kohanz

In my experience it's not limited to large metro populations with high COL. We live in a mid-sized Canadian city (~400k population) with a relatively low cost of living and the preferred daycares here all have waiting lists. Basically, if you don't get on them soon after your child is born (or about 12 months before you intend them to start), you'll be left with a lot less choice when they're ready to start.

I've posted about this before, but years ago I made a blog about completing the application and exams to obtain a professional engineering license in my jurisdiction. It is just a WordPress blog. Over a year or two, it started getting organic traffic since it provided information in an underserved niche.

After making next to nothing with Google ads, I was approached by another site that sold help packages for the licensing process and we struck up an affiliate deal. It didn't work right away and had to build up, but nowadays it generates anywhere from $200 to $800 per month in completely passive revenue (haven't written a new post in years). The revenue has been growing too. It will have done about $5k in 2018.

I'm a developer who does part-time contract work to support bootstrapping (so far) a business. Here's my advice to you.

> I am building a B2C website after work and on weekends, however it is very slow going and at this speed I think it's going to take at a minimum 12 months before I have something to launch with. This is frustrating on it's own, since I want quit my job and build something that I can pour myself into, but I'm never able to make any meaningful progress between work and family. I really beleive in this idea, however I am trying to be realistic.

Don't spend 12 months building something. Please. Unless you mean 12 months of building something while showing and selling it to people along the way every week or so. Whether you believe in your idea or not, it's the opinions of your customers (and more importantly, their wallets) that will decide whether you've got a business here.

> I am building a B2C website

Understand that the #1 challenge in B2C will be marketing. It doesn't matter if you build the best version of something, or a completely new something that people find amazing. They will not know it exists or find you, unless you put a ton of effort into marketing. More than development.

I learned this the hard way. I've built a B2C product that users love, but getting users to it is challenging, even though the product has some built-in virality. I'm actually pivoting the core technology to a B2B use-case that I can sell to companies for recurring revenue. To be honest, I wish I had done this from the start.

> I have a wife and 2 young children, and my wife is getting upset that I spend all my free time working on my side project instead of hanging out with the family. So it's getting to the point where something has got to give. My initial thought is to quit my steady decently paying full time job, and move to contract work.

Yes, this is a good idea. I didn't even start getting seriously into entrepreneurship until I had established a successful consulting business. Your family, especially your spouse, are going to be your number one support through the tough times. Do not take them for granted - they need to be on your side.

> Am I just being naive? Is it a requirement to risk my families savings on my business idea?

The naive aspect that I see is that you haven't really presented any real validation or traction for your "idea". Pre-sell it, build a fake MVP, etc. there are tons of ways to get out there and validate an idea before building it. Just please, don't spend 12 months where you're primarily developing software, because it's such a small part of a successful business. Find out whether your idea is something you can sell and people will pay for first.

I've freelanced successfully for a few years and never really had to explicitly network to get clients. They all came from my existing professional network (built up over a 10+ year career in traditional employment). I know that's not possible for everyone and I didn't come here to say just that.

Lately I've been focusing more on bootstrapping a startup and using freelancing as a part-time way to pay the bills, so time to go out and find jobs has been less. Fortunately, I was able to connect with another freelancer who is great at networking and often lands more jobs than he can handle. He then sends work my way. I charge my usual hourly rate and I suspect he's quoting these clients with project-based billing and in some cases making a tidy profit. I'm absolutely fine with this - he takes the risk, communication overhead, blame if stuff hits the fan, and I get some steady side-income where I essentially report to another developer who is an understanding person.

Perhaps if you're an introvert, seek out an extrovert freelancer that could use some extra bandwidth.

I know this seems flippant, but I mean it with all due respect: Is it possible that you've just grown up?

I don't mean to say that those pursuits weren't fun or worth pursuing. My point is a lot of time has passed since "chat rooms" and "browser games" were all the rage and also that "fun" is not an objective measure and depends on your perspective. There are a lot of things that I found "fun" when I was younger that I simply don't or would not anymore (like logging in once a day to a BBS, pre-internet, to play a text-based RPG). Also, the things that younger people today find fun online aren't things that I, now a middle-aged man, would enjoy. As far as I know from my distant, curmudgeonly viewpoint, kids today are still having fun online, be it on snapchat, discord, fortnite, or whatever. It's just that, because of my age and life experience, I can't find those to be fun in the same way.

