Can you not find a way to make small circles in each direction you want to be working... set hours or days working in one Circle then switching...doing the same in the other Circle... ultimately being able to draw the circles together eventually or realizing it's time to let go of one....
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
181–190 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time. At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area. If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in. > Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't wor…
The ratio between goals and people is not 1:1. With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.
That’s reasonable. Also, solved goals entice new goals to be created for others.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#183My approach has been to only engage in activities where I can get a lot of value out of failure. Personally, I chose to work on Open Source projects because there are a lot of possible upsides: - It gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about a specific field and become an expert in it. - Better job opportunities and career security (being the founder of a moderately popular OSS project can help you to build your p…
I've always struggled with how if I want whats best for my resume rather than fix a project that has gone unmaintained / slowed down / is popular but just needs more hands on deck it makes more sense to start from scratch so you can "put your name on it".
I've made dozens of FOSS contributions over the years but usually its "I want X fixed / working, I'll spend a week learning the codebase and fixing it". Sometimes I can find 2-3 of those in sequence on a project, but while I'd love to hang around in one large codebase (I was active in the Clementine music player for quite a while) a lot of the larger issues in a project like that are structural and would take months to develop and would require your commitment of time in the long term to support and maintain it.
Which I'd be all for, but employers really don't give a crap if you are only the #8 comitter in a project with 10,000 commits. Even if your ~500 is twice as much as you would have made developing your own stripped down clone of the project to call "yours" and get your foot in the door.
Just over the holiday break I was doing some patches for Krita - I'd never worked in the codebase before so there was a lot of exploratory work involved. I implemented the feature I wanted and left dozens of questionable design decisions and undocumented behavior untouched / refactored not because I wanted to but I realized if I want "resume cred" I can't be doing trench work like that. I implemented arbitrary button support for action events because thats something I can bullet point easily. "Refactored the input system to avoid memory leaks, wasted cycles, and streamlined the ergonomics with C++17 features" doesn't turn heads.
It just feels wasteful to have spent probably ~10 hours just reading ~5,000 lines of C++ to learn an entire subsystem of a program and to just leave it at that when you can tell there is a lot more room for improvement but its also much more nuanced. Its why everyone gets feature pull requests and none of the bugs get fixed because most bugs worth fixing are structural ones that would take a lot of effort for little "payoff".
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#184I found a tolerable job with friendly people in a city that I like. My manager at said tolerable job gives me tasks to complete. In exchange, I get paid money which I use to live.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#185It seems like you need to do some good-old soul searching. You need to figure out what you want out of life and from your career, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Once you've figured that out, it'll be a lot easier how you should plan your career. It will probably be a moving target because people tend to get bored at what they do and need change once in awhile.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#186"Follow your heart [rather than your wallet]" is generally a bad advice [1], but if both tracks are equally well paid you might as well indulge, if only for long enough to get a feel for it. Meaningful work is one of the pillars of mental health, don't take that away form yourself unless you have to trade it for another pillar. [1] It's a bad advice because it often turns people to soul-sucking cafe ownership, hand-t…
Owning a cafe is soul sucking?
Yes. I vaguely recall some research indicating it's the most likely venture to fail. You might be used to this in the startup world, but here there is no outsized upside, and you're not cultivating a valuable skill.
Business aside, there is also a huge discrepancy between the romantic image of happily hopping about a cozy little shop and the crushing burden of 18-hour workdays for near-zero pay, demotivated or thieving employees, obnoxious customers, flaky suppliers, rising or unexpected costs, your own failure to plan for this or that, and all that with no hope of things becoming different in the future. There were profiles in the NYT which I can no longer find, but here is one I did find just now: https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/why-to-never-open-a-res...
If you are contemplating this nearly-suicidal move I highly recommend interrogating an acquaintance who's been that and done that before investing any further effort.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#187It is great that you are thinking of this and from my experience, it will continue to come up even after you have solved this one and you become more of an expert in the path you have chosen.
Something to help with the paralysis is to note that you are in a very privileged position. Majority of the world is not plagued by this issue because the problem they have to solve is how to survive. So, in other words, there is no wrong answer here. Whatever you choose will bring positive value to the world. Do not get paralyzed on if it is the most value you can provide because there is no way you can foresee this or measure it.
I will advise that you pick the one that seems to generate the most passion in you, not in the follow your passion sense, but more of the fact that there will be HARD times ahead when solving HARD problems and only the love of finding the solution is gonna take you through it. If you pursue a path for any other reason (except survival), when the going gets tough you will always measure if it is worth the trouble. In your case, your heart seems to be in Energy and AI, while your practical side tells you Healthcare is very important to the world. I will say go with Energy and AI cause who the hell knows. Where I live a major problem health centers have is consistent energy and who knows you may come up with some AI that Diagnoses better than a human can for a specific disease. My point is I have found that following where my interests really lie always lead me to where I am supposed to be. You may start in Energy and AI and somewhere bridge the gap into healthcare or you may jump in and solve problems you never imagined and be fully self-actualized. The most important thing out of all of this is that you start.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#188I found a tolerable job with friendly people in a city that I like. My manager at said tolerable job gives me tasks to complete. In exchange, I get paid money which I use to live.
I like this. Work doesn't have to be an end itself.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#189Basically, before finishing school, I've decided that would be better to make that choice if I had real experience first. So, I've started working on both. 8 months later I figured that I loved working as a programmer with engineers and that was my decision.
As a plus, one year later I enrolled myself in university and was easier for me than most of my mates.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#190Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, I led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project, known as "Quantum Leap". Pressured to prove my theories or lose funding, I prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator and vanished. I awoke to find myself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image that was not my own. Fortunately, contact with my own time was made through brainwave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer, who appeared in the form of a hologram that only I could see and hear. Trapped in the past, I find myself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong and hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.