Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Top19 | Hacker News Reader

Wow cannot thank these guys enough. Every scam that is serious about making money has SEO-carpet bombed Google to death, making any serious search for the truth impossible (unless you’re one of those people who always knows to go to the 7th page of search results).

Also here’s a pro-tip. If you’re searching for something and a bunch of Youtube videos says “Is XYZ a scam??”, the answer is “absolutely yes”. Those videos pretend to be honest reviews that wind up finding out that “surprisingly, it’s not a scam and looks pretty good”, but it’s all a lie.

Other scams, usually by virtue of providing a 100% incentive based compensation structure:

- Selling mattresses

- Real Estate sales or seminars of any kind to someone inexperienced

- MLM or Pyramid Schemes

- Typically anything that advocates obscene amounts of positive psychology and a scientology like version of a Christianity

- Insurance sales

- Selling internet services for a company like CBeyond

- Any college of any-kind that makes a profit short of coding boot camps (and they’ll probably turn into a scam within a few years which is sad)

>Any college of any-kind that makes a profit short of coding boot camps (and they’ll probably turn into a scam within a few years which is sad)

You definitely lost me there - while there are scam schools and the cost of reputable private colleges has ballooned from expensive through unacceptable into stratospheric, higher education remains one of the best investments a person can make in themselves.

Yes, vocational training like coding bootcamps or other trade schools can be a way better path for a lot of people. And yes, the sort of bootcamp that charges 5 figures to teach you the javascript framework du jour is probably not worth what it charges. But a lot of bootcamps these days are partnering with large companies to learn what sort of skills are needed and going with income-based payment, something like X% of your income above $N for Y months expiring in Z years. I wouldn't write them off.

To clarify I didn’t mean private colleges like Swarthmore, Westminster, or Rice. Schools like Kaplan, ITT, Cordon Bleu.

Also I have no problems with coding bootcamps. But the schools I mentioned above, whose avarice I feel like knows no limits, will eventually discover “coding bootcamps” and make them into a brutal profit extraction machine with laughable education value. But again, that in no way has happened yet.

Kaplan did buy Dev Bootcamp a few years ago. I noticed that mentioned quite often in the articles that came out in July about Dev Bootcamp shutting down.

I don't know anything about how Kaplan's ownership affected it though, either positively or negatively.

Apollo Education (which owns the University of Phoenix) acquired The Iron Yard bootcamp in 2015, and it is shutting down as now as well.

So in these cases at least, some of the large for-profit education providers don't seem to have found dev bootcamps (in their current form, anyway) to be very lucrative.

Most (all?) legitimate colleges, public & private, are non-profit. For profit schools are things like DeVry college and Corinthian Colleges. These are pretty widely considered scammy.

>But a lot of bootcamps these days are partnering with large companies to learn what sort of skills are needed and going with income-based payment, something like X% of your income above $N for Y months expiring in Z years. I wouldn't write them off.

The company I currently work for is spearheading a program like this- you go through a six month bootcamp and get placed in a the 2 year long rotational program for out-of-college hires. The distinction here is that they're also trying to pipe in college hires for the bootcamp, just those who discovered they liked CS too late or majored in the wrong thing.

For colleges I personally recommend "If they are going to you with advertising, they aren't good enough to be known by you or employers".

If you're including mattresses, insurance, and real estate, I can't help but to think your definition of 'scam' is 'thing I don't like'.

That's not what he's saying

Insurance and mattresses salesman did not get to that position by signing up to some online "course" where they were promised "unlimited returns"

Walking up to your local mattress shop and handing your CV has a much higher chance of you getting an actual job doing that

- Binary options

- much foreign exchange trading (FOREX).

(Huge racket. In many cases, you're not really buying options; you're betting against the house, which is a bucket shop. The house cheats, and won't pay up if they lose. 40% of Israel's financial sector is this stuff.[1])

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-wolves-of-tel-aviv-israels...

Wait, what? Mattresses?

I am confused and, I confess, Google is not exactly helpful - like you suggested.

I don't think I've ever been scammed when buying a mattress? I don't think anyone has even tried to scam me while buying a mattress. Then again, those two traits would make for a good scam.

They aren't really a scam as such, the margins are just ridiculously high.

And there is stuff like no 2 stores having the same mattress, so you can't comparison shop.

Ah, thanks. I don't really shop or compare prices, but just get what suits my needs. I've been happy with the results and costs, so I was unsure of where the scam was.

You only buy so many mattresses in your lifetime, and they take up a ton of space. Of course their margins are high.

The author wasn't very clear on this one. It's not that mattresses in general are a scam, but the internet offers to make a fortune selling them.

The scam is in the "100% your money back if you find a lower price"

Each mattress is a different version because they use different color thread. Everything else is exactly the same as the competition.

Mattress companies provide some of the highest payouts through affiliate marketing. As a result, there are many more bogus reviews for that product category than most high ticket items like good sound systems or cars.

I just tried googling for:

Is the stock market a scam?

And the first hit is a youtube video of someone explaining that it's not a scam. If we agree that the stock market isn't a scam, that's at least a false positive for your test..

You found a video review of the stock market?

Unboxing NASDAQ

Uh... do we all agree that the stock market isn't a scam?

> short of coding boot camps (and they’ll probably turn into a scam within a few years which is sad)

Some of them are pretty close, if not there already -- not always intentionally though.

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