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NiagaraThistle

276 karma · joined August 28, 2019

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NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Examples of Simple Profitable Websites?
I don't know if either fit you "simple" definition, but NomadList and RemoteOk (both built and run by Pieter Levels) are the first to come to my mind. Neither one is a static blog but both started VERY simply: NomadList was a Google Sheet with a list of cities, Remote OK was job board that scraped other boards for Remote job posts and posted on the site plus allowed users to post their own job posts for fee.

Also, JustFuckingDoIt was "profitable" when it was launched. Probably not the level of profitability one would brag about, but definitely made money.

THese are the first three that pop into my head because I was just writing about Pieter Levels, but there are others.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: How do you find customers? And how do you find their pain points?
I'm not sure if you have, but I'd suggest listening to Pieter Levels and Courtland Allen on youtube. They each have several talks where they discuss this sort of thing. Pieter Levels actually walks through his process of identifying problems and building them into potential startups within a month timeframe. Courtland has a Micro Conf talk where he discusses the various stages of building startups.

Also, a great resource to learn how other people literally went from ideo to customer to profitable startup is the Indiehacker podcast. The first 200ish episodes are all interviews off this exact thing, plus IndieHackers has about 400+ written interviews of profitable startups by the founders that touch on this in many cases (IndieHackers is run by Courtland Allen)

NiagaraThistle··on We should have a $25 minimum wage
And I want to be perfectly clear: I do not in any way have the thought that anyone making minimum wage is "lazy/violent/oversexed etc". I don't think we need to "be protected from" minimum wage earners. As I mentioned in my original post, even when minimum wage was $4.25, I earned substantially less at my first job. Even as minimum wage increased, I earned close to it for a long time. My family lived check to check at best when I grew up.

My bone of contention is with the lawmakers changing the min wage and not focusing on the greed of politicians and corporations: give taxes back to the poor communities/earners; reduce profits to allow for lower costs so low wage earners can afford to get themselves or their children out of poverty.

I did not mean to imply the "blame" lies with the workers. I know full well, many people earning minimum wage are already doing the best they can, even if these types of jobs are not meant to raise families on or be sole wage suppliers, sometimes that is the only option.

NiagaraThistle··on We should have a $25 minimum wage
True, but this occured 3 months ago. 3 months is hardly the long term I was referring to. Also, isn't Seattle one of the more expensive cities to live in? If cost of living sites are to be believed, it is 50-70% higher cost of living than the average US city. Higher minimum wages are just going to make that worse as prices go up to offset the higher wages.
NiagaraThistle··on We should have a $25 minimum wage
It might be a popular opinion because I make more than this and have increased my earnings over the years from $2.90 per hour to what I earn today, BUT why does anyone think the MINIMUM wage should be this high? DO the same people expect to give me a similar wage increase to offset what will inevitably bring on higher costs and probable inflation?

I mean assuming minimum wage were $10 and we raise it to $25 arbitrarily, that's a 150% increase. At the BOTTOM. Now everyone who wasn't earning minimum wage has just had their earning power slashed. What about the employees that worked hard in school or through a series of jobs to get up to $25 per hour? Now they are making "minimum" wage at a potentially high-experience-necessary job? Does this mean that my and other people immediately and automatically deserve a 150% salary increase to keep the earning-power relative? So someone who was earning $100,000 now automatically deserves $250,000?

What about costs of goods and services? Do we automatically increase these by 150% too? Gas that is $4 now $10? Rents at $1000, now $2,500? How does that help the minimum wage earners? Sure they have a higher wage, but now costs (ie inflation) has just skyrocketed keeping them and their buying power exactly where it was previously. And if EVERYONE'S wages weren't increased those not on minimum wage (assuming their wages didn't get the 150% bump) just lost out bigly.

I am ALL FOR fair wages for work. But resetting and arbitrarily raising the minimum wage doesn't work for a sustainable long term solution. Instead, why not pressure companies to minimize profits thereby reducing costs so lower wage earners can afford the basics and hopefully some extra comforts.

Why not provide more financial education so lower income workers don't get caught in credit card/debt and paycheck loan traps that keep them poor. Let's put more tax dollars to work in low income neighborhoods and areas.

I feel there are so many other ways to lift people out of poverty traps, but arbitrarily raising the minimum wage only looks good on a piece of paper/paycheck. In the long run it just keeps people in the same position and hurts those higher up the ladder. And yes I know this last part sounds elitest, but that is not my intent. I am only saying that this hurts EVERYONE'S buying power in the long run.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: How do I practically create wealth?
There are a lot of good advice in the comments. I will just add for a great "build a startup to generate enough income to live on" model, I'd listen to Pieter Levels talks on YouTube and his first appearance on the Indie Hackers podcast. Then I'd spend $30US and buy his book 'Make'. It's the blueprint of how he built over 75 projects, monetized the successful ones, and makes almost $3m per year as a solo founder.

