5 ms·
Ask HN: What would you work on if you couldn't fail?
I've been sprinting 10-16 hours a day for almost a month now. I feel cool, calm, and collected though.
A lot is happening in the world and in our industry but I am doing all I can to be part of the cure, not the cancer.
This gives me peace of mind and helps me adapt regardless of if YC backs me or not. I'm moving to Palo Alto regardless, just being in the zip code alone will be enough at this point.
- bell-cot 1y agoTime travel.
- sslayer 1y agoPerpetual energy, Zero point energy, warp drive, gravity manipulation, teleportation
- mikewarot 1y agoI strongly believe the von Neumann architecture is a premature optimization. I want to bring bit level systolic array chips into reality and democratize access to petaflops.
- chistev 1y agoA personal blog that ends up becoming the biggest in the world.
- throwaway843 1y agoAscension。
- bitbasher 1y agoPrevent cancer?
- muzani 1y agoWhy cancer specifically? Why not say, diabetes or heart disease?
- nothercastle 1y agoThose two have an element of self infliction. Often, but not always related up poor lifestyle choices. Cancer can get anyone rich or poor healthy lifestyle or terrible one
- bitbasher 1y agoYes-- this, combined with personal reasons.
- vhcr 1y agohttps://www.aicr.org/resources/blog/study-vast-majority-of-cancers-caused-by-lifestyle-not-bad-luck/ https://www.aicr.org/resources/blog/study-vast-majority-of-c...
- bitbasher 1y agoTell that to the kids in a pediatric oncology unit.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoI'd be working on the same old things, but with a whole lot better luck :)
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y agoExistential risk from superintelligent AI, naturally. Even if it turns out to not be a risk I'd sleep a lot easier at night with an ironclad mathematical proof of why exactly it isn't on the presses. And if it is a risk, it's almost certainly the most important thing anyone could work on right now. I'm interpreting "can't fail" as "guaranteed to succeed one way or another", here.
- muzani 1y agoFixing inequality. Properly, not the current form which overcompensates and just flips the inequality. It is a hard problem because people are unequal and shouldn't not be forced to be equal, but you want this to be controlled and not a runaway loop. The ideal IMO is single breadwinner households with a two story house and one car and decent public transportation. Single breadwinner is particularly important - many families grow up with both parents absent for much of their lives. They don't learn what love is and this leads to broken families and crime as their children don't have a good framework. Inequality also causes a lot of political distortion. When the rich get richer, they try to hold power. They spend more, debt goes out of control. The poor are treated like they deserve to be poor. Bad work ethic becomes the norm for this society. Increased debt and spending hits a point where the ROI is negative. The poor become increasingly desperate and murderous. Wars trigger. The empire overextends. The inability to pay debts result in bank runs. And this pattern repeats itself again and again in nearly every fallen empire. No amount of technological advances or wealth helps if there's runaway inequality.
- miljanm 1y agoFixing opportunities is a better choice imho
- bjourne 1y agoProving p=np
- billconan 1y agoelderly care robots
- more_corn 1y agoFusion Life extension FTL travel Misinformation
- more_corn 1y agoSo what are you working on?
- didgetmaster 1y agoThere is a difference between building or inventing something that really works, and getting a large percentage of the population to actually adopt it. You could say the thing you worked on 'didn't fail' if it really did what you designed it to do; even though almost no one recognized its value and put it to use improving their life, even in some small way. History is full of very useful devices that only improved the lives of a few people; while also full of mediocre devices that were widely adopted due to very good marketing.
- posed 1y agoSurfing
- throwaway889900 1y agoIt's time for human-animal hybrids to become a real thing!