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Show HN: Taxi Wars – Stories from the front line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12193273 (359 days ago - HN submission links directly to http://taxiwars.org/)

tl/dr: HN provided a nice boost, but websites don't grow if you don't feed them.

Backstory: ~5 years ago I started driving a taxi, for fun & adventure & freedom. And to support myself, while trying to figure out how to finish recovering from a head injury [1]. After 8 days I made an account on kuro5hin.org (k5) & started blogging about my experiences.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13123659

At first I was just trolling k5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", who had grand ambitions to help people, but was handicapped by a history of mercury poisoning -> mental illness. My point in being 'TaxiCabJesus' on k5 was to show that it's the little things that count. After a 3.5 years I'd learned a lot about what people actually experience (which I hadn't appreciated due to my upper-middle-class upbringing), and was forced into retiring from the taxi driving gig...

One day kuro5hin.org went away. K5's absentee founder Rusty hadn't prepared for a datacenter move, and the site was lost. I posted in HN submission RIP kuro5hin that my story "Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0" was last to post [2], and one of you responded that you appreciated my k5 submissions & encouraged me to re-post them at a site of my own.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802

I still intend to write a Taxi Wars trilogy: A New Hope, The Vultures Strike Back, and Return of the Drivers. I also have some other stories to tell. Retrospectively I realized that I was learning about the various 'predicaments' that people find themselves experiencing. Draft titles include:

The Predicament of 'old people' / Ordinary Rendition: The Public Servants' Quagmire / the predicaments of doctors and patients

I joined Toastmasters several months ago. Recently I gave a speech that's based the 'predicaments of doctors and patients'. It went over pretty well, which was motivation to work on my little site...



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