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  crystal_revenge
  > Having your OSS library take offAll 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.
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  hypfer
  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.
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  ayuhito
  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.
• d4rkp4ttern
  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.
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  volkercraig
  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?
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  charlieyu1
  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.
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  aarondf
  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=32071137Lots 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!
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  blibble
  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
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  beej71
  This has definitely worked for me. Never got rich from putting stuff out there, but got a number of good jobs from it.
• neoCrimeLabs
  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.
• Jaauthor
  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/
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  FabCH
  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…
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  ronbenton
  I used to release some writing and publish code publicly but the mean comments got to me.
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  why-o-why
  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.
• realitydrift
  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.
• DustinBrett
  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.
• angarg12
  I love the concept of luck surface area. Worth a readhttps://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
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  the_gipsy
  I just want to share software with fellow nerds. I don't care about stars, community, getting famous, or getting a job.
• ChadNauseam
  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
• anon
  undefined
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  OCTAGRAM
  Sounds like Fallout mechanics
• dmezzetti
  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.
• PunchyHamster
  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"
• zwnow
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• a_state_full
  [dead]
• oth001
  It's also a great way to train megacorp AI models without compensation.