
What the smartest people do on the weekend, everyone else will do in 10 years - mmahemoff
http://cdixon.org/2013/03/02/what-the-smartest-people-do-on-the-weekend-is-what-everyone-else-will-do-during-the-week-in-ten-years/
======
jacques_chester
Let's all pat ourselves on the back with a fluffy blog post about how jolly
wonderful we are. In about 10 years everyone else will be doing the same.

Just kidding. _Every_ profession I have even a passing familiarity with is
absolutely chockers with self-congratulatory fluff. And it's usually hilarious
to the outsiders who can see the narrowness of a profession's vision.

Out of the professions I've seen, who have been the widest thinkers outside of
their own field?

So far: lawyers. I'm serious.

~~~
pg
This post is brief, but not fluffy. I wish he had dug more into the forces at
work here. But it is an important point nonetheless.

And we on HN could do better than merely dismiss it. We could try to dig into
the underlying forces ourselves. E.g. not all hobbies consist of making the
Apple I. So which do, and why? Are the things called hobbies two different
types of work that are conflated by clueless observers simply because they're
not the worker's day job? Or is there some amount of crossover between
inventing the future and merely playing around?

Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical
dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _I wish he had dug more into the forces at work here. But it is an important
> point nonetheless._

He was busy slapping all nerds everywhere on the back with reflected glory.

You're just reading in what you _wanted_ him to say and judging your desired
reading, not the original.

(Edit: and I did the same, fixating on the self-congratulatory fluff and
ignoring the selection-biased hypothesis about making predictions.)

> _Instead the top comment is the forum analogue of a fluff post: a cynical
> dismissal based on some presumed bad intention on the writer's part._

You're basically imputing to _me_ a motive to impute a motive to _Chris_ that
in my estimation neither of us had. I mentioned Naïve Realism a while back in
one of the various pitchfork debates (the Tesla test drive, I think). I think
it's happening here too.

But really, this post was self-congratulation. I've read similar fluff from
marketers and advertisers who see themselves as the lever-pullers of
capitalism, from student politicians about their destiny as masters of all
creation, from lawyers about the utter indispensibility of their ancient
craft, from engineers ditto ... ad infinitum. In all such cases they could
have written the same stuff about how they were shaping The Future Of The
World years ago.

I'd be more interested in seeing the base rate on all the garage projects that
go absolutely nowhere, achieve nothing and have no meaningful impact on the
world. That would be most of them.

Which is _fine_. But let's not pretend that since Woz was a genius, the rest
of us are also in the same category.

~~~
zosima
He coined a nice epigram I will remember. That is enough for the article to be
interesting.

What is the problem with being self-congratulatory? What is wrong with
focusing on the positive and thinking that your hobby and life's work is
worthwhile? Would anything be created if people were constantly doubting
themselves and their creations? Would anything be better then?

What harm would there be in people hoping to be the next woz? And with the low
base rate of garage projects going anywhere, which we are all painfully aware
of, don't you think it's better to give encouragement and hope. I do, and I
think a dismissal such as yours is harmful to the greater cause of creating
interesting ideas, programs and thoughts.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _What is the problem with being self-congratulory?_

I'd like to say here that having some perspective can prevent certain kinds of
mistake. I think that's correct.

I'd be on surer ground if I point out that a person entirely satisfied with
their professional perspective isn't going to improve past a certain asymptote
that they themselves are unable to perceive.

