rocannon

But it's not "nothing to show for it" if you use the subscriptions... people pay money to go to a movie, go out to dinner, go to the gym, etc. When you leave each of those venues, do you think you have nothing to show for it? Okay, maybe the movie was bad, or the meal was poorly prepared. Hopefully, most of the time, you enjoyed the experience and it fortified you mentally (and even physically, if the meal was nutritious and the gym workout was a good one). The same applies for any of these subscription services. You get value while you are paying. It is not nothing :)

How do you consider this flattering?

"If their interaction with the Catholic students seemed like an expression of bigotry toward white people, some of their most vile language is reserved for black people in the communities where they preach."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, categorized at least 80 groups nationwide that follow Hebrew Israelite theology as hate groups."

Would you rather that NY Times not report on confrontations like this?

Check his profile :) https://www.lessboring.com/

Please do not be discouraged. You can't always beat dumb luck, but you can certainly fight it. Also, there's a saying: "you make your own luck". It sounds glib, but there's some truth to it.

If there is anything at all that you can do to automate parts of the unpleasant tasks that I have to do, I try to do that. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of thought to figure out a way to automate something, and sometimes it's staring you in the face. Anything you can do to shave off time from these tasks is probably worth the effort.

Another thing to do is to delegate them if possible. As an example, some people really dislike keeping their houses clean, so they'll hire someone to do that. Obviously, YMMV, and it may be that you cannot afford to delegate a task, or there's some other problem (e.g. you cannot offload work onto another freelancer due to an NDA, etc.).

cityzen - your email address is not in your profile. I do have some questions for you. My email address is in my profile.

nope, it tastes awful to me.

According to this site, average health insurance cost for family coverage is almost $20K/y - http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/health-insurance-premium... So it really depends on whether your employees are all single. Also I think you're not counting other things that are normally counted in overheard: cost for space, recruiting, etc: http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-...

It may be tough for people to give advice, because I think your options are going to vary a lot, depending on where you live.

The first thing I'd recommend, though, is that you keep track of all your expenses, if you aren't doing this already. This gives you the starting point for deciding how much money you really need to make in order to live the way that you want. Please keep in mind that expenses can increase as you age: for example, health insurance premiums can skyrocket depending on where you live, and things like hearing aids, expensive dental work, and so on, may not be covered by insurance. You may not want to worry about this stuff now, or maybe you'll get lucky. Anyway, if you track your expenses now, at least you'll have a handle on what you need for the immediate future, barring unforeseen emergencies.

A few years back, my goal was very similar to yours. I started tracking every single expense to figure out how much money I actually needed to survive per year. As someone else mentioned, you can amass a pile of money and live off the income stream from that, provided you trust the "4% rule" or one of its variants. Take a look at these blogs:

http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/ - guy who worked till about 40 and retired, living off income from his savings

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/blog/ - guy who worked and made a chunk of money, continues to work on his own fun projects that make an income stream

http://earlyretirementextreme.com/ - guy who lived a really lean lifestyle with just a small income stream (iirc 4 h/w doing jobs off craigslist) (but then he went to work for a hedge fund, iirc).

Anyway, seems like you want to check out the last link first.

You may also want to read "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

Someone else mentioned Timothy Ferriss' "Four Hour Work Week". I agree that it can be helpful, but I think he makes it sound easier than it actually is to set up a small lifestyle business. So I'd suggest reading it for inspiration more than anything else. Also it's a bit outdated.

I think maybe what you're asking is this: you don't want a FT job because you don't really need all the money you'd make from a FT job. You'd rather have much more free time, and screw the FT job. If this is what you're asking, definitely check out the retire early extreme guy.

I'm sure you're aware that you might change over time and may suddenly discover a passion for sports cars, a spouse, travel, or whatever. So, if you can squirrel away any extra money, it won't hurt. Just keep that in mind, it can happen.

"especially as you mature and people aren't always getting on your nerves so much"

I found that as I got older, people got on my nerves more! The first few times people did something annoying, it was like, "whatever". After the 100th time, it was like "here we go again", and I was getting ready to explode. The only thing I found that helped was avoiding such people, and when you're forced to rub shoulders with them due to work constraints, it can lead to a lot of stress.

Regarding "freedom of will": I quit my job when I accumulated about $500K in net worth. (Needless to say, I did not live in SV. However, my rent was about $1200/mo.)

The day after I quit my job and I didn't have to go in to work anymore, I felt such an extreme sense of joy that I don't think I ever felt in my life. At the time, my feeling was that "the exercise of free will" was the cause of this bliss - similar to what you're saying about freedom of will.

