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Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

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Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#81

Post by drewcrawford »

marme wrote: post #77
drewcrawford wrote: post #55

Two ideas. 1. I desperately want to be able to send a link to somebody and have them be able to book a N-minute meeting on my calendar (CalDav) without any further interaction. I have spent probably several hours trying out products, all of which suck. I currently spend $30/month on a tool that really doesn't even work. 2. The enterprise IM (CampFire, HipChat, etc.) is pretty well done at this point, but the "group c…

the first one you describe is exactly what you can do on outlook. Everyone who is connected to the same exchange server can view everyone elses calendar and see which times they are free and which times they already have meetings scheduled and then they can send a meeting request at a time that everyone is and it is automatically added to your calendar unless you reject it. The only problem with this is that outside…

> The only problem with this is that outside clients wont have access to you exchange server.

My company consists of: me and the guy sitting a few feet from me. If I wanted to schedule a meeting with that person, Exchange would be a poor improvement on the existing solution of turning my head.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#82

Post by Aqua_Geek »

martinkallstrom wrote: post #42

Here is a problem that I would pay a subscription for a great solution to: Cron as a service. Sometimes when you set up a simple codestack on Heroku or Parse or similar, it would be great to be able to specify a web hook that should be called repeatedly just to run maintenance code, summarize scores, clean up logs etc. If you have root access you can set up cron but this is not always the case, and I think it would b…

Doesn't Heroku already have a few of these? https://addons.heroku.com/#queues

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#83

Post by [deleted] »

vacri wrote: post #65
contingencies wrote: post #5

Work someplace. Live frugally. Don't spend the money. Leave it in term deposits or other low risk, relatively high yield (ie. at least above inflation) locations. Rinse and repeat. (Recently, I heard that Vietnam offers solid rates on term deposits in foreign currencies.)

I went to Vietnam nearly two years ago, and the inflation rate at the time was 22%. I'm not a financial guy, but inherently that doesn't sound low-risk.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#84

Post by adventured »

aaron695 wrote: post #27

I never get why these vague I want money posts get to the front page, how is this hacking? Wanting more money, for little work? That's status quo. Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip. Or Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.

Hacker News != just news on hacking

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#85

Post by Tichy »

patio11 wrote: post #71

Some options: 1) Do you have freelancing or other experience which has exposed you to multiple people with similar problems? For example, have you implemented the same "$()#% authentication system for a web application 20 times? Package up that one little piece of the puzzle into a scalable way to teach people to do it without needing to have you or someone similarly skilled on their team. Common form factors include…

"you are looking for a MS Excel spreadsheet which has ever been mailed by Bob to Cindy"

That's how I (unenthusiastically) described my job as a Java developer in the first decade of the 21st century. Not sure if by now all Excel sheets have been "consolidated". In any case mobile apps seem to be the current wave.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#86

Post by adventured »

gfodor wrote: post #15

Save $200k and buy a 33% leveraged muni bond closed end fund, which are currently yielding approx 6% tax free at a 10% discount due to the recent bond selloff. Disclaimer: if interest rates rise you will be unable to reclaim your principal but, generally speaking, this income stream should be pretty safe for the foreseeable future. And of course, $1000 a month today is not going to be as much in the future if inflati…

Doing this at the point in time in which money is about as cheap as it has ever been in history due to hyper QE to hold down rates, is a very, very bad idea.

It's not a question of if rates will rise. They're going to rise a lot, because every day that goes by the cost of artificially suppressing rates gets more expensive (which is why the Fed has had to keep expanding their QE program). Equal but opposite reaction, is what will occur, conceptually. To the extent they've created hyper cheap money, is the extent to which money will be expensive, sooner than later I'd argue.

The bond bubble is nearing an end. If the Fed wishes to continue it, it's going to cost trillions worth of new inflation, setting up a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. The era of cheap money is over.

If you want to earn a return on your $200k, wait for the inevitable disaster that follows these insane central bank policies. Swoop in with your pile of cash and pick up dirt cheap assets after the next crash. Or go after yield as rates skyrocket in the next five years.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#87

Post by patio11 »

aaron695 wrote: post #27

I never get why these vague I want money posts get to the front page, how is this hacking? Wanting more money, for little work? That's status quo. Anyway stop wasting your life on stuff would be my tip. Or Learn to cook well(healthy and tasty) over a few months, it'll save you money and health costs. Great tax free not wasting money passive habit to pick up.

Consider it the creative application of computer code to systemic weaknesses in the global economy, with a clearly defined success function which is fairly difficult to fudge. That might help explain some of the attraction. (There's also the "If you only know W-2 employees, then making money by a legitimate means other than a day job feels like cheating", and for some reason a lot of hackers like winning by rules exploitation more than they like winning.)

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#88

Post by jacquesm »

h2s wrote: post #31
jacquesm wrote: post #30

Passive income isn't. Lots of little projects may look like passive income but almost all of them (not saying it can't be done but I just have not seen any) have some kind of overhead. It may be better to search for something that can be started small but that you can eventually scale.

When people say they want "passive income", I take it to mean "I want to start a tiny business and then neglect it and hope it dies slowly".

I take it to mean "I want to start a small business with a fixed up-front investment and eternal steady income". I don't think they hope it dies slowly, it is just that it will die slowly.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#89

Post by cageface »

wilfra wrote: post #73
greghinch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having spent some time in Vietnam, and spoken with residents (expats and natives), I would not invest my money there. Or most SEA countries. Too many tales of foreigners getting screwed with little to no recourse.

That's quite a sweeping (and inaccurate) generalization. I have no experience banking in Vietnam but what he said certainly applies to both China and Thailand, if you stick to the largest banks (ICBC and Construction Bank in China are both probably safer than any US bank - Bangkok Bank, Bank of Ayudhya (owned by GE) and Siam Commercial are all rock solid in Thailand - along with HSBC in both countries). Singapore and…

I've been living in Vietnam for more than two years now and there is no way I would put any significant amount of money in a Vietnamese bank. Interest rates have already fallen to under 10%. What's worse - just about everybody I've talked to that understands the Vietnamese economy thinks that the banks here are headed for a serious insolvency crisis.

A number of expats here that had planned on living comfortably off the interest of their Vietnamese bank deposits are now scrambling to come up with a plan B.

Re: Ask HN: Passive income ideas?

#90

Post by mikecsh »

ploureiro wrote: post #67
Sealy wrote: post #25

I made a lot of passive income by coding trading bots for bitcoin. Its a steep learning curve but if you are willing to learn, it can be very profitable. Like you, I can code confidently so during my morning commute I would read books about trading and economics. In the evening I would play with bits of code interfacing with broker API's. Within 3 months I had a working bot that automatically traded away as I slept a…

Can you recommend any specific books? (on trading) Cheers

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