But honestly? I just find self-congratulation tremendously embarrassing. I
don't know if it's inherited or a self-deprecating theme present in Australian
culture or just plain old jealousy. Or some combination of the above.

~~~
zosima
Well, ideas are constantly being heavily pruned and cut to the ground on
hacker news.

And some of that pruning is good and necessary. Otherwise, bad ideas would
proliferate and take air and light from the good ideas. But often when I read
HN's comments, the field just looks like scorched earth. A complete,
overpowering negativity everywhere. And I think then the pruning has lost its
purpose, and is a bad thing.

I suppose, I would like that whenever an idea was dismissed it would be by
pointing to a better idea in the vicinity which could then be thought about or
worked on instead. That way the true purpose of criticism and pruning would be
clear: To not let the bad ideas take resources from the good ones.

With regards to self-congratulatory behavior in general: well I suppose I
understand you. I've been brought up that way too, as has perhaps most people.
Still, I recall Russel's own adage:

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”

I don't know the author of the OP, but I do certainly think that negative
attitudes create even more doubts in the wise, while fools and fanatics likely
are innately immune. Therefore, I don't think that unreserved dismissals
usually will do anything to people's character, except for strengthening those
traits you really want to see less of, in the wise.

------
pdeuchler
I see where Chris is getting at, but he's not generalizing it well.

I think a better rule of thumb would be: Look at what new and upcoming
technologies people with large domain expertise are excited about. Those
technologies will probably be included in business practices within that
domain in the near future.

Edit: It's also a rather self-fulfilling prophecy. Obviously industry leaders
will pave the way for their pet interests to gain more mainstream acceptance,
and at the same time those who look up to said leaders often outsource the
mental overhead of investigating the newest technologies to leaders who's
purpose is to guide the community. This cycle is rather exacerbated when a
leader creates a new technology that he/she is now interested in distributing.

~~~
mijustin
Exactly. It's a bit tricky to do the attribution. Looking at a current
technology and giving it a single origin isn't realistic.

In the comments Chris cites HAM being a precursor for BBSes. Maybe; but so
were actual physical bulletin boards.

~~~
jff
Ham is not an acronym. Nobody's quite sure of what it means, but it doesn't
seem to be an acronym.

~~~
mijustin
Thanks ;) It's "ham radio" from now on!

Just found the etymology here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio#Etymolog...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_ham_radio#Etymology)

------
jgh
Day in and day out there are articles on here talking about how the smartest
people "optimize" their time as if just relaxing and doing stuff with your
friends/family is something only the unwashed masses do. Frankly I like my
weekends a lot better when I'm not subjecting myself to "time optimization" or
hobbies that take over my life.

~~~
iamwil
Awesome. But hardly the main point for the OP.

~~~
jgh
Fair enough. I'm just tired of seeing these articles pop up constantly and I
have no downvote ability.

~~~
doktrin
Submissions can't be downvoted (only comments) :)

------
andrewljohnson
Which hobbyist invented the web? Blogs? It isn't at all obvious to me who he
is citing, if these people are hobbyists.

Also, was "most" open source software a hobby, or a professional scratching an
itch?

And the first pc? Is Chris trying to say that's woz, and he was a hobbyist?

The whole blog post is a little too pat.

~~~
ebiester
Is usenet not the precursor to Reddit? And the first blogs were certainly
hobbiests. look at BBS zines as one example.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Please someone say a name or citation already. Who the heck invented usenet?

~~~
itsprofitbaron
Tom Truscott[1] and Jim Ellis[2] invented Usenet.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Truscott>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Ellis_(computing)>

------
joshmlewis
I was in a mentor talk over the summer and this veteran business-man who has
turned a few failing companies into successful ones, and walked into his
current company with hardly no pay and turned it around gave an interesting
tid bit of advice.

He drew three overlapping circles and they were:

What am I passionate about? What can I be best in the world at? What drives
the economic engine of it?

He said it takes all three to have something successful and sustaining. If
it's just passion and being the best but there's no money making engine, it's
just a hobby. If you have an economic engine and passion but you're not the
best, it will never grow past a certain point. If you're good at it and you
can make money, you'll hate it after awhile.

Now I personally like to believe that if you're the best in the world at
something you're going to make money, but that's career wise, I'm talking
about business wise. I feel a lot of companies are lucky that don't have a
solid business plan but have become uber successful. The risk is certainly
there, and it will probably tighten the gap of repeatability in the near
future as well. All this to say, find your passion, be good at it, and figure
out how to make money from it.

