Ask HN: What do you use Machine Learning for? - <AUTHOR> What real-world applications are you finding it useful for right now? <comment><USER2> I use it as something to worry about not knowing how to use, and how that might make me unemployable in a few years, while also having no obvious need for it at all, and therefore no easy avenue towards learning it, especially since it requires math skills which have completely rusted over because I also never need those, so I'd have to start like 2 levels down the ladder to work my way back up to it.

I've found it very effective in the role of "source of general, constant, low- level anxiety".

<comment><USER3> This is true of the software engineering profession in general. I think there's a quote somewhere stating "the half-life of a software engineer is 2-5 years." There's constantly new programming languages, new frameworks, new platforms, new tools, new paradigms etc. It becomes harder and harder to keep up with all that as you age and have more responsibilities and require more stability having a mortgage and offspring (although there's certainly individuals that can keep up with it).

Those who are still in school or fresh out of it will be up-to-date with the latest theory and trends. And they will be eager to pour hours of overtime into their new career. Sure, they will have years of practical experience to gain, but that's not usually what they will be interviewed on (from my experience). They will be interviewed on the latest tech and the algorithms and theory they learned in school. Their whiteboard interviews will be another day from class.

Given the influx of fresh blood, I view the software engineering profession as a entry-level type of job, regardless of the varying levels of seniority titles available. The only way to escape the constant churn is move to other roles, such as architect, management, executive or to start a business such as in niche consulting or a startup, etc. Or you can eschew the typical life of mortgage + kids and dedicate it to keeping up with every latest trend, hopping jobs to stay current and hoping you never slow down.

<comment><USER4> "Those who are still in school or fresh out of it will be up-to-date with the latest theory and trends. "

The theory doesn't change that fast... also trends? Maybe in terms of a new JS library.. but I think it's more of new grads will work for cheap and will take more bullshit. They also are more likely to move to/for the job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not using it at this moment, but in a couple of weeks I'll have a newborn, and I was thinking of taking pictures of him every time he is upset, and then tagging the photo with what ends up being the resolution (feed, change, or nap) and seeing if I could build a classifier that could figure out what he needs just from a picture of his angry face.

Semi-related, but if anyone is using the AWS tools for their AI, please ping me. I'm looking for a speaker for a community event in SF in June. (contact info in profile)

<comment><USER6> Suggestion from a new father: you'll have a better chance analyzing your newborn's voice. They have very little control over their facial expression, but there might be some useful information in their crying. Good luck with your new projects!

<comment><USER4> Yeah I agree, you figure out very quickly by the voice/cry what they want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We analyze images of skin lesions and give a probability whether they are malignant melanoma. The analysis is performed on-board on mobile phones.

<comment><USER8> do you worry about the weights of your net being stolen off the app through reverse engineering?

<comment><USER7> It is a bit of concern, but we are not out in the wild yet so we have time to look at ways to protect the IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Detecting what pornstars, actions, production and categories appear in 5mil+ adult videos.

<comment><USER10> Is this somewhere online? Github, site or what?

<comment><USER5> OP works for Pornhub, so I suspect it is on their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Classifying future elite race horses, before they've raced.[1][2]

I didn't develop the original approach but am involved in working to improve the predictive outcomes.

[1] [https://www.breezeupiq.com](https://www.breezeupiq.com)

[2] [http://www.performancegenetics.com](http://www.performancegenetics.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I work for a large semiconductor manufacturer. In our R&D operations we require a large volume of newly designed parts to be purchased from suppliers. These parts are not off the shelf but are all custom created by us. Once a design is approved we try to get them into the lab the fastest way possible so the earlier we can get the designs quoted with a supplier, the better.

I use machine learning to predict if a newly designed part will have to be purchased soon to go in the lab. That prediction saves me about 3 weeks of lead time to get it to a supplier. Before machine learning, the first time the purchasing department knew that it will need to be purchased is when the designer filled out a form. Now they know as soon as he submits his design and can get a head start.

<comment><USER13> That sounds really interesting. What sort of data do you use to do this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Burning CPU cycles on an opaque, needlessly complicated model created by a canny professor who realized that putting ML in grant proposals gets you 5x the cash compared to regression.

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately I bet this will be the case for the next few years until funding agencies figure out not everything has to be done with machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I run a website called Hey Am I Fat. We've trained a classifier based off a simple softmax regression in TensorFlow that tries to detect whether people are fat or not. If you submit a picture of yourself to HeyAmIFat.com we can tell you if you're fat or not within minutes.

<comment><USER17> A nice email / phone capture portal you have there.

Does anybody know what the value of such lists are? Having no other information with them I can't imagine it is much.

<comment><USER16> I don't store this information after we send the response, but that would be one way to make money if you don't care about being an asshole to your users. This is mostly a joke and I don't make any money from it.

<comment><USER17> Likely fair enough - I'm just suspicious of anything that takes contact details when it could just hold the late open and let me know when it's done

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We use it for automated seizure detection in EEG data. Most seizures have no clinical manifestation (e.g., shaking or trembling), and if a seizure goes on too long (~30 minutes) the patient can suffer permanent brain damage or even die. This is particularly problematic for patients in the ICU since they tend to seize silently more often and it isn't easy to tell that they are seizing without having a neurologist examine the EEG data.

We also use machine learning for detecting other features of EEG data and removing artifacts. (Eye blinks, for example, cause big artifacts.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Replacing project managers and introducing reward/score based AI bots that keep track of progress of individuals as function of stories they are working on, and these bots send out reminders (slack chat bots perhaps). This will can help improve productivity at large firms with multiple (and sometimes unnecessary) levels of manager hierarchies such as IBM, Dell, HP, oil companies etc. Let's be honest a certain programmer has a pattern with which he/she works. Time spent on a problem, number of initial bugs, number of commits, time spent vs difficulty of a certain problem and so forth. We have all this data to quantify and train a bot. I mean why not :)

<comment><USER20> That sounds a lot like the workflow in Dave Eggers' "The Circle". I think if you read the book you'd be less likely to implement anything like this. :P

<comment><USER19> I have been meaning to read that book recommended by a friend working in tech. Apparently there's a movie out now too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> (In progress) Automate e-commerce business completely, including customer/supplier e-mail responses, voice communication, identifying data structure of supplier feeds and performing automated conversion between formats for integration, sales estimation, hidden platform variables identification (how to win a buy box?), price competition etc. Tech based on Python, DL (Keras), RNN, GAN, SVM, decision trees etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Checking for issues with loan photos as they are posted. It's been interesting to find that many ML platforms and libraries don't do a great job of recognizing humans with dark skin. Hopefully, by adding Kiva's 1 mil+ images to the mix we can give them a better basis point to learn from. Hoping to use it for a lot of other things as well, but we're still getting to know how to leverage it.

