Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#141

Post by flowless » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

ghc wrote: post #95

Pretty much everyone is in the same boat. Even if you have an advanced degree, most of what businesses need is plugging together components and adding business rules to create a product. As a discipline, we're too young and our technology is too immature to support a true split between engineering/science and computer programming. If you want to work on interesting problems you're passionate about, there's a few ways…

Nice, I'm building something similar with TTN - using Haskell to glue MQTT/SQL/WebSockets to be able to stream data from sensors and also optionally store data in timescaledb. For web fronted I really want to try miso (https://haskell-miso.org/).

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#142

Post by Const-me » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:43 PM UTC

I generally like what I do.

I stay away from webdev. I did a couple of small projects but the web was just an outer API, the main work was done by native code running on CPUs or GPUs.

I stay away from enterprise systems, or fin.tech, or ad.tech. I removed enterprise-targeted keywords from my resume, Java, J2EE, SOAP, SQL. I have some experience with them from my early career but I don’t want to use them anymore.

Also, for many years I’ve never worked in/for huge companies, i.e. google/amazon/microsoft scale. My employers/clients are/were mostly small to medium companies.

What do I do? Almost everything else. Native desktop, native mobile, embedded, GPGPU, robotics, GIS, videogames, CAD/CAM, streaming media. Many startups, and small to medium companies, have problems to solve that I find interesting to work on.

There’re still boring parts in my work. But because of my experience I usually find ways to minimize the time I’m spending on them. The most generic advice, pick the right tools.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#143

Post by chud37 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

I do a lot of CRUD, and while it is really boring and very similar work, It all builds up to my global system that I basically developed from the ground up at the charity that I work for.

I have been able to invent my own projects along the way, such as mp3 to subtitles and a student portal for the college side of the charity. It's been really fun. However without writing a crud page for some new idea that someone has once a week I dont think I'd still be here.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#144

Post by exikyut » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:44 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #100

itronitron wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have found the boundaries of the box, and anything you find outside the box will be judged against everything inside the box. There are a lot of people inside the box, and the box is small, so they make a lot of noise. When you get outside of the box you need to also get away from the box so that you can't hear the judging.

Interestingly put. Sounds poetic. So here I am, with the map of the boundaries of the box finally taking shape. Now the question is, how do I exit the box? I'd like to walk around on the outside and check it out. Also, is leaving this box even a good idea? What if everyone left the box at the same time? Would the world collapse then? (I can't help myself, I tend to be interested in the global view as well.)

Well, that's where universal basic income has some validity.

It's a very nice idea.

It does have the potential to create localized unimpressedness though; the question is how powerful the temporarily-put-out groups would be, and whether the backlash would remove your power as well.

Money is power, laterally too.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#145

Post by ramblerman » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:45 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #31

You might as well have asked who among us won the lottery. I've been struggling with this for years now; after 4 boring jobs I finally gave up even the expectation that what I'll be asked to do will be even remotely interesting (or socially useful). The chance of landing an interesting job is absolutely minuscule - the market rewards whatever it rewards at the moment, and that's where jobs flock. These days, one of t…

I think you hit the hammer on the nail.

Boring problems are quite manageable when they are also important and meaningful. The general lack of purpose most of us find in our jobs (apart from 'earning money') is the real problem.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#146

Post by wambotron » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

weliketocode wrote: post #140

sAbakumoff wrote: post #105

My suggestion : forget you CS degree, drop the idea of doing something interesting during your work hours, think about it as inevitable procedure to earn your montly salary. At 5pm run away from your office and focus on whatever you think is interesting.

Is this view that common? I'm all for work-life balance and working on passion projects on the side. But do that many people really think of their developer job as a salary and a daily grind?

I do. I've only had two jobs I truly enjoyed doing the 9-5 work for, all the rest have been a slog to get through to pay for my other interests and family-related stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#147

Post by ChrisRackauckas » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

I'm working on numerical methods for solving differential equations and running the JuliaDiffEq organization to build all of the newest methods into DifferentialEquations.jl. So much of this field is undocumented or has never been tested, so it's awesome to just come up with new ideas and new schemes and test them out. My PhD was in control of stochasticity in biological organisms (how do you control the internal randomness of biochemical reactions?) and the methods for simulating such models. So I get to work with hot off the press new biological "big data" and develop new techniques which use some of the newest advances in mathematics (stochastic analysis) to do something that can have some very practical outcomes.

If you're really looking for interesting technical problems, I highly recommend looking into systems biology. There's interesting mathematical, computational, and biological problems being worked on here (with lots of funding!).

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#148

Post by wambotron » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

I have recently been interviewing and people have been asking me very CS-specific questions that, quite frankly, never come up in my day-to-day work. Not only that, but they _haven't_ come up in the past 15 years of work. I had to really think about some of the answers because I just never do it.

The roles were for more CRUD-related gigs. I don't really get the emphasis on those CS particulars when you don't really run into them much.

Anyway, no my job is not interesting. The challenges are organizational and political rather than technical.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#149

Post by hxchen » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #142

I generally like what I do. I stay away from webdev. I did a couple of small projects but the web was just an outer API, the main work was done by native code running on CPUs or GPUs. I stay away from enterprise systems, or fin.tech, or ad.tech. I removed enterprise-targeted keywords from my resume, Java, J2EE, SOAP, SQL. I have some experience with them from my early career but I don’t want to use them anymore. Also…

You have to be really GOOD at your field to have this freedom. Good for you, dude.

I also like to abstract away the non-sense part of a problem, so that I can focus on the real intellectual puzzles.

Re: Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

#150

Post by jacques_chester » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

jjoonathan wrote: post #62

jacques_chester wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't agree with Marx, your sense of ennui seems to reasonably represent what I understand to have been his concepts of reification and alienation. One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point. Hayek more helpfully explained that the market provides a mechanism for determining value, not virtue . That it works, but doesn't uplift. And that tr…

> the market provides a mechanism for determining value The market's notion of value is weighted by wealth: making coffee for the rich is "valuable", meeting the basic needs of the poor is not "valuable." This makes the market notion of "value" very different from just about any other notion of value in the world. If you muddy the distinction, or let someone else muddy the distinction, markets become almost tautologi…

My fondness for alliteration backfired.

Hayek understood that what we think about prices and what we think about ethics are distinct things. He didn't see rightness as flowing from markets. He saw it as a discovery process for allocations of resources.