A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?hpw <comment><USER3> "The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that's ridiculous."

In my experience this may be empirically false. My 4 year old could barely count, but after spending 2 months in the summer playing a couple of iPad games, he's adding 2 digit numbers and subtracting 1 digit numbers, and doing simple math puzzles. His elder brother couldnt do those till Kindergarten, and I dont think the difference was aptitude.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I learned my early math skills primarily by playing math games on a Mac 128k. That person doesn't know what they're talking about - <USER2> teaching systems can be engaging in a way that pen/paper has no hope of matching.

<comment><USER5> Playing "Maths Circus" and Lemmings on beige macs were the most powerful educational tools for teachers to use as a reward for good work to get me to perform well. Sadly that stopped a grade or two later, and my interest dropped, and so did my performance.

Hopefully soon our computational freedoms for big actual work won't be relegated to computer monitors. Laptops and tablets are great, but they make you focus/stare at one area for a long time. There is often a wall behind that monitor, we are basically staring at it, for many hours, most of my adult life is staring at a wall.

<http://worrydream.com/KillMath/>

There's a Microsoft Research concept video that showed people interacting with computational environments within their natural environment. Statistical information could be represented for any data needed, and people were not bound to their seats. Problem is, I don't see things being able to change much for people that work in the terminal.

Basically, what I am trying to say with my thoughts is, the positives of both worlds will interwine and the negatives of both will mostly disappear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think their are just approaching the problem from the wron side. They are right in saying that the computer is being used wrong, but wrong in saying that not using the computer is the solution. I'm more in alignment with what Mr Wolfram from WolframAlpha is saying: Computers can helkp you with tasks that are repetitive and inhuman, you should learn what is needed to solve a problem efficiently. That is actually more in alignment with what the Waldorf system says: Creativity through hands-on. Denying kids access to technology is just stupid, because if you think about your own life: Doesn't technology make it easier and more efficient to get things done?

</comment><comment><USER7> Maybe they don't let students use computers because when you search for information about the Waldorf schools, you get all sorts of stuff about them being some kind of cult.

In my admittedly limited research, I found information about astral bodies, Atlantis, soul nourishment, clairvoyance and and a dislike of the left handed.

From the Skeptic's Dictionary:

 _Waldorf schools reflect Steiner's education theories, which hold that children advance through three stages....during the first stage, birth to age 7, the spirit inhabiting the body of the child is still adjusting to its surroundings, hence lower grades in Waldorf school offer minimal academic content. Reading is not introduced until second or third grade. During the second stage, ages seven to 14, children are said to be driven primarily by imagination and fantasy, so students are introduced to mythology. After age 14, the third stage, an astral body is believed to be drawn into the physical body, creating the onset of puberty._

<comment><USER8> Waldorf schools are based on some crazy-nutty voodoo philosophy.

They also, more or less coincidentally, work really, really well.

<comment><USER9> _more or less coincidentally_

That's too easy. How can we know that? On the contrary, it would be surprising if how well the schools work were unrelated to their philosophy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My sister-in-law has taught at a Waldorf school for years. The school the article describes sounds typical. Waldorf is actually based on an extremely deviant philosophy. They get away with it because they deliver results. In particular, their kids routinely decimate all standardized tests.

<comment><USER10> Hmmm. Kids from affluent families who likely have highly educated parents working at high tech companies do well on standardized tests created to cover the entire spectrum of children? nowai

<comment><USER9> Please don't interject that kind of rudeness here. The school my sister-in-law teaches at has little in common with your demographic description. It's bland middle class with mild (very mild) alternative tendencies. What it has in common with the school in the article is basic Waldorf principles: eschewing technology in the early grades, emphasis on imagination and handwork and so on. The Silicon Valley aspect of the article is a red herring, no doubt because it's attention-getting, but perhaps also because the author doesn't realize this is simply an instance of a type.

<comment><USER9> Edit: I was unfair to the author. The article clearly discusses Waldorf schools as a type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There seems to be a false dichotomy being made between hands on education and the use of technology in the classroom that bothers me a bit; why should they be separated? I see no reason why a collaborative, hands on approach to education is precluded by the use of technology.

The developers of Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) have an after school program called Program by Design (<http://programbydesign.org/>) and one of the things they found was that some of the students started wanting to learn _more_ math because they needed to know how to add things to their programs! The extreme view presented in this article seems to be based more upon fear of technology than any kind of understanding of it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I went to this school for kindergarten through the first half of sixth grade. Being an elementary school student I was less familiar with their guiding philosophy than the actual execution. But I can say that they did some things really well for an elementary school child, one of which was not burdening their students with homework. This gave me free time to read everything I could get my hands on, which I think has been incredibly valuable to my development and later education.

But I left when we were covering fractions for the 3rd year in a row (when I was in sixth grade), and I felt completely stifled and unchallenged. I have no regrets that my parents sent me there, but at least when I was there, the execution of the philosophy began to fall apart when I turned 10.

For some context, I am now a CS and Physics major and don't feel that an unfamiliarity with computers when I was 8 hampered my math or computer skills at all.

</comment><comment><USER13> We send our kids to Waldorf inspired schools. Most schools (especially public schools) give me a sense of dread, like a twelve year prison sentence would. The Waldorf schools have a warm, human feel that actually makes me a little jealous of my kids. I would rather my kids be raised as whole humans, not little test-taking machines.

<comment><USER14> Could the Waldorf schools be a reaction to the new concept of simply dumping one's child at a school to be raised?

<comment><USER9> The schools themselves have been going for about a hundred years, so they aren't a reaction to it. Perhaps some parents are. I hope so. Unfortunately, I think the social trend is the other way around. Where I live (Canada), debate tends to center around how wonderful it would be if children could be raised by day-care workers before being handed off to school workers, so the parents can go be workers someplace else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, there's a limit to the practical use of gadgets in the classroom. Learning human interaction, motor skills, and other parts of being human are best done with other humans.

It's also pretty clear to me that equating computing to the use of Word, Excel, and Google leads one to the conclusion that computing is easy and not a big deal to pick up. Naturally, as a software engineer, I disagree vehemently with that.

I think that some level of _real_ (not turtle or other games) programming should be taught from middle school on to the point where a HS grad can successfully write a small program to deal with the small needs of life: things like accounting, sophisticated searching for files, etc.

I believe - have faith - that a programming-enabled population can do some pretty amazing things when set free to do them. All it takes is the knowledge and the eyes to see what can be automated to do so.

<comment><USER16> Please don't diss the turtle. I was too old for the Logo scene (by quite a bit, actually) but I learned (and grokked) recursion reading an article about Logo and turtle graphics. I made _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ a much easier read in '80 than it would have been otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I went to Waldorf for 10 years (preschool - 8th grade).

Didn't get a computer until I was 12.

Now > [http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/19/how-two- te...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/19/how-two-teenagers- broke-in-to-silicon-valley-and-the-music-industry/)

</comment><comment><USER18> _"The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that's ridiculous."_

Ugh. Also read as: "Something I haven't seen doing something I don't expect it to? Ridiculous!"

The correlation between students at Waldorf schools and prestigious schools later is _extremely_ easily explained by a single character: $

That said, something different than our current, standard public-school fare probably stands a decent chance of doing better. Anything with more attention to the methodology stands such a chance. But I'd be willing to bet that many of the successes also simply reflect parents that are more aware of their children's education.

<comment><USER19> Your specific comment about "$" may be false. Waldorf schools in urban areas are indeed $15k+/year/kid, but there are Waldorf schools in rural areas that charge far less for tuition. Not having kids myself but knowing parents of kids who go to Waldorf schools, your second statement seems more accurate: from what they say the parents are very involved in the schooling - in fact the Waldorf methodology is insistent on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think that this approach is basically absurd. I easily learned more during my lunches in the computer lab, going through HTML, CSS and then JavaScript tutorials or writing batch files to do silly things than anywhere else during my time in middle school.

Not only this, but (especially further on, in 7th and 8th grade), I learned other subjects more effectively thanks to computers. I still remember _The Crucible_ because I made a website (complete with red text in Chiller, uncontrollable music and animated drops of blood for the background) for it; I learned factoring by writing a simple JavaScript game for it.

I think this easily beats spending weeks cutting up fruit and shunning technology. Had I not been playing around with computers and the internet since a young age, not only would I probably not have found my true calling-- CS--but I would also probably have had a worse education in all the other fields as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the philosophy. Foundations of learning should not be built on use of Google as a search engine. Foundations should he a mix of the things necessary for brain and personality development.

Its synonymous to the debate about letting kids use calculators for simple (or not so simple ) math problems.

<comment><USER10> Isn't it sad that the computing experience is now defined as using Google? What a waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Curiously, it's in Los Altos. So are the first schools to adopt the Khan Academy platform.

<comment><USER9> Rich freethinkers.

<comment><USER22> Is that good or bad?

<comment><USER9> Good on both points in my book.

(Was going to say "rich hippies" but thought better of it. I mean freethinker in the original sense, someone who doesn't follow norms.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I went to a Waldorf type school (called a multi-year back when I was in elementary school). My classroom was 90 kids, grades K-3 in a room that was four classrooms with walls knocked down. No desks, self-directed curriculum, etc. I was in a 4-6 after this, which was more structured but still self directed.

