[HN Gopher] On the use of a life (2020)
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On the use of a life (2020)
Author : metadat
Score : 139 points
Date : 2022-07-04 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.daemonology.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.daemonology.net)
| jl6 wrote:
| Until a man is twenty-five he still thinks, every so often, that
| under the right circumstances he could be the baddest
| motherfucking programmer in the world. If I moved to an APT in
| North Korea and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was
| wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to
| revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted
| it to wiping out side channels. If I just dropped out and devoted
| my life to wizardry. I used to feel that way, too, but then I ran
| into cperciva. In a way, this is liberating. I no longer have to
| worry about being the baddest motherfucking programmer in the
| world. The position is taken.
| schoen wrote:
| For people who don't get the reference, this is an adaptation
| of a famous line from _Snow Crash_ , by Neal Stephenson.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I liked the style of that book, fun story. Except for the 15
| year old getting it on with an (estimated) 30+ year old.
|
| But I can see how and why Mark thinks he should build the
| Metaverse ... (and why I'll never visit it)
| ge96 wrote:
| > studied real hard for ten years
|
| Somewhat related thought. I wonder about this with regard to
| AGI, I have this fantasy of a symbiote/friend thing. But it is
| not easy to make that. I don't know if I have the real/actual
| drive to do it. I'm also a mediocre programmer/developer. That
| kind of passion where you do it every free moment of your
| time/not monetary based. It is not for me. I tinker on CRUD
| stuff/low-end robotics on my free time. So yeah not sure of
| effort vs. talent/genius.
| Swizec wrote:
| > That kind of passion where you do it every free moment of
| your time/not monetary based
|
| I used to have that passion. Every waking moment devoted to
| figuring out cool things. Or at least what seemed cool to me.
|
| Then one day I joined a rocketship company and all my side
| projects and ideas started to feel small, boring, and
| insignificant. The grandest idea I could come up with
| couldn't hold a light to even the most mundane problems a
| real business in the hockeystick part of the curve comes up
| with.
|
| Sometimes I miss the motivation to tinker. Sometimes I
| cherish my newfound ability to relax. Perhaps one day I will
| tinker once more.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I had the opposite.
|
| I used to work for one of the most famous imaging
| corporations in the world. My little team was part of an
| elite, worldwide, organization that created instruments
| that sold for tens of thousands of dollars, and were used
| to capture some of the most iconic images in history, and
| make some of the most astounding scientific discoveries.
|
| Since leaving, I have been working; mostly alone, or with
| very little assistance from others, so my scope has been
| drastically reduced. I write little apps.
|
| I love it. I am constantly working on code. My GH ID is
| solid green (no exaggeration), and is not "gamed," the way
| some folks do it.
|
| I have no intentions of ever working for anyone again. I
| was constantly told that I was wrong, that my work was
| insignificant, that I should not cast my eyes heavenward,
| etc.
|
| These days, I set my own agenda. I design my software the
| way that I always wanted (and was never allowed) to, and I
| am absolutely _thrilled_ with the results.
|
| Turns out, I was absolutely right, the whole time.
| pdimitar wrote:
| You should not compare your own ideas to others. If an idea
| is extremely stupid but at the same time it gets you going
| in the morning you should stick to it.
|
| Some of the most useful inventions that we use today every
| day have been made by very stubborn people who were told
| thousands of times that their idea was stupid.
|
| I still have the motivation and desire to work on some very
| interesting and super hard stuff one day -- and I am 42.
| You should get back to that enthusiasm. Maybe that
| business' ideas and actual products are much more useful
| and interesting on a general socially-accepted level. That
| doesn't mean that _your_ thing isn 't the best in the world
| to work on for you.
|
| So IMO get back to doing your own stuff when you have the
| time and energy for it.
| mrkramer wrote:
| >Some of the most useful inventions that we use today
| every day have been made by very stubborn people who were
| told thousands of times that their idea was stupid.
|
| That's true; Zuckerberg's parents told him that Facebook
| idea is stupid and that he should get his Harvard degree.
| Larry and Sergey couldn't sell Google to Excite for $350k
| because Excite's managers thought Google was unnecessary.
| Swizec wrote:
| I appreciate the sentiment. Truth is my ideas stopped
| getting me going in the morning because the dayjob feels
| like such a bigger better more interesting opportunity.
|
| I'm sure exciting ideas will come again. Until then
| "Enjoying my dayjob too much" isn't a bad place to be :)
| pdimitar wrote:
| I agree and I am happy for you that you have that going
| for you. Personally for 20.5 years of career I have only
| had 2-3 short-term contracts that truly interested me.
| ge96 wrote:
| Yeah having a full time job does limit you a lot with what
| you can do after the day is done.
|
| When I was younger (10+ years ago) I had all kinds of crazy
| ideas/things to make. High traffic websites, get rich, that
| kind of thing. But they were all dumb... unvalidated, went
| nowhere. But now that I know how to build things (web) I
| don't have any ideas. Funny how that works.
|
| When you look at indie projects seems like there's so many
| niches/ways to make money out there. But personally I found
| it hard to do hence 9-5er.
| sureglymop wrote:
| This is why instead of actually executing my ideas.. i at
| least divinely them meticulously. I have a book filled
| with (to me) brilliant ideas. Who knows what will happen
| with them.
| ge96 wrote:
| Just don't pay $99 (non-refundable) to sell your idea
| brendamn wrote:
| I've found myself in a similar position. I've often
| wondered whether the cause is one specific thing (eg my
| ideas seem small / less impactful than other projects I've
| worked on), or the culmination of several things.
|
| I suspect in my case it's a combination, but with a big
| dose of "been there, done that". There's only so many times
| you can get excited about a new tool or optimization.
|
| The answer is, of course, to dive into something that isn't
| tech. There'll be a host of problems that seem/are fresh
| and interesting.
| walrus01 wrote:
| recent real estate chaos and vast increases in cost of living
| makes me wonder how many people in the tech industry might
| right now be _literally_ living in storage units as described
| by Hiro Protagonist.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I can relate (long story, lots of tears. Get your hanky); except
| for the "able to buy a house with the proceeds" part.
|
| The stuff that I'm most satisfied with, has never earned me a
| cent. In fact, it has cost me thousands.
|
| I _know_ that the software that I 've written has actually helped
| save lives, so maybe it's not really a "waste"?
| Cerium wrote:
| Beyond the well reasoned response, I object to the premise that
| it's "just backups". Quality backups are a big ug lever for
| ensuring that others work is able to continue and exist to be
| appreciated.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, but generally the reason people's backups don't work
| aren't that they're using backup software written by
| programmers who weren't smart enough to win the Putnam.
| Generally when people's backups don't work it's because they
| don't do the backups, or because they set up the backups in a
| way that can't work (for example, forgetting to back up the
| files they really care about, or backing up a live database
| tablespace with a filesystem backup tool without snapshots), or
| because they're in some kind of a dysfunctional relationship
| with a vendor like Google that doesn't give them programmatic
| access to their own files so they _can 't_ do backups.
|
| So, while I don't think it's bad for cperciva to have spent a
| lot of time working on Tarsnap, which is clearly a useful piece
| of software, I also think things like scrypt actually matter
| more in the end.
|
| However, I also think cperciva is a better judge of what to
| spend his life on than I am.
| cperciva wrote:
| Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865
| ghoward wrote:
| Random question: would you be willing to do an paid audit of
| new cryptographic code?
| cperciva wrote:
| Yes, if it's in my (fairly narrow) area of expertise. About
| 90% of the time when someone approaches me with audit work
| the answer ends up being "I'm not the right person to hire
| for this".
| stopachka wrote:
| There's a big truth here that screams out to me. If you want to
| do great work, you need freedom first.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _If you pay a man a salary for doing research, he and you will
| want to have something to point to at the end of the year to
| show that the money has not been wasted. In promising work of
| the highest class, however, results do not come in this regular
| fashion, in fact years may pass without any tangible result
| being obtained, and the position of the paid worker would be
| very embarrassing and he would naturally take to work on a
| lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure
| of getting year by year tangible results which would justify
| his salary. The position is this: You want one kind of
| research, but, if you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to
| research of a different kind. The only thing to do is to pay
| him for doing something else and give him enough leisure to do
| research for the love of it._
|
| -- from the biography of J. J. Thompson
| auggierose wrote:
| Amen. It's really a simple thing to understand. But most
| people involved in academia don't (want to).
| hprotagonist wrote:
| we all know. we just can't figure out how the fuck to get
| it funded.
|
| That sort of blue-sky culture needs a whole lot of
| disinterested money, and that's hard to come by. In
| previous generations, we've used monopolists, the gentry,
| and other ways...always a challenge.
| auggierose wrote:
| If you know, you'll find a way to do the research you
| want anyway. So, no problem here. But I guess the problem
| is finding out which research you really want to do. You
| might find other aspects of life more rewarding /
| interesting / important.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Sadly there's plenty of money being spent in the world
| every second and even 1% of them would be enough to fund
| most of the science on the planet for years in the
| future... :(
|
| You wouldn't believe how much money do top Twitch /
| YouTube streamers get in an hour. I understand that they
| provide entertainment / influence and many people need
| that and pay them -- it's fair business and I don't look
| down on it. On the other hand... aren't there like sooooo
| many other and much more pressing concerns in the world
| to fix with surplusmoney? Yes, there are.
|
| So yeah I sympathize with the "we can't figure out how to
| fund proper free research". It's really a shame on
| humanity.
| yt-sdb wrote:
| "A room of one's own" by Virginia Woolf is a great book about
| this topic. Financial freedom proceeds creative thinking.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Academics are not the place to go to make useful novel
| contributions, there are too many confounding factors. First, the
| university owns whatever IP you come up with, and will happily
| exclusively license that IP to entities with no interest in
| developing it. Monopolistic corporate power centers aren't known
| for fostering novel competition to their established businesses.
| This is why it took so long - and serious capital - to get
| something like Tesla going, as the likes of Toyota, Ford, GM etc.
| were closely tied to Exxon, Chevron etc. via their investors, and
| had no interest in developing electric cars.
|
| Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these days
| is best understood as corporate R & D for established interests
| in pharmaceuticals, technology, industrial chemistry, etc. You're
| certainly not free to do blue-skies renewable energy research
| (budgets for that are still miniscule at best, and have been
| since the 1980s), for example. The job description has become
| indistinguishable from that of in-house corporate researcher -
| narrowly defined assigned problems are what you get to work on,
| and 'academic freedom to pursue the research wherever it leads'
| is a quaint myth.
|
| The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of academic
| IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act), which would force
| corporations to spend capital on their own private R & D
| divisions if the wanted exclusivity, and simply make any
| university-held patented discovery available to any entrepreneur
| who wanted to develop it for a small flat fee.
|
| Until then the author is 100% correct about entrepreneurship
| being the only way out of the trap.
| schoen wrote:
| He was specifically going to be an academic mathematician,
| which would probably have allowed him to publish discoveries
| without patenting or licensing them.
| eastbound wrote:
| As I often say, open-source is the 7th wonder of the world. In
| no previous situation have humans worked together on a larger
| scale to create a software that powers literally everything in
| the world, and even a helicoper on Mars.
|
| And just to put it at scale, the engineers of Apollo were so
| early before our times that they had to code the timestamps _in
| negative_.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| > First, the university owns whatever IP you come up with, and
| will happily exclusively license that IP to entities with no
| interest in developing it
|
| That's simply not true.
|
| Academia has a lot of problems, we don't need to start making
| up new ones.
|
| Universities want money. The #1 concern, by far, of any
| university technology licensing office is to get those patents
| working so that they can reap the benefits in terms of huge
| licensing fees. Literally, no one wants to license anything to
| anyone who won't develop it.
|
| Also, university licensing offices always have deals where the
| researchers get the right of first refusal with their own IP.
|
| > Any kind of applied research in the US academic sector these
| days is best understood as corporate ...
|
| Academics do very little applied research. Overwhelmingly, we
| do what is called basic research. Finding cool new ideas. Then,
| we give them to those corporations that do the overwhelming
| amount of applied research. This is how the system is supposed
| to work!
|
| > The job description has become indistinguishable from that of
| in-house corporate researcher
|
| No idea what university you at. But this is totally false for
| any university I've seen.
|
| > The obvious fix is to eliminate exclusive licensing of
| academic IP (i.e. repeal the 1980s Bayh-Dole Act)
|
| So.. you want academics to do less impactful research that has
| fewer applications? Because that's the outcome of denying us
| the ability to patent our own work.
| mandmandam wrote:
| It seems to be common knowledge that the systems behind
| publishing papers and getting grants are nearly completely
| broken. It feels like a weird hazing ritual, where the people who
| get through it fiercely defend their abuse.
|
| > Is entrepreneurship a trap? No; right now, it's one of the only
| ways to avoid being trapped.
|
| ... Realistically, you need to be rather well off to have even
| one good shot at starting a company. Get sick at the wrong time
| and forget about it. Get less than very lucky, and forget about
| it. Get your ideas stolen by a megacorp; forget about it.
|
| I'm so tired of seeing truly extraordinary people forced to do
| menial labour to survive, and starting a company in the hopes of
| getting lucky isn't all that much better.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > I'm so tired of seeing truly extraordinary people forced to
| do menial labour to survive
|
| This * 10.
|
| The teacher/mentor part of me relishes seeing success for
| others. Meeting many talented, creative and hard working people
| in my life had been a privilege. But I do feel a sense of
| injustice and awful waste. To see people who could change the
| world and solve real problems settle for less, that hurts. When
| graduation time comes around I sometimes feel a dark sense of
| helplessness, and maybe something of a hypocrite/imposter
| because the one thing I cannot teach or offer is opportunity.
|
| > and starting a company in the hopes of getting lucky isn't
| all that much better.
|
| Maybe not, but I encourage all of them to give it a shot once
| in life. At least failure is _yours to own_ and not feeling
| thwarted by some manager prick whose decision to obstruct your
| dream was just a way to get by for one more day in a firm they
| couldn 't care less for.
| elric wrote:
| I hadn't heard of spiped, and I was very happy to discover it
| through this blog post. It's elegant, simple, and solves a
| problem I was over-engineering my own solution for. So thanks,
| Colin!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| spiped is amazing. I remember looking for something to use
| Kivaloo for when TFA came out, but I don't have any need for
| what it offers
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2020)
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24537865
| cableshaft wrote:
| I've had more of an urge to do some research on CS topics lately
| (beyond the usual you can find in textbooks), but as someone who
| was never in academia, and only got an undergraduate degree, I
| don't really know how to approach it as an outsider, like what
| sources I should use, how to find something to focus on, etc.
|
| Does anyone else have any experience with this and have any
| recommendations for how to approach it? I imagine I'll probably
| have more success in areas that are game or recreational
| mathematics related (like Martin Gardner), at least to get
| started.
| 70rd wrote:
| Hard question to answer without specifying topics. The usual
| way is to find an introductory textbook on the subject, find
| the papers and authors referenced for results and theorems and
| work forward through the literature. This will give you both
| historical perspective and develop your knowledge at a gradual
| pace.
| schoen wrote:
| (2020)
| metadat wrote:
| Thanks, title updated!
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