Technical skills *alone* is not valuable, correct. But if you find ways to ensure whoever coming to your website will generate new users and stay (virality factor) and also grab publicity at the right moment, and you understand what "right moment" means instead of naively going to TechCrunch while your website's fundamental design is not all that viral and not all that usable (e.g. the Color app that got $41M in investments) - then, only then, will you have some chance of success.

In short, it's all about execution, and most people think it's simple.

While you're saying all these things are bullshit, quite a few people made billions and thousands if not tens of thousands made millions. Businesses (e.g. Nokia, Borders) that can't follow are seeing a hit in real revenues, people are fired, and whole companies are going belly up.

You may think all these are bullshit, but to the investors, entrepreneurs and all related newly minted rich; or the newly fired people from older companies - the effects are very real.

Maybe if you see your personal wealth as an optimization problem, and thus if you're doing consumer software - things like traction, user experience, virality as optimization problems - you'll begin to appreciate the complexities inherent in building successful products (which can look deceptively simple, but the reasoning behind something simple can be very complicated) and by extension, companies that actually work well instead of "work" like a Dilbert comic strip.

I can understand the left-leaning and socialists among Slashdotters will hate what I just said. But at the end of the day, whatever technological and scientific advance you or I made have to serve human interests. You can't say "I like to do [math|quantum mechanics|machine learning|art|product design|rockets|science fiction|...] because it's fun" without "I".

But you need to take the Shadowdancer prestige class to Hide in Plain Sight.

They should go Dr. Evil and demand one million dollars *checks back with Number 2*, sorry, one hundred billion dollars.

Why do you think the average politician wouldn't find killing innocent people awesome?

It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).

Half Life 2 doesn't have a emotionally deep backstory anyway - you get dropped into a situation and you kill monsters. Your character doesn't even get to say a word about all the crazy things happening around him. A "Please, somebody help" in Half Life 2 doesn't give the same kind of feeling as in the real world - all it does is telling you that something dangerous is approaching, ready your crowbar.

n/t

Because we're not powerful enough to control and manipulate the laws of physics, and mathematics, yet?

If you think about it.. most people's image of God is quite a bit less powerful than what's needed to fit their definitions.

I used to work for a major open source project at home for 2 years... it felt awesome for the first 6 months, but after that I felt terrible being at home alone all day long, every day. I have a few other friends who experienced something like that, working at home for large tech companies for various reasons - it's awesome for the first few months, but you'll feel really bad after a while.

It doesn't even take 20 engineers over 3 years to make such a mistake. It only takes one - even you can and will do it. Just imagine yourself doing simple addition with numbers in the range [0, 10] every day - and you do 1000 such stupid math questions on a good day and 10000 during crunch time. And you keep doing that for 3 years. There has to be one day, you do one of these additions wrong - not because you're bad at maths - but because you're a human. I understand perfectly that you'll use an ORM or at least SQL bind, or whatever method you prefer to prevent SQL injections... but just as it's possible to leak memory in Java or any GC language, you're bound to find an uncommon or plain stupid way to make a mistake after a while.

The thing is, if you have 100 engineers working on your code, and they write or modify 200 lines of code every day - it's very hard to guarantee there's not a single line of vulnerable SQL code written over 3 years. It only takes one mistake to get your server compromised.

Just in case you're not the guy who pays the bills of a company... H1Bs are fucking expensive, ok?

We don't even have fire. My tribe fling mud into the air for signals.