You are reading Hacker News. While I don't know your personal situation, the odds are strongly in favor of your personally making at least 3 times the average person. which is to say you have a spending problem not an income problem. I get it, I like my toys and luxury as well, but I know a few people who are living and raising kids on less than the average income and they are not doing that bad in life.
HN is a free to access website, that anyone interested in tech can stumble across at any time and access with any personal budget (assuming they've landed an web capable device)
I was in high school with a basically non-existent budget when I first found this site, I'd trust someone here who says "Yeah, I'm not financially stable" - seems like the average income here is no longer relevant at that point.
I've been around long enough to know there are a lot of people who claim they are not financially stable despite making far more than average. I know one person who said "We are so poor the bank wouldn't give us a loan for a brand new Mustang so we had to pay cash".
There are for sure poor people in the world, but most of them are not reading HN.
When you are in high school or college you are financially secure (baring bad luck - an accident could cause significant brain damage at any time...) since we trust you will finish your education and get a job. We also trust that in high school your family is feeding you, and in college you can get plenty of student loans (too many really, but that is a different subject). You don't have a lot of money to work with, but is not financially insecure, just a known low point in life.
Right, because there is no such thing as a technically skilled person on earth who does low paying contracts and knows about HN.
I am trying to get the VMs feature of aidev.codes out (also a bit of a reskin) since hundreds of people signed up for the website builder and tried it but only three people were willing to pay a dollar or more and about one other submitted a bug report. Credit purchases currently disabled because it was mainly used by one guy to test credit cards. Also everyone seemed to want to build complex applications with backend code. So I ran out of money and couldn't really market it and decided to just focus on the ability to generate and host back end code on GPT-4 powered VMs. This is basically working in the dev version, but still some bugs and other things to do, and haven't been able to focus on it the last month (although making progress bit by bit) because I have been busy doing low paying contracts from Upwork and reddit to pay rent (I did not have time for an extended search to pick up a high paying contract and got these within days which I consider an achievement).
So I built a program that automatically writes queries on the fly for an MS ADX database, and optionally will generate arbitrary graphs, based on a user question. And now another system that integrates Slack and document question answering with semantic search (using llamaindex/gpt-index). Both for $1000 or less and within one or two weeks.
I believe that a competitive rate for these tasks would be more like ten times that much, in some markets. But for Upwork and reddit, it's closer to what I billed if you want to be able to pick something up fast. Also I would rather make these my own businesses if I was not desperate for the cash to pay rent/bills.
All it takes to continue being poor is to start being poor and need to pick up work fast. Or just not have a friend to seed your startup. Or maybe my whole problem in life is just making ugly websites by hand instead of using a template.
I actually think I am probably doing it wrong because I see people with less technical skill and integrity focusing on raising money instead of solving problems and having all of their needs easily met.
At the moment I am just sort of praying that the guy from Reddit doesn't turn out to be a crook or something and actually pays me the rest of what he owes. Which I don't really think he is but he really should acknowledge messages faster on Slack.
you have made an intentional decision to "not work for the man". I hope it works out for you. If you were not willing for the (hopefully short term) quality of life costs you could get a regular job with some boring company (finance, insurance, manufacturing...) and work 9-5 with a great salary. Best of luck.
But it was your decision to not go for as much money as you could.
