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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?

#181
post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

Thank you for lunar. I use it every day. The ability to rotate the inbuilt apple display has been a killer feature for me.

Huh, I had no idea that function would ever be useful :) I guess you never know. Thanks!

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But do you see a lot of lawyers uploading their agreement templates on github? Value (or actually price) is a function of supply and demand, and when there’s almost infinite supply at a zero price point value/price goes to zero. That’s what has happened.

Yep, the geeks were duped. It reminds me of a documentary from about 20 years ago where Eric Raymond is boasting to some Microsoft Exec that open source was their worst nightmare. Yeah open source sure showed them, by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.

> by providing lord only knows how much of the Azure infrastructure for free.

They learned how to play the game. Absolutely no other trade out there makes their work available for free to the extent software engineers do. Essentially software engineers put themselves in a position where they _depend_ on salaried employment, working for those that leverage their free work to generate billions in revenue. Sure there are contractors out there but by and large software engineering is salaried work. The naive thinking is that by making software available for free somehow they change the world for the better. Instead they willingly provide free work to corporations that then abuse them.

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

#183
post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

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"

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

#184
post #25

Building and selling macOS apps is a pretty good niche to be in right now. I escaped my stressful corporate job 1 year ago and I’ve been living comfortably since then from app revenue only. I’m making between $3.5k and $9k per month with https://lunar.fyi/ and the smaller apps I create at https://lowtechguys.com/ It’s not much for some parts of the world. But I’m well enough from this that I even took the time to bui…

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 the HDR section from https://lunar.fyi/#xdr

Safari is the only browser that can activate the HDR subsystem on these Display P3 screens, and by doing that it taxes the GPU more when playing back video.

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

#185
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are nice companies like that even at 100-something employee size. The company being owner-run is paramount, as is the character of the owners (caring more about the product and the craft than about maximizing profit).

> (caring more about the product and the craft than about maximizing profit). Actually caring about profit is good too. Problems start when the people in charge care about advancement, prestige, status, resume building, or CYA.

The owners should certainly care about being profitable, but increasing profit shouldn’t be the primary criterion for career advancement and product design. In a small company, the hierarchy is also flat enough that there isn’t much space for the people in charge for advancement/prestige/status within the company, in particular not for the owners themselves. In the end, this is also about hiring people with the right attitudes, which again falls to the owners.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing books just don’t make enough money. It makes you look like cool for having published a book, and that’s about it.

I second this. I wrote a book for Manning, and I always describe it as something I'm really glad I did, that I'll never do again. However, it did have nice second order effects on my career, and if I had written a book in an area that hasn't sputtered out (mine was on building voice apps for smart assistant platforms), I suspect it may have even lead to work directly.

Found your book. So you would consider this area dead? Why? Did Google et al close down their APIs?

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

#187

> The thought of returning to corporate working kind of disgusts me. daily meetings, middle management bs, politics, bureaucracy... im sure your familiar with the typical complaints. Have you considered working in a company that isn't like that? Things to look for: * Ownership: The owner should be the person running the business. * Size: Fewer than 20 employees. Ideally two or three; consider being the first. * Reven…

One of my favorite burnout jobs was as estimator for a high-end hardwood flooring company. Completely fell into it by accident, the place was next door to where I'd walk to get an espresso around 10AM.

So I'd walk in there occasionally to look at some of the demo work they had on the walls, and one day I opened my mouth and said "I need some exercise" and the owner said "we'll make you 'shop boy'!"; bear in mind I was in my 40s at the time. So one or two days a week I'd come in and sweep and clean for a few hours, and then that led to dump runs and eventually they found out I could fix electrical things (like their tools).

The owner was a fundie who homeschooled his kids, I wouldn't tag him as someone I'd seek out for a friend, but we had great conversations about religion and philosophy. The guy who did estimates was tired of it, so he gave me a week's training and off I went; he was my "boss" and he was 19 years old, awesome to work for. It was usually 4-6 hours, 5 days a week. Only paid minimum wage, but after a month they gave me health insurance and I didn't even ask for it.

It was a hoot, I had a "floor hunter" schtick. I got to look at some wild things: a safe that had fallen through a floor, somebody what wanted to put a wine cellar in the underground tunnel (needed a cypress floor natch) which the PO had used as a gun lane, a studs out remodel of an amazing mansion (I saved the subfloor in the ballroom!). Got to see the other side of some IT peeps I knew by reputation, a couple of whom I'd briefly met; a several of them looked like they were experiencing deja vu, but none of them found me out. I bid jobs from $1000 to $100,000 USD.

Did it for about a year.

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

#188

In trading, I realize I always made loses when my emotions get involved. So I decided to implement a trading-bot in Python for fun. It took 1.5 years of development. The bot can open ~100 positions each day and closing all with 1 cent gain (in total ~1$ profit per day). At least its nice to see something I made can make some money even its amount pretty small.

How much did you paid for the broker fee ?

The bot trades on the Binance spot, fee is 0.10%.

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

#189

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.

I assume you mean 15-20 hours per week on the side? ;)

My bad. That's what I meant. :)

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

#190

I wish there was a platform where I can earn money by doing code reviews. Many people may want to earn money this way. but I don't know who would want to pay for it

https://app.pullrequest.com/signups/reviewer

Interesting! Thanks for sharing
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