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

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621–630 of 744 posts

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

#621
post #142

Two things, both of which I stumbled into accidentally - I make lots of jellies once the berries in the garden are ripe; I bought a house in a rural area a few years ago and it came with loads of berries. Might as well put them to use. It is all done manually (in part because it is meant to be a diversion from my engineering job) - red- and blackcurrant and gooseberries mostly. Last year the harvest was some 1200 4oz…

This is a true break from tech. Go for it.

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

#623
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think about it like this. The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses. That makes life worse for everyone but the people exploiting the loophole. You’re no different from the people who exaggerate their losses to insurance companies in order to claim extra insurance money. Because of them, premiums have gone up. You might see you…

Thanks for the reply. There is a clear difference between claiming extra insurance money and what I'm doing: lying to get more insurance money is fraud, while what I'm doing is exactly what the service is intended for (sending money to others for free). But using your framework of, "if everyone did this, how would this affect the business and others using the business," then I (and many others) are doing a lot of oth…

Interesting discussion. Certainly, some of this fails simply by not agreeing upon what is ethical. For instance, people can claim that blocking ads is an unethical action, but if the ads themselves are attempting illegal things (and some are), then blocking ads has a quite legitimate and useful purpose.

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

#624
post #20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was hugely profitable but you had problems with people you were paying minimum wage?

Theres a reason why it was profitable, low labor costs

Yes but seeing the numbers I think this person could have paid workers more and still make a profit. I don't know if it's greed or robot like optimization

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

#625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same with American made products. Have you driven a Chevrolet lately?

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

#626

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…

That's amazing and I can't believe how much this sounds like what I'm trying to go for! I got my first two hives setup on Saturday and we finally moved our first group of 12 chickens out of the house and into the coop yesterday.

If you don't mind, how many hives do you have and how do you sell the honey? I was always thinking I would need more hives than I could ever manage to actually get enough to sell. My goal was to get into gourmet mushrooms and sell through the office or maybe get attached to a CSA or something.

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

#627

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…

How do you convince founders, small businesses and startups to pursue this kind of ethno work? In my experience only big companies with dedicated consumer insight teams have the budgets and patience to do this kind of exploratory qualitative research. Just curious as to how you’ve ‘sold’ this service in to smaller organizations...

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

#628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The customers always find the rows that are not accounted for, it's bad form to drop data. We sell high quality data, which you can't claim if you can't account for every single row. You should be careful about delivering an incomplete data-set.

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

#630

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…

> ...the money makes up for the stings.

Out of curiosity, how often do you get stung? I would have thought the bee suit prevented all that?

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