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

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

#451

This is inspirationally depressing. Really makes you realize what a shit human being you are when everyone is doing so many interesting things -- on the side.

Do you have a hobby? Most of my side projects (and if you notice, a lot of the projects here too) stem from a hobby. It's not work if you have fun doing it, and if it's a side project then you can stop whenever it stops being fun.

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

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run the numbers and compare in your next sale. As a rule of thumb if you can get 1% of the sale price per month in rent you’re doing awesome. And a good property manager should take away 95% of the hassle.

You're saying that if the house sold for $500,000, you should keep it if you can rent it for $5,000 / month or more? I've heard of 5% of 1/12th of the projected sale price, which seems more realistic.

Yes $5000/month would make that a great property. Look up the one percent rule.

There are lots of other things to consider but it’s a great quick rule of thumb.

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

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you get clients for this kind of work and about how much do you charge? This sounds pretty laid back and potentially lucrative

That my friend is the secret sauce. My first job out of school was for a staffing company that pimped me out to perform similar projects. Word of mouth mostly, it's very lucrative if you have domain knowledge and can sit for long periods of time. It's not Mechanical Turk style cleansing and I have to take personal responsibility for every row as they mostly just suck up my cleansed data and roll with it, which you ca…

I do big data stuff mostly. A lot of that involves cleansing. So working with large excel/csv/other tabular data formats is second nature to me. Familiar with many technical tools that I could maybe use as force-multiplier (e.g. serverless SQL processing, OLAP, RDBMS, python pandas, spark), hence my interest since if we relax the condition that every single row is accounted for, my productivity would likely be pretty high

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

#454
post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that circularity on the casting would be messed up, you would just think that the person on the mill would have the presence of mind to take a look at it before sending it off to the end-user. We reject castings pretty regularly, and that ID could be turned true without a great deal of difficulty provided the deviation in roundness didn't exceed something like 1/2 material thicknes…

A 5 axis mill? Once you had the model you could get one offs in many contract shops. It is by no means trivial but if it is an expensive part you could make a very workable copy. Given the required characteristics of the air flow there are some programs that calculate blade profiles. Maybe the part would end up even more expensive but that sounds like an interesting and worthwhile project.

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

#455

Launched in 2016 for free. Started making money in 2018 with $3,000+ MMR. Referral only (side) business. I work full-time as an engineer/principal in growth. I conduct a form of ethnography, embedding myself in the lives of consumers the way Margaret Mead did among Samoans. I interviews my subjects and the people around them, itemizing the contents of their home (photographing and videotaping), and accompany them as…

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm interested in your service. How should I contact you to discuss details? Thanks.

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

#456

I raise bees and sell the honey. Good for a few thousand a year and the money makes up for the stings. I have a couple of dozen chickens and sell the eggs, but this makes very little money since eggs are so cheap in the super market. It pays for the feed and that's it. I wrote an Amazon book on how to play harmonica in the style of Sonny Boy Williamson II that sells steady and makes me beer money. I sell a couple of…

I love how diverse all of these things are! Very cool.

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

#457
In addition to regular index fund investing I trade options sometimes. Been doing it for about 6 months now and I'm up about 90%. I am a lot more conservative than most options gamblers but it's still pretty risky. I put all my gains into high earnings stocks (currently buying STX and LYB) and at this point since I've almost doubled my principal, I could lose basically all my money currently allocated to options and have only lost 10% from my initial investment. I do it somewhat as a way to earn money but mostly for the experience, since I think it helps me learn a lot about how equities are priced and how the market reacts to news and macro events.

Rather than continually making bets just for the sake of making bets I only make trades when I think a stock overreacted to bearish news (meaning it's likely to rebound to its old price given that the business' fundamentals are unaffected), was oversold due to underperformance of other stocks traded alongside it, or is greatly overvalued due to some irrational hype (Lyft and most canadian weed stocks). And I sell quickly if the option loses a lot of its value or if the option greatly appreciates to lock in profits and limit losses.

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

#458

About 10 years ago and ten years into my career, I had been working and stayed at the same job way too long and both my salary and career stagnated. I had two part time money making side projects. I was a part time fitness instructor and had some rental real estate. Teaching fitness classes was fun, I made a lot of friends, and it gave me a release valve from working at a computer all day. Real estate was a headache.…

Thanks, this is insightful. Sounds like the opportunity cost of a side business isn't worth it for you right?

If I worked on a side business now that wasn’t purely passive income, it would be doing side software gigs involving technology I was already good at. I’m not sacrificing my job (main source of income), my time working out, or my family. The only thing I could realistically give up would be filling in skills gap and learning more.

So instead of in two years being able to command 50% to 100% more as a cloud consultant/architect, I would still only be able to make what I’m making now. I will be spending a lot of time building instead of sharpening my axe.

Even worse, I risk being further behind technically in two or three years and not even being able to find a job in development in the then hot technology.

It’s like the difference between deciding to go to work right out of high school and postponing starting your career and going to college.

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

#459

I established DamnInteresting.com in 2005, a place where myself and handful of others produce original long-form non-fiction in article and podcast form. Despite plenty of traffic, it didn't reach the break-even point for several years, because I despise advertisements and I refused to add them to my site. I funded the project in other ways, such as donations, publishing a book, licensing content, etc. Nowadays it st…

Damn Interesting is my 12 year old daughters favorite podcast.

Thank you for keeping it going. It’s great story telling.

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

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm focusing on Bitcoin and physical gold / silver, as I view stocks and houses overvalued, but I always get downvoted here on HN when I go into details, that's why I prefer if people read a lot for themselves. I like Mike Maloney's youtube series as a start on macroeconomics.

1. Cryptocurrency isn't an investment, it's more like unregulated gambling. 2. This [1] is the guy that you think is a good economist? Really? [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/whygoldandsilver/featured

Look at my top comment. Probably Bitcoin and physical gold is not for you, the important part is that for me long term investing is a great side project to make money. There are lots of ways to do it, and if you don't like my tools, there are lot of other options to be profitable.
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