I remember reading your comments pretty frequently, but the ones I see are about being an abuse survivor or a woman[0] rather than tech or any other industry, and a quick look at your HN bio, twitter, and blog doesn't show a portfolio or a company.
[0] which are fine things to talk about, I just have no idea what you want to do for a living
I have a Certificate in GIS from a very respected program and I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I had a college class in Homelessness and Public Policy years ago as part of an incomplete BS in Environmental Resource Management with a concentration in Housing that was intended to be the basis for eventually getting a Masters in Urban Planning. (Most planning degree programs are masters programs. There are relatively few bachelors in planning.)
So housing issues were a main focus and I've probably gotten the most traction or respect on HN for writing about homelessness. The two are very much interrelated. Housing policy is a large factor in homelessness in the US.
I also worked at Aflac for a bit over five years which exposed me to the award-winning design work of their wholly owned subsidiary Communicorp.
I went through YC's free online Startup School last fall and I'm doing what I can to try to figure out how to develop community development resources for underserved small communities and also find some means to turn that into a real business.
Community development work is somewhat outside the scope of what is typically handled by YC companies and much of it is done by either government entities or non profits.
For profit companies in urban planning or economic development spheres tend towards being consulting companies that do contracts for government entities.
I did some volunteer work locally for a couple of years for a couple of non profit organizations that operate in that realm and quit last May, which is a long story that I don't know how to sum up.
I started Eclogiselle a bit after quitting and likely wouldn't have done so if I had been taken more seriously locally. I'm okay at this point with how all that has gone so far.
Maybe I'm "dead" in the eyes of locals and maybe I'm not. I don't know. I have reason to believe some local movers and shakers have followed my writing and that has changed the discussion of local issues but I haven't succeeded in turning that into significant paid work for me.
Related projects:
ProjectSRO.blogspot.com
ButterflyEconomy.blogspot.com
At the moment, I'm pretty pleased with Project: SRO though it's small and I don't know how to get traction with it.
Peddle the idea.
If you have the political chops: city planning meetings. There are usually developers going to these meetings.
If you can find a way to monetize these buildings (e.g perhaps establish a homeless-to-work program with the city, that provides subsistence jobs to homeless people, that they can then turn around and be funneled into these SRO properties, and make these commercial real estate developers bank), then you can talk your way into being a consultant.
There's a more humanitarian way to phrase this (and assuredly, a more humanitarian way to organize and build this type of venture), but I frankly do not have the emotional bandwidth.
Although I'm not sure if HN is fertile ground for establishing an income. It would be less than 1% of users, I imagine.
Although I'm not sure if HN is fertile ground for establishing an income. It would be less than 1% of users, I imagine.
The top answer to the question 43 days ago of Ask HN: What tangible benefits did you get from spending time on HN? is:
I did a Show HN for the idea of a SaaS for GitLab and I’m now the CEO of a $6b company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366538
There are people here who are not interested in using HN to make money. But there are many men who do, in fact, make tons of money because of their relationship to HN. This is extremely well documented to the point that it just makes me nuts that people try to tell me that doesn't go on.
They do monthly hiring threads. They advertise jobs here for YC companies. They do a Freelancer? Seeking Freelancer? thread every month. I've seen comments by individuals that talked about having no problem making money via HN from people who had been here about the same amount of time as me and had lots less karma.
Men can come here, connect to other businessmen and make money if that's what they are looking for. I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard and I remain dirt poor with terrible prospects for the time being and this has been true for a lot of years.
Please do not do this. Address the issue of sex work. Don't add comments politely dismissing the idea that men make money via HN or something. Men make money via HN. It's common knowledge that men make money via HN, sometimes scads and scads of it. Meanwhile, the highest ranked woman here still has to put up with this kind of crap where people act like I'm imagining things and this isn't a real problem.
It makes me feel like the entire forum is intentionally gaslighting me because, wow, can 5 million people actually all be that completely oblivious to how much men use HN to line their pockets? I have enormous trouble believing that.
Edit: I will add that even if it is "only 1 percent", with 5 million monthly visitors, that would be 50,000 people.
2nd edit: There was also this question two days ago that got overwhelming support for a young man who is having trouble getting hired and it stuck in my craw because there has not been overwhelming support by HN of people trying to help me solve my problem:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26825017
Instead, I continue to get amazingly shitty replies implicitly suggesting "It's not a real problem. She's exaggerating and the problem is her imagining that participating on HN has any real power to positively impact your income. Ha ha ha."
HN makes you money only if you use HN to make money. At the end of the day, Hacker News is a public forum. Some people use it to launch their startup, or get hired. Some people use it to find news. Some people do not read the articles and instead read the comments.
It's up to you to use HN as you see fit as long as you are within the site guidelines. I think your confusion is stemming from the fact that HN Karma and the amount of dollars you make from HN are correlated. They are not.
No, I have no such confusion.
I mention my karma as shorthand for "I appear to have done the best job for figuring out how to participate as a woman here and can't turn it into adequate income though it's an explicit goal of mine."
