jenno's comments

jenno | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is your money-making side project outside programming?

I'm willing to bet the quality of a lot of these is shite, though. Plus people in the US would most likely want to buy from a seller in the US (faster shipping + implied better quality).

There is a solution to so many problems here (creating usually unavailable parts for machines/devices/products) but the problem is knowing which parts are in demand and currently have no supplier.

A maker would need to have an interest or hobby in such a device & discover a need for the item for it to come into fruition. But just think of how many general 3D printed parts could be printed as solutions for so many products out there that are going unmade.

jenno | 7 years ago | on: The Egg (2009)

Sometimes I wish I knew some in-depth physics, take a bunch of LSD, and see what hidden truths would emerge... Does that happen? A bunch of scientists should really take some psychedelics together.

jenno | 10 years ago | on: Why Airbnb is dead to me

If you cancel on a guest as a host, Airbnb heavily penalizes your listings. They will be outranked by pretty much every other listing for at least a couple of months. (It happened to me and many other hosts I know.)

jenno | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Has anyone here gone through a development bootcamp?

I took General Assembly's web dev immersive course last March. Truth be told, I had a terrible instructor -- he could code, but he couldn't teach very well. One caveat is that I already knew HTML and CSS before entering.

I appreciated that they try their damnedest to hook people up with jobs if they want one. The instructor you wind up with might just be the most important puzzle piece. People in previous classes with better instructors are now in jobs making 70-110k in NYC. I landed a job at an education startup and they offered me 62k.

A friend of mine who entered the bootcamp a few months ago, based on my experiences, landed a job paying 50k. We both admitted that there wasn't much actual coding going on, though -- my job was working with Puppet configs and building out new instances of cookie-cutter websites. His was mainly messing around on the front-end and putting together email templates.

I'd do it over again if I could. It did teach me a whole lot, and got me started on a junior path, but there is no question that most of us need a bit more experience and work before really being able to call ourselves junior devs. As the previous commenter said, a lot of the knowledge they impart is skin-deep -- until you run with it and make projects with it. The students that stayed up till 3am coding, then made it into class at 8:30am are the ones that you'd define as "successful" with 6-figure salaries now.

There are many threads on Quora that answer this question more in-depth, if you want more info.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: Making money flipping items through technology

I just bought one of the listings here. It claimed a profit of $14.05 with a Buy price of 22.95 and a Sell price of $37.

Some notes:

- The "Buy" and "Sell" locations were the same website. Immediately raised some concerns (why would the same entity want to screw itself over by buying the same book it's selling for more money?)

- Upon inspection, it's because to be eligible for the Buyback price of $37, the book must not have tears, highlighting, or missing pages.

- The books at the Buy price of $23 or less have all been noted as just "Acceptable" condition with missing pages and highlighting. The books at better conditions are all $50+.

- Wasted $3.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: Making money flipping items through technology

I do think it's neat. One feature I expected and was surprised not to find: a "Sort by Profit Amount" feature. Clicking on "Profit" should allow me to sort the listings by amount of profit, from high to low.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: General Assembly raises $35M Series C

I took the web development immersive. I will say, the experience you have depends mostly on two factors: 1) your instructor, and 2) your own ability to want to learn and the amount of effort you put in.

That said, they did try to fit a lot in the 12 weeks, but there are so many facets of the tech stack they didn't cover (they rushed through html/css quite a bit, so those that don't know it will still feel lost after the course unless they dedicate some time to get it down. They also don't cover things like how to host your app on AWS, only Heroku).

The redeeming quality they have is that they do seem to care a lot about students' outcomes. After the course ends, they try their hardest to get everybody a junior dev position or apprenticeship. There's a great support network for this and people on staff dedicated to students' outcomes.

For me, the course was worth it because:

* I had some background in web design before

* It was hard for me to teach myself, not knowing what to google or what path to take

* I got an apprenticeship afterwards which turned into a full time position

But about half my classmates did not get a job or full-time position. Your mileage may vary.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: Your best passive income? (2014)

I have a few things going on.

1. Income from ~5 non-fiction Kindle books for sale on Amazon. Around $100 a month, though at one point when I was more heavily marketing them it went up to $900-$1000. Would be great to spend more time on this and automate a system where I have a couple of assistants doing this for me around the clock (marketing and book creation).

2. Income from a single Youtube video which links to a simple blog (about solar power) with Adsense ads. I get about 50 cents to a dollar a day from this.

3. I used to work for a jewelry firm doing SEO, going into their office on weekdays. Had to quit later, so I asked if I could do the work from home and send a work log each week. They pay me $300 per week for simple social media and blog posts. I pay a girl in Pakistan (who has good English skills) $70 per week to do the work for me. She's very good and I'm thankful to have her. They have no clue.

Feel free to PM me if you'd like to speak about these things / wanna brainstorm.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: My sister's a quilter and Google mugged her

Has this sister ever engaged in any dubious SEO practices, such as hiring "backlink providers" on fiverr, spamming her link on unrelated websites, or too much prolific use of using the anchor text of "portrait quilt"? Any of those will signal to Google that they are unnatural links and as a result, the site can be penalized and show up less in results, sometimes being removed altogether.

I apologize if this comment is too obvious -- I have worked as an SEO consultant for a while. The first thing she should do is check her Google Webmaster Tools, as this is where she will receive any unnatural link warnings. If it is there, she can start taking steps to remedy the situation by undoing any of the questionable SEO tactics she may have used, and request reconsideration from Google.

jenno | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: My first attempt at passive income. Where do I take it now?

Another option is to put it up for sale for the Kindle (kdp.amazon.com) and at B&N as ebooks. At one point I had 5-6 books on kdp and even made over 4 figures one time. I haven't promoted them at all for a good 5-6 months and still make a couple hundred each month. Non-fiction tends to do well; there are many guides out there on how to rank better for your book (use certain keywords and categories etc) so that could be a good avenue for you. One drawback is that it takes 3 months to start receiving your payments.
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