HN user
Even more flagging -- tptacek and friends are flagging off posts, leaving their ridiculous replies to things not actually said (the tactic of responding to things not actually stated, and then leaving their aghast reply. This is tptacek's thing). As mentioned they waited until this fell off the front page, when they could, 1984-esque, change the reality of the thread.
What an utter abomination.
This is exactly the sort of post that you find regarding quick fix solutions and Make Money Fast schemes. Don't believe in the magical cure-all nature of Trend Of The Week? So bitter and negative.
Instead you are employing classic and cowardly character assassination techniques.
This is the "untouchable" argument that attempts to short circuit any critical discussion. If skepticism is a character assassination, then hopefully we're all assassins.
There is literally nothing Patrick or his defenders can do to refute your claim (mostly because you refuse to make one).
Nor is there any specific thing I can do to disprove their claims. A bit of a catch-22, isn't it? As incredibly uncommon as their claims of success in the consulting world may be -- and I'm not saying this out of the blue -- it is possible that somehow they lucked into a series of incredibly generous clients who saw BCC as such a success that they gave a blank check. I have never seen an individual consultant without an incredible reputation (and being famous on HN != being famous) make anything near what they claimed, but it remains possible.
Pretty much anything is possible. If someone claimed to have achieved alchemy (theoretically possible via fusion), I similarly couldn't possibly say "no, they're lying!".
It's possible. I think it's incredibly improbable, but it is simply impossible for me to say that it's a lie.
So perhaps lighten up on the double standard.
Harass him? What an outrageously transparent attempt to prejudice the audience, which in this case happens to also be for your own benefit as well: Good judgment would have been that you should stay away from these threads (for those who don't know, tptacek is a cofounder, with patio11, of their "turn HN fame into value" startup), but instead you come rushing in guns blazing.
I found the consulting story incredibly dubious. None of the facts meshed, and I find those sorts of pie in the sky stories to actually be destructive to people entering or in the industry. If you find skepticism "harassment" -- does fame on HN make one untouchable -- you have a very perverse sentiment of what that is.
It seems like you are saying "Patio11 clearly is lying about his consulting rates and the sale of BCC proves it."
The root of this thread is someone who is a little surprised at how small of a transaction the sale of BCC was. Despite all of the transparency, a lot of people had a much greater sense of success, and it is a little like finding out that the stock guru had a yearly return of 2%. That is neither here nor there, and I have no comment or interest in BCC and related ventures, and was only tangentially commenting on the notion of inflated success, and with that reputation for wisdom/knowledge.
On the consulting side, I'm not saying that he's lying, however many people defensively jump to that conclusion. More generally I am saying that history has shown that a lot of people do lie (embellish, exaggerate, etc) to get attention, which leads to a situation where the onus of proof is on the speaker, increasingly so when there are extraordinary claims. I found the post about consulting simply extraordinary, and I have no reason to give anyone a pass just because.
This sounds like a variation of the "you're just jealous" reply, which is an easy, convenient retort to virtually all skepticism for even the most incredible claims. When we want something to be true, the easiest way to undermine doubts are to cry jealousy.
Super weight loss regime. Visit with aliens. Top secret NSA/CIA/FBI/FSB clearance. Quintuple black belt. No-effort muscle building technique. Endless success with the ladies. Exponential stock market success. All demonstrated by just words?
Doubts and questions = jealousy. It is the charlatan's ally among human denial techniques.
That is a fantastic blog, thank you very much. I love reading stuff like that.
I have the luxury, of sorts, that the farm doesn't really need to support anyone financially (the primary income still coming from `traditional' sources), and ultimately just having a selection of foods available for my own immediate and extended family would be awesome. I've done the home vegetable garden thing for years, and would really like to take it to the next level. One of the next things about a lot of crops is that minimal effort often gets you 70% to the best outcome, so while a dedicated farmer carefully tends everything to fully optimize, I find the bounty and selection of just a variety of lazily planted tomato plants incredible.
Professionally I can essentially work anywhere with a high speed connection, and my wife is in healthcare and can work anywhere near even a somewhat built up area. We would like to do low-intensity farming, have some chickens (primarily for eggs), ideally have some woodlands, and so on. My wife really wants to try keeping bees, and the honey products from that.
