Allocating resources where they solve the most important problems | Hacker News Reader

Allocating resources where they solve the most important problems

terraformindustries.com

63 pointsperfunctory20 comments

I love their website. And I'm 100% serious about this.

It definitely backs up the claim that they are allocating resources where they will have the most impact.

mostly irrelevant comment, writing to the HN advice column:

> Are you mechanically intuitive? Do you want to help solve climate change? Do you like working on big hardware projects? … Send a page of evidence of execution ability … This could be a resume enumerating prestigious schools and high GPAs, but it could also be a summary of an awesome project you built that showcases your world-saving skills

I really like this approach.

I’d like to work somewhere like this, working on engineering real physical things

I however have no relevant (electrical/mechanical/etc) skills, no evidence of execution ability, and no diplomas from prestigious schools.

I got an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering 5 years ago because I think that electrical engineering is cool and wanted to learn how to make stuff, but somehow managed to get the degree without really building anything or learning how to build anything (this is partially because of the program, but largely because of me). I didn’t get a job working as an hardware engineer, and ended up in software. I’m pretty good at my job, but I do not like software, and wish that I had tried harder to get a job in hardware or tried to go to grad school.

Does anyone have any experiences developing non-software engineering skills while working as a software engineer, or transitioning from software to some other engineering? How can I develop electrical / mechanical engineering skills?

one approach I’ve considered is to try to go to grad school now, but every program I’ve seen requires letters of recommendation from professors, and I did not have any meaningful relationship with any of my undergrad professors and doubt that any would remember that I was in their classes.

I guess the other option is to try to build skills by working on side projects while still keeping my day job. Is it possible to become proficient this way? (enough to be employable compared to people with skills developed at prestigious schools)

in short, I botched my engineering undergrad pretty badly (despite graduating with a 4.0) and went down the chute to software. does anyone have advice on how to fix this, develop the skills I want to have, and get into the career I want to be in?

i guess this probably should be a separate ask hn

I’ll leave it for now, but if others think it doesn’t belong please flag it and I’ll delete it.

“If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?”

— Richard Hamming

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3msMuwqp-o&list=PLctkxgWNSR...

Because it pays your bills...?

I.e. because of a bug in economy which makes useless or harmful jobs profitable.

It depends on how you define "important", I guess. Flipping burgers is not relatively important, useless, or harmful. It's not a "bug". It's just something that has to get done, so we pay people to do it.

Flipping burgers is useful work. Working in spam center is harmful. Web search is useful. Spying on users is not. And so on; I don’t think it’s hard to grasp.

Economy exists because it’s beneficial to society. When it results in gratifying behaviors that harm the society, I’d say it’s a bug.

> Flipping burgers is useful work.

We were talking about important work, thus my point about how you want to define important.

Screwdrivers are useful, but none of the screwdrivers I own are important. I could lose one and not notice.

I don't think it's hard to grasp.

If you can afford to take a lower salary, you could try getting a position as research technician in an engineering lab. No guarantee that you'll develop the skills you want, but at least it would solve the problem of professor recommendation.

One reason I started working on "Linux on the Web" is that I wanted to work within a paradigm (web development) that has strong connections with current practices but that also can allow me to iterate in directions that are more related to the nuts and bolts of our shared physical reality.

One thing that nobody ever talks about are the more hardware-centric possibilities of the web platform such as WebUSB, but I would absolutely love to start playing around with it in order to allow for an interface of real world objects with the LOTW system -> https://github.com/linuxontheweb/LOTW

>letters of recommendation from professors

You may need to broaden your search to include less prestigious schools that still have good programs. The quality state schools I am aware of also accept letters from technical managers.

> "Why does our website look like this? ... Our website embodies our cultural commitment to allocating resources where they solve the most important problems."

so looking at the source, the html is invalid (no title, for example), it eschews the lowly <p> tag for multiple <br> tags, the chemical structures are practically unmaintainable, monospace is not very readable for paragraphs of text, and it extensively misuses a deprecated element, <tt>, for the monospace font. seems less an example of ingenuity, and more hubris. these things could be fixed in less than an hour, but apparently that's wasted time (they do better with their blog, since that comes by default with wordpress).

with that said, the goal is ambitious and noble, but it harkens back to alchemists trying to make gold from lesser elements, something that seems tantalizingly achievable but is it really? i'll give them that there is a ton of free energy hitting the earth every day, and part of the overall progress of humanity will be better harnessing that energy going forward, instead of burning through the finite, previously-transformed solar energy that is buried oil & gas.

Or they are not web experts and put just the amount of time needed to get the information across. So they could get back to value adding work.

that would be fine if they hadn't called attention to it, but they decided to take extraneous time to make it a point of identity, time they could have put into making the site minimally correct (and a little more accessible). whenever someone tells you of their goodness, rather than just letting their actions speak for themselves, it's reasonable to question their underlying motives.

Wrong, the HTML is completely valid, in the sense that a browser renders it. All text is valid HTML; that's the whole point of lax parsing. It might not be valid XML, but if it works, why care?

> but if it works, why care?

Let me rephrase: "but if it seems to work, why care?". Welcome to the new world of crap built upon crap.

Maybe not directly related to the article but worth noting.

https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/sites/default/files/cc08...

Worth noting that people associated with this resigned and complained about being used to further climate change denial because it's basically propaganda:

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Copenhagen_Consensus

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