There are plenty of successful applications with bad UIs. Also, business logic is encapsulated in code - if that's borked, no amount of UI will save it.
If you are in the US, make sure you are up to speed on any county/local regulations and tax laws about running a business. Even as a freelancer and depending on your area, you may need to obtain a business license, pay gross receipts or any other such legal obligations.
Yup, the local markets often only cater to the entry-level, casual users. That's where their profit margins are. If you need something niche/higher-end your only options are to go online. Otherwise you get the usual response: "We don't have that in stock but can order it online for you. It should be here in 2 - 4 weeks."
Agreed, attacking degree programs is a red herring. Also, what kind of society would we be if the only subjects available to pursue were a select list of STEM programs?
It's not true, it's just a trite, condescending right-wing talking point repeated ad nauseum all over the Web whenever a discussion of minimum wage pops up.
> Mod_php was always faster at executing scripts. There is less overhead as you don't have to communicate like you have to with fpm.
The "overhead" of communicating via CGI to a PHP process has nothing to do with the speed of execution of the script itself.
> For light scripts this is far superior to fpm. On the other hand, always loading php does have it's downsides too as memory consumption can get quite high depending on the number of threads.
It's not far superior as the "overhead" of CGI is negligible in the real world. Plus you can pool processes for better scaling. Also, if you are using prefork with mod_php (which is the most probable scenario) it means you are forking an entirely new Apache process and not just "loading PHP" with each request.
> This is was also the reason for the fpm hype a long time ago: don't waste memory on php when php isn't needed. It had nothing to do with it running php faster.
It's not hype, because for a long time, mod_php required prefork because it was not thread-safe (even now it's still a pain to manage re-compiling PHP to be thread-safe for mod_php + Apache)...which means you could not take advantage of mpm_event or mpm_worker.
> I would never discourage anyone from self-employment
I would, especially if they are in their prime earning years and are trying to become independent contractors. Software engineering jobs command high salaries and benefits these days. The opportunity costs are just too high and the odds of sustaining a one-person contracting show for 5, 10, 20+ years is slim to none.
> But proven bank deposits over multiple years also counts.
That's just one factor. Banks are looking to minimize risk and from the perspective of banks, self-employment increases risk. That's not to say banks won't loan to you, just that the hurdle is much higher for you to prove that you are not a risk. Chances are your interest rates will still suffer even when a bank decides to loan to you.
> high price communities where everything works, surrounded by large swaths of shanty towns where nothing works.
This isn't something that's only attributable to CA. Economically depressed towns relatively close to highly concentrated areas of wealth are all over America. Also, the scale of poverty in places like the south, Appalachia, the rust belt, rural America often meets or exceeds that of third-world countries.
Wholesale data collection has become normalized in the US. For-profits, non-profits, it doesn't matter the industry, everyone is obsessed with capturing as much data as possible and believe it's just the standard way of business. No one outside of HN cares about PII or has an understanding of things like GDPR (it's just for the Europeans). Consumers are clueless or otherwise feel hopeless.
I think the lede is buried here, since it doesn't sound like any of them regretted their decision of seeking more meaningful work. The take-away seems to be that it may not happen right away with the first job you take and it may take some time to get adjusted (from a high-earning lifestyle).
Eh, that's not really the case anymore either. It's made many improvements over the years. Not that I'm saying it's some wonderful language, but you can't really compare it to the PHP 4/early 5 days. I think credit is deserved to the folks who have brought PHP to where it is today.