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Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

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Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#221

Post by difflens »

This is a great post! I have very similar thoughts! I haven't escaped the corporate job yet, but the pandemic and subsequent layoff scares have convinced me that bootstrapping a business is a good way to take back some economic control.

I'm working on DiffLens to improve how developers see diffs of their code changes. DiffLens uses abstract syntax trees to make diffs more focused and understandable. It's free at the moment while we iterate on it and get the word out. I think it's the best way to view source code changes. If someone is interested in checking it out, see https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DiffLens... . It works within VS Code and supports JS, TS, CSS and text diffs. JSON support is coming soon!

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#222

Post by yboris »

jollyllama wrote: post #164
yboris wrote: post #156

I have mild success at $500/month by selling my $5 Video Hub App (though I donate $3.50 of every purchase to a cost-effective charity). This is averaging 100 sales per month for several years now. https://videohubapp.com/ - though I also have it open source: https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

How do you promote it?

Initially on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17587992

After that shared it a bit on Reddit and some forums. Haven't promoted it for several years (other than occasional comments on Reddit and HN, where fitting). I got lucky that several individuals reviewed my app on their blogs.

Some traffic also comes from this amazing website: https://alternativeto.net/software/video-hub-app/

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#223

Post by tome »

noelsusman wrote: post #112
jimz wrote: post #21

For the most part, if you can make money for other people, you can use that skill set for yourself. Also, if you're somewhere where it's legal or at least accessible, it's not actually 100% true that at a casino the house always wins. It will take a little bit of effort to get started and you do need a small bit of infrastructure (but a cheap VPS or a SoC would actually do, depending on what you focus on), but it's n…

5% ROI doesn't sound that great? I can get nearly 4% from US treasuries right now, unless I'm misunderstanding you.

I guess that means per bet. Whether that's good or not depends on the variance though ...

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#224

Post by deanmoriarty »

lavventura wrote: post #193
Temporary_31337 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it outperforming the market though?

I was experimenting in Binance Spot.I don't believe it out-performs the market, but it can survive when market crashes since the bot is not greedy. The bot opens up to 20 positions in parallel each starts with 2$ and always limit order with 0.5% profit. Some positions close itself in few seconds some remain for a day. If there is -5% loss on a position, I added up the amount of the position and re-order limit order w…

This is called "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller". You will make your $1 for many, many days, then the day comes where you continue doubling down and you lose a substantial amount of capital in the process.

Very similar to systematically trading options, i.e. selling covered calls, ...

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)

Source (FWIW, but it really isn't needed for this case): I worked at the most prestigious hedge fund/market maker in the US running their strategies on the servers colocated in all the major exchanges, so I know a couple things about arbitrage strategies. If a similar approach were to even remotely work, I would have most certainly seen it.

No need to reply (to me at least): I won't be convinced by any further argument that your trading system circumvents this basic paradox :-)

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#225

Post by mydogcanpurr »

waltbosz wrote: post #113
borplk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds cool and I'm not experienced in this area but I'd say watch out that it's not creating some kind of phobia or obsession with them thinking about scary invisible things in their mouth!

To give more context to the story about my son: I didn't at all give him some overbearing lecture. I simply read the page to him as if it were regular story-time and let him make the decision, which he did with remarkable swiftness. That's good advice about phobia/obsession. My daughter is a bit weird about germs. For example the other day, I was handling a deer skull that we found in the backyard, and she was a litt…

> For example the other day, I was handling a deer skull that we found in the backyard

Have you ever heard of prions, e.g. chronic wasting disease?

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#227

Post by conductr »

tayo42 wrote: post #4
rozenmd wrote: post #3

Consider teaching on your own blog - it's not immediate money, but if you're patient, you'll start to get folks asking if you're available for consulting, or if you've considered writing a book on what you write about. Source: I wrote a book about a single function in React, it did okay.

Ive thought about the blog thing, i just have no idea how to find readers? With the book the publisher takes care of the marketing part? I think that's a common theme Im noticing with where I seem to stop. How do i find, reader, clients, users for whatever i want to do.

What’s a growing area/project that is poorly documented? Just start blogging as if you were creating documentation, add code examples, etc. Since you’re bad at marketing, make it SEO.

Once you have some traffic coming in, promote a paid course/ebook where you build a full project/app or some bigger unit of work with the thing.

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#228

Post by tambourine_man »

alin23 wrote: post #184
tambourine_man wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your apps and site look awesome, congratulations. For whatever reason, the hero video at https://lunar.fyi/ makes Safari use 100% of all cores, Webkit.GPU goes nuts, WindowServer unresponsive… works fine on Chrome however. Monterey 12.5.1, iMac 5K, 27"

Thank you! I think that might be because Safari uses the HEVC version of the video. I'm also seeing 25% usage on an M1 Max MacBook, which is more than I expected. Firefox and Chrome don't have noticeable CPU usage. They only support the H264 encoded video. I might have to reencode the video and optimize for hardware decoding. Default ffmpeg options were not enough apparently. ------- EDIT: it's actually because of th…

Ah! Makes sense. Thanks for sharing

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#229

Post by karaterobot »

leobg wrote: post #219
karaterobot wrote: post #149

> freelance - compared to just working rates seem low and its hard to find work from what ive seen Freelancing money can be very, very good. It does take work to find jobs initially, but often at a certain point your referrals start kicking in, and you've got to increase your rate because you've got too much work. Not that it's easy, but it's a good racket, and during economies in which companies may not have budget…

So how do you find your first gigs? Upwork?

Well for me, I had friends with companies who needed some help. I ended up taking over a project that was on a stupidly short timeline, and the other guy had flaked out. I did a good job, and that led to introductions to a much bigger company who provided work for several years. Basically networking.

This was in like 2007, so I don't really know what the landscape is like now, or how you find jobs. I would assume it's easier if anything, because it's just a larger space with more resources, but what do I know. I stopped being a sole proprietor in 2010, and joined a consulting company for the next 10 years, and am now elsewhere, as a salaryman.

If I were starting today, I'd probably look at job postings anywhere (LinkedIn, Indeed, whatever) and even if the job posting was for a salaried position, I would contact them and say "I am a freelancer, and if you can't find somebody qualified, or if it doesn't make sense for you to hire someone on a permanent basis, please consider me." /shrug

Re: Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

#230

Post by [deleted] »

pythonbase wrote: post #98

I have been doing consulting on the side, around 15-20 hours per day. Also into niche website development; building search engine optimized websites that are monetized through display and affiliate ads. Both side gigs usually generate more than the full time job.

[deleted]
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