Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

news.ycombinator.com

671–680 of 818 posts

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#671

I built a web app that extracts data from documents, like PDFs, Word, etc. I've seen people say "GPT wrapper", but it consistently outperforms similar tools in the space. My main customer is a private equity fund that randomly reached out. I didn't know much at all about fintech, but it works and gets the job done. I don't have a proper marketing site yet since I've been focused on building the app, but it's coming s…

Could you please link your website?

Sure, you can try the demo at:

https://www.subsystem.ai/demo

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#672
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess: events are not frequent, at least not in the above commenters neck of the woods. Travelling costs money, so they stick locally.

I play cash games, sit and go. Tournaments are much harder and become shove fests towards the end.

sit and go meaning sit and go tournaments vs organized tournaments?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#673

I did not like any Kubernetes UI so I built my own https://aptakube.com It went from side project to my primary job in less than 6 months. Everyone was saying that $99 was too much for “an API wrapper”, but here we are, 2 years later and with hundreds of small to enterprise companies using it :)

How does it compare to Lens?

Lens isn't all that great so I'm sure it must be better.

Lens shows me repeats of log lines when I'm trying to scroll down in a live log. It has checkboxes but no means to operate on checked boxes. If I have my Secret set to show b64 decoded, and paste in a new secret that is very clearly non b64 encoded, it tries to push it as-is and fails quietly. It shows things as Healthy whose only sub resources are not healthy, but that's par for the course in Kubernetes land. I also have to fully quit it (not just close the window) on my new MacBook whenever I make the mistake of looking at it after a gcloud auth timeout, even when simply running fresh kubectl commands in the background every time would outperform the garbage Electron tab changes.

Plus, this new thing has resource diffs, which I was surprised Lens didn't have. Frankly I was surprised how little Lens has once I started actually using it and figured there'd be easy money in building the community's new favorite editor. But I'm glad to have seen this post, here's hoping it becomes the new standard.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#674

I built custom electric cars, and now I am sharing my knowledge for free in a knowledge base and in a YouTube series: https://foxev.io/batteries https://youtube.com/@foxev-content I hope this helps someone :) My knowledge is EV and renewable energy knowledge from first principles and for an open source tool. https://openinverter.org lets you re-purpose the drivetrain from any EV, like Toyota Prius or Tesla Model S an…

Are these custom cars and cars with re-purposed drivetrain ok to drive on the road from an NTSB perspective?

Safety and legality of this kind of work comes down to the owner and the jurisdiction. This guy is providing support for getting the drivetrain running, not auditing the safety of the vehicle.

Besides, people probably aren't buying brand new 2025 cars and converting them to EVs, they're generally older cars which already don't meet modern safety standards, so it's a bit of a moot point.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#675
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I make this listen to a zoom call and have it transcribed and summarized

A lot of folks use it for this. But its not very straightforward like the tools that join calls and listen in. It only transcribes what it can listen to. So if you are on a zoom call on your computer it can listen to both the audio from the PC and you speaking and transcribe. Ive been looking into tapping in directly to both the audio out and mic in on apple devices. Im making progress but its not stable yet. Hoping…

Why not... Let it join meetings?

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#676
I have been making youtube videos for a long time on many different accounts. I don't know what else to say except try to choose topics that youtube won't give you trouble over so avoid things like privacy, crypto, politics. Then you just keep making videos and one day you win the lottery when the algorithm finally shines the light on you.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#677

I've built a SMS to Slack which enables two-way SMS messaging from your Slack channels. I had an annoying use case where when trying to login to a shared work account, the 2FA code was being sent to a colleague's phone number. Now being able to receive that code in Slack solved the problem. Customers now use it for their own customer support. End users really like SMS as a messaging platform, nobody wants to send an…

I really recommend adding WhatsApp as an option besides SMS

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#678
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to it on my Android phone and it worked fine.

Yeah, mine was via a corporate policy. God knows how it decides such things, but it's not a message I've ever seen before, so there could be something wrong with the site that other security software might flag

I'm convinced that the corporate web filter does this to make itself look like it actually does something.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#679
post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for replying. I am (on and off) building a regional price comparison website for various regional online bookstores. I do want to build a more fairer and honest monthly/yearly list something like yours and the price comparison as the main USP but more so I really like reading and enjoy exploring books even if I don't read all of the ones I wan to. Your website is quite inspiring to me and have given me more…

yeah the amazon product API has some severe limitations. I have 25,000~ books on my site, and I just don't have enough API calls in a day to keep the prices 100% updated. It's on my todo list to revisit this, but it's low on my priority list. I don't make that much from amazon refs(couple hundred a month) I will say that I don't think they really defend their TOS too much from my experience. I used to have a cookbook…

Thank you for sharing your experience. This has been helpful.

Re: Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2024 – Show and tell

#680
post #611

The gist I get from this thread is that if you have something on the cards you should just commit to it? How much is just survivorship bias? I have like 4-5 side hustles being worked on at any one time, but I rarely ship for various reasons. Lots of people in this thread seem to have just gone and done it without thinking. How often does that pay off?

I guess it is survivorship bias, but I’d never be one of the survivors if I don’t even try. I have an Etsy product, Christmas tree ornament, has made about $600 gross last year and another $400 or so this year… It’s not much but now I have an Etsy shop with 5 start reviews all across. Planning to make a few more non-seasonal products and see where I can take it. But, I also have a graveyard on my GitHub! I guess the…

Makes sense. One of my projects is bound for etsy. How do you find selling there?

I also have the distinction of publishing a halloween item on cults, but a month after halloween ended, so I am waiting 10 more months to see if theres any interest.

Post reply on HN