To start with, this won't work for everyone mostly because not everyone works from home like I do.

I used to have this constant, nagging lower back pain when I used to sit at a desk working an office job. It wasn't the sort of back pain where you've pulled a muscle after a botched deadlift or you just twisted the wrong way picking up a sock off the floor, but it was the sort of pain where it just felt like there was a warm knot in your lower back that was not-quite-painful but incredibly uncomfortable. Hard to explain. It was hard to sit still and I had to change sitting positions after every 5-10 minutes which made it difficult to actually focus on work. I strengthened my core and tried various stretches but it never went away.

This went on for years until I started working from home. I figured, instead of trying to find the perfect way to sit, why sit at all? Maybe humans weren't built to sit for long periods of time but I sure don't have problems lying down! I got myself a laptop stand, started working while lying down, and I've never had lower back issues since.

I wouldn't mind having JP's set up in Grandma's Boy either actually (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHLR3faI7lU). Monitors at eye level to eliminate neck strain, seat all the way reclined to relieve lower back pressure, and keyboard at just the right height. Perfect.

I'm Asian and I could pass for Japanese if I really wanted to try at it. Also, my wife is Japanese so it isn't a hard leap for anyone in Japan to make when they see us together. This was more of a disadvantage to me than I had realized since Japanese are far more willing to make allowances in social lapses for obvious foreigners than say, a socially awkward Japanese. I find that instead of trying so hard to blend in, it might be easier to simply embrace standing out. So instead of a "konnichiwa", I start out with a confident "Hi!" in a cheery American tone (we all know that one) and proceed in broken Japanese. Even better when they hear me speaking unaccented English with my wife. That way, they know that I'm a clueless tourist and not a socially inept local.

I'm not local but I have friends there. The Chinese were accepting of the pollution at first because of the success they were experiencing on a world stage. They figured that if the politicians and the higher ups could deal with it, then the ordinary citizen can too. Then the average citizen started realizing that the elite didn't actually have to deal with it because they would buy expensive air purifiers for their homes, cars, and work places. There has been more of an outcry against the pollution that is now causing all forms of health problems as of late and despite the heavily authoritarian rule of the regime, the Chinese government is prudent enough to know that a largely dissatisfied citizenry is always a risk. So the various local and national governments are moving, albeit slowly, to try and reduce their pollution levels.

I opted to use CloudFlare almost as soon as they launched and they indeed had some uptime issues in the beginning. But I stuck with them and I haven't had any issues for a long while now even at 180M page views / month.

There was one time where I had just upgraded a server at a host and load averages just spiked. Host techs were clueless as well as the server admin I hired to diagnose the issue. They surmised that it was a DDoS attack and to turn off CloudFlare because it might be a cause (what?). Well I'm not a server admin so what do I know and I asked CloudFlare about it. They said there were no problems on their end. After a month of stressful, intermittent downtimes, I decided to just switch to Softlayer, and lo and behold, the issues went away. Turned out that one of the SSDs in the RAID array was dying but the techs at the other host just never bothered to look at it.

If you ever do figure out the issues, try giving them another shot. Their features are excellent and I hate to say it but my applications are now so dependent on them to the point where important parts will break if I even try to move to a competitor (and there are none).

I think he's alluding to the fact that the more people that come and work in the U.S., the more people there will be to fund his social security.

Assuming that they actually work.

What the hell does that mean?

He means the hell that immigrant households use welfare and related wealth-transfer programs at higher rates than do non-immigrant households. But of course his comment got the hell voted down by the hive-mind because he was rude enough to notice.

> immigrant households use welfare and related wealth transfer programs at higher rates

The data includes both legal and illegal immigrants along with the minority high skilled immigrants.

http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011 implies that most of that welfare use is from low skilled immigrants and not high skilled ones that are the topic of interest of most HNers.

He presumably got downvoted because it is irrelevant at best and misdirection at worst (by combining illegal and legal data and claiming immigrants claim more welfare which makes it look like highly skilled immigrants claim more welfare).

A quote from the link that you provide: "But even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants (no U.S.-born children) still had a welfare use rate of 56 percent in 2009." Not a very impressive difference, that.

As for the notion that most HNers are interested only in high-skilled immigrants rather than low-skilled ones, that may well be the case. But low-skilled immigrants certainly are interested in HNers, or rather the money that HNers possess.

>even households with children comprised entirely of immigrants

I kinda suspected you will quote that! You realize that you cannot tie that to skilled immigrants as such right? For e.g. there is family based immigration, diversity visas and what not that could and does result in households with children comprised entirely of immigrants.

If one thing is clear - highly skilled immigrants are not taking your welfare. I have lived through it and encountered a lot of high skilled immigrants and have not even an anecdote to refer you to where someone was using welfare. I would be very surprised to see data that indicates H1Bs, EB-1/2/3s, F-1s etc. take significant part of welfare benefits.

What you say you want: more skilled immigrants.

What we will get: more welfare, more crime, more unemployment, more ethnic nepotism.

You really need to separate the illegals and family/diversity based less skilled immigrants from the skilled ones, otherwise it makes it sound like it is somehow skilled immigrants and their employers' fault that we have all of the perils you mentioned. http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/ois_lpr_... - 2012 immigration stats. Only 14% of legal immigration is skills based.

