Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

Sharing funny kid quotes.

Been going for years, not a whole lot of traffic, but the family loves it (that was the intention). Recently migrated from a severely aging kohana/mysql backend to express/rethinkdb.

I built a show tracker just for me (it's not nearly where I want it to be, so I don't share it anywhere, eg. currently my show database is out of date I need to see what broke my cron tonight. no ssl cert, no optimization at all I don't even know if my js is minified tbh, etc).

I am the only active user http://www.overseer.tv/user/smt and I built this because I watch a shit ton of shows and I often forget when premieres come, or what episode I left off on. My site is basically one click to mark a show/season/episode "watched" and I have a calendar and upcoming section, which is all I wanted from many other sites I tried before creating my own.

I host this on an EC2 instance for 29$ a month, and my own usage alone makes it worth it to me haha.

I've started to get into Ethereum and Solidity recently, but mining even a few coins just to have gas money costs more in electricity than they're worth. I'm letting my desktop mine anyways, but when I reach my pools payout threshold in a week or two (it's got a 3-year-old GPU), I'll probably kill the mining. (I know I could just buy some ETH with USD, but that's probably even more expensive and somehow feels different.)

(To be fair it hasn't been all negative - I bought a copy of the game Portal with the first bitcoin I ever earned, and a Kindle with the second bitcoin. But looking at it from a strictly money perspective, I'm definitely in the hole. In theory, it will be positive eventually.. but I'm still not sure exactly how.)