Firefox Takes the Performance Crown From Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/02/146251/firefox-takes-the-performance-crown-from-chrome?utm_source=slashdot&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER4> (Disclaimer: I used to work on Chrome. I'm more than a year out at this point but I still talk to Chrome developers.)

Chrome wins some tests but loses the most on the start-up benchmarks, which is a real bummer. There was a time where we'd spend literally days figuring out why startup regressed by a handful of milliseconds, and this test shows an end-to-end test taking nearly six seconds.

One idea I saw mentioned is that there may be a bug related to how Chrome reads the system proxy settings (something about an API change between Windows 7 and Windows 8). I think most of the Chrome developers are still on Windows 7; the bots that are tracking startup performance are definitely still Windows 7 as well. So maybe that number is more of a single bug than a systematic thing.

All of the above is not intended to diminish Firefox's impressive results -- just thought I'd provide some background! What these sorts of tests show most is that competition pushes browsers ever faster. If the proxy theory above is right, then maybe this test will inspire Google to invest more into Windows 8 testing, which ultimately benefits users.

(Edit: Firefox won other tests too, I also didn't mean to say this was the only factor.)

<comment><USER5> > Chrome wins some tests but loses the most on the start-up benchmarks

Well, congratulations to FF for being the perfect browser for the 0.01 percent of people who don't keep their browser open all day.

<comment><USER6> Startup time matters (a lot). Even if i open it once a day i still want it to be fast. Nobody likes slow apps.

<comment><USER7> > _Startup time matters (a lot). Even if i open it once a day i still want it > to be fast. Nobody likes slow apps._

Slow is the 99.9999% of time you use it. Not the few seconds it takes to open.

Also, get an SSD and be done with it.

Also, with sleep, you don't even startup once a day.

<comment><USER8> I have an SSD, Firefox still takes a few seconds to open. Chrome is instant.

<comment><USER9> But for the majority without an SSD, Chrome is a lot slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Performance is nice to be sure, but I think other things are much more important in 2013, like consistent HTML Canvas implementations.

For one small example the in-canvas kerning on both Firefox and Chrome are _awful_ compared to IE10.

From a while ago: [http://i.imgur.com/62WBzVZ.png](http://i.imgur.com/62WBzVZ.png)

You can see for yourself here: [http://jsfiddle.net/vVC4s/](http://jsfiddle.net/vVC4s/)

Notice also the difference between doubling the font and doubling the scale, esp where each line gets cut off: [http://jsfiddle.net/jGcrL/](http://jsfiddle.net/jGcrL/)

This makes animations rickety and un-smooth (text animation): [http://jsfiddle.net/simonsarris/HZFcR/](http://jsfiddle.net/simonsarris/HZFcR/)

Surprisingly IE10 handles all of these perfectly. Of course, IE10 has totally broken canvas clipping (non-rectangular clipping regions are impossible. They worked fine in IE9.)

Firefox does render large text much better than Chrome, which is why I used it when taking screenshots for my book. But scaling the text (as opposed to setting a larger font) is a disaster.

This is just an example. I could go on for days about canvas bugs. I wish there was a bigger push to fix those instead of eking out a performance advantage.

To Firefox's huge credit, I've submitted a lot of bugs to Chromium and the FF team, and the FF team _consistently_ gets back to me within a week and usually fixes the bug within a month. The bug reporting experience with Chrome on the other hand is rather disenchanting.

For a cross-platform bug example, the context's miterLimit is just plain broken by default in Chrome. I reported this (with examples) back in April and have yet to receive _any_ kind of reply. Thank god it's an easy workaround.

[https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=225512](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=225512)

If you want people to use your browser and develop with it in mind, working elements are more important than being slightly faster than the others. (Good developer tools come in close second I think, at least for this crowd).

<comment><USER11> My experience with reporting bugs in FF/Chrome is a bit different. I reported a bug in canvas text implementation, which occurs in both of those browsers, on Feb 20. I provided all the necessary info and even a minimal test case. The bug has been confirmed in FF quite quickly (within days) and then... nothing. It's quite serious, basically you can't do smooth animation (movement) of text. Similar to the text scaling bug.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=843310](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=843310)

Reporting to Chrome has been even worse. No word, no nothing. Not even a confirmation. (Although the submitting process itself has been simpler AFAIR).

That's really uncool, after a few of those you lose interest in submitting any more since the feedback feels like "we don't care". So you end up using the time to find workarounds instead.

Now obviously someone will point out everyone can go ahead and submit a patch for the bug itself since it's open source. That's all cool and dandy, I love open source as much as the next guy, but please, let's get serious. Who has the time to dive into a massive codebase like that and fix the bug? Not everyone has plans to become a browser developer.

<comment><USER12> I note a Mozilla developer has commented on this bug today: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=843310#c3](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=843310#c3)

<comment><USER11> Indeed, I started getting some emails after posting my comment here. The power of HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ehm, at least one of the tests they used is wrong. They used this one as WebGL performance test:

[http://luic.github.io/WebGL-Performance- Benchmark/](http://luic.github.io/WebGL-Performance-Benchmark/)

Despite the name this program in fact doesn't use WebGL, it runs using three.js 2D canvas renderer (just check the source).

Additionally even the results they got there are suspicious, I got completely opposite results on my system (Windows 7), with Chrome being faster than Firefox by a large margin:

[http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera- next,3534-8.html)

They got 777 on Firefox vs 437 on Chrome, I got 290 on Firefox vs 441 on Chrome (this is fully in line with my everyday experience, doing browser graphics).

<comment><USER14> Toms hardware seem to consistently have methodology problems in their tests. I don't understand why they are given so much credence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just switched from Chrome to FF. The performance is close enough, and good enough for both, that it's a secondary consideration at this point.

I switched because I got tired of hearing Chrome constantly accessing my hard drive. I wound up going through the list of Chrome switches here ([http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_s...](http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc)) to try to alleviate it. Some things helped but not to an acceptable level. I use W7. Using procmon I could see Chrome constantly re-reading keys from the registry and writing to temp files even though caching and pre-fetching were disabled.

I was also was concerned for Chrome accessing my laptop SSD. Even though I couldn't hear it I could see the lifetime allotment of reads and writes being flushed.

<comment><USER16> On a similar note, my PC's hard drive starts making crazy noises as soon as Windows 7 goes into screensaver mode. I've turned off every disk-related option I can find and it's still doing... something. Maddeningly it stops as soon as the screensaver is interrupted.

Linux is a lot more predictable in that regard...

<comment><USER17> Probably the Windows indexing service. It's configured to run when you're not using your computer. You can turn it off and see if that stops the hard drive noises: [http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-f...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/disable-windows-search- indexer/914286d5-9485-49a9-a3df-f9516c9970cd)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> i'm developing some js compute-heavy apps and Chrome still pulls ahead quite significantly (by as much as 5x) in many cases. i've filed js-perf bugs with mozilla that have been accepted but seem to be quite low on the priority list. artificial benchmarks don't always tell the full story :(

if any mozillian js dev is lacking stuff to work on ;)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=879393](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=879393)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858986](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=858986)

</comment><comment><USER19> Actual benchmark story from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970429)

</comment><comment><USER20> Go straight to article referenced in Slashdot [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera- next,3534.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> The issue with Firefox is that some times the whole browser is freezing. That's what keeps pushing me back to Chrome, not performance issues.

<comment><USER22> That is _your_ issue with Firefox or your setup. I never had this for at least one or two years now, even with misbehaving scripts.

<comment><USER23> Nope, It is a common issues with Firefox although it has been greatly reduced in the last year or so.

The project to fix all this is called e10s. Moving Content, and UI etc to seperate process as well as OMTx ( Off Main Thread Everything ) where Firefox Dev trys to do everything in async style and move them off Main Thread.

Progress has been slow. But at least they are working on it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I gave up on Firefox a year or two back because of performance concerns - <USER2> raw speed but ram consumption (leading to thrashing when tabbing between ram- intensive processes) and its poor single-threaded freezing problems. Nice to hear that FF is getting better and I'll be able to go back to it - <USER3> extension community is far better than Chrome's, and Firebug is without peer.

<comment><USER25> Frankly I think Firefox performs a lot better than Chrome for memory usage now. After a few days of having Chrome open it's usually using between 3 and 6GB of RAM (Usually Facebook is using a gigabyte so killing that tab frees up a lot) and this is with <50 tabs open. Friends who use Firefox end up with ~1GB of RAM usage in a similar timeframe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm really surprised that no one in these comments and the thread on the actual story[1] (instead of this...whatever the equivalent of blogspam is but for slashdot) hasn't mentioned the horrible averaging methodology of this benchmark suite.

The individual tests aren't even a problem (though I would maybe pick some more and/or different ones, especially their somewhat odd benchmark choices in performance and graphics), but the averaging makes no sense at all.

