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

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221–230 of 305 posts

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

#221
If I won the lottery (I don't buy lottery tickets, but roll with me here), I'd go to graduate school. Multiple graduate schools, in multiple subjects. There's so much to learn, and so many beautiful places in the world in which to do it. European two-year masters degrees are perfect: lots of depth, without a vast time commitment. I'd do an anthropology degree; archeology; something in history; art history. Urban planning is fascinating. Experimental economics. Do one at Oxford; another at Trinity College, Dublin. I'm sure there's something worth studying in Wellington, NZ. I'd improve my Spanish to the point that I can read Spanish poetry at Madrid University, then find something else interesting to dive into somewhere in South America. I'd endow a chair or something everywhere, so no one looks too hard at my pre-reqs, and I wouldn't worry about grades, but I'd still work damn hard, because everything about it would be a joy.

If you're just talking about a normal retirement? I'd go back to doing theatre, which was my first love, and the thing I was better at than anything else I've ever done. Acting, directing, teaching, writing. Theatre people are my people. Making theatre was my passion, and I could do with some passion back in my life.

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

#223
post #171

In an ideal world I would go back to chemistry. Since the option in the world we have is working 60 hours sub minimum wage trying to get through a PhD followed by bouncing round on 2 year short term contracts as a postdoc (still barely on minimum wage) while University administrators make your life hell I took the only rational route. I switched to software and make people's lives and the climate worse for a paycheck…

have you heard of precious plastics?

I hadn't, that's super interesting thanks for the pointer.

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

#224

Fortunately, I have reached that stage. OTOH, still figuring out what to do next. I keep reminding myself of what PG had to say: By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that.

Figuring it out is so much fun.

:-), it's a good problem to have. If you have figured it out, it would be genuinely useful to hear how you did so? Thanks.

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

#225
I would work on making education more enjoyable and more effective in a scalable way, so that young people start liking it intrinsically and can get more out of it.

I would study to get as much as possible formal education myself in economics, law, marketing / psychology and politics and I would try to improve peoples' lives through politics.

I would develop the most useful side projects I put on hold.

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

#227
I would like to make my DevOps colleagues more productive and less frustrated. I'm actually already doing it, it's just way slower when you can't do it as a full time job.

I started working on Next Generation Shell in 2013. I have the programming language in quite a good shape and we use it at work.

I'm working on the UI now. The main idea of the UI is to get rid of telegraph-style communication paradigm of sending text and receiving text. We can actually use the whole screen now. We have text editing using full screen since 1976 (vi) but classical shells are ignoring this capability till this day. It's time to stop treating outputs of programs as if they are still printed on paper, allowing zero interactivity.

https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs/wiki/UI-Design

https://github.com/ngs-lang/ngs/wiki/UI-Chain-Design

Have a nice day!

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

#229

I am quite surprized how few people are proposing to make art or music. Is this why artists/musicians can't make money, because so few people enjoy it? I always thought it was the digitization and easy access that allowed us to enjoy these things from our homes (instead of going out to clubs), but maybe not. Anyway, for the record, I would be recording my lifetime backlog songs I've written. And probably re-recording…

I'd become a vocalist for a death metal band
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