I know a lot of people might be haters, and I DEFINITELY know his methods might not be repeatable everytime by everyone, but the tenets are sound:

1. Find a problem you want to solve that others have, 2. Build a tool to solve the problem, 3. tell people about the tool, 4a. Monetize the tool if it gains traction, OR 4b. No traction? Go back to #1. 5. Invest the profits from your product(s) in an S&P500 index mirroring ETF

Keep building until you find something that gives #4a.

End of the day, you need to work hard at something long enough to earn more money than you spend and save then invest that money over a long period of time. Selling products you build allows you to earn more money than some salaries.

DISCLAIMER this is NOT financial advice. You need to work for what you want in a way that works for you and your situation. Good luck.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Why is visual programming so popular for game programming?
For me, someone who wanted to build a NES Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy clone back in the early 90's and had no idea how games were even made, let alone owned a computer, the idea today that I can show my kids they can build a game without them needing to fully understand how to code is mind blowing.

I think that's really why it's so popular: "anyone" with an idea can sit down and cobble something together that looks like a video game. A lot of people will give up when they realize you need to know more than "drag and drop" to customize your game, but it allows a lot of people with game dreams to dive in who would otherwise simply never try because they don't know anything about programming.

Now where did I put those maps to my Fantasy Dragon Quester 2-d jrpg game?

NiagaraThistle··on 2022 World Cup Ball: Al Rihla
FIngers are crossed, prayers have been sent, hope is at an all time high. 25 years is a long time to have been waiting.
NiagaraThistle··on Phone Tones in Musical Notation
I had forgotten how weirdly addictive this show was. (kids have long outgrown it)
NiagaraThistle··on Phone Tones in Musical Notation
Although it's interesting how the author breaks this down, I didn't think it was necessarily unknown that phone key tones could be used to make basic melodies.

When i get stuck in a freezer, I know that I can hack my phone (or a pocket calculator) to play certain songs with the key tones to alert my robot friend to save me. Thanks Johnny!

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?
I'd say maybe remoteok.com but it focuses sole on remote jobs. I know Pietr Levels was looking for a way to add features that would draw SO users to RemoteOk when he learned SO job board was shutting down. Might be worth a look.
NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Replacement for Stack Overflow jobs section?
This is a really good idea.
NiagaraThistle··on Are sprouted potatoes safe?
Exactly
NiagaraThistle··on Are sprouted potatoes safe?
Fair enough. But I meant "month old for my house"
NiagaraThistle··on Are sprouted potatoes safe?
I'm not sure if my household is immune to potato poisoning or if you need an insane amount of bad potatoes to be affected, but I sadly feed my family month old potatoes quite often. I do peel them (as I do 90% of the time when I make any potatoes). I do pop off any sprouts (wouldn't this be common sense?). And I do "peel out" or cut off any blacking bits on the potato (again wouldn't this be common sense?). And if any potatoes are truly moldy I just toss them.

Who is eating potatoes that are so far gone that they are getting sick from them? When a potato is bad, you KNOW it by it's funky smell.

Oh and I store my potatoes and onions in the same container until for days or weeks.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
This is probably the best advice for the OP I've read here.
NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Should I give up and get a job?
"I don't even know if this is something people would want or pay for if I completed it."

This is the problem. As I was reading your situation, before I got to this point, I was asking myself "Is there a market for this?". I have no idea if there actually is, but I just can't imagine there being a market easy enough to crack into for what you're building. This would lead me to believe that it would be more prudent to go work for someone else, even if for a "short" time, so you can build up stability and savings for yourself and future family.

There is nothing stopping you from continuing to work on your project AND work for someone else AND be a father - many of us do this, albeit with varying success in each area.

Courtland Allen of Indie Hackers has a great talk about this and explains that so many wannabe founders make the mistake of thinking they have to focus 100% of time and effort on building their start up and there is no other way. He calls this the "runway of certain death" where your savings is the runway and your project is a plane needing to take off before the runway runs out.

Long story short: get a helicopter so you don't need to worry about the runway. What he means by this is don't put yourself up against impending failure when you could stretch your timeline to launch by earning an income and just working on your project less hours per day but for many more days.

