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Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

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Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#81

Post by gravitycop »

jraines wrote: post #80
gravitycop wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off-topic, but is there a reason they don't use ski-lift-ticket vending machines, at least at the slow windows where the per-ticket labor cost of manual vending must undoubtedly be rather high? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alta_Ski_Area#Recent_developmen... Eventually, users will be able to track their vertical and lift ride data online and purchase Alta Cards using "ticket vending machines".

We do have them, but a lot of people either don't notice them or would prefer to buy from a person. We also sell lesson packages, redeem special discount vouchers, do will-call, and answer questions. However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.

Based on what you said in that first paragraph, I predict that in five years the average ski resort will have less than half as many employees as it does today. People may tend to prefer to deal with in-person people, but this competes against the value provided by automation and tele-help (e.g. questions can be routed to centralized, inexpensive call-centers).

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#82

Post by cdibona »

Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs should be conducive to hacking.

Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for knowledge acquisition. Get a job at MIT that comes with course audit benefits. A job that requires the hands, but allows you to consume audio lectures on your ipod. Long haul trucker that listens to mit courseware?

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#83

Post by cdibona »

cdibona wrote: post #82

Nothing food service related! Think your keyboard is dirty now? Wait until your laptop has been on the salad station for a night or two. Seriously though: The forest service has some -lonely- jobs watching for fires in the national forests. Lighthouse keeper? Night watchman? Lots of night shift jobs should be conducive to hacking. Seriously consider also jobs that won't be conducive to hack but would be for knowledge…

Some of my best times hacking have been on planes. A pal of mine used to fly around the world, selling off upgrades and miles online to cover it. He spent a lot of time reading, the slack...he could have been coding!

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#84

Post by gaius »

pclark wrote: post #26

why not a sys admin? its fairly easy work 95% of the time ...

I think sitting in the NOC watching screens and responding to the odd alert might be, but 2nd and 3rd line SAs (and DBAs) are working at at least as hard as the programmers (in fact to borrow an old IBM-ism are "systems programmers").

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#85

Post by glenstein »

jraines wrote: post #31

I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day. Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.

Your feedstomper service rules. I'm using it for Ask Metafilter, and I'll probably use it for a host of others.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#86

Post by jraines »

glenstein wrote: post #85
jraines wrote: post #31

I sell lift tickets at a ski resort. Some of our ticket windows are not at the main resort & get about 5 customers on a slow day. Last week I built this: www.feedstomper.com I also get to ski for free at 3 of the top resorts in the U.S. Pretty awesome so far.

Your feedstomper service rules. I'm using it for Ask Metafilter, and I'll probably use it for a host of others.

Thanks man. I've been encouraged by the response so far, but also nervous. Let me know if you have any problems -- it's worked on all feeds I've tested except one: the friendfeed 'best-of-day' feed, which is both voluminous and heavy on html.

I'm going to make a few more tweaks tonight and try to get some more feedback from HN.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#87

Post by robak »

gravitycop wrote: post #81
jraines wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have them, but a lot of people either don't notice them or would prefer to buy from a person. We also sell lesson packages, redeem special discount vouchers, do will-call, and answer questions. However, I do wonder sometimes if the offsite windows are economical.

Based on what you said in that first paragraph, I predict that in five years the average ski resort will have less than half as many employees as it does today. People may tend to prefer to deal with in-person people, but this competes against the value provided by automation and tele-help (e.g. questions can be routed to centralized, inexpensive call-centers).

People are sick and tired of talking to recorded voices. Trust me - if you want to win a customer coming back every winter to ski - you will pay stupid 8 bucks an hour to a student. Because this is more economical than losing customers.

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#88

Post by robak »

captainobvious wrote: post #46
sabat wrote: post #11

Actually I've had that situation several times in technology jobs. It's not so much the job itself as it is the company. I had a great gig at a company in Marin County (read: north of the Golden Gate, laid-back, hippies) where I was able to learn Perl, the WWW, and Unix. Find a non-critical role in a company that isn't audited heavily (non-public company, smaller division of a large company) and hack away. One option…

Seems like theft that isn't illegal. No thanks.

Nice comment. So slavish... No go to the parking and wash my MB, I'm paying you for something!!!

;-)) lol

Re: Ask HN: What's a good low profile job where I can hack at the same time?

#89

Post by glenstein »

jraines wrote: post #86
glenstein wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your feedstomper service rules. I'm using it for Ask Metafilter, and I'll probably use it for a host of others.

Thanks man. I've been encouraged by the response so far, but also nervous. Let me know if you have any problems -- it's worked on all feeds I've tested except one: the friendfeed 'best-of-day' feed, which is both voluminous and heavy on html. I'm going to make a few more tweaks tonight and try to get some more feedback from HN.

Hey, me again.

After having used your service for a bit, I wanted to say that the single biggest pain is that title of a feed item looks identical to the description text of the feed above it, so it kind of looks like the description text just has a line break and some more text, not like a new item has started. So the items all seem to bleed into one another.

Perhaps get rid of the "Link" and make the title a link to the item itself? Or seperate each item with an ?

One other thing. Is there a better way to store feeds than feedstomper.com/82.xml? I imagine that will be a ton of processing power and data necessary to store if a lot of people start using your service. And I'm not sure how you handle multiple requests for the same feed, or look to see if people stop subscribing to a certain feed.

Why not something more like feedstomper.com/?feed=http://www.reddit.com/.rss or something? But if you switch to that, will everyone who is already subscribed to 43.xml and 95.xml find that their feeds get broken?

Also, it means that I can just browse around and take a look at 32.xml or 15.xml and check out what everyone else is reading, which might be problematic if people are submitting personal feeds, from say, "friend's shared items" from google reader.

And what about a "when do you want this feed updated" option? Ideally I want it to update just before I (arbitrarily) decide to access it, so the feed is as current as possible despite having only updated once that day.

It's possible that I'm being pre-emptive and you have already thought of these things. You did specifically ask for problems, rather than feature requests.

But I like the service; the few alternatives I know of are not nearly as elegant.

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