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Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#271

Post by xiphias2 »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #213
xiphias2 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them. This is the video series I was writing about: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE88E9ICdipidHkTehs1Vb... Mike Maloney most imp…

What about Ethereum? I'm not in the space much and follow it rather loosely, but Ether seems like one of the better options out there.

Ethereum is very interesting, but it has some red flags for me:

- It has multiple implementations, which is generally a good thing, but not for consensus critical software. When you have a software worth tens of billions of dollars, and people don't have consensus on who owns those billions of dollars, that's really really scary.

- Ethereum has a lot of hard forks and the ice age, which is a way for the dev team to force users to always switch to newer clients.

- With Bitcoin backwards compatibility is one of the main features: you don't need to trust new code from the dev team to send your money (for receiving new money, the situation is trickier).

- The parity multisig theft was extra scary for me, because I use multisig to store my Bitcoin in multiple physical places. The 1 line bug fix without tests was even scarier. If you look at Bitcoin, the devs are working on MuSig, the newer multisig protocol for years now, and they are trying to have a protocol that's proven to be safe and goes through peer review before thinking about implementing it. Ethereum doesn't care about having a provably safe multisig implementation, because it focuses on general smart contracts.

- It's really expensive (more than $10k) at this point to have a machine that have a full sync node from the genesys block, which means that Ethereum has less security than Bitcoin, as there exist only a few full nodes in the whole world.

- State data is not cacheable, which makes it harder to improve on the node syncing protocol

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#272

Post by electricslpnsld »

mrfusion wrote: post #133
electricslpnsld wrote: post #54

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspe…

Would it make more sense to rent them out rather than sell?

I would then have to deal with finding tenants, property maintenance issues, etc (or pay someone to do this), which is more than I really want to do right now. At that point I would be closer to a full time landlord, not a full-time software engineer who enjoys working on houses on the side!

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#273

Post by electricslpnsld »

tejohnso wrote: post #147
electricslpnsld wrote: post #54

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspe…

Any tips on house selection? What do you stay away from when looking at candidates? How many weekends does it typically take before you're ready to sell? This sounds like something I'd do even if it just barely covered costs (including a reasonable per-hour time cost).

I look for smaller places that I can handle on my own (2 bedroom max), no major structural/foundational issues that would require bringing an engineer in, no demolition that would require an engineer, that kind of thing. Finding an inspector that you trust and that knows their stuff is really key here. Basically the same kind of things you would look for when investing in house flips (which is really all I'm doing, just for fun on my own).

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#274

Post by kwiens »

microtherion wrote: post #132
dplgk wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hard part is finding appliances that need fixing. This is super easy if you happen to own a lot do things that break. If not, it becomes quite boring and tedious to scout out things that are breaking for other people, that you have no personal motivation to fix, to get the broken appliance and then figure out the 3d model for the bad part.

A few years ago I bought a replacement part for a baby stroller: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/bugabooparts It's a neat business model: The person posts DIY repair videos on youtube, which drives traffic to his site. The strollers can easily cost $1000 new, and are often handed down / resold, so there is motivation to keep them running, and they have some weak spots which tend to break. The 3D printed replacement p…

Yes! We have guides for doing Bugaboo repairs using 3D printed parts on iFixit. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Bugaboo+Cameleon+1+and+3++Handl... https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Bugaboo+Cameleon+1+and+3+Swivel... https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Bugaboo+Cameleon+1+and+3+Brake+...

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#275

Post by electricslpnsld »

LeonM wrote: post #74
electricslpnsld wrote: post #54

For the past few years I've been buying, renovating, and selling small-ish houses. My dad was a contractor growing up so I picked up most of the necessary skills helping him out during middle and high school. I mostly work on weekends and holidays which makes it a bit slow going, but I've made a reasonable amount of money. Even if the money was worse I would still probably do it, I really enjoy both the physical aspe…

Depending on the country you are in, it shouldn't be that hard to become a certified electrician. Granted, I have a degree in electrical engineering, but certification was not part of that degree. I got the certification at a night school, IIRC it took 2 months with about ~5 hours per week in effort. If you don't have experience with electronics it would obviously take a bit more effort, but it's totally doable.

I've considered it! Our local community college offers classes like this for pretty cheap, maybe when I'm done with the current place.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#277

Post by MrFoof »

Nabi wrote: post #263
MrFoof wrote: post #84

I buy cars, repair them and recondition them to my level of satisfaction, and send them back out the door, typically targeting 55-65 year olds. I focus mostly on entry level luxury crossovers around 7 to 10 years old, though starting to also do hybrids since there’s more profit in it since everyone is seemingly allergic to batteries and pack replacement/rebuilds. Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do…

May I ask what car brands do you usually work on?

Bread and butter is the Lexus RX, Acura MDX, Honda CR-V and Toyota Highlander. There is zero issue putting them out the door, because the demand is insane. I've also started with Toyota Priuses because there's high-demand, most mechanics are allergic to batteries, and people dump them for cheap over any battery pack issue.

Though I've worked on a ton of stuff, the above is where there's A) enough people owning the above who still think all vehicles explode when their odometer hits 100K B) have inexpensive and easy repairs for simple things that are rotting or are wearing out and C) plenty of people who know better and when they test drive a 10-year old one that feels as good and looks as good as new, won't even negotiate your asking price.

I've entertained the idea of selling BMW M cars, Audi S/RS and Merc AMGs, but the reality is there's far more labor involved, far more to usually fix, higher acquisition costs, less demand, and buyers who are completely insufferable. I've sold several, but in retrospect it wasn't ever worth the time and effort.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#278

Post by DamnInteresting »

kkaranth wrote: post #242
DamnInteresting wrote: post #229

I established DamnInteresting.com in 2005, a place where myself and handful of others produce original long-form non-fiction in article and podcast form. Despite plenty of traffic, it didn't reach the break-even point for several years, because I despise advertisements and I refused to add them to my site. I funded the project in other ways, such as donations, publishing a book, licensing content, etc. Nowadays it st…

This looks neat. I'll be sure to read a few articles from here. Why the curated section though? I think it distracts to have links to articles from NYTime or Wired on the side.

It's a long story, but the short version goes something like this:

At first we worked our cabooses off to publish new original content several times per month. This proved unsustainable, partially because we were becoming more ambitious with our work, but especially owing to stressors that had arisen in my personal life, and I burned out.

I spent a year-long hiatus putting things right, and when we resumed our writing, it was with the understanding that we were switching to a marathon-not-a-sprint publication schedule. The curated column arose to fill in the gaps between our in-house writings. Nowadays many readers specifically visit us for the links, so we feel duty-bound to persist.

Re: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

#279

Post by grogenaut »

gottebp wrote: post #32

Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL and BCG600SIL Grinders. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use iFixit[2],[3] to drive the traffic. It passively makes enough to cover my own coffee needs forever. I spend about 20 minutes per month fielding questions. This all happened because my grinder failed and I co…

are you concerned about the low amounts of ground nylon that your customers (or really the original customers) were ingesting if this part does wear down over time?
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