Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are you working on interesting technical problems?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 441 posts

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

#151

Post by franciscop »

I love working on user-facing stuff! It gives me the chance to learning about interests, human behaviour, interaction, etc.

But I think your main issue might be about keeping learning. Personally, specially since I never studied CS (Industrial Engineer bachellor here), I loved reinventing the wheel about programming while at university for fun. I made a bootstrap and jQuery clone that ended up quite popular. Since I have finished, it has been more difficult because of time and energy, but here I am, reading HN while working on my robot before sleeping.

I have given it a thought to ask for part-time working next time I am looking for a job to be able to focus on my passions on ny free time: https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/01/08/part-time-programmer...

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

#152

Post by exDM69 »

At work? No.

Outside of work? Yes, but most of that doesn't involve programming. Mostly doing stuff with pre-industrial revolution era woodworking and blacksmithing. I do have a few interesting programming side projects too, but I haven't felt like sitting on the computer after work for a while. Maybe when it's winter and I don't feel like going out.

For doing projects outside of work, I've had to learn some patience and preserverance. Previously I'd put all my might into a side project and then burn out and abandon the project. Nowadays I try to keep the side projects in a state where I can easily pick them up and leave them dormant for a while. I've got projects that I've been working on for 5+ years and they're still going.

As for working with boring projects... I just had to get used to it. I've never enjoyed any work I've done (in exchange for money), but the pay is ok and I can aspire to do great things outside of work.

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

#153

Post by exikyut »

throwawaymath wrote: post #139

I'm in the exploratory stages of starting a noncommercial project focused on hosting, processing and serving a vast amount of climate data for scientists and researchers. I've "seeded" this project with my own bare metal hardware, electricity and internet access. This includes 136 vCPUs, 512GB of RAM and 128TB of hard drive storage capacity (with room for another 456TB). As my own money permits, I plan to slowly add…

Wow :)

High-level questions:

- At the risk of birthing a page-long subthread on ZFS-vs-everything-else... what storage solution are you using, and why?

- What sort of hardware are you using? (This is a non-catalyzing question, and is just out of curiosity)

- How did this get started, and how are you managing this?

- Will you ever be interested in accepting donations or funding? (Including on a voluntary basis; and including with clear stipulations/structure about management)

- What sorts of decisions/motivated this initiative?

More focused:

- Do you have any interest in creating this as a "community hub", with a central code repo that data scientists can push updates to that then get run on the cluster? If the visualization data (or prerendered bits of it) are openly cached/accessible, having the code that generated the data equivalently open/available could be interesting.

- What kind of availability/openness are you looking at with data? (TL;DR translation: rate limiting)

You may already be aware (very likely), but AFAIK archive.org is interested in this kind of thing. Interesting bunch of people, but the various projects do like climate data, and they have a few hundred PB of space, FWIW.

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

#154

Post by some_account »

tw1010 wrote: post #96
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…

There should be a name to the phenomenon that humans seem to become crushingly depressed once they start to grasp the big picture dynamics of the system they're encapsulated within. I think it's an effect that we're not quite prepared for as we reach closer and closer to science dotting all its i's. It's as if childhood primes us to think that life is all about figuring out what the heck is going on around us, and as…

This feeling is because in our current stage of development, we are very primitive spiritually. Some of us don't even believe we have a soul. That it is all meaningless. Science in its current form also looks at our material world and concludes the same. Nasa tells us we are just a speck of crap in a giant space as well, with no beginning or end.

You guys talk about boxes. Well there are huge ones for the mind, carefully constructed to be believable for the masses. Too complicated to understand, they require you to put beliefs in people with credentials, who will repeat to you what they found in the books they were given, or the math they got shown.

If you want to understand your purpose here, you have to step outside of scientific thinking to start with, and that's a huge problem for almost everybody. You have to look at origins of the matrix we are living in, the illuminati, the Egyptians, book of the dead, the occult.

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

#155

Post by jacques_chester »

thinkingemote wrote: post #115
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…

Marx is vague and rightly so. I think the situationists took a similar approach, which is also their main criticism. They do not describe what the utopia would be not really the steps, they instead say that it's a state that occurs when people live according to their desires. That to me sounds like "do what thou wilt" where the task is to find out what our desire, our will is.

If Kołakowski is to be believed, Marx's view of the post-revolutionary world has a somewhat mystical flavour stemming mostly from Hegel. It is the immediate roots in Hegelian philosophy that makes it, in practical terms, wishy-washy.

What has always tied Marxism in knots has been the tension between waiting for the inexorable laws of history on the one hand (and sometimes trying to give them a hurry up) versus on the other hand agitating for reforms. The former see the latter as delaying the revolution. The latter see the former as something between dreamers and jerks.

I think that history, having been somewhat lawless after all, makes the reformers look better.

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

#156

Post by exikyut »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120
chrisbennet wrote: post #117

I feel so sorry for you. Life is so very brief to be working on something you don’t like. I look forward to going to work every (week) day. I work in a different corner of the development biz doing computer vision, graphics and new products for companies. This week I’m working on “reading” test strips for a new medical device. Last month I was working on the graphics for a landing radar. At the risk of of telling you…

Not the OP, but regarding the "eat what I do" - how do I get your food? How do I get to work on medical test strips, or landing radars?

Not the GP, but regarding tiny companies, I wanted to link this, which resonates strongly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17236637

It seems that everything's relative and being the near-smartest person in the room can be a tactical advantage.

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

#157

Post by ghc »

flowless wrote: post #141
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/ ).

Unless you're targeting consumer you might want to be careful with tech like web-sockets. After a decade of using sensors in industrial facilities I've come to appreciate the value of on-device buffers and transactional logging systems that don't maintain persistent connections. Real-world environments are unfortunately really tough on technologies designed for browsers.

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

#158

Post by juliangoldsmith »

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?

A job doesn't have to be a calling, and a job that isn't a calling doesn't have to be a soul-crushing grind.

Most developer jobs are for CRUD apps, and you'll rarely be doing greenfield development. There's not a whole lot of room for passion there. If you just treat it as a job, though, rather than something you have to force yourself to be passionate about, it doesn't need to be that interesting. Once you make a living, you can satisfy your creative urges elsewhere.

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

#159

Post by bonyt »

This was one of the reasons I went to law school after getting a CS degree. I now practice law, focused on patent litigation.

My experience generally has been that the work is more varied, and there is more learning as opposed to mechanically doing.

Sometimes I get to deep dive into interesting technical topics. I’ve taken things apart and reverse engineered bits of software and worked with experts. Plus I am deeply fascinated by computer history, and sometimes I get to dive into that as well when looking for prior art.

On the other hand, some patents really suck and have claims that were clearly written by people who didn’t understand what they were writing about. Arguing over these requires you to almost suspend disbelief to operate in a world where the claims make sense.

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

#160

Post by flowless »

I've left master CS studies to be able to do robotics and be free to learn stuff I want/need. After number of years hacking stuff all around in local hackerspace I'm finally getting onto something which is an attempt to create distributed motion control system (https://distrap.org) which is also one huge experiment with generating code from Haskell utilizing Ivory Tower framework made by Galois (https://ivorylang.org/). During the process I've realized the potential of this framework and started writing a book about it (http://48.io/~rmarko/book/) so people don't have to spend half a year reverse engineering it.

Beside that we're also building vpsAdminOS (https://vpsadminos.org/) for running LXC on top ZFS. At https://vpsfree.cz we currently run openVZ with the intention to migrate to vpsAdminOS which is currently tested by members.

In my experience you gotta sacrifice stuff (like well paying job) so you can do stuff you really want.

Post reply on HN