I didn't have to report to anyone, there was literally nothing that I had to do which did not come from within me.

This feeling lasted for about a year. I moved to a cheaper rental. My cash runway lasted about 5 years, and I felt really pretty good about life for the first 2-3 years. After that, I started to become more worried about whether I'd have to go back to work, or what kind of life I'd be able to live without that.

What I'm trying to say is that you can get to the freedom of will state with far less than $1M. It may not last forever. But I highly recommend doing it. It may be especially sweet for people like me, who have delayed gratification for decades.

Are you aware of intersex people? This is why the editors of Nature are correct in saying the proposal has no foundation in science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex How do people with ambiguous traits at birth get categorized according to such a proposal?

There are different ways of doing this, though. E.g. some law firms will pay off student loan debt as long as you're working for them: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/payin...

It's kind of mental accounting for the employee, though. The law firm is basically giving you an extra $100 or whatever per paycheck. However, this $100 is earmarked to pay off your law school debt, so in effect the company is helping to pay for your training.

The nice part for the company is that they do not take on any risk paying for the training: the employee already shouldered all the risk for paying for law school. The company buys a little bit of loyalty by helping the employee pay off the debt over time. It probably makes the employee think twice before quitting or looking for other employment; it is similar to the health insurance benefit in that respect.

I think the book is worth reading. His inspiration for writing 4HWW was his experience running a supplement business, which he later sold - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ferriss#Career

Prior to reading the book, I had a retire-early mindset. My idea was to work hard at high paying jobs and save a lot so I could retire early. After reading the book, I had the idea to create multiple streams of income in order to achieve the goal of retiring early.

Others have mentioned that it's not easy to find a lifestyle business that earns you enough income to live off of, and I've also had that problem. However, I've had partial success. I don't think I'd have ever pursued this path without reading 4HWW. It's not an instruction manual, though.

Ricardo Semler is an example which comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler

When looking at someone like Dr Seuss who kept trying after numerous failures, you also have to consider that there's an opportunity cost to doing what he did. Note: his story "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" was rejected 27 times before being accepted: https://www.npr.org/2012/01/24/145471724/how-dr-seuss-got-hi... Maybe if he'd been rejected 100 times, it would have been worth thinking about trying something else?

Also, if you follow the above link, you find that Dr Seuss admitted it was sheer luck that he got published. He was ready to give up! '"He bumped into a friend ... who had just become an editor at a publishing house in the children's section," McLain explains. Geisel told the friend that he'd simply given up and planned to destroy the book, but the editor asked to take a look... "He said if he had been walking down the other side of the street, he probably would never have become a children's author," McLain says.'

I'm guessing, but I'd think that for most people, getting rejected after trying the _same thing_ 100 times probably means that your product is not good. So giving up after some reasonable number of tries, and pursuing _something else_, is often the better course. If you have nothing better to do, and don't mind failing in the end, then you can keep trying, too!

The problem then is trying to figure out when to quit, and when to keep trying at the same thing. Some people have faith in themselves because they know that their product is great. But it's hard to tell the difference between justified self-confidence and unjustified self-delusion.

In 1971, Terry Ellis, the co-founder of Chrysalis Records, paid him a flat $1,500 fee for the three paintings which would comprise the album’s artwork

It is too bad he didn't negotiate a royalty agreement, but then they might not have given him the work, either.

FWIW if he had invested $1000 in the S&P 500 on January 1 of 1972, that investment would be worth about $100K today, according to some online calculators that I tried.

Granted, investing is a lot easier, now that online brokerages exist. It was probably not something that many artists did back in the '70s.

Here's a summary of one of Stampfer's papers: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/higher-cons...

The health effects of specific types of fats depended on what people were replacing them with, the researchers found... people who replaced saturated fats with unsaturated fats—especially polyunsaturated fats—had significantly lower risk of death overall ... People who replaced saturated fats with carbohydrates had only slightly lower mortality risk. In addition, replacing total fat with carbohydrates was associated with modestly higher [my emphasis] mortality. This was not surprising, the authors said, because carbohydrates in the American diet tend to be primarily refined starch and sugar, which have a similar influence on mortality risk as saturated fats.

This analysis is also based on the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Apparently, Stampfer finds the Nurses’ Health Study credible enough to support his conclusions.

Eggs - full with cholesterol and choline, illegal to advertise them as healthy or safe in the US

This pdf from the USDA says "Eggs are among the most nutritious foods on earth and can be part of a healthy diet". True, the pdf then goes on in great detail about the potential health hazards: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/wcm/connect/5235aa20-fee1-4e5b...

