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

Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#71

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

At the risk of meta-posting: A "Life's Work" is kind of a misnomer. Certainly, people are known for those things, but reducing your entire life to a narrow project or field is only going to misalign your expectations.

Of course it's great to have a focus! I've definitely focused on high performance optics for most of my career (haha). But life is a vastly complicated and messy thing, and I've gotten the most satisfaction out of taking a step back from projects that were demanding all my time. It's all about balance.

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#72

Post by l0b0 »

I've been background searching for one forever, and never found anything I think I'd want to work on until I retire. Instead, I'm devoted to adding a bajillion little fixes and tweaks all over the place:

- Speeding up a third party app

- Productionising tools

- Simplifying, testing, linting & formatting all the things

- Reporting issues when I don't know how or what to fix

- Generally just having a dialogue with communities, avoiding the jerks and cheering/actively supporting the nice people

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#73

Post by fsn4dN69ey »

hackily wrote: post #53
fsn4dN69ey wrote: post #40

Being really good at Dota. Sounds kind of ridiculous, but I make plenty of money for my age, very very secure/comfortable financially. However, I've been playing Dota for the better part of the last 12 years, spent some of those years being in the 0.01% of players, friends with current pros, etc. I love it and could honestly do it for the rest of my life.

That's so great to hear! I went to high school with someone who took a path like yours - his parents were not sure about his ability to live a comfortable life going into pro Dota. But I'm so glad you folks are able to do what you love and make a good living.

To clarify, I work as a dev or engineer or whatever, but pretty much every other bit of free time goes into it. At this point, 16k hours and counting.

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#76

Post by kcplate »

bko wrote: post #42

Maybe not what you're looking for, but my children. I have a lot of hobbies and try to contribute what I can with my skill set. But I'm honest with myself. Nothing meaningful I create in the digital form will outlive me so I'm never overly attached. I've also lived long enough to see my interests change drastically that I am confident I won't have the same interests in 5, 10, 20 years (nor would I want to) However wi…

Same. One piece of software that I contributed to is going on it’s 23rd year of use (but that is likely it’s last year). My youngest child is much older than that. When I am long gone, my kids and grandkids and the guidance I provided them will be my legacy. Frankly it’s my hope that my career accomplishments are not even mentioned the minute after I walk out the proverbial door as a retiree let alone in my eulogy.

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#78

Post by 082349872349872 »

cwbrandsma wrote: post #30

Raising my kids, and I have 5 of them. I've built some cool software, which has built companies and positively affected the lives of millions of people, but in the end that was just a paycheck. One kid will be a nurse, another is in engineering school, another seems to be destined to be an artist, and the last two can do almost anything. But even more importantly, they are all kind people (nerdy, but kind). I will ta…

> Adult: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Child: An honest, brave, compassionate human being.

Adult: No. I mean, how do you want to sell your labor?

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/328209-what-do-you-want-to...

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#79

Post by 082349872349872 »

zmgsabst wrote: post #23

Explaining how the Curry-Howard square [1] relates to DNNs and AI more broadly. Not a full time job, but been at it fives years and still going… so that seems the strongest contender so far. [1] - Alegebra-geometry equivalence commutes with logic-computation equivalence; this provides a map between the world of type statements and the world of diffy-Q networks.

ok, I'll bite: algebraically logic is being and computation is becoming; how does this geometrically map into denotations and diffyqs?

Re: Ask HN: What's You Life's Work?

#80

Post by zmgsabst »

082349872349872 wrote: post #79
zmgsabst wrote: post #23

Explaining how the Curry-Howard square [1] relates to DNNs and AI more broadly. Not a full time job, but been at it fives years and still going… so that seems the strongest contender so far. [1] - Alegebra-geometry equivalence commutes with logic-computation equivalence; this provides a map between the world of type statements and the world of diffy-Q networks.

ok, I'll bite: algebraically logic is being and computation is becoming; how does this geometrically map into denotations and diffyqs?

You have something like this [1], where you have clear maps from the type theory world into the typed representation of software and the category map structures to Euclidean VM/difference EQ representation of software. This is classic Curry-Howard.

And algebra/geometry split of being/becoming happens in both the type theory/category theory and typed program/difference equation relations.

[1] - https://zmichaelgehlke.com/images/curry-howard-square-graphi...

Post reply on HN