 months ago

I have a side project that I have worked on for years, mainly because I enjoy writing software. I get an adrenaline rush when I can make my data management system do things better and/or faster than other things on the market.

I have written articles about it and made the binaries freely available on my website under an 'open beta'. People keep telling me that if I really want it to take off, I should open source it.

So far, I have resisted doing that, for many of the reasons that you cited.

bob1029• 7 months ago

I have started a new OSS project and intend to provide optional enterprise offerings on top. I really don't care if someone steals the ideas presented in code because they're actually fairly pedestrian. The much bigger concern for me is the fact that if I do not make my source open by default, I will have a very hard time developing trust in the community and prospective customers. I know I nearly instantly walk away from the "provide your info to download our white paper PDF" sales experiences in 2025.

It is also helpful to remember that 100% of $0 is still $0. And that .001% of a trillion dollar TAM is still a pretty big deal.

tacker2000• 7 months ago

This is pretty much the only way open source doesnt lead to burnout and continues to be maintained, and a lot of projects are doing this already successfully.

Get “street cred” in the dev space by being open source, and let the enterprise customers “pay” for it.

gcanyon• 7 months ago

I maintain Navigator, a development tool I started over twenty years ago; I am the only contributor to the open source repository [1]. I have rewritten drag and drop in that thing four times (because drag and drop in Livecode [2] is a bit of a hack). It's a pain every time. I'm not rewriting it again.

1. https://github.com/gcanyon/navigator

2. https://livecode.com

PunchyHamster• 7 months ago

That reads differently knowing that one single effect of that would be "it will be easier for AI content scraper to get high quality data for their overlords currently destroying the economy"

ChadNauseam• 7 months ago

Writing I posted online lead to me meeting some cool dudes in SF, which lead to my current job. It’s hard to say if I just won the lottery or not, but it does seem true to need that you get more luck that way

hypfer3• 7 months ago

I suppose we're going to just gloss over the fact that the primary party benefitting from people publishing their work like this is someone else.

Someone else being usually some corp that is happy to pay with exposure instead of money.

This is of course a rather cynical read, but the first instance of luck being "Having your OSS library take off" kinda paints this picture for me.

Which does make sense I guess, given that it's a piece of writing by the great free labor extraction machine GitHub, which was bought by Microsoft not because they had suddenly gotten altruistic at heart.

Which isn't to say that it's all bad, but there obviously is a clear conflict of interest here that doesn't get explored at all.

There is a point to be made for not publishing your work in ways that makes it trivial for others to benefit from it. A more balanced piece of writing would've warned about this instead of purely providing encouragement.

wseqyrku• 7 months ago

Was looking for a comment to articulate this better than I could. I have the same feeling about 'release something bad early' advice given by investors, it's so obviously a shady comment in that position because they have the resources to build a clone if they can't talk to you.

cmrdporcupine• 7 months ago

I keep waiting for this younger generation to wake up to why we invented the GPL in the first place. Entities that are happy to use your brains for a while, and then eagerly dispose of you when they can.

They love your free labour. "Thanks for your OSS project! No, no, we're not hiring... and you'd never make it through out interview process!"

One should make free software for other free software developers and grateful end users. Not for parasites. Recognition doesn't pay the mortgage. And now you won't even get that because your work will just end distilled into weights in a large language model.

aarondf14• 7 months ago

Hey! I wrote the article. Having an OSS project take off changed my life. YMMV

socialcommenter2• 7 months ago

Hi! How - if at all - would you amend your advice now that scraping and LLMs have become so big that any published work is likely to be taken and repurposed, for no royalties or credit?

I have a lot that I'd love to share (and let's... charitably... assume it's worthwhile stuff) but would be afraid to start just because of this stumbling block.

skhameneh2• 7 months ago

I have no doubt your intentions were good and I am a fan of open-source myself. Unfortunately, since this was written, it’s become more widely known and commonplace for large corporations to disproportionally benefit from open source.

And that wouldn’t bother so many as much if it weren’t for the fact that large corporations often do not give back. It’s become so much of an issue that OSS maintainers have switched licenses, some have shifted closed-source, and others have simply abandoned their projects.

Just last week I began rethinking usage of MIT/Apache licenses for future work. For the longest time I was hesitant about GPLv3 and almost scared to use in my personal projects, but it turns out my hesitations were fueled by...large corporations.

hypfer3• 7 months ago

If you throw my nickname into a search engine, you will see that that is the case for me as well. Doesn't change anything about what I said though.

If anything, the fact that it worked for me, yet I found it necessary to add the full context, probably strengthens the statement even more.

But anyway. Standard damage control statement that latches onto nothing because there is nothing to latch on to as I made sure to structure the comment that way.