The American Egg Board pretty much states they are wonderful for your health: https://www.eggnutritioncenter.org/egg-nutrition-basics > Eggs fit into the healthy dietary patterns recommended by public health organizations. > The high-quality protein in an egg is essential for building and maintaining lean body mass

Essential, hm.

Okay, I suppose it is possible that Krauss does "research" as opposed to research. This is what the article says about it: "The [meta-]analysis, overseen by Ronald M. Krauss, director of atherosclerosis research at the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, found no association between the amount of saturated fat consumed and the risk of heart disease."

So do you dispute this result? I was in fact under the impression that recent studies say saturated fat is not really bad, especially if it is not paired with highly processed carbs. Trans fats, OTOH, are extremely bad. Trans fats occur in small quantities in meat, FWIW.

Note that the Scientific American article cites several different studies and scientists, e.g. "Meir Stampfer, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health" (is Stampfer also in the pocket of the beef industry?):

A 1997 study [Stampfer] co-authored in the Journal of the American Medical Association evaluated 65,000 women and found that the quintile of women who ate the most easily digestible and readily absorbed carbohydrates—that is, those with the highest glycemic index—were 47 percent more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes than those in the quintile with the lowest average glycemic-index score. (The amount of fat the women ate did not affect diabetes risk.)

I suppose you could accuse McDougall of bias; after all he does run a business around his diet. I wouldn't go that far, though.

Here's a 2010 Scientific American article, "Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart": https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbs-against-car...

Note the emphasis on refined carbohydrates. I would think that if you ate an unhealthy vegan diet which emphasized lots of junk food like high fructose corn syrup loaded sodas, etc, you'd be pretty unhealthy. Personally, I suspect that a vegan diet can be very healthy for you, but it could also be quite bad for you, depending on how you do it.

Regarding cholesterol: Humans make cholesterol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol

Also: http://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/nutrition/art...

Many people think that all the cholesterol in their blood (and elsewhere in the body) comes from the cholesterol they eat, which is called dietary or preformed cholesterol. In fact, most of it is made by our livers.

I'd be curious how your panels compare to mine

Do you have a link to your before/after panels? I'd be curious to see this, and also be interested in your before/after diet.

I had a login at a game website called Shakes & Fidget years ago. The site itself is low-consequence. I wouldn't care if someone hacked my login. Another example is when I'm just trying some service and don't expect to use it ever again.

What would worry me is if people hack the login for a low-consequence site and then figure out that those login credentials for this user are the same everywhere: at their bank, Amazon, etc. Personally, I use different passwords at every single website, but at low-consequence websites I sometimes use less secure ones. I don't see how this is a problem (for me).

I understand why low-consequence sites do not implement schemes to force users to use stronger passwords, though. Howls of outrage, lost users, and attempts to get around it, as charDiversity says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16975773

Oh yeah, I did see that Candy Japan post. I had forgotten. Thanks!

no one wants to hear about my journey with my disease

May I ask why you believe this? I checked Amazon, and found a few books written by people with CF. They aren't best sellers, but all of the ones I've looked at have sold at least some copies, based on the reviews. Your own story would be different, and uniquely interesting.

I realize, as I'm sure you do, that one can't pursue every possible avenue when trying to generate an income; there's only so much time in the day. So maybe writing an ebook about your experience is not the most promising thing to do, in your mind. Then it's a judgment call to decide where to put your efforts.

People are routinely dismissive, attacking and ugly

For this reason, if it were me, I'd keep that content separate and anonymous (I would have done this from the beginning, because I know how these things go). But that doesn't mean you shouldn't write it.

FWIW, earning an income is not necessarily in line with self-promotion. The vast majority of people who support themselves do so in relative obscurity.

She had a pen name (+ persona?) previously, but now is dropping that.

An ebook seems like a good idea to me!

I can see a few problems.

I'm not an expert in SEO, so take this all with a grain of salt.

First, you have a number of websites hosted by blogger (*.blogspot.com). It is my impression that blogs with their own domain name get more traffic than those with blogspot as the domain name. If I am serious about my blog, I buy a domain name (a .com) and use it. You can still have blogger host the blog fwiw. Here's advice from namecheap: https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx...

Even if there's no login, I also host my blogs with an SSL certificate, because google's search algorithm is biased towards "https" sites.

You also want the site to be mobile-friendly - I didn't test your blogs, but they look good in that respect, so I don't think this is a problem for you.