<http://fsd.k12.ca.us/rollinghills/multiage.html>

This was my program. My sister and I went through it. To this day a lot of us still keep in touch with our teacher.

It was not strict Waldorf, more inspired by it and still is to this day.

</comment><comment><USER24> wow these "tech" worker parents are seriously pretty messed up. I'm pretty sure my early computer use and curiosity led to my current career as a software developer, I can't imagine not knowing how to use a search engine until eighth grade, I was messing around looking at HTML code and stuff in like 5th or 6th grade

</comment><comment><USER25> One thing that saddens me in education is the death of Long Division. I took a couple math-ed courses in college and I was shocked when I learned that most it's not being taught in most schools. It's "too hard" and it's "useless", some say, so it's being taken out of the curriculum.

Bullshit it's useless. Multiplication tables are memorized lookup tables. That's "rote" but important, but it's not when math starts to become interesting. Long multiplication and division are the first time people have to use an algorithm for a problem too difficult to do in any other way. And yes, it needs to be done by hand and if it takes a few months for the average student to get it right, fine. It's important. Not the actual skill of dividing 83914 by 203, but the process of carrying out a mechanical algorithm by hand.

Should computers be a part of education? Absolutely. Should programming be taught in school? Yes. Should we abandon the process of running algorithms by hand, as a mechanism for understanding rule-based computation at an early age? No.

Interesting fact: early computers (in the 1940s) were not competitive with human "computers"-- savants whose jobs were to do arithmetical calculations. They were actually slower. What made mechanical computers such a win was that they could keep going and remain reliable, whereas human computers would start making mistakes after 8 hours.

If you've gone through the humiliating process of trying to calculate a 6-by-6 determinant by hand and getting it wrong, you understand this, and you know _why_ the rigor offered by mechanical computation is so important. If you haven't, it probably doesn't make sense to you.</comment>


Yet another communication app? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetrigger.io/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

I am jimi one of the makers for this app. We want to create a different form of communication/messaging where the sender-recipient relationship is fluid but conversations can be organised intuitively.

Would love to get any feedback? and would try to answer any questions you have?

</comment><comment><USER2> Website needs work, and UX is lacking. Does not compete with other communication apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your feedback, we are updating and refining both the site and the app in the coming weeks.

ATM the is a pre-launch landing page. Was there any specific part that you feel was unclear you would like to see?</comment></comment>


Vodafone chief speaks out after hospital-serving phone mast torched - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/15/vodafone_chief_speaks_out_birmingham_phone_mast_torched/ <comment><USER2> Sometimes I wonder just what it is exactly that keeps society held together when you consider just how many numbnuts are out there.

<comment><USER3> No kidding! It's as if you could create the most ridiculous rumor you can possibly imagine and you would gain a following. It's astonishing. How about this one: if we don't start getting cars back on the road, the roads will break up and float away into space! Pot holes are proof it's already happening!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The Birmingham NHS Nightingale Hospital is located in the NEC exhibition > centre, best known for its hosting of dreary tech shows.

Why is this news article so opinionated, and why are they attacking an exhibition centre for something so unrelated to the news story?

<comment><USER5> Because it's _The Register_ , it's their house style.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, as a regular El Reg reader I wouldn't consider it an attack, more playful ribbing.</comment></comment></comment>


Is There a WhatsApp Alternative for Daily Chatting? - <AUTHOR> https://utopia.fans/security/is-there-a-whatsapp-alternative-for-daily-chatting/ <comment><AUTHOR> Do you believe WhatsApp is safe on the whole?</comment>


Ask HN: Building a workstation - <AUTHOR>

What's your favorite motherboard / processor (and other components) at the moment for building a fast, cheap linux workstation?  Any recommendations or warnings? <comment><USER2> I've built the budget box from Ars Tecnnica and been happy. The latest guide: [http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/04/ars- technica-...](http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/04/ars-technica- system-guide-april-2009-edition.ars)

</comment><comment><USER3> I always enjoy this series, but I've never actually built one:

<http://cr.yp.to/hardware/build-20090123.html></comment>


Ask HN: What is your passive income 2019? - <AUTHOR> Time to ask again :)
Any side projects, Games, OSS. <comment><USER3> I built an escape room! Startup Escape ([https://startupescape.com](https://startupescape.com)), a parody of startups where you have "$1M to launch your startup" (1 hour to escape).

It's a physical game in San Francisco, but it's run day-to-day by a manager. Overall it makes about $15k/mo, and after rent/labor/etc I just make a few thousand dollars a month.

<comment><USER4> Looks fun. Might have to recommend it for a team offsite.

But, um...

> Startup Escape is in the Tenderloin North SOMA! The address > is 447 O'Farrell St, San Francisco CA

That's... literally the Tenderloin. Or is this (and the oxymoron that is "North SOMA") a joke that just went over my head? Haha.

<comment><USER5> "North SOMA" would mean "North South Of MArket" :)

(For those not as familiar with San Francisco - SOMA is a neighborhood south of Market St. where a lot of tech companies in SF are found. Tenderloin is another neighborhood that has a reputation as the most dangerous in SF and is nearby but north of Market St.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first book was published six years ago. The title is in my profile, if you're willing to click through for the plug.

It has continued to sell well, and about two years ago I "earned out," meaning my royalties exceeded my advance, so now every six months I get a royalty check.

I've also agreed to several deals that allow my book to be translated and sold in different countries. Those deals are usually on the small side, but the only work involved is picking up a pen and signing the paperwork.

The success of that first book has allowed me to write several related books, and while the advances I've received for those don't count as passive income, my hope is that they will generate some passive income in the future, if I should be so fortunate as to earn out again.

To anyone who is thinking about writing a book, I offer this advice:

There are some cases where it makes sense to self-publish even if you can get a book deal. Niche e-books on technical topics written by people with large built-in audiences are one example.

But in general, if you can get an agent, get an agent, and if you can get a book deal, get a book deal.

<comment><USER7> Oh awesome, I really enjoyed your book! Now I'm wondering if I first heard about it on HN, or through some other means.

If you don't mind answering - what made you decide to write this book in particular?

<comment><USER6> I had a baby who wouldn't sleep, and at 3 a.m. one night, while in a rocking chair with him, my sleep-deprived brain thought it would be funny to write a book of science experiments you can perform on your baby. Woke up the next morning, still thought it was a good idea, and decided to pursue it.

<comment><USER7> That's awesome! Is that the first time you decided to write a book? Or was this something you were planning on pursuing regardless?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not exactly passive, but side hustle that I hope becomes main hustle: [https://simplescraper.io](https://simplescraper.io)

Tryna fill the gap that Kimono left.

Aim to post as a _Show HN_ once I polish it a little more.

<comment><USER9> Would you mind sharing how you want to monetize this?

<comment><USER10> It looks like there are credits for automating it outside of your browser

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Investing in boring index funds has produced 20% returns this year. Can't imagine it will happen again next yr but who knows.

Actually I had an allocation in Apple which has had a crazy year..up 60% or so to all time highs.

<comment><USER12> curious, do you count unrealized gains as income as well?

I also did some passive index fund investments but I only count cash dividends as actual "income".

<comment><USER11> I am in this case..I don't really day trade, have dividends auto-reinvested and rarely sell.

The market does sort of concern me right now though. We're sitting at all time highs for the S&P but there's worrying signs everywhere. I don't know how it'll all play out next year, so I might gradually sell some to lock in gains before end of year.

<comment><USER13> only do this if you need the money < 5 years. Timing the market is not possible, and while I agree many troubling signs, it's impossible to time when to buy back in, and you lose dividends and potential gains during the time on the sidelines.

If you need the money short term, then it shouldn't be invested in equities.

<comment><USER11> In theory I agree...but it's been a 10 year bull market and I would really not want to see any of my non-retirement or retirement accounts halved if I can help it.

My amateur "macro" view is we're in for heavily volatile times in the next 5 years.

I tend not to follow textbook personal financial advice _shrug_

<comment><USER14> I cashed out in September 2018 and I am most certainly not crying about missed profits :) That money is happily deployed elsewhere for better uses and the next time I have excess savings it will go into stocks when they're at the bottom of the market

<comment><USER15> > when they're at the bottom of the market

Will there be an announcement?

<comment><USER14> Yes, but there's also no need. When 2008 happened, not only was it in the news 24/7, anyone looking at the chart understood they were getting a 30% discount on an index of the US economy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm working on a website that calculates the unit prices on Amazon products. Hoping to help save people some money, since there are a surprising amount of times where buying in smaller quantities actually saves you money.

The website is [https://unitprice.org/browse](https://unitprice.org/browse) if anyone is interested! It's still very much in its infancy, but I plan on doing a "Show HN" soon! Based on the last two weeks, I have only made about $10, but that's been with very little traffic so far.

<comment><USER17> Do paper towels & toilet paper please :)

<comment><USER16> I've added some initial paper towel and toilet paper listings, FYI! More to come, so expect an even better deal later this evening! [https://unitprice.org/categories/home](https://unitprice.org/categories/home)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I run [https://bannerjs.com](https://bannerjs.com) which is a configurable banner announcement service for websites that currently brings in $220 MRR.