<comment><USER5> That's a great insight to use Kiva as training data, because I agree that not recognizing dark skinned people is a huge problem with current facial recognition datasets.

This will get worse as more retail establishments use image recognition in their every day operation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> In search, Learning to Rank is a common application for ML ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank)

[https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Learning+To...](https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/solr/Learning+To+Rank)

</comment><comment><USER24> Building a smart home security system, so you can be notified when your friends have arrived, or if someone is trying to break into your home. Machine learning is very useful here, as you can train the system to recognise what your friends look like, or what a break-in might look like.

<comment><USER25> How do you get the data for training how a break-in looks like?

<comment><USER26> Couldn't you just train it on genuine visitors and then use the probability of it being a genuine visitor to determine whether it is a break in?

<comment><USER27> I imagine only training on genuine visitors would be tricky with any traditional classification approach. Even having a 90/10% split of positive/negative training data is difficult since a lot of classifiers will just degrade to a majority vote.

Maybe a Restricted Boltzmann Machine or something similar?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I work for a large multi-hospital corporation.

      We use machine learning to predict the risk of a patient, after an inpatient admission, being readmitted in 30 days post discharge.  If the risk is high, we proactively put process in place to reduce the readmission risk.

<comment><USER29> Can you elaborate a little bit more on the process?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Forecast loan payment defaults for 90 days or longer, 3 months in advance using a tree based model.

<comment><USER31> What's your training set?

<comment><USER30> past loan performance data

<comment><USER32> Lending Club?

<comment><USER30> hedge fund

<comment><USER32> How large of a dataset are you looking at? I'm curious as to whether Lending Club's publicly available data will be lengthy enough to get meaningful accurate results for general 5-10 year loan predictions. Though it is nice that a economic crash happened to occur in the middle.

<comment><USER30> of course more data is always better, but there are plenty of flexible models that can learn form small data, so just try the lending club data and if your model isn't learning anything choose a more flexible one...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am just getting into it, but I am primarily looking at it because I have about 8 months worth of home automation sensor data stored in a MySQL database thanks to my home automation software (thanks home-assistant!) and I want to see if ML can look at patterns from that sensor data and infer what to do in my apartment.

For instance when I get home (gps sensor) and when I open my front door (door binary sensor), can a system understand that I typically turn my TV on when that happens?

</comment><comment><USER34> Automatically answering HR queries worded in different ways

<comment><USER35> Different ways of wording automated HR answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I use Stanford NER to extract book titles and authors from HN comments. Previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14202557)

<comment><USER37> How do you disambiguate similar/identical titles?

Did you evaluate other NER against CoreNLP? e.g. how does spacy compare?

EDIT: answering my own question -- research here [1] ranks CoreNLP as the winner among CoreNLP, NLTK, spaCy, Lingpipe but AFAICT spaCy is competitive.

[1] [https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2703.pdf](https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W16/W16-2703.pdf)

<comment><USER36> I found spacy's documentation lacking in details on how to train NER from scratch (at least I couldn't make sense of it). That's why I decided to stick with Stanford's NER.

Regarding disambiguation: People usually mention books with their respective authors, so it takes one query against the local database to check whether entity is indeed a particular book by a particular author. When no author is mentioned, I check parent comment (if any) to find if the given book is mentioned there. Well, and if comment turns out to be standalone then I query Goodreads / Google Books API. Given books with identical titles, these APIs return the most popular option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm using it to isolate acapellas from music for making mashups/remixes. Not quite "real world" yet, since even my most recent models aren't perfectly reliable, but it's getting there.

<comment><USER39> Could you share what sort of model you're using? Something WaveNet inspired?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Predicting mistakes made by humans during audio/video transcription, giving them auto-complete suggestions, classifying severity of changes, predicting the difficulty level based on audio characteristics.

</comment><comment><USER41> I've been working with clustering algorithms to create a personal news aggregator from sitemaps and RSS feeds, using an NLP library (Stanford CoreNLP) to do feature extraction. [1] I'd like to extend it to classify articles into different categories so I could filter things like transcripts, opinion columns, web scrapes gone wrong, but I'm not sure how to set that up yet.

[1] Very rough prototype: [https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/](https://confabulator.io/newsclustering/)

<comment><USER42> Hi writeslowly,

a friend and I are working on a tech investment news aggregator (manually curated right now -- [http://circulaat.com](http://circulaat.com)), and I think your clustering algorithm might be really useful for it. I can't figure out how to DM you via the HackerNews system but would love to get in contact

<comment><USER41> I've added my contact information to my profile. Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Detecting moments of user frustration in web apps (ie. rage clicks, shaking mouse, refreshing the page) [https://logrocket.com](https://logrocket.com)

</comment><comment><USER44> Fraud detection (credit cards, online banking)

Detecting illegal mining activity via satellite

network intrusion (packet analysis)

Predicting machine failure

Stock market trend prediction (up/down)

Simbox fraud

Finding similar parts for large vehicles to help engineers

I can keep going, but this is a sample I've seen over the years. We mainly do work in time series data for enterprise basically mostly "things google doesn't do". A bulk of what we do doesn't appear in research papers because it's not "GAN art" eg: "the current hype".

</comment><comment><USER45> I use some basic tf-idf machine learning for clustering similar articles for [http://tracket.com](http://tracket.com)

</comment><comment><USER46> At Transloadit we're going to use it for predicting how many machines we'll need to encode incoming video and audio files in near realtime, and then scaling that capacity up in parallel, as files are still being uploaded or imported. Already half a year in the making, but in our early tests it seems we can outperform the custom algorithms we had in place for this, by a lot.

</comment><comment><USER47> Detecting malware. [https://www.barkly.com/product](https://www.barkly.com/product)

</comment><comment><USER48> Not ML per se but ANN have proven to be quite useful in tumor growth modeling. I am using them to model cancerous cells' genotype.

</comment><comment><USER49> Classification of Contenets Segmentation of MEdical Images Neural Networks can also be used in DeNoising, DeHAzing Super-Resolution

</comment><comment><USER50> * financial forecasting

* resource demand forecasting

* balancing distributed energy resource loads

* automating metadata generation

* categorizing 'events'

* finding anomalies in satellite data

Most important:

* running bots on my xbox

</comment><comment><USER51> Use it in my software engineer screening service to determine if a user should answer more questions on a particular topic and dive deeper into a particular subject. Using Azure ML, been working out well so far. Went from messing around for days with other ML libraries to up and running within 20 minutes on Azure.

</comment><comment><USER52> Hotdog/Not Hotdog

</comment><comment><USER53> We use machine learning for parsing jobs and resumes and then to match them with each other.

To see the results - post your resume here: [https://www.postjobfree.com/post- resume](https://www.postjobfree.com/post-resume)

</comment><comment><USER54> We use ml to identify users who might try to commit fraud when purchasing things from our site, as well as prevent identify fraud when users verify their ID with us. We are also looking into taking advantage of adaptive design to improve ux and conversion.