Averaging time-based benchmarks is problematic enough (it feels more right, but it still isn't a good idea), but how on earth do you convert a "number of times we had to refresh a page" result into a number that you can then average with a "standards compliance" count and a measure of memory efficiency?? Even if you normalize (which it doesn't seem like they did from the output numbers, but maybe they did), the numbers still aren't comparable because you've given no account for the relative magnitude of their effect.

e.g. if you have a test of "does the browser have a konami code easter egg?", it doesn't matter if the geometric mean is less sensitive to outliers, because it still doesn't make any sense to take an average of that with "the playback framerate of an HD Trololo video" and then pretend that the average provides any insight. And it's even worse if you then compare that average to other crazy averages!

At best you can look at relative ranking, which they actually mention but then proceed to give exact numbers for their relative ranking. There's no information about "betterness" in there, though, except if you then divide up the numbers again to say "these points came from the win in test A, and these points from test B"...at which point you just have the original tests again. Better to count win/no-wins and use that as your final result. Then at least it's obvious that if some tests are much more non-trivial than others that you'll have to give arbitrary weights for the final result, as opposed to having the arbitrary weights being implicit in the tests themselves.

Sorry for the rant :) This is a good recognition of Mozilla's hard work, though notably they've been winning many of these tests for a while now (especially the memory ones), but it would be nice if tomshardware could drop the basically meaningless overall scores (or we could just collectively ignore them).

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5970429)

<comment><USER27> I agree the need to produce a single overall number is nuts. We need a better setup for comparing things, somehow...

That said, if you _do_ need to produce one in a situation like this, then geometric mean is the least bad way to do it because it does not depend on the normalization of the individual tests at all: if you have 'k' tests and change the workload for one of them by a factor of N, then the average will change by a factor of N^{1/k} no matter what the actual numbers are. This is why it's used so commonly in benchmark that want to produce a single number.

Of course this very property is what makes geometric-mean-based benchmarks so gameable: a 20% speedup of an already-fast operation (say eliminating a single instruction) is worth as much for purposes of the benchmark as a 20% speedup in something that's really slow. The result is that browsers keep micro- optimizing already-fast things to win the benchmark game....

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> So much of any comparison like this is about performance, but I really don't think that's as important as it used to be, and that's coming from someone who generally uses slow computers and optimizes software until they run fast.

I'm typing this on a bit of an exceptional example, a 2.6 GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 1 GB of single-channel DDR-400 RAM. The one saving grace is that it has an SSD, but I put the swap file on the spinning drive (which is modern). It's running Linux Mint 14, Xfce edition, with a handful of minor OS- level optimizations. Firefox 21, with a fairly standard configuration, flawlessly handles a dozen or more tabs on a daily basis. It's even pretty snappy, more limited by my internet connection (1.5 Mb DSL) than by the hardware it's running on.

If this sorry excuse for a computer does that well, are the relatively minor differences in performance between browsers going to be a big deal on modern hardware? There will be edge cases, such as the people who have hundreds of tabs open at a time, but for the average user I'm having trouble envisioning that.

The things that make a difference anymore are very tough to quantify in tests like Tom's Hardware did. I will always have Firefox around because I think Mozilla actually cares about privacy. I use Presto on my phone because it's the only one I've found that renders things how I want. Many people are tied to a browser because of extensions. Standards support doesn't matter until you find a page where a browser doesn't work, and those pages will be different for different people. Browsers can be rock solid on one computer and worthlessly crashy on another.

I don't think a round of benchmarks has meant anything to me in browser selection for a long time, and when it did I did them myself so as to account for the computer they were running on. I choose by trying to use a variety of them for a while, and a winner always emerges quite quickly.

</comment><comment><USER29> I seriously can't understand how people can use it with its constant single threaded UI freezing. I've just tried nightly and still the same issue!

</comment><comment><USER30> I wish they (FF) would also spend some time on the small annoyances:

 _Lack of a restart button. Now when I upgrade FF, I have to "kill -9" it from my terminal to get it to restore windows upon restart_

 _Memory leaks. Leave yourself logged in to Facebook for a few days, and watch it take up 2GB of memory._

 _No way to easily filter sites with cookies like you can in the next tab over, where you manage sites with saved passwords. Why is this? Does FF secretly want you to not muck with cookies?_

Now, I'm sure there are addons and plugins for the above. But I should _not_ need addons for basic UX. Save the addons for fancier stuff.

<comment><USER31> * For the restart after upgrade, either it is a bug, or you have not seen the little "restore tabs from last time" button in the lower right part of the browser.

* I have not experienced that, I don't use Facebook.

* For the cookie stuff, you'll be pleased to learn about the about:permissions feature (type it in your address bar).

<comment><USER32> Whoa, about:permissions is awesome. Thanks for that!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I just learned something my math teachers never told me from a tech blog:

 _Geometric mean is useful for comparing when the expected range or units of values is different. For example, startup time is measured in seconds, but BrowsingBench numbers are things like the unitless 6646. The arithmetic mean would fail to "normalize" these values and give disproportionate weight to some over others; the geometric mean is one way of trying to account for this._

</comment><comment><USER34> I suspect this was "by a nose". But that's good: I hope to see both browsers trading blows in this little war, leap frogging back and forth in the lead.

<comment><USER35> Actually not; Firefox beat Chrome comprehensively in the overall test. Chrome actually came 3rd in the list - [http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...](http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-opera- next,3534-12.html)

<comment><USER26> To be fair, this slashdot story covering the original story (presumably submitted because the original story was submitted and talked about yesterday) mentions the "performance crown", which was just "by a nose". You're right about the overall test, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I did not find this objective, the test scope was limited and the sample set of browsers tested were not the latest version. Not that I use IE but why use IE10 when IE11 is available for testing? If you are doing a performance benchmark browser vs browser you will not be taken seriously if your test is not objective. In this case I find the sample set skewed.

<comment><USER37> If I understand correctly, IE11 is only a preview version not the final release.

<comment><USER36> Correct it is a preview.

If that is the case then I am wrong in my assessment and withdraw my statement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> These types of headlines are so meaningless. On what benchmark on what platform?

On OS X Safari outperforms both for many tasks (again, YMMV depending on what you're doing.) But that's meaningless for the billions of Windows and Linux users out there.

I wish our industry would move past these kinds of silly headlines. When it first started when Chrome came out there was a _massive_ difference between Chrome and the other browsers, now all of them are very capable and competitive for pretty much anything you want to do.

<comment><USER39> TomHardware's browser benchmarks are pretty comprehensive. However, what annoys me about this test and this headline, is that Chrome 28, with its new faster Blink core, is literally a week away from being released, which means Firefox will only have its 15 seconds of fame (or rather a week).

Why did they make the test immediately after Firefox was out? Or do they repeat the test immediately after each browser version comes out? In that case I'm looking forward to the test with Chrome 28 included.

I'm not saying Chrome 28 will necessarily win in the next one. I just find it a little strange that they did it without waiting a bit more for the next Chrome version, too, before writing a headline like that. It just reminds of me those polls who turn out a certain way depending on how you ask the question.

<comment><USER6> Most likely because it takes time to do those benchmarks. After Chrome 28, FF 23 should be out so why not wait for that either ?

<comment><USER39> The difference between FF release and next Chrome release is 2 weeks at most. The different between the Chrome release and the next Firefox is 4 weeks. But whatever, I'm not too hung up on this. Good for Firefox, if they can maintain that lead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In my daily use, I find Chrome to be overall faster and easier on the computer in general. I have recently run into a case during my development where Chrome actually has trouble compared to Firefox ANNNNNNND IE. It involves a large unordered list with several different divs, buttons, and links in it. There is some serious jumpy scrolling compared to both of the others, which surprisingly render smoothly.

This is the only instance I've ever run into where it didn't quite measure up.

</comment><comment><USER41> The reason I use Firefox is because it has a set of extensions I find useful, and because I like Firefox Sync (end-to-end encryption of bookmarks/history etc.).

Whether the browsers shave a few microseconds off JavaScript performance is neither here nor there for me: but perhaps I'm a weirdo.

Performance is nice, but not enough of a reason for me to switch browser.

</comment><comment><USER42> I just want to know one thing. When I have only two add ons in Firefox why does it take up nearly 200m of memory with no pages displayed? IE is taking 38m with this page displayed, FF has moved to 208m. Firefox is so damn quick to eat memory it causes my laptop to start caching which decreases performance and eats battery.

</comment><comment><USER43> Still has big issues with mouse events between iframes and parent documents. Been an issue since at least 2009. Sad.

Edit: issue was reported in 2001. I can't even comprehend that.

</comment><comment><USER44> I stopped using Firefox and switched to Chrome when, even on an x86 Mac, I could see the browser's UI redraw itself. Not going back at this point.

</comment><comment><USER45> Doing comparative tests of browsers is OK up to a point but in reality the performance problems on the web are due to the way we build and deploy sites.

