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?

#451

Post by kuu » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

CrackpotGonzo wrote: post #114

I built a really simple way to poll 50 random people in the US. It's called This or That and functionality is currently very simple. You submit a question along with two images via SMS and you get your answer back usually within the hour. I've had a few people use to test new logo ideas, to ask which of two TV shows to watch, or which outfit looks best. So far no one has paid for it, only a few hundred free users, bu…

I participate in a poll/survey portal as a reviewer. Just to give you an idea of how it works: we the participants are free to register and get some points after every completed poll/survey (the amount of points depend on how long it took). With these points we can access to a "shop" of small prizes, like headphones, small cameras, books, etc. I assume that the companies making the polls are the ones paying and probably they select the demography of the people to survey (we're asked about this info on the polls). Maybe a model like that can work for you too.

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

#452

Post by killtimeatwork » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

plumeria wrote: post #408

killtimeatwork wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that it's a good rule of thumb to not develop something that is just an extra feature of an existing behemoth (e.g. Atlassian plugins etc., but also the thing you built). If you're failure, then you've wasted time and money and if you're a success, the behemoth will just reimplement your work as a part of their platform. Pretty much the only way to win it so make something that provides marginal revenue, w…

Couldn't one expect at least a job offer?

Maybe, but working hard for months/years a chance at a job offer doesn't sound that amazing anyway.

BTW I worked in a startup once and a guy, who was developing opensource plugin for our product, applied for a job with us. The owner (a known blogger BTW) said "Why hire him if he's already working for us?"

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

#453

Post by cbozeman » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

biztos wrote: post #370

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…

A zillion years ago I had a housemate who was a brilliant programmer and could smoke himself into the Zone like nobody's business, and one of his weird little side ventures was a Mac app to cut up Illustrator files and lay them out in HTML using tables, because that was the state of the art. As best I can recall, he wrote it in CodeWarrior over a couple weeks together with another guy who presumably knew Illustrator,…

> he wrote it in CodeWarrior

Wow, that's a name I haven't heard in 20+ years. We used CodeWarrior Pro for my Pascal class at a local community college that I took during high school, because my high school was so small, I literally ran out of classes to take by senior year, so I had to take a programming course at a CC that was 10 miles away. Had to get a waiver to leave school before noon to go to the class because state policy was that students can't be released from school before noon, and because all my classes (all 3 of them) were over by 11:30.

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

#454

Post by jmnicolas » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

aik wrote: post #434

During the previous crypto craze a few years ago I built a .net service that continuously scanned 100s of sites for crypto news for specific keywords (configuration of sites and keywords stored in xml files) and texted me alerts when keywords hit, in an attempt to apply an event-based investment strategy to the crypto space. Given the immaturity of the market, small events often led to irrational spikes, and I made s…

Why didn't you use the Google service (sorry can't remember the name) that warns you when your keywords appear somewhere on the web?

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

#455

Post by jmnicolas » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

bobkrusty wrote: post #100

koellewe wrote: post #4

I built a Tinder-like matchmaking app where users log in with their Facebook account and the app then auto-matches users by their FB likes. I thought taking the hassle out of swiping could give my app an edge over Tinder. It was working fine for a week or so before Facebook caught up and revoked my API keys (effectively killing the app). They didn't give any reason besides some vague recommendation to review their Te…

This like the case of Amazon antitrust current Tech giants are need to be replaced

> current Tech giants are need to be replaced

There's no reason their replacement will be any more moral. They should be dismantled imho.

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

#456

Post by 37ef_ced3 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:17 AM UTC

Smerity wrote: post #426

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…

I work in the space and was impressed with NN-512 as there's a painful gap in inference cost between CPU and GPU that doesn't have to exist. Intel and AMD are really missing a boat here, most other companies have enough cash they just go to GPUs, academics rarely sling low level code even in CUDA let alone AVX-512, and other than Fabrice Bellard's work few I've seen few go that low level. My suggestion would be to fo…

In your [1], are your input/output arrays aligned the same for the fastest SIMD and ISPC runs?

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

#457

Post by fapjacks » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:24 AM UTC

polynomial wrote: post #336

asutekku wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine most people are going to buy the music where they usually buy it from. And with just three sites it compares I could just check these sites by myself. So for now it lacks a bit of content. However, something I would like to see and i think could be more niche-oriented would be similar as this but for physical releases. Discogs does have some retailers, but they need to manually upkeep their inventory…

My understanding is that Discogs has mainly eaten this market. And my experience is that the same items on eBay are consistently higher priced on average (sometimes much more.)

Just a heads up to OP... Discogs is definitely a mom-and-pop endeavor in more ways than one. If one were nimble enough, I am almost certain they could not keep up with a more featureful competitor that shaved off the (many) pain points of buying/selling in their marketplace. Inventory (and want-list) management being a great example.

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

#458

Post by exged » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:30 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…

Just wondering, what makes NN-512 superior to Intel's oneAPI DNN library?

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

#459

Post by lone-cloud » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

I built https://www.tomati.io/ to rate restaurants (mostly in Canada and west coast US) based on their health inspection scores. Turned out the demand wasn't there and it's not super fun maintaining scrappers for a bunch of crappy government run inspection websites.

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

#460

Post by Smerity » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 9:38 AM UTC

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #456

Smerity wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the space and was impressed with NN-512 as there's a painful gap in inference cost between CPU and GPU that doesn't have to exist. Intel and AMD are really missing a boat here, most other companies have enough cash they just go to GPUs, academics rarely sling low level code even in CUDA let alone AVX-512, and other than Fabrice Bellard's work few I've seen few go that low level. My suggestion would be to fo…

In your [1], are your input/output arrays aligned the same for the fastest SIMD and ISPC runs?

Not in that codebase as it was a tutorial / wanted to ensure it's callable from safe Rust code so stuck with `_mm256_loadu_ps`. That code was just playing with dot product like lookup over vectors on CPU. The code I'm more interested in is trying to cram models into ~L2/L3 cache such that a CPU optimized model can be trained on GPU to be deployed on CPU.