I hate corporate so much man. Just because you can predict what happens doesn't mean that the happening would be any less frustrating.

___

I understand that your role requires you to do this. That is clear to anyone moving through these systems.

What I do not understand though is why you even tried to deflect this with such a low-quality "oh it worked for me it might not have worked for you. YMMV" thing, when you could've also just said nothing at all, not forcing my hand and making me call you out on that.

That is, above all else, strategically unwise.

Fortunately, however, this all doesn't matter. It's not like anyone cares about anything on this platform anyway. So even a strategically unwise move might as well not exist at all.

OCTAGRAM• 7 months ago

Sounds like Fallout mechanics

odie5533• 7 months ago

A long time ago, I was having a discussion with my clan leader about luck in video games. He said that the better you are, the more lucky you are. Luck and skill go hand in hand. That's always resonated with me.

sph2• 7 months ago

You make your own luck. “80% of success is showing up”

FabCH• 7 months ago

The article was written by „Aaron Francis, Marketing Engineer“.

I’m not a language purist, but are we really calling people who work in marketing „marketing _enginners_“ nowadays?

That seems like going a bit too far with the meaning of engineering…

codegladiator• 7 months ago

Well the "software" folks started it, I met a full stack engineer the other day, that word used to have some meaning as well.

ahartmetz• 7 months ago

"Full stack" grinds my gears, too. Do they really work from sand to human factors?

ayuhito2• 7 months ago

I feel it’s an evolution of the term “Devrel” which still feels tacky.

Nor would you want someone who built most of their career as an actual engineer to suddenly drop that term and become a generic someone in “marketing”. They’re more than that for sure.

I quite like the terminology the more I think about it.

https://github.com/aarondfrancis

aarondf14• 7 months ago

Totally. An engineer, who (at the the time) works in marketing! Makes sense to me :D

michaelt• 7 months ago

Some fields of engineering have long had roles with names like that.

Want to do something with motors, but don’t know how to calculate the right combination of motor, gearbox, brake, encoder and controller? Maxon’s sales engineers will happily walk you through the calculations.

aarondf14• 7 months ago

I'm a software developer who was, at the time, working in a marketing role. Happy to answer questions.

ayuhito2• 7 months ago

I strongly relate to this in many ways.

Because of OSS, I’ve never actually applied for a job or done a Leetcode interview. I’ve gotten multiple direct offers through Twitter DMs (I don’t post) and multiple referrals through random encounters that I never used.

E.g. Debugging an interesting issue with GitHub customer support eventually led to a referral for Microsoft by an MD. Similar stories with Cloudflare and more.

It’s not limited to OSS, but just having any sort of backing credibility to your name without going through the whole CV/CL process unlocks a whole slew of opportunities since people can “pre-screen” you from the start.

ghaff2• 7 months ago

You're sort of describing networks more broadly whether you initiate a connection or someone at a company does. Latterly, I didn't apply in the usual sense for 25 years or so.

Don't code a lot but have written books which led to book signings at conferences that probably led to other opportunities if I had the need to exploit them.

zwnow• 7 months ago

Unfortunately, publishing work in my region requires me to dox myself through an imprint.

Usually this only applies to business related websites, but lawyers could even argue a personal blog is business related due to the possibility existing for me to advertise products.

So yea, while I would love to share my work publicly, its simply not feasible due to medieval laws in place.

realitydrift• 7 months ago

This resonates, but it also feels like we’re entering a phase of content reality drift. Publishing still increases luck, but attention is fragmenting and integrity is harder to maintain.

The advantage now is being able to preserve semantic fidelity as everything else accelerates into noise. Work that stays legible and grounded seems to compound in ways raw visibility no longer does.

dmezzetti• 7 months ago

The message here is good. I've now spent over 5 years in the OSS world (https://github.com/neuml). I started by picking a problem I was interested in and checking the work into GitHub. I've been extremely fortunate to have gained a following over the years.

Even with a following, most of the time when you publish it goes into the abyss. Every once in a while something hits but most of the time it takes a lot of patience and resolve. I've had some good visibility over the years from Reddit and Hacker News (though any post I make now on HN is marked as [dead]). It's not always fair and others can "pay" to get the visibility.

I've seen some of the other comments talking about the burden of OSS but I haven't felt that. I set my own agenda and fix what I want to fix. If someone wants to change my priorities that becomes a paid effort.

d4rkp4ttern• 7 months ago

This resonates with how I’ve been thinking about open source. I see the steps as:

1. Personally identify a pain in your own work, and it most likely will be a pain for many others.

2. Build a solution to solve for it.

3. Organically talk about it in forums — for me this is Reddit, HN lately and to some extent Bluesky.

When people ask why I build open source, I say it’s about signaling. As other comments have mentioned, if you’re fortunate enough that it gains traction, it becomes your calling card and can lead to consulting and jobs. It’s analogous to academic publishing (used to do more of that) but with different dynamics.

