Ask HN: What's your current side project?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2024 where @nbbaier convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
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HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 10 comments
Social welfare programs.
Got laid off, am Millenial, cue 2008 flashbacks. Have to scramble to keep a place to live, as my savings gets wiped out every few years.
I'm fascinated by the differences between social programs in the US (born) and Canada (where I am now). There's little if any means testing. Many programs I just ask for help, and they give it. Then, social welfare is available to a LOT more people as compared to the US. For example, someone my wife grew up with has to stay poor enough in the US to keep their healthcare. Here, if I make less than 90k a year (for a family of two), then I qualify for many programs; Including just cash payments. Just amazing to compare the two; It's night and day.
Implementing version 2.0 of https://contextualise.dev/ ↗ a knowledge management tool. At the moment, adding (vector) embeddings for semantic search and automatically surfacing related topics. Once that is done, adding a multi-modal embeddings model so that uploaded images can be (semi) automatically described and tagged.
A blog documenting my journey to learn algo trading: https://learningquant.com ↗
And a basic web app that converts HEX codes to Tailwind colors: https://hextotailwind.com ↗
I'm trying to recreate this plugin in VSCode: https://github.com/hoschi/yode-nvim ↗
Currently facing challenges with the extension API lacking features needed to do this.
I’m building a browser extension. Currently trying to implement payments and subscriptions.
It’s very hard to do in the context of a browser extension when you don’t have a server. So I’m using cloud functions, probably not doing it correctly though