~~~
ryanmolden
The whole "best in the world" schtick just seems like such pablum, and most
people espousing it aren't best in the world at anything. The arrogance
required to think you can be/are (literally) the best in the world at
something is astounding. I mean if it is intended solely as an
aspirational/inspirational idea you have in your own mind that is fine, but
actually, legitimately, thinking that just seems to border on delusional, or
seriously myopic.

I heard a great quote today that is almost the opposite of this: "There are no
great men, just great challenges which ordinary men, out of necessity, are
forced by circumstances to meet" - William Halsey

That seems like a much greater view than "you'll only succeed if you are the
best in the world", which pretty much translates to "why bother" for just
about everyone, because almost no one is objectively "the best in the world"

------
gizmo
In an attempt to re-rail the discussion away from the somewhat fluffy and
self-congratulatory tone of the blogpost, let me make a few observations.

Startups and new technologies need growth more than anything. Whether it's
bitcoin or NoSQL, you need to reach some sort of critical mass or it's game
over. As a general rule, if your idea is good there must be people out there
who can get really passionate about what you're doing and you have to be able
to find them. The earliest adopters. To them you have to provide what pg calls
the quantum of utility.

You don't create these early adopters as much as you discover them. If the
problem is real then the pain points are real and then people will
automatically care about your solution and spread the word.

We programmers hack away at projects in the weekends, because it's what we
love to do. Frequently we gravitate to projects that somehow make our lives
easier. Maybe we just need a couple of scripts to grep through a music library
or maybe something to reliably diff SQL table layouts. Of course it's not just
programmers, it applies to makers of all sorts. For instance you'll see
mechanics modify office chairs so they can work comfortably in odd positions.

These makers who hack together solutions for themselves aren't early adopters,
they _precede_ the early adopters. They're not just people who realize a some
half-baked startup product prototype is useful but people who immediately see
how it can potentially change the world exactly because they considered
building it 9 months ago. A long time ago we learned that it's madness to
market new products to Laggards. It doesn't matter that they need what you've
made and that they have money. It doesn't matter because you have to persuade
every Laggard individually. And that way you can't grow.

I'm thinking that in the same way targeting early adopters is madness when you
can target Makers instead.

If startups are all about traction, who is a better advocate for your product
than somebody who's been playing with the idea for the past year during their
weekends? Nobody! If you have an army of makers as your first users and
customers the regular early adopters will follow automatically. And with
traction like that you'll be unstoppable. Like Stripe.

~~~
olalonde
Your comment would be so much better without the last sentence. As much as we
all like Stripe, they didn't invent a new technology or kick start an
industry.

~~~
gizmo
Good point. Thanks.

------
defen
I think this post is attracting such vitriol because it has the condition
reversed - rather than saying "What the smartest people do on the weekend,
everyone else will do in 10 years" - it's probably more accurate to say "A
significant portion of the new activities people do 10 years from now will
have had their origins in a smart person's weekend project".

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about this in his newest book _Antifragile_. He
makes a sort of evolutionary argument - people who are actively trying to
invent the future must necessarily focus on what they think will be desired or
necessary. But predicting the future is nearly impossible! So the huge masses
of non-teleological tinkerers - _considered as a whole_ \- who simply work on
what they enjoy for its own sake, have the advantage. In other words, any
particular tinkerer will probably not invent the future, but the odds are good
that eventually someone will stumble onto something.

------
_delirium
I think this is, on the whole, probably false. There are a lot of things the
smartest people do on the weekend which will never catch on, because there is
not much of a business case behind them. Not everything interesting is
monetizable.