I'm surely missing something, but how this is a bad thing for an average user. Surely the idea behind throttling is to protect users on shared instances from bad actors that are hogging resources beyond a reasonable amount. Running the CPU at 100% for 30 minutes, or do similar actions with the disk or network would degrade performance for everyone else and I would want my cloud provider to address that. I would be shocked if DO and Linode did not also have such a safety feature in place.

Yes. It's called a lead magnet. I have no issue giving my (business) e-mail to get such beautifully designed templates for free. There's at least $100 of value on those sites. If they start sending e-mails not relevant to me, I can simply unsubscribe.

To add to that: https://remote.co/

Do you mean besides different types of insurance? (health, life, critical illness & disability, etc.)

My question of how it could go down was firmly tongue-in-cheek. My own serverless web app has gone down a few times during AWS outages, for example.

But it's "serverless", how could it go down?

(and I say this as someone that runs a web app built on the Serverless platform that I'm quite happy with - I just think it's a dumb name)

The author does mention she had some pretty "sharp edges", but regardless I don't think one can expect an "objective" assessment in a situation like this nor is it preferred, in my opinion.

We're talking about two soul mates. No one can possibly relate to Alex in the way the OP did. When you're with someone in that good of a relationship, for that long, you don't see that person the same way as anyone else possibly could. As I read the article, I could only think of my wife (thankfully still here with me), because that's my "Alex". My wife is not perfect, but I also don't see her as having truly negative qualities, more like strengths and weaknesses and I love the entire package. I guess what I'm doing a crappy job of saying is that eulogizing your SO isn't really possible to be understood as an "outsider". You can understand it in the context of your own relationships, but with regards to the person being remembered, thee whole picture is impossible for you to see and perhaps also those details are only meant for the closest relationships, in my humble opinion.

Hi HN!

Creator & founder of VidHug here. It started for me with a request to create a video montage for my mother's 70th birthday. I hacked together a very lousy prototype to make it easier for people to send me recorded videos (even DropBox would have been too complicated for some of the more elderly users) and then iMovie'd the result together. It was a success in that my mother loved it (tears of joy), but what I was left with was a feeling for how much work the whole process had been. So I set about to create VidHug, to make it easy enough and low-effort enough that anyone can do it.

There are still a lot of features that I want to add (music, photos, etc), but so far it's extremely gratifying to see people use it to connect on a deeper emotional level for special occasions (rather than the usual "Happy Birthday" text/comment). I'm also exploring other use-cases.

Thanks for checking it out!

I wouldn't be surprised if compliance is nil. I don't live in India, but have a name that is common in that part of the world (moreso Pakistan, to be honest) and a Gmail address that reflects that. My address gets signed up for different web services in India & Pakistan on nearly a daily basis. At least 50% of the time, the email address of the person signing up is not even verified, so the account is immediately enrolled and I start receiving all sorts of confidential information which is not intended for me (phone bills, travel receipts, banking information, etc). I have almost never had success contacting these companies to let them know they're sending this information to a random individual. They often do not have "unsubscribe" options and, as you mentioned, if they list a support address it often bounces or a human reply is never encountered. Obviously I'm generalizing here, but my impression of the standards in that region with respect to this stuff is pretty low compared to North America. There appears to be little or no pressure to comply.

> while others benefit from it?

I might have felt a tinge of that until I tried being an entrepreneur myself. Risk is a real thing.

Perhaps not the same, but reminds me of the Waldorf education philosophy [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education

Did you roll your own recording front-end as well or is it done by file upload?

What stack are you using to record, trancode (?), and store the videos?

