super-serial

So... just like Upwork is providing an opportunity to 'developer entrepreneurs' who want to code but not handle the other aspects of contract work?

Usually platforms like this are rigged so nobody comes out on top except the company providing the platform. Maybe there are awesome chefs working in Doordash food factories but it's probably because they just don't have any better options.

I tried freelance and realized I hate it more than any other type of programming work.

I can tolerate being an employee where I do what I'm told. After a month I get a feel for the environment so it becomes low stress and then I can keep my head down programming. Or I can tolerate selling software or having a SaaS. If I'm CEO I decide the direction of the product and then just have to handle customer support.

But the BS and stress of dealing with clients, contracts, undefined specs and getting paid... I have no f-ing idea how people tolerate it. So good luck with that. It took me way too long to figure out that I absolutely hate working as a contractor.

The gains from GM crops are a lie[1] - most GM crops are made so agri-chemical companies can sell more pesticide for pesticide-resistant crops. Overuse of pesticides is killing all the insects and ruining soil quality.[2]

If you want to get more efficiency out of the food system you can easily do that by going vegan. Raising livestock provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland. If you cut out meat you get 83% of the farmland back. You don't even need to cut out meat completely - just have a couple more meals each week without meat and you're saving many times more than any GM crops could achieve.

[1] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/failure-yield-evaluating-pe...

[2] https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/hidden-costs-industrial-agr...

What if they’ve already profiled that person and they are in jail already?

I think the worry with this new form of authoritarianism is that it will be so good no one will have the chance to stop it.

The US healthcare system is the only system in the world that bankrupts people for receiving medical care. We constantly hear how we’re getting charged many times more than other countries for the same health services.

Is it really surprising that large segments of the population distrust the medical community? I’m actually one of those people.

Luckily I realize the difference between valid research that has over 100 years of proven effectiveness like the research behind vaccines, versus the type that’s done so there can be a new ad to “ask your doctor” about on TV.

A lot of people generalize and can’t tell the difference. If we want to fix that maybe we should fix the system first.

Have you ever heard the story of Darth Wordpressius?

I thought not. It's not a story the HN Council would upvote.

You can be ambitious and still hate everything to do with career tracks and personal development as seen by large corporations.

I make sure I work somewhere that isn't too stressful, and pace myself as much as possible at the dayjob so I can work 20+ hours per week on my own business.

I wish I could have a 3-day workweek so the other 4 days I could be coding my own projects. After $100k why do people even want more money? I just want more time to work on my projects for a chance to have my own business. I'll never understand why so many people choose to be put into golden handcuffs.

I wonder what the success rate is for their retraining program to turn factory workers into coders.

When watching Andrew Yang's Presidential pitch for UBI he said most government retraining programs only have a success rate of 17%.

Watch some videos of Andrew Yang explain his plan for UBI and how it could work in America.

He's the only Presidential candidate that is providing pragmatic solutions to handle a rapidly changing economy.

It's completely dependent on the traffic of the site if a spammer takes the time to break a custom captcha.

I work on a site with 10 million monthly pageviews and spammers register on a form that has recaptcha and email verification... and we tried hidden input fields and other tricks, but each day we have consistently had 5 new spam accounts. With SVG they can just take a screenshot of what a user sees and send that to OCR. Complex math will turn away as many legitimate users as spammers.

The only real way to stop spam is to use a 3rd party API to detect it, or use something like a karma system that builds up over time. I think we're at the point where simple solutions won't work well unless you have a small site.

I have a membership to Novel Coworking. The space is awesome and the membership costs a fraction of WeWork.

I think it's because Novel actually owns the spaces they lease out so they can lower costs while still controlling quality. They can't grow at the breakneck pace of WeWork, but why should they have to? Unlike Uber there aren't any network effects when you have more spaces. If you provide a cheaper, better space in the same neighborhood it doesn't matter if WeWork is in hundreds more locations. Uber has an advantage with more drivers and market saturation leading to better service, but WeWork has nothing. Sooner or later they'll be completely overtaken by competitors.