One example: a lot of the smartest computer scientists of the 1960s were
really into algorithmic art as a side-project hobby. Was algorithmic art
mainstream in the 1970s? No. Hell, it isn't even mainstream today.

~~~
iamwil
The sentiment is that tomorrow's markets and innovations comes from people
that are on the edges, fringes, and seemingly wasting their time. Everyone
loves and applauds the idea of innovation in abstract, but few people
recognize it while it's happening, even those in tech.

Usually, it's written off as being non-monetizable, too much of a toy to do
actual work, "why would anyone do that?", "I don't have any friends that do
that", etc.

Search was considered non-monetizable at first. That's why internet giants of
the 90's, like Yahoo, were focused on being portals.

PCs were considered too much of a toy to actually do any type of work. Back
then, you did serious work on shared on on mainframes.

Radios, when shown to initial investors had one quip, "Why would I want to
send messages to nobody in particular?"

When TV was shown to the same innovators in radio, they didn't think it would
ever catch on.

Whether large numbers are divisible by primes seems like a useless branch of
mathematics called number theory, but we found it useful for encryption.
Without it, we wouldn't have online commerce, for math started 2 or 3
centuries ago, when there was no online commerce.

Point is, innovation happens when people try new and different things, even if
they're weird. Even if they seem useless. Even if no one else is doing them.
Even if people think it's stupid. Even if it doesn't make you money. Because
there's something else that's motivating you to explore.

You don't have to be smart to try new weird things, but smart people tend to
not worry about what other people think and go ahead and try new things.

Perhaps your quibble is the order of the statement. It's defn true that not
all things that smart people do in their free time become something
mainstream. But it's defn true that everything that we do nowadays, it was, at
one time, something some smart person was already doing years ago.

So if you ever spot someone doing something seemingly weird, strange, useless,
non-montetizable, but defn new, then stop yourself from being a cynic because
it might be something you end up doing yourself in 10 years, as improbable as
that seems now.

~~~
gamblor956
I seriously doubt the PC, radio, and TV examples. The benefits of radio would
have been immediately obvious; the same with television. Nor were PCs
considered a toy; they were simply too expensive for most families and
businesses to own.

And indeed, with regards to radio, an operating radio station was built merely
a year after the inventor received a patent for the first successful method of
radio transmission (and within a decade of the first successful radio
transmission). The first television station was built within 3 years after the
first working TV (capable of showing moving images) was built.

Search was not considered non-monetizable; it simply was not as monetizable as
a portal based on the technology prevalent when Yahoo--or even Google--
launched. Google did not invent the business of bidding for search terms--it
licensed the Overture's keyword bidding technology and later bought Applied
Semantics (which developed and commercialized the technology that is now known
as Adsense), which is what allowed it to monetize search. (If Yahoo hadn't
granted Google that license, Google wouldn't be here today.)

~~~
iamwil
To clarify, when I said radio, I mean it as the broadcast medium we know
today, not just the point to point wireless analog transmission. It's only
obvious to you the benefit of radio as a broadcast medium, because you live in
the future.

"By 1916, along with Armstrong and de Forest, [David Sarnoff] was using his
newfound fame to push the idea of commercial radio, something he called the
"wireless music box," although this idea was before its time. Even as late as
1920, one potential investor wrote him to say, "The wireless music box has no
imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in
particular?" Even the Marconi Company, his employer, rejected the idea of
radio as anything but a communications medium. So he went to work for the
Radio Corporation of America [RCA] in 1920. \-- Radio Pioneers enter story of
the wire on David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for
investment in radio." [http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-pioneers-enter-
story...](http://www.radioworld.com/article/radio-pioneers-enter-story-of-
wire/17426)

"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially
and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need
waste little time dreaming." \-- Wikiquotes -- Lee DeForest, American radio
pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube,
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Televisio...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Incorrect_predictions#Television_2)

As for the PC, I don't have a quote. But I remember IBM was the way "serious
people" had their computational needs met, and it was not PCs.

I never made claims that Google invented the business of bidding for search
terms. It is true that search was considered non-monetizable, or if you like,
less monetizable. Either way, it wasn't considered fertile ground for making
money, but there were people trying anyway--which is my point:

Smart people try things that don't make money, aren't cool, seem weird, etc,
and while not all of them will be mainstream in the future, there's a good
chance that a some of them will be.

------
B-Con
> Engineers vote with their time

This is a good description. We really do. It's pretty much our currency for
getting what we really want.

------
cpressey
YMMV, but I found this poisonous. At least mildly so.

My hobbies are what I do for fun. I don't give one whit if they're ultimately
"successful". I engage in them because I find them intrinsically interesting.

After reading this, I feel like there is a peer pressure, however slight, to
have hobbies that have "momentum" which will ultimately make them "the
future". (Like, oh no, maybe I'm engaging in the "wrong" hobbies, because I'm
pretty sure than in 10 years, still not everyone will be building ships in a
bottle.)

This sort of pressure _completely_ defeats the point of having a hobby, sucks
all the fun out of it, and will leave me personally feeling discouraged and
apathetic (for this morning at least -- until I can flush this mild poison
from my system.)

