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The Donut Hustle
- webwanderings 11y agoIt's a good read, but I don't know what it is teaching. Ethics anyone?
- Apocryphon 11y agoI think of it as a cute, slightly self-promoting story in an inspirational vein: underprivileged kid gains valuable business skills by hustling family-friendly wares to fellow students, grows up to use those skills to realize his childhood dream. Also he knew Kendrick Lamar before he was famous. It's light, but I like it.
- pnathan 11y agoThe value of hard work and seeing the angle.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- gjreda 11y agoI see it as teaching fairly basic business and personal finance concepts. In a league where 60% of players go bankrupt within five years after leaving the sport [1], this is likely pretty enlightening for some readers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professional_American_athletes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_finances_of_professio...
- noonespecial 11y agoThe park where I’d go to play basketball as a kid was a big Blood hangout. And obviously, my CD empire wouldn’t exactly hold up 100 percent to copyright laws but compared to the alternatives of what I could’ve been doing for money, I think it was pretty solid. I'm not a big moral relativist, but "ethics" when viewed by a resident of Compton in the early 2000's might appear in a slightly different light than many other places I can think of.
- webwanderings 11y agoTwo wrongs do not make one right. Principles are only relevant when they are difficult to follow.
- noonespecial 11y agoI'd argue its that degree of difficulty that is at issue here. $15.99 paid to a big corp is very different to an out-grouped minority living in poverty with almost no investment in "the system" than it is to a Princeton student living on his trust fund. Ethics are for rich people. Morality is for everyone. What this kid did may have violated some of the ethical rules a bunch of privileged people set up to perpetuate and sanitize their own in-grouped society, but Aaron had basically zero participation in that group so its rules must have seemed impossibly distant to him. His actions, however seem to have been both a benefit to him and to his community, vs the other choices he could have made that would benefit him at the expense of his own group. I'd call these actions moral, even if not "ethical". How different really is this than when Uber or AirBNB thumbs their collective noses at the rules "the man" has set up that seem wrong to them? Aaron's a hacker, and a hustler, just like us. One of our kind.
- webwanderings 11y agoSadly, you are incorrect, and probably in the majority. Rules of ethics are not setup by privileged few; they are the cause of civilized humanity. Without them, we wouldn't have come this far. What he did to hustle the donuts, was fair and ethical. He earned his fair share. But what he did with churning out CDs, was not. We all can possibly see that. But of course, the trade born out of Napster must have been hard to resist. The part about resisting, is where ethics reside.
- mindslight 11y agoOne can have a consistent set of ethics in which imaginary property does not exist. For example, my personal opinion is that it is unethical to directly support companies working to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, especially for mere convenience.
- EvanKelly 11y ago"Honestly, I think that philosophy is why I was able to make it to UCLA and have a long NBA career. A lot of dudes have a good jump shot. A lot of dudes can play ball. But how many guys are willing to put in the extra work that it takes? At this level, you have to be almost addicted to the work." I think this is clearly the point and it jives with John Urschel's article posted earlier today.
- orthoganol 11y agoBluntly, that's a very white person response. Do you know about Compton? Anything that's not selling drugs or gang related to get out is fine. What's right or wrong has a lot to do with the circumstances you're in.
- wavefunction 11y agoI am a white person who worked at McDonalds to get money as a teenager. Presumably something like that would have been ok? Or is that too "white?" (Keep in mind I had friends in gangs, not Compton but they got in shootouts nonetheless.)
- wavefunction 11y ago0'd again for innocuous comments. I know, don't "complain" about downvoting.....
- rdancer 11y agoWhat valuable business skills are you gonna learn working at that fast-food establishment?
- oldmanjay 11y agoRacism isn't really a useful tool, even when you really believe in the racist principle you espouse. All people believe their racism is justified, all are wrong.
- ZoF 11y ago> that's a very white person response. ...
- georgemcbay 11y agoI pirated the hell out of software when I was a relatively (for America) poor kid being raised by a single-mom. I would have never been able to afford all the development software I used to learn C, assembly language, etc. This is back on the C64/Amiga 500, before free software was a thing for at home use (the gnu project existed, but I was doing this well before Linux existed). The software was often being sold for multiples of the cost of the (scrounged-together) hardware I'd be running it on. It became less of a thing as more legal options (eg. Matt Dillon's excellent DICE C compiler) became available and I pay for all the commercial software I use now, but there's no way I would condemn someone else for abusing copyright to get ahead as a youngster. I'm perfectly accepting of ethics being somewhat flexible on some things if you are legitimately lacking the means. Stealing a physical good? Never acceptable to me, you're not just taking something but you are depriving the owner of that thing. Violating copyright? Ehhhhnn... They weren't getting my non-existent money either way so the loss to them was very theoretical and the gain to me was huge.