Startup logic... anyone can take on Google or Amazon if their ideas are innovative and good enough.

History remembers the winners - so even though I actually agree with what you're saying about US government economic warfare, the end result was the Venezuelan government turned to shit. It's become oppressive, their policies have failed and now their society is crumbling and people are suffering.

If Venezuela's form of socialism was working so well, then it should have sustained itself no matter what the US did. Instead it was supported by oil money, and as soon as the oil dollars were cut off it collapsed because there was nothing revolutionary or innovative about it. I'll be voting for Andrew Yang this primary because I like the idea of UBI and a social safety net and how he's planning to implement his policies. I think that form of 21st century socialism might work - the form that Venezuela chose just led to cronyism and oppression.

I wonder if an entrepreneur with less connections and not a part of YC would get that $1 buyout deal. I would think the default would be ousting the founder and selling the assets. Then the founder would be left with nothing. They'd have no lifestyle business, even though they could have had one if they never took VC.

40 hrs/wk at dayjob, about 20-25 hrs/wk at coworking space working on my startup.

I used to only do 12 hrs a week at the coworking space, but what changed for me was I started taking 3 hr naps after my 9-5. So I nap 7p-10p, wake up go to coworking space until 2am, go to bed by 4am, wake up at 8am. I feel it resets my brain to sleep inbetween dayjob work and startup work. Sat/Sun I just try to do 8 hrs each day, and also workout. As for social life - no I do not have one. I guess sometimes I hang out with my sister who is 17 yrs younger than me - we usually play videogames.

No it's not. Right on the homepage they say it can be used for marketing emails including newsletters: https://aws.amazon.com/ses/

If someone has different info let me know... we're migrating off Mailchimp and already have some of our newsletters on SES at work.

I'm in a very similar position and since I also suck at sales I choose B2C over B2B. Selling to businesses directly is hard. Why not first sell to consumers, then have an "enterprise version" if it catches on?

So for example for your campground app - why not first solve problems of individuals going to the camp? It could be as simple as a public map tool where people could put/share markers for different resources on the map... then after you provide value for free, offer premium services. I haven't been successful either so maybe this is horrible advice, but that's basically how I try to solve the problem of sucking at marketing/sales. (do marketing through engineering)

YES - I hate Google, their AMP team, or anyone else trying to tell us how to "fix" the web.

It used to be innocuous when Google had 20% browser market share, but now they act like they own how users should experience the web. Like the uBlock origin guy said... if Chromium keeps heading down this path it should no longer be called a "user-agent" because it's no longer acting on behalf of users.

I agree in general weather and climate are different. But concerning the polar vortex - the jet stream has become more wavy (north & south instead of west & east) due to climate change.

That's why we get -20F a couple days in Chicago, then a few days later it's 45F. Shifts like that never used to happen. The only reason it does now is because the jet stream is changed due to climate change.

Since you have options why don't you quit what you're doing, leave the place that you're living, and focus 100% on fixing your quality of life?

There are no "right choices." If you take some risks, then maybe one of those risks combined with timing and luck will result in the outcome you desire.

I think a lot of people in this thread are underestimating the possibility of safety drivers going remote and how that could be a solution to these edge cases.

When making decisions or coming across strange situations the AI has a confidence level, and when that falls below a threshold it can notify a remote person to potentially handle the situation. Right now Waymo has problems merging on a freeway with asshole drivers... but what's the big deal? It's maybe 1 minute out of a 30 minute drive.

If you only need a human operator to take over the vehicle 2 minutes out of every hour of autonomous travel, then you could probably get by with 10 remote operators monitoring a fleet of 200 vehicles. That could translate into way better profit margins than any current ride-share service.