<comment><USER55> Interned at a KYC/KYB company last summer and its all manual there. They've got people checking the submitted forms/scans manually. How good are you getting because I truly believe they can all be replaced very quickly! Talk to me :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> -Customer analysis / clustering / behavior visualization

-Financials analysis / predictions

-Image classification

<comment><USER56> bump on this one. \- Sales Promotion/Offer Prediction \- Customer Analysis / Clustering / Site Content Display

<comment><USER39> I've got a client that's wrangling their data into a place where I can do some targeting for upselling, end-to-end - I'm really looking forward to that. Lots of value on the table, IMO, and really interesting and unusual datasets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Automatic text summarization.

<comment><USER58> Mind sharing which algorithm you are using?

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Predicting day-to-day harvest yields of perishable fruit, like Strawberries.

</comment><comment><USER60> I find it useful for learning from experience E with respect to some class of tasks T and performance measure P if its performance at tasks in T, as measured by P, improves with experience E.

</comment><comment><USER61> At work we're using it to battle fraud, we're also using it to recommend apps and themes to our users and we're using it internally for various forecasting tasks.

</comment><comment><USER62> Evolving mobile games to discover variants that earn 5 star reviews. Using [https://improve.ai](https://improve.ai)

</comment><comment><USER63> At my work we use it to do large-scale analysis of remote sensing data, in particular segmentation of satellite imagery to provide land monitoring services.

</comment><comment><USER64> image processing and effects using deep learning: [http://somatic.io](http://somatic.io)

</comment><comment><USER65> improving relevancy of search results - [http://www.coveo.com/en/platform/machine- learning](http://www.coveo.com/en/platform/machine-learning)

</comment><comment><USER66> Multilingual named entity recognition and disambiguation

</comment><comment><USER67> predicting the evolution of running cases, and the arrival of new cases, for capacity planning in a call center

<comment><USER68> Do you believe ML is adding value there (instead of a standard prediction/forecasting model)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Recommender system using visual features

</comment><comment><USER69> Trying to predict horse racing

<comment><USER70> Me too :-)

<comment><USER69> What do you use ? I found out that svc trained with proper data leads to satisfying perf for predicting the four first horses (in disorder though)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Not me, but a friend of mine heads a company that uses drones to identify defects / damage on containers. He uses ML to process the images captured by the drones, which is fed through an ML processor to detect such damages & flag them for insurance claims purposes.

<comment><USER72> By containers, do you mean shipping containers? Sounds interesting!</comment></comment>


Thousands of people are experiencing housing instability in Seattle - <AUTHOR> https://seattle.curbed.com/2018/4/17/17248722/invisible-homelessness-first-person <comment><USER2> This story makes very little sense to me.

It tries to claim that the mom is just in this impossible situation and there's no possible way to get out... that living in an SUV in the Walmart parking lot is the only option.

But it also says she's making $1300 a month [edit: from social security disability]. Honestly, why can't she drive that expensive SUV for an hour in literally any direction to reach a place where you can get a one bedroom apartment for like $500 a month?

This is what I don't understand about homelessness: why do people insist that they have to live in a very high cost city?

<comment><USER3> Would she still be making $1300 a month if she moved?

<comment><USER2> The story says she's making $1300 a month from Social Security disability. She doesn't need to commute, she gets the money even if she stays home all day and doesn't do anything.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough, but I think my broader point was that you also need to factor in things like the support network that would need to be rebuilt and the cost of whatever services happen to be cheaper because of location.

Moving is an inherently costly proposition both from a financial and mental perspective, and people who aren't in the best state for any of those things will probably not. Living in a Walmart parking lot, as bad as it is, is _stable_ and _predictable_. Moving isn't.

<comment><USER2> I don't know. It still seems to me that there are options here, and this woman has chosen not to pursue them, for whatever reason.

I would also take issue with your assertion that living in a car in a Walmart parking lot is stable or predictable.

This looks less like involuntary homelessness and more like a lifestyle choice.

<comment><USER4> Would she have made that choice if she had more money or housing was cheaper? If she is making the best of a bad situation, maybe that's a failing on our part not on hers.

<comment><USER5> It's completely a failing on her part. If she is on disability, why should the government give her _more_ money to live in an expensive place. $1300 a month isn't a lot, but it is enough to live in many parts of the US.

Why is it the taxpayers responsibility to make sure that she doesn't have to move from Seattle?

<comment><USER4> Mainly because forced migration is something an enemy does to a people in a war.

I also take issue with the parasitic landlord class.

<comment><USER5> So a landlord should charge less rent than it takes to cover expenses?

Are you going to tell small town America to pay for people to live in Seattle that can't afford it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why isn't the writer helping her mother? Maybe give room and board? Maybe she doesn't have much to give but combining assets can help both?

<comment><USER7> Didn't read the article huh?

Are you asking for someone to help summarize it for you or are you just musing in the time before you finish reading it yourself?</comment></comment>


Deploy-your-own-SaaS: "only yours" cloud services for everyday needs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Atarity/deploy-your-own-saas <comment><USER2> It's a nice list of really useful services.

However, it should also be pointed out that it's also a deploy-your-own- unpaid-system-administrator-job. A lot of the value in SaaS products is the service provided of someone else maintaining it. The maintenance and security patching for running all this stuff, especially on the open Internet, that would quickly become a part time job.

So, I'd say that for most people with a limited time budget, it's worth the cost to simply find a high quality, paid SaaS provider for many of these services.

An example on from list: deploying your own email server and depending on it for your important communications is something that almost nobody should attempt on their own. Instead, most people should look to migrate from free providers that could do things like close your account/delete your data at any time, to paid ones that treat you like a paying customer.

<comment><USER3> "Host your own" isn't about simplicity or cost necessarily. For me, it's about controlling data.

I have my own media server, because when netflix removes friends, ill still be able to watch it. sure that means i have to buy the box set of friends for like 100$, which is 10 months of netflix into a single show. but i never have to worry about that going away. I'd rather have a raspberry pi with a webcam with motionEye letting me monitor my house than feeding private data into a company a dont trust.

This is also a hobby for me that has benefited me in my job on multiple occasions, and I only do it for services that I'm ok with downtime on (I've outsourced my email even though that's the data I would love to control the most, I'm not going to mess around with downtime on that). I absolutely wouldn't recommend any of these things for my grandma.

Also, "unpaid system administrator job" can be a bit of an extreme analogy. I do spend non-zero time working on these things... but because I was using this as a way to practice actual system admin things, they are generally set up for stability. there isn't much work to put into it after setup. Unchanged software rarely just suddenly starts breaking for no reason, especially when the traffic on it is low because there are only 2 people using the service. (again, I'm aware that self hosting email has all sorts of "you need to keep spam filter stuff up to date" weirdness, but I wouldn't advocate for that).