</comment><comment><USER46> And that's the day I switched back. I abandoned after FF 3.x

</comment><comment><USER47> What, no Lynx?

<comment><USER48> WebGL is not implemented, though 3d renderers to tty exist since the 90s, e.g. ttyquake! A scandal!

[http://web.archive.org/web/20021113144923/http://webpages.on...](http://web.archive.org/web/20021113144923/http://webpages.onvoy.com/bobz/ttyquake/) (original site gone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I switched to Chrome to see what the speed was like and I came to the conclusion it was a slicker browser for daily use.

But then I reminded myself that some things are more important than raw speed and responsiveness.

Google's interest is tracking and targeting. Chrome actively worked against me in this regard. Firefox, despite its financial ties to Google, put control and freedom onto my desktop.

A bit of occasional sluggishness is a worthy price to pay.

The beer is free at all the browser bars and while I was drinking it, I remembered I liked free as in speech.

<comment><USER50> >Google's interest is tracking and targeting.

Last I checked, every bit of this can be turned off in the browser settings if they really bother you that much. (Or heck, use Chromium.)

In my experience, they offer quite a bit. Typo correction, instant and stupidly fast searches from the address bar, that kind of thing.

I'll never understand the pathological hate-on that people have for advertising, I suppose.

<comment><USER49> Advertising is annoying and rude. Flashing away trying to steal my attention from the activity I am trying to pursue.

"don't do that, come and do this instead"

"skip this ad in 5 seconds" \- no thanks

The interesting thing about the New Albion was that it was so completely modern in spirit. There was hardly a soul in the firm who was not perfectly well aware that publicity--advertising--is the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced. In the red lead firm there had still lingered certain notions of commercial honour and usefulness. But such things would have been laughed at in the New Albion. Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money- god. Gordon studied them unobtrusively. As before, he did his work passably well and his fellow-employees looked down on him. Nothing had changed in his inner mind. He still despised and repudiated the money-code. Somehow, sooner or later, he was going to escape from it; even now, after his first fiasco, he still plotted to escape. He was IN the money world, but not OF it. As for the types about him, the little bowler-hatted worms who never turned, and the go- getters, the American business-college gutter-crawlers, they rather amused him than not. He liked studying their slavish keep-your-job mentality. He was the chiel amang them takin' notes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Thanks Google, for investing on the best web browser out there!

</comment><comment><USER52> Websites like "Tom's Hardware" really piss me off.</comment>


Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay? - <AUTHOR> One of my friends was working in call center. Now due to stay at home orders, he's been asked to stay home without any pay.<p>Please suggest some ways to generate income. <comment><USER2> There is shortage of 3D printing filament because of virus, so I've been creating filament and selling it.

[https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at- ho...](https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-home-for- cheap-6c908bb09922)

This activity also help recycle waste plastic.

Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool

It's trivial to get the quality right.

You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Etsy or your own Shopify store and use Facebook ads/Google Ads to advertise your website.

<comment><USER3> I don't think someone working at a call center has the technical aptitude and financial resources to source and build there own extrusion machine.

<comment><USER4> Lots of technically gifted people working dead-end jobs, due to things like location, family situation, lack of formal education, personal issues, or whatever :-)

<comment><USER5> Exactly.

As the saying goes "talent is evenly distributed; opportunity is not."

I've known lots of very smart people working what would be considered dead- end, or at least, lower-end jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some truly awful suggestions here. The question isnt about changing his life by learning to code or setting up a plastics machine (which is pretty cool but takes investment) or starting an affiliate site and then generating traffic, it's about generating income during a global pandemic.

1\. Fiverr 2\. Mechanical Turk 3\. Craigslist Gigs 4\. UpWork

Can generate $50 by dinner time if you're willing to focus and put in the time.

<comment><USER7> That brings up a question: What can you do to earn $50 in 24 hours?

Unless you already have mturk the waiting period is days to weeks if you're not rejected. Fiverr/Upwork would all require a large amount of luck to make $50 in one day as communication with client and turn-around time could take 12-24 hours before even starting a small one hour project. CL might be the best way to make that money in that time period doing a miscellaneous yard service or delivery or whatever. I'm curious though if there are other avenues to make $50 in one day.

<comment><USER8> People Ready (aka Labor Ready). Be there early before they open, and if you're lucky (because I'm sure they're swamped these days) you'll get a full day's work. You get paid that evening.

<comment><USER9> I've always been pretty nomadic, and one trick I was taught long ago when you need cash in a hurry is to go stand outside a self-storage facility and look for people that need help moving. I was able to make $50-$150 a day when times were tight.

I bring this up because people actually do call day labor companies for this all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Start selling anything and everything that has any monetary value on platforms like: Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook marketplace, nextDoor, close5 (if they're still around), letgo, etc. I mean, literally, just go through every last item in your house. If you haven't used it in the last 3 months, what's the point of holding on to it?

It's labor intensive, but at when you're done, you'll have a much cleaner house and a little bit of money too. I do this on the weekends.

<comment><USER11> A friend used to have a great ebay sideline in reselling poorly listed items at a higher price.

He'd search for reasonably high value items that had been listed with spelling mistakes in the name so that they didn't show up in searches, or showed up too far down the results to be noticed. He'd then buy them and immediately on winning the auction, re-list the same item but without the spelling mistakes.

His secret trick was using a copy/paste of the text and images from the historically highest priced listing that had sold for that same item, which ebay made it easy to search for. By the time it arrived in the post, he'd already sold it on at a higher price to someone else. He just relabelled the packages, sent them on and pocketed the difference.

<comment><USER12> That's a great trick! Any idea how profitable this was?

<comment><USER11> I never asked for figures, but he kept doing it despite being in a reasonably well paid job as social media manager for a restaurant chain.

Which brings to mind another of his tricks: He set up a lunch voucher trading scheme for all of the other restaurants in the little downtown area where he was based. He got to eat anywhere he liked every lunch time.

One of his employment perks was getting a free lunch from his restaurant every day. He soon got bored of it, so he designed and printed some home made lunch vouchers with his name on, and arranged for the front of house staff to accept them in lieu of payment. The understanding was that there would be no more than one per day for the days he didn't eat there. Then he went to all of the other restaurants and told their front of house staff that they could swap their own free lunches for his by letting him eat there in exchange for his vouchers. They could then eat at his restaurant for free on one of the next few days.

That was 10 years ago and I've never since met anyone with a better hustle than that guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just started working on a list of gigs/side hustles - you can see it here:

[https://goofy-swartz-25f1b7.netlify.app/](https://goofy- swartz-25f1b7.netlify.app/)

or here in a day or two:

[https://www.lotsofopps.com](https://www.lotsofopps.com)

Filter by skills, physical level, time to get paid, and things you have. It has some rough edges, but I'm fixing things and adding new listings every day.

Finding some of the data is difficult - many companies bury their commissions and fees and very few companies tell you what you'll earn. Most payouts take several days to reach you, but if it's your _first ever_ payout, it may be an additional 1-2 weeks.

<comment><USER14> This is great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> File for unemployment. The federal government is increasing the weekly payment. Additionally, I believe this is not limited to California, unemployment compensation starts from day 1 rather than the second week.

Edit: Also unemployment compensation is being extended to job types which previously weren't covered, like hairdressers and massage therapists. Having been told to stay home from work for Covid should be sufficient to at least get the federal compensation.

<comment><USER16> This should definitely be done, but a caveat against assuming this is a blanket solution: I have plenty of friends in the theater industry who mostly make money as non-employee contract/gig workers. But 2 of these friends also had some minimal part-time work last year where they made under $1000. Because they had a W-2 last year, they are disqualified from getting unemployment based on their contract work, even though their contract work represents 95% of their income. The amount of unemployment you get is based on the amount of money you made at your last job or over the last few quarters. Which means they're getting almost nothing in unemployment benefits. To make matters worse, the website clearly just shoehorned in the corona-related changes and the application process is extremely confusing for someone in their situation. Even walking them through the process over screen share, as someone who has applied for unemployment benefits twice in the past, I couldn't really figure out exactly how to answer some of the questions. So there are definitely people getting screwed on unemployment, even if it is working out well for the majority.

<comment><USER17> This brings up a good point about the complication of the unemployment application system.

Maybe "Unemployment application screenshare advisor" would be a good job for a lot of people right now.

Especially if they have experience with the edge cases.

<comment><USER18> This is a great idea, an independent covid-related gig that's totally compatible with call-center experience.

I will also add that some states are hiring unemployment office temps to handle the surge in applications, so it would be similar work, just more formal and no charge to the user (which would be the hard part of being independent).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber Eats, and the like make pretty decent money. About $7 per order before tip and in a busy area you might be able to snag two or three orders going the same direction making the $/hr a little better.

It's basically the definition of not great money but it's not very difficult, not physically straining, and you don't have to interview or whatever for it.