I also run [https://www.junior-to-senior.com](https://www.junior-to- senior.com) which is a career advice newsletter for programmers that currently brings in $0 MRR, mainly because I'm focusing on content and growing the audience right now and haven't looked into sponsorships or paid subscriptions yet. I'd like to get it to a point where I can run it as a publication with multiple authors.

<comment><USER19> I've always been interested din how people monetize email lists. What's your plan? I see from the site at the moment it's just a sign up box. IS that what you intend on it being forever, or do you eventually plan to have other content like a blog on the site to pull organic traffic?

<comment><USER20> I started a company that publishes email newsletters, we now have about 10, and there are several of us in the company. We make 95% of our money through sponsorship/advertising in the newsletters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My primary frontend blog/website ([https://www.impressivewebs.com/](https://www.impressivewebs.com/)) is mostly passive, I post maybe one article per month, usually not even that much. The blog has been active for about 10 years, so I get lots of SEO traffic, which brings in about $400-500 per month.

I also sell ebooks that are compilations of articles and tips from my newsletter (see below) on Leanpub and Amazon. ([https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle](https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle))

My main newsletter ([https://webtoolsweekly.com/](https://webtoolsweekly.com/)) is now also a regular income stream (about $400-700 per month and growing), but not exactly passive. Takes regular research, writing, etc. But it's fun to do and leads to all sorts of paid tech writing projects.

Finally, my newest newsletter ([https://techproductivity.co/](https://techproductivity.co/)) is not yet making money but that's starting to change as the subscription number has started to rise to a decent number and it's very easy to write that one, maybe 2 hours of work per week.

<comment><USER22> This is awesome stuff. This is exactly the type of content I want to start creating (development blog, newsletters, etc). Do you think it's better to build your own blog site if you were starting now as opposed to using Medium or something?

<comment><USER21> Yes, I think your own site is best. You can do Medium too for promotional reasons but it's good to have your own brand and own your own stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have an outgoing SMS API called Textbelt ([https://textbelt.com/](https://textbelt.com/)). Kinda like Twilio but with flat pricing, smaller SMS packages for hobbyists, no dependencies, and allows 1 free SMS per day (good for crons or alerts).

I also run QuickChart, an API for generating embeddable chart images and QR codes ([https://quickchart.io/](https://quickchart.io/)).

QuickChart is fully open source, Textbelt has an open source version. Not always passive but they don't take much time. Combined they fund my non- mortgage spending.

<comment><USER24> Damn, I've been looking at building an app that requires SMS messaging. I'll give yours a look over before going straight to Twilio.

A bit annoying that I have to give an email address to get a key, just to get pricing info though.

<comment><USER23> There is a pricing link up top that goes straight there, but I'll add a link by the Generate Key CTA to make it clearer. I've also realized that mobile phones don't see the navbar link. Oops! Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I sell a web service that randomly texts your kids to call you. Or reminds you to call your parents.

[https://www.callyourmomanddad.com](https://www.callyourmomanddad.com)

<comment><USER26> And what's your passive income?

<comment><USER25> People buy a subscription to get/give reminders to call their parents. Every first Saturday of the month I schedule 8-12 texts per US time zone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've posted about it before, but since it's being asked again:

It's not "tech" and it's refreshing to build something from scratch that's very tangible. I want to walk away from data science and create something that allows me to open a store selling lifestyle products for men one day. To this end, I launched a men's skincare line about 3 months ago ([https://www.mendskin.co](https://www.mendskin.co)) which isn't "successful" yet, but it's my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. Right now, I spend about 10 hours per week on Ads, customer service, and fulfillment. So, it's kinda passive.

"Beauty products" (for lack of a better term) definitely require heavy capital, and it's becoming hard to do everything by myself. All the individual things that need to be done aren't hard- it's just that there's so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products.

But I enjoy it.

<comment><USER28> Wow! I'd love to read a blog about this and the whole process, any hope for something like that?

<comment><USER27> Definitely... I just didn't think people would be interested :)

I have an interview with a publication coming up. After that publishes, I'll post a link and talk about things in much more detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> $25/month from Patreon for a very niche open source game. Not exactly passive, except that I was doing it already anyway, might as well have a Patreon for it. ([https://spacenerdsinspace.com](https://spacenerdsinspace.com))

<comment><USER30> Wow, how many hours have you put into building this? And you are doing it all for free?

OSS developers are the carries of our civilization.

<comment><USER29> No idea how many hours, but coming up on 7 years in November. There's a long thread on freegamedev.net chronicling more or less the entire process. It starts off really simple and stupid, and then it just keeps going and going. [https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3710](https://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3710) I'm doing it for free because it's essentially my hobby project. It's fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Game DB ([https://gamedb.online/](https://gamedb.online/)) - I take data from Steam APIs and show it in a friendly format. I am currently losing money, but hope to change that soon.

<comment><USER32> It would be great if it could help to find the next game, something like the most popular games or the trending games etc

<comment><USER31> @melenaos

Hi, I think the page you are looking for is here: [https://gamedb.online/apps/trending](https://gamedb.online/apps/trending). It could be more accurate with a higher sample rate, but would cost more.

<comment><USER33> How does this API works? You are charged for API call?

<comment><USER31> @siscia There are currently no limits on calling the API but eventually I will need to add some, 100/minute for example.

<comment><USER33> Why it is getting expensive then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not what you were looking for but real estate (mostly rental) has been and remains my primary passive income.

<comment><USER35> What would you recommend as training/resources to get started in real estate investing? I was thinking of getting a real estate dealer license as a way to get a better idea of how the system works and go from there, but any words of wisdom from someone already doing it successfully would be most welcome.

There's plenty of "real-estate investing" information online but most of it looks scammy as hell.

EDIT: I'm based in NYC, FWIW

<comment><USER36> Kind of OT but I don't understand why everyone with some spare time doesn't get licensed for real estate to circumvent the cartel fees. It costs about $300 + the fees for the classes and 135 hours of time. But it can save you tens of thousands, gets you privileged access to listings, plugs you into the whole real estate ecosystem... it's kind of a no brainer, as far as I can tell

<comment><USER37> Here's a couple of reasons why I don't want to do this:

1\. 135 hours is a LOT of time to invest for even tens of thousands of dollars return. I could build and market a side project or two in that time, which could have potential for significantly higher return.

2\. To recoup that return, I have to take a big risk, using a highly inexperienced agent (me) in a huge dollar transaction where everyone I speak with will have much more experience.

3\. Worst decisioning -- if I am my own agent, I'm not in a good environment for optimal decision making.

There are other reasons outside the scope of your question (some people prefer lower touch investments), but those are a few.

<comment><USER34> Yea, to add one major point to that list, a real estate agent most states require you to house your license with a broker. And you cannot become a broker in most states until you have usually some period of time working for a broker. In my state you need 2 years under a licensed broker before you can apply to be a broker (there are some other things you can do to qualify too but it is still a lot of time). So in the end that means, you get your agent license (pretty easy <$1000 generally), work as an active agent in some fashion for 2 years before you can get your broker license and then, finally, you can eliminate 50% of the transaction fee.

The math just doesn't work out, if you get to the point you are doing that many deals, just hire a broker for your business.

Getting access to the MLS isn't that hard. And finding a good agent/broker to work with is very doable as they want to work with investors since it is a source of recurring income usually for them.

That all said, I am always interested in other peoples approach to minimize transaction fees, but most investors I know in real estate use this approach as it just works and minimizes liability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> [https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level- design/mod...](https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level- design/modularpro-level-design-151460)

Launched this a few months ago. I've made about $14 a month. In terms of return on investment I would have been better picking up pennies in the street, but it was a fun side project. Also, haven't done any real marketing yet... All sales have been organic discoveries through Unity store.

<comment><USER32> Looks great! Good job, I don't have any clue what the unity already provides but the snapping and the flow that you created this house it really great. I was working on a Architecture building software long time ago and it was nothing close to that fun as i see here!

Couldn't you use this plugin, the unity editor, a bunch of ready made objects, walls, doors, floors etc and bundle them into one autonomus executable and sell it?

<comment><USER38> Thanks! Yes there are possibly applications in the architecture space but I'm not very familiar with it so it's not a priority right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am working on Mascot Gaming Logo Maker ([https://mascotlogomaker.com](https://mascotlogomaker.com)). It's a tool that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team.

As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to call passive it sure pays for some video games gg.

<comment><USER40> Great idea. I have a friend that just created an eSports team logo, would've loved to share this with them if it was up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> cannabis online store. my profit share currently nets me around than CAD10k per month.

started about a year ago when a few friends pooled money together to take over a failing online cannabis store, which are not legal in Canada but are sort of outside of law enforcement interest currently so we operate pretty freely at this moment. i've always been keen to do this as i've heard how profitable it is, so when they asked me to manage all the computer stuff in exchange for a small profit share, i agreed. i had minimal experience with SEO, but learned along the way how to tweak little things here and there, like which types of promos worked, etc and managed to do a decent job in the end. it did require some work at the beginning but once most of the things were set in place, my role was reduced down to mostly designing promos and customer service, which i performed simultaneously at my full-time job which i maintained. the customer service largely involves me just engaging with customers on Discord and answering emails.

it didn't start off 100% passive, and it probably still isn't considered passive, but i don't feel that i do much work for it now and i'm still getting paid roughly CAD10k. my next step is i'm in discussion with one of the partners to start up a new shop, this time as an owner.