I'm well aware you have to seek to use it that way and karma score does not directly correlate with success in using it that way. I've sought to use it that way. It has not gotten satisfactory results. I have good reason to believe my gender is a factor in that failure to achieve what I would like to achieve.
This is solely your depiction and doesn't make it a truth (and I don't think it's anywhere close to being true). I also think if you keep thinking that, you are unlikely to achieve satisfactory results (and subsequently shift the blame to your gender instead of your strategy).
Some issues:
1. If men will only take me seriously if they think I'm a man, what happens if they arrange to meet me in person and find out I'm a woman?
2. How do I arrange to accept payment online for work while continuing to hide my gender? My name is not gender neutral.
3. Business is done on a basis of trust. How do I convince people to trust me when they find out I have been actively deceiving them wrt my identity and gender?
There are other complications specific to me as an individual, but women generally will face the above issues if they try to take advice to simply hide their gender as a supposed "solution" to such problems.
I've heard that kind of thing a lot -- "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog if you don't tell them" -- and it ignores a lot of critical details. You can potentially be anonymous online for purposes of engaging in discussion in a forum but if you wish to actually make money, it gets vastly more challenging to be anonymous and hide your gender.
But it's no longer a barrier to YOUR success, and you just might, if it's what you want, have the comfort and audience in your success to spread this message more effectively.
But if you feel gas-lit, and like you're yelling into the wind, finish your breath and change tactic.
I did run into some sexism, but not enough to make me want to make my own account.
Genuinely: Do you want to do business with the sexists etc, anyway?
In seriousness, focusing on outliers sounds like a recipe for disaster. I hope you achieve your interpretation of success.
Honestly, my only idea is that you go to a strongtowns meeting (virtual or physical) and try to meet people there, they are far more involved in urban planning than any random HN user.
The people making money using HN are ones seeking it. Usually at the expense of other goals. At least in terms of directness of achieving those goals.
My suggestion would be to shift focus a bit and try to find money areas of public planning where money is being spent badly or where it can’t be spent currently.
What is a problem for public planners they’re willing to spend to solve and how can you use that to advance your own goals in public planning?
Historically, you see more prostitution in "Victorian" style eras of prudery. During "Hippie" style eras where ordinary women will put out for free because they actually enjoy sex, you see less sex in exchange for money.
Let me remind people that marriage is the only contract that is considered void and annullable if it is not consummated with an act of sex and dividing up marital assets and monies is a big part of concerns about divorce and rightly so. Historically, a man was hired to a lot of jobs more or less on the assumption that he had a wife at home to cook for him, do the grocery shopping and clean up after him so he could focus on his job and then his money was viewed as "family money" not his personal income. She had a right to it and those rights have eroded over time.
This is not at all a simple topic because if you assume that couples must marry for life ("until death do us part") and cannot divorce and yadda, then you are saying people have to stay in abusive relationships and that's all kinds of problematic.
Anyway, our laws surrounding topics like this generally do a poor job of protecting the people we claim to be protecting because our mental models aren't actually about human rights. They aren't actually about things like agency, quality of life etc for women and children.
They are about prudery and an assumption that sex is bad and somehow adding money to the mix makes it pure evil.
And, yet, men tend to be expected to pay for dates and men tend to be expected to support their wives financially, etc. So there are lots of ways in which money is already tied to sex and in a gendered fashion. Sex workers are typically women. Their clients tend to be men.
There is a lot of growing that needs to happen before we can get to a point of actually giving a damn about the welfare and agency of people who are at risk of ending up sex workers for various reasons.
At the risk of having this misconstrued as usual:
When I was homeless, men would straight up offer me money for sex based solely on being pretty plus very obviously poor while at the same time trying to network via HN and figure out how to adequately support myself some other way has gone very poorly for a lot of years. There are lots of factors suppressing my income. It's not just my gender. But my gender is a factor and most of the time when I bring that up, I get a lot of not great replies that boil down to people trying to deny that men here are somehow guilty of something .
I'm not trying to point fingers and say "men are bad people." But the reality is that simply being female makes it hard to figure out how to connect with businessmen in a way that helps improve my bottom line and doesn't get misconstrued as me offering to date someone, in essence.
I don't know how to solve that. I've worked on it a lot of years and things are less crazy making than they used to be, but I haven't found any slam dunk wins substantially moving the needle on my bottom line.
So if you are inclined to be all "La la la not listening, not my problem" about how the highest ranked woman on HN finds HN not fertile ground for trying to establish an income when lots of men have no problem using it that way, then you are part of the problem here. Women tend to do sex work because it pays better than a lot of jobs that are open to women and it's amazingly hard to keep "choosing the high road" when that involves literal starvation. (For those who did not get the memo: I was openly homeless for nearly six years and an active participant here for most of that time.)
So think on that. This issue is complex and cannot be resolved by just focusing on sex work per se. It isn't going to be resolved until there are other avenues for women to readily support themselves, among other things. "Just say no to sex work" when there are no ready replacements for such income for so many women is simply not a viable method of fixing the underlying social stuff that fosters current outcomes and statistical trends for this issue.