Ask HN: What is your 'end game'? What kind of life are you striving to live?
Something that's been on my mind lately. I enjoy the depth of thought on HN, I always learn the most here.
Donning a favorite old band t-shirt, some ragged hoops shorts, flip-flops, and sipping my coffee on the back deck of a VERY modest, but paid-off, house. Watching the deer from said deck.
Then riding my bike into town (TBD, but someplace with <50K people) to a part-time job at the local supermarket. Plan B: doing the same at a local, for-young-people rural incubator & being the wise software sage. Making enough to pay for a Lagunitas Lil Sumpin or two.
At night: dinner with friends. Probably a bowl of pho. Steakhouses (and the requisite dress codes) are for other folks.
Twice yearly: taking the trailer to a coast. Probably alternating between Port Aransas, Texas and the North Carolina barrier islands.
I drink coffee I got from Colombia or Guatemala in the morning. While the coffee is brewing, I go through everything I'm grateful for and brush my teeth.
I drink my coffee while I check my email, reddit, HackerNews. I make a list of everything I need to do or continue the list from the previous day. I don't have Facebook, rarely check Twitter or Snapchat, save Instagram for later in the day or bathroom breaks. I turn on some good music that isn't overwhelming too sometimes.
I'm a consultant/creative director, I work remotely. I wear a comfy tee (band, Star Wars, plain) and sweat pants or basketball shorts.
I'm scaling my agency/consultancy at the moment by adding bigger and more interesting clients. I have gotten out of debt and started saving money to reinvest into some side projects that can become income streams.
The end goal: to own a camper van and travel all of North America with my camera while running this company from coffee shops and BnB's. It would be nice to share this with a dog and a woman, but the latter is optional. I can save money from my income streams to travel the world and eventually buy a cabin/farm out West somewhere, live a quiet and peaceful life away from the hustle and bustle of the city but still have good wi-fi and good shipping times from Amazon.
In the last year, I've quit drinking, smoking, and meat. I've added meditation, yoga, and grown closer to my family. I don't feel the need to 'change the world' or 'be the best' anymore. I just want to be a nice person, enjoy my day, create value for others.
I'm so glad I asked this question, I don't feel weird for not wanting the 'SV dream' anymore.
Retire and use my data engineering and deep learning skills to help genetics and drug discovery field. I think this area is ready for vast technological improvement, and we can help alleviate a lot of suffering here.
Almost at the 10M, maybe in 1-2 years I’ll be there
Why not start pursuing this right now and earn a smaller paycheck (presumably compared to what you do now given your net worth :) rather than wait until you hit your net worth threshold?
I've also gone quite far into novel vectorization and auto-encoder spaces, and have several models now ready
I need to sell my company soon, that'll push me over the line, then I will get to work.
Do you work in the field? We should keep in touch ...
What's your thesis / search space if you dont mind me asking? Ie virtual structure or ligand based screening with structure or affinity data, machine vision for analyzing cell based assays or histology slides etc, lead optimization, mining annotated genomic data etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_owne...
Then I realized I'm doing a lot of that now, but without much financial security and with a lot of stress. I live in a small apartment but my gf and I have a nice outdoor garden in our complex, I volunteer at a ranch working with kids with disabilities on weekends, and all of my work is at startups trying to use science and software to solve medical problems. I make a small fraction of what I did working in finance, at the moment not enough to save much even with low expenses, and the stress of trying to make super early startups work is real, but I really enjoy my work and have almost complete control over where and how I work. My biggest worry is not making enough to provide for the family at this point. I have a few years to see if I can make it work until this issue trumps all others and I'm forced to get a "real" job, make enough money, and then retire to do what I'm doing now :)
Teaching in an university or such (I love teaching)
Traveling the world to meet my friends
Financial freedom to do things I'm interested in (racing, VR)Right now I go once a summer and it costs about $3000 - all in. That includes hotel, food, track car rental and lap tickets.
When I have more capital I want to build a car for the ring and get a lease on a house, but that requires about $50,000 disposable income (Year 1) that I don’t have at 25YO.
Disclaimer: I am British and live in the U.K., prices in USD because of the wider international audience on HN.
Goal 2: hit the three coma club (billionaire) and ensure long-term cryogenic storage for me and my wife at EOL
Goal 3: solve the global food and clean water crisis
Build a startup in the field of AI.