<comment><USER42> What were some of your pain points in handling the tech?

I've been toying with the idea of starting a cannabis software company to help people like you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Currently i have mainly two different passive income streams. A side project and multifamily property investments.

My side project ([https://www.teamcalapp.com](https://www.teamcalapp.com)) returns around $2500/month and growing. I think the main improvement to be done is doing more marketing, which is unfortunately not so passive.

Im also investing in apartment complexes. Right now i have 4 passive investments. Since I'm only a passive LLC member that income is truly passive. Those investment deliver nice regular cashflow (8-10%) and appreciation once sold. Right now I'm in the process of buying my own property together with friends (50-80units). That will then be a bit more work but still partially passive once all is setup with the property management company.

<comment> wait-a-minute Silly question, but how will your product survive if Google decides to just implement that type of view on the calendar?

<comment><USER44> Google has neglected their calendar product for almost a decade. I wouldn't be too concerned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was selling computer chips, old but still valuable for resale in my local market. Had to stop due to new restrictions on imports, namely elimination of tax floor for imports. Now everything is getting taxed, and that means my margins are gone.

It was fun while it lasted, I had about 10k USD Per year in profits , used it for beer and travel money.

I would do personal deliveries in bakeries, and only bakeries. My alarm would blare reminding me of making a delivery with the message "Chips at the bakery". I would also do shipping with snailmail, but I enjoyed the personal encounters.

<comment><USER46> Lemme guess , Aussie GST changes?

<comment><USER45> Umm, not quite. But let's say just say it's the same OECD bracket.

<comment><USER46> Fair enough! They started charging the 10% on all imports recently, which I know killed a few peoples side import/resales

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Semi passive rental income - one unit. Looking to acquire more and retire in 4-5 years. =) failed at monetizing my side projects in a scalable way

<comment><USER48> Same, although I have four rental units and one AirBnB. I wasted years of my 20s trying to come up with a monetizable SaaS product until I realized that I could earn passive income through "boring" businesses like rental properties.

Now that I've had a taste of passive income through real estate, I've come to despise the tediousness of writing software. I can barely bring myself to do it anymore now that I don't "need" the income from my job to survive. My plan is to keep acquiring rental properties over the next fews and then quit the tech industry for good once I have enough to live comfortably.

<comment><USER49> I am in a similar position and would like to know how you got started with rental units. Are you using a property manager like it was mentioned in a previous comment? Do you recommend AirBnB vs. long-term rentals?

<comment><USER48> I self-manage since my properties are in the same small city that I live in. It's not the much work. I love AirBnB but you have to be careful with it - <USER2> lot of towns and cities have outright banned short-term rentals or at least made it very difficult to operate them legally.

<comment><USER47> A coworker who lives in PA sold his unit after laws were changed that would no longer allow his AirBnB to be profitable. He would have to add a sprinkling system and other things that cost 30k+

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> $250/month this year -- I created _Video Hub App_ as a personal project that became good enough to share with others.

Nearing 1000 purchases since its launch (1.5 years ago), earned about $3500 (just about all went to my favorite cost-effective charity, Against Malaria Foundation). Released version 2 a few weeks back and had about 100 sales this month -- perhaps over the years it will earn a lot more. Was averaging about $250/month this year.

[https://videohubapp.com/](https://videohubapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Followup question (if allowed). If your passive income involves software and you're also employed at a software company, how do you deal with the potential legal problems?

Most contracts don't allow for commercial side projects and the company owns anything you create even outside of working hours. Do people just keep quiet and not tell their employer? How risky is it? I know some people who simply don't bother telling their employer (and may or may not pay taxes, too), but I guess you can only do this up to a certain point.

<comment><USER52> > Most contracts don't allow for commercial side projects and the company owns > anything you create even outside of working hours.

I never understood this. I have friends who were developers at a software company and afraid of doing anything after hours since they felt their company essentially owned them and anything they create, 24/7\. I am not a lawyer, but I reckon unless you're building and/or running your business using company property or company proprietary IP, that section of the contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

<comment><USER51> Seems to depend on the location and the specifics of the situation and the contract, but it's not out of the ordinary: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side- pr...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Not exactly passive, but... I teach online webinars/in person tutorials on the basics of Data Science and ML with Python: [https://www.data4sci.com](https://www.data4sci.com) Started beginning of the year and hoping to make it to $20k

</comment><comment><USER53> Myself and a buddy run:

[https://SQLizer.io](https://SQLizer.io) \- migrate data in CSV, JSON, XML, etc into MySQL databases.

It's doing ok, but growth is static and we've tried a lot of stuff. Feels like we're hitting the total available market for "people who want to convert to SQL".

</comment><comment><USER54> I mean, it's worth asking, but anyone with a good niche would be smart to not post it publicly unless the benefits of publicity outweigh the risk of competition.

<comment><USER55> Eh! Based on what I know of people, the odds of _any_ competition are slim. The odds of any _effective_ competition are slim to none.

Most people are basically lazy and will talk a good game, but not actually do anything.

<comment><USER56> Sure. But most good passive income ideas are good because of how easy they are, and because they're the perfect size for a small market. Usually even one more competitor entering the market is enough to significantly disrupt them. If you are sitting on one of those, why would you post about it in an HN thread that will be archived and trawled by capable competitors specifically looking for ideas? If it only takes one competitor to disrupt your golden goose, why would you post about it here?

While there are many interesting ideas in this thread, I expect there are a fair amount of people lurking with much more profitable and higher leverage products. So maybe just take the thread with a grain of salt and don't think of it representative of a ceiling on what's possible to build in 2019.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> My wife and I make some money with a couple of cheap renting units. To make the administration work easier I started to write an application last year ([https://adpro.sun.com.py/en](https://adpro.sun.com.py/en)). At first it was very Paraguay-specific so currently I'm working on the last part of internationalization which is the contract and invoice editor. From the start I integrated the ability to also administer renting units for others.

It is very useful to us but I'm not sure about product/market fit. I'm eager to learn from others who rent out what they use for administration and such a system makes sense to them. If I really go after the idea I'll also need a co- founder, please contact me if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER58> With 2 friends, we have built a "pokemon-go" like platform, called [https://geogaming.io](https://geogaming.io), to create fully customisable scavenger hunts.

We sell it mainly in B2B to companies who sell team building events and that need a touch of digital... We have other customer segments coming (zoos, theme parks, tourism offices...)

We also use the platform for individuals,like for birthdays ([http://birthdays.geogaming.io](http://birthdays.geogaming.io)) or hens/bucks parties etc.

This platform brings us ~15k a month but it's growing very very fast.

Our architecture is based on AWS lambdas so our infrastructure costs are very limited and the product is highly scalable (games have been played with thousands of players)...

We are based in Sydney.

</comment><comment><USER59> I have a website that attracts about 100 unique visitors a day and it brings me <$100/mo via Amazon Affiliate. Getting bigger than that requires a lot more traffic, which requires doing things like SEO research and marketing work which I'm generally too lazy to learn how to do.

<comment><USER60> For 3000 visitors/month Amazon pays $100? That seems quite a waste.

<comment><USER59> Not a waste. Last month I got 2800 uniques, 5300 views, and made about $50. The thing is, The blog is there anyway. It's truly passive income.

<comment><USER60> Well, I meant waste on Amazon side. But I guess all that money is paid by the consumer of those products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Roughly $1,500 a month or so with a web hosting affiliate site - [https://www.whatsthehost.com/](https://www.whatsthehost.com/)

There's decent money to be made but a ton of competition, so for newbies I'd recommend easier niches to start!

<comment><USER62> Your site breaks the use of my scroll wheel.

Please don't try to implement custom scrolling methods in JavaScript. It never works properly on all platforms and just breaks things. It's also highly infuriating.

EDIT: Here's some good rants on not messing with scrolling: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883433](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13883433)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Not sure how to properly put an adjective to it, but I'm doing some side money on crypto trading.

I started with a rather small amount of money (~0.15 btc) that grew to around ~0.21 in two months before the shitcoin I was playing with went literally to shit (They are not called shitcoins for nothing) and was left with around ~0.12.

I'm testing the waters now with a more stable shitcoin.

FWIW mine is (seems to be, at least) a very stable brute force approach. That I'll make no comments about ;)

P.S.: I obviously have data to back up my claims - the transactions log of my crypto exchange account - but as well the "method" I'm employing can be inferred from there, as it's rather obvious.

</comment><comment><USER32> Asked by your local Tax office.

<comment><USER64> Are you concerned about something specifically, or is this just another Reddit-like comment to be ignored, and that shouldn't have been made in the first place?

