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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?

#631
post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is an interesting proposition, but I do not know why, I feel to give out my book for free, the reason for this might be from the fact that I learned programming on my own reading free books, the great books came with a hefty price tag, hence I don't feel it morally right to publish my book/tutorial at a hefty $$. Said tutorial/book since people have told me that if it isn't present in actual stores it can't be cal…

I deeply admire your motives. Am not trying to remove that pleasure from your life, but I will say that very often people who pay tend to appreciate and value one's work product more than if it's free. Thanks for the thoughtful answer.

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

#632
post #617
post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The only way I could make it fairer is to add a magnifying area zooming to 100% but that would be too much work. Hoping that links to images is enough.

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

#633
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common refrain in the UK is that inflation figures are an elite conspiracy with the reality being much higher than reported. There's an awful lot wrong with CPI/RPI measures, but needless to say this is tinfoil-hattery.

Actually, I ran an ecommerce platform and had a £3bn p.a. mixed basket of goods being sold on the platform. Since 2012 goods have increased in price by about 6% p.a. To say there is nothing to see without looking at any data is ass-hattery.

So 1.5%/year, which is a lot closer to 1% than 10%.

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

#634
post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an interesting proposition, but I do not know why, I feel to give out my book for free, the reason for this might be from the fact that I learned programming on my own reading free books, the great books came with a hefty price tag, hence I don't feel it morally right to publish my book/tutorial at a hefty $$. Said tutorial/book since people have told me that if it isn't present in actual stores it can't be cal…

I deeply admire your motives. Am not trying to remove that pleasure from your life, but I will say that very often people who pay tend to appreciate and value one's work product more than if it's free. Thanks for the thoughtful answer.

Thank you!

Yes, I do understand that folly regarding money. Money tends to bend reality, there are many psychological experiments done with money,

for instance: spending physical money induces more pain than spending money using a card, that's why it is recommended to carry cash around the next time we do shopping (read this in a book Thinking Fast and Slow and observed in real life)

I know you aren't trying to remove that pleasure from my life! But the thing is, after open sourcing my tutorial, it has been read thousands of times, and there have been 4-5 readers who went out of their way and communicated to me how much they loved the book and in the words of one reader on HN, "it is one of the best tutorials I have read" regarding webapps in Go.

It is a humbling experience for me to hear this from someone else (who isn't my best friend :D)

It is a great irony that while documentation is free, books are not.

Plus, I am not an author, writing tutorials/books isn't my primary source of income, although I was thinking of keeping the Vue book/tutorial open source on github, it already is, http://github.com/thewhitetulip/intro-to-vuejs/ and charging money for the PDF, most probably I won't be doing that, let's see.

Thanks for your input!

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

#635
post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if you can't find tenants for 12+ months? I've seen many commercial properties sit barely occupied for years.

Worst case scenario, pay the mortgage with my salary.

So that seems a pretty risky investment to me. Only a few percent profit for the risk of eating a giant monthly bill.

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

#636
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems not passive. If you blog 5 hours a month and make $50, you made $10 an hour.

It is if you like to blog anyways.

So if you like to program, programming is passive income?

I don't think that's how it works.

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

#637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems not passive. If you blog 5 hours a month and make $50, you made $10 an hour.

True, but no income is truly passive. I think you also have to consider the savings of not having to own a house (or being able to rent out an existing one) so it's as good as any other 'passive' strategy posted here.

I think stock market is passive income. Literally 5 minutes to set up an account, and it can provide income for life without touching it. I consider that 5 minutes small enough to not count, but not sure what the hard limit is ;)

If you make an iPhone game.. spend 1000 hours.. then it makes you a few $100 per year for a few years, I don't think thats passive income. It is just income that is very delayed from when the work was done for it.

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

#638
post #93
post #13

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…

Any tips for something solid vanguard-like in the EU?

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/EU_investing

For non-EU/US residents I got a recommendation for http://int.tddirectinvesting.com/

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

#639
post #551
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…

Illuminati confirmed then right. My bad.

Professional investors are not pretty consistently beating the market...secular! Anyone can have a good year or two.

I'm not talking about dudes talking their book on CNBC. Yes there are shops that beat the market, but if you have beaten the market 5 years in a row, you can't keep it a secret even if you want to.

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

#640
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vincent Dignan, one of the worst twitter spammer I've ever blocked (more than once since he likes/liked to ignore complaints, open a new account and do it again...to the same people!). If spamming all of twitter in alphabetical order is an example of the growth hacks.... I see the account he used to do most of the spamming has been suspended by Twitter now https://twitter.com/vdignan

Would you not spam Twitter if you were in debt and could make 11k/mo? I agree it's lame but gotta pay the bills :)

You can deal crack too, it pays the bills.
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