My personal examples of solving for a pain are:

[A] I started building the Langroid LLM agent framework after having a look at LangChain in Apr 2023, at a time when there was hardly any talk of LLM-agents. The aim was to create a principled, hackable, lightweight library for building LLM applications, and agents happened to be a good abstraction: https://github.com/langroid/langroid

[B] With the explosion of Claude Code and similar CLI coding agents, there were several interesting problems to solve for myself, and I started collecting them here: https://github.com/pchalasani/claude-code-tools One such tool is a lossless alternative to compaction, and a Tmux-CLI tool/skill for CLI agents to interact with others.

the_gipsy• 7 months ago

I just want to share software with fellow nerds. I don't care about stars, community, getting famous, or getting a job.

aarondf14• 7 months ago

Then define luck as "connecting with fellow nerds." Still works

charlieyu1• 7 months ago

I wrote a few math books. Does it increase my luck? A little bit, here or there. Will I recoup the 1200+ hours working on the project and be paid at least minimum wage for that? No chance.

jckahn• 7 months ago

I've had a similar experience with being a relatively prolific OSS contributor. It's a decent look professionally, but it hasn't led to employment.

rrsp• 7 months ago

This is why it’s luck.

Putting more out there will increase the probability of a reward, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

aarondf14• 7 months ago

Very well said

angarg12• 7 months ago

I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a read

https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...

neoCrimeLabs• 7 months ago

I can attest at least some of this is true.

My blogging and publishing almost never comes up during an interview. Afterwards, I am openly told it's why they either asked for me, or why they chose me over another candidate. This has happened at almost every job I've accepted.

My writing style or content is not all that special. As the saying goes, 90% of success is simply showing up.

Just being explain complex topics in simple ways can go a long way, even if you're not an amazing author.

---

Addition: This is especially true with topics so expansive that even great LLM often conflates subtopics in weird ways. While this gap is rapidly closing, being able to clearly explain complex interconnected topics in simple ways is absolutely an advantage.

oth001• 7 months ago

It's also a great way to train megacorp AI models without compensation.

DustinBrett• 7 months ago

This worked for me, but I just coded my own personal project in the open and would post its progress. I don't think it "took off" in the sense of people using it, but a lot of people became aware of it. It's still just a hobby project and I do it for fun.

Jaauthor• 7 months ago

As an author, I dig what this is saying since it resonates so well with my journey as an author. Everything I publish is one more chance to connect with people who are drawn to other people in motion. I'm still learhing how to bring people along and inspiring others to create.

Here's some of my work - it's free until Jan 1. https://inkican.com/smashwords-white-hot-scifi-winter/

aarondf14• 7 months ago

Hey! I wrote the article a few years ago. Fun to see it on HN again.

It was here back when I wrote it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32071137

Lots of comments talking about how this is just some sort of ploy to feed the machine. I don't know what to tell you. I can only tell you it changed my life and the lives of many others. Hope it can help you too!

narag• 7 months ago

Sorry to say, but the article is complete BS. Publishing is only desirable when your work is top-notch ;)

aarondf14• 7 months ago

You had me in the first half! <3

why-o-why2• 7 months ago

it's the same logic lotto uses: "you can't win if you don't play".

while i agree it is irrefutable logic, the chance of being seen is quite small because there are literally millions of other people doing the same thing. gauging probability is what human brains have trouble with.

but it does improve your odds a minuscule amount. but it is always always always better to have friends in high(er) places who can amplify your work. that counts for x1000 more. one mention from someone with 1M followers is worth more than publishing 1000 articles.

aarondf14• 7 months ago

And guess how you make friends in high(er) places...

by...

publishing your work and making friends in your industry

why-o-why2• 7 months ago

I don't know enough about different industries to know if this is true in general. But I do know in tech it is all about networking (aka soft nepotism): spending your career making friends ("swiping right on every work relationship"), and the fraction of those who go on to massively succeed you can then call in favors. At least that's how I made three huge jumps in my 35+ year career, and how the majority of my peers got the big step-functions in pay.

Perhaps in my original post I'm just confusing academia with industry, since I know so few academics.

pendenthistory• 7 months ago

My problem is I have non-competes and clauses in my contract which makes it difficult to talk about and publish stuff that I might want to turn into a product. So I'm sort of in a catch 22. I want to talk about what I'm building but I can't, not until I can convince myself that I can turn it into something real and I can quit and focus on it, and that's difficult to do without ever putting it out there to see if people want it enough.

Publishing your work increases your luck

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