<comment><USER32> Are you trying to teach me manners?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> I run a business automation services site ([https://www.mergeyourdata.com/](https://www.mergeyourdata.com/)). Basically I build an automation for small businesses and schedule them to run. Took years of learning the ins and outs of the biggest pain point areas for businesses and the technical solutions that would solve those. The learning all pretty much took place at my regular day job and I was just able to expand on those lessons.

<comment><USER66> Very interesting. If you wouldn't mind sharing some more details: Are you receiving fairly steady order flow now? Where do most of your customers come from?

Thanks!

<comment><USER65> Orders come and go inconsistently since almost all of them come from referrals and/or organic site traffic. This does result in a wide range of requests which keeps things interesting.

Basically all of the work is in the beginning then it's just subscription based for the automation refreshes (or an agreed upon amount if services are continuously running) and any minor updates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I do microlending through Lending Club, own a Pawn shop (which is managed day- to-day by someone else), and own a Great Clips (Sounds silly, but, again, managed by someone else).

<comment><USER68> I've become increasingly curious about things like owning a ____ franchise (mostly from watching this fantastic location by my house go through a revolving door of poorly-run franchises and wondering "I bet you could make some money if you just ran the place right"). So this doesn't sound silly to me in the slightest. But I am curious if you would indulge my curiosity, how'd you come to decision to pursue such investments and what's it been like to own it?

<comment><USER67> I just know that I needed to diversify what I had -- and, it was between buying a Great Clips franchise or opening up a pizza joint.

<comment><USER69> My conversation about owning a similar "utility" store with SO came to grinding halt at "We'll talk once you find someone who's actually done this".

Well, now I do! Thank you !

Would you please share some details; how you started, what it took time and money wise, what to avoid, what really matters.

It may seem silly to you but I really need this. I'm willing to communicate offline/in-person/chat/phone whatever works for you. You will not believe how hard it is to find someone who's done what you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I invest in large industrial real estate ($2-10M) with established tenants (often publicly traded companies) in the Midwest with a group of other investors. It's kind of like Fundrise [0], but with a handful of people in a 2-3 deals a year. With ~180K invested, I'm around $1750/month in positive cash flow.

0\. [https://fundrise.com](https://fundrise.com)

<comment><USER71> Now this is really interesting to me. Just peeking at their website the returns data only goes back about 5 years. Aren't you concerned about losing that money if/when a recession occurs and big-business investment dries up?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I run an independent, localized wedding registry platform. Couples pay a one- time activation fee. A friend and I built the site some years ago and never really changed anything. All we have to do is to reply to 1-2 support emails per month and keep Google ads running. On average it generates a profit of about 1,5k per month.

</comment><comment><USER73> Honestly it's not sexy but [https://incomedata.org](https://incomedata.org) and [https://nsndb.com](https://nsndb.com). Simple data backed sites. They end up being pretty fun to make and useful for specific people.

<comment><USER74> This is really fun. I just spent ten minutes looking through zip codes I've lived in and the "interesting" ones you linked.

Do you make money from it? I don't see any ads or information on payment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> A diversified portfolio of index funds. This year return so far is ~15% (which in absolute amounts is more than my after-tax salary, even after accounting for long term capital gains), and my annualized return since when I started investing (~a decade ago) is ~10%.

<comment><USER76> Which index funds do you like? I've been going back and forth between considering one or more index funds or just getting a target date fund and leaving it alone altogether.

<comment><USER75> I basically replicate a target date fund manually, using the standard Vanguard funds like VTI, VXUS, BND, ...

That way, I can tune allocations if needed and I can take advantage of tax loss harvesting opportunities, so I get some extra benefits.

<comment><USER77> And target dates usually have a higher expense ratio than funds like VTI. So you keep more of your investment income by doing it manually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I sella boutique Jekyll theme for software folks and academics which makes about $400/month. The base version is free, maybe somebody here likes it too: [https://hydejack.com/](https://hydejack.com/)

<comment><USER79> I used your theme for a blog I ran for a few months last year:

[https://blog.spaceduck.io/](https://blog.spaceduck.io/)

Thanks for creating it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I built MerciCookie ([https://www.mercicookie.com/](https://www.mercicookie.com/)) an API to send cookies to customers, partners... I'm in France but we can send cookies in all Europe, US...

<comment><USER26> As per the title, what's your passive income?

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Not entirely passive, but I'm a Nominet registrar and buy/sell domains as my side gig. For the most part, this involves taking preorders for domains which have expired and are about to drop, then trying to catch them when they do. I also hold my own domain portfolio which currently consists of just over 200 domains. I generally have an idea for how to develop most of these, but I'm mostly just holding them until I get time to work on them.

Depending on what's dropping, my earnings from the domain side can vary drastically. It usually covers its own costs, and my best month so far (I only started in April this year) earned me around £1000

<comment><USER82> Mind u share how do u register the domains ? API ? Manual ?

<comment><USER81> A combination. For any preordered domains, I poll the domain until it drops and automatically register it using the API. Each day I'll review upcoming drops for the next day for anything I want to chase myself, and also review the drops from the previous day for any that weren't worth chasing but are worth manual registration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm making around $1,500/month of passive income. Here is what it worked for me: I created a web tool for stock technical analysis but instead trying to acquire clients by myself, I contacted some players with a solid distribution channel who lacks some tools to sell. So I offered them white label to sell inside their website, splitting the profits by 50/50\. No cost for me to acquire users, sales, marketing or even support. I believe it can work with any kind of product. Pretty much the same as selling your app in a marketplace, but I would say it is easier to sell having a brand on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER84> What are we calling "passive" these days? Is there a notion about the amount of (ongoing) sweat equity/maintnence to payout we all have in mind? The original notion seems unlikely ==> finish initial work/build and then just sit back and collect checks. Seems like few of the projects posted so far, if any, meet that high bar. Realistically there is almost always ongoing maintenance, and if it comes from a passion, probably also constant tinkering and improvement. I've definitely got one of those -- I can't let it sit long enough to ever call it fully passive :)

<comment><USER85> Usually it just means recurring revenue in general with relatively little work involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> Have some small sites that have generated a few hundred each month from ads that continue to do well. I don't have to do anything with them. But I have started to double-down on some of these successes by offering some paid SAAS options around them. After an initial push, I hope they will mainly be passive, as well. The free sites serve as the lead generation. So I am OK with them growing organically that way. It's slow, but easy. If one shows more promise or potential than others, perhaps I will put in more feature development or marketing efforts there.

</comment><comment><USER87> We've built Bugfender 5 years ago as an internal tool at Mobile Jazz for solving our own need of iOS and Android debugging and remote logging. After the first 2 years or struggling we've now just crossed MRR $23k USD and the business continues to grow healthy with small and big customers.

[https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side- projec...](https://bugfender.com/blog/bugfender-growth-from-side-project-to-a- sustainable-20k-mrr-business/)

</comment><comment><USER88> I made a twitter bot (@schumannbot) that posts the Schumann Resonance graphs from [http://sosrff.tsu.ru/new/shm.jpg](http://sosrff.tsu.ru/new/shm.jpg) It gained close to 10k followers within a year.

I started selling related T-Shirts, and make ~$60 a month. Nothing big, but it's beer money. I plan on expanding the related website and even starting a YouTube channel, but it's not exactly something I planned on monetizing.

</comment><comment><USER89> Running the same passive project as 2017 - a day trading robot focused on Canadian (TSX) market conditions. It's been wildly successful closing positions on a nightly basis and exploiting market patterns that work at a scale that I care about. I spend almost zero maintenance time per month, less than 10 minutes per day interacting with it.

It's also proved an excellent toy for me to constantly retool and play with new languages, frameworks, and databases. Couldn't be happier.

<comment><USER90> And that works?

I had assumed the evil Goldmans of the world had thrown enough cloud power at everything to find ever free penny already

<comment><USER89> Absolutely - rather predictably, but only within the segment I use. If you're an HFT trader you can't win. But if you have patterns you've noticed, can act on and encode... well quite frankly it's incredibly consistent on baskets of stocks (not daily), but very much based on a variety of characteristics.

Over the last year I've met two to three traders (as in big bank) who literally do this for weeks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> Is anyone still making ad revenue?

<comment><USER92> I used to run an online forum, showing google adverts. I also had a couple of them dotted around the most popular pages on my personal website.

I set them up years ago and averaged about £80/month. I was just thinking a couple of months ago that I'd not seen any "You've got payment" emails. So I went to check on my account, and despite serving a ton more traffic these days advert revenue just dropped through the floor.

I guess it is adblockers which killed the income for me. Anyway it was nice while it lasted, and I figured I'd just remove the adverts to increase page load-times.

I suspect if you have more niche content, or more tightly integrated adverts than Google Adwords you could probably still do OK. But adblockers really did rise from nowhere to become extremely common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> While in college I started a price comparison site for textbooks ([https://www.affordabook.com](https://www.affordabook.com)) that generates affiliate income.

Back in the day it generated great income and warranted full time work, but these days it still generates some solid passive income. A lot of the traffic is from SEO, but we still have a small social presence and a healthy amount of repeat visitors.

</comment><comment><USER94> Same as last year. High-dividend stocks and ETFs. Everything else (including my rental property) is a lot less "passive" than most people think.