I'd love to have enough land to have a small nanny-suite house, a bunkie off in the woods somewhere, etc. With connectivity (which is starting to appear in even really rural areas via wireless options), I really have to imagine that more of an exodus out of urban areas will happen by the people who want the more remote living and had only moved to urban areas out of proximity needs.
"If every neighborhood had its own vertical farm, how many fewer semis would be choking up the metro area?"
In my area - Southern Ontario -- farmland is cheap and plentiful, a lot of it turning to brush or "hobby" farms (which usually means farms that don't really produce). In my area just outside of the metro area, everyone's property, with long growing seasons and excellent soil -- are in the measure of acres, and only grow decorative plants.
We recently as a family started considering the notion of mixing up life and moving somewhere else in Canada -- 100+ acre farms in PEI, NB, and Nova Scotia can be had for under $100,000. Many are now considered vacant land having been abandoned as farmsteads.
Whenever these sorts of articles talk about the "solution" to locally grown or a food crisis, I compare these two facts and something is not meshing.
Rather incredibly, the comments and moderation throughout this very story are a microcosm of what is being discussed -- people drag so much baggage into these discussions, with pekk just loading their comment with a mountain sized chip on their shoulder.
My comment above has been down"voted" yet is absolutely accurate -- this rather weak study has zero to do with someone saying they're a 10x programmer or the "best" PHP coder. It specifically asks about sharing accomplishments. Cue loads of baggage and justifications for people's entirely negative reactions.
The article may have made this unclear, but just being happy about good news for you isn't self-promotion.
The article quite clearly states that such self-promotion is what is often termed "humble bragging" (and in case the article might have misunderstood the study, the actual study itself uses very neutral language, like "sharing accomplishments"), which unfortunately is essentially just sharing any good news at all -- the examples given are new car, promotion, but the gist of the pretty limited study was sharing accomplishments.
From which I have to say that nostrademons is somewhat on the mark. It is unfortunate that many people project their own negative feelings (jealousy, resentment) onto other people's statements, to the point where our lives have to be presented as a shit sandwich if we ever really want to share good news without "bragging" --- "Pretty surprised that a dumb jerk like me got a promotion. I'll probably end up getting myself fired.". It's easy enough to do, but ultimately it's usually lying to yourself and the audience just to pander to other people's insecurities and just adding noise to the whole world.
And one of the best examples of this is the infamous Facebook baby updates: To people who care about the person, those are wonderful bits of news about something that is the one of most important events in the person you care abouts lives. To other people it's some asshole trying to lord over them just because they can procreate...I mean any asshole can go and have a kid and really do you need three pictures of a little shit and noise machine in a whole week? Who do they think they are...
"Bragging" is in the eye of the beholder more often than not, and generally is a case where people have to start to increasingly filter facts about their lives lest they pass the "bragging" line in the sand of the listener. Many people love to hear your bad news, but they resent your good news.
There's a large retailer here in Canada -- Canadian Tire -- that I personally think should be legally forbidden from selling a good portion of the products they sell: Tools that break on the first use. Toys that have a very short path to the landfill (I feel a pang of guilt when a relative gifts one of my children with a "New Bright" or whatever utter junk brand toy is that they picked up at CT, knowing it won't make it through the night, immediately gauging just how large of a garbage bag it will need). Ultra low quality outdoor wear and tents. Cheaply made bicycles. BBQs that rust out 3 months into their life.
They are purveyors of poor satisfaction garbage dump filler products that only barely fulfill their stated purpose. Most consumers have become so accustomed to this that they don't even realize there's an issue.
It's a serious problem. A minimum level of durability for a given purpose is one of those things that is a benefit of the commons -- it is good for the entire planet.
A Dell R920 with four E7-8880L v2 15 core processors (e.g. 60 real threads, 120 with HT), and 1024GB / 1TB of memory costs about $50,000 USD. To go to 1.5TB of memory pushes you to $60,000 USD.
Expensive in a relative to a low-end server or month of cloud usage, but that's an absurd amount of computational power.
JSON is used for persistence in a limited number of projects, and still lacks fundamental things like a validation schema or even a date type. Yes, it absolutely is "trendy", and it absolutely pales compared to XML. They both fill virtually the identical requirement, one just slowly repeating all of the mistakes of the other, as history tends to repeat itself.