Other than email, anything on this list would be great for someone who wants to keep data in home, as long as they know the scope of how much free time they have vs their desired reliability.

<comment><USER4> "I have my own media server"

Is this accessible online, or just at your house?

<comment><USER3> In home. Wife has a lot of movies, and it's just to avoid having to walk to the movie closet and search through stacks on stacks of DVDs. Not doing any high seas or movie sharing. Just convenience and a fun project.

Also a prime example of a "downtime not a big deal" project. If it breaks, we just go back to the movie closet, and its no less convenient than how we used to do things (or just watch actual Netflix).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is also this collection of self hosted services: [https://github.com/Kickball/awesome- selfhosted](https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted)

<comment><USER6> Does anyone know a self hosted licensing server? A sevice that software could call with a license key and some stats, and it would verify the license, the number of users or whatever and log the stats.

<comment><USER7> There are on-prem options for developers to build DRM, if that's what you're asking. Of course the software has to be built to utilize the license server. CodeMeter comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also Framasoft [1] which has a collection of self-hostable free software services to replace most of Google (and other walled garden companies) products.

[1] [https://framasoft.org/en/](https://framasoft.org/en/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Home assistant's add-on store has a lot of these ready to go.

[https://community.home-assistant.io/tags/hassio- repository](https://community.home-assistant.io/tags/hassio-repository)

<comment><USER10> I didn't know HA had plugins like this, seems weird, HA itself is one of these things, not some sort of parent thing to which they're deployed.

That's how I see it anyway.

<comment><USER11> Depends on how you're running it. When I was running hass.io on a RaPi, I used a few of those plugins (including PiHole). Now that I'm running HA in a VM on a bigger machine, it makes more sense to run those services as separate VMs alongside it.

<comment><USER12> I've been trying to decide between these options myself. I was never happy with the slow restarts and potential for microSD failure when I ran HA on a RaPi3 (years ago, legacy AIO on stock Raspbian) so I haven't kept up with it and now want to start from scratch on something like a NUC. Do I make Hass.io a VM along side other VMs for PiHole, my LAMP website, etc? It will be idle so much that low power/heat during idle is significantly important, but I love the simplicity of reverting an isolated service back to a snapshot after I break it.

I suspect a single OS on metal with each of these in a Docker container would be more efficient, but I haven't played with containers before.

<comment><USER11> I have a single machine running FreeNAS that's running all of my home services at the moment (I know it's not the best hypervisor, but I wanted my NAS on bare metal and I can't justify a separate dedicated server). I have Ubuntu running in a VM running Docker, and installed Home Assistant using the official instructions for this setup[1].

PiHole is so light-weight and relatively low-risk, you could easily run it on the same VM as Home Assistant if you'd like. I keep separate VMs for everything out of habit. I would isolate the LAMP site as much as possible, especially if it's publicly available—potentially even keeping it off of the same network as everything else.

[1] [https://www.home- assistant.io/docs/installation/docker/](https://www.home- assistant.io/docs/installation/docker/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's easy to forget that sometimes you don't really need to host things. I used to run a Next Cloud server for syncing my documents, contacts, and calendar with all my devices. I'd rarely use a device that was not mine to access those things. I've switched to Syncthing ([https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)) and DecSync ([https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync](https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync)) and that's replaced 95% of what Next Cloud did for me.

Your use case might differ from mine quite a bit, but for me it was the best way to go. No server to babysit and everything "Just Works™".

<comment><USER14> Do you mean you switched to a hosted Syncthing?

I'm looking into Nextcloud and syncthing. A lot of people suggested Nextcloud. What do you like better about syncthing?

<comment><USER15> Syncthing is not a hosted service, rather its a p2p way to sync files and other things between your devices. It relies on the bittorrent protocol, so you don't need to have a central server. What you can do though, is install it on a NAS as well, so that files are also synced to a central location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there really a market for a self hosted B2C SaaS options? Would it be enough of a differentiator to drive business away from competitors?

<comment><USER7> I think so. I literally will not look at most services unless there is an on- prem option. To the extent where I will regularly design my own solution instead of deploying something Cloud based.

<comment><USER16> How turn key do you expect the self hosted option to be? If it contains a lot of other software like SQL and Redis, would you be comfortable installing it or would you expect the option to bundle it in some kind of installer? Would you be OK with using a container, or would you want binaries?

<comment><USER17> In my dream world, all open source software would consist of a single binary and the only third party need would be a DB (preferentially Postgres or MySQL).

Must be why I like Go so much

<comment><USER18> I share your dream world. Sadly I never even come close to carrying out it out when I build a small thing for myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wrote this a while back to build and run my own apps in containers:

[https://github.com/sumdog/bee2](https://github.com/sumdog/bee2)

It's not really ready for general use, but I'm still glad I wrote it for myself. It hits all my use cases, taught me a lot about the Docker Engine API and helps me put up new self-hosted stuff really quickly. I might use it to deploy some stuff from this list.

</comment><comment><USER20> Or you just make your own HTTP app server with integrated distributed JSON database and self host on a raspberry cluster:

[https://github.com/tinspin/rupy](https://github.com/tinspin/rupy)

<comment><USER21> So this is sort of like a barebones mongo db? Looks very cool.

<comment><USER20> It's inverted, I put the db on the app server so it talks HTTP natively; but the app server is also non-blocking async. concurrent so it's not only a toy.

I call it Joint Parallel, because that's the best term to describe that many cores can co-operate on the same memory at the "same time".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For your self-hosted SaaS needs, Yunohost is awesome.

One-click install of many apps and services – but more impressively one-click upgrades as well. Nice, user-friendly, very little maintenance required. Self- hosting for people who don't want to do system administration.

I've been running a Yunohost server for the past three years, adding and removing various services on the fly. Love to use it, and the great work of people behind this.

[https://yunohost.org](https://yunohost.org)

<comment><USER23> Same here. I don't use any of the yunhost apps though. Instead I use docker images and the redirect community yunhost app to route to them. Eventually I want to run yunhost itself in a docker container. Regardless it has been Rock solid for me for about three years as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love these lists. That said, it reminds me of the apps that come with inexpensive Cpanel type hosting where many of the same apps are one-click installs. Would be awesome if static ips for home were easier & cheaper.

<comment><USER25> cpanel can only handle PHP apps. I think Cloudron is an alternative for modern web apps which are written in various languages as it uses Docker internally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It was awesome until I realized I had to deploy them on AWS or GCP

<comment><USER27> Where did you get that idea? Anything here should run fine on bare-metal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Something similar that I've been working on:

[https://selfhostedsource.tech](https://selfhostedsource.tech)

</comment><comment><USER29> Maxapex

</comment><comment><USER30> Could you also add "Deploy Your Own Firebase"?

