31–40 of 70 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on what you call "a living". You probably won't get rich from doing $500 bug bounties. But there are hackathons with bounties in the $1000-$10000 range. Do 2-4 of those per month and you're good.
You're not good if they are very close to the bottom of your range. Unless you live in a hut in Thailand or something.
Not the same question, but related. Over the years I feel I've got very good at tracking down reasons for crashes in C and C++ programs, and I quite enjoy the experience of tracking down such bugs. I've often fancied a way to monetise this, maybe even a "no fix, no fee" system (assuming you can give me a way of reasonably predictibly reproducing the crash, even if it needs a while / has a random element). It would re…
We’ve found him, we’ve found the one guy that likes debugging. Honestly though, good for you. There need to be more people like this in the world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not good if they are very close to the bottom of your range. Unless you live in a hut in Thailand or something.
$4000/mo pre-tax is an above average salary for the UK. You'd live just fine in most places in the UK (london aside).
If you have irregular income, you need to plan for a lot more since you'll always have slow months with no income, or customers that don't pay or pay much later than you expected, and you have a lot of costs that employees don't (eg. you need to pay for your own hardware, office space, accountant, tax advisor, health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, etc).
HN has a "who is hiring" post on the first weekday of every month. You could try posting there. It shouldn't be difficult to bring someone on through a normal consulting arrangement. Lots of people with good qualifications are looking for work these days.
Doing it through a "bounty" means that you're asking people to work on the issue speculatively, with no guarantee of getting paid (PR is not accepted, someone else gets it first, etc). So FOSS bounties (unless they are quite large) tend to be seen as recognition for basically altruistic work. And who wants to work altruistically on a Google product of all things, especially if Google itself is unresponsive to the bug report?
There was just another post about someone collecting $2 million as a security bug bounty for some cryptocurrency app. The person found a bug that would have allowed takeover of the entire blockchain for that currency. It looks from https://bughunters.google.com/about/rules/android-friends/61... that Google's highest offer for Android exploits is $1 million but there are a lot of smaller ones that are still in six figures.
Of course security issues are "unknown unknowns" and are a different challenge than simply fixing a known bug in a known feature, but just the same, the above shows that getting people's attention with pure financial incentives can take some pretty big amounts. If you're really up for that and are credible, then the approach can work.
Anyway, in the case of a project with a public bug tracker, you can always open an issue and make your offer as part of it. There doesn't have to be a "sponsor" button for that.
> There's a WebRTC Chromium bug that is making life difficult for us. I'd like to pay a developer to fix it, but I don't know where/how to find people. Have you filed a bug in the project's issue tracker? Has the project team not followed up? Is there a link to this issue?
Not the same question, but related. Over the years I feel I've got very good at tracking down reasons for crashes in C and C++ programs, and I quite enjoy the experience of tracking down such bugs. I've often fancied a way to monetise this, maybe even a "no fix, no fee" system (assuming you can give me a way of reasonably predictibly reproducing the crash, even if it needs a while / has a random element). It would re…
We’ve found him, we’ve found the one guy that likes debugging. Honestly though, good for you. There need to be more people like this in the world.
Some codebases have every participant screaming they stabbed the goddamn basterd, and the job is more a whodidn't.
> There's a WebRTC Chromium bug that is making life difficult for us. I'd like to pay a developer to fix it, but I don't know where/how to find people. Have you filed a bug in the project's issue tracker? Has the project team not followed up? Is there a link to this issue?
a) get a human to look at your externally submitted bug report unless you just get lucky with one of their team seeing your reddit post
b) get that bug accepted by the team as a bug
c) get the bug prioritized to the point that it isn't "bankrupted" to make the team's stats look better at the end of the quarter
d) actually fixedI always wonder if there is anyone making a living of bounties? I've once considered it, but the public bounties that I could find were so laughably low that I just saw no way to make it work. I guess it could work if there were a lot of bounties for a project that you are familiar with, so that you can fix them quickly, but there are so few bounties available that you probably have nothing to do after a week or so.
Depends on what you call "a living". You probably won't get rich from doing $500 bug bounties. But there are hackathons with bounties in the $1000-$10000 range. Do 2-4 of those per month and you're good.
I'd really love to hear from someone who is making a living from bounties or hackathons, because it just seems very hard or impossible to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve found him, we’ve found the one guy that likes debugging. Honestly though, good for you. There need to be more people like this in the world.
Ey, next to teaching it is the favorite part of my profession! (I like modeling systems and greenfield development as well, but I feel my time is absolutely best utilized when I can train others or crack hard bugs that are worth paying someone good money to crack.)
I always wonder if there is anyone making a living of bounties? I've once considered it, but the public bounties that I could find were so laughably low that I just saw no way to make it work. I guess it could work if there were a lot of bounties for a project that you are familiar with, so that you can fix them quickly, but there are so few bounties available that you probably have nothing to do after a week or so.
I know many people making a very good living from bounties (>$500k/year). If you're good, you'll make bank. If not - don't quit your day job.