tjic

LOL, yes.

I'm a coder, ran my own "startups" (small businesses, no VC, no hypergrowth) from 2000 to 2014, my .emacs is thousands of lines long, etc.

TY for the positive reviews of my books!

Thank you! So kind of you to take the time to say so!

This is similar to how I've been living on my homestead for the last 8 years, and I'm enjoying myself.

I made the jump 8 years and 3 days ago. (In fact, I wrote books about it https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-1-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... and https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-2-Travis-Corcoran/dp/B093... ).

My first two years were full of buyer's remorse. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had expected, the work was very hard, I felt incompetent, I missed my friends back in the metropolitan area, and I missed out on a lot of the food choices.

...but the buyer's remorse passed. Partially this was my preferences changing, partially it was making new friends, partially it was hiring on help to do some tasks (farmhands to install fencing and clear an overgrown pasture, etc.), partially it was acquiring the skills and equipment that made work easier, and finally it was cutting back on the task list.

I'd be happy to share more thoughts if you want to go into more details on your thinking.

This is an excellent point @bluntfang.

I'll be very upfront: homesteading is a money losing proposition. It's a consumption good - it costs more than any (monetary) profit it brings.

And my writing about it is ALSO money losing. I'm a coder. When I write and sell novels, the opportunity cost is huge - at an hourly rate, I lose about 90% of what I could otherwise be making coding.

Writing about homesteading is much better - I only lose about 50% of what I could otherwise be making.

I write because (a) I am more driven to create and share my ideas with people than I am to make a marginal dollar, (b) I am ideologically in favor of people moving to the countryside and living a different lifestyle, so writing is an ideological / political choice.

Author of "Escape the City" here.

I didn't "need" $90k to write the book.

I chose to sell copies of a book, at typical book prices. Thousands of people chose to buy the book. That's where the $90k number comes from.

And the book's photos are black & white ...

"The food is terrible...and the portions are so small".

The wonderful thing about the free market is that those who want to buy a thing can, and those who don't, need not.

Cheers!

Website won't let me read the article without signing in.

Thesis proven!

The only winning move is not to play.

Agreed.

"1 year sabbatical, backpacked around Asia."

If I saw that on a resume I'd think it was awesome. (...and I've hired dozens of people).

There is a an issue in all statistics: "the seen and the unseen". It basically means "measuring benefits but not measuring costs".

Even if the statistics is accurate.

Even if denying people the right to self-determination is a positive in your ethical system.

Even if X, Y, Z are true... I still have to ask: what about the COST? Pesticides exist because they do something useful - kill off pests. They increase food production and decrease labor.

What if we've saved some lives...but also made 200,000 farmers each spend an extra five hours a week bent over in their fields, picking bugs off leaves? Or made them plant more land in order to harvest the same amount of food?

I fear that trying Scrivener might launch me into a five year quest to duplicate some of its features in elisp! :)

I've been using emacs for about 27 years, and even wrote two novels ( e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JPPMS6 ) in it. Author friends tell me that I've really really REALLY got to try Scrivener, but I know from previous attempts at using other tools that nothing but emacs feels right to me.

I should give it a try, I suppose...but it's going to be really weird.

Garbage article with garbage headline.

One person expresses his political opinion.

Unworthy of HN.

So much this.

If you aren't generating profits, and want someone to work for you, either:

* borrow the money in your own name

* borrow against your house

* don't bring them on

You're the one creating the risk. You've gotta eat it.

Anything else is massively unethical.

I did this for six months.

I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.

The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.

Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.

SiteStacks can find the technology used at any domain

I punched in a URL of a website I built, it didn't have data, went out to get some, then reported back that it couldn't.

Meanwhile https://builtwith.com/reservations.camprrm.com worked.

The geodesic dome is brilliant in how it minimizes the amount of materials needed to enclose a given space.

Except sheet material is sold in rectangles, so you end up with a huge pile of offcuts.

As a child I was entranced by geodesic domes in the late 1970s (part of the hangover of the utopian back-to-the-land movement), and I read up on them extensively over the following decades.

I've also done a bit of construction.

Domes are wildly impractical for almost every purpose.

Yes, the hold more volume per surface area. That's great for a liquified natural gas tank. It's not so good for humans who live on flat surfaces.

