Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

Three things for me:

1) I own a small rental property in Florida that is fairly low maintenance and pays for the mortgage + a small amount each month on average. This is a long-term ROI play since after taxes, maintenance, repairs, and everything else it ends up being close to a wash until the principal to interest ratio on the mortgage payments improves after 5+ years. I only say this because everyone and their brother in my age group seems to want to retire on rental properties, but in reality it's really not that great.

2) Basic ETF investing in a combination of value-oriented and dividend-oriented ETFs. This is, in my opinion, the only way to get truly passive income with literally zero ongoing effort.

3) I design and 3D print props and cosplay pieces on a referral basis for commission. In reality it's a horrible way to make money since quality 3D modelling for 3D printing is time consuming to the point of the hourly effective rate being lower than minimum wage, but I enjoy it, so it's kind of a semi-paid hobby.

Hey, taking a look at the picture on the site I saw that you only offer a format of 8.5" x 11". If you'd like to grow to Europe, other formats like A4 would be very interesting and probably needed. I'd also be happy about one in A5! :)

Sure, no problem. As you can see I didn't dig deep in other instruments, though there are a lot of interesting things (selling puts for banks, corporate bonds, buying VIX), but they require due diligence as well, you just need to dig deep and read everything that you can find about them.

This is the video series I was writing about: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE88E9ICdipidHkTehs1Vb...

Mike Maloney most important part of the film about investing in silver: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAAIwef3dOg

Why you should invest in Bitcoin (Tuur Demester, 2013): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LQu-eIOO0

Bitcoin Whitepaper: http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Origins of money (by Nick Szabo): http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/index.html

Also if you decide to invest into Bitcoin, the most important things are:

- Buy only what you can hold for at least 5 years (and expect the 95% downturns)

- Use a hardware wallet (I prefer https://trezor.io/ , Ledger is probably OK as well, but the source code is really ugly, and it has a trusted module that I don't trust).

- Don't buy alt coins, or if you do, make sure that you read the source code, look at the test coverage, read cryptography books to understand their cryptography, see how many bugs they have, make sure that you are really able to run a full node that synchronizes from the genesis block, if it has smart contracts, see if the smart contracts have integration tests as well, look at the energy that's securing it...there are a lot of reasons why I never ever thought of buying any alt coins.

My wife sells women's clothes as part of an MLM. I help her, mostly back office stuff but sometimes I help with shipping and sales.

MLMs (deservedly) have a bad rap. The focus is usually on recruiting rather than selling, and usually involves converting social relationships into business ones.

For us, it's more like being a franchisee. We do $20-25k in sales a month, have two part time assistants to help with shipping and cataloging inventory. We have non trivial spend on marketing and are actively involved in our local chamber of commerce and various networking groups.

My wife otherwise is home with our kids, and she loves it. It's busy, it's a ton of work, but we have fun doing it.

Not necessarily suggesting it for this, but for anyone not used to shapeways they have a wide range of materials, with plastics of different types, metals (I have silver wedding rings I got printed there) and ceramics.

I think sellers may be able to limit the materials to known working ones (each material has it's own requirements).