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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#181

Post by vladdanilov »

benmarks wrote: post #158
vladdanilov wrote: post #26

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 .

Any thoughts about delivering this as a webservice? Lots of catalog images out there are managed by merchants and need hands-off processing. Happy to chat further about this.

CLI is cross platform. I'm certainly planning a server license with an option to spin it on AWS.

I have some performance updates planned making it 2-3 times faster. Probably worth waiting.

Email is in the HN profile.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#182

Post by pc86 »

davidwihl wrote: post #122
logicallee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity has had numbers for some 200,000 years. any hacker can, in the next ten minutes, cause their CPU to do more arithmetic than the arithmetic (explicitly adding 2+5, and so forth, multiplying two numbers in their heads) that every single person has done in the history of humanity. okay, but that's just numbers. Today we live in a connected world where 2,000,000,000 people can be reached in any eight-hour period…

I'm all for entrepreneurship but the original question asked about passive income. Your suggestion is clearly very active.

Yes but why answer the question when you can get on a soapbox instead?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#183

Post by vladdanilov »

nkkollaw wrote: post #98
vladdanilov wrote: post #26

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 .

Saw that on PH, looks good. May I ask what percentage of sales did you get? I'm going to launch my product soon, and I'd like to know what I can expect.

Thanks. Literally a few. Contact me if you need specifics.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#184

Post by icebraining »

velcro wrote: post #93
jrheard wrote: post #13

Young hackers who have a surplus of income and have funds to spare that aren't being channeled toward debt / family / donations, heed me: save as much of your salary as you can, and put it in boring investments (index funds / etc), probably through vanguard.com (no affiliation, I just use them and have heard nothing but good things from people I trust). You can pretty easily set up your job's direct-deposit system so…

Any tips for something solid vanguard-like in the EU?

I'm using DEGIRO (based in the NL), seems to be OK, decent website and low fees. They have this weird thing about loaning out your shares in the regular accounts; I couldn't quite get the risk I'd be exposed to in that case, so I went with a Custody account.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#186

Post by ommunist »

IAmEveryone wrote: post #18

210,000 Euro, divided between me and a friend. We started a small online shop about 10 years ago, and it's mostly automated. About 5 minutes/day + one week / year of work. Before that, I had spent a few years (trying to) run rather big software projects (for me – I was 18 or 19). They had cost me so many sleepless nights that I swore to never again take on customers paying me more than 100 Euro each. Now, if anybody…

mescaline?

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#187

Post by 551199 »

threeseed wrote: post #91
lowpro wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't necessarily true. The US dollar is actually increasing in value as people want their money to be safe. If Trump does bring back American jobs, meaning less jobs in Asia, the dollar buy will continue, depressing Asia and strengthening the US for now. But you're right, the OP definitely needs to tread lightly with property and the contracts. The devil is always in the details.

The unemployment rate in the US is 4.9% which is basically full employment. Now sure there are a number of people who don't report and those who wish to work more. But I don't think it's going to be easy to get those people back into work. Most are either in industries that are disappearing due to automation. Or they lack the skills/training to re-educate themselves. And without tariffs (which will impact exports) th…

You want to look into participation rate. Compare participation and unemployment rate over time and it's clear '4.9%' is pure fallacy.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#188

Post by Dowwie »

tove wrote: post #119

My passive income is quite standard. Three apartments in a new block. I bought all of them four years ago when the construction was still unfinished. This got me a good price. I knew that the area would be under continuous development, therefore it won't be hard to find renters. I was right. Best part is that I didn't even have to furnish them. I managed to rent them all unfurnished.

In what country are you located? Furniture is more of a short term rental requirement, unless you've included essential appliances with your categorization.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#189

Post by cesarb »

ericd wrote: post #168
cesarb wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, holding actual physical USD cash is a bad investment; older bills are worth less (exchanges will give you something like 10%-30% less for older bills, if they are accepted at all), so the longer you hold it, the less it's worth. On the other hand, there are funds which track the USD; see for instance http://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/siteEsp/dtvm/dwn/inf04128893.p... . That fund had a return of 150% in…

Older bills are worth face value in the US, why does anyone take a 30% discount on them?

They are worth face value in the US, but not outside of it. See for instance this question: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/25959/converting-...

Instead of simply not accepting the bills, some places take a discount to offset the risk that they're fake. The older the bill, the greater the chance that it's a counterfeit.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#190

Post by ommunist »

madaxe_again wrote: post #79
cesarb wrote: post #71

Here in Brazil we have it easy. The most boring funds (the ones which track the interbank rate - CDI) easily return around 12% per year (depending on the administration fee; the smaller the administration fee, the higher the return). With the inflation around 6% per year, this gives around 6% returns before tax. If you stay with the fund for at least two years (and it's of the correct kind), the tax rate is 15% over…

Man alive. Here in the UK a five year treasury bond yields precisely nothing - potentially less than nothing. I have a mountain of cash and nothing to invest it in here. Even property doesn't present a meaningful yield any more. It also doesn't look like it's going to get better, just worse - so as far as I can discern the best course of action is just to spend it before it becomes completely valueless. To stay ahead…

What do you call a meaningful yield? Ecommerce in Russia is growing. JV?
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