http://dollarfuckyou.com/ I've made about 300$ :/
Awesome idea, please make it available in the EU.
Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
531–540 of 713 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#532Young 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…
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…
> Why save a salary, when you can create a business, create value, and scale to the entire Internet and give people some benefit?
Risk tolerance.
If, for whatever reason, my business doesn't turn as much of a profit as I'd hope, and I've spent everything I could on it, I'm in an awful position: both as a person who needs to keep a roof over my head, and as someone hoping to do good things for humanity. If I'm on the verge of bringing humanity miles forward, and fail, I've done less good than if I reliably brought humanity a few inches forward.
On the other hand, if I do save my salary up, I can choose at some later point to spend all of my time and energy on something cool, and keep spending that time and energy until something happens, because now my risk tolerance is much higher. And then it's much more likely I will bring humanity forward by the miles I wanted to.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was on the "max out retirement accounts" train when I was younger. When I got older and home prices got massively inflated, I wished I kept more of that in non retirement accounts to be made more easily liquid for a home without steep penalties. Saving tax while something grows is great, unless you need that cash sooner. Then it is not too helpful. I wish there were a tax advantaged vehicle to use for setting aside…
You can avoid the 10% tax penalty for early withdrawal for your first home if it's in a Roth IRA, up to $10k. It's not very tax advantaged though. [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p590b/ch02.html
This is confused.
EVERY contribution you make to a Roth IRA/401k can be pulled out, tax-free, at any time for any reason. It's the earnings you have to be careful about. But for example if you have contributed $20k to your Roth IRA or Roth 401k, and it is now worth $35k, then you can pull out $20k at any time for any reason, while for the other $15k you have to wait until 59 1/2, or use SEP withdraws, etc.
In addition, for a first-time home purchase you can pull out up to $10k without penalty (but with normal income tax applied) from a traditional IRA or 401k.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
About once per month. I purposely set expectations low by saying it may take a little sanding. That lets me over-deliver since it's usually a perfect fit. Also, ShapeWays has a decent refund policy and customer service for stuff under their responsibility. Also, anything that comes up that takes significant back and forth with a customer, I immediately add to the iFixit writeup. All the troubleshooting steps at the b…
> I purposely set expectations low by saying it may take a little sanding. That lets me over-deliver since it's usually a perfect fit. Wow. This is genius. You should write a click-baity blog post titled "This Weird Trick will always get your products 5-star ratings"
I think "over promise and under deliver" has been part of business for far before any of us were around :)
Or spoken in more buzzword silicon valley speak - you have to set customer expectations and then aim to exceed them.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
So buy into the Renaissance mutual fund. There, you beat the market.
Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns?
People have been saying that about rentech for the last 20 years. People have also been saying that about berkshire hathaway for the past half century. At some point, past performance IS indicative of future returns.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#536I wrote a blog post about three years ago about doing single-sign-on stuff between salesforce and google by writing a google appengine app that acted as a SAML IDp. At the time, salesforce didn't speak OAUTH and google didn't natively speak SAML, so you had to do it on your own. I put it on an old blog I had laying around and turned on google adsense.
To date, I've made $6.31 from that blog post alone. Someday, I'll get over $100, so adsense will pay out.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#537Young 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…
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…
> Why save a salary, when you can create a business, create value, and scale to the entire Internet and give people some benefit? Every hacker should start one or several businesses. While it may not exactly be a moral obligation, this brings humanity forward.
How does starting a business bring humanity forward? Maybe I'm just pessimistic but as far as I can tell the pursuit of money largely just ruins things.
I would think that a "hacker" would make things just because they can and enjoy it, without concern for things like profits or market value. Indeed weren't the very first hackers amateurs and not professionals, in the literal sense?
I'm not saying that people should just forego money completely of course, as I am just as guilty of anyone of wanting more money. I just don't understand why "every hacker should start one or several businesses." if we're solely concerned about humanity.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
What type of returns are you seeing? How has it performed in down periods? What's your beta?
The owner sent me his returns from 2007 and it's a steady upward slope, even through down times. I just started last month, and I'm up overall, although the Trump event took some back. The system takes these draw downs into account. If I told you I made $11K last month it's mostly meaningless since the size of the account and markets you choose are important. So I don't have enough data for you, but the data that was…
How did the Trump event take some earnings back? Since the election, markets have been going very steadily up.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#539Young 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…
This is if you don't need that capital to create your own businesses or other streams of revenue.
Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a strange attitude. I'm very grateful that my landlord chooses to own an apartment and rent it to me on a short-term basis. I needed housing for four months, I already own a house (which is being remodeled), and I certainly didn't want to try to buy a second house for five months. For that rental, I'm happy to let my landlord earn a profit, in exchange for taking on the risk of owning and maintaining the propert…
Not strange at all. Many well-respected people have this point of view, from Nobel laureate economists to free-market libertarians. The problem is that most of the profit he "earns" is from the ownership of land, not from maintaining the property. See my other comment for more, or this now on the HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13153047
The profit he earns is because he's providing a service that I need -- short-term housing. To do that, he's taking on various risks associated with homeownership, such as a lack of available tenants and fluctuations in capital due to market conditions.
Some of the issues discussed on the linked post aren't fundamental to the idea of profiting from what you own, they're examples of something closer to monopoly abuse -- buying out all of the available properties in an area, etc.
It's not great when there's not enough property available for outright sale, but it's also not great when there's no room available for short-term housing either.
The linked article has several issues with it, though I won't disagree with the problem of using regulation to lock-in a high-profit monopoly. That's a bad thing, and it's common, and it's something we should fix. But some claims in there -- "A professor at an architecture school or law school does not earn a six figure salary due to providing superior mentoring and teaching. They earn their money because they are the legal gate keepers to entering licensed occupations." -- are baloney. The earn that salary because that's what it takes to pay them to not go make substantially more money in practice, and the university carefully calculates that minimum to keep their professors at minimum cost.
(This one I do have specific knowledge of - I'm a professor who just spent the year in industry, and the degree by which my salary increased during that year was... large. That's not specific to computer science, either; I know a lot of law professors who're in a nearly identical situation. They do the job because they love teaching, and the university is happy to give them a pay cut in exchange for that.)