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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?

#511

I licensed my house as a winery, and run a hard cider company with my girlfriend. We sell to some stores in our area, and do our local Farmer's Market during the summer. It's been very satisfying making and selling a physical product. The profitability part isn't quite there yet. But we're working on that.

How do you bottle your products? I see the cans with your logo, seems like a bigger operation than you describe. :)

There was a lot of research that was done, but we were able to get into cans with a few key components.

We use a piece of home brewing equipment right now to fill our cans and bottles, the beer gun [1]. The beer gun allows us to purge our cans/bottles with CO2 (oxygen is bad for alcohol), and then fill them from the bottom to reduce foam.

I was able to find a local supplier, that wraps cans in plastic. So rather than printing them, they shrink wrap our label on to them. They're a bit more expensive than printed cans (if I recall 34¢ sleeved vs 19¢ printed). This allows us to order a single pallet at a time, decreasing our storage needs

The last key was the can seamer[2]. I found this early on, and it's been a great little work horse for us. We've put over 6,000 cans through it, and it's been one of the best purchases we've made.

Bottles are the easy one, we just use the beer gun [1] and then a manual capper to seal them.

Happy to answer any other questions! It's been a fun ride trying to figure out how to "mass produce" something on a smaller scale :)

[1] https://www.morebeer.com/products/blichmann-beergun-v2.html [2] https://oktoberdesign.com/shop/canseamers/mk16/

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

#513
I make things out of wood with a laser cutter and sell them on etsy. Mainly things from an MMO I play but also other games and tv shows. So far it covers the cost of materials and laser time. It won't ever comes close to my day job in terms of income (I did the math) but it's interesting as a side thing that's not engineering. I optimize the process and marketing (since I find that interesting) but don't stress over income from it.

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

#514
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to bet the quality of a lot of these is shite, though. Plus people in the US would most likely want to buy from a seller in the US (faster shipping + implied better quality). There is a solution to so many problems here (creating usually unavailable parts for machines/devices/products) but the problem is knowing which parts are in demand and currently have no supplier. A maker would need to have an intere…

I meant that there must be Chienese people doing the same thing people used to do here when domestic factories a thing. I was not commenting on the quality of the work. BTE, saying the Chinese quality must be automatically shite is a ridiculous idea.

Not all Chinese stuff is bad, but there's so much bad stuff that it's hard to know what's good. "Chinesium" is an accurate description of the situation.

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

#515
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually thinking about ethics a lot while I was doing this little project. By ethics do you mean morals or something different? What framework would you suggest for determining the ethics/morals of doing something like this, where we're playing by the legal rules by trying to optimize for our own benefit?

A simple overall rule here is to consider what the intended behaviour was from the company offering this. Anything that fits the rules, but is outside what you would consider expected behaviour is essentially exploiting a bug. A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely w…

I think it would be better to assume that any service you offer could be exploited, than to think otherwise. Lots of places run deals and sales on items with the condition "limit x per person per day" for that exact reason. Or an "unlimited" high-speed phone plan might have a restriction in the fine print where you're throttled after some amount.

Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.

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

#516
I think side projects and businesses are a great way to learn and have an interesting life, so I am usually doing something outside of work. My friends write plays and do standup which sometimes pays. I used to teach swimming after work because it got me to the gym and I could develop my communication skills.

Currently, I have a hobby map business that generates some money (https://www.wellingtonstravel.com/). Recently I created a matchmaking app for people who travel. It's not making money yet, but I expect it to be able to generate income too (https://www.fairytrail.app/).

I believe it's about finding what interests you first. Money is a nice bonus.

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

#517
post #84

I buy cars, repair them and recondition them to my level of satisfaction, and send them back out the door, typically targeting 55-65 year olds. I focus mostly on entry level luxury crossovers around 7 to 10 years old, though starting to also do hybrids since there’s more profit in it since everyone is seemingly allergic to batteries and pack replacement/rebuilds. Parts are cheap, I listen to music or a podcast, I do…

Do you float the titles or just bend over and take whatever arbitrary limit for non-dealer title transfers that the dealers lobbied into existence in your state?

What does floating the title mean? Is it never registering it in your own name and just letting the next guy do it?

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

#518

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 brot…

Would you mind expanding on what ETFs are you holding and your strategy for (if any) rotation?

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

#519
I’m a physician (epileptologist)... Started out comp sci and made the switch to medicine to help people. Currently doing programming/academic medicine roughly 50/50; the former has yet to provide any significant money or grants, but it’s still enjoyable and comes in handy from time to time for research endeavors.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems a tad unethical

Take a close look at the USA Hospital (/Healthcare) business model. No payment of property taxes ("Hey, we're a non-profit--nothing to see here"). They get all kinds of Free labor ("Volunteering is good for the community"). They solicit and receive Every manner of donation under the Sun ("We're a Non-Profit; please help us out"). They Make Billions and Billions of dollars... just sayin

"Teacher, billy punched sally and got away with it, that means I can punch johnny too!"

As for the ethics of this CC deal: fuck 'em. :) Global speculative capital makes money on arbitrage and legal fictions that produce financial instruments all the time, if a consumer can play that game, god bless em.

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