I don't see how asking for/having more skilled immigrants can possibly be linked to more crime, more unemployment or whatever. Unless you are speculating on what congress might do with immigration reform that will cause it or you want immigration to be completely stopped. (Not sure how that will work out given the illegals situation.)

I'd be happy to separate the various categories of immigrants, but here on Planet Earth those who have the power to implement policy--politicians, pundits, Silicon Valley billionaires--seem hellbent on implementing policies that will open this country up to millions upon tens of millions upon hundreds of millions of people desperate to get into any country that isn't the one they currently live in.

I can't help but state my observation that you sound like a total bigot.

In your OPINION I sound the hell like a total bigot. (As opposed to a partial bigot, I suppose.) Your OPINION and twenty-five bucks will buy a phony Green Card.

I was pretty excited about Google Drive when it first came out due to its pricing and integration with my current Google account.

The syncing just isn't where Dropbox is right now and not where I need it to be. I would oftentimes get errors for small files that Google Drive couldn't sync but Drive would provide few cryptic descriptions as to why. I've switched back to Dropbox because I'm running multiple OSes and environments and I take their pricing as the cost of being able to use something that just works.

I'd be interested in a backup service directly from Amazon though...

I personally have a fear of making things nobody will use. I know that the act of working on something is not a waste of time since you learn from the process of building but I can't ignore the feeling that I wasted my time anyway.

The way I do my projects now is that I try to get a core group of influential people in their niche to get excited about the project I'm building and I leave it to them to tell their friends about it. I've never spent a dime on marketing. A lot of traffic to one of my sites comes from FB, for example, and mainly from fan-created pages.

With the new project I'm currently working on, I noticed a group of users trying to shoehorn their activities into an existing platform that didn't exactly fit them. The first thing I did was to contact a lot of these people personally and asked them questions about what they were doing. After getting a fairly good idea, I then asked them if they were interested in testing something that I'll make for them in the next few weeks which got a positive response.

I spent a week building the core features that I thought were the most useful for them. All the core features worked but since I ported a lot of existing code from my old projects to speed things up, a lot of the other stuff was broken but that's okay. I hate building useless stuff so I needed to know right away if I was on the right track.

I invited the people I contacted to test it out. They didn't like it. Discouraging but expected. After a weekend of tweaks and discussions, they started getting more and more excited about the project as they started to see things progress. I made sure I involved them in all of the design discussions and tried to make them feel that this was their project as much as it is mine. Basically, tons of buy-in which also works wonders for my morale to keep going. They're excited, I'm excited, and now we're at the point where they've decided that they're going to bring all of their activities over to the new site.

It's a lot of upfront work to be sure, but this way, I can approach it more from a systems analysis standpoint now than a marketing exercise later.

TL;DR Find a key group of prospective users and involve them in your project from the beginning. Let them be a part of its creation, generate excitement, then let the marketing take care of itself from there.

As someone who's currently looking for a new hosting provider, I'm curious to know what made you go with Liquid Web. My experiences with them have been so-so and have been thinking of moving to SoftLayer for possibly more reliable, albeit more expensive, hardware.

A bit off-topic: As someone who has built a decent web company on top of PHP, I'm curious to know if you decided to leave it for something else and if so, what was your reasoning?

I'm of the mindset to stick with what I know best when I'd rather build a working product and get it out the door quickly. I don't actually personally care too much what language I use (I feel like database selection is more crucial) but I read about so many startups running on Python or Rails that I'm starting to wonder if there's something I'm missing and if there are business advantages to using other languages/frameworks.

This essay has been referenced over and over here, but have yet another link: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html Check out the whole thing, the money quote for this context is: "Back in 1995, we knew something that I don't think our competitors understood, and few understand even now: when you're writing software that only has to run on your own servers, you can use any language you want."

Contrary to the other comment, there are business advantages to using a particular language. (Though I would concede if your only choices are Ruby's Rails, Python's Django, and PHP's Yii, for many problems there isn't much to compel you to one or the other besides your preference and available talent.) I could write a large comment going over the pros/cons for different use-cases of PHP (plain or with a framework like Yii), Python (with Flask), Java (with enunciate), and Node.JS (those are the only languages/environments I've built larger-than-toy webapps with; I still need an excuse to use Clojure's Noir for something). My list would not just be language-war pros/cons but business value considerations and hypothetical consequences. It's not the most important choice you can make, but it should be considered if there's more than one option because the type of problem you're solving can be made much simpler or easier with the right tool.

I think you've got the right mindset, and that's to use what you know for anything important you need to finish soon, but I'd recommend checking out the other environments on your own time just for fun. Also before starting a project, research to see if it's a solved (or mostly solved) problem for another framework/language. Even if there's a learning cost to something brand new, depending on the problem it can be well worth it for the overall cost reduction that the tool provides. There are a lot of "We learned and used/migrated to Erlang" stories out there because Erlang solves particular problems very well.

I would be interested in reading a blog post which details your experiences and business decisions behind all of the frameworks you have mentioned.

I often find myself wanting to start new projects in $new_platform but have no idea how to really compare them before I get started, save for looking at their documentation or advertised features.

There is no business advantages at using Python/Rails over PHP. (and vice versa)

You should only use the technology that suits your company the best (in terms of needs and knowledge -never EVER start a company based on a tech you don't understand or know)

Depends. The availability of open-source libraries in a language can be a big advantage.

Do you happen to use an ad manager that distributes traffic among all of those ad networks? I currently use Google's DFP and I realize that's not exactly all that safe either.