441–450 of 713 posts
Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts. [1] https://www.shapeways.com/prod…
Being a developer in a large corporation.
Gotta appreciate sarcasm in this answer, take a [+]
What do I mean by 'quit'? I've been working in large corporation bouncing from team to team. I only write code if I absolutely have to. So in practice I end up actually "working" a few days a month. I don't do shit at work. I just deliver something every so often, and with my experience, I can do as much as a typical dev in 1/10 the time. And I can do the hard stuff some developers just can't. An example of this was writing a parser for third party lua config files. The team fought a half assed implement for months, I came in and re-did it in a week.
Agile has been a god send for me. I just complete a couple of tickets a week, enough to have something to report in the stand up. So far as management is concerned I'm golden.
In early 2016 I purchased commercial real estate, got a 25 year fixed rate mortgage, and leased it. This requires very little of my time every month, and the post-tax yield is above 5%. I couldn't be happier. I'm now considering doing this again in 2017. Hopefully interest rates will remain as low as they have been in order to lock-in an attractive mortgage.
What was your downpayment? Asking because I tried to do the same thing earlier this year. Thought I was clever, did the math on how much I can rent out an apt on AirBnB, and what the mortgage would be on 30 year fixed, and my calcs said I need to put only 5% down to break-even. Then I contact lender and turns out, for Investment properties, they require minimum of 25% to 35% cash as downpayment. They said this was to hedge their risks against a borrower who would bail easily if an investment property goes south.
Any way around this? i.e. around not having to put 25% down on investment RE?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Renaissance is part of the market, and it's the sort of thing that we individual investors can't beat. "The market can't be beat" doesn't mean no one can see better returns - it means a random yahoo like me simply can't compete with the information, processing power, and access funds like Renaissance have. Thus, an average investor is a lot better off with an index fund instead of trying to pick individual stocks. (F…
So buy into the Renaissance mutual fund. There, you beat the market.
I wrote Hello Web App and Hello Web App: Intermediate Concepts ( http://hellowebapp.com , they're learn-to-build-a-web-app books using Django) and self-published both in 2015. Just checked and this year I've made about $13,000 in profit. It's mostly passive — this year I started using a fulfillment company so the majority of my work is sending them orders (and answering questions about the book.) Hoping to continue t…
I also find it satisfying to see that it's apparently quite possible to make (some) money on such projects - keep up the good work! :-)
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…
For what it's worth, my best passive income was from investing as much of my income as I can part with paycheck to paycheck. No boring investments though, always the exact same two funds: UWTI and DWTI, both of which are gone, they delisted on Dec 8th. That said...there are many funds like them, those in particular are 3x leveraged crude oil ETF's. That means if the price of oil rises 1%, UWTI rises 3%. If it falls 1…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pornhub
To be fair porn sites do need all the video/image optimization they can get due to the sheer amount of data they hold
Source: http://blog.devtool.com.ar/2012/04/how-does-pornhub-use-redi...
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…
Earlier this year, at my last boring corporate job, I was trading stock trading stories with our head accountant. (Like the time my brother and I were trading stock tips about 10 years ago, when he turned me on to some up-and-coming German solar energy firm and I mentioned to him some small biotech company I had just read about. I invested a couple thousand dollars in the company my brother suggested and it was bankr…
Your income, your 401k match, and your ESPP are all tied to your employer, so as long as things are good, ESPPs can be a great way to make easy money, but if things take a stark downturn, you can find yourself with ESPP you lost money on, a slouching 401k, and no job. The chances of that happening are fairly low, but still something that makes me a little uncomfortable about ESPPs.
Obviously your advice to max our 401k/IRA contributions first should mitigate a lot of this, but I think it's important to mention the risk too since there's a certain temptation for younger engineers who think it sounds like easy money and don't realize the full implications of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you are probably better off borrowing against your investments if you need cash I don't understand what that means. Whom would you be borrowing from? Where would the cash be coming from?
Your broker https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=interest&p...
Breville coffee grinders are impossible to get internal parts for. I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder. The storefront is through ShapeWays[1] and I use ifixit[2] to drive the traffic. It's passively making ~$425/mo with about 10 minutes of work per week on my end. This all happened because my grinder failed and I couldn't get parts. [1] https://www.shapeways.com/prod…
Did you post this in /r/coffee? I think I remember seeing something similar.