Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#381

Post by wolco2 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:25 AM UTC

THE_PUN_STOPS wrote: post #374

ZguideZ wrote: post #144

In 2004 my brother and I developed a buttplug shaped like George W. Bush - we called it the Bushplug. Manufacturing was more expensive than we had expected but we sold about 100 of them - presumably as novelty gifts. Our price point was too high for a novelty gift and the nose was a little too pointy to be an enjoyable sex toy. We made our money back and had some fun with being featured on BoingBoing and Fleshbot. So…

Right idea, wrong time. My friend owns a sex shop in Provincetown, MA and has sold tens of thousands of Trump-plugs over the past 4 years.

location, location, location

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#382

Post by Aeolun » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:29 AM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #380

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...

Photoshop had a kind of high price point just for cutting up images.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#383

Post by mike_d » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

ublaze wrote: post #376

I made a bot that bet on horse races. The strategies were succesful but ultimately I spent more than it earned on AWS fees. I might turn it on again next year.

Sounds like you just need to move it out of AWS?

I spent about $5k on some refurb Dell servers and pay $200/mo for colocation to replace what was $1,000+ mo in AWS bills. The best part is I can put all my small projects there as well and they are instantly profitable.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#384

Post by wolco2 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:36 AM UTC

gfxgirl wrote: post #380

rangelreale wrote: post #103

In 2006/2007 I built HTMLButcher, a C++ desktop application to slice PSD/image website designs made by designers to HTML. In these years sites where made with tables, so for slicing a design I had to cut the images and fit then into borderless HTML tables. I took 2 years to build it, and in this timeframe people started building sematic websites with CSS, and abandoning table-based designs. I managed to sell 100 copi…

I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier. https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...

That's where you start. But to make it responsive it takes more work. If I remember..

For a 9x9 basic table grid you would set the width 100% of the top and bottom image do the opposite for the sides and fix the corners. All of these tricks involved choosing designs that could work.

It would have been a tool I would have liked.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#385

Post by reitzensteinm » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:38 AM UTC

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #181

NN-512 ( https://NN-512.com ) generates stand-alone C code for AVX-512 neural nets The idea was that user companies (or even the hardware companies: Intel, AMD) would pay me as a contractor to implement deconvolutions, transformers, etc., as extensions to the free/open core I released (which includes very sophisticated support for all forms of dense convolution, fully-connected layers, pooling, batch norm, activation…

Your project is seriously cool, I'm sorry it didn't work out for you.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#386

Post by TheNewAndy » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #326

TheNewAndy wrote: post #168

I built this for a bit more than just "making money" (wanted some experience), and it is still early days. But I made an iOS game: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463... So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year. http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).

App not available in my country (the Netherlands). Sad. We have money too, you know

Sorry about that. I am hoping to open it up to more places, just being small I need to be a little bit aware of the tax implications. Having my incompetence lead to missing sales is preferred to having it lead to tax evasion.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#387

Post by TheNewAndy » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:51 AM UTC

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #250

TheNewAndy wrote: post #168

I built this for a bit more than just "making money" (wanted some experience), and it is still early days. But I made an iOS game: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463... So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year. http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).

Clicked, saw “This developer does not collect any data from this app”, bought.

Thank you so much. Really appreciated.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#388

Post by TheNewAndy » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:53 AM UTC

dave84 wrote: post #221

TheNewAndy wrote: post #168

I built this for a bit more than just "making money" (wanted some experience), and it is still early days. But I made an iOS game: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/two-birds-one-stone/id15396463... So far, my main win has been to qualify for the apple small business program, so I will qualify for the reduced apple commission next year. http://ideationapps.com/ (has gameplay video and other stuff for the curious).

App not available on the Irish App Store.

Sorry about that. I am (probably overly) cautious of tax implications so it is currently US and AU only. Maybe I should reread the legal stuff and try to get some more places open.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#389

Post by smk_ » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 2:53 AM UTC

Void_ wrote: post #124

Definitely https://focuslite.app I built it for myself, and really expected to make something on it. But didn't get anywhere.

Seems interesting, similar to the app ColdTurkey. Been looking for something like this since reading Deep Work, will check it out.

Re: Ask HN: What's a side project you built to make money that hasn't?

#390

Post by mobilio » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 3:01 AM UTC

mpermar wrote: post #270

An app for finding the best hotels for traveling with kids. It was basically crawling the booking.com API and then applying an algorithm to figure out if a property was suitable for families with children or not. It would do the usual. Parse descriptions and try to find keywords there, parse and count the number of comments mentioning family-related topics, up-score hotels with certain facilities and then push the im…

This pandemia really crush all tourism industry...