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Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

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Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#211

Post by Scoundreller »

pascalxus wrote: post #200

Start selling anything and everything that has any monetary value on platforms like: Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook marketplace, nextDoor, close5 (if they're still around), letgo, etc. I mean, literally, just go through every last item in your house. If you haven't used it in the last 3 months, what's the point of holding on to it? It's labor intensive, but at when you're done, you'll have a much cleaner house and a litt…

And if you have the time, look into parting it out for max value. Often the parts are worth more than the complete unit.

And we probably all have spare bubble envelopes and boxes from delivery services.

Plus you get to learn how it's assembled.

And people will pay more for parts from a 100% functional unit than a scrapped unit of unknown provenance.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#212

Post by cosmodisk »

soared wrote: post #106
econcon wrote: post #50

There is shortage of 3D printing filament because of virus, so I've been creating filament and selling it. https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho... This activity also help recycle waste plastic. Production cost of filament is $7.5 per 5kg and filament roll has 850 gram filament and can be sold for $20-30 per spool It's trivial to get the quality right. You can sell rolls on Amazon, eBay and Ets…

I don’t think someone working at a call center has the technical aptitude and financial resources to source and build there own extrusion machine.

I work for a call centre of sorts.You wouldn't believe the kind of skills people have.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#214

Post by gumby »

uoaei wrote: post #197
__s wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you worked at a call center? In a past life I worked at a place where my manager & IT guy were originally call center workers. The manager was a crafty guy, does nice woodwork. My ex happened to also work at that call center & is now an illustrator. Another friend from that place eventually went to college to be a machinist

It's almost like some people don't attach their identity to their job, and make an income to pursue their interests in other hours.

Indeed. I've always hated that question "what do you do" (meaning your job) and usually answer it with "about what?"

I understand it's a pretty straightforward way to look for common ground and introductory topic of conversation, but there's a massive implication which I consider socially corrosive.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#215

Post by mtlynch »

Nextgrid wrote: post #115
goatherders wrote: post #77

There are some truly awful suggestions here. The question isnt about changing his life by learning to code or setting up a plastics machine (which is pretty cool but takes investment) or starting an affiliate site and then generating traffic, it's about generating income during a global pandemic. 1. Fiverr 2. Mechanical Turk 3. Craigslist Gigs 4. UpWork Can generate $50 by dinner time if you're willing to focus and p…

From experience on Upwork, that platform is a big dumpster fire that should be avoided at all costs. Any task will immediately get spammed with lowball offers by monkeys which means it's impossible to actually earn realistic prices. The clients are non-technical for the most part so they will not see the red flags and will go with the lowball offers anyway, with predictable results. The rating system has been gamed t…

Just as a contrasting datapoint, I use Upwork a lot as a client, and I've found a lot of good contractors on there. I agree with you that the platform itself is terrible and seems to succeed in spite of itself, but it's worked well enough for my needs.

I've hired cartoonists[0], editors[1], writers[2], accountants, and developers. I had the worst luck with developers because, as you say, the ratings are meaningless. They have the lemon problem[3] that good developers won't really work for $15/hr, but there are also bad developers who charge $125/hr. But to evaluate whether a developer is good or bad, you generally have to invest 10-15 hours with them. So a string of expensive bad matches can cost you $5-10k in trial hires just to find a decent developer. I think other tasks are easier to hire for because costs are lower and the outputs are more easily inspectable.

[0] https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

[1] https://mtlynch.io/editor/

[2] https://mtlynch.io/hiring-content-writers/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#216

Post by Scoundreller »

brandonmenc wrote: post #134
hnrodey wrote: post #70

Good ole fashion yard work. Despite the unemployment rate, many people are still working and spring is here. Grass is growing, mulch needs spread, etc.

My parents just paid a kid $250 to lay mulch for a day. Found him on Nextdoor. He doesn't even have to bring the mulch - homeowner purchases it and has it delivered, and he just shows up to lay it. I guess he does this a few times a week - that's a cool thousand bucks on a good week.

Probably anything involving "I'll plant your tomato/vegetable garden for you" would do very well right now in the right places.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#217

Post by cosmodisk »

fred_is_fred wrote: post #148
ge96 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the competition is nuts too, when I've been on the other side(hiring) it's overwhelming how many people you get to respond/hard to tell if the person is competent/trustworthy(with regard to allowing access to your tech to work on it). Starting from 0 is really hard(people with former work look more trustworthy).

Excellent point. This is the modern version of the oft ridiculed Boomer idea to "just go door to door until you get a job like I did back in 1967".

I've got a feeling that it'd probably be even easier nowadays. I remember when I came to London about 10 years ago: no money,no connections, nothing.Went online to check some jobs just to see some ads with 200+ applications.. Printed my crappy CV,a list of a few agencies and started going from one to another. Managed to get a job 4 hours later..

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#218

Post by mattgibson »

pascalxus wrote: post #200

Start selling anything and everything that has any monetary value on platforms like: Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook marketplace, nextDoor, close5 (if they're still around), letgo, etc. I mean, literally, just go through every last item in your house. If you haven't used it in the last 3 months, what's the point of holding on to it? It's labor intensive, but at when you're done, you'll have a much cleaner house and a litt…

A friend used to have a great ebay sideline in reselling poorly listed items at a higher price.

He'd search for reasonably high value items that had been listed with spelling mistakes in the name so that they didn't show up in searches, or showed up too far down the results to be noticed. He'd then buy them and immediately on winning the auction, re-list the same item but without the spelling mistakes.

His secret trick was using a copy/paste of the text and images from the historically highest priced listing that had sold for that same item, which ebay made it easy to search for. By the time it arrived in the post, he'd already sold it on at a higher price to someone else. He just relabelled the packages, sent them on and pocketed the difference.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#219

Post by AxiomaticSpace »

econcon wrote: post #147
kube-system wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's trivial to get the quality right. Is it really? I've looked into this a good bit myself and it seems that many who have tried this have trouble keeping the diameter consistent. I suspect that if it really was trivial, then you'd think just about any commercial supplier could get it right, there's a lot of junk filament out there. Maybe you are just very good at it; +-0.02 is pretty good even by commercial stan…

>Is it really? I've looked into this a good bit myself and it seems that many who have tried this have trouble keeping the diameter consistent. If you'll check my medium post, I've linked a video where I am extruding filament. Problem with those hobbyist machines is motor torque/power rating. And second, they don't use a special screw and barrel. The motor used in professional extruders used in real filament factorie…

Instead of a laser gauge, you could try using a camera hooked up with some edge detection software and use that to estimate the width. It probably wouldn't be as accurate, but it would definitely be cheaper.

Re: Ask HN: Ways to generate income when you're at home without pay?

#220

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

koheripbal wrote: post #35
xoxoy wrote: post #17

Day trading

In this market over the last two months, that's how I've made more money than I have in the entire last 3-4 years combined. Crazy. ...but that opportunity is probably overish. Also, "day" trading is usually bad - buying the dip and selling the excitement on a week/month basis takes much less time and is much safer.

You mind sharing a couple of your big wins?

How many trades a day were you actually making?

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