~~~
catshirt
i respect your perspective, but i think instead you should consider that many
(all?) of the hobbyists Chris is talking about weren't concerned with
"momentum".

------
unimpressive
Why is this the top voted article on HN? It's extremely short, makes a point
that has already been stated elsewhere at least once, and it's entirely vapid.
(See: Paul Graham essays.)

~~~
return0
Because people up-voted it.

~~~
outside1234
And its Chris Dixon.

------
mijustin
What smart hobbyists are doing now is part of the picture. There are other
elements that are needed for a "thing" to become a "big thing" that the whole
world uses.

Tech hobby trends need to conspire with other trends in business and society
(and also have the right timing) to become a future industry and a widely
adopted technology.

Two counterexamples off the top of my head: MUDs and ham radio.

I think the original "seed" of the hobby is just one building block needed (of
many).

~~~
iamwil
sometimes, ideas might need a little tweaking. Perhaps MUDs inspired MMORPGs?
It seems likely.

I'm not sure what the equivalent for ham radio would be, if at all.

~~~
mijustin
The hard part is attribution. Hobbies are just one of the seeds that germinate
into fully adopted technologies.

MUDs were definitely part of the inspiration for MMORPGs, but the success
behind MMORPGs has a lot to do with commercial internet, the development of
GUIs, etc...

------
Create
"As our own common sense tells us, Armstrong had discovered a vastly superior
radio technology. But at the time of his invention, Armstrong was working for
RCA. RCA was the dominant player in the then dominant AM radio market. By
1935, there were a thousand radio stations across the United States, but the
stations in large cities were all owned by a handful of networks.

RCA’s president, David Sarnoff, a friend of Armstrong’s, was eager that
Armstrong discover a way to remove static from AM radio. So Sarnoff was quite
excited when Armstrong told him he had a device that removed static from
“radio.” But when Armstrong demonstrated his invention, Sarnoff was not
pleased.

“I thought Armstrong would invent some kind of a filter to remove static from
our AM radio. I didn’t think he’d start a revolution—start up a whole damn new
industry to compete with RCA.” [4]

Armstrong’s invention threatened RCA’s AM empire, so the company launched a
campaign to smother FM radio. While FM may have been a superior technology,
Sarnoff was a superior tactician. As one author described,

“The forces for FM, largely engineering, could not overcome the weight of
strategy devised by the sales, patent, and legal offices to subdue this threat
to corporate position. For FM, if allowed to develop unrestrained, posed ... a
complete reordering of radio power ... and the eventual overthrow of the
carefully restricted AM system on which RCA had grown to power.” [5]