Spend my free time writing comedy (and get really great at it).
Maybe teach the stuff I've learned about startups/CS (through articles/books/video courses).
Find a group of good friends. Get a dog.
Invest in life extension and cryonics so I'd get to enjoy my life for as long as possible.
Really long term:
Live long enough to upload my brain, and merge with AI. Explore the universe, learn everything there is to know. Create a universe that doesn't suck (or fix this one).
A somewhat hedonistic pursuit but whatever works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVCbsZtB4-4
The problem of accepting revealed knowledge. Whether to hunt down the best one or settle with assumptions.
The common trap for many brilliant atheists scientists is trying to use intellect to understand everything. Humanity has rich history of prophets and messengers. Historians tried whatever they can to fill the missing pieces. Ultimately, the person decides whether to accept the revealed knowledge. Or not.
Everything in the world cannot be proven. Everything that cannot be proven sufficiently to you right now shouldn't be assumed to be untrue.
Scientific knowledge [0] is in principle the only true knowledge in the word. It is repeatable and testable, which means it is reliable and can be applied. (By the way, too many people do not know what science means. They think it is just one of the ways to discover the world...)
If the meaning of life exists, it must be possible to find it with science. I see no contradictions here. If you see, you are welcome to reveal them if you will.
Except when it isn't and when it isn't.
A vast majority of articles published right now will never even be reproduced and yet we take nearly all of them as if they are gospel.
>If the meaning of life exists, it must be possible to find it with science. I see no contradictions here. If you see, you are welcome to reveal them if you will.
Science is based on some kinds of assumptions taken on faith (like every thought system). Here are a few (there are more surely).
1) Everything is observable to us as human beings.
2) Everything scientific will be reproduced and confirmed by someone else despite there being very few financial incentives for anyone to undertake all this costly reproduction and confirmation.
For (1), we know that there can be multiple dimensions, yes. A 2d figure can never really experience and observe the third dimension. He can only wonder about it, ponder about it, conjecture about it, but never know it because his physical senses will not let him understand that third dimension. Observations are powerful but they are limited by our observing senses. For (2) there have been countless hoax papers snuck into scientific journals, I don't need to cover this too much. Most scientific work is not reproduced, but posting it online will make most people think it is true.
You also forget that the meaning of life may exist and yet operate in a way we cannot sense. Just as there are planets we cannot see and may never be able to confirm.
No we don’t. You are projecting. Look up “projecting” if you don’t follow what I mean.
Science is not what you seem to think it is. Anyone who says science operates on faith is mistaken and ignorant.
Many such people like you are insanely overconfident about their knowledge and refuse to consider that they might be utterly wrong.
>Observations are powerful but they are limited by our observing senses...
omg this is so wrong I don’t know where to begin. There is such a thing as tests which can be devised to go way beyond our senses while still giving us the ability to falsify theories...
First of all, who is "we"? I certainly do not take them for granted. Any other responsible scientist doesn't as well. Science is not always perfect, like everything in life. Testability and reliability are just its goals. When they are reached, this is the success of science. When not, we should push further and better.
> Science is based on some kinds of assumptions taken on faith (like every thought system). Here are a few (there are more surely).
>1) Everything is observable to us as human beings.
Not true. Quantum wave function [0] is not observable. But it works reliably nevertheless.
>2) Everything scientific will be reproduced and confirmed by someone else <...>
There is no such assumption in science, too. One just does the research which _can_ be reproduced. Due to the lack of infinite resources, only selected things are in fact being reproduced.
> his physical senses will not let him understand that third dimension.
What is 'understand'? This is not even a declared goal of science. No one 'understands' quantum mechanics [2], but it is tremendously useful nevertheless.
Upd: by the way, some scientists say understanding is just nonsense. Everything is just mathematics [3].
> Observations are powerful but they are limited by our observing senses.
Not true. We created many devices which allow us to observe what our senses cannot. An obvious example is X-rays.
> posting it online will make most people think it is true.
This is not a problem of a restriction of science. This is the nature of humans, which goes against science in general.
Upd2:
>You also forget that the meaning of life may exist and yet operate in a way we cannot sense. Just as there are planets we cannot see and may never be able to confirm.
Sooner or later we will reach those planets. There is nothing preventing us to fly there in principle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function
[2] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Richard_Feynman#%22If_you...
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/0709.4024 via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15637074