alt Hacker NewsI'm still reading it, but to your first part:
That "I never got to finish" feeling is the absolute worst. I've been struggling with it for years, and I feel like understand ya here.
It absolutely sucks you feel that, and I hope you find some comfort soon, however it may come.
If you're looking for a "so what now?" Moment, there's only one thing I can say that I've been proselytizing a bit: share everything. All the time. And get people to look at it and be your hype person; and if you're not getting that in your friend ground or workplace or community, find a new one to add to.
The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
You've done nothing wrong. You're just with some other folks like us that don't have the same die rolling power.
Don't give up on your ideas. Don't stop experimenting. Make your own tools because it's for you, and maybe your dice will come up that you get the other person in the world that sees it and goes "yes!" And you get all the fancy posts and stars and attention and such. Because that feeling of validation - not just popularity, but acceptance and being seen and heard for one's craft - is one everyone seeks and needs in life. It's not a weakness. It's being a human.
Thank you for sharing your experience with internet strangers.
Replies
I've gotta say, that is by far the most wholesome, empathetic reply I've ever received on this forum, and possibly on any forum. So on a personal level, thank you. Really. Especially because lamenting that I could've scooped Anthropic is just undeniably hubristic; my reasoning for not sharing partial results at the time was mostly about AI safety, which is silly in hindsight for betraying the exact same sin.
The (penti-)closing statement is also pretty damn poignant, and very true. I daresay your thoughts on publishing deserve to be published!
Substantively, I absolutely agree in theory -- I even recently set up my Substack with this in mind, despite that being an insane thing to do when frantically job searching! I (/Claude...) just found a brief exchange[1] I had w/ @simonw on this very topic almost exactly two years ago below a heartfelt blog post[2] about someone's personal reasons for struggling with this, even. Reading it now mostly serves to remind me of the roadblocks, though:
1. I was quibbling with his advice to "force" yourself to share by reflex (and the author's framing of the failure to do so as "laziness"), and two more years of reading about, discussing, and managing AD[H]D symptoms have only strengthened my convictions there. Charitably, getting into the habit of publishing is an investment, and my metaconscious/'inner critic' has plenty of quite plausible arguments as to why it wouldn't be worth the squeeze[3]; less charitably, I'd note that the relatable blogger in question only posted twice over the following 12 months.
2. That exchange took place just as A) reasoning models were changing everything, B) artificial articles outnumbered human ones for the first time.[4] In the intervening years we've seen AI turn from niche to vitriolic, and at least a dozen variations of "If you didn't care enough to write it yourself, I don't care enough to read it" posts hit the front page of HN. Obviously we all agree and are talking about human writing/ideating here, but the overall vibe is still undeniably... tense, let's say[5].
I still appreciate your comment and agree, mostly because the anxieties presumably lessen considerably with exposure and practice. In other words, I'd get used to it.
In fact, I just queried the corpus that I ironically have yet to publish the pipeline for, and I've written 6,280 real comments (>50 words of original text) and 1,788 long ones (>100 words) since that day on Reddit, Bluesky, and here. Some of that might be real differences --say, ostensible anonymity on Reddit and lower expectations for mere comments-- but the only factor that accounts for a spread of 6,280-0 is habit and comfort, I think.
As usual (55 times since November 11th, 2024): apologies for the rant, y'all.
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[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42101327#42104145
[2]: https://swapnilchauhan.com/blog/procrastination-and-the-fear...
[3]: Especially now that we're at the tail end of the initial six months of agentic engineering; investing the emotional energy to share my work is a lot harder to justify when I could orchestrate more+better engineering work in those same few hours than I could've accomplished in a few days two years ago.
[4]: https://graphite.io/research/ai-now-writes-as-many-online-ar...
[5]: Wow, I was more right than I thought! Claude just found a preprint showing that "pejorative accusations" more than doubled in the final third of 2024 --jumping from 7.9% in August to 17.9% in December-- despite poor accuracy: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12073
> The only way I've found to beat that feeling of "why is it i have the good ideas years ahead but can't do anything with it" is to roll more dice. That's it. These larger companies just essentially have infinitely many die and they're rolling them infinitely faster.
Many of us have ideas, ideas are cheap. Executing a complex idea well from thought to completion is much more rare.