As someone who extensively uses pgsql and SQL Server, I don't think it's fair to say that PostgreSQL is "more advanced" because it has one particular, somewhat trendy feature. There are many critical features that pgsql either lacks (query parallelization), or came many years after SQL Server (index-only scans, true materialized views, etc).
And really json in the database is just the more modern version of xml in the database, which of course SQL Server has supported for years. The problem with xml in the database was not a fundamental one, but rather an implementation issue -- where the json model in most solutions is some variation of toss-some-structured-data-in and then work with it, the XML model of SQL Server required significant poorly documented, confusing to implement configuration to work with in any meaningful way. It really killed the feature.
Personally I still think XML is superior to JSON, but it got usurped by the architectural astronauts who kept layering noise on it to the point of being unusable.
Worth noting that there is an Instagram Hyperlapse-type app on Android called "Gallus". It's made by some guy (e.g. lacks polish), and apparently isn't perfect on all devices (1), but my experience has been that it yields as good if not better outcomes on my Nexus 5 than Instagram's app on my iPhone.
It has gone almost entirely unnoticed, but it creates outputs a world better than this Microsoft app. I get that they're going for 'the videos you already have', but if I have a mobile device with so many sensors, why wouldn't I use them?
(1) - I mention that because whenever something pushes the edge, if someone finds that it doesn't work on their own Android handset, they tend to be the absolute loudest about it, declaring that therefore it must not work on anyone's handset. It is the most bizarre aspect to apps in Android land.
Speaking of strawmen, where did I cite waterfall? The entire foundation of your post is a fiction.
Software is tough. It is always, and has always been tough. The same flexibility that is the great benefit of the domain is also its curse. This is true across any methodology, so try not to project your own hangups into that statement.
Agile is something that some shops try to do, imperfectly, against that reality. Every one of these angry anti-agile comments seem to opine that agile is terrible versus some mythical alternative that is shapeless and amorphous, boiled down to "have a great team". That is, quite simply, nonsense. It is the pat solution of the bottom feeder.
Religious views? Again, the entire foundation of the anti-agile screed, which is generally by people with a chip on their shoulder (and they probably had a chip on their shoulder about everything that people with more influence over them got adopted) is that it is deficient compared with an unspoken, unstated alternative.
And I'm the one bringing religion in this? Christ.
The "argument" is that making software is an ugly, brutish affairs in virtually every case, with virtually every approach. There are extraordinarily few cases throughout history where a team converged, looked at the problem, built a solution, and voila, everyone emerged happy. In the real world there is always a discord between requirements and reality, skillsets and the problem space, change management and the need for rapid change, scope creep, and on and on.
It is the story of every software project everywhere throughout time.
But invariably the comments will fill with tales of woe with agile (usually with people betraying a complete lack of understanding of it, as an aside, such as seen with most uses of the term "scrum" throughout these discussions. It serves as the canary in the coal mine when noxious gases are afoot), as if troubled projects are some unique reality of agile. They're a reality of every single methodology. Agile merely tries to help reduce a few of the bigger and most deadly issues, which are friction with the business (the ability to adapt to change), and enormous investments of time and money to a project that ends up being a solution to the wrong problem. It doesn't suddenly make everyone cooperative and great.
As to my "misunderstand", so the solution as you see it is just to have developers that work well together. Easy peasie solution.
Any discussion about agile invariably yields the predictable flurry of personal hangups and misrepresentations.
Most common of all, though, are the claims that if you just have a great team full of great developers, you don't need a process. Agile and waterfall both be damned.
But most teams aren't great. Most of the teams of people participating on HN statistically aren't great. But those teams still need to develop something -- banks and big cos and countless firms are churning out code by the millions of lines, by millions of completely average developers -- and agile is an honest conclusion that the classic method of software development doesn't work, most critically by biting off work in such enormous chunks that implementation or design issues -- the fit to the problem -- aren't discovered until enormous efforts have been wasted.
So talk about how agile failed, in your estimation, at some shop or another. But the truth is that almost anything would be a "failure" versus the idealized notion of a perfect design built expertly by great developers. Agile is trying to make the best of a normal situation.