Our project ( [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) ) gets 1M+ downloads a month and can be self-hosted easily with a 1-click deploy into production.

Will try to make a PR when I get to my laptop. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Just found out that I'm gonna be a dad - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone, I just found out that I'm gonna be a dad. If is something I always wanted but my income is unpredictable. Sometimes I make 50k sometimes nothing. It never bothered me untill now. So I'm freaking out. What do you guys did when you have to have consistent I'm income. <comment><USER3> Congratulations! One thing, not as major as some of what other commenters have mentioned but worth knowing, is that you should not feel guilty about buying used clothes/cribs/etc. for your kid. 1) most baby clothes get worn very few times before they're outgrown, so you can get them in good shape at garage sales or thrift shops 2) your baby doesn't care whether it is dressed stylishly or not, it just cares if it's comfortable and its parents are nearby 3) your kid will likely throw up on it five minutes of putting it on anyway :)

Some parents feel guilt about buying used things for their child, and end up spending a lot of $$ on new clothes, crib, etc. for a child that will not benefit from all that extra expense in the least. You don't want to cut corners on, for example, health care or quality food, but things like clothes because they are visible can cause some parents of newborns to spend a lot of money they don't need to. Save it for the things that actually matter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it safe though? Like possible skin issues that can easily be transferred?

<comment><USER4> :)

Dude - relax! Becoming a parent is a real emotional roller-coaster, and it's hard to keep your perspective, _especially_ with your first, but remember - all kinds of morons have kids, and they're fine. Perfect is the enemy of good in this part of your life too

(my kids, and all my friends' and family's kids, wear and have worn hand-me- downs almost exclusively, except for fancy or special-occasion clothes)

<comment><USER5> > all kinds of morons have kids, and they're fine

So, so true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On a non-monetary note, here's some advice I gave my brother recently. (My daughter is now 15 months old, and I was thinking about what advice I wish I'd been given before she was born):

1) Remember at all times that no matter how tired you are, your partner is almost certainly much more tired. Basically, give her a free pass for the first few months, if not longer. (The hormonal changes a few days in are no fun either)

2) There is no point comforting a crying baby - they just don't understand what you're trying to do. Distract the fuck out of them instead. (This from a baby psychologist on a BBC documentary.)

3) Babies are their own tutorial. They start off really simple, with about three things to remember, and then once you've got the hang of those things they start adding new ones on. But you don't need to panic about whether you can do it, it's not complicated, just full on.

4) Bonding - do not panic if it takes you six months (or longer) to fall in love with your child. I certainly felt incredibly protective of Sophia from the moment she was born, but I didn't feel fully connected to her until she was able to smile at me, and we could have some kind of interaction. It's really easy to feel awful because all the TV and movies says it happens instantly, but it can take a fair while, so don't worry about it.

5) Ignore any advice you don't like.

[https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3746257.html](https://andrewducker.dreamwidth.org/3746257.html)

<comment><USER7> This is good advice. I've got 7 kids and can verify this. To add a bit more to it, teach your babies how to fall asleep without you rocking them for hours. It's a skill and one few of them learn on their own. Your life will get incredibly easier once they're sleeping through the night and mom and dad can sleep through the night as well. A recommended book is 'On Becoming Baby Wise'. Worked for our 7 - all them were sleeping 8+ hours at night before 12 weeks old.

<comment><USER8> Holy shit dude, seven kids?

On a more serious note: how do you teach them to fall asleep without rocking then for hours?

<comment><USER9> In short, ignore them... for actual details, you can google "Cry it out". There are a variety of techniques, varying from letting them cry for 5 minutes, to just letting them cry. Most modern ideas lean towards the 5 minute route, starting when they are close to 6 months old, as then they are old enough to not need feeding overnight.

It does work. Kids do learn that crying doesn't bring any attention, so they stop, and learn a sleeping routine. And with 7 kids, I can understand the appeal. With less kids, we went another route. When my kids were little, there was research saying these techniques were not healthy, but in the last 10 years newer studies have said they are OK. But it is a heated debate among parents.

Ultimately, every parent needs to make their own choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations!

1\. Get a health insurance for you and your wife if you don't already have one. That takes care of large unexpected costs.

2\. Make a budget for next 2 years. This will show how much money you might actually need.

3\. Build savings from today. You should be able to make good savings by the time your baby is born.

4\. Not sure what you do. If possible find a way to build long term relationships with your clients.

5\. Doing 2 projects, about half time for each is also a good idea. Gives you a safety net.

6\. Choose clients that have good cash flow. Funding or profitability.

It's important not to freak out now. Your wife needs a lot of support and you should be there. Also, first time dads under estimate the support they will get from friends, family and the system in general. It should be manageable!

<comment><USER11> Is the government recommendation of $25k/yr per child accurate? To answer this:

> _Make a budget for next 2 years. This will show how much money you might > actually need._

How much _does_ one need for a child?

<comment><USER12> Government numbers are hard to use in reality. If you have insurance that should cover the medical. What share you apportion that to a child ... Breast feeding saves money, makes for healthier children. Diapers could kill you. We did disposable. Look for coupons and watch for sales, try to double dip that one.

Important things to remember: 1) kids want your time, not the crap you buy them. 2) you will make mistakes, just try to learn and move on. Anyone who says they did not is not being intellectually honest. 3) start reading and numbers as soon as possible. ABC 123 from day one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My son was born less than a week after my 20th birthday. I had been doing odd software contracts to make money, but those weren't consistent. Here's what I did: I picked up 3rd shifts at McDonald's while recruiters floated my resume to a few companies. Yep. I had no college, no professional experience at anything, so I got the one job I could definitely get while I worked on making a better one possible (doing interviews, working on my portfolio, etc). Eventually I landed a full-time software job in a city 2 hours away. We moved down there and the rest is history. I should say that I was also buying baby food with WIC, and my parents provided a critical safety net when I would occasionally run out of money before payday.

Nowadays, I'm gainfully employed at a rate that disqualifies me from public assistance anywhere, and I have gotten all of my software jobs through Angel.co and Hired. I'm not the world's most talented engineer or likable person, but I've managed to work alongside some very talented and likable people. I think most people with an in-demand skill like software engineering can do what I did and make their way to a stable income that they can raise a family on.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congrats! As someone else said, make sure you have a healthy buffer of cash. Unexpected doctor visits come up, you'll want to take the kid somewhere and they go through diapers really fast in the beginning. Also make sure you and your partner can communicate and have plans for sleeping and babycare. My son is just two months and we've finally figured out a sleep routine since we had both been getting up when we started to fuss or cry at night to eat. If you need any advice, have questions, or just want to talk I can send you my email.