<comment><USER95> My personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they are more expensive than non-dividend stocks.

Further to this, I have strong preference for firms which re-invest their cash flow resulting in capital gains which is much more tax efficient than a dividend.

<comment><USER96> > My personal opinion is that retail investors love dividend stocks and they > are more expensive than non-dividend stocks.

This is absolutely not true, there's plenty of stocks around here with low P/E ratio and dividends. You just have to look outside of tech to find them.

<comment><USER60> Examples?

<comment><USER97> STWD

<comment><USER98> it's REIT, with all the tax etc implications

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> I've been running [https://kriptode.com](https://kriptode.com) a bunch of services that run with Bitcoin on Lightning.

Most popular is [http://sats4likes.com](http://sats4likes.com) where you can earn/pay Bitcoin for twitter likes.

It's not exactly passive or profitable but I learned a lot.

</comment><comment><USER100> I released the initial version of [https://datamaps.world](https://datamaps.world) at the beginning of September. So far I earned around 200$ from subscriptions and 100$ from selling the license to my datamaps chart library.

I have a full-time job and I'm working on this project only in my spare time.

</comment><comment><USER101> Kernl ([https://kernl.us](https://kernl.us)) - WordPress Plugin/Theme Updates, Git Deployment, Analytics, Load Testing, etc.

Currently around $1200/month with fairly linear growth. It's a fun project to work on and I get to make money on the side for doing it.

<comment><USER102> This seems to be more active than passive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> \--Tried selling coffee online - failed- margins too low -CCA too high \--Real estate multifamily (8units) - once deferred maintenance is taken care of, will be profitable \--Looking for a pain point in my companies product marketing department that I can solve and productize

</comment><comment><USER104> I sell/invest in Pokemon/Magic the Gathering/Yugioh Cards. It's some work to keep up to date with prices, managing the online store / in person matters. But it's a fun hobby and I've made lifetime friends as well.

<comment><USER105> The market for these is hot but I would generally not call it passive. Timing is critical on many cards and offloading them can be nontrivial. I do this lightly as well, mostly for fun

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> I wrote a paid Chrome extension that tests websites for SEO, speed and security best practices:

[https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)

It currently has 30K active users of the free version and 100s of paid users.

<comment><USER107> What kind of breakdown do you see between monthly and yearly subscriptions?

<comment><USER106> About 30% for yearly and 70% for monthly. I'm still experimenting with the pricing plans. I only started the monthly plan recently. I had a quarterly plan in its place before which don't seem that common with other SaaS products.

I found quarterly appealing in that it probably reduces billing related support requests, the higher price tends to attract customer that are less demanding in terms of product support, and customers aren't pressured to evaluate if they want to continue their subscription so often.

<comment><USER107> Very interesting. It some kind of sense to me that the noisiest customers are those paying less, even if they're only making up something like 20% of actual MRR.

Are a lot of the support requests related to yearly billing or do you mean a quarterly option would theoretically preempt those kinds of requests?

Really great extension, site and all-around product, by the way.

<comment><USER106> > It some kind of sense to me that the noisiest customers are those paying > less, even if they're only making up something like 20% of actual MRR.

Yep. Another factor is Checkbot covers a big range of website problems where the fixes for each vary a lot (where it's not possible to determine the source via web crawling) so noisy customers can have complex requests.

For example, a bad redirect could be coming from Apache, Nginx, WordPress or cPanel settings. I get a lot of messages where someone is convinced Checkbot is wrong when it's actually correct too (e.g. people convinced their HTML is valid when it's not) which can generate bad reviews if you're not careful.

> Are a lot of the support requests related to yearly billing or do you mean a > quarterly option would theoretically preempt those kinds of requests?

I mean each payment can prompt a support request so the more spread out the payments the less support requests. They're not super common, but they build up the more customers you get and I feel a sense of urgency to handle requests to do with payments.

I think the longer billing periods let people relax more with evaluating the product too e.g. you're not thinking "I need to use this a lot right now because I've only got 30 days to decide if I use it enough to keep paying or not".

> Really great extension, site and all-around product, by the way.

Thanks, appreciated. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> Github sponsorship 750$ per month

<comment><USER109> Whoa, that's great! What OSS projects do you work on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> [https://extracttable.com](https://extracttable.com) \- started on Aug 26 ($1400 till date), injecting the revenue back in to it to release more services.

</comment><comment><USER111> I'd consider my work as an Amazon 3P Seller as semi-passive.

It's been my "side hustle" for 2+ years now, with 2019 at $40K in YTD earnings. (Inclusive of all costs except my own labor, which I do not track)

AMA?

<comment><USER112> Growing, stable or declining?

<comment><USER111> Stable or slightly declining, but that is a personal choice I made as I focused on my career.

Unlike many, I don't update or A/B test anything after a product launch, so once a product is out launched, it's done from my perspective.

With some more effort, I could be growing, either by launching new products (last product launch was in February) or by starting up my ad campaigns again (I cancelled most of them in April to improve profitability at the cost of slower turnover).

I was let go about two weeks ago, if I can't find anything I love working on, I'll take this full time and (hopefully) go back to growing.

<comment><USER113> Are you selling a product you found and posted to Amazon, or did you create/assemble an FBA pack?

My partner and I have two related product assemblages that we think are under- represented on Amazon, but for which we think we've identified a reasonable demand.. and for which content/instruction/information are not consolidated/accessible.

<comment><USER111> More or less than former. Either I find something interesting, or I have someone reach out to either of my buying agents. We go back and forth a little if any packaging / product customizations are needed and go from there.

I do offer two "FBA packs" for my own private labelled products but will not be restocking them when they sell out because of packaging challenges.

One big issue is discoverability. You will always be outranked by the sole product(s) as that's what people will search for. Customer acquisition costs are the major piece that many new sellers miss, and can easily sink an otherwise great listing.

That said, the great thing about selling on Amazon is the low barrier to entry. I would recommend you give it a shot and see if it works. Better yet, see if you can private label the product and have complete control over the packaging. (assuming branding is not an asset)

Seriously, send in 5-15 units and see what happens.

<comment><USER114> I don't know much about this. Could you recommend a single online resource where one could learn the very basics?

<comment><USER111> [https://services.amazon.com/tutorials-and- training.html](https://services.amazon.com/tutorials-and-training.html)

But really, just try it and Google every question you have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> I wrote a book several years ago and in the last year or so sales have exceeded the advance, so I get that income. It is no more than about $100 a year (if that) but it is something.

</comment><comment><USER116> Social Security + about $100 a year from an oil royalty i inherited

</comment><comment><USER117> Retirement income + money market investment income. I've left the market, because I'm a pessimistic investor. I've sold my house and it too is in cash investments.

</comment><comment><USER118> $80/month. Regular Expression Pocket Reference for O'Reilly. 1st edition in 2003, 2nd edition in 2006.

$1k/month Medium back catalog. I moved everything I've ever written behind Medium's paywall and took out any CTAs so that I'd qualify for distribution inside their algorithm.

</comment><comment><USER119> Have a SaaS product I built a few years back. Still churning and profitable but for a niche audience.

Wanting to pick up another passive income stream.

</comment><comment><USER120> Stock photography

<comment><USER121> How did you get started with this? I remember reading somewhere that stock photography is a nickel-and-diming business given that almost anyone can produce a half decent picture with modern cameras.

<comment><USER120> By no means am I making large amounts of money. I get about $1 per day from photos on Adobe Stock. I have a portfolio of about 300-400 images taken over the past 8 years. Every so often I'll upload some new shots.

About 1-2 times a year I'll get a large buy (eg. $75+) from 500px, but I don't upload there very often since they broke their Lightroom plugin.

<comment><USER122> Why did you choose Adobe Stock?

Are you uploading to any other stock agency?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> I can offer a way to generate passive income. I have a software consultancy (among our clients are Fiverr, Intel and HP software) and I pay about 2000$ per month as finders fees for referring software consulting leads.

What you need to do is to ask your software developer friends if their company is looking to hire a contractor.

When I sign the contract I pay a nice monthly finder's fee.

Contact me for more details if it sounds interesting to you. My contact details in my profile..

</comment><comment><USER124> I've released two SQL courses on DataCamp, which bring in a nice sum every quarter.

</comment><comment><USER125> I sell about 2-4 books a month.

<comment><USER126> I bought your book a while ago, it's not bad.

<comment><USER125> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> I post photos to pixabay.com and get Paypal donations

<comment><USER113> Of what.. and does it amount to much in $?

Curious, because I've looked on pixabay for some things that were wildly under-represented, and I had half a thought to fill those gaps, mostly for fun and I'm... close to it.

<comment><USER127> Just the same landscape/architecture photography I do anyway. It's more than I made from Shutterstock. Probaly $100/year? So it's definitely on the level of "beer money."

