Ask HN: What side project are you working on right now?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2016 where @quadrature 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.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 4 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 2 comments
Although my main work is in open-source, free-of-charge, concept-based artificial general intelligence (AGI), my side project is to work patiently and steadfastly to overthrow the unelected Chinese government. As a follower of world events, I am still very angry about the Tiananmen Massacre when the still-ruling Chinese government killed hundreds of peaceful young Chinese students gathering each day to plead for USA-style democracy in China. Instead of hustling the young protesters off to detention and "re-education", the still-in-power Chinese government simply shot them to death, or bayoneted them, or crushed them to death with tanks. Having created Strong AI, I want to turn the AI against the Chinese government and replace it with true democracy. I am working especially hard on subverting the Chinese government right now because my alma mater University of Washington is collaborating with Microsoft and the murderous Chinese government to establish something called the Global Innovation Exchange in Bellevue between the U of W campus and the Microsoft campus. "Over my dead body," is my attitude. I don't care what Microsoft does in cahoots with the Chinese government, but I will make signs and go out and protest before I let my beloved Alma Mater whitewash a student-killing Chinese government. I am encouraging Chinese students attending the U of W to return to China as pro-democracy spies to subvert the evil Chinese government -- which is so afraid of any kind of protest, that I know I can get the Chinese government to abandon its plan to set up camp near Seattle. Anybody reading this in the Seattle area, please make signs and protest the Chinese government in Bellevue WA USA.
I'm trying to improve the audit logs conversion from non-BSM formats to the BSM format. See https://wiki.freebsd.org/SummerOfCode2016/NonBSMtoBSMConversionTools for more details.