Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

I would devote my time to building high quality, durable, and energy efficient 3bd 2ba homes in the rural areas surrounding major metropolitan areas, which I would then sell at material cost.

Buying my first home (mobile/manufactured) has been a combination of the best and worst thing I've ever done. The house cost nearly 3 times what my grandparents paid about ~30 years ago in the same neighborhood (on the same street!) while the construction and finish quality are sub-par at best, with a nearly endless list of things that are constantly in need of repair, multiple water intrusion issues, etc. To make matters worse, the housing market in the area I live has reached unreasonable levels, with my current home being 'valued' at 1.4x what I bought it for roughly 3 years ago.

Additionally, I keep seeing homes built that are on monolithic slabs and nearly everyone I know personally who is a homeowner is having issues with their home's foundation due to the high movement soil (clay) even in recently built homes. I would build homes that use pier and beam foundations with piles deep enough to resist soil movement, ensure site drainage was appropriate for each home, and generally put all the necessary care and work into ensuring that each home built would last for multiple generations.

I want to build homes that last and allow others to flourish without the litany of concerns I currently have to struggle with on-top of my day job.

I mean, I think it is a different scenario. The kind of person who makes a billion dollars has something going on in their brain that makes them want to keep going. Think about it: by the point where they've made a billion dollars, they've long since passed on the opportunity to retire comfortably. They already had all the money they needed, and, faced with the chance to stop, they decided to stay in. They flew past $10MM, past $50MM, even $100MM—far more than anyone could ever spend unless they really tried—all while saying "no, I'm not done yet". I would not expect someone with this mentality to suddenly stop at $1 billion. They are in it for something other than reaching the point of not having to work anymore. I'm not saying I admire them, in fact it sounds like a terrifying inner life to me.

On the other hand, the rest of us, the 98.7% of people who are only working for the paycheck that allows us to do the other things we actually want to do instead of our jobs. The extent to which we work is the extent to which we must pay for those needs. Remove the need to work, and we wouldn't be working anymore—not at those jobs, anyway.

What I'm saying is, I believe non-generational billionaires are weird outliers, and we can ignore them for the purposes of this question.

NixOS, digital archiving and curation

I won’t tell the whole story but the other day a 1st grader who came over to hang out with my kids punched me in the stomach with “wow you have so much food.”

The breakfast program at school is largely funded by Canada’s largest, exceptionally profitable grocery chain. But this year they’re radio silence on renewing the funding.

So I’d probably be working on making sure children are fed.

On nicer homes builders will sometimes put cylinders of concrete down from the slab towards bedrock. Then they pour the slab over top of them. I assume this helps prevent the movement. Not sure how this compares to p&b in cost. Just another option.