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Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

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131–140 of 272 posts

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could draw a fake one

Exactly. You hide the native cursor with css and show an image on top of the page whose position you move around.

This would work visually but I think you'd run into a lot of edge cases where JS/CSS/the browser itself is expecting to hook into or access mouse APIs

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#132
In the late '80s I created version of Augment [1]. Takeaway was a hierarchical menu that saved all of your places. So a menu of average of 7 choices, which went 7 layers deep, would address 7^7 end points, or about 823,543 items. The number of auto-bookmarks would be 7^6 (117,649). Because the bookmarks would save your place, the average number of gestures to reach any item is about half that, or 3.5 clicks.

Am now playing with that idea for a Heads up Display for AR glasses, using SwiftUI [2]

The first use case is to port a visual synth, I created in the early Naughts, which used a static template on a Wacom Tablet[3]. The interface controlled > 2000 parameters.

The question is: how to control thousands of real-time parameters with virtual touch?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31676445#31677125

[2] https://github.com/musesum/DeepMenu

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXlkzZubHnM

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO "scalping" is OK and is just selling for what the market will bear. There is demand for something with limited supply (aka scarcity) so prices will go up. I also don't buy that it is unfair to the artist because if their tickets are being "scalped" they could just as easily add more dates to each venue to provide more supply to the market. Some artists do this but many just want to breeze through town in one show…

If tickets were sold for "market price" then the vast majority of people would be priced out of many events because the wealthy are so much wealthier than the average person that they'd simply monopolise a whole lot of entertainment. Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver. If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertai…

> If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value.

What I don't think you realize is that rules against scalping help create a mono-culture. Sure huge swathes may be barred from a Bieber concert or whatever is popular today but if that happened the dearth of access to that content will lead to its decline in popularity.

If we let that happen it would open up room in the market for smaller artists and artists at every other level to thrive and build audiences that would otherwise be glued to whatever the corporate record companies are hocking.

A similar way to think about it is that most people would love to have their own yacht but scarcity makes that very difficult. Does everyone deserve a yacht? Instead, with a market, a few super rich get to have a yacht (woopty doo) and the rest of us who want a boat own something smaller and more reasonable.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#135

Neural net for soft porn (tasteful nudes). Android app, 5 years old: http://driftwheeler.com More than 860 users per day, on average. Continuously growing user base. Profit through Met-Art affiliation: https://partners.metartmoney.com

The images are all generated? That is ridiculously cool.

Oh nvm demo video. You select a portion of the image to get other images "like it". Very interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpers don’t typically sell tickets for less than face value.

Nor is OP if you take their 20% discount into account. Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans, then re-selling them to anyone for profit is scummy even if the price still comes under the non-fan price. At best you're just denying other fans the chance to get discounts for your own profit.

OP bought one set of season tickets to their favorite baseball team, went to the games they wanted to see, and sold tickets to the games they didn’t want to attend to other fans for less than face value and (presumably) without the outrageous fees that you’d pay at Ticketmaster, et al.

Every casual season ticket holder does this, but most of us don’t systematize it - we just send messages to our group chats, and if nobody wants the tickets for that game then the seats stay empty. There’s absolutely nothing scummy or untoward about OP’s approach.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#137
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried this with Google Sheets add-ons. It can be hard since there is no built in payment method so I end up using lots of API calls to Stripe to check for current subscription status. However, you have to get the user to subscribe on one site and install the add-on on another.

Yes, about half my code and effort is handling stuff that an "app store" usually would.

I don't know much about this ecosystem but do you see an opportunity for a business to supply these tools (or be the app store) for excel/google sheets addons?

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If tickets were sold for "market price" then the vast majority of people would be priced out of many events because the wealthy are so much wealthier than the average person that they'd simply monopolise a whole lot of entertainment. Not entirely unlike what has happened to the housing market in cities like London or Vancouver. If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertai…

> If you're okay with huge swathes of the population going without whole sectors of entertainment because "it's a free market" then you're entitled to that opinion. That isn't a society I value. What I don't think you realize is that rules against scalping help create a mono-culture. Sure huge swathes may be barred from a Bieber concert or whatever is popular today but if that happened the dearth of access to that co…

Yachts aren't inherently scarce, they're just expensive to build and maintain. With more money, more yachts can be built.

With more money, you can't build more Biebers.

And given that music is especially easy to copy with the internet, it doesn't follow that their popularity will decline, it simply means that fans will be limited to only watching via TV or the internet rather than being able to attend concerts.

Likewise with sports and sports teams.

Re: Ask HN: Side projects that are making money, but you'd not talk about them?

#140
post #99

I made Accelerator Keys, a little Mac app that gives people Alt key shortcuts in Office software on Macs. Most people have never encountered the problem, so it’s hard to talk about this in general company. But it’s solving a pain point for a few hundred finance/consulting folks with Macs, or tech startups buying Macs for their finance/strategy teams. Haven’t worked on this as much since kids came, but I’d love to fig…

wow, this is actually awesome! I had this exact problem at one point and would have loved this. Pretty weird market, though. I suspect you have two segments and the overall user base may be smaller than you think:

1. People in school (MBAs, late college undergrads mainly) who have past experience with windows excel. You might be overpriced for them.

2. People at work (tech/consulting/finance mainly, mostly analysts) who have past experience with windows excel and currently use Macs. You may be underpriced here

Maybe try pushing this on some of the MBA forums?

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