Your post sounded very much like my own story. Flew most of my life, wasn't particularly afraid until a night-time flight with severe turbulence where the plane dropped so fast the only thing that kept people from hitting the ceiling was our seat belts. A few people screaming, lots of scared murmuring. After we got off the plane, we heard there was bad weather with 100km/h winds. Ever since then, the slightest bit of turbulence gets me very anxious. I'm also less scared when I'm alone (dying alone isn't as scary), but usually I'm with my wife & kids, so the fear amplifies (even though they are all quite comfortable).

One coping mechanism I recently came up with is that I realized it's not so much the fear of crashing that I have (I've been able to rationalize about how turbulence != crash), but it's more that when the turbulence starts, I hate the unpredictability of it - I have no idea if the next bump is a small one, a big one, or one so big it will cause panic in the cabin. Thus even the smooth waits in between become angst-filled.

On a recent vacation, on the ground, I ended up playing with my kids on a "parkour" playground, running up and down hills, jumping on trampolines, getting the same feeling in my stomach and inner ear as a bumpy plane ride. So once I was back on the plane and we hit some turbulence, in my mind, I visualized myself running around that playground again. I know this sounds silly, but it worked wonders. When the bumps came, my mind was already prepared as it was pretending running and jumping on a trampoline. This helped me cope a lot, by taking me to a different place.

Many people mentioned hearing pilots attitudes towards turbulence helps and I can totally see that. However, one thing that I wish they wouldn't do is announce before the flight that a) it's going to be a smooth ride or b) there will be some bumps along the way. For me, at least, in scenario (a), if we hit some unexpected turbulence that makes it worse for me because I know the pilots weren't expecting it and (b) if they say there will be a bumpy ride, I'm bracing myself the whole time and I've been on flights like that where they ended up being 100% smooth :/

I had no idea who Scott Aaronson is, so the context was useful to me.

Lambda is not intended for long running jobs. It would be costly to do so.

I'm using Lambda to kick off an EC2 worker running a Docker image with AWS Fargate. The EC2 instance only runs for the duration of the job (which lasts from 5 to 20 minutes)

You can pay them for GSuite, but I don't know if the terms are any more favourable.

I'm wondering the same thing. I chose this morning to soft-launch my side-project/startup and sent out the sign-up link to my e-mail list. Of course, it's AWS Cognito-based, was working yesterday, but failed for the new users. Great timing! Phone support said they are looking into some outages (even though the status page is all green).

Yet despite all of those arguments, there are many budgeting or expense tracking "apps" (of the non-spreadsheet variety) out there that are popular, some of them massively.

Analogy: with a little time and some equipment, practically anyone could learn to DIY their own oil changes, yet very few do.

You're thinking about this from the perspective of a developer, rather than the population at large. Suggest building a spreadsheet to one of your non-technical friends or family for something like this and you'll get a blank stare.

I have no idea about the course and its ability to reproduce your success, but just wanted to say I found your marketing copy and site to be excellent. I wasn't particularly interested at first but found myself reading and scrolling quite a ways down. Well done.

With all due respect, I think you're reading something into my comment that simply isn't there. Perhaps I should have denoted 'formal education', because the OP is educated, just not formally.

The only thing I meant (beyond what I said) is that while there are many good reasons to pursue higher education, if one does so with the goal of ridding oneself of impostor syndrome, that could very well turn out to be ineffective or perhaps even counter-productive.

I'm simply relaying my own experience to the OP. I work in software with a post-graduate degree and am also licensed by a professional engineering body and while it's not with me all the time, I do endure bouts of impostor syndrome as well despite these things that should assure me. It makes sense; now I've got these extra letters behind my name that I'm supposed to live up to - and we know how our minds can take that and place unreasonable expectations on ourselves.

My experience, especially in higher education, was that the more I learned, the more I realized how much I didn't know. I noticed this amongst my peers as well. Some of the people I knew that suffered the worst had PhDs!

While I think you make excellent points, I believe that impostor syndrome is actually quite common, if not moreso, amongst the highly educated.

OP doesn't mean "wasting time" by doing nothing on the train. They mean the time you could have spent doing anything else by getting to your destination faster vs. extra time spent on the train.

> For example, I think in India a woman can finish medical school at age 23, whereas in the U.S. it would be age 26

Do they emerge with the same level of training & experience? Difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison.