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

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

#301

Post by davidjnelson » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:18 PM UTC

rumcajz wrote: post #162

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…

Interesting work is done by open source hobbyists at night. What remains is what you get paid for.

Who wants to work on monetizing open source by working hard to create a reliable way of paying the project creators to do the interesting work as what they get paid for?

Now that sounds meaningful. Email me if you agree.

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

#302

Post by throwawaymath » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

teddyg1 wrote: post #294

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…

I love the focus. Starting at the base level data and working to normalize it is definitely the most difficult piece. How far back have you assembled data? Feel free to reach out to me individually (email in profile), I'm working on operationalizing climate data like this and would like to look at this together!

Your email is not in your profile :)

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

#303

Post by killjoywashere » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

Photographers have a similar issue with a different take: they are trained on a tool, and apply it to a wide variety of problems. The difference, I find, is that in photography circles, photographers express a vast array of motivations and interests. They may be doing what they do because they are an artist, a scientist, a journalist, a human rights advocate, maybe even a computer scientist.

I would encourage you to look at computer science through a similar lens (pun intended). What human problem are you solving?

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

#304

Post by Waterluvian » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #167

Waterluvian wrote: post #52

I do a lot of robotics software engineering from top to bottom: UIs for mapping spaces, web APIs, web servers, databases, ROS nodes to handle mapping, web-based controls, industrial integration APIs, error handling, etc. I've excitedly taken on every little task thrown at me over the years, I think, because I went to school for GIS, earned geography degrees, and never in my life expected to do anything remotely as in…

> All without any engineering or CS education (which makes me really angry at the education system for barring me from engineering or CS, but that's another story) I wouldn't mind hearing about that, huh. (In my case my story was learning difficulties I only began to get past at around 25, with virtually nil remembered schooling (besides what I could figure out on my own) from before that point, more or less.)

The short story is:

I'm naturally smart, motivated, curious. I grew up surrounded by technology, tech enabling parents and siblings. I got into robotics via. FIRST. I love building stuff. But if you ask me to sit quietly in any class for an hour it's game over. I just can't. So my grades never got within a mile of the minimum cut-off for ENG or CS programs.

So I guess I found my own route into engineering. But on occasion I will feel livid about how much I lost out on by not getting to go to school for engineering. Usually it's in a moment of, "okay I would probably understand how to manipulate these matrices if I had learned it in school, but yet again I have to play catch-up."

On top of that is a longer story about the struggle with ADHD, people always assuming you're just lazy or that ADHD isn't real. About the ADHD drugs that allowed me to adjust a slider between Focused/Antisocial/Suicidal and Energetic/Social/Impatient and how I very slowly learned how to cope without the drugs that I was pretty sure would kill me one day.

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

#305

Post by killjoywashere » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:32 PM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #193

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…

My overall happiness was so much better when I was working for my university's pharmacy school making websites about where to find Naloxone and heroin overdose info than currently at my huge engineering firm company making twice as much. I'd love to find a job doing simple web development for a nonprofit.

Split time. Get a side gig. I have a friend who spends 4 days a week at the dental school fixing catastrophic oral pathology problems for the uninsured, and gets paid a pittence. He spends one day a week at a posh private clinic and pays all the bills for the month in the first week of the month. The following 3-4 days of posh work in the month fund everything else.

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

#306

Post by tejtm » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

Geek for science!

There are trade off for sure, but I would go back to building things in the physical world rather than program for any other reason. note: I have been happily at it for decades

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

#307

Post by foobaw » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

I used to be the product lead for AR. This may seem interesting but in reality, it wasn't at all.

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

#308

Post by hobscrk777 » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:40 PM UTC

Atreus wrote: post #112

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…

As a Mechanical Engineer with solid math and physics background, using Machine Learning and Numeric Methods to substantially engage and improve product performance, I really feel like I won the lottery.

Are you free to say where you work?

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

#309

Post by neltnerb » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

Seems like the issue is that any company will prefer to avoid a technical problem for $10k rather than pay $100k to do it in-house. I personally do a lot of interesting work purely because the stuff I'm doing cannot possibly be done externally (since I'm a scientist and systems engineer).

So I guess the trick then is to work someplace where what you want to do is exactly the business problem they're solving. Anything that isn't directly their offering is likely to be farmed out, and I think that will only accelerate.

I don't know the right software analogy, but I wouldn't advise a client to research new ways to manufacture PCBs if all they actually need is to have working PCBs. But if their business model revolved around a new PCB manufacturing method, it would make perfect sense for them to hire me to help them develop that new method.

Assuming it's similar with software, if you want to research making databases run faster don't work for a database consumer, work for a database provider.

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

#310

Post by neltnerb » Tue, Jun 05, 2018, 5:50 PM UTC

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…

I had a dream where I was in a coma for 20 years, woke up, and found that AI was now able to trivially answer even the most difficult research questions I could imagine. In my dream I visited my old workplace, and found that while the CEO was still there the ease at which questions could be answered made the humans more supervisers than researchers.

For some time in my dream I was lost, not sure what my value was as a human being without my skills that I've spent decades refining.

Then I remembered that humans have inherent value, that I am not my work, and went to a park to meditate and teach karate. It made me think, in my dream, how even if a machine could teach karate better, I was not doing it for society -- I was doing it for myself.

Realizing that you are not your work, and are not defined by your work; that humans have inherent value and you have every right to simply be happy when the opportunity arises; that the Puritan virtues of work are an illusion, and that humans should follow their passion; that the illusion of the necessity of work often prevents people from ever discovering their passion in the first place.

It was probably my best dream, and I approach life quite differently now. I think when I feel like I have a closed form solution, it is much the same spirit as an AI that will solve your problems for you.