Grocery stores in my area are also hiring constantly right now. I assume the demand will flatten eventually but for now they're just taking people on with zero fanfare. Again, not good money, the work is physically harder, and you'll have to take shifts but it's a job you can get in a few days.

<comment><USER20> > it's not very difficult, not physically straining

eh ... I've never been a driver, but I kinda doubt this right now. A Chicago driver just ran over this women:

[https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/5/16/21261241/ms- ts-...](https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/5/16/21261241/ms-ts-fried- chicken-grubhub-hit-and-run-delivery-driver-chicago)

We don't know the full story as the video starts with her blocking his car. He shouldn't have run her over obviously. There's no excuse for that. But if he's operating on very small margins, he may have been frustrated they were moving slowly. He allegedly kicked their door, they wouldn't let him in, and then he was just going to dive off. They then blocked his car waiting for the police. The guy turned himself in, so if we give him the benefit of the doubt, it might have been stress rage. He's probably going to serve several months for assault.

People are on edge right now. A lot of companies are profiting and also screwing everyone over they can. You can be a delivery driver, but be aware it might be a very short term gain, and may not cover the cost of maintenance/operation of your vehicle in the long term.

<comment><USER21> Or, some people are just assholes. I find it very odd to read a comment here basically defending the driver - they were obviously going to call the police as soon as you started committing property damage to their store.

<comment><USER20> I'm not defending the driver. We also don't know what the 'property damage' was ... maybe he just kicked the door in frustration. He should go to jail, but the underlying thing I'm getting at is that EVERYONE IS ON EDGE.

This whole thing has made humanity more scared and dumb than anything. People are worried about their jobs, paying bills, etc. I don't think what this drive did was right, but there is a whole context being lost as to what led to this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Have they considered teaching their skills online for money? If they worked in a call center, they probably know how to deal with some really hard things. I'd love to learn how they have patience when dealing with angry customers.

At [http://joinstream.io](http://joinstream.io), we're building a super easy way to host a monetized livestream using Zoom. We generate a marketing page for you, handle billing, attendee management, and notifications. All you have to do is focus on selling your unique skills.

<comment><USER23> You can also create courses on [https://udemy.com](https://udemy.com) and on [https://youtube.com](https://youtube.com). A great way to identify good targets is explaining newly launched platforms and how they worked for you and what you learned. There's no guarantee that they'll make you a living wage immediately but they have a decent residual value.

<comment><USER24> Let's say, just hypothetically, that someone was burned out from working for ValleyBigCo Inc, has no need or desire to work full time+ and wanted to transition into teaching something to do with the creation of software - design, actual programming, whatever. What's the best path for this? Do your Udemy/YouTube suggestions still hold or is there something specific for this use case?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> 1\. Teach English by video to children overseas.

2\. Get a remote call centre job.

3\. The DoorDashes and Uber Eats of the world are doing tremendous business right now, as is Amazon (and they have the Flex delivery service). Instacart was also hiring some 300,000 people.

4\. If your friend is the creative or innovative type, there are a ton of competitions being hosted by various companies. You enter enough and the income can be somewhat reliable. This is my own personal niche.

5\. Freelance writing. Even with the downturn, there seems to be a decent number of businesses with blogs wanting guest articles.

<comment><USER26> Any sites you'd recommend for connecting with students/parents overseas looking to learn English?

<comment><USER27> [https://www.italki.com/](https://www.italki.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Get rid of old stuff on ebay/cl/fb marketplace. Or buy stuff from ebay/cl/fb marketplace and sell on Amazon.

and plugging a friend: [https://www.flipmine.com/](https://www.flipmine.com/) scrapes arbitrage opportunities b/w ebay and amazon.

<comment><USER29> Interesting recommendation of flipmine.

I buy in to the idea of what they're selling - used goods arbitrage - they're just selling another form of a "get rich scheme". Follow the money.

If this niche were so great then the proprietors would keep this software platform to themselves to identify the opportunities and perform the work. Instead, they "offer" you the opportunity while they take in a $39 monthly fee for their service.

That's my take on almost the entire industry of "make money doing X, just use my service or take my course!" Bro, the real money is conning these suckers.

A fool and his money will soon part ways.

<comment><USER30> I mean SaaS probably requires a lot less time... and scales a bit more than doing it as a business.

<comment><USER29> Exactly! So you should start a SaaS company and get the hell away from spending monthly fees to find your next time consuming manual sale.

<comment><USER27> The point is, not everyone can start a SaaS company (like, as in OP's example, you are a call center employee). Just because you can't create the same high- ROI software business does not mean that the software being sold is a scam/worthless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fix bikes. There is presently a bike shortage, but probably a vast inventory almost-working bikes hanging in garages. Offer for a fee, a "no parts" bike tune-up, meaning you do what you can without access to spare parts, and quickly let them know if the bike is beyond your help.

A bit more adventuresome: Offer to buy klunkers and then use them as a parts supply for fixing the bikes that can be fixed, or combine parts to create working bikes that you can sell.

Many bikes are purchased with the best of intentions and then set aside for whatever reason. Later, the owner isn't sure what's needed, if anything, to get the bike in riding shape. They might even throw you a nominal fee just to be reassured that their bike is OK to ride.

</comment><comment><USER32> Unless you're desperate for cash, the most effective way to raise your income level is to learn a new skill while updating your resume and networking in that field.

Position yourself for the post-pandemic economy. ie. tech.

<comment><USER33> Any recommendations for someone with a background in logic controls and light IT (industrial background)? What is actually worth investing your time in?

<comment><USER34> Just offhand, that sounds like a good start to being a datacenter tech. Learn how to handle all the power equipment, HVAC, racking and stacking, cabling, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> With daycares closed, there are a lot of people working from home and trying to watch their kids at the same time. You'd need to sort out with them (and any housemates) about what level of contact to have outside your (now expanded) bubble, but people need childcare badly.

<comment><USER36> Daycare may require state certification (just beware).

With so many kids homeschooled, tutoring the last couple of months was probably a gold mine. Many parents run into a hard wall with respect to math and science and can no longer help their kids.

<comment><USER35> Watching the kids of a single family is being a nanny, not a daycare, and at least in the US doesn't require a license or certification.

<comment><USER37> I would guess this varies by state. (IANAL.)

<comment><USER35> What state do you think does? High-regulation states like MA and CA don't, and it would very much surprise me if others did. (I'm also not a lawyer.)

<comment><USER37> Sorry, I was unclear. I was guessing that low-regulation states might allow watching the kids of more than one family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If you are in the suburbs, there are always lawns to cut.

Make a simple sign outside your home.

"Most lawns $25. Cut, trim, edge blow. 555-555-5555 No contact payment by eTransfer"

This works very well, and will generate a small side income, get you outside of the house, fresh air and exercise.

From here, it's just letting you imagination run wild... Hire and train some young adults, grow from a single person to multi person team, etc.

<comment> kube-system I'd give someone $30 to cut my tiny lawn right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> If you can buy and sell bikes over the next few months I think you'll make some extra money. Right now they are becoming really hard to get with orders taking 2 - 3 months where I'm based.

<comment><USER40> I find this to be bizarre since bikes don't really go bad or wear out, from over the last 40 years there should be thousands of surplus bikes on the market.

<comment><USER39> Yes I think it may only be new bike that are harder to get right now. The second hand market may be better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I run an affiliate blog, and they're definitely easy to get up and running. However, they're not "only 1 or two hours a day" type things as they are often claimed. But they can be fun and rewarding. I usually make around $200 a month with about 500 page views a day.

<comment><USER42> would you mind expanding a bit on what you do and how did you start?

<comment><USER41> Sure, I run [https://basicbands.com/](https://basicbands.com/). It's a website about watch strap fashion. Most of my income comes from Amazon. I don't make money off the sale of watchbands very much, they're very cheap, so I write posts about watches. This is an example of a money post: [https://basicbands.com/the-complete-guide-to-the-seiko- presa...](https://basicbands.com/the-complete-guide-to-the-seiko-presage- cocktail-time-line-of-watches/)

I either write the content myself, or ask watch strap companies to send me pictures. I then link back to their website and mention what watch is featured and use an affiliate link. Most companies are happy to send me pictures. I also interview custom leather watch strap makers. Most sell on Etsy and they're happy to be featured. I send them a form to fill out and they provide the content and pictures. This is an example: [https://basicbands.com/small- brand-spotlight-choice-cuts-ind...](https://basicbands.com/small-brand- spotlight-choice-cuts-industries/)

I make almost zero money off featuring the watch strap makers, but they fill out the blog with interesting and fun content that bring it a step above the usual affiliate blog (I hope). Its also the most fun part and it keeps me going, because the artists are fun to talk with. Otherwise I think I would have stopped by now from boredom. Most of my traffic is search engine, Pinterest & Reddit.

I got my start by reading the case studies on this subreddit: [https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/](https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/) They're getting less useful now, but the early ones were a big help. Basically, just start something and see how it does.

Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap, which I totally understand, but its also very easy to get into, basically a WordPress theme and some cheap hosting, so its very accessible for people at home.

<comment><USER43> Thanks for the description, it's very insightful, especially since I enjoy similar affiliate marketing sites such as [https://dappered.com/](https://dappered.com/) and [https://www.primermagazine.com/](https://www.primermagazine.com/).

I will say that their frequent listicles, however, tends to feel exploitative... Primer currently has "8 Essential Innovations That Make Hot Summers More Bearable" as its headline, which feels like a not-so-subtle "hey, here's some affiliate links to click on"

<comment><USER41> That's exactly what it felt like to me too. It's why I enjoy featuring the custom watch strap shops, they provide a break from the affiliate angle. I also try to make my guides a bit longer than usual and also more in-depth with model numbers, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Depending what he was doing in call center and if he wants to keep his current job or is open to find a new job, he might be able to find a job for a company that hire people remotely. He can even look for this kind of job internationally. Some industries have been hit quite hard, but some others have seen increase of activity (i'm thinking in the saas world, mainly tools that are being use for remote working, but i'm sure there's other industries as well)

</comment><comment><USER45> If you're a North American native English speaker with a college degree you can pretty easily get certified to teach English online to Chinese children with VipKid

<comment><USER46> And preply

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you have even a little experience with Linux or are looking to learn, we've built [https://hostlaunch.io/](https://hostlaunch.io/) to make it very easy to start a managed cloud hosting company.

Just drop in your DigitalOcean, ServerPilot, SendGrid, and Stripe API keys, set your prices, and you've got a hosting company.

<comment><USER48> Honest question: why would anyone want to buy from a reseller rather than DO directly? Are DO's tools so bad?

<comment><USER47> There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost.

The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.

<comment><USER48> I don't get it. What's your edge? You basically have no control over anything. Why would the customer go with jsamuel hosting rather than ornornor hosting if we're Both reselling exactly the same thing? Or why not stay with dreamhost for that matter? What's the reseller's edge in that case? Anything goes wrong you have to wait on DO to sort it out. And price wise you can't do anything that anyone else can't get from DO too. I'm probably missing the point but I'd really like to understand.

<comment><USER49> Managed hosting is much more than what DO does, I suppose. They offer services like setting up a Wordpress, emails, nameservers, etc. for people who don't want or don't know how to. You sell customer service basically, you talk to people on the phone, usually works better within your local community.

Edit: and I suppose HostLaunch's edge is to get all the hassle of setting up that business out of the way so you can focus on customer service instead of plumbing servers together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Maybe become a Guided Project instructor at Coursera and share your expertise with learners? I'm sharing some details from a previous post:

Access an instructor community and support team that will give you all the tools and resources needed to create a high-quality project. Earn income remotely on a per-project basis as soon as your project is reviewed and approved. Impact lives of learners around the world by sharing skills they can apply immediately to their careers.

What is a Guided Project? Guided Projects on Coursera are interactive projects that enable learners to gain a job-relevant skill in under two hours. A side- by-side interface allows learners to watch visual instructions on one side of the screen while following-along on the other side of the screen. Guided Projects are for anyone who is looking to get hands-on learning and get practice applying a skill or using a tool in a real-world scenario. Every Guided Project includes everything learners need directly in their browser and step-by-step visual instructions so they can get started without any software installation or prior experience.

Guided Projects are focused on enabling learners to practice and apply skills in computer science, data science, and business software using a broad variety of real-world tools such as TensorFlow, Google Spreadsheets, Tableau, Canva, etc.

If you're excited to create hands-on, Guided Projects and want to become a project instructor on Coursera, please apply at [https://teach.coursera.org/](https://teach.coursera.org/)

<comment><USER51> Can you actually make a decent income?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Check out sites like Lionbridge or whatever, where you can do online tasks (registering maps, transcribing stuff, etc.) - they do pay a legit salary, even though the work can be really boring.

It's basically like a bit more exciting and better paying version of Mechanical Turk.

Other than that...help out HS and College kids with homework? I'm on a lot of homework help forums, as I like teaching math, and there's been an explosion in demand for skype teachers etc.

</comment><comment><USER52> Depending on his state, he could apply for a job as a Contact Tracer. These are essentially WFH contact center roles.

</comment><comment><USER53> Has your friend applied for unemployment? He should be eligible...

</comment><comment><USER54> I made a gdoc with a list of work from home opportunities back in April. Hope this helps!

[https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nF8FH-5f-51-Q_Hzt06jhYMN...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nF8FH-5f-51-Q_Hzt06jhYMN5JCiy3bj7_5aElEQECw/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER55> thankyou!

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Cant beat online "tutoring". Schoolsolver.com, chegg.com, etc. These sites are booming right now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Good ole fashion yard work. Despite the unemployment rate, many people are still working and spring is here. Grass is growing, mulch needs spread, etc.

<comment><USER57> My parents just paid a kid $250 to lay mulch for a day. Found him on Nextdoor.

He doesn't even have to bring the mulch - homeowner purchases it and has it delivered, and he just shows up to lay it.

I guess he does this a few times a week - that's a cool thousand bucks on a good week.

<comment><USER58> Probably anything involving "I'll plant your tomato/vegetable garden for you" would do very well right now in the right places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> content generation. you have no idea how many marketing companies need content writers for their clients. typically you can make between $5-$25 an article with an article being 300-2000. most articles don't have to be great, they just want articles written for a specific keyword.

<comment><USER60> I started a little economics experiment on Fiverr a few months ago (to try to figure out how much the market is willing to pay for a native English speaker with technical knowledge) and I've had a surprising amount of success at the $0.05/word pricepoint. When you charge a little more, the worst of the worst buyers are scared away by the price.

<comment><USER61> What keywords should I search for on Fiverr to see examples/how this service is marketed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> If he or she has good sewing skills, making masks and selling them on Etsy.

<comment><USER63> Like 10000000000 other people there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> What country, what skills, how desparate

</comment><comment><USER5> Call center for what kind of company? Can he reach out to similar (possibly local) companies and offer to do similar work for them?

Years ago, when my first job folded, I did customer support for them for a couple months on a fixed rate with a minimum time. e.g., $75/hour, minimum bill of 0.2 hours -- those are examples, I don't recall what I actually charged.

The point is, he's used to talking to customer all day and negotiating issues and frustrations. That is really valuable experience to a small company that may not be able to afford a full-time customer support person.

Besides that, being a Virtual Assistant might be a good transition for him: [https://horkeyhandbook.com/how-to-become-a-virtual- assistant...](https://horkeyhandbook.com/how-to-become-a-virtual-assistant/)

</comment><comment><USER65> Amazon's Mechanical Turk market place ([https://worker.mturk.com](https://worker.mturk.com)). Also google around for the forum and find insight and tools to help snipe higher value tasks.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'd recommend joining the local tech Slack channel(s) for your city or state. I've seen several decent job openings and gigs where I live. The nice thing is, you can chat with the poster if needed and get an idea of what the work entails before you apply.

I'm not searching anymore because I believe that tech has lost its way and won't be a rewarding field until it allows for ~20 hour per week part time jobs that let us make on our own time. Because I've been surviving in tech for 20 years and have basically gotten nowhere with my life goals. Always feast or famine. But I do know how to survive.

</comment><comment><USER67> This is a recent curated list of online jobs, 'Modern Day Jobs':

[https://moderndayjobs.com/](https://moderndayjobs.com/)

</comment><comment><USER68> Domino's Pizza is overloaded. They need cooks, drivers, etc. Probably the best money you can get now without an investment in learning something.

</comment><comment><USER69> Go to suburban neighborhood. Offer to clean the garbage roll out barrels.

Tether yourself and go up on customer's roof and blow off the leaves and debris.

Weed the flower beds. Wash windows. Detail cars. Play with kids outdoors. Clean and polish the brass fixture exterior lights.

Use customer mower to cut the lawn.

My friend does Concierge errand services and he makes $50 a day.

</comment><comment><USER70> Teach english, cambly

<comment><USER53> This is probably excellent, and undervalued, advice.

I wonder what fraction of potential English learners can afford $20+ per hour... (Right now that won't beat the unemployment payout here in the States, BTW.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Your friend should check with the state to see if they are eligible for unemployment, food, or any other benefits as soon as possible; regardless of what their employers says.

For more information, Google: [corona laid off benefits]

</comment><comment><USER72> I've been working on a project to allow anyone to get paid for their time. It requires they have some knowledge that someone else is willing to pay for but it might help. Free for hosts. BuyTime.co

Hope your friend finds success!

</comment><comment><USER73> Pretty wide open question. I recommend that whatever creative leanings your friend has, to focus on them. Do what you love and produce something of value, then try to sell it.

<comment><USER74> And make sure you _do_ try to sell it. [https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_business](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_business)

<comment><USER75> Thanks, I just discovered a wonderful cartoonist. A joy to read those illustrated thoughts full of creativity and humor.