That's expensive if you don't watch much TV. I just watch sci-fi shows and wish I could put my money just towards those types of shows. My perfect subscription would be a mix, where I pay a small fee per month but can try out individual shows. If I like the show I'd pay for the rest of the season.

For example Amazon now has The Expanse, Starz has Counterpart, Netflix has Black Mirror and I also liked the new Lost in Space. Hulu has... Future Man? CBS All Access has... the ability to ruin Star Trek, so I might want to watch that train wreck.

Anyway if there was a cheap subscription like Amazon Prime which allowed me to try out a couple free episodes, then pay $3 per episode that would work. That way I feel like I'm supporting the specific shows I want to see.

Over the last couple years Google has acted like a dictator on the web. No more autoplay... except if you're Youtube, or these 100 approved sites. If you use Chrome... oh now you're auto signed in. You opt out of location tracking - we'll still track you, we don't care.

Don't give Google more power.

Implementing your website in AMP is basically handing the keys of the web over to Google. They're going to make it more and more ridiculous to stay AMP-compliant and you're going to be shut out if you don't play their game. Eventually they'll enable/disable features of AMP-based sites arbitrarily... similar to how they determine autoplay policy on their "approved sites list." Do you think Google should be the all-powerful being that determines what features you can have on your website? That's the future you're opting into if you implement AMP.

I think the acronym Google always misses out on is KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) because no one there is "stupid." If you only hire geniuses, no one wants to write documentation or do things the boring/easy way that would create more maintainable software.

Instead everyone there has to use the latest framework or best practices, then re-engineer things to prove they deserve their top-performer salary.

I think the first Google Hangouts was written in Angular 1? Code rot from frameworks like that will ensure the product will die in 5 years at a company like Google. Everyone at Google is a "top-performer" so they want to use the latest development tools and shiny things and no one wants to upgrade/maintain 5 year old code written in an old framework.

I think a lot of other companies get around this by hiring less than top performers. Those types of coders will maintain legacy systems because they don't have as much pride. So I think it's mainly a problem that Google has a culture of tech elitism, instead of a culture that focuses on user satisfaction.

Because violating copyright laws could get him sued and jeopardize his startup?

I actually live in a city a few blocks from work, don't own a car, and only eat poultry/eggs which have a lower carbon footprint than red meat. On the other hand I do order a lot of crap from Amazon.

It's not so much about offsetting my personal carbon emissions - it's more about supporting projects that could potentially slow down runaway global warming. There are a lot of feedback loops in the pipeline in the next 20 years that will accelerate climate change (arctic ice melts, more heat gets absorbed etc). Those feedback loops are going to kick in even if we stopped all human emissions today. So when that happens and drastic environmental changes start occurring, I'm hoping we'll have some demonstrated solutions like advanced weathering we could scale up.

Part of it is I want to support promising geoengineering solutions because I don't think reducing emissions will be enough in the future. In particular spreading olivine on beaches also reduces ocean acidity and gives nutrients to the base of the ocean food chain.

Donating money so that polluting industries can pollute less seems like a bailout to those industries. They should be fined/regulated by their governments in those countries. If they get a bailout which gives them a competitive advantage (free money) what's stopping them from opening another low-tech, inefficient plant with the extra money, then expecting another bailout? It seems like rewarding bad behavior.

That's awesome - I would be one of the people who would pay $400 to be carbon neutral each year. You should think big and do a Kickstarter with $25 gifts up to $5k gifts...

For $400 I want a t-shirt that says "I'm carbon neutral. Do you have the rocks to become carbon neutral too?" with a pic of olivine rocks and your website url.

I just think it's the best out of all the options. Since it's a natural process I think it has less chance of unintended consequences compared to something like putting aerosols in the sky to block sunlight. Just like Elon Musk's plan to put humans on Mars there's going to be tons of problems, but it makes sense to start working on it now so we can come up with solutions.

I'm glad someone mentioned it above, because my favorite solution is still "advanced weathering" of rocks: http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions. Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.