Ask HN: If your economic necessities were taken care of, what would you work on?
Maybe you're already doing it, and income isn't part of the equation, but where would you focus your time and energy if you could work on anything?
- I took 1 month off. Seriously. No computers, just reading, playing games and swimming. I needed a break.
- I spent 3 months leaning Deep Learning from the fundamentals - learning without an urgency of time meant I could do things like: I couldn't remember the chain rule in calculus, so I could just stop my lessons there and go and spend 3-4 hours learning that, then resume lessons - this ability to stop and research as required was immensely powerful to getting a deep understanding.
I have spent the last 6 months building SignalBox - a Deep learning platform. I now have 15 large customers, and I'm scaling up -- I cant keep up to be honest, but automation is helping me scale this out a lot.
I am now focusing more on computational chemistry and molecular exploration with Deep Learning.
I really think Universal Basic Income is a good thing, because although a large part of the population could piss it away, I am by no means unique, and there must be hundreds of thousands, or even millions of other "me"s out there that would benefit from having the necessities paid for so that they could just produce great work.
1. As a ex-biologist and ex-scientist I wonder how the deep learning can be used to leverage that can put direct dent into certain fields such as drug discovery for genetic diseases and cancer thus saving many lives.
2. How it can be used to collect social data in a larger scale from different social networking sites and analyzed to predict criminal behaviors and prevent future criminal actions.
3. On natural disasters and climate related warning etc.
4. Searching for extraterrestrial lives.
5. And the most thrilling impact on mankind will be using AI and deep learning, can we preserve the entire neuronal network mappings of a human brain and able to simulate its thought process and mental action after he/she is gone?
As others here have predicted, I spend a lot of time outdoors (having moved to France specifically for the rock climbing) and building tree forts in the back garden for the kids. Pretty much any day can be a day off, so if the sun is shining you probably won't find me at the computer.
I also find I still work quite a bit (which translates to a few days a week for me). Partly because I realize that products come and go, and that these ones will eventually plateau then fade away, so I'd better have another one in the pipeline to replace them when that happens.
But partly because it's fun. This has been my hobby since I was a kid, and it's only an accident that somebody decided that we should start paying computer programmers hundreds of thousands of dollars back in the 90s. Had that not happened, I'd be an Engineer who programmed in his spare time. I used to spend most of each year traveling, and I'd find that the thing that brought me back to the "world" was never money, but the need to use my brain again.
I bet that even if this next thing [1] takes off and leaves me idle again, I'll probably find another fun project to work on.
Then I'd use this platform to disrupt higher education and hiring/job seeking systems.
I'm not actually sure how to get over the "no content" moat, to be honest. Maybe build the basic framework and then market it as a stackoverflow alternative at first? This would, of course, involve mapping more than just conceptual and procedural masteries. I was thinking of including versioned systems as well (since versioning is the one thing that stackoverflow sucks at).
If I had known that a general mapping of masteries required for web development with Ruby on Rails looked like [0], then I probably would have approached the subject with a more focused mindset.
Oh, you mean _in_ the tech industry? I'd probably spend a fair amount of time working on space tech and real time software. There are untold lessons in reliability, efficiency and know-how that I'd like to at least glimpse before I'm gone - I've had enough of the mess that the Web has become in any of those regards.
1. Self-fund a PhD in something worth a damn.
2. Work harder on developing family.
3. Write a fiction.
4. Wonder about (figuratively) with no aim in particular.
- spend more time volunteering in animal sanctuaries.
- never read another business book or listen to a business podcast again.
- never think about marketing, SEO, CAC, conversion rates again.
- spend more time cooking.
Then travel the world with my girlfriend, eventually our family.
I'm fascinated with farm-tech. I went into tech because there isn't money in farming. My passion is farming. A fusion of the two is my ideal job.
(I've had free time to do amazing things several times and I e always blown it by lack of motivation.)
Also, my deadlift, left hook & bike endurance. Wouldn't mind a few multi-week self supported bike rides thrown in there.
Travel and meet top researchers I admire and learn from them.
Solve real human problems.