Ask HN: Do you feel like you're missing out?

What if OP genuinely is missing out on something? I have followed this discussion, and a vast many people are equating 'Fear of Missing Out' with a 'Freedom of Missing Out'. The argument that the internet has made spatial disadvantage obsolete because (apparently) we can now call anybody, any-time, from anywhere is a myth. The thoughts of cold calling influential people in Silicon Valley to discuss a new coding project frankly terrifies me. I would much rather afford to bump into them casually and spark up a conversation the natural way. i.e: Over coffee, or by way of bumping into them randomly on the street. So many great things start that way, and I dare suggest the Googles and the Amazons were born naturally like that as they are insiders clubs.

There are many countries where the Internet is disagreeable and molasses slow compared to Silicon Valley, and also a vast many people who can not even afford a keyboard to type on, never mind having several Herman Miller chairs in the office with exposed brick walls with fixies hanging on them. I know a few friends who are making their office like that just to replicate Silicon Valley, but that is like wearing an olympic medal for a few minutes just to see what it is like winning the race, but without having to run it. Maybe OP wants that, if not for the part where spatial disadvantage disallows it, or for the part where simply not having access to capital disallows it. Fair enough, research suggests we are not in another bubble, but those studies did not factor in how cheap it is to start things now, and how much leverage we have. Product Hunt is a perfect example of how far we have come in terms of leverage. It is basically free now to 'start something' or commit to a cause.

I think OP is referring to the amount of shoestring businesses / bootstrappers that are sprouting from the woodwork because of pure opportunism and nothing else. Perhaps they do believe in their idea and are causing parties to happen. Perhaps they are stuck in a hype machine. The internet is, after all, the perfect hype machine. Social media (especially Twitter) has allowed ideas to become a dime a dozen but with no real traction behind them. Ideas are allowed to sprout but quickly become ephemera. Ideas usually stick around much longer when they are on Apache servers however; but that doesn't qualify those ideas any further - it just appears that way, and seems like the webmaster is on to something because money was thrown at the idea, but the webmaster is not following up on the idea. You still see sites that were setup 10 years ago that are only online because they are monetized by Adsense. It seems 'Founders' have become the new 1998 webmasters.

Plain ol' FFMPEG can take images and turn them into videos. I did have to buy a tripod, but, I've wanted one several times now in the past couple of years so this finally tipped me over.

(Amusingly, if you haven't bought one in a while, they all come with "smartphone adapators" now, at least at the consumer level. 21st century ho!)

I used this command line:

    ~/bin/ffmpeg -r 3 -start_number $X -i %03d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 \
        -qscale:v 3 -s 1920x1080 ${MOVIE}.mp4

"-r 3": 3 frames per second. "-start_number $X -i %03d.jpg": Use JPEGS named like "123.jpg". Nominally the %03d.jpg is supposed to be a printf-style template, but I had trouble with anything but straight numbers like that (possibly my camera's naming convention confused it). I used emacs' wdired mode to bulk rename the files. "-start_number $X" is helpful so you can just grab photos off the camera's photo list without having to renumber them. "-s 1920x1080" tones down the resolution since the vast bulk of cameras take way-more-than-HD resolution, and I didn't bother with trying to fiddle with setting it down in the camera, because 32GB SD mini cards are cheap now.

I'll say this to anyone thinking of trying it out: Once I had a little stubby tripod I could put on the kitchen table, it was really quite a fantastically easy project. Stop-motion is, of course, an incredibly labor intensive style of animation... for professional results. For 3 fps, grabbing some children's toys that were probably just on the floor, and moving just one or two things per frame, you can be taking a shot every 10 seconds or so, quite easily. My kids were 7 & 4 and, quite frankly, probably both below average on their patience (for various reasons), and we actually made 4 videos today. It's had a much better bang/buck for the kids than I expected.

And it's yet another place where Legos really shine, by the way.

I think that a lot of people are missing out. I also feel like a lot of genuinely exciting projects get drowned out by the noise created by well-funded mediocre projects.

There is a problem in society now whereby successful (sometimes well-deserving) people are helping their friends too much. I have seen really poor quality projects (with 0 growth) keep receiving funding year after year because the CEO was friends with the investor.

The marketing noise created by these mediocre projects prevents a lot of quality projects from reaching the awareness of consumers.

I often wish that all newly minted tech millionaires would just keep their money to themselves and go on a perpetual holiday to the Bahamas instead of using their money to pollute the market with poor quality projects/companies.

Funding isn't necessarily evil though, funding the wrong project is (even though it is unintentional).

I feel like I'm missing out from just the regular life that most people on HN seem to have. I work as a baker at a food chain, I make less than $20,000 a year, and I don't have a college degree. Hell, I don't even have a smartphone because I still can't afford one. And yet, here I am trying to stay in the know as I self-study to maybe become a programmer one day. But I certainly feel like I'm looking from the outside in, not really a part of the world that is embodied in this site.

Also check out http://toonloop.com/