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

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

#181

Post by anonzzzies »

ralphc wrote: post #125
anonzzzies wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, Java did win but c/c++ didn’t die and I just liked them better. And seemed you could’ve made a good sandwich for the past 25 years with CL as well. But yeah, the path I chose was probably the best for the time. Allowing me to retire before 30 (but didn’t).

COM I missed completely: we drank the Windows hatred koolaid popular in some circles back then too (Borg Gates etc), management I did for a bit thinking I would like it; I didn’t.

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

#182

Post by knighthack »

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…

Out of curiosity, what was the trigger for the heart attack? I see you enjoyed your work, so I wonder if the stresses were beyond that? Or was it a diet/lifestyle issue?

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

#183

Post by Vivtek »

markus_zhang wrote: post #96
Vivtek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I are 57 years old, so I think I can address this. We finally got the younger child through to grad school and paid off all our debt, and now we can devote our time to what we want to do. Mostly, anyway - I'd like to be doing coding for pay, but instead I do technical translation. But in terms of study - academic work - we're free. She's got a PhD in theoretical physics and has finally had the time to sta…

Thanks a lot. I really appreciate your sharings. I'm glad that both of you manage to work on things you are interested in. Did your wife get the PHD recently or when she was young? Reading through the lines I feel it was when she was young but I could definitely be wrong. I also feel I don't have much to write down every day. Most of the time is spent on work chores or family chores. There are a few happy moments but…

She got her PhD in 1999, shortly after the birth of the kid who just finished his first year of grad school.

Sure, you're working, I totally get that. But you're also sometimes reading about stuff relevant to your eventual academic interests, if only articles you see on HNN or whatever. Sometimes you'll have a thought in the car. Develop the habit of journaling them when they come, in some place you won't lose over the intervening years.

You will be astonished at what you both do and don't retain over those years. It's mostly still down in there somewhere, but if you've got a few clues to unravel the threads, it'll help more than you think now.

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

#184

Post by Vivtek »

okdood64 wrote: post #95
Vivtek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I are 57 years old, so I think I can address this. We finally got the younger child through to grad school and paid off all our debt, and now we can devote our time to what we want to do. Mostly, anyway - I'd like to be doing coding for pay, but instead I do technical translation. But in terms of study - academic work - we're free. She's got a PhD in theoretical physics and has finally had the time to sta…

> Write down your daily thoughts. Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of daily thoughts did you write down and how did it help you?

So a million years ago (the mid-90's), I was working with Doug Hofstadter and I had some ideas I wanted to follow up. Over the intervening years of raising a family, none of which do I regret, I never had the opportunity to actually do that - but I've done a lot of pieces of it, sometimes forgetting exactly where it fit into that original big picture.

Unfortunately, a lot of those pieces were logged on paper, but I've got electronic notes from about 2011 on, and a good content index has come in really handy for pulling out earlier ideas on various topics.

I've been working on that for the past year, and also scanning in a lot of the paper notes and starting to transcribe some of them. Looking back, there are some ideas I have every five or ten years, every time thinking I'm quite innovative.

Now that I've had the time to collate all that (and to read an absolute metric ton of literature I missed, an ongoing process), I've started to make consistent progress towards my original goals.

But just as a for instance - I have my readings and research bibliography from 1995 in machine translation. Most of that is dead as Carthage from a technical standpoint, obviously, but the philosophy has been invaluable as a starting point for recalibrating where I'm going.

But I've also got a lot of notes on related projects and just noodling thoughts I've had over thirty years of driving kids around in cars. I think the most important aspect of this is just keeping your mind active and focused on the things you find interesting, even if you don't have anything like the time you'd need to pursue them properly. Because sooner or later, the stars will align and you will. And when you do, your notes will be absolutely vital.

But I'm kind of obsessive about notes, so your mileage may vary.

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

#185

Post by utensil4778 »

Honestly, I'd keep doing what I'm doing now, I'm a research engineer. I kind of stumbled into this career path and it turns out to be just exactly the thing I was built to do.

