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Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#611

Post by fapjacks »

kohanz wrote: post #308

This was pretty accidental, but to motivate myself to complete the arduous application process for my professional engineering license, I creates a WordPress blog documenting the process. Also because I thought I would learn something new (setting up WP blog) and this seemed very "shippable". I completed the application process over the course of a year and haven't written a blog post in over a year. Thanks to a comp…

Hey, just to give you a trailhead into a service that I've used before for automatic ad-placement optimization, try Ezoic (ezoic.com). They did very well for me (150% increase in Adsense revenue) and their site says on average they double Adsense earnings. It's totally legit, they're a publishing partner with Google, which is eventually what made me sign up with them after some initial skepticism. But they delivered for sure.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#612

Post by tomcam »

jrheard wrote: post #330
logicallee wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't want to start a business and in fact I specifically plan to never start a business. Sounds terrible. All that... business stuff. I shudder to think about it. I do like programming, and I plan to spend my productive time on this Earth programming on projects that interest me and help humanity in some way, but I just absolutely 100% have no plans to start a business. I admire your excitement about the idea, but…

Serial entrepreneur here. Love your attitude. You play to your strengths and keep it chill. Not my style but a rock-solid strategy nonetheless.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#613

Post by tomcam »

BorisMelnik wrote: post #370

Started a hosting company: its very small and only offers shared hosting right now, but it is almost making money. I never wanted to get into hosting, but so many of my clients were using Godaddy etc I just had to get them away from that chaos. Note: I'm also looking for a partner in this if anyone has any experience let me know.

Try webhostingtalk.com to find partners or advice.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#614

Post by tomcam »

raybb wrote: post #542
Shrugs wrote: post #325

I made http://fivestar.io/ a year or two ago; it's a better Amazon search. It shines when you search for something that you want the best version of, without caring about the details; i.e., let the masses determine the quality for you. It weights results based on ratings, review volume, and some other stuff, segmenting the results by price range. Helps me answer the question "I want the best phone mount for my bike,…

Isn't it against Amazon's terms to use the affiliate API to make a search engine?

Note parent's username

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#615

Post by tomcam »

averageweather wrote: post #278
libria wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. Some wants: * If I type Manhattan, NY, automatically show me a map w/ overlay of weather in Manhattan and surrounding areas. Maybe default to today, but also forward cursor to calendar. * Or maybe automatically show bar chart of Manhattan for 1 week starting today. If they select a day automatically show +-3 days. * or allow a date range to be selected or even just Month of December * you need exposure, I've ne…

Thank you. Any tips on exposure?

Mention it on city-data.com or Reddit local subreddits. Test this strategy by doing only the biggest population centers.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#616

Post by tomcam »

thewhitetulip wrote: post #244

After being encouraged by folks on HN I published my tutorial on writing webapps with Go without a framework, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook There isn't much income because I want the book to be free, I'm writing another tutorial migrating the same app taught in the book to use VueJS library.

Why not publish (at a typical ebook price) on Amazon also? Be a fun experiment to have both paid and free versions--not too many opportunities to collect that kind of data. Or maybe make the vue version available only on Amazon while leaving the older version as is.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#617

Post by vurpo »

kusha wrote: post #590
vladdanilov wrote: post #26

Optimage – a visually lossless image optimization tool http://getoptimage.com Released this week. Came unnoticed on HN but somehow got featured on PH. 1200+ downloads of free version and a few sales. Not sure if that'll change. In that case, the best of 2016 will be one of the plugins for Sketch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12319286 .

Just a small suggestion, clicking to see the difference on the demo images wasn't clear at first. Maybe you should use one of those sliders that they use for before/after images. I think that would be better UX.

I think that kind of drives the point home. Maybe it's my display or my vision, but I still can't tell a difference between the "Before" and "After" pictures. That's very impressive to me, looking at the compression ratios.

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#618

Post by [deleted] »

jamez1 wrote: post #551
qwrusz wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market cannot be beat by 100% of amateurs piddling away on their brokerage account during a few spare hours a week. The market cannot be beat by 99.9% of professional investors spending all their time day and night trying and with a team of people helping them. I'm calling your bluff on you being an econ PhD student or maybe you have been one for a month or two at most...? If you are an econ grad student you know…

Academia doesn't pay that much attention to the real world. Most of the papers out there are rubbish and would be considered junior level work, except with way too much detail. There are pretty much no econ papers that would describe what happens inside the high end systematic firms. (Source: I work in the industry) Bringing up the outliers is a perfect counterexample when wild sweeping statements are made. These are…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your best passive income in 2016?

#620

Post by fapjacks »

jsaxton86 wrote: post #472

It seems like the vast majority of employment contracts prohibit side projects like this, or at the very least, require explicit company approval. I'm interested in hearing strategies on how to best pursue side projects without violating one's employment contract.

One way is to be a California employee, where the labor law explicitly protects your side projects as long as you aren't using your employer's resources and isn't related to your day job. If you decide to take something Big Time and make a startup around one of your ideas, California also conveniently ignores non-compete agreements. These two things are why Silicon Valley exists in California and nowhere else.
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