What problems to solve? Paying the rent.
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
321–330 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#322Learning to get best out of wherever you are is what works.
Regret and other feeling are supposed to come, they prove you are a human, but you have to control them and pick up the best for you by contributing your best and always being on your toes to get things done.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#323I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…
I wonder if Kierkegaard being Danish is at all related to Danes being the happiest people in the world.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#324I'm currently coding R and SQL in healthcare, would love to code in energy as well at some point. Healthcare is an extremely tricky area, our data is MASSIVE and very very rich, many hundreds of variables to access taken over many years of time. It's very challenging though: old tech stack, slow bureaucracy, tons of paperwork, usually not on the "cutting edge" due to the myriad security/privacy concerns, people still using SAS up the wazoo. Contrast that to energy: much less issue of security/privacy, however much fewer jobs, arguably less complexity and less legacy practices, and less "humanity" at the core. Energy does have the benefit of saving the planet, without which all of our health would go to Mad Max situations...so, both are very very important, good luck choosing :)
I got into it via biological sciences, then epidemiology, then straight epidemiological data analysis, with a flavor of public policy and program implementation/effectiveness analysis. I was originally pre-med, but coding is IMO a lower stress, lower debt-ridden, and still remunerative field which gives higher rein to analytical talent than medicine, which to me is more about people skills and healing than raw analysis/technicalities.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#325Life is not meant to be controlled based on your understanding of world because as human being we all suffer from subjectivity and fallacies. Learn to silence your brain and feel the life around you and in yourself. Listen to it and your role in this world would become apparent.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#326For the last 15 years, I have been working on medical device software. I fully understand your desire to make the world a better place based on your career choices. Every day, I am excited to go in to work for that very reason. I have had the privilege of working on NICU ventilators (think preemies born at 22 weeks), pulse oximetry, ECG devices, infusion pumps, and now ultrasound. It is fairly common in the medical device world for management to invite patients and families to visit the engineers who worked on the devices that saved lives. I particularly remember a perfect, healthy, beautiful 18-month old little girl and her parents. She had been born severely premature, and was kept alive for months in a NICU on one of our ventilators. Tears all around the room! Medical device engineers make the devices that clinicians use, and consequently have a potentially huge multiplicative impact on people's lives. My last ventilator product family has an installed base of over 200,000 units worldwide. I like to think about the transitivity of the situation: you save or improve one life. That also has a huge impact on that person's immediate family. Then, consider the secondary and tertiary impacts that emanate out to extended family, and whole communities. Moreover, medical device software is extremely challenging and interesting to work on. Tons of new stuff to learn along multiple different dimensions. It is frequently "close to the metal" programming, so you need to be in to that sort of thing to enjoy it. (A note of realism: our real goal is simply to move the probability needle on patient outcomes. But in fact, that is enough.)
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#327I got some good advice about a decade ago, which I've used for guidance and, on reflection, has served me well. You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside. Until you have this clarity, do what you can to become part of the core community driving the thinking in your field of choice. There's a strong case for the social importance of many proble…
I like this. The only worry is that sometimes it can take a long time to get to the center and in the process of making that journey you may realise that you chose the wrong center to go towards.
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#328I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted that - in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basi…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#329I always went after the hardest unsolved problem I could find. This has often ended in pain and heartache but that taught me about some things to look for in a problem. Some key bits of advice: 1) Prepare like your life depends on it. It does. Your time may not come for 40 years, but if you're not prepared, you'll never know. So study hard. This is where Paul Graham's "swim upstream as long as possible" comes in. 2)…
> Most successes come around age 50 What do you mean by this? Don't most of those who make it big do so while young?
I mean objective, measurable success
https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/20-year-old-ent...
As supporting evidence, we also know happiness kicks up after your 40s
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2010/12/16/the-...
Re: Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait a second... what’s stopping you from changing —this— situation then? Solve the data format problem. Make it easier for everyone to exchange data in meaningful, efficient ways. Sounds like a terrible pain that you understand well enough to be able to solve. When you have, it might remove a major bottleneck and open the floodgates for more smart people to join, ultimately benefitting healthcare in a massive way. M…
Short answer: hospitals, insurance companies, governments Long answer: It's not like people don't understand that the current situation is suboptimal. It's that any kind of change implemented unilaterally will leave you unable to communicate with your counterparties. The severe consequences of this (not getting paid, being out of compliance with HIPAA) means that any kind of change to health-care IT at a system-wide…
The more interconnected the greater the energy required to change from the groundup but trivial to change at the top (submit in this format or no payment)