[https://pixabay.com/users/derwiki-562673/](https://pixabay.com/users/derwiki-562673/)

<comment><USER122> Why have you chosen to upload photos to an "agency" that pays via donations? This doesn't seem like a guaranteed income for each photo that is licensed - particularly with the generous licence that pixabay places on each photo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER128> I built a portfolio management tool for cryptocurrency investors. I was able to get to $2k MRR in the first month with a MVP without quitting my job. Here's how i did it:

[https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/zero-to-two-thousand-mrr-in- one-...](https://www.hodlbot.io/blog/zero-to-two-thousand-mrr-in-one-month)

</comment><comment><USER129> 0

</comment><comment><USER130> Start amazon affiliate site</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to familiarize yourself with a new codebase? - <AUTHOR> Sometimes a codebase has sparse documentation, or the maintainers are too busy to answer questions regularly. This is especially true for open-source projects.
When looking over a large codebase with poor documentation, what tools and tricks have you learned to understand it faster/more easily?
Examples can be language, platform or IDE-specific, e.g. "projects on github have a handy search in project feature!" <comment><USER3> \- Never aimlessly browse through large codebase. Pick a change you want to introduce, maybe a string change, a small bugfix, low hanging feature etc. Goal gives you the motivation to keep digging through things and in that process you make a good mental model of the codebase.

\- Sprinkle logging statements all over the place and tail logs to figure out the execution flow.

\- Look at the past merge requests. They typically have descriptions. Go through the ones where you have some context about the goal of MR.

</comment><comment><USER4> For C# codebases that have no documentation I use a script that has evolved over the years that generates a private documentation collection for myself.

It scans for static methods and data access classes using reflection and dumps their signature/return & parameter information into a documentation template. That way I can see what exits to leverage when adding new features - <USER2> spent way too much time over the years listening to 'why didn't you leverage _this_?' in code reviews.

I'm currently working on a new one that scans for stored procs in databases to see what's living in the dark down there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think understanding a code base should be an interactive process, because software's static form, i.e. its source code is different from its dynamic form when it's loaded into memory and runs. And it's really the later we want to understand. So the key tool should be a debugger, windbg , gdb. Other than that, grep, find, opengrok are good tools.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're not using an IDE or a text editor with "go to definition" feature you really should be. Might sound obvious but it will change your life if you're not already using this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out the unit tests around the parts that are interesting and dig into the codebase from there understanding how things are used from the tests.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm using atom.io plus grep plus find. Also found reading code directly from github quite comfortable.</comment>


Nginx.conf 2014 - <AUTHOR> http://nginx.com/nginxconf

<comment><USER2> I maintain a list of upcoming developer conferences in this GitHub repo:

[https://github.com/MurtzaM/Developer- Conferences](https://github.com/MurtzaM/Developer-Conferences)

I currently track conference name, website, hashtag, and city. I am also considering adding a list of sponsors for each conference.

What other data would be useful or interesting?</comment>


Facebook's top execs 'make tobacco executives look like Mr. Rogers' - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/11/16/18098008/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-new-york-times-kara-swisher-scott-galloway-pivot-podcast <comment><USER2> Clickbait. I think the actual story was already posted a few days back.

I'm pretty sure tabbaco has killed a few more people than Facebook, so this is a ridiculous comparison.

Facebook does a lot for which it should be criticized, but it feels like we're just beating on a dead horse.

It's also hilarious that someone would be so critical of Facebook all while including their share button in the same article. Apparently they're evil, but not evil enough to stop using their service. I think that says a lot about the author.

<comment><USER3> > I'm pretty sure tabbaco has killed a few more people than Facebook, so this > is a ridiculous comparison.

There are worse outcomes than death.

<comment><USER4> Like having a shadow profile on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you f-ing kidding me? Until 90%+ of FB users start dropping dead because of lung cancer then that statement is complete garbage.

EDIT: a lot of people are taking my statement as meaning not to criticize Facebook. That is not it at all! It just means not to lose perspective. At least I still consider tobacco to be far worse, directly causing ~7M deaths annually with no visible benefit.

EDIT 2: Genuine question: has anyone studied the rise of fascism post-FB vs. pre-FB? It's not like dictatorships and far-right governments didn't get elected pre-FB. Obviously I am one of those who doubt FB's direct responsibility vs. it being simply a media narrative against a business threat.

[1] [http://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/tobacco](http://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/tobacco)

<comment><USER6> I see what you're saying, but it's also true that cigarettes didn't fundamentally weaken the structure of democratic societies. The long-term consequences of that (heck, even short-term) could be much more severe.

<comment><USER7> This is one thing I don't get about this narrative. At this point how do we know how permanent what you're talking about is? And how much is due to Facebook vs. just generally the unexpected terrible combination of it becoming very easy to distribute information + the fact that humans seek out information that tells them what they want to believe.

I'm not saying we shouldn't criticize Facebook, or that they shouldn't be the ones to solve this problem. But I think it's important to frame it as a problem to be solved instead of growing extremely cynical and saying Facebook is pure evil.

<comment><USER8> In the case of cigarettes, the companies had the answer to these kinds of questions for decades and used it specifically to mislead the direction of public discovery. In their case, they had to risk their own studies in almost all cases instead of just monitoring their own distribution system.

When Facebook says they don't know something there are a few possibilities, the least likely is that they don't know and don't have a reason not to find out.

I do agree with you that it is not up to them to fix. They should be limited to whatever extent possible in what research they can do on their own discretion to prevent them from staying ahead of public information and misleading research.

<comment><USER7> No, I wasn't clear enough. We should be pressuring Facebook to fix this societal problem. They -are- disseminating a ton of bad information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Oh, my God. Using an Android phone is like paying for dinner with a Discover card. It's like saying, "Don't have sex with me." It's the ultimate prophylactic that says "I should be ..."

Oh, Scott. Once again.

"I should be screened out of the gene pool." If you use an Android phone or have a Discover card, your family tree should come to an end."

Stopped reading after this.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish other companies could get the same kind of scrutiny as Facebook. For some reason while most scandals are pushed down and quickly forgotten, Facebook is being dragged around for all its worth. Maybe they weren't planting enough stories.

<comment><USER11> Which companies do you refer?

I am fine with other companies facing public backlash for their actions just like Facebook is now if they are doing things as shady as Facebook.

<comment><USER12> Google with YouTube and Twitter? Even though most congressional hearings are a farce, Google didn't even show up to speak with congress. The amount of racist, nazi propaganda I'm exposed to on Twitter every day far outnumbers what I've ever seen on Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think this makes light of the fact that lung cancer is one of the leading causes of death in the world. Every year millions of people die. Millions. And this is just one way cigarettes have negative impact. I've heard doctors say that we would need far fewer hospitals in the U.S if it wasn't for all the negative effects of smoking.

<comment><USER13> I would note that they're not comparing the effects of the two businesses, but rather the PR decisions made under fire.

Not that I necessarily agree that the comparison is completely apt, but it's certainly a much closer one.

<comment><USER7> The frustrating thing is that tobacco execs are still around. And that there is no hedging or context given so it's pretty easy to come away with the impression that it's something more broad than just the PR tactics. In fact I think that's pretty open to interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The FB media onslaught is getting a bit overdone at this point. They aren't the worst company in the world. They probably have figured out that connecting everyone doesn't necessarily make the world a better place immediately but I applaud the effort and I think long term it will make a difference. So they make money selling ads which they display by algorithmically sifting through metadata. Around here I know it's not a popular practice but for the vast majority of FB's 1.5B DAUs I think it matters a lot less than the media would like it to. All ads are annoying but I personally prefer the targeted ads of today to the random banners ads of the late 90s early 2000s. I know they aren't a perfect company but who is? I think the media just smells easy traffic here.

<comment><USER12> HN has always been super negative towards FB and their products (with perhaps the exception of Whatsapp) because HN has never been FB's target market. It's a lot easier to criticize a product that's never provided any utility to you personally. You don't really hear about the spread of racist, divisive, Russian sponsored content on YouTube or Twitter nearly as much here, and when you do you also don't get comments sections filled with moral grandstanding on how if you work at FB you're human garbage that should burn in hell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see some parallels with "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Facebook doesn't share awful hate speech, people share awful hate speech. Half of us will be like "not enough, take away Facebook" and the other half will be like "some people suck, but I should have Facebook".

I think the answer is to tag content using ML and then allow users to apply filters. It could be a "protect me" button in settings. I'm assuming most hate speech is in image and video format with text in the image but Facebook can probably figure that out with less than $1B worth of dev hours. It's easy to delay sharing into "protect me" enabled news feeds until after processing and tagging.

<comment><USER10> Very few people are against hate speech, most people are only against hate speech that targets groups they feel alligned with. As a result you would see many people turn the switch on only to go and write a diatrabe against a group that they feel is a fair target.

<comment><USER15> I certainly don't want hateful media in my news feed. In my proposed solution nothing stops you from posting hate speech but it's one button to filter all hate speech on the receiving end. I would suspect that hate speech gets fantastic engagement and wider audience than required.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Patrick Gaspard, the president of the Open Society Foundation, just saying, "The notion that your company at your direction actively engaged in the same behavior to try to discredit people exercising their First Amendment rights to protest Facebook's role in disseminating vile propaganda is frankly astonishing to me. It's disappointing to see how you have failed to monitor hate and misinformation on Facebook's platform to now learning that you are active in promoting this distortion is beyond the pale."