The talk is much better and informative :)

I have a young family. I am an agency Web Developer. I quit my job in May 2021 to "focus" on my side project. My focus has not been great and I am not finished with my project yet. At the beginning of February I started looking for a FT job again because I'm burning through my savings and it's no longer fair to watch my wife work FT while I continue to code an unprofitable project. I secured a new job today and will be able to relieve some stress from myself and more from my wife. And I will go back to working on my project as a side project outside of work and family hours for a couple hours each day.

Also, I'd recommend taking a break on BUILDING the thing, and spending some time MARKETING the thing to try to get at least one person that doesn't know you to tell you that's thing is the thing they need to save their business and will pay you any amount so they can use it to save their business. If you can't find one person to honestly tell you this, you might have a failed project on your hands. If you find someone, ask them for money right then and commit to a launch date for an MVP for their own use. Now you have a customer, proved you concept, have $$, and a beta user.

If you can't find others who will pay you for your project, cut losses, work for someone else and start a new side project that DOES have a profitable niche.

Don't ever let people who "don't get it" tell you what you're doing is a failure and that you need to "grow up". Handle your responsibilities, of course, but keep your dream alive - it's the only way ANYTHING great was ever brought to the public.

Good luck.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: What is the most important thing you could be working on?
She would. But as the husband and after saying "i'll get to it", it really is my job and I need to get off my ass to do it. My wife does so much for the household and is a very patient person, by the time she does get pissed it's warranted.

Re: getting kicked out was an exaggeration, and this original comment was more a "i need to do the small daily things to keep my wife happy because that really is the most important thing I can be doing at this moment, not procrasti-working and reading HN". It was more toungue-in-cheek than anything.

By the way: I DID finally clean the garage and it looks wonderful, so crisis averted.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: What are you favourite games?
1. Dragon Warrior - RPG for the original NES

2. Final Fantasy - RPG for the original NES

Get off my lawn!

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: What do you have for breakfast?
Love this. I make it on the stove top, but Scottish porridge is delicious.
NiagaraThistle··on Twitter’s new CEO is taking ‘a few weeks’ of parental leave
Wouldn't it have more to do with the company or national policy and less to do with wealth situation?
NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: What do you have for breakfast?
It varies between a fruit and yogurt smoothie, homemade pancakes/french toast/waffles with bacon or sausage and some fruit/berries, croissant with jam or nutella, REAL porridge (not that instant oatmeal in a paper packet garbage), toast and two eggs with bacon/sausage, italian breakfast "sandwich" (slice of ciabatta, fried egg, slices of prosciutto, slice of provolone cheese, topped with marinara sauce and broiled until the cheese bubbles). Fresh brewed tea or espresso. If I grab my coffee on the 'commute', I get an orange chocolate latte instead. These are my go-tos. On the weekends or a big Rangers/Scotland match I will do a full Scottish fry up.

It's about 15-20 minutes depending on the meal, but I LOVE breakfast and have two young boys who do too, so I make a point of making good ones.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: What is the most important thing you could be working on?
Cleaning my garage. If I do not, my wife is going to kick me out. Instead, I'll type up this comment and think about when I should schedule cleaning my garage...

Seriously, it's probably the small things that need to be done for someone else's happiness that are the most important things to do right now. Doing so, makes those around us happier and less stressed. And removes the mental load from ourselves so we 1. feel good about actuallay accomplishing sh!t we need to; and 2. can focus on these larger ideal projects.

Actually going to go clean the garage now...oh wait another interesting HN post...

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: How to research an app idea when you have no idea of where to begin?
What are you trying to research? If you have the idea already, are you trying to find out if it exists already? Are you trying to find potential customers? This is very vague.
NiagaraThistle··on What are the best ways to fight imposter syndrome?
This is what I came here to say. I don't have "decades" under my belt but after a long time as a developer, I have ALWAYS felt like the company I am working for is going to one day tap me on my shoulder and say I don't belong here because I'm not as good of a dev as the guy next to me or the one blogging about the new JS framework. Doesn't matter how many companies I've worked with, doesn't matter that this has NEVER happened, it is just me comparing myself to all the other "good" programmers out there and feeling inadequate because I see what the produce and am in awe. I know guys who I'd consider rock stars that feel this too and won't entertain finding better paying jobs because they think they don't have the skillset, even when I explain to them that "even I can do this" and I know they are much better than me.

I think it's a part of our industry and I'm not sure anyone can "fix" the problem for someone else. I think you just have to understand that 90% of your peers also feel this and of the 10% that don't 90% of THEM either don't realize they aren't that good or don't really care. The remaining 1% are who we compare ourselves to and shouldn't.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Did you benefit from getting a dog?
Yes having a dog was beneficial. I'm not sure I can put "benefits" into words, but having my dog was awesome. Until I had to get rid of him after 6 years. It was like losing a child or best friend and was solely my fault because I was unable to properly train him. Get a great dog, train him well early.