- webwanderings 11y agoWhat about Bill Gates' role in popularizing desktop computers for the whole world, and mostly for free or bootlegged copies of Windows? Apple/Jobs didn't want to do that. Nobody wanted Linux in comparison.
- timbrah 11y agoThe song "Black Boy Fly" on Kendrick's Good Kid Maad City talks about how he was jealous of Afflalo. https://youtu.be/BPAxrGT2emw https://youtu.be/BPAxrGT2emw
- bluedino 11y agoI paid for my first PowerBook G4 this way. I didn't buy the built-in SuperDrive because I knew I'd burn it out in a few months, so I got a Sony FireWire DVD writer. I had my PC setup with all the file sharing programs, hammering my cable modem 24/7, downloading movies and music. DVD's were $10 and audio CD's were $5. My main competition was bootleg movies on regular CD's that you could buy at flea markets, gas stations and party store but they had terrible quality. Not just because they had to fit on a CD but many of them were shot in the theater with a handheld video camera, not rips from IRC channels. They were only $5, though. It was way too much work driving around dropping discs off and I couldn't use my laptop for learning Cocoa, so I stopped doing it after a few months.
- wmeredith 11y agoThis is an engaging story, but that's one of the worst, most distracting websites for reading I've ever seen. Random page animations? Fuck off.
- dexterdog 11y agoGood thing I read it in the HN app.
- swampthinker 11y agoAre we looking at the same website? It looks very clean to me, with the exception of the animation at the top.
- yitchelle 11y agoWhats with the anger? I found it to be an engaging experience. The animations must be minor as I did not even noticed them.
- klean92 11y agoI have more respect for hustle than intelligence. Love this story.
- crabasa 11y agoI think you mean "knowledge" or "education". There's nothing in this story to indicate the writer isn't intelligent.
- nommm-nommm 11y agoWe also had two $5 CD hustlers in my high school in the Napster days. I can attest - The demand was insane. Retail price was really high and $5 seemed to be the sweet spot of affordability.
- mrspeaker 11y agoI remember someone back in the pre-napster days when CD writers were thousands of dollars. They were selling "The Best of Bill" on CD for $15 a pop: it had Windows 95, Visual Basic, Word etc, Visual C++...
- marpstar 11y agoI was one of those hustlers from 2000-2002. I was in a junior high with only 90 students, and I was the first with a CD burner. It was best when a clique of girls would come up and ask for the exact same songs, $5/ea...easiest $15 ever. I don't remember who eventually took over supplying the masses, but I was honestly sick of doing it by the time they did.
- beatpanda 11y agoMy friend and I also hustled bootleg rap albums in the early 2000s, but in our case, we were two white kids selling the explicit versions of the albums you couldn't buy at the nearest music store, which was a Wal-Mart. Lots of our customers already had the album, they just wanted the version with the curses left in. It was also (to us) INCREDIBLY expensive to buy a CD burner, so before either of us could get one, we made cassette tapes of the albums, and sold those. The weirdest thing for me to think about looking back on it is how many of my peers still had cassette tape players in the year 2000.
- jongraehl 11y agoReally clear writing. Sweet story.
- vonklaus 11y agoIf you’re a man of your word and people can count on you, it cuts across all lines. This was a pretty inspirational story, I really enjoyed it. He seems like a smart guy, and I am sure he enjoys playing ball, obviously a very successful guy. He picked an avenue and followed through going pro. If he had more opportunities it would be interesting to see if he turned out as an academic or entrepreneur or if having to fight for everything he had is what made him so great.
- roflchoppa 11y agoBy the time i hit highschool, it was easy to find music and movies online, but modding the hardware to play it, PSP, DS flashcards, chipping xbox, PS1, was ripe. esp. because no-one else knew how to use a soldering iron, and the whole bricking your device warning turned people off.
- Graziano_M 11y agoI made dozens of dollars by running across the street to buy 5c candies only to sell them for 10c each. Good times.