171–180 of 441 posts
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 ha…
Interesting, how does that work?
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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.
I don't really approve use-cases like running a webserver to control lights on ESP8266 where simple TCP sockets would do.
Btw I've written an implementation of ZRE protocol which you might possibly find interesting - https://github.com/vpsfreecz/haskell-zre
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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, caref…
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.
Some boring problems need to be solved anyway, and they can’t be abstracted away. Just when you’re picking the right tools, it shouldn’t take too much time.
For example, that CAD/CAM app I’ve developed has a lot of very interesting algorithms inside. But the software still need to appear on the user’s PCs somehow, i.e. we needed an installer. I’ve picked http://wixtoolset.org/ It’s mature, well supported, first-party i.e. made by Microsoft, open source, integrates nicely into visual studio. Because of these things, I’ve spent less than a week in total over the course of 1.5 years working (=develop, test, and support combined) on the relatively boring installer part of that software.
The installer was just an example, many commonly encountered boring problems already have good solutions. E.g. need RPC, pick .NET and WCF. Need to store structured data, pick the highest level library that fits other requirements (despite I generally don’t like SQL, I still know it and I’ve used sqlite a couple of times when it fit well). Need to expose JSON HTTP API on MacOS without much performance constraints, pick Python + CherryPy, the Python is sufficiently high level and it’s already installed there. Without picking the right tools, I’d spent a lot of time solving these boring problems.
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…
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…
Not all of us are raising families, but I think it highlights a bigger points. Work is not what builds societies (certain jobs do harm society I think, mostly by destroying it's moral virtues). People relationships are what build societies and build happiness.
And you're right - there are a lucky, select few who get jobs that can also influence society.
I'm not worried about that though (anymore - I was for a time though). With my job, I can provide and care for those around me (provide for my family and generally have positive, uplifting interactions with those around me).
I have resigned myself that it's not my job to fix society, it's our job to fix society, and I'm doing my part where I am. From my perspective I have more than enough to do locally anyway: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17176036
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"Ennui". I like the word. Thanks! > One might ask: what does the alternative look like? From what I can tell Marx is a bit wishy-washy on that point. I have no clue either. But it feels to me as if we're turning humanity into a single superorganism, with each one of us being just a cell, except all those cells have brains capable of wishing they'd play on the same level as the superorganism. Related: I've never had a…
I don't have answers either. I just chase books and try to cobble them together. I wish you luck.
I'll be sure to let HN know if I ever come to any lasting conclusion.
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 ran…