RCA at first kept the technology in house, insisting that further tests were
needed. When, after two years of testing, Armstrong grew impatient, RCA began
to use its power with the government to stall FM radio’s deployment generally.
In 1936, RCA hired the former head of the FCC and assigned him the task of
assuring that the FCC assign spectrum in a way that would castrate
FM—principally by moving FM radio to a different band of spectrum. At first,
these efforts failed. But when Armstrong and the nation were distracted by
World War II, RCA’s work began to be more successful. Soon after the war
ended, the FCC announced a set of policies that would have one clear effect:
FM radio would be crippled. As Lawrence Lessing described it,

“The series of body blows that FM radio received right after the war, in a
series of rulings manipulated through the FCC by the big radio interests, were
almost incredible in their force and deviousness.” [6]

To make room in the spectrum for RCA’s latest gamble, television, FM radio
users were to be moved to a totally new spectrum band. The power of FM radio
stations was also cut, meaning FM could no longer be used to beam programs
from one part of the country to another. (This change was strongly supported
by AT&T, because the loss of FM relaying stations would mean radio stations
would have to buy wired links from AT&T.) The spread of FM radio was thus
choked, at least temporarily.

Armstrong resisted RCA’s efforts. In response, RCA resisted Armstrong’s
patents. After incorporating FM technology into the emerging standard for
television, RCA declared the patents invalid—baselessly, and almost fifteen
years after they were issued. It thus refused to pay him royalties. For six
years, Armstrong fought an expensive war of litigation to defend the patents.
Finally, just as the patents expired, RCA offered a settlement so low that it
would not even cover Armstrong’s lawyers’ fees. Defeated, broken, and now
broke, in 1954 Armstrong wrote a short note to his wife and then stepped out
of a thirteenth- story window to his death.

This is how the law sometimes works. Not often this tragically, and rarely
with heroic drama, but sometimes, this is how it works. From the beginning,
government and government agencies have been subject to capture. They are more
likely captured when a powerful interest is threatened by either a legal or
technical change. That powerful interest too often exerts its influence within
the government to get the government to protect it. The rhetoric of this
protection is of course always public spirited; the reality is something
different. Ideas that were as solid as rock in one age, but that, left to
themselves, would crumble in another, are sustained through this subtle
corruption of our political process. RCA had what the Causbys did not: the
power to stifle the effect of technological change." -- <http://www.free-
culture.cc>

~~~
javajosh
Stories like this make me so mad. It's just so _unfair_ to Armstrong. And
unfairness, in my view, isn't some abstraction: fairness has real value. When
we see or read stories about RCA and Armstrong[1], or the inventor of the
wind-shield wiper, Robert Kearns[2] it's tempting to become resigned to this
fate. Innovation is not rewarded. Do not try.

When the anger passes, the harsh light of reason prevails. Clearly, an
inventor cannot succeed in disrupting large, powerful entities without
friends. Innovation on it's own is naked, vulnerable, and weak. Inventors must
trade the strength of their idea for the support of others: those with
connections to finance, government, and the big-businesses that will be your
competitors. It is access to these kinds of networks that give (some) VC's
their power.

[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong [2]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kearns

~~~
Create
High Stakes, No Prisoners is a sharp, brilliant insider's account of the way
Silicon Valley really works: the sharks, powerful incumbents, and old-boy
networks who play hardball all the time and the geniuses who make the products
that have changed the world.

------
AndrewKemendo
Got it, Start up a bunch of day care centers (People seem to love to play with
their kids on the weekend).

------
stevewilhelm
The smartest people I know are cooking family style meals using locally
sourced ingredients, brewing beer, raising chickens and bees, and turning
their lawns into fruit and vegetable gardens.

I sure hope everyone else will be doing this in ten years.

------
shurcooL
"Business people vote with their dollars, and are mostly trying to create near
term financial returns. Engineers vote with their time, and are mostly trying
to invent interesting new things."

I really like that.

------
ajju
What do you guys do on weekends?