Also, have you got a google analytics account which you can use to see what search terms are leading people to your sites? You want to see what people are searching for, and write more content for those search terms to help build yourself up as an authority in them.

If you need more traffic, you need to write a lot of posts. I can't tell you how many will do it, and there's no guarantee that it will work, but if your site does not look like an authoritative resource to a search engine's algorithms, you aren't going to get much search traffic. I looked at some of your blogs. I see two blog posts on http://1001histories.blogspot.com/ - this will not get you a lot of traffic. There are 3 posts listed in http://cysticfibrosisrevolution.blogspot.com/p/archive.html - again, unlikely to get you much organic search. So when you say you need more traffic for your websites, which one(s) do you expect or want to get more traffic?

Regarding patreon... Your patreon photo looks a little too much like a mugshot (sorry, I'm not trying to be rude or hurtful!). If you look at patreon photos, many successful ones look like they got a professional photog to take the picture. E.g.: https://www.patreon.com/explore/writing . That's expensive and probably not worth doing until patreon income justifies it. My suggestion here is to take a lot of pictures of yourself in different sorts of lighting, and go for the best one, the one that looks most friendly and looks like it belongs on that top 20 list. It looks like you don't have to use a photo of yourself, so you could also go with a photo of something else, or a logo. I don't know if the photo matters much.

I saw one patreon post that mentioned a personal crisis. I would not mention this on patreon, if it were me. I'm not sure if it's a negative, but I'd be afraid that it would turn off some people. I'm curious to hear what other HN people think. If I wanted to discuss personal problems on the web, I'd do it as anonymously as possible. Potential employers might get scared off by what they'd see as a lack of stability.

Speaking for myself, I've never supported anyone using patreon, but I could see myself doing so if the person provided content that I really like and consume frequently. If I used patreon as a creator, any patreon content that I'd add would mostly not be about myself, but about topics of interest for my supporters.

Some of your content seems tailored to an audience that can't afford to give you patreon donations (the homeless). Personally, I'd focus on topics that have a more potentially lucrative audience.

Again, take all this with a grain of salt, but I hope some of it helps!

I don't think it's wise to pay a company to let you work for them. I'm a rather skeptical person, and I'd be leary of anyone taking my money in such a scenario. Seems like a good way to lose $10K and wind up in the same place a few months later.

You haven't said what you've done to try to get a job. You should talk about that before people can give you advice. I have nothing to go on there, so take this with a grain of salt.

Did your bootcamp give you a promise of any assistance in finding a job? Have you kept in touch with any of your cohort? Reach out to them for help (explain the problem, ask if they have ideas that could help). These are two things that I'd try, right off the bat.

As someone else mentioned, talk to several recruiters. Present your resume and see what kind of feedback you get. If they tell you that they will be unable to place you, ask them if they think you don't have enough experience, and what they think you are missing. Recruiters are not your friend, but they are in the business of making money by placing people in jobs. If they think that they can make money by putting you in a job, they will try to do so.

Next: NYC has a smorgasbord of tech meetups with free or low-fee entry costs. Go to as many as you can. Most such meetups have an initial 30-minute period when you can stand around and talk to people about their jobs. Take notes, then go home and use the Internet to find out more about the parts of these discussions that you didn't understand. This should help to make you more technically competent.

Next, you want to do some "informational interviews": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informational_interview If you have friends, friends-of-friends, relatives, etc. who are working in an area that interests you, tell them you'd like to spend 30 minutes or an hour to ask about what they do at their jobs. Keep in mind you're not going to ask them for a job. You're just asking for information. Take good notes, bring them home, and again research the parts that confuse you. You can do phone informational interviews if needed, too.

The informational interviews and tech meetups are intended to help you build a network of people who know you, know that you are looking for a job, and may be able to refer you to an open position. They will also be a goldmine for learning more about the field that you want to break into.

It may help to build a small side project, and have some code samples in github. I can't speak to that, since those things never helped me.

Good luck!

My main issue is that I don't want to install this kind of software on a computer that is not dedicated for that specific job. If they don't trust me enough to report my work correctly, then why should I trust them when installing proprietary software on my computer? Who knows what else this software is doing, once I install it?

If I had to use this type of software to get a contract, I'd be willing to do it (on a dedicated machine), but the payback would have to be substantial. However, it seems like the gigs that require installing this type of software don't actually pay as well as those that don't.

I don't know why they did that, you would need to ask them. They seem to be open to questions and suggestions. My guess is that it's historical and now it would annoy too many users to change.