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Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#121

Post by maest »

pc86 wrote: post #55
maest wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible advice.

It limits your upside but of all the stock-trading advice floating around this isn't very high on the "terrible" list IMO

It's terrible in that:

1. it is not positive expectancy (because naive strategies like this never are)

2. it involves trading in less liquid instruments, which means you lose more money to transaction fees

3. you're _selling_ options. Even if these are covered in theory, there's so much scope to screw this up implementation-wise, that it's just not worth it.

I see no redeeming features for this particular "strategy".

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#122

Post by KomoD »

tayo42 wrote: post #46
cmews wrote: post #27

If you are good at security, try bug bounty hunting. Make the web safer and earn some money!

I tried this, maybe I just suck. But my experience was pretty bad. It seems swarmed by people in 3rd world countries running scripts endlessly already. If you do find something there is still the chance the company will find a way out of it. The whole thing felt like a scam in a way, people show off their massive payment bug find, but in reality its hours of work for almost no payout

> It seems swarmed by people in 3rd world countries running scripts endlessly already.

For the same surface-level stuff, yeah. Other, in-depth issues, not so much.

> people show off their massive payment bug find, but in reality its hours of work for almost no payout

They don't advertise it as some "get money quick" thing just because they show off their payouts.

I occasionally find issues which make me $100, $200, $300 for a few minutes of work, it's not much but it's something.

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#123

Post by KomoD »

glitchcrab wrote: post #51
tayo42 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this, maybe I just suck. But my experience was pretty bad. It seems swarmed by people in 3rd world countries running scripts endlessly already. If you do find something there is still the chance the company will find a way out of it. The whole thing felt like a scam in a way, people show off their massive payment bug find, but in reality its hours of work for almost no payout

My experience tallies with this, used to work for a hosting company and we got plenty of emails from guys in India, Pakistan etc who had 'run burp suite against X and found Y'. We had no bounty program as we were fairly small fry so we said thanks and fixed the bug. You can't compete against the volume. And the big payouts take a lot of time and skill to find and exploit.

Yeah, those are beg bounties (not a typo) https://www.troyhunt.com/beg-bounties/

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#125

Post by ferennag »

thisismyswamp wrote: post #119
kossTKR wrote: post #88

Interesting that for over a decade these threads were filled with hundreds of optimistic posts, but now it's almost pure pessimism and warnings. Maybe earning money on the internet, even with advanced skills and experience has just been met with so much global competition that it's just not that valuable a skill anymore, maybe the monopolies took over e-trade and maybe most users became trapped in silos or on giga-se…

The secret is to build stuff and people commenting on hacker news tend to not be focused on building

I'm not sure I understand this comment. Could you elaborate? If you look at Show HN posts, it's clear that people do build a lot of stuff. I also want to build stuff, I just miss the good idea of what to build

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#126

Post by ferennag »

schwartzworld wrote: post #101

If your company has a referral bonus, it might be worth your while to do some networking. Some companies have really generous bonuses. A simple conversation can earn you thousands of dollars. It's hard to imagine that any web app I'm going to build is going to have as good an ROI.

Usually these only get paid out if they actually hire the person. This will never be a stable monthly side money

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#127

Post by ferennag »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #106
frontman1988 wrote: post #33

There are no easy ways to make money.

I think they really mean “realistic” or “not so hard as to be unrealistic” Mentoring is easy, vs. say starting Dropbox

Exactly. Or if you need to learn 9 years to start earning, that is not easy.

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#128

Post by tmn »

pc86 wrote: post #111
tmn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sell the options

I mean, it was a joke, but also that only works if someone wants to buy them. I've bought options (not on $SPY) where I made a quite a bit of money on paper but couldn't sell them and didn't have the cash to exercise so they ended up expiring. Especially on low-volume securities a big part of the risk is that you simply won't be able to unload them if you don't have the cash on hand to exercise.

When you sell to open, there is a buyer for the order to get filled. At this point, you become the buyer to close the option if you thus desire. If you're selling puts, yes ensure they're cash secured. This avoids anything like the scenario you described.

The difference here is you're not betting with leverage. Modest, high probability returns.

If this didn't make sense and to be super clear. You described buying an option and attempting to sell it later. This is not what I'm describing. I'm describing selling and option to open

Re: Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?

#129

Post by Gnarl »

david-gpu wrote: post #112
Gnarl wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for looking. That was for starters. A pilot study. There's much more there. A selection: "Electromagnetic radiation of mobile telecommunication antennas affects the abundance and composition of wild pollinators" https://pubag.nal.usda.gov/catalog/5196373 "Exposure to cell phone radiations produces biochemical changes in worker honey bees" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3052591/ "Distribution, div…

I hope you understand that I won't entertain this Gish gallop after the substandard quality of the first link you provided. Thank you.

Of course. I don't care about your opinion. Only those who are actually interested in looking into this.
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