Everything about tarsnap is absurd. It's basically the world's most absurd backup service (insanely expensive, poor UX, bus factor of ~1, restoring moderate amounts of data appears to take days (!)[1]), brought about by an absurdly bad allocation of human capital (it's run by a double Putnam challenge winner, with several other impressive accomplishments), and as such, absurdly beloved by HN.
If tarsnap has even a modicum of popularity, thanks to these prices it would be bringing in bank. If he's making bank, that means he's providing value (even if it's just to "uninformed"). And it seems this system mostly runs itself, so it's a side gig. It's probably a far more effective allocation than many other possible allocations of human capital.
How many of the world's best and brightest are doing all sorts of busywork? At least Colin has some time to do whatever he wants to do while running tarsnap.
> If he's making bank, that means he's providing value
I don't find that that logically follows from making bank. Not everyone who makes bank is a positive influence.
Tarsnap does provide value, even if I think it's less than its cost: I'm just commenting on the general case that making money would mean you're providing good value
[1] In case of an emergency, you will always be able to get back your data from tarsnap at a blazing rate of 50kB/s https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333.