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

Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 305 posts

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#121

Post by markus_zhang »

ralphc wrote: post #105
markus_zhang wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing. I really look up to people like you as I'd like to semi-retire around 55 too (13 years from now on). I have a question for you: How do you assess your learning ability at 55? Let me explain -- I'd like to pursue studies in some Physics topics when I semi-retire (I can't do that now due to lack of time), but I'm not sure whether my brain is up to the job then. I know you are not studying Physics, b…

For the most part I'm staying near my field of study, programming, programming languages, theory about programming etc. In that way, just about everything I see I can relate to something I've learned before, I'm in true "I've seen it all before" mode at my age. For example the pattern matching and recursion-based "looping" navigation is just like when I went through my Haskell/Ocaml/Common Lisp/Scheme phase in the mi…

Thanks a lot. I do agree that staying in familiar ground requires less brain work.

I do agree with the "more time without a job" observation. That's part of the motivation to pick up serious stuffs when I go semi-retire.

I hope you get well (the heart attack thing), but I'm happy that you make those changes when still young (relatively).

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#122

Post by lotsoweiners »

I’d do absolutely nothing. I’d sit on a beach or in a pool/hot tub drinking beer and wine while reading or watching tv. I’d walk enough so that I don’t look like the future people from Wall-E. I’d make sure to do absolutely nothing productive though.

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#123

Post by aaronrobinson »

I stopped work at 55 after 40 years in tech, from being a developer right up to CTO. I do very little coding, mainly because there are so many other things I want to do. Having this time really makes you ask yourself what it is you really want to do and for me that means running, particularly in mountains. Like another poster I also watch a ton of stuff on YouTube about DIY and I’m learning how to do stuff on my own house and doing a van conversion (to take to the mountains). I see a lot more of family than I did and I consciously try to spend more time with and in particular give my time to help others. I’m helping my daughter a lot to break into software engineering. Like another poster I have so many things I want to do and just not enough time so I’m journaling a lot and making a lot of notes about ideas I have and these are starting to lead to some ideas about software that would be useful to me and so I expect others. I’m constantly learning what I like to do and I have so many non technical projects on the go.

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#125

Post by ralphc »

anonzzzies wrote: post #114
ralphc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider fads of the 90's? We had object-orientation, of course, Java, it was the beginning of XML.

All of them and more… We did CL, and Perl before Java and then immediately went to the 0.1 of Java when it was available. JSP didn’t exist yet, or servlets even, but we were hooked. I went into 2000s doing enterprise java beans (and Corba code generators in xml) and stupid over architected Java stuff with everything XML (and XSLT). We wrote our own db which stored XML (but was mostly in memory), our own frontend lang…

It all did die because of Java, or at least went into hibernation.

Common Lisp, true or not, was known as an AI language and died because it was attached to the AI winter.

C++ was killed by Java for a lot of business software, including at my company. It won what I call the 80/20 battle, meaning it gave you 80% of what the old technology gave you for 20% of the hassle. You still had OO, but didn’t have to worry about pass by reference vs. pass by value, interfaces got you out of the multiple inheritance diamond problem, and garbage collection of course. Do you think if your application server was in Common Lisp or Perl that it would have sold for a lot?

Other losers of the 80/20 battles, Java over C++, XML over SGML, JSON over XML.

Cobra…shudder. Oh and COM, don’t forget COM. My greatest accomplishments in my career were avoiding going into management and avoiding COM.

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#126

Post by JohnBooty »

In the tech realm: I'd spend my time doing optimization work for open-source projects. It's fun, and you get to show some objective results. I'd probably do that until I had some sort of concrete idea for a cool project or some kind of project that might benefit the world somehow.

Or maybe I'd just leave tech behind entirely and do volunteer work.

But I feel like that's a one-way street. If I walked away from tech for a few years, and decided I wanted to go back... it feels like it would be very difficult.

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#128

Post by mikestew »

I guess I'll find out on Friday, which is my last day. Poking around on computers has been good enough to me that I can call it quits at 60. What comes after this? First, a summer of being a bum (if I last that long). After that, more volunteering at the animal shelter, more volunteering with the local running club, and I half-jokingly say I'm going to be a professional trail runner (where I'll be paid in socks and cheap medals from my age group wins).

I'll buckle down on my mandolin playing, and it's time to pick up the fiddle and give it a good effort.

Read more.

Let's not let all that coding experience go to waste: I'll go hunt down an open source project that I could make some good contributions to, and then devote a good chunk of time to that. Or write something new that the world could use.

But beware: "if you didn't need money" is a pretty loaded phrase. As I stare down the firehose of money and realize it will soon produce only a trickle, if that, I still ask if we have enough even though we're probably better off than the majority of retirees (if various sources are to be believed). Because there's "don't need an income" and then there's "won the startup lottery, and my kids won't need an income", and we are firmly in the former category. :-)

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#129

Post by vlod »

keploy wrote: post #3

If cash wasn't a thing, I'd be all in on creating a system that lets you transfer your memories and brainpower into another body or a robot. I'll let you laugh at this like others, but I'm serious.

Curious how one starts doing this. Don't we need several generations of Neuralink to even start?

Re: Ask HN: What would you spend your time working on if you didn't need money?

#130

Post by vlod »

hnthrowaway0328 wrote: post #25

I'd ask the same question, but with a sinister twist: What would you do if you don't worry about money AND law enforcement?

Since you're on a throwaway account, I'm assuming you've already started this machiavellian endevour. ;-)
Post reply on HN