Particularly like his honesty, exposing his vulnerabilities in a way we can only laugh, and reflect on it ourselves.

Whether you're an artist, an entrepreneur or aspire to improve yourself, you certainly can relate to his work and self-reflections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> It seems that a lot of people are starting OnlyFans accounts...

<comment><USER77> that's interesting right, so much free stuff what compels you to pay, idk. there's that psychology too of being "closer" knowing someone eg. watching twitch or whatever... oh well glad I did not get sucked into that, though I'm not a social success myself

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Swabber assistant if your country or county is opening to it.

</comment><comment><USER79> I'm pretty sure (from people I know that this happened to) you can apply for unemployment even if you're furloughed and "still employed".

</comment><comment><USER80> hey

some options for your friend:

1)if he has hardcore skills like programming, or any techy-related, try upwork.com and find a niche for himself, but a new comer will have a difficult time to get sales first, you need start with a very low price rate, get some orders then raise your hourly rate. 2)he can also choose Fiverr.com, one can provide many services there, typically $5 per case, small cash. 3)start a youtube channel: post videos that he is good at and can attract enough visitors. This is pretty much a long term endeavor as you need 4000 hours watch and 1K subscribers to get monetization enabled, but if he can find the right niche and get the hang of it, this thing is legit and can earn enough for living.

seems there are no very quick ways to make some money, but he could still try:

4) provide some quick local services for quick money 5) regard 3), he can post CPA offers under the subscription section below the Youtube video, you can earn money at very 1st day via doing CPA affiliate marketing, just post right videos, attract visitors, put offers.

Good luck

<comment><USER81> I tried upwork 4 different times with no luck. It doesn't matter how low I offered my job for or how many offers I sent. It's almost impossible to get started there as a developer.

<comment><USER80> You are right somehow, there are highly severely competitions as this is the best known freelancing platform in the world, but totally worth it, just gradually build your portfolio, you will get sales sooner or later.

There are a lot people make good money on the platform for side cash.

Meanwhile, you can browser producthut, indiehackers, for some quick ideas for your own products, SaaS, websites, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> This thread is so important. At times of crisis like this we need to know about demand. Demand is king. All of the sudden we have resources like knowledge, materials and even money, but not much clarity about how to employ them for the greater good.

In my head, still in a very abstract way, we need something like LinkedIN exposing demand and not only job openings.

</comment><comment><USER83> Not applicable to most people, but: Breeding Fish.

Especially with the air travel situation what it is right now, fish stores have trouble restocking. So, if you already have some equipment but the market was always too lousy, you might be able to pick up a few bucks. Hard to scale up to a significant income, though.

</comment><comment><USER84> You can do Virtual Visits at Papa.

[https://www.joinpapa.com/papa-pal-qualified- application](https://www.joinpapa.com/papa-pal-qualified-application)

Help out senior adults through the aging journey.

</comment><comment><USER85> If he is a call center operator, I don't get why he can't work from home. If his current employer can't allow this, maybe he can find a more technically competent company?

</comment><comment><USER86> Now that kids can't go to school because of lockdown, the demand for online teaching is proliferating. You can start coaching students online or just kids in your neighborhood.

</comment><comment><USER87> I don't know of anything that is instant in generating income.

I remember flexjobs.com having a pretty diverse curated catalog of jobs you can do from home.

Not the typical remote engineer postings we see around here.

</comment><comment><USER88> Perhaps not for call centers, but for recently laid off engineers you could do mock interviews on sites like PracticeCodingInterview.com, Gainlo.co, and interview.io.

</comment><comment><USER89> It all depends on his health condition, abilities, equipment owned, and place of residence. These are required to produce an actionable suggestion.

</comment><comment><USER90> onlyfans

<comment> rbrtdrmpc- this is the only thing that i saw working during this pandemic, too bad it is a niche for a specific gender

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> Learn programming while doing something like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. delivery in the mean time. Then start applying for roles.

<comment><USER32> Unless you _really_ need the money, your best investment is putting 100% of your time into learning new skills.

<comment><USER92> That can't be true. If you spent all of your time developing new skills you wouldn't have any time to capitalize on them. You are likely better off conquering a niche.

<comment><USER32> I mean _temporarily_ during this lockdown - not indefinitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> Buy office chairs from offices that are closing and resell to people who are setting up home offices.

</comment><comment><USER94> Start a remote call center company.

</comment><comment><USER95> Where is this? Would your friend not qualify for some sort of government payment?

</comment><comment><USER96> UpWork, Fiverr, ...

</comment><comment><USER97> not stay at home but donate plasma. upwork probably is another avenue.

<comment><USER66> You should not be getting downvoted for this. Where I live, our plasma center is offering $450 per month because supply is so low right now. I've heard it can be as high as $600 per month for new donors.

I feel that it's maybe morally questionable to donate during the lockdown, but, my city has allowed bars and gyms to reopen. So that sentiment is probably no longer true at this point. I do live in a relatively sparsely populated area though. People in major cities might consider waiting a few more weeks or months.

<comment><USER98> > I feel that it's maybe morally questionable to donate during the lockdown

The US blood supply system is well regulated and has survived lots of other health risks. The behavior+history+medical questionnaire and health screening go _a_ _long_ _way_ towards mitigating blood-borne contamination (and risks to the donors and donation staff). Then they test a percentage of blood donation specimens before they are distributed to recipients. They demand that you contact the donation organization if you turn up sick after the donation (I ended up donating with a food-sickness late last year and had my donation unit destroyed after I notified the hospital)

I personally donate frequently. Only about 10% of eligible people donate. I feel it's "maybe morally questionable" to _not_ donate (so long as you feel healthy and honestly follow the donation guidelines) if you can but never do.

If by "morally questionable" you were weighing the desperation of unemployment + the payment for donation, I could maybe agree with that a little bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> Gig economy jobs

</comment><comment><USER100> Learn a skill that can be used to get a higher paying job once a vaccine is found.

</comment><comment><USER101> textbroker.com

</comment><comment><USER102> Day trading

<comment><USER32> In this market over the last two months, that's how I've made more money than I have in the entire last 3-4 years combined.

Crazy. ...but that opportunity is probably overish.

Also, "day" trading is usually bad - buying the dip and selling the excitement on a week/month basis takes much less time and is much safer.

<comment><USER102> I don't think so. I don't see how the Fed can do anything about demand or a second virus wave or delay in vaccine. The market is pricing in a perfect recovery. Will likely be a decent short opportunity soon.

<comment><USER32> I disagree. The Fed is printing so much money that you have to remember that all those stocks are priced in now diluted dollars.

The worst thing you can do is keep your money in cash. When inflation kicks in, the companies will raise their product prices, and their stocks will inflate accordingly. Meanwhile the purchasing power of your savings will dwindle.

This is also why real estate is going up despite the pandemic.

<comment><USER103> What about precious metals?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> Day trading futures (and developing the required mindset).

<comment><USER105> No. Seriously not. Daytrading is not a job for 99% of all. Even if you survive the first years, your risk management will also affect your "income". If you get greedy, your losses will break your neck. It's not something you can quantify like a "real" income you can count on.

I trade S&P500 futures sometimes. It's fun when the markets go slowly up all the time or if there is a sharp drop. In all other times you'll probably lose a lot of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> The best way to start generating income is to change your mindset.

Instead of asking other people, all of whom have found their own specialized niche that will never be applicable to anyone else, step away from the computer and look around.

Just in the past week I have heard from so many friends that are looking for good people. They never post stuff on job sites - it's way more trouble than its worth. They ask around.

Get outside and talk to people in your community. Call friends, call relatives. Volunteer your time. There's an abundance of opportunity right now in this churn - make it happen!

<comment><USER107> Asking on HN is the same (or better, given audience size) as looking around and talking to people.

It's also not helpful to say "there's an abundance of opportunity" without any examples.

<comment><USER108> It's not the same, because HN users don't have local knowledge. People here mention landscaping, but that wouldn't make much sense where I live, for example (lawns are relatively rare). Locality is a crucial factor in the labour market.</comment></comment></comment>


GoDaddy Gives Downed Websites A Free Month Of Hosting - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/12/godaddy-gives-downed-websites-a-free-month-of-hosting/ <comment><USER2> I _hate_ mail containing links to a page where you're supposed to enter login credentials.

While I'm pretty sure the email I got wasn't a phishing attempt, it's not worth a few bucks worth of hosting to find out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yep, that definitely makes up for the downtime.

</comment><comment><USER4> and what about those who just have DNS with godaddy?</comment>


Android malware increasing; Google's Chris DiBona calls it a scam - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/21/2577669/android-malware-rises-Google-responds <comment><USER2> This is tripe. He completely misses the point and instead goes on to list other, unrelated projects that have overcome some of their problems. Notice he doesn't say "Android doesn't have malware", while the original article (and many more before it) say "Android has malware". True, anti-virus won't fix the problems, and true, there is unlikely to be a traditional "virus" on a mobile platform, but that's not the point. The point is, malware exists, and it exists more on Android than other mobile marketplaces. Remember the definition of malware, don't get tied down into the Windows classification of a virus. Malware is a broad term.

