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

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

#221

Post by chupaolo » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:21 PM UTC

mattgibson wrote: post #218

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 tri…

That's a great trick! Any idea how profitable this was?

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

#222

Post by TAForObvReasons » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

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…

This is a great time to sell any retro video game consoles and equipment -- the third party market prices for lots of old controllers and consoles and games jumped 25-100% in the last two months.

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

#223

Post by neurostimulant » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

ornornor wrote: post #119

jsamuel wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge market of people who want to purchase managed hosting, not be responsible for their own servers. Think of the customers (such as WordPress developers) of any traditional hosting company like DreamHost. The purpose of HostLaunch is to make it extremely easy to start your own managed hosting business to sell web hosting services in that same market.

I don’t get it. What’s your edge? You basically have no control over anything. Why would the customer go with jsamuel hosting rather than ornornor hosting if we’re Both reselling exactly the same thing? Or why not stay with dreamhost for that matter? What’s the reseller’s edge in that case? Anything goes wrong you have to wait on DO to sort it out. And price wise you can’t do anything that anyone else can’t get from…

This is perfect for freelancers. When someone commissioned them to build a wordpress site, they can offer them to host the site on that platform. No need to spend time to build their own hosting infra each of their clients. It's also pretty cheap as you can cram three or more Wordpress site into a single $5 vps on DO.

Another use case is people in 3rd world country sometimes need international hosting but don't have any local payment method accepted by international companies (they only accept visa/mastercard/amex, not small regional card/bank network). You can tap that market by offering local payment processor support, essentially become a middle man for those vps companies. This service doesn't support this kind of use case, but other web hosting kits are very popular in 3rd world countries for this reason.

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

#224

Post by pascalxus » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

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.

People are a lot more capable than you think. There's a pretty vast oversupply of talent and not enough jobs to fill them. As a result, you have people who are capable of becoming so much more ending up in menial, low end jobs.

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

#225

Post by odonnellryan » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

mtlynch wrote: post #215

Nextgrid wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It's probably good for hiring, but awful for freelancing.

They still have $1k of my money (well money I earned through a client) because they banned my account without explanation!

I haven't used them in years, maybe they have gotten better.

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

#226

Post by cosmodisk » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:38 PM UTC

economicslol wrote: post #129

partingshots wrote: post #21

Learn programming while doing something like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. delivery in the mean time. Then start applying for roles.

"Learn to program" People are still repeating this meme? But seriously while Uber and other companies are laying off thousands it's probably one of the worst times to try to enter the market as a new SWE.

No, it's not.One won't enter the market today,as it'd take 6-12 month to get to the point where you know the basics. Such a person wouldn't be competing with those from Uber,as the level of seniority is completely different. 100% junior dev jobs may be hard to come across over the upcoming months, however there are tons of jobs out there that would absolutely benefit from having someone who can write even basic scripts.

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

#227

Post by botwriter » Thu, May 21, 2020, 9:49 PM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #68

barbegal wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to make money in this way is by finding items that have been incorrectly listed (and thus undervalued) and listing them with better keywords, accurate information etc. The tricky part is finding those listings in the first place because they will often be at the bottom of many searches due to poor relevance. Searching by "ending soonest" on eBay can bring up many hidden treasures. You then need to have a…

There used to be a browser extension that would search common misspellings of things on eBay to find undervalued items. “Kat Spade” instead of “Kate Spade”, for example. I built quite a collection of shoes and handbags with this method in college. But I’m sure eBay’s search has gotten better at delivering misspelled listing in results over the past decade so perhaps it’s not as useful as I remember it being.

Was it fat fingers by any chance?

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

#228

Post by nitrogen » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:01 PM UTC

AxiomaticSpace wrote: post #219

econcon wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You'd be looking at very subtle variations in the color of single pixels, so you might as well just use a single optical sensor and light source into a single high res adc, using intensity to measure thickness.

At some point dust in the air will be a limiting factor.

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

#229

Post by botwriter » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:07 PM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #141

Not applicable to most people, but: Breeding Fish. Especially with the air travel situation what it is right now, fish stores have trouble restocking. So, if you already have some equipment but the market was always too lousy, you might be able to pick up a few bucks. Hard to scale up to a significant income, though.

aquaculture specialist here. the big money fish are still big money (I'm looking at you Zebra Plecos) but you won't make any money breeding your everyday stuff most stores will just give you store credit.

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

#230

Post by jgable » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:08 PM UTC

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…

I can help you with the microcontroller and control algorithm side. It’s what I do. If you’re a software developer you can do it yourself with a small amount of guidance from someone like me. Email is my username plus 79 at gmail if you want to set up a quick discussion.