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Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#181

Post by mrtron »

FraaJad wrote: post #8
jeb wrote: post #4

I'm planning to identify a suitable candidate to get married to, and who is genetically appropriate enough to give me good quality kids, then convince this person to marry me and carry my child, within the next year. Difficult, but I assume interesting.

Step 0: Get adopted by Indian parents. Step 1: sit back and relax ;)

I was shocked to discover how often that occurs with families, even in the north america.

A friend of mine is having a difficult time convincing his parents and hers that he has found his own partner - even though they would be very suitable candidates for an arranged marriage.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#182

Post by stavrianos »

djm wrote: post #144
elomar wrote: post #3

I want to leave mommy's house and start living as a "digital nomad", moving from country to country every few months as I want. I want to know the world a little better. The most obvious roadblock is making money along the way. My plan is to do it by launching a small web product, blogging about the travel, working as a local on countries where I'm allowed to, and doing some freelance programming work. I have at leas…

I spent nov/dec 09 in thailand trying to do the digital nomad thing. I was travelling while studying though, not working for money. Few things to consider: (1) Peace and quiet costs money. You may find it difficult to work if you stay anywhere that the backpacker crowd congregates. (2) The longer you stay somewhere the cheaper it gets. An example from my experience - I spent a month in chaing mai in northern thailand…

eating what the locals eat, beware of endemics. If you're in rural India, do not drink the tea sold at road-side carts.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#183

Post by plinkplonk »

Get admitted to a PhD in CS at Stanford next cycle.

Bottleneck: At my age and with no formal education in CS and poor academic records, getting an admission is next to impossible by conventional wisdom.

But the challenge is what makes it interesting :-).

PS: If anyone has any data/anecdotes/advice on "impossible" PhD admissions, I'd be glad to hear it (either here or my email is in the profile).

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#184

Post by mrtron »

mattheww wrote: post #115

I want to start a company that builds solar panels in space. Roadblocks (the ones I think are the biggest anyway): Supply Chain. Probably going to first need a way to or supplier who can mine and process materials from somewhere other than Earth. Infrastructure. Definitely going to need some sort of factory in space in which this operation can be done. Knowledge. I don't know anything about manufacturing in space. Th…

Very ambitious. I mean this in a jealous way.

It will probably take 20 years and a billion dollars - but both seem miniscule if the project is successful.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#185

Post by Random_Person »

nzmsv wrote: post #173
Random_Person wrote: post #153

I am currently trying to get back into programming. I haven't touched code in 10 years and way back then I was still writing little-- applets I guess we would call them today-- in QBasic and cracking out some crappy VBasic stuff. I was completely self-taught which meant that my code was as sloppy and inefficient as you could possibly imagine while still successfully getting the job done. I had been writing BASIC for…

Python. Easy to get started, but also very capable.

I looked at Python a few years ago and lacked the self-discipline to continue forward with it. I remember nothing of that failed attempt other than everyone spouting how wonderful and easy it was. It could very well be my answer though. One of the solutions I would like to work on involves a few small applications that I would need to run on Windows, Linux, OSX and cell phones. I could cut out the cell phone requirement if needs be as I would likely be one of a handful in my company that would use it.

I sought Java out as a truly multi-platform endeavor that most of my users would already have installed on their systems. I know very few Windows users that have Python or would know what to do with it. Also, I would eventually like working towards redeveloping our current web apps which are a mess of dysfunctionalism at its finest.

Does it sound like I would be better served with Python? Also, the allure of VB for me, like any Visual environment is that I can quickly build nice GUI's that make my stuff instantly usable by the-- less informed-- that I work with.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#186

Post by davidw »

mrtron wrote: post #172
davidw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

San Francisco is pretty good: doesn't rain often, relatively compact, lots of traffic.

True. How about safety and parking there? Both are important factors. Rain isn't much of an issue. Being from Toronto, the cold and snow are big deterrents. But safety is the biggest concern for me, even riding a bike in a bike lane is really dangerous. Cars don't look for you when making turns, they just go. I was hit once cycling when someone made an abrupt right turn without signalling. My handlebar dug into the s…

Car parking is bad, which means scooters are good. Although I got a couple of tickets for putting mine on (huge) sidewalks, which was, IMO, incredibly lame.

Safety... yeah, you're probably a bit safer than on a bicycle, but you have to watch out. The first night I had mine I hit some tram tracks and felt the back wheel skittering around, which was not a fun feeling. Kept it up, though.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#188

Post by johnfn »

The google codejam occurs about once a year ( http://code.google.com/codejam ). If you make it past the qualification round and the first round, and you place in the top 500 of the second round, then you get a codejam tshirt. (This year, I placed around 1300, which is good, but not good enough!)

Getting that tshirt is my goal - a nice, tangible way to symbolize the massive amount of algorithmic things that I'm attempting to learn. A year ago, I couldn't solve a single problem in round 2.

Practicing for this sort of thing is a lot of fun. Programming competitions offer bite-sized questions to think about, and I believe that solving these types of questions really helps my coding style. If you don't write the best, most straightforward program to solve the problem, then you're going to run into costly bugs.

Re: Ask HN: What's your most interesting life goal currently?

#189

Post by jackmanbob »

ganley wrote: post #162
pchristensen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congrats! Here's the advice of a father of two: 1) Less and more than you think. Bank on at least one to two hours out of every four (that's about their sleep-wake cycle for the first couple months). Very little of it is hard if they're not sick, but the cycle is relentless. 2) Babies are very portable for the first 6 months or so b/c they're so oblivious to the world. Wake-up, change them, feed them, interact for a…

Huh. My answer (as a father of 3) to how much time they'll consume would, only slightly facetiously, be "all of it." Your math about sleep cycles is way wrong, and the idea that you'll still have half the free time you used to is laughable. Assuming a more or less 'normal' work schedule, most of the time they're sleeping, this guy will either be at work or will be sleeping himself. My advice is to assume that for a f…

To say that he's wrong and that his ideas are laughable is very small-minded. He stated that he's a father of two -- he knows what he's talking about. If his statements don't describe your experience, that's because you've had different experiences -- not because he's wrong.
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