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

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231–240 of 305 posts

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

#231

You ask one thing in the title and something else in your text. I'm answering only the question in the title. As of now, I'd split my time between a couple of things: (1) In winter and autumn, become a part-time psychologist to help reduce some of the mental pain that people go through. (2) In spring and summers, go for weeks-long hikes in nature, become a part-time hiking guide in the mountains. Help maintain the tr…

Is a seasonal psychiatrist a thing? Don't patients need support in spring?

Good question. To be frank, I haven't given a thought about all these details. Just to riff on this hypothetical scenario, it's not a clinical setting. Ideally, I'd working with a small group, where we can work together with the client. Maybe take turns. Or maybe in a supporting role to another senior expert. Again, this is all fantasy at the moment. :-)

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

#232

Probably Christian apologetics. It is clear to me that science is incompatible with atheism and supports the Christian worldview, but this does not seem to be widely understood.

Is there any book in that area you'd recommend? I'd be interested in reading something I'm totally unfamiliar with.

I would recommend Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson. A short and extraordinarily limpid book. Reading it is like drinking a cool glass of water.

I also like everything written by Stephen C Meyer. As far as I am concerned Meyer is the world's leading historian and philosopher of science.

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

#233
Teaching kids how to educate themselves and use computers to do so. I would do it by setting up a all you can play video game arcade not with cabinets but with consoles and computers.

The currency to play video games would be some sort of educational math and reading rabbit type games. After doing some lessons they d be able to go back and play video games for a set amount of time.

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

#235
I have a few ideas:

Would spend my time building an organization that helps people get dev roles, kind of like a recruiter agency, but if the person isn't getting jobs because of their experience, we give them the platform to gain the experience they need to be successful in the job market.

Would work on helping eSports athletes to make a living playing the game they love. Dunno how that'd even work yet but that'd be something I'd like to work on.

Staying with eSports, trying to 'Moneyball' FGC games. How do we track stats & data for fighting games and extract meaningful metrics we can use to improve players skills. Would want to do this for other games but there seems to be work going on there so it'd probably be best to start with fighting games where that work might not be happening.

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

#236
post #76

This is me. Fortunate to be able to retire at 55, programming my whole life, I love my career even when particular jobs had their issues. So now I work on projects I want to work on, no commute, no 20-person meetings. I'm currently working with a team that's recreating the Prodigy online service servers in Elixir. Having a blast, and I have my next project already in mind, also in Elixir or some other BEAM language.…

I would love to have time to study those topics. However when I have spare time and I could devote a whole day to study, I realize my attention span does not make it.

So to anyone reading this, my advice is not to wait for retirement. I am lucky enough that my kids now prepare and go to school alone. So every morning I have about 45min when I can say fuck to the outside world including work and pursue studies I am interested in. I can't study any difficult or new subject after work.

Progress is slow but real.

Thanks for the advice for note taking. This is something I really have to improve.

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

#237
Same stuff I do now, probably. Contribute to Fedora/Ansible.

I'd like to think I'd take better care of myself, but given I know this should be the priority now... I'm being realistic.

I'll forever be angry how I had to min/max skills like this to break out of poverty. Making things accessible to others is my dream.

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

#238
I would continue to (re)build my decentralized Web Browser network, which aimed to combat fake propaganda, fake news, shit storms etc by creating evidence trails and by correlating articles with similar or opposing entries.

That, and a lot of nice things you can do when you have trust ratios of local/global peers, more efficient bandwidth usage etc.

Anyways, long story short, needs lots of time and money to build something like this. But seeing how messed up Mozilla's future plans are, I really think someone should do it.

After I got doxxed by kiwifarms, /pol/ and others I decided that I have to fix the cybersecurity problem first before I can go back to this.

[1] (prototype) https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

[2] (privacy focussed fork of webkit) https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

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

#239
post #76

This is me. Fortunate to be able to retire at 55, programming my whole life, I love my career even when particular jobs had their issues. So now I work on projects I want to work on, no commute, no 20-person meetings. I'm currently working with a team that's recreating the Prodigy online service servers in Elixir. Having a blast, and I have my next project already in mind, also in Elixir or some other BEAM language.…

Now pushing 70 and retired for 4+ years, I don't seem to have any difficulties learning new or difficult things. There's some irritation at not remembering some of the prerequisites to certain topics that you once knew well, e.g., all the old trig identities. But after 50 or so years, that those memories are somewhat degraded is hardly a surprise. As others have noted, they're still in there, you just have to coach them out and polish the pathways. I seem to have more pursuits now than I actually have time for. Right now, I'm working through a calculus/diffeq refresher to prepare to go down the physics/electronics rabbit hole. I've spent some time playing around with Arduino and while it's fun and you can build a lot of things, it's mostly about what. And what and how were the dominate memes from my working life. Now I want to know the why behind the how on many subjects. And the math that has decayed over the ensuing decades is thus essential. For me, retirement has been like a new beginning. Live like you'll live forever. You won't, of course, but it sure as hell beats the "Waiting around to die" mindset.

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

#240
post #197

Probably Christian apologetics. It is clear to me that science is incompatible with atheism and supports the Christian worldview, but this does not seem to be widely understood.

interesting. can you expound on that?

A good example is the multiverse hypothesis. It is the only way to avoid theism if you are a physicist, but it is also ludicrously extravagant and states as it's first principle that evidence for it cannot be detected (because all the things we can detect are in our universe).

But if the need to avoid theism counts as evidence, then I guess you're stuck with the multiverse.

The best example is the existence of life. The question of the origin of life truly is the only interesting question because without life no other questions even arise.

But we can do biochemistry and microbiology at a high level now and the evidence for life having been designed is overwhelming to the point of being staggering. We found a freaking a *code* at the bottom of it all, for !*$%&@ sake!

Note that the entire Darwinian story assumes the existence of life. So you can't appeal to "evolution" to bail you out because evolution depends on reproduction and survival and so on, and none of that happens prior to the existence of life. (Read The Stairway to Life: An Origin-of-Life Reality Check by Tan & Stadler if you want the reality check good and hard).

People will commonly start throwing in big words at this point: abiogensis! protobiotic vesicles! bioenergetic pathways! abiotic polymerization! but it is all just designed to snow you into submission.

Physics rules out atheism, and the existence of life rules out deism. So we're stuck with theism.

The move from theism to specifically Christian theism can also be made, but I'm not going to do it here.

I will say, however, that unless Christianity is true Judaism doesn't make any sense, because Judaism lacks a universal cosmology (it simply can't answer the question "why didn't God choose all people").

From the perspective of Christianity Judaism make sense (the Jews are chosen in the sense that through the Jews comes salvation for all people), but Judaism doesn't make sense from the perspective of just Judaism.

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