<comment><USER15> "they go through diapers really fast"

This is where a membership to a wholesale place like Costco becomes a no- brainer. Diapers, wipes and formula are best bought in bulk.

<comment><USER12> I do not want to be a nay sayer, but often the costco bulks are a rip off. Specifically paper products. Of course their hotdogs are a good cheap meal ...

Get the calculator out and do the math. With coupons I often bought the smaller packages and saved money. Then the next month the bigger ones. When we had kids we often bought diapers at Toys-r-us / babies-r-us, but I think they are out of business. In the end shop around. Ask others. Friends and neighbors will save / grab coupons to help you out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't see much mention of it in other comments so for what it's worth.. don't underestimate the importance of being involved in a community. While I would personally suggest a church community, it could be anything as long as you're open to receiving help and giving it to others when you can. Nobody wants to feel like a charity case but anyone who has had kids understands how hard it is and people are often willing to give you a hand with babysitting occasionally or with food/supplies. Good luck and congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER17> What field are you in?

You could switch to a corporate job for steady income and it usually comes with decent benefits.

Honestly, you really want to budget very well. We are planning on having a child sometime next year. We created a plan. Bought a house, remodeled. Now, we are going to aggressively save $50k, so we can survive 12 months without any income if we ever need to. After we save $50k, we will focus on aggressively paying of the house, and investing 1k a month. My health is so so, therefore I am not sure how much time I got.

As far as career goes, I will most likely start consulting in a few years, as I have experience with the full life cycle of applications, even forcefully extracting requirements.

</comment><comment><USER18> Save your money. Live to the lowest standard you can.

I had my business start to fail while my second was born. I thought I wouldn't recover it. I did. It is survivable.

I now have three, but my income is still significantly down. Thriftiness and creativity will do you wonders. Budget and save, even if it's a little bit.

Some wise financial advice I received as a young man went like this...

Those that make little but save a dollar are better off financially than those that make more but spend a dollar.

The stress of debt will do more harm to you than anything. Try to stay out of it, enjoy these next years, you'll never get back your children's early years, but you will always recover finances or a career.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

<comment><USER19> Yes, avoid debt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> When me and my gf got pregnant I was part of a startup and was contributing to random hacking groups for burning man, music festivals, etc.

What happened was that I stopped doing anything that did not pay me and started working all my hours on the most profitable and constant stream of work (in my case a 20 hours a week gig for $20usd an hour while working from Colombia where minimum wage was $2 usd an hour at the time). In my young mind this was the equivalent of kind of failing: not doing the most interesting stuff and just going for the money.

But this worked out pretty well, all of the sudden the Django skills that I had got in 2007 doing not for profit projects were in full demand in Enterprise by 2012 and onwards and I got to $60, $80, $100, $120 usd an hour as I did more specific projects for bigger clients.

Short version: Go for the boring stable job because the most important thing is providing roof and food for your family. It will work out, God permitting.

</comment><comment><USER21> Congrats!

Diversify the income stream. If you make most of your money freelancing, consider doing some pluralsight courses or writing a book. I highly recommend reading this article [1] from Troy Hunt (creator of HaveIBeenPwned) on some of the finance lessons he's learned.

You might also look at working part time with a regular client at a cheaper rate, or modifying your contract to ensure more regularity, especially if you can manage to get benefits.

[1] - [https://www.troyhunt.com/10-personal-finance-lessons-for- tec...](https://www.troyhunt.com/10-personal-finance-lessons-for-technology- professionals/)

</comment><comment><USER22> First of all, congrats! I wanna tell you things I wish someone had told me, some of which will involve your career.

Assuming you and your partner live together-- you will have a strong hint if you're having a boy or a girl by how the pregnancy affects the woman. Girls generally are a sleepy pregnancy. Boys are generally energetic pregnancies. This has to do with the fetus producing sex hormones which affect the mother.

Being a parent is a marathon, not a race. I burned myself out before the baby was even born trying to be everything to everyone. Trying to keep my wife happy, trying to keep an employer that could never be happy satisfied. Let me repeat this point. You need to separate yourself from things that can't be satisfied. From employers whom you can never work enough for, from people who use all of your time and energy.

From now on, your life will be about stability. Children thrive on stability, and you will too. When you enter the stability mindset suddenly whole swaths of society make sense.

You're going to have a hard time getting a job with a child. You won't have time to study interview ephemera. Your hair will turn gray from lack of sleep. You won't have time to participate in the latest fads, or to get drinks after work, and you will be judged for that.

But all the meanwhile, you'll be doing something vastly more important.

</comment><comment><USER19> Congratulations. Cherish it ! Take care of your partner - eat healthy food.

I would like to add - stop worrying. Yes you don't have a predictable income, but your constant worrying about it will hamper your ability to have one. It is a vicious loop. Be calm, keep improving your skills and producing better results. In your anxiety to provide for your kid, it is easy to forget to actually "be" with them, love them. Children can easily pick these things in you. Read/tell them stories every night. Goof off with them - this is your chance to be a kid again !! It is surprising how easily you can get away with "my kids insist I do/play this with them" :)!. The world can wait, it will be there still, when you return to it.

Like others have said, lower your costs - increase your savings. Keep increasing your Savings Rate. Drop things that cost but add little/no value. Convenience has a cost - Embrace inconvenience. Prefer buying used things, learn to invest at a low cost. Stay healthy. Parks and libraries are free, use them over other forms of entertainments.

</comment><comment><USER23> Congrats!

It really depends on your current situation, so to be more helpful please answer these:

1) how much savings do you have?

2) assuming a spouse, will the spouse continue to work? Do you have parents nearby who can help with childcare?

3) can you clarify your earnings, maybe with yearly breakdown of the past 5 years?

4) where are you located (country at least)?

Option 1) Get a regular job with health benefits. If you're a programmer in the US with some experience, $65-80K should be readily attainable. Certainly much more depending on location and abilities. Likely the least stressful but more boring option.

Option 2) diversify the income as vorpalhex said. This will be more stressful. You do need to figure out your "minimum expenses" and budget for that. You can't afford to go 1 year without making anything unless you've got significant money banked.

One datapoint: in a US midwestern city, a conservative baby/toddler budget is running me about $4-6K not including increased medical. Set a budget just assuming you're going to max your out-of-pocket every year. 1 birth + 1 ER visit will usually get you there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have small saving (<10k) and I run my own dev agency which just survived dramatic founders separation. We live in Ethiopia but my wife is American. I think she just stopped paying for healthcare . I didn't wanna bring it up just now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ohh the one advantage I have is that my parents and older sisters live cloth by. So, at least, no baby sitter concerns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Beyond the advice of "healthy buffers of cash" \- which is good advice - <USER2> might want to get your sleep now.

I don't mean that you should oversleep - since you want to balance your time in order build up as much cash as possible NOW...What I mean is: don't go out and party much now. You will not have enough sleep when your baby arrives, so sleep now.

