martinesko36

I have a spare computer at home that’s quite powerful (16core Ryzen, 64gb ram, NVMe SSDs)

I was thinking of using it as a web server for my side projects. And if a project gets some traction I’ll move it to DigitalOcean or Heroku first thing.

Does that kind of setup make sense at all? What should I know before I begin?

I am currently in an undergraduate university considered "elite" in US. CS is the most popular major. My friends have switched from finance & medicine to CS majors - for the money and because it's obviously a good idea to do so right now. All the worries my classmates have is how to get an internship at FAANG. Again not that they'll do interesting work (which is rarely the case), but for the resume item...

I've been coding for half my life, out of pure interest for the building things and never got into it for the money. CS career being obviously a good choice and every smart kid I know majoring in it, mostly for the cash, honestly makes me worried about the future of the field in terms of whether it'll still be a good career in the future. I think smart people will do good work, just for the wrong reasons ($) and this might impact the field negatively. In 5 years maybe things will still be okay, but if the trend continues for 10 years? Will CS become unsustainable hours like working in the quantitive funds or unsustainable competition and workload like in medicine, or both?

PG has said something along the lines of "if everyone thinks something is a good idea, it's probably a bad idea" and Peter Thiel's competition theory where profits get competed away if everyone's doing the same thing are two ideas I think most about.

What does HN think?

I am trying to be more cognizant of where my time goes, and as a side project I wanted to build software that automatically tracks where my time goes. I can't, however, figure out how to automatically track the time I spent watching cable TV with software only. Do you have ideas?