Hey thanx for the tip, I did their live chat and their instances come with LAMP already set up and can use webmin/plesk. I've heard good things about them and so far they are living up to their reputation. I would have switched a long time ago but for some reason thought they were a lot more expensive. At the height of our business, we needed 500MB storage and 40 GB transfer per month, which works out to about $19, but only on the heaviest months, so we'll probably save money by switching.
For me personally, there is a moral code beyond money. I think that when asked "would you rather make more money if you knew you were participating in something unscrupulous?", we tend to be concerned about what it would do to other people. So are we aligned with management or labor in this case? Are we willing to stand up for what we believe in?
Fellow programmers make fun of me for liking Matlab. I've tried to explain it to them many times (how it doesn't need iterators, how most things are one-liners, how it's 10-100 times less code all the way down), but I've come to the conclusion that they just feel threatened because it goes around most of the problems they've learned to solve with c. It's like how some auto mechanics don't think much of electric cars. I know that hundreds of cores is the future, but nobody knows how to use inherently parallel languages like Matlab, so all I can do right now is wait for the future to arrive.
Ya I've come to the same conclusion. I realized after posting this that there are really two concepts here: 1) earning a benefactor and 2) my life lessons, which for the most part nobody cares about. So this topic is dead in the water for now, but I may try again if I find some new angle on it.
Just a little more background for anyone still reading this: I was trying to pay off my debt for 3 years at $1000/month at my last job, and finally realized that it couldn't be done and that the rat race was destroying any chance I had at doing something relevant, which is why I quit.
It turns out that bootstrapping with my repair biz actually provides enough income to live on at the proverbial 4 hours per week than all of my previous jobs provided at 40 hours per week, because of self employment leverage. Instead of earning $15-20 per hour in wages for the $100/hr that the business charges, I can just keep the whole $100. Without that leverage, there is little to no hope of getting ahead as an entrepreneur IMHO.
So right now I am working on some apps to steadily replace my repair income so I can transition to a sustainable income from software, and then I will settle my debts as a four year consolidation or whatever.
What frustrates me most is the timescales involved in this: 12 years in the school of hard knocks after the 16 years of mainstream school, and now another 4 or 5 years to pay for the mistakes I've made. I have the potential to make world-changing concepts like facebook, but odds are, I'll spend half my life just working as hard as I can to break even, and I see this pattern repeated over and over in our society.
Something is fundamentally broken, I think we can all sense that, but I'm not sure I can simply blame rich people who don't do anything cool anymore, because many of them realize that capital is so difficult to obtain that it can't be given away lightly.
Your final sentence is true, where "close to zero capital outlay" is in terms of technology cost, but that's overshadowed by time and cost of living. The general public overvalues security so I think it's important for hackers to shut that out to some degree, and find a way to be left alone and do their thing, because the reward/risk ratio of making something epic is so high that it outweighs the risk of austerity.
Hey I went to UIUC for Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), the best 4 years (and decision) of my life :-) Of course, it was 95-99 so some of the headiest, fastest paced years in the history of mankind. God I miss the 90s. I feel bad for kids who had to grow up in the 2000s, but am hopeful that they will work harder than we did to make the world a better place.
I just quit my job over a similar issue. I was doing tech support and repair work but the bosses insisted on having all of us do everything with no division of responsibility. So out of a 9 hour day of constant interruption answering the phone and front desk, I got maybe 1 or 2 hours of repair work done.
I finally realized that I can make more money freelancing on my own, since they charged $99/hr but only paid $15/hr. The levels of inefficiency at that job were staggering, and I muddled through for 3 years.
Now I am living the dream coding on my own and don't look back. The funny thing is, based on my pay stubs and commission, I know I was making them on the order of $100,000 per year. They only acted like they wanted me around...the day I gave notice.
If your employer doesn't understand these concepts, then you may have to think about finding other work with people who are more at your level. You won't regret it.
That's cool. Ya I was thinking that it would have to work similar to real employee-owned companies. There would be votes to determine tiers of pay, or equal pay for everyone (which I personally don't think is fair, after pulling about twice the weight fixing computers at my last job). The more perceived "fairness" for all parties involved, the better the talent that will be attracted. This kind of flies in the face of for-profit decision making, where the owners and shareholders are given more priority than the workers.
Ya that's my thought too. The logistics of running a business are different (and in my mind easier to solve) than the logistics of programming, and should be solvable in a more general way. Also there is a social aspect to it. It's pretty obvious in any project who is pulling their weight (at least for people on the inside).
Disclaimer: this is my site, sorry for the shameless plug.
Like you, I have hundreds of ideas just like this one that are eating me up inside. This is beyond the scope of what I can do myself, so I decided to just throw it out there with the hope that it comes into existence in two or three years, because I could really use it.
Technical issues like databases, servers and networking are trivialities. The real work requires large warehouses and staff in every major city, so it's really beyond the scope of what geeks usually do, and falls into the realm of venture capital. Somebody will make a killing.
Dunno if you have ever been to this site, but I think of startups about once a week, like he thinks of inventions:
When I read Hacker News, I can't help but think that the intellectual capital here is not just worth millions or billions, but trillions of dollars. You will all be the pillars of industry someday.
I have another idea like this, but I've decided that it's within the scope of what I can do locally. I guess if you live in Boise, drop me a note haha.
I'm massively in credit card debt and work at a job that pays the bills but withers the soul. There's nothing quite like acute suffering to focus creativity.
Unrealized potential is the challenge of our generation.
I have always been in a different boat (I'm 32 now). I always knew precisely what I wanted to do, and knew it would be something nontrivial and...transcendent I suppose is the word. Life always stops me, whether it's work, money or relationships. You may have think of the future, how you want it to be, think of things like solar powered bikes you can ride for free forever, or computers writing their own programs, or imaginative ways of meeting other people whose dreams exceed even your own vast expectations, to find your own path. Maybe those are just things I'm interested in. But I know that the world as it exists right now at this moment is so profoundly underwhelming that it can't be the basis of my own enlightenment. Although HN has sure blown my mind this last year.
Ya the styling works properly, it's just that, when every other link shows as read, it gets more difficult to sift through them.
As an experiment, I just tried saving this in a file called stylesheet.css, and setting it as the default style sheet in Safari under Safari menu->Preferences->Advanced->Style sheet:
td.title a:visited
{
visibility: hidden;
}
It's a hack to make the read items disappear. Ideally, the whole row could be hidden under a turn-down arrow, or the site could somehow track which links have been read by the user and skip them (although that's not ideal for privacy, so would be best as an option).
P.S. I wasn't expecting the first reply to be from PG! This site is awesome.