Beyond cash and sleep, begin to work out a system (AHEAD of time) with your partner - including who will sleep while the other is on pager duty - er, I mean, feeding/diaper duty. In addition to organizing duties, communicate, communicate, and communicate with your partner NOW, DURING, and AFTER your baby arrives. Communication is so important during projects, and this is vastly more important than other projects, so it makes sense that communication with your partner is essential.

You (and your partner) are about to put a dent into the universe; cheers, congratulations, and best of luck!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Edit: We just came back from a long walk out. At first I was quiet and awkward. Then I talked about it and handled it better. I even told her how I asked the HN community for help and how it helped me. It turns out she did the same in some mom's community. The advice she we got was completely different. Hers were things like 'take a cute pic'. Mine were more practical and what I wanted to hear. Even though some of them were scary. Maybe, I should have provided better context. Everyone assumed am from US or EU. Anyways, thanks for the help and sold advice. I was in the toilet shaking when I posted this. You guys helped me to think about it in a practical way. I still don't have a solid plan but I feel like I have a clear head.

<comment><USER19> If you don't live in the US/EU, basic things are pretty cheaper in RoW. The family/community ties tend to be stronger. You can live off well on a small budget and increase your savings if you ignore keeping up with the Jones's, societal trends or obligations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Congratulations! Becoming a father involves so many great emotions and moments of excitement, fear, and wonder.

It's scary becoming a new parent. Having children is world changing, because you no longer have to think only about yourself — there is someone else who loves you, and depends completely upon you. There is no one that I've ever spoken with has ever said that they felt ready for this change. That's completely normal, and that's okay.

My wife and I were relatively young — age 21 — when we had our first son. Our situation was somewhat similar to yours in that we had a financial challenge; we learned how to utilize what was available to us. As others have said in this thread: your community and relationships are extremely valuable. It takes a village!

</comment><comment><USER26> Many of us here started with a family and no money and now the children are older have money. Life is a bit back to front that way.

My advice is work hard. Knowing you have provided for your family is one of the great joys of life. Whether that means the $20 second birthday dinner you paid for or helping your twenty year old through uni. Provide what needs provided.

My journey was being the photocopy guy in a school, advertising fixing computers in the newspaper at night, getting a degree with the Open University, being an IT Technician and now leading an Infrastructure Team for a saas company. I also have a sideline which my company let's me work on one day a week. Do what you have to do :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> If you have inconsistent income you have to have a healthy buffer of cash that you can draw from in times where you aren't making a lot of money. Congratulations on becoming a dad!

</comment><comment><USER28> Budget. Make your inconsistent income look like a steady one and plan how you're going to spend the money.

I use YNAB, and they have a bunch of articles / videos / podcasts about variable income, such as [https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ynab%20variable%20inco...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ynab%20variable%20income)

</comment><comment><USER29> Wow, what an incredible journey you're embarking on. Congratulations to you -- I'm vicariously thrilled and terrified as I read this post :)

Regarding consistent income, one of the companies I work for offers part-time, fully remote contractor work conducting technical interviews. I use it as a way to keep a stable income while I pursue riskier ventures outside of that company and a lot of the folks working on the platform have very young families. I plan to use it as my sole income when I start a family of my own. It might be a good fit for you since it sounds like you'd want to continue doing your own contract work.

It pays $100 USD per 90-minute interview -- if this type of thing is interesting to you (or anyone reading, for that matter) -- feel free to send me an email! Details are in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER4> In my experience having a baby cost very little. There's an initial outlay for crib/buggy/etc, but you don't need to buy new - and if you have family nearby you probably can mostly use hand-me-downs (we did). Dunno where you live, but doctor visits for kids are free in a lot of Europe. Also - breastfeed!

</comment><comment><USER30> I was in a similar 'unpredictable income' situation when I had my kid. Since you're on HN, I'm assuming that your income comes from some kind of knowledge work, and you have to be mentally sharp to be productive.

The best investment I ever made was to get a night nanny. This is someone who comes to your home at night and changes diapers, feeds the baby (or brings them to the mom to nurse without waking you up) and may also do basic domestic stuff like laundry and dishes while your partner adjusts to their new routine as a parent.

The cost is going to vary dramatically depending on where you live and whether your kid has any kind of special needs (e.g., if they're a premie you might want a night nanny who is also a registered nurse).

They will basically double your productivity during your waking hours since you will not be suffering (as much) from sleep deprivation.

</comment><comment><USER31> Congratulations.

It's a good idea to have a list of must have's/nice to have supplies for the baby. Stick to the must have's, skip the others. You will spend less money and avoid having too much stuff afterwards.

The money you save this way you can use it as a buffer for the periods with limited income.

</comment><comment><USER32> Plenty of people with less financial stability than yourself are parents and do just fine. The most important part, more than any other advice is to just show up. A lot of people overestimate what it takes to be a good parent. Be there, be present, and the rest tends to fall into place.

</comment><comment><USER33> Congratulations. Not sure if this will work for you or not but this is what I did -

* Make sure you have a good health insurance plan.

* 529 account - the day my kids were born I started a recurring deposit 100 with some extra deposit on events like tax refund/bonus etc. I want to have enough to support public college tution.

* whatever I have left after mortgage and monthly expenses, I contribute to each of my accounts in specified order, going to next account only when I reach max limit for that account

         - Checking account (limit 2 months of expenses)

         - Online savings account for emergencies (limit 6 months of expenses)

         - Roth IRA for both my wife and me (limit IRS prescribed limit around 6K per year)

         - Retirement accounts (Robo advisors : regular investment account/IRA)

</comment><comment><USER34> Definitely read the book Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting.

Getting the baby to sleep through the night is something you want to do as soon as possible.

Your also going to want to get really good at time management. With one kid, you are allowed one hobby. Once you have two kids you can have a hobby once in a blue moon.

If you can get a stable gig, I would recommend it. Diaper prices recently went up.

</comment><comment><USER35> Just remember in the beginning. It's basically 3 things that will make a baby cry. Those are needing a diaper changed, hungry or tired. Also if you want to gain brownie points with the wife. Switch off with her for caring for the baby. Just realize your both going to be tired. The switching back and forth with the care not only helps avoid arguments but also is nice getting a few extra hours of sleep.

</comment><comment><USER36> Congrats. I owe my career and the opportunity to bring my family to the states thanks to Upwork.

With that level of income I could save for the trip, home, car, the works. It opened up a huge market for me and ultimate gave my everything. Try that platform to find work I'm assuming you are a programmer or something related since you're on HN.

Also, try not to freelance as much, it's too unpredictable for children.

</comment><comment><USER37> Look for Daddy-bootcamps, as well as all the other kind of classes available. These classes are often times free or pretty inexpensive. You don't even have to belong to the Hospitals that they're presented at a lot of times.

