Very timely. I'm working on writing mine down this weekend. This is where my current thoughts are going: I want to live my life in a manner the inspires and encourages everyone I cross paths with to be the best they can be, to give their best, to continual strive to improve .5 % everyday. I want to be a bucket filler and to live out that attitude is more important than aptitude.
Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
61–70 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#62I don't know if I can do it but I would really like to dramatically lower the bar for people to change careers. I think a lot of people get stuck in their careers which they pick too early and then the costs of switching are way too high (lack of information, available learning resources, other barriers to entry).
The job market is very skewed towards specialists which causes a lot of "must have experience to get experience" chicken-and-egg issues. i.e. "find someone who has done X for 5 years". I think that is fine, but there should be an avenue to value and recruit people with diverse experiences i.e. someone who has done X -AND- Y.
I think the key solve is to help companies take on people who want to career switch but have applicable prior experience that you're not completely throwing away either. I think this happens anyway so I'm completely unsure what if anything I can do to help it.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#63For me: work, life, family, everything is built on these foundations (albeit imperfectly): Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. http://www.reformed.org/documents/WSC.html He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8 ESV)
I was wondering whether someone would make a statement like this. Nothing satisfies like enjoying our infinite God.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#64My mission is to gain knowledge in order to understand the world in a new way, and communicate this such that I can do my part to help help Life succeed in the very long term. I wrote about what I believe the "Purpose of Life" is on my blog, though I haven't publicized it very much yet: https://goose.us/thoughts/the-purpose-of-life/ (TL;DR - the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for o…
>the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for our enclosing system.
Can you put this in laymans terms?
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#65My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.
There are lots of CRUD apps that help people in need.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#66My mission is to build amazing free software that is accessible and usable by the whole world.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#67First, achieving a stable financial situation. Then, the big goal: Making the world better by: - Stopping the mass murder of animals - Bringing the demise of irrational practices such as religion and astrology - Pushing knowledge forward by contributing to science or teaching those who will hopefully do so, and by making the software environment tidier
Not sure how ending religion would be better for the world. There are some religious fanatics, always will be, that will use their religion to bring about hate and violence. However there are billions of people who practice some form of religion that are peaceful people who use their religion to spread love and peace throughout the world. Don't try to throw the baby out with the bath water. Religious freedom is a cornerstone of a viable democracy.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#68Software is a mess.
There are too many programming languages, libraries, frameworks, websites, apps, devices, etc. We're still far from what was imagined 50 years ago. We still use text files. Most people still can't program. That's a problem.
My mission is to clean up this mess. It could take a lot of different shapes, but the high-level pitch is to build one application/interface/language/platform/system that will replace all of the others.
Imagine if Google, YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, LinkedIn, Twitch, eBay, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Google Maps, Spotify, Uber, Gmail, Pinterest, Domino's Pizza, Tinder, and Craigslist were all just one application. That's my mission.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#69I live in a country (Italy) that has been crushed and whatever mission I might’ve ever had or sense of accomplishment I might’ve ever earned has been superseded by a never-ending sense of dread and struggle to not drown in a decaying world. I have very little time for glib self-improvement or self-coaching. I’m starting to wonder what purpose all of this could possibly serve (”none at all”, comes my self-reply).
I come from Italy as well, and felt that sense of dread, and I solved it in the easiest way possible: I moved to another country. In Europe is really easy to move nowadays, and you can pick a well-governed state to move to :)
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
After reading (1) which is about a hospital management system built using visual tools, with a first version done in 6 months, I really wonder if code is the right tool when aiming at easy, even when building complex systems. (1) https://www.outsystems.com/blog/introducing-sapphire-hospita...
I just took a look at this and I don't think that the real win in terms of productivity is the fact that you are building an app with a visual environment or code. Both of them are roughly equivalent. What likely set them apart is the building blocks they provide. If you are a consulting company and building apps for businesses, you are likely doing the same thing over and over and over again for every business. Once…
I think the article is about the first version, not about reuse. But I could be wrong.
But in any case, code is difficult: it requires deep attention, good memory - both short and long term(and long term memory doesn't work so well if you don't exercise the knowledge repeatedly ),good learning capabilities, and good abstractions capabilities.
Visual systems are fundamentally easier. So if they can scale well to the required level of complexity and offer similar or better levels of productivity , they may become the 'easy' route.