Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

asc.ohio-state.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 285 posts

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#111

Post by brilee »

leephillips wrote: post #77
benrbray wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this way of looking at the problem, I wouldn't have thought of this! I think this relies implicitly, too, on incompressibility of the fluid, no? As well as surface tension? Otherwise, we might imagine the fluid having less density at the bottom, while occupying a circular cross-section of the same area.

It does rely on incompressibility, but, to this order, does not include surface tension. The water faucet puzzle that interested me as a student was after the water had reached the sink and begun to spread out radially from the stream. Have you noticed that there is a circular boundary where the layer of water suddenly changes depth?

google "hydraulic jump"

Separately, when you model surface tension, you get an equation for when a stream breaks up into droplets - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plateau%E2%80%93Rayleigh_insta...

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#112

Post by Netcob »

schindlabua wrote: post #66
Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore. I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up. (I can't imagine how it is for…

When things are kinda slow and aimless at work, that's when I really start to do some projects at home again. But to be honest, it all comes and goes.

But yeah, right now I'm both single and in lockdown, and if it was any other way I wouldn't spend a week just programming some sort of custom build/deployment agent.

With kids? One of my colleagues once told me that once you have them, you'll suddenly be out of time you didn't even know you had in the first place.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#113

Post by humanistbot »

bvsrinivasan wrote: post #11

The meta-principle is that in complex domains there is no straight line, well worn, "plannable" path to greatness. Kenneth Stanley calls it "The Myth of the objective" and has spent the last several years trying to formalize this idea (within AI as well) and get it more traction. Book -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c... Talk -- https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI

Reminds me of Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions" --- an anthropological study of plans and planning, which also has a lot of implications for AI. Resonances to that famous Eisenhower quote "Plans are nothing, planning is everything"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/342380.Plans_and_Situate...

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#114

Post by jameshush »

piva00 wrote: post #85
schindlabua wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah sounds like you described me perfectly. But I do have to say, ever since I'm programming full-time I seem not to be able to just code for fun anymore. I used to program all day long.. and I guess I still do, but now it's for work, and after 8h of work I'm just done, you know? The "stuff I want to look at" list is growing longer and longer and there's no hope of me ever catching up. (I can't imagine how it is for…

I don't know how old you are and for how long you've been programming but your experience mimics my progression. I started playing with some kind of programming when I was about 9-10, BASIC on a MSX and later HTML that opened up me for web development on ASP 3.0 and PHP at the time. It was a very big hobby when I was young and turned into a career when I was pretty young, about 16. It stayed as a hobby for another 9-…

This resonates with me too. Instead of spending 2 weeks shaving off 100ms in a request I’ll spend two weeks shaving off 3-4 days worth of time for a request from the marketing or sales team by figuring out a better process for them to request changes on the management side.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#115

Post by ibrahimsow1 »

jll29 wrote: post #64

Interesting how Feynman can be inspiring people long after his death. He sounds as if he likes to talk about himself rather too much, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a fair amount of exaggeration in his prose. That said, if I made a list of dead people I'd like to spend a day with if I could, he'd sure be on it (as an aside, who [else] would you add to such a list?). And he could be serious, too: despite bein…

Viktor E Frankl

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#116

Post by ddoubleU »

bvsrinivasan wrote: post #11

The meta-principle is that in complex domains there is no straight line, well worn, "plannable" path to greatness. Kenneth Stanley calls it "The Myth of the objective" and has spent the last several years trying to formalize this idea (within AI as well) and get it more traction. Book -- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25670869-why-greatness-c... Talk -- https://youtu.be/dXQPL9GooyI

Woah, thanks for sharing this. I can see a connection with the way Feyman stopped trying to go for his objective yet he still achieved it

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#117

Post by Netcob »

spion wrote: post #72
fuzzy2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, it’s different for me. Since at work I don’t really do the Continuous Integration/Delivery stuff (or anything with “real infrastructure”), I find it very enjoyable to fiddle with it at home. There’s no pressure to accomplish anything and I can just leave it alone for months or even years before coming back to it. There’s a nice side-effect, too: The CI definition documents how to compile the project. I recently d…

It also really depends on what you find cool, there are different ways to look at things. For example if I think of pipelines as these execution graphs that run on their own and make sure your artifacts end up in the right place, then its really fun. CI systems that visualize this make it even more interesting. A little combination of the right personal interests and perspective goes a long way towards building up re…

I had this interesting experience back in university. We were doing some simple web service project in pairs, and it consisted of a program and some devops stuff. My partner in that project turned out to have skills that exactly complemented my own - he had trouble with the algorithmic stuff that I thought was trivial, yet he easily stitched all the services together by editing some configuration files before I even understood what any of them were for.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#118

Post by temporama1 »

Netcob wrote: post #44

Goal-oriented work, creativity and motivation definitely have a difficult relationship. In programming, I learn the most things simply by experimenting at home on my own. I'm thinking about switching jobs, so I wanted to learn some new frameworks and concepts to help with that, and I decided to make my personal projects a bit more "professional". Use continuous integration, focus more on web stuff, build and automati…

> I'll come up with my own tools. They won't be great, but...

They WILL be great. They'll do exactly what YOU need them to do, and nothing else.

Software at present is a disaster, partly because we're just piling on complexity all the time, thinking only of the benefits and never of the huge downsides ("fighting with tools").

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#119

Post by dqpb »

I think this roughly boils down to information theory and the exploration / exploitation tradeoff. Play is fun because it’s information-rich. It’s personally rewarding because exploration opens new doors.

Exploitation is boring because it mostly discovers nothing new. It’s information-poor, and its reward is mostly fixed, and doesn’t open any new doors.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#120

Post by cannabis_sam »

You get a couple of lines in, and it’s painfully familiar, since it’s sadly so incredibly similar to my waning love of programming...

It’s wildly destructive for society to have these completely devoid of ethics, fascist-style assholes with capital/power, that can dictate what what more useful people than can spend their time thinking about, yet no-one even thinks it’s a problem.

Although to be fair it’s just a sub-problem of how humanity has forced itself into self-destructive patterns, by ignoring reality and following fanatical ideologies about “unrestricted capitalism” and “the free market” as if that is some sort of divine power...

Imagine spending your short life developing ads for Google or Facebook. It would have been objective better for all of humanity if all these naive assholes people had become alcoholic bums living on the street... that would at least have curbed their ability to fuck with the rest of humanity.

Post reply on HN