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Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

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Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#151

Post by polymatter »

thefreshteapot wrote: post #135
georgieporgie wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I am an old man, I hope my family make more of an effort than to plan for strangers to call me. That's a really rude statement. Also, you have no reason to think the parent commenter's father enjoys games, or even to think that an aged person with health problems is interested in puzzles over human interaction.

I stand by it, I dont think it is rude. I think it highlights the focus we as technology advocates hold that technology can solve society based problems. Turn back the dial 50 years, we held our elders in far higher respect than we do today. That said, I want to show you an example of something a bit more meaningful with skype and the older generation. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17870178 Clearly this is not f…

In the general case, I think you're not rude at all and is a valuable comment.

But if you're refering to a specific person to whom you don't know their individual circumstances, and you do it publicly, then it is extremely rude. For the record I'm from the UK in case this is a cultural thing.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#152

Post by srconstantin »

The lowest stress, highest paying per hour job I can think of is tutoring high school students. $50 an hour is normal, $100 is possible in affluent neighborhoods if you have a good pitch about why you're worth it; I have even heard of $500 an hour, but that was a math PhD student who found a remarkably rich Manhattan family.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#154

Post by MoonUnit »

damian2000 wrote: post #116
andrewhillman wrote: post #111

How about get her blogging (if she has neat viewpoint on something) and some adsense. It would take a while to reach $1K per month though.

Agreed - you probably won't reach anywhere near $1K per month unless you are in the 300k hits per day territory, which is pretty much impossible for most bloggers. Just extrapolating my own blog figures from adsense - I've made maybe $50 in adsense so far, from half a million views (over the past several months). While blogging is technically easy to monetize, it is very difficult to make decent money from it.

If you are making only 1k per month from 300k hits per day that means you are either not presenting the adsense in the correct way or you are blogging about a subject that does not have any competition for the niche that advertisers are willing to pay for clicks other than a few pennies. As an example I have a site that makes around $400.00 per month that only get 150-300 hits per day.

With proper research and the way you setup the blog you can potentially create a great income stream even without hitting huge amounts of traffic. It is all in what you blog about and the amount of people who may be interested.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#155

Post by menothere »

Does she enjoy being around kids? Considering the severity of her herniated disc, she may be able to successfully start an at-home day care for children in your neighbourhood. My aunt does this and she is making reasonably good money. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's definitely more than minimum wage. IIRC, she takes care of about 12 kids scheduled at different times through out the week. Usually no more than 4-6 at a time though.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#157

Post by joncooper »

franze wrote: post #27

just a wild, very wild and untested, idea. a mini-niche "mechanical turk" iphone(andorid) app. i.e.: if your wife is called "gloria" the app is called "Ask Gloria" * user types in an question/request. * gloria (the real gloria) response. the app is free(? or 0.99) with a 1 question package. an additional question pack (of 5 questions) costs 10(?)$ the selling point is that not an anonymous person or siri-AI answers y…

There were at least two versions of this: Chacha and KGB. The former I used extensively - you'd just send a text to CHACHA with a question and a real person would answer it for you. Some of the responses I got were quite amusing :)

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#158

Post by spiredigital »

shimon_e wrote: post #132
spiredigital wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're exactly right - outstanding service is a GREAT way to differentiate yourself. And it's often some of the best marketing you can do, too. I'm constantly amazed at how many companies will make you send something back to get a refund / replacement, even if it only costs a few bucks. If our customers receive a defective item that costs less than $20, we simply ship them a new item immediately, without asking them…

Does no one send faulty item back to the manufacturer so they can prevent the same fault from happening again?

If the defect is recurring, or on a really expensive item - yes. It will go back to the manufacturer. But many defective items aren't indicative of a mass problem, but rather a one-off slip up.

If it costs $10 to ship a product from the customer to the wholesale, and then another $10 so ship it back to the manufacturer for a refund, it just doesn't make sense to do for inexpensive items each time a defective one is discovered.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#159

Post by tbeseda »

thefreshteapot wrote: post #135
georgieporgie wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when I am an old man, I hope my family make more of an effort than to plan for strangers to call me. That's a really rude statement. Also, you have no reason to think the parent commenter's father enjoys games, or even to think that an aged person with health problems is interested in puzzles over human interaction.

I stand by it, I dont think it is rude. I think it highlights the focus we as technology advocates hold that technology can solve society based problems. Turn back the dial 50 years, we held our elders in far higher respect than we do today. That said, I want to show you an example of something a bit more meaningful with skype and the older generation. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17870178 Clearly this is not f…

Is there data for well elders were respected now and 50 years ago?

I think this is a common cultural misconception. Much like "Americans are getting dumber," is socially manufactured.

Re: Ask HN: My wife needs something to do from home to make money...

#160

Post by nathansobo »

pbj wrote: post #76
rhspeer wrote: post #49

QA, testing web sites in late development and logging bugs. Most developers hate doing this, & PM's are not good at anything. I usually pay $40/hr for this, however it only takes a few hours, and that rate means the bug report is reported in a way that it's easy to read and recreate without having to have a conversation about it.

I'd love to get into doing this on the side, but 99% of QA jobs I've seen require solid knowledge of programming. Is this not the case?

It's so ridiculous that people always want QA testers to be programmers. My fiance is a fantastic QA tester but has no interest in programming. She interviewed at Twitter, which at the time did not have a single manual QA tester keeping an eye on their products, and they just asked her a bunch of questions about coding. They should have sat her down and asked her to find bugs. No programmer I know has the patience to do what she does manually. She works with a team that makes extensive use of automated testing. But things still slip through, and it's worth it to have a human being looking for issues. Doing everything with manual QA is obviously stupid. But I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as well. Having no manual QA whatsoever seems like a big waste of time for teams that are large enough to afford it.
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