I'd likely go work for someplace better with more resources and a goal I find more interesting than my current work. Or I'd be a crazy inventor type building new machines and technologies in the garage.

I actually think about this question a lot. Thinking about all of the inventions that I or innumerable other engineers might have built, might have changed the world with, if only they had the resources to pursue mad science. It's pretty sad.

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

#186

Post by Vivtek »

ralphc wrote: post #107
okdood64 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Write down your daily thoughts. Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of daily thoughts did you write down and how did it help you?

I keep a notebook of ideas I want to pursue later. A lot of times if you don't write them down they'll be forgotten over the years, unless they're of major importance.

Over enough years, they will be forgotten, just like the names of the people you went to school with, unless you've got a way to rehearse them.

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

#187

Post by thelastquestion »

CMCDragonkai wrote: post #155
thelastquestion wrote: post #147

General infrastructure that benefits humanity in a goal agnostic way, e.g., related to energy or compute seems like a meaningful thing to get behind. This could be novel technology or logistics and efficiency improvements, but these are things that can augment everyone's ability to do the things they want. Socially, there are a lot of things that seem "silly" (euphemistically), and it's a blight on civilization that…

I don't think the US's strategic goal is to solve homelessness. In that between maintaining world dominance and solving homelessness, homelessness is way less important. Nations choose their sacrifices based on their priorities same as individuals.

Let’s assume that world dominance is the root priority. Your statement implies that solving homelessness wouldn’t be in service of world domination. That might be true, but there’s clearly a minimum effort here: an entirely homeless and starving population would disrupt production, military, research, global economic power in a way that would be detrimental to the goal of world domination. Further, if the population gets too unhappy, revolts will occur that would hinder world domination efforts of those currently in power. So where’s the inflection point and why? To say the inflection point is the status quo feels intuitively wrong since what are the odds we happen to be in the optimal place with respect to homelessness, food insecurity, and civilian unrest? I tend to believe that it’s likely further investment into the population will produce a citizenry base that would aid in sustained world domination efforts. If you let the citizenry fall behind or become too unhappy, you’ll be overtaken by other countries. Curious what you see as the opportunity cost of that investment.

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

#188

Post by random3 »

Vivtek wrote: post #85
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…

My wife and I are 57 years old, so I think I can address this. We finally got the younger child through to grad school and paid off all our debt, and now we can devote our time to what we want to do. Mostly, anyway - I'd like to be doing coding for pay, but instead I do technical translation. But in terms of study - academic work - we're free. She's got a PhD in theoretical physics and has finally had the time to sta…

Love this! I’ve been mostly doing my hobbies as work for 20 years, but I’ve been having a blast getting back to deep pure math and PL research in the last 6-12 months which absolutely topped everything. It’s fully targeted towards my business goals which is ideal for me as I need a concrete problem to solve when learning. I’m 40 and this has been intellectually more productive than anything else I’ve done (feels like x times more than what I remember). It’s exciting and inspiring to see others doing it later in life as I wish I could keep doing it too.

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

#189

Post by kennyloginz »

cko wrote: post #118
dmayilyan wrote: post #117

1. Science 2. Philosophy 3. Art I am currently factually volunteering to a project in CERN that needs full-time attention, but unfortunately I need to feed myself and my family so I work at daytime as a full-time Software(Data) Engineer. I spent whatever time I find (mostly nights) doing science. I do hope I will manage to deliver new NN method I experiment now. This has a lifelong meaning for me.

How do you "work on" philosophy? Asking because my web developer wife, who happened to have majored in art and philosophy, is currently unemployed and kinda bummed about it.

Check out the local dive bar. They are the modern version of 19th century coffee houses.

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

#190

Post by yoav »

This is me. 36. I’m building the startup lab I always wanted to build now that I’ve been around the block a few times, and writing lots of open source.

Once self sustaining will branch into angel investing as well but trying to focus in one big thing at a time.

I just absolutely love startups and helping people bring their ideas to life.

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