Instead of shouting and screaming and dismissing the claims with the wave of a hand, we should be working to eliminate malware on mobile marketplaces. Chris says malware isn't inherent to Android but the fact remains with an open market and training users that sideloading applications from a random website is safe and acceptable, malware IS more inherent on Android. None of their competitors allow for this kind of free and easy installation of random applications. Google needs to figure out how to stop malware without destroying the very thing that made their OS popular (the open platform).

</comment><comment><USER3> This would have been better as a link to Chris DiBona's Google+ post rather than this article. [https://plus.google.com/u/0/114765095157367281222/posts/ZqPv...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/114765095157367281222/posts/ZqPvFwdDLPv)</comment>


Ask HN: What small things can I do/code for you this weekend? - <AUTHOR>

Do you have some sort of task that can be handled remotely over a weekend or repetitive task you'd like automated? Post what you'd like done in the comments and let's figure it out!
Looking for $30-50/hr, but depends on the work.
---- About me
I'm a generalist coder who has a hard time holding down a job that isn't in a highly collaborative environment and those are in short supply locally. I'm making plans to move, but still need to bring in more money until I do. <comment><USER2> How are you with Python / ScraperWiki?

<comment><AUTHOR> I <3 Python. Haven't played with ScraperWiki yet, but I've done some scraping here & there...no time like the present to learn!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> where are you located? Are you looking for a weekend gig or can commit more?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in Lafayette, LA. Just looking for a weekend gig, but willing to discuss something more in private.

<comment><USER3> e-mailing you. Got email from your linkedin profile.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: DarnBrokenRails – A Rails Code Quality / Security Teaching Tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/WriteCodeEveryday/darnbrokenrails <comment><AUTHOR> Trying this for the last time, I feel it was just not well received during the weekend, but I'll call it off if it doesn't go anywhere today.</comment>


Amazon Web Services Blog: Bits For Sale - The New Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/01/bits-for-sale-amazon-s3-requester-payment-model.html <comment><USER2> Dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=416055>

<comment><USER3> Don't think it is a dupe; it's the blog post that jeffbarr said he'd put up in response to a comment on that article you linked to that asked for the option to add a surcharge.

<comment><USER2> Ah! Thanks for the fix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're selling data, this could be killer. There are apps like <http://spinn3r.com/> that would no longer have to worry about scale or delivery

</comment><comment><USER5> Alas it doesn't charge the requester for storage.</comment>


Show HN: Mining and Visualizing Alternative Financial Data - <AUTHOR> https://glimpse.info/congress <comment><AUTHOR> I started this website as a hobby to try and mine alternative financial data (from Reddit for instance) and to visualize it in a nice interactive way.

With all the news recently about insider trades in congress, my own senator in GA being at the forefront of that, I decided to do some digging.

The data hasn't been updated since last Sunday and only has two basic filters right now (transaction volume, and transaction sum) but I'll keep tinkering away at it. I also want to add senate data. I'd bet that there's more valuable information there. Looking at their website, it will be harder to mine and might require using a headless version of selenium or something.</comment>


Vaccine for Cat Allergies Developed by Swiss Scientists - <AUTHOR> https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2019/08/16/vaccine-cat-allergies-developed-swiss-scientists/ <comment><USER2> as someone who is both allergic to cats and also rather fond of them as companions, something like this makes me very happy. granted, im perfectly comfortable with taking cetirizine daily as it tends to work fairly well, but it would be nice to not have to do such</comment>


Reddit is down due to database failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.redditstatus.com/

<comment><USER2> As a result of the button reaching zero.

<comment><USER3> For those who want some context: [https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton](https://www.reddit.com/r/thebutton) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi! Just like your fire extinguishers tests, you should also test your database failover procedures.

</comment><comment><USER5> And it's back.</comment>


Microsoft CEO explains his remark on women asking for raises - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/20/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadella-dishes-on-the-cloud-gender-inequality-in-tech-and-piracy-as-freemium/

<comment><AUTHOR> I must say I find his apology very sincere. Increased my respect for him. It also brings to the fore the point that without enough women representation, it's hard for men to put themselves in the shoes of women and understand the world from their perspective.</comment>


Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/06/30/momentum-building-arm-hpc/ <comment><USER2> Is it really though?

I'm a strong believer that the future of supercomputing (well, if anyone adopts it, HPC can be notoriously un-innovative, borderline corrupt even in some countries...) lies in manycore processors like GPUs or their MIMD counterparts like the Rex Neo and the Adapteva Epiphany.

I have very few kind words for the Xeon Phi. It's relatively poorly executed, is not competitive with GPUs, etc.

I'm not really sure why people think ARM can do much better though. If you're going to go for a new ISA because supercomputing can recompile often, then you might as well start with a clean slate ISA.

<comment><USER3> I agree about Xeon Phi, but how is arm not many core enough?

Back of the envelope.. a GTX 1080 has 2560 cores, TDP 300W, 1.6 GHz, so ~12 compute thread GHz/W. Dual 48-core ARM boards, 4x32 SIMD, TDP 100W, 2.5 Ghz, so ~10 compute thread Ghz/W. (this is assuming IPC and price are similar)

So, for SIMD enabled workloads, there's potential to be in the same ballpark. For non SIMD or mixed workflows, GPU isn't even an option. For HPC in general (not deep learning specifically), arm may be a better long run bet that GPU.

<comment><USER2> There's a variety of even more efficient MIMD processors. Eg, rex neo, adapteva epiphany, etc.

The reason I don't see ARM being very competitive is that ARM processors have no discernible advantage compared to a clean slate ISA design. What exactly does ARM offer that the Rex Neo doesn't?

By contrast, the Neo is far more efficient, doesn't waste energy on OoO, has no caches, making it far more efficient (especially in terms of data movement, which is a big deal) and has the advantage of having a simpler decoder.

<comment><USER3> I haven't heard of that stuff to be honest, so it's more likely in my case to get stuff into an FPGA than considering about a new ISA...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Note that this "article" is an advertisement written by two ARM employees.

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't an advertisement. From bottom of article: Editors Note: This non- sponsored article was written by two participants from ARM who were present at the workshop at the request of The Next Platform since editors were otherwise engaged during the ISC event.

<comment><USER5> I can confirm...I didn't make a dime :( just reporting on on the goingarm.com workshop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I tried a scaleway arm8 server and performance is ok. 35€/mo for 16 cores at 500 Mflops on scimark2 whereas my mbp i7 does 2200 one core, 1700 all four, so on such a parallel workload, arm server outdoes a quad core i7. Ec2 pricing for similar performance would be higher Id expect.

That said, single core performance is far lower than x86. With high core counts it makes sense for HPC work.

I'd really like to see a good OpenCL implementation for arm.

<comment><USER6> You will never see a good OpenCL implementation. Period.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> 2017 is the year of ARM in servers just as it is the year of Linux desktops, as the meme goes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like ARMv8 + SVE could provide some decent competition for the Xeon Phi. In a way both are heirs to the IBM blue gene line (lots of low power cores) and "old-school" long vector systems like old Crays or NEC SX.

Interesting times.

<comment><USER9> Anything with a pulse can provide decent competition for Xeon Phi. It is well know these 'accelerators' are barely providing speed-ups compared to existing CPU solutions.

While Phi are easy to port, they aren't close to GPUs for vectorization- friendly problems. This is likely why the Aurora supercomputer has been delayed/canceled.

<comment><USER8> I wonder why noone (?) has tried to bolt on a GPU style SIMT extension to a general purpose CPU architecture. It's a more flexible programming model with a decently(?) low additional cost compared to vector style SIMD.

IIRC Andy Glew had some slide deck where he advocated that. _Edit_ : [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5qTWL2s3LcQNGE3NWI4NzQtNTB...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5qTWL2s3LcQNGE3NWI4NzQtNTBhNS00YjgyLTljZGMtNTA0YjJmMGIzNDEw/view?ddrp=1&hl=en)

<comment><USER10> My understanding is the instruction set isn't as far removed as you seem to imply, and the huge differences are in programming model/compiler.

AVX-512 has many of the primitives required, and ISPC ports the GPU programming model to CPU SIMD.

<comment><USER8> Yes, AVX-512 IIRC adds scatter/gather, and masking/predication, bringing it substantially closer to classical supercomputer long vector ISA's compared to the short vector ISA's mainstream CPU's have been equipped with for the past decade or so. Still, even with these improvements, as explained in Andy Glew's slide deck I linked to, it's less flexible than a SIMT style approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every real world performance/watt benchmark I have seen shows Intel winning so I am not sure how ARM will breakthrough.