They are very hard to plumb and wire.

They generate tons of waste.

They are hard to maintain.

Roofs and walls have different purposes (structural support vs shedding preciptation) and different materials are best for each.

The list goes on.

I could write a 500 page book on why domes are almost always the wrong answer, but the shortest proof I have is: if they were so great, they would have caught on.

yep!

Manufacturing of any kind is as competitive as hell.

Absolutely true. And this is why I was very specific about picking a high end niche, and using tons of jigs, etc.

If you try to make rocking chairs, or cabinets, or whatever, you're going to be undercut by people in Malaysia, or huge factories in North Carolina.

You need something where there is a LOT of complexity AND a relatively small market, both to serve as walls to market entrants.

Woodworker.

From running two small ecommerce companies I think I've learned enough about MVP, shipping, inventory management, etc.

From 25 years as a software engineer I've learned about building tools to automate steps.

I'd pick some "hard to find / expensive niche (e.g. Greene and Greene, Art Nouveau, etc.), but offer repeatable designs, not do custom work. That would allow for lots of jigs, fixtures, using cheap machines in duplicate to eliminate setup times, etc.

...and then after growing sales and shaking the bugs out of the production, I'd hire assistants to keep cranking stuff out.

Eventually I'd allow customers to start turbing a few "knobs" on products, via a website tool (this isn't too much falling back into software, is it?), which results in customized cut lists being kicked out for my assistants. Mass customization.

There seem to be more and more "high tech farm" threads on news.yc over the last few months, and I've got several friends who are doing the same thing I'm doing: making a living as a coder, but running a farm as a hobby.

I set up a slack a few months back for a few friends to chat on this topic, but we didn't have critical mass.

If anyone wants to chat about coders who farm at https://codefarmers.slack.com/ send me an email at tjic@tjic.com and I'll invite you in.

Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow.

I lost my entire crop to the Colorado Potato Beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle in 2016.

Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."

If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.

As I've said in other threads re high-tech farming ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063841 ), most of these websites and startups and schemes are completely inane.

I'd bet that this one is in that category too.

I probably spent $50k in my first two years on my farm.

* 30 HP tractor - $14k

* brushhog, back blade, cone spreader, log splitter - $3k

* 1,000 ft^2 greenhouse - $5k

* water to greenhouse - $5k

* haying equipment (baler, tedder, disk mower, rake) - $5.5k

* buckets, pails, tubs, lights, etc for livestock - $1k

* hoses, hand tools, etc. - $1k

* drip irrigation, raised beds, soil tests, etc. - $1k

* fencing materials - $5k

I could keep going down the list, but even just barely starting, I'm sure that the $50k number is correct.

Obviously, this package doesn't include haying equipment or chicken egg incubators or chicken feather removal machine, but I can easily imagine how you could spend $50k.

When a person walks into a restaurant in the USA they can waive a $20 bill at a waitperson and say if you do what I want, and if I like you, and if I'm feeling generous, I might give you some of this.

So you also dislike bonuses for white collar professionals?

Because it's exactly the same thing.

Note that the AMA, run by doctors, is required by US law to give their approval before a new medical school may open, or an existing medical school can expand its program.

The doctors who would see their salaries fall if supply increased have complete control over supply.

This is complete regulatory capture, and it's terrible.

JFC

:(

Congrats from working up from the bottom, busting your ass, and achieving your dreams.

That's an inspiring story.

There is something called survivorship bias. IT means that the selection that you happen to see is the selection that is visible, because it accidentally survived.

Steve Jobs is great an inspiring, because he did X and Y and Z and never compromised his standards.

You know what? You happen to know of Steve Jobs because everything worked out well for him.

There may very well be 20,000 other people who refused to compromise their standards...and perhaps that strategy really sucks and the other 20,000 of them went bankrupt and are working at used car lots now.

"Never settling" sounds great.

I'm not 100% convinced that it is.

I think this is incorrect.

Supply and demand curves _ALWAYS_ meet. It's just that the point where they meet tells you what the market-clearing price is.

Sometimes this information makes one sad.

Managers who "can't hire good people" are sad because good people cost more than they want to pay.

Employees who "can't find a job" are sad because jobs that match their skills and other requirements pay less than they want to receive.