</comment><comment><USER17> Another "facebook is the devil" propaganda hit piece. This is getting to be so freaking exhausting and so obvious.

You know what's becoming worse than facebook and their execs? The news industry and their editors.

</comment><comment><USER18> perhaps this is an incendiary comment, but i really do wonder what all of the HN facebook employees are telling themselves to deal with the cognitive dissonance caused by this latest scandal wherein facebook paid for smear campaigns to distract from their own dirty laundry.

every time i have encountered these people on HN, they've portrayed a cultlike naivety regarding their organization's actions. they always allude to the outside world "not knowing the whole story" or something similar. in other words, they've made excuses.

but i really do want to see what the excuses are this time. i imagine they will be particularly entertaining.

more seriously, it's time for facebook to wrap it up. we've known for years that they were abusing the public trust. while i doubt we will see any leadership from congress regarding breaking up the company or degrading their capabilities to hurt the public interest, the intense amount of flak that FB has been getting lately is immensely promising. plenty of people are leaving FB.

while it is true that many of these people are leaving for instagram, it's a critically different product. i think instagram has a much more limited ability to negatively impact the public good via propaganda etc mostly because it isn't as participatory as facebook.

<comment><USER19> I wondered about this too. I'm someone who won't work in any adtech at all for ethical reasons.

I asked my friend who works at FB, and he said, "I don't know about all that. I just want to work on cool tech."

I think that's how most humans feel about their role in orgs like Facebook, so I don't judge him at all.

<comment><USER16> "I was just following orders"...</comment></comment></comment>


How to scale your rails app, by Scribd (a YC startup) - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/49575/Scaling-Rails-Presentation <comment><USER2> Presentation is nice, but I would like to suggest a feature for you guys. Instead of that terrible flashy frame, why don't you by default show documents in HTML? Browser handles scrolling, selecting and picking font size much better.

If I want to print or store PDF, I see "download as PDF" button already.

Also, what's with the popups? I have not seen them because my browser blocked them, but there appears to be some critical functionality that relies on popups being allowed.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice. It definitely looks like the scribd guys have a clue.

Scribd is still still running on just one web server. That means they're not at the stage yet where they can just throw machines in to handle growth. That's a pretty significant step. Their one web server just happens to be so damn beefy that it can handle a lot of traffic. It will max out at some point though.

<comment><USER4> _That means they're not at the stage yet where they can just throw machines in to handle growth._

Hmm, why do you say that? They've already got the DB off on other machines, and it sounds very much like they are doing all the things you do to a rails site so that you can scale it by plugging in more app servers. I.e. they already put everything shared into the DB or memcached.

<comment><USER3> Most people discover fun problems when they split their web servers, no matter how prepared they thought they were. I'm sure they'll handle it well, but it's a significant step.

<comment><USER5> It isn't really a significant step. You just plug in another web server and make sure the load balancer and DNS settings are right.

<comment><USER3> Yes in theory you're correct. In practice things are usually dirtier.

What if they don't have a load balancer? What if they want redundant load blancers? What if they use round-robin DNS and then need a failover procedure? What if round-robin DNS isn't balanced enough for them? What if logs files need to be merged? What if the web servers aren't 100% identical? Data needs to be sync'd? Load distributed more intelligently? Cron jobs modified? etc, etc.

Perhaps they kept things unusually clean and simple, but most sites require a little finagling when they go to multiple web servers. I'm not saying it's _difficult_ , but I do think it's wise to expect a few bumps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Hm... I don't understand why did they opt to go with TWO(!) SQL servers so early. If your DB is designed well and your queries are written well, you should max out on HTTP side first.

Even on super-fast ASP.NET, we started with two HTTP servers plus only one single SQL server behind and it worked very well...

<comment><USER6> Scribd is pretty write-heavy - between traffic analytics, hit counts, votes, comments, favorites, and submissions, they're looking at several DB writes per page view. Good indexing and DB design can make your reads really fast, but your writes are still limited by the speed at which the disk rotates. And if you have a lot of indexes to support fast queries, they'll slow down your writes by some (fairly small) percentage.

You're right though - most of the sites I've been involved with have been heavier on the webserver than the DB. It depends on the application...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I would like to know more about the overall architecture especially with their backend written in C# rather than Ruby.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> this talk was given at the silicon valley rails meetup a couple days ago.

</comment><comment><USER8> how did they just launch and already get 1 million hits a month?

<comment><USER6> They're one of the most popular sites on Digg - not the site itself, but individual pieces of _content_ hosted on the site. It's the YouTube effect - if you build a site that's viral, you grow exponentially, but if you build a site that _hosts_ viral content, your growth _rate_ is exponential.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pipe, library to run ifttt-like alerts locally - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sathish316/pIpe/blob/master/README.md#pipe

<comment><USER2> Cool! If I remember, you're the same guy who did <http://apify.heroku.com/resources>, yes? Does this have a lot of shared code with scrapify?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is completely independent. It'll work for any json service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Neat project. If I could make a recommendation, I would suggest dropping the capital I. Its not used consistently; git repo versus title of this post versus command name.

<comment><AUTHOR> I looks like pipe character in github. But i had to drop it here for readability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks good but it shares its name with a popular pseudo-tool; may I suggest WTTT (when this then that)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you referring to Unix Pipe, which inspired Yahoo Pipes, which inspired ifttt and Zapire? ([http://nickoneill.com/the-forgotten-yahoo-project-that- inspi...](http://nickoneill.com/the-forgotten-yahoo-project-that-inspired-two- recently-funded-startups/))

<comment><USER5> There's also a Facebook file-sharing app called Pipe. I guess this project could use a less-overloaded name!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Damn, I was talking to a friend about writing something like this just yesterday!

Good job!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd use this! Kudos for implementing it. I look forward to seeing where this goes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks nice - been thinking of something like this for a very lightweight ESB.

</comment><comment><USER9> Any plans on making this a web service?</comment>


Github ClassicMap, Google Map tile rendering for iOS6 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/ClassicMap

<comment><USER2> This seems pretty good from a first glance; provides a "Standard" or "Classic" option to select between Apple's and Google's Maps. If you just care about tiles (rather than e.g. transit directions) then this should be a good stop- gap until Google releases their own version. It's a nicer experience than the mobile Google Maps site.

Direct link to App Store: <http://itunes.apple.com/app/classicmap/id566173771>

<comment><USER3> Neat for a demo/concept, but what's the purpose?

The web version of Google maps is already more powerful. No directions, layers, no streetview, no auto-matching, no reviews etc. Loads slower. How is this nicer than the web version by google (other than the obvious, ie lack of a URL field)

If you haven't in a while, look at the latest google web version they've made some changes, e.g. look up Brooklyn Bridge, NY.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER2> I guess it's personal preference but I find the Google Maps web app to just feel clunky and slow in scrolling around and that bothers me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's in the Apple App Store ( <http://itunes.apple.com/app/classicmap/id566173771?mt=8> ). I presume that means Apple have looked at it, and approved it, and it won't be yanked in a while for breaking any terms of service,

right?

<comment><USER5> No, it'll get removed; the App Store Approval process is a sham, and this is absolutely breaking the Google Maps TOS.

<comment><USER6> Hi tmcw. Two questions for clarification

1) How is the review process a sham?

2) How is the app breaking Google's TOS?

<comment><USER5> 1) Because there's very little evidence that malicious applications are successfully filtered (many get in), and much evidence that nitpicky comments keep 'good' applications waiting.

2) <https://developers.google.com/maps/faq#tos_tiles>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Pretty cool. I wish it had the transit stuff left over, though!

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it authorized to download map tiles form Google? Is there a limit? Can there be any reason to fear that it might stop working a few days later?

I had been holding off upgrading to ios6, not to miss google maps. But if this app gets removed after I upgrade, that will be devastating.

Any one knows, is there any reason to be concerned?

<comment><USER9> It doesn't credit Google as far as I can tell (the legal section just seems to be for the new iOS maps). The link to "Legal" is really small and there's no Google Logo (as Google had required previously)

Still it works if you all you need is map tiles (which I highly doubt what most people use Maps for)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The search seems to be quite limiting. It only seems to recognise place names, the thing I miss most about google maps is searching for POIs.

<comment> X-Istence That's because it doesn't do that search on Google's servers. It only grabs the Google map tiles and renders them...

<comment><USER11> It actually does hit Google for the search:

[https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/ClassicMap/blob/master/C...](https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/ClassicMap/blob/master/ClassicMap/WMMapViewController.m#L146)

Here's the URL it's hitting:

        https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=[whatever_you_entered_in_the_search field]&sensor=true

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does Google actually allow you to use the tiles, as long as you credit them? Could I do something similar in a commercial app?

</comment><comment><USER13> So does this actually populate the local information data as well from Google? Or is this strictly a visual thing?

<comment><USER11> Looks like it might be both. It's inserting Google's tiles as an overlay on Apple's map view, and it's also hitting Google's API when you search for something: [https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/ClassicMap/blob/master/C...](https://github.com/kishikawakatsumi/ClassicMap/blob/master/ClassicMap/WMMapViewController.m#L146)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I like most is that it's open source. So maybe this will lead to interesting improvements.</comment>