I used to fiddle with some robotics (Lego Mindstorms and my Roomba) until I
started InstantCab. A bunch of my smarter friends seem to be working on
applying machine learning to firehoses (<http://www.maaya.com/> and
<http://technicalelvis.com/blog/category/twitter_mining/>), or on hardware
projects.

------
iamwil
I thought of it always as "What technologists, teenagers, and rap artists do,
we'll all be doing in 5 years."

I never thought I'd see news anchors do an exploding fist bump.

------
tarstarr
The smartest people avoid Disneyland on the weekends...too crowded. Good to
know that in 10 years, I can head back there again! Oh boy.

------
philwelch
Whatever facile point this article had, it immediately blew it by saying
Bitcoin and NoSQL are the wave of the future.

~~~
frabcus
Bitcoin itself may have any number of problems - it is though, the first
algorithm that allows truly distributed ownership of objects in a network.

I think that changes the game totally. I don't yet know what application of it
will go mainstream first.

Agreed about NoSQL. Its vision is too narrow (scaling within one organisation,
rather than truly distributed, syncing, forkable data)

~~~
philwelch
Bitcoin's a cool hack for sure, but most of the hype surrounding it is just
the same old goldbug nonsense.

------
aroman
While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic, can it be backed up
some how with past examples? Were "the smartest people" really hacking on
serious phone apps before iPhone and Android came out? (as an example)

~~~
jamesbritt
_While I don't disagree with the principle of this logic,_

The logic seems to involve defining "smartest" as "did stuff on the weekend as
a hobby that they later were able to turn into a successful business, product
or tool."

There seems to be a serious selection bias going on.

Do we have any data on the stuff smart people have done on the weekend that
never became anything notable?

------
senthilnayagam
Hobbies is not just being interested or being audience/spectator ,it is trying
new things which interest you , find new ways of doing things , enjoying the
process not just the outcome.

Lot of interesting things I share with friends and colleagues would be some
tricks which I come up with everyday things. Each wow or awesome from my
audience would make me feel proud, if it is not good enough will try more new
things.

------
egsec
There is a difference between a hobby and business, according to the IRS and
according to investors. You could also invent something awesome, and not make
any money, but the world loves it. You might still get something rewarding out
of that feeling.

Start a business to make money, but start a hobby to explore and enjoy. It is
also possible you will start one way and the end up on the other side (biz vs
hob)

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janson0
You know, the truest thing about this is that it takes time and effort to
really make things happen. It is the engineers and the hobbyists that are
taking the time and nights to solve problems. There is a lot of good,
unexpected stuff coming that is being cooked up in people's studies and
garages. Looking forward to it.

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jedc
I love Tim O'Reilly's quote on this phenomenon: "The future is already here;
it's just not evenly distributed"

~~~
jacques_chester
I believe it was actually William Gibson (of _Neuromancer_ fame) who said it:
<http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/>

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tomasien
The problem with nerds and their hobbies is so many of them (or better stated,
us) have hobbies that will NEVER be used in the mainstream. So which ones
will?

Right now my guess is 3d printing is going to be massive in some way or
another. It's got that feeling. People love to make shit.

~~~
tomasien
Plus, nerds and design nerds both love 3D printing. That's a powerful
combination.

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zellyn
I just can't believe that in 10 years, everybody is going to be coding 6502
and Apple ][+ emulators in Go.

Oh, wait...

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kokey
I think the list of examples could do with adding hobbyist unmanned drones and
high altitude balloon and rocket launches.

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peachananr
Right on. I couldn't have put it better than this.

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BuddhaSource
_It is totally worth it when a side projects gets serious_ , our hackathon
project made more impact than our main product

However a growth hack for 3Crumbs evolved into <http://Justmigrate.com> We
treated it as a hackathon project, had full freedom to ideate & execute. We
build this after hours for a month & it was a great success. Lot of users
loved it & this bought tears in our eyes :).

Weekend hackathons are important, it lets you think out of the box. Now our
original product is seeing lot of evolution for better growth.