The only competitive opportunity that Intel leaves open is by artificially limiting its CPUs to jack up its margins and it seems that AMD Epyc has been designed from the ground up to exploit this opportunity.

Between Intel and AMD I don't see any niche left for an ARM solution to get off the ground.

</comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, I've been down this road a number of times before. With ARM specifically and the Calxeda experiment. Here is what I wrote in 2013 [1]

"2013 was not the year of ARM. It was the year of ARM hype. But for reasons having nothing to do with ARM itself. Basically ARM was the anti-Intel. Everyone was looking for an anti-Intel, in order to maintain pressure on Intel. I can't tell you how many times I'd heard "Intel is done" or "Intel is in trouble" in meetings with customers, or partners. This wasn't true, though there was a great deal of wishing it were true on the part of some. We hedged a bit by trying to work with Calxeda. Unfortunately, as we rapidly discovered, the claims about ARM as a viable replacement for Intel were simply not true (specifically talking about Calxeda's chips) at this time. Calxeda were positioned in customers and partners minds as being "just like Intel's maybe a little slower and much less power". Neither of these statements were true. The chips were badly underpowered, and when you aggregated enough of them to do interesting work, they ran … HOT … ."

What we found was a strong misperception in end users minds, what I will say ... willfully ... placed there by interested parties, that 1 ARM core == 1 Intel core. This is most definitely untrue (then, and as far as I can tell, now).

I know that people really want a viable alternative to Intel, and I understand why. But, honestly, ARM isn't it, and doesn't look like it will ever be it.

There are many reasons for this, but it boils down to actual real world application performance, and toolchain issues. The former is the main reason why I am betting against ARM now. The latter is made even more difficult by a fractured ARM market. Which ARM ABI should you write for, and do you have good optimizing compilers for?

So I am very skeptical at this moment. I've seen the song and dance before. Then I did the testing. And it was embarrassingly bad. 200 ARM cores [2] were not as fast as 16 Intel cores. All while the 200 ARM cores consumed the same if not greater power, had a smaller memory address space, and were slower.

I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this. Though I wouldn't bet on this outcome.

[1] [https://scalability.org/2013/12/the-evolving-market-for- hpc-...](https://scalability.org/2013/12/the-evolving-market-for-hpc- part-1-recent-past/comment-page-1/)

[2] [https://scalability.org/2013/02/a-lightly-armed- jackrabbit-6...](https://scalability.org/2013/02/a-lightly-armed- jackrabbit-60-bay-unit/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Risc-V?

<comment><USER14> Years away at best. Risc-v is where arm was in the early 2000s.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What would you do with a profitable software company? - <AUTHOR>

I have a company that sells a few (old-school desktop/server -- ie, not web-based) software products.  The company makes about $700K/year, with just me and one employee.
The products are already quite competitive in their niches, and I have a ton of ideas about improving and making them best in class.  Also, not a whole lotta marketing is happening.
There is a few hundred $K in the bank as a cushion (I'm paranoid and low risk -- don't want to lose my house, or ever work for anyone else!)
What should I do?  Get VC money so I can grow faster?  Borrow from a bank?  Risk the cushion and hire?  Get a marketing agency involved so I don't have a long term commitment with a marketing employee??
Right now I'm doing it all, and it's working, but slow -- only so many hours in the day.
EDIT: Thanks for the feedback so far. I guess I want to grow the company to 10-20 employees and create a great place to work with a good work-life balance. To me that also means growing the company to $2-3 million/year. Also, I want to create some awesome software that customers will love.
Guess I'm not quite sure how to get to the "next level". <comment><USER2> What you've already done has provided you with enough income to make almost any option work. The question really, is what do you really want out of your life?

You could make some key hires, and manage them and the company to become even more profitable. Is that what you want?

You could outsource some key marketing initiatives (buying adwords, competitive analysis, targeted marketing, etc.) and drum up extra business that way. Is that what you want?

You could dive into the products and make them even better, or even more useful to your existing customers (via upgrades or whatever). Is that what you want?

You also could angle for a sale to a larger company, take the money and live whim by whim. Is that what you want?

All of these options will "work", but you live with the consequences of each. Having employees isn't a cakewalk. Increasing your interactions with your customers may not be as pleasant as it initially sounds. Dealing with a new aspect of the business (marketing) may be more frustrating than you'd expect. It's really up to you. What do you want most?

If I were in your shoes, I'd outsource some marketing initiatives. You have good odds that it produces more revenue without the possibility of needing to maintain employees or modify your existing products and business model.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can relate, I am in a similar situation.

It all depends on the niche. For some industries hiring a sales guy with good connections could make the revenue jump n-folds, for others hiring someone to set up an affiliate program would be a better option, for thirds - adding a specific technical feature can spur a viral growth.

But all in all, I would go with a short-term contracts and the cushion. If you want to borrow money, a bank should be the absolute last resort. Should you fail, they _will_ want them back, and some other investors - will not. A marketing agency sounds like an overkill, but, again, depends on the nature of your products.</comment>


Why American Cops Kill So Many Compared to European Cops - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/american-cops-lethal_us_565cde59e4b079b2818b8870 <comment><USER2> There is so much misuse of statistics in this article it's hard to take it seriously.

If you're going to make blanket statements about the US vs. Europe than compare those two entities, don't cherry pick a European country for one stat and then another countries for other stats.

Also, sometimes the author compares absolute figures and at no time does the author ever use risk adjusted numbers.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you missed the big picture in the middle that has the subtitle "Annual fatal police shootings per million residents" with a big green happy(?) face for the US with the number 3.42, and variously-colored small happy faces for various European countries with hard to read numbers proceeding from 0.187 to something almost unreadably small that might be 0.016.

<comment><USER2> I didn't miss that. Those aren't risk adjusted numbers and are meaningless.

I think if you were to re-read my comment you would see that I wrote he _sometimes_ uses absolute figures and _never_ uses risk adjusted numbers.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand: are you arguing that because there is a substantially higher percentage of people being shot in the US, it is expected that there should also be a higher percentage of people being shot by police in particular in the US?

<comment><USER2> There are many factors.

What is the total population, what is the violent crime rate, what is the prevailing attitude of civilians towards police, how many police encounters are there, how well does the government record these statistics, etc...

You can't be shot by a police officer if you don't encounter one. In the US, most police officers know if you have a criminal record, a warrant, or LTC before they even approach your car. If your culture thinks arguing with cops is a good idea, your culture also might be more prone to violent clashes with police.

All those things factor into the individual situation, thus I would expect these would be represented in aggregate figures as well.

The problem is that none of these risk factors are considered and thus produce meaningless statistics.

As a surfer I see this same BS with shark attack stats. Most of them go like this: There were 150 shark attacks the the US last year and there's 300M people in the US, so your chances of getting attacked are 150/300,000,000.

I hope you see the obvious flaw in that. Some one in Arkansas isn't at risk. So a better number would be everyone who visits the ocean. But now you're counting people who probably only dipped a toe in the water or stood in waist deep water for 15 minutes.

The real people at risk are swimmers and surfers and to get real numbers you don't just need to know how many people are in the water, but also how much time they spend there. And more than that, you need to know what time of the day it is.

When you're done, the final numbers will be a table, not one neat number. Each number in the table will represent the time of day and be expressed as a probability per unit of time spent in the water.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a lot harder to beat someone to death from the window outside their car.

</comment><comment><USER5> To be fair and not less important to understanding the issue; the opposite is also true.

Cops are considerably less likely to be shot or even assaulted in Europe, being shot on the line of duty is almost unheard off.

</comment><comment><USER6> Cops are racist. But when they aren't racist they kill people because guns. Let's pass gun control so only cops (Ed: and criminals) have guns. Then we can be awesome like Europe (Ed: though our demographics look nothing like the countries mentioned)

There, did I get that right?

<comment><USER7> assuming you are giving an example of a straw-man.. then yes, spot on.

<comment><USER8> I think he is sarcastically summarizing the article.

<comment><USER7> My guess is neither one of you read the article.

(hint: it doesn't mention gun control anywhere)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN - How do I find a reputable hacker to help design prototype? - <AUTHOR>

I have been interested in applying for various startup weekends or programs, such as Y Combinator, but in order to gain entry one is required to have a working prototype. My question is how do you go about finding the right person/company to code for you? My idea is simple and based on existing API, just need to wrap into a new platform. <comment><USER2> Are you trying to find a hacker to join you as a co-founder, or are you just looking to outsource the development? If it's the former you might find it difficult. See: [http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-1...](http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2010-12.html#e2010-12-01T15_45_40.htm)

If it's the latter, just ask your connections to recommend a good outsourced development shop, or wait for somebody here to chime in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the response. Right now looking to outsource development. If prototype gains interest then need to partner-up or hire on. Really just need a bare bones proto using geo-loc technology. Thanks again.</comment></comment>