I went to a daddy bootcamp, breast feeding with my wife, baby-care, etc... All of which were extremely informative and helpful.

Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER38> Why can't you just buffer money on your business bank account, and thus give yourself a steady salary on a private account?

</comment><comment><USER39> You always have the option to switch careers.

</comment><comment><USER40> Find a permanent job at BigCo. Take mortgage and buy a house. Spend lots of time with family and support your wife morally, but do not "spoil" her. Start saving for kid(s) education. Plan for 2. Congrats and good luck.

</comment><comment><USER41> Congratulations, your life is about to change in all sorts of ways. One of them is that you are now responsible for others, not just yourself. Accept this, don't freak out and think Cooley and rationally what needs to be done.

</comment><comment><USER42> Congratulations!

Get a steady gig. Life is about to get real. (BTW, kids are the greatest.)

</comment><comment><USER43> Hey man, first off... no judgement intended, but look on Glass Door and make sure you're being paid appropriately for your line of work in your region. And... consider moving to a region that pays more. Just saying, $50k seems low for tech / anything that would bring you to the Hacker News community.

If you're freelancing, and sometimes you get paid and sometimes you don't, you need to work on getting clients to pay up-front (most are happy to do the first payment up-front at least), or at minimum make sure your contracts are solid and you're billing and following up for the work you did. (This is the bane of freelancing, and it gets more complex the more clients you have.) Fixing your contracts and invoicing will keep things consistent. Cut any client that doesn't pay on time, and never lift a finger to help someone who is behind on payments -- so many times people try and be "nice" but if they don't pay, they're just using you.

Generally speaking, so many issues are sorted out for you if you take a job at a bigger company. Stability, insurance, consistent pay... this is a huge draw for a lot of people. Freelancing is fun for diversity, and the pay can be better, but in the long-run most of my friends who work at big companies seem like they have more time for their families. Something to consider.

Savings is going to be key, and it's impossible to retroactively save, like it's impossible to retroactively diet, so you just fix the issues as you see them and try to avoid mistakes and stay healthy going forward. You need to find a way to get money saved up. It'll help with your stress. When I freelance, I try and keep 6 months of cash for all bills on hand. My mortgage, car payments, etc. -- should work dry up, I want runway to fix it.

The prerequisite to the above is having a budget. A lot of people just sort of spend what they spend, and don't think about it. This is lazy and wasteful. If you eat out a lot, set a budget... and consider scaling that down. When I first started tracking, I realized I was spending about $600 a month eating out. I cut that to $300 -- it was a bit harder at first, but I like cooking and meal prep, and within a year I went from eating out almost every meal to almost never eating out at all -- unless it's for work.

Once I had a budget, and my target savings goals, I got there by auditing my spend, and cutting expenses. Then putting aside 10% of my paycheck (for a few years), into paying off all debts and building savings. Once I hit the "cushion" goal, I still take 10% and put it into a 1) rainy day fund, and 2) retirement fund. The rainy day fund is for bigger purchases... things like, "Oh crap, I need a new AC," type stuff. It's invested, but it's more liquid -- I can turn it into cash inside of a week if needed.

For debts, it's not rocket science. Pay the ones with the higher interest rates first. Generally speaking. Credit card debt is horrible, and will doom you. Get it all paid off as quickly as you can. Then work on things like student loans, mortgages, etc. Keep in mind a lot of this debt helps you with your taxes... set up some time with a professional tax consultant and see what they say.

For a retirement account, and for a kid's college account, I just use a three- fund portfolio approach. [https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three- fund_portfolio](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio) It's simple enough, and I've beaten the market the last 10 years. Let the machines do it, I wasted money on a money manager for years... kicking myself. They always took 1% of my money... not just the profit. It was a rip off. And you can do this stuff yourself. (=

Setup some time to chat with a banker, but y'know... understand that they're out to make money too. If you're new to investing, they can help you with some of the basics... a Roth IRA, for example, if you don't already have one. Keep away from places like Edward Jones, the strip-mall shops have literally the worst returns vs. fees vs. risks (vs. environmentally friendly investment) ratios.

Anyway look, financial health, like fitness, or anything... isn't something you just do over night. It takes planning and effort to get where you want to go. Don't beat yourself up for past mistakes, learn from them and adjust going forward. Cheers!

<comment><USER44> There are areas in Texas with moderately tech savvy industries where $50k can cover basic needs for a family of four with good housing (3BR/2BA with reasonable dimensions for all rooms and yard), savings, and an occasional splurge on entertainment.

Now in the SF Bay area, you've got to look at 2.5-4+ to keep that quality of life.

Useful salary, to some extent, is geographical.

The rest of what you're talking about, I've got nothing to add.

<comment><USER43> Yup, always gotta watch that salary vs. cost of living ratio.

That's what ruled out Seattle, SF, LA, and NYC for me. I'm in Austin -- not the cheapest place in Texas, but your buck goes a long way here. Not as far as it went 15 years ago, but property investments have really paid off for me here.

[https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/24/studywhen...](https://www.bizjournals.com/austin/news/2019/06/24/studywhen- adjusted-for-cost-of-living-austin-tech.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER46> First thing you need to do is make sure it's yours? You don't want to be trapped taking care of someone else's child.</comment>


graphql-tools-fork – keeping on stitching - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yaacovCR/graphql-tools-fork <comment><AUTHOR> Fork maintainer here. Hoping to continue supporting schema delegation and stitching despite Apollo deprecation, as well as addition of cross-service delegation caching. Looking for help, and trying to assess interest. :)</comment>


How William F. Buckley Jr. Tore Down Summer of Love Liberalisms (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kqed.org/arts/13653108/how-william-f-buckley-jr-tore-down-summer-of-love-liberalisms <comment><USER2> Great videos. Watching WFB, it makes you wonder just what its like to have more intellect than all the people on that panel combined. And he knew it too, and didn't have to prove it.</comment>


Laziness Inspires Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://nickmudge.info/index.php?post=125

<comment><USER2> This isn't really innovative, good idea its just done already.

Selenium does this for browser based apps. Autoit does it for most windows apps. There are more depending on your particular os/language needs.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't mean to indicate that automated testing is innovative. Just that laziness can cause innovativeness within oneself.</comment></comment>


"So... imagine you are building a sex machine" - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1264925104175112192 <comment> nca-peripherals Military connectors seem a stretch whereas Lemo F connectors would fit the... whatever because they come in a cornucopia of sizes, from 2 to 68 pins. 69 if you count the shield. Just chuck the male side in a rotary hammer enclosed in a stamped metal case and the user won't know the difference. They're even suitable for harsh environments.

[https://www.lemo.com/en/products/harsh-environment- connector...](https://www.lemo.com/en/products/harsh-environment- connector/f-connector)</comment>