This terrible article is actually a great example of a submarine. Note the mention of a completely irrelevant "security" company halfway down, and then a link to their blog post.
In any case, it's terrible because it takes testing criteria under extreme conditions (don't store your SSDs at 55C) and then fearmongers this as the norm.
Saturated means that you've filled (or can fill at will) the time you've allotted and targeted, not 100% of your possible time. e.g. 100% of 50% of available time.
he never claimed to have a continuous stream of $30k/week projects lined up, those are words you're putting in his mouth
He claimed it was his so-called "rack rate". His standard rate. Over a year long period. The prior year his "rack" rate was 20K/week. He didn't say "I put out a ridiculous rate and wouldn't you believe it this one guy bit!", but claimed that it was a ongoing day to day rate that saw continued success. That was sort of the whole, rather odd, basis of that part.
Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary proof. Yet we don't know a single client, or a single project, that paid these grossly out of the ordinary rates, and I can tell you that I don't know a single organization that would even consider such a rate for an individual freelancer (respected consulting shops -- the sort that you hire because no one ever gets fired for hiring them -- with armies of bodies yield less on their contract). People can wave their hands and say that it's because it saved so much but that sort of argument leaves me agape, wondering if a bunch of people just discovered the business world.
It just doesn't work like that.
I have absolutely no fundamental reason to believe Patrick a "bullshitter", or to accuse him of being so. On the flip side, I have absolutely no reason not to consider that he might be. Because it turns out that a remarkable number of people are -- particularly when they're trying to get attention for something -- somewhat aggrandizing. And we all know how important signalling is, and how if you act the part, maybe, the myth goes, you'll become the part. It plays a part of quite a few HN front pagers.
I didn't say that it was counterintuitive, or that you can't turn down clients.
I was observing the reality that most freelancers are more likely to find themselves absolutely starving for business, and shouldn't look at this and wonder what they're doing wrong. Telling a client to keep their money because it's an "ego project", when they're your only client over a month period, is a quick recipe for bankruptcy. It doesn't magically make other clients come knocking.
Once you get to the point where you're reaching saturation, sure you start to evaluate engagements for most reward/utility/etc. Many if not most freelancers will never come anywhere close to that.
The 30K thing was related to a post on here a few days back where an author claimed that they had their pick of "30K / week" engagements. As an interesting contrast with your policy, they claimed that they kept their rates hidden, thus allowing them to magically and endlessly ramp it up.
In any case, I've long come to learn in the freelance industry that the more people talk about their success (which can be "so many clients I turn them away", or "I am now charging 50K+"), the more unlikely that success actually is. e.g. the guy who puts "published author" at the top of his blog likely has an Amazon Digital Delivery PDF book. The guy who talks about "top clients" had someone from Apple visit their blog once. And so on.
The more bombastic about success someone is, the more incredible the claims, the more likely they're struggling for relevance, using the escalating accomplishments to create it. Again, this has been my experience in the industry, where when you look behind the curtain you find Lenny asking you not to tell anyone how he lives.
In no way am I saying that about you, but just in general HN has been awash in "so much success I have to wear shades....now would you like to buy some tupperware?" type posts (I'm not being facetious with the tupperware thing -- it's people claiming boundless success, and then pitching something so petty that it puts it all in stark contrast), and I have to think it does a massive disservice to most of the readership, putting in their notice on this notion that there are endless lines of clients throwing money around for vague needs.
"Patio11, back when he still did consulting, charged 30k/wk"
He says, adding heavy draw to an initiative. Absolutely nothing or anyone can validate those incredible claims, though. Every engagement was, to us, like the girlfriend from Canada.
I'm a cynical sort with a lot of experience in the industry consulting, and I can't help but view a lot of these pieces as heavily...embellished. Akin to "fake it to make it". Ala "I'm so overwhelmed with business at 30K per week....but would you like to buy some tupperware?"
I understand the author is here, and hopefully people don't embarrassingly downvote this purely to try to act civil -- I think the embellishment is doing a massive disservice to the entire industry. It is often complete fantasy. I will also say that I found the claims the other day about the 30K+ per week consulting engagements, apparently chosen at whim, completely ludicrous (again, having worked with countless organizations). It has zero verification or believability, but is a nice draw for someone's new initiative.