I miss you Brinley.

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: How to make the most out of time at university?
Came here to say basically this. This is great advice.
NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: Do you know any great coding tutors? I have 100k students for you
Not sure what type of coding, but if it is Web Dev, I know there are a lot of excellent instructors on YouTube that would love 100k dedicated students. Brad Traversy is a great teacher, really good at instruction and explaining his code and difficult concepts. He has a handful of Udemy course too.

If it's php or more specifically Laravel, maybe send them Jeffrey Way's way at Laracasts.

(This post makes me wish I'd started the web dev tutorials I said I was going to when COVID first sent us working from home :/ )

NiagaraThistle··on Help, I don’t know where to start
TL;DR: check out Brad Traversy's youtube video tutorials.

It depends on what you want to code.

I am going to assume web development and building some variant of websites and web apps since it my wheelhouse and there are a lot of jobs out there paying decent for this right now.

Assuming this is what you want, I'd really watch and code along with Brad Traversy on YouTube. He's even got a "Web Developer Guide for 2022" video that just came out that goes through a high level overview of what a modern Web Dev should know and learn. He's a great teacher and some very cheap and great courses on Udemy.

I created a detailed list of his tutorials with times and costs on what I would reco for learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript as a comment to someone's HN post. I'll find it and add it here for you.

I really have ZERO affiliation with Udemy or Brad Traversy, I just really like his method of teaching, and as a 10+ year web dev veteran, it is very refreshing to see someone clearly teach intro and advanced topics clearly.

Good luck.

EDIT: found the link to the list of my reco'd Travesy tutorials for Frontend Web Dev: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30177167

NiagaraThistle··on Ask HN: How do you cope with realizing you mostly wasted your potential?
TLDR: It is never too late to live up to your perceived potential. Let go of the past, decide what potential you want to live up to, and start making small decisions today to achieve that potential.

I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, but it really is in the same vein as what a lot of other commenters are saying here: Stop dwelling on your past. If you really are intelligent and have any sense of drive and desire left in you, stop blaming the things in your past for your "lost potential". Unless you are still in those situations and they truly are stopping you from PHYSICALLY making decisions to get out of those situations, the only one holding you back now is you.

My life was pretty easy growing up so I can not relate to your past and my heart breaks that you had to endure such hardships - no one deserves that. You didn't deserve that.

What I do draw from as evidence that potential is never wasted because of a hard background are my father and maternal grandfather.

My grandfather grew up poorest of the poor in rural US after the depression and had nothing, no money, and couldn't go to school. At 40 years old, after a stint as a Merchant Marine and years of odd jobs with a wife and 9 kids, he went out to home construction sites and asked to work on the sites for FREE to learn the various trades. As he learned to build houses, he built a home and restaurant for his family and my grandmother ran the restaurant successfully almost for 60 years until her death at 93. When my grandfather died in his 80's he was a multi-millionaire.

My father's story isn't as "glamorous" but has more connections to your own story. He grew up in a poor neighborhood with other poor families living in multi-family housing. His parents were heavy drinkers and in-and-out of work, and his father and brother were in and out of jail. When he was young, he seldom had shoes or clothes that fit, he'd have to avoid fights on his way to and from school, and certain teachers and people indifferent neighborhoods would discriminate against him because of his family and their religion. The one thing he was able to cling to during his youth was soccer and even though he did not become the pro he dreamed of, it helped him to avoid the life he otherwise might have fallen into.

As he grew up he saw the writing on the wall and did not want to let the circumstances of his upbringing dictate his future. He moved to the US in his 20's, met my mother and had 3 children. He spent much of my youth coaching soccer at the local and college level. He worked every day to provide for his family, purchased a house he never could have dreamed of as a child, and for all accounts has reached a level of success and happiness that his child self could only have dreamed about.

Both my grandfather and father told me independently that our past makes us who we are but does not dictate what we are capable of.

It is never too late to live up to your perceived potential. Let go of the past, decide what potential you want to live up to, and start making small decisions today to achieve that potential.

CAVEAT: Depending on your past and the trauma you still carry from it, it might be vitally important that you seek therapy or someone else to talk to to help you move beyond it. The baggage we carry, even though we were strong enough to get through it, stays with us. Sometimes we need assistance dealing with so we can clear our mind and soul enough to overcome it.

Good luck